BLURT 13: There is more to China than silk and economics. “Superiors” berate, threaten a friend for involvement with “this evil religion”. No opportunity for explanation or defence, but this might’ve been a good one: “we desire but the good of the world and the happiness of the nations”. Ignorance is a long, long march from bliss.
One morning last week, I awoke as usual to the early morning sounds of Dalian, China: the loudspeakers outside the daycare playing random happy tunes (“We Wish You a Merry Christmas” is good to go at any time), the dook dook of high heels on concrete, the air horns of the endless dump trucks that move the remains of mountains to help build chic residential addresses where before there was only sea. I woke up, though, thinking about the Caledonia Corvairs.
It must have been the accidental browse through my down-home weekly newspaper’s on-line presence the previous day. The Corvairs are the Junior hockey club in that small southern Ontario town, and they are celebrating their fiftieth year. That was evidently more than enough to send me into a nostalgic spin.
In my childhood winters, Friday nights were the Corvairs for me.
BLURT 12: Professional basketballer Ron Artest has changed his name to Metta World Peace. Shall we rejoice? The end of war on earth is a punchline, not a pipe-dream!
Subtle, he wasn’t! This is the title of a poem by the American Vachel Lindsay, one of my daily electronic gifts from the Academy of American Poets. Sometimes, the day’s package of words overwhelms me – again? More tangled texts to unravel? – or just irritates me. Poetry at its best is wonderfully irritating, like the grit in a clam shell. I was glad to greet Mr. Lindsay. (And sometimes it just ticks me off, especially some contemporary stuff, so aggressively obscure that it’s no surprise most people have given up on “serious” poetry. But the words don’t give up on us, and they keep returning: in popular song, in gangsta rap, in comics and graffiti, like twitch grass sprouting between the patio bricks.)
Vachel Lindsay killed himself in 1931, victim of another era’s financial meltdown
BLURT 11: We all remember on big anniversaries. ‘Never forget’ does ring less hollow when the horror is but a decade old. But few see 9-11 as the toxic symbol it is: the toxicity of privilege and resentment, the disease of disunity, the pathology of meaningful futures sought without meaningful changes in outlook or decadent practices.
Yesterday after class, I went to my favourite noodle joint. I call it “the Muslim place” because one of my friends identified it that way, and a nodding salaam alaikum is received with appreciation, and because I can’t read the blue and white sign in either Hanzi or Arabic. A wall poster for the city of Lanzhou, capital of China’s central-western Gansu province and an ancestral home of noodliciousness, makes me think that the owning family must come from there. It’s fairly clean (but don’t use the washroom), there is a posted No Smoking request (but don’t ask them to enforce it), the noodles are hand-made, old-fashioned, in-house (free and easy to watch, from the back tables, the one-eyed maker throw the dough),
BLURT 10: It’s always good to try new things. Openness. Discovery. Antidotes to fear and complacency and sloth. But. What but? Lay’s Chinese potato chip flavour “Lobster Cheese”. Now trembling about “Refreshing Cucumber” and “Green Tea” as well.
BLURT 9: Reveille plays from the sports field next door: it’s megaphones, and marching, and martial music, and hundreds of young college students in uniform by 6:00 am. Yi! Er! San! Se! It’s frosh week in China.
BLURT 8: Returns and returns: this modest collection retrieved from electronic limbo, this Canadian family walking the now-familiar paths of a Chinese life.