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reORIENTation

Posted by :James Howden On : August 26, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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(Or is that DISorientation?)

(Or maybe a simple case of disappointment? )

Downtown Dalian: Labour Park and Highrise Central. No view of the hills, or of the sea, that highlight this windswept little village of six million.

They’ve had a tropical summer in Dalian. My dry, windy Chinese city had wild thunderstorms last night and remains a humid mess of clingy air and greyness. Usually, the ocean winds blow away the smog, but not today. (Maybe it’s not all car exhaust this morning.) The gardens at the top of our hill are taller and more riotously green than I’ve seen them. The weeds make visions of compost dance in my fevered head. The last few weeks of our Canadian summer, plus a weekend near Los Angeles, were bright but surprisingly cool for August. Here, I go through several shirts a day, and I’m not even trying to move much.

Marching music plays on an endless loop from the college next door, where this year’s pseudo-scholarly inputs are being put through their paces, without a hint of a metaphor. Their introduction to higher education, these future hairdressers and kitchen hands of China as well as their more highly tested university counterparts, is to march and march. There are team-building, patriotic and letting-off-steam aspects to the drill, but as bystanders our experience is one of martial music on repeat, amplified exhortations and ceaseless counting: Yi! Er! San! Si! Yi, er, san! Si!

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Define Your Terms, For God’s Sake

Posted by :James Howden On : August 21, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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What do we mean, fergawdsake, when we say that something must be done/undone/thought about/dismissed for this ultimate reason? 1 And who believes in God anymore? Well, lots do, and I suspect that more would want to, fashionable intellectualism aside, if only the idea of the Creator weren’t so polluted by fairy tale images, anti-scientific credos and rancid politics.

Here is one thing we might mean: when we do things at our most sincere, or our most urgent or beneficent or noble, we are helping God out, doing the (theoretical) Lord and Master of All Things a good turn. Well. This assumes that the Prime Mover needs a nudge in the right direction from one of the millions of species populating one little blue planet. That doesn’t make a lot of sense; it’s at least arrogant, if not delusional, to think that Something capable of fashioning a universe needs my advice or yours.

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Where It’s Art

Posted by :James Howden On : July 28, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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“But Wayne, how did you get into this?” Perhaps this question came from my wonderment at a quiet man going into retail in the first place – and not just any sort of shop, but one selling original paintings, sculptures, stained glass, woodworking and pottery. I’ve been in the Ethel Curry Art Gallery many times over the past couple of decades, as family ties have drawn me regularly to the small northern Ontario town that is its unlikely host.

The Gallery from outside, reflecting a northern summer sky.

I’m a small town boy, and I love these places, but they’re not noted for their devotion to and support of the arts, if I may risk a generalization. Haliburton, about three hours northwest of Toronto, is a pretty little place, perched by a lake and surrounded by wooded hills. The surrounding county of the same name, bordered on the north by Algonquin Park, contains an absurd number of lakes and a surprisingly large roster of artists among its 16,000 citizens.1 One of them was Ethel Curry, whose nephew Pete owns a woodsplitter and a small retail building in Haliburton village. Wayne is a woodworker, and as he tells the story, it wasn’t long before conversations about wood led to others about art and display space which led, 18 years later, to him explaining the genesis of the gallery to me. Again: the whole thing thrills and bemuses me, and I can’t believe it’s around the corner from Jug City convenience and the “Aprons and Soaps” shop. And how does a veteran of African development work, a confirmed loner, dog-lover and crafter of meticulously detailed model ships and other wooden delights, become the owner of an art emporium about an hour south of Nowhere?

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07/01/2013: The Longest Canada Day

Posted by :James Howden On : July 6, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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I’m almost back to normal, though my body remains confused about why I

Missed the big party in the capital, but that was alright with me.

insist on lying down in the dark between 1 and 5 am, which it regards as Afternoon Drive Time. It would be if I was still in China, but I’m sitting in a sunny, leafy backyard behind a loving occasional home that features books, the resumption of sweet old conversations, gustatory temptations that haven’t crooned to me from such close range for nearly a year, and beds in the basement for son and bride and me. We’re back in Canada, almost completely. We flew on Canada Day, which for a long while seemed it would never come; when it did, it went on and on.

It started the way most days have recently, at least for this displaced Canadian trying to figure out Where is HERE? Though worn to a frazzle by an exhausting wrap-up of my working year in Dalian, China, my bladder and the barking of sunrise called me from my bed at about 4:30 a.m. Happy Canada Day! I tried to get back to sleep, but my mind-emptying mechanism was on the fritz. (I couldn’t stop writing parts of this thing, for instance, but I was also mentally packing, packing.)

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Guest Post: A Chinese Student Speaks Up

Posted by :James Howden On : June 29, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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Through a P2C2E — a “process too complicated to explain,” as Salman Rushdie called it in his wonderful youth novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories — I got to meet Ms. Z. Like many Chinese university students, perhaps most, she studies in a major chosen by her family, not by her. Unlike many, she is a writer, even in her second language. In a spasm of bravery, she wrote an English essay about something honest and true-hearted and even a bit angry, and it found its way to me. It is a declaration of independence. It is her youthful emancipation proclamation.

I was moved by her courage and her plain-spoken message, and asked her permission to share it with my readers. (I did a quick edit of some rough second-language edges, but this is all Ms. Z.) She is not a “typical” Chinese student, if you assume such a thing exists, but neither is she alone. Perhaps you will enjoy a small taste of life in a Chinese university — but this time, from an eagle-eyed student perspective. She calls her piece “Marionette Generation”.

The ties that bind.

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The Party, the Bread, the Track, and the Circus

Posted by :James Howden On : June 10, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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God knows that I love bread. (Bread and I, however, are in the midst of a relatively amicable separation, and my waistline has noticed.) The student body at my university, and especially at the rich-kid college within it where I teach, is of a particularly well-fed demographic, and they see their grindstone bachelor’s degree exclusively as job training, nothing more. (The majority work in majors chosen for them, often with no real interest or aptitude in the subject but only faith in the promise of the “comfortable life” that most Chinese — understandably — seek.) Though privileged within Chinese society, they do endure acres of boredom and megatons of rote learning, so the circus does come to town. And though I am not above the occasional superior sneer at the circus entertainments chosen by others, I’m still a sucker for the Olympic march of the athletes, small-town parades, the communal experience of fireworks. Even loners like me love a good show, some high-wire performance, but I was recently put in mind of the ancient Roman poet Juvenal’s scorn of the use of “bread and circuses” to pacify a population.

It was Sports Day at my university in northeastern China, a day common to most schools here. It is a more of a show than a track and field meet, and actually two days of class are

The March of the One-Time Athletes. A beautiful day for a show. (Photo: JP Mayer)

sacrificed for it. Many students are required to miss class sessions in the days before in order to prepare, but not for their events. In a country where precious little importance is given to physical education – except, that is, for the tiny minority selected in their youth or childhood to attend State sports schools and bring sporting honour to their province or their Olympically-ambitious country – this once-yearly festival of geng kuai, geng gao, geng qiang (“faster, higher, stronger”) sees astonishingly little athletic preparation, or even the possibility of it. It drives my Canadian friend JP, a masters decathlete and long-time high-school coach, just slightly bonkers.

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The Gate Swung Wide, and Nobody Really Heard…

Posted by :James Howden On : May 23, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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…but many can still hear the echoes of that new age opening, and the view through that humble Portal gets wider and more dazzling with every passing year.

This is a small shout-out to the Baha’is of the world, who today are joyfully remembering, as a great and holy Figure known as “the Bab” — an Arabic word which means “gate” or “door” — had predicted in 1844: “This very hour will, in the days to come, be celebrated as one of the greatest and most significant of all festivals…”   Bay Street, Wall Street, Tiananmen Square and Hollywood Boulevard don’t yet shut down on May 23, but millions of people, in the world’s greatest cities and in some of the most out-of-the-way neighbourhoods you can imagine, will be recalling a quiet, thoroughly marvelous conversation in southern Iran, a dramatic dialogue that begins the most recent of the world’s great spiritual traditions. 169 years is not quite enough to appreciate what that meeting of two young men meant,* but we’re learning.

There’s not a lot of poetry in this space, but years ago I wrote the following on a day like this, thinking of a 25-year-old merchant of Shiraz and the flaming young scholar who had suddenly realized the object of a years-long quest:

TWENTY-THIRD OF MAY

 Today the world changed.

 Today, a young man

who did not watch the game of the week

told a secret.

They called him a merchant.

Used cars were not in his traffic.

 Nobility kissed commerce.

 He did not crow

I am the Greatest!

for a mass of sedentary millions.

 I am the Gate of God

He whispered

to a road-weary audience

of one.

A final resting place in this magnificent shrine, a golden symbol of the promise of 1844.

* But it’s FIVE YEARS TOO MANY for seven innocent members of the Iranian Baha’i community, who have been locked up for the crime of  working for global harmony, justice, and peace. It’s a great and terrible story, one of the bitter sub-plots of the chronicle of the “planetization of mankind“, as a Christian thinker described it. (It’s happening. Fitfully, inevitably.)

Too Bad About Your Gift, Bro (Sis)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 16, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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Better luck next life…

An acclaimed young architect, with signature projects having been built, with his mind blooming with visions of constructions yet to be, finds that he is less and less able to draw. After years of intense training and the honing of a unique skill, a brain surgeon notices, not long after her 30th birthday, that she’s sometimes a bit clumsy with her scalpel. An ethical young lion of business finds herself hesitant, unable to make up her mind, while the dynamic teacher faces his class and finds, in the second decade of his dream career, that he doesn’t really know what to say to the kids anymore.

These are local tragedies, but what’s up? How does this happen? There must have been an existential earthquake. Cancer, a brain aneurysm, Lou Gehrig’s disease, something dreadful has suddenly snatched away or disabled someone’s essential gift. What a pity! It’s unjust, dispiriting. It just shouldn’t happen like that. If we are wealthy, we fear losing our money and possessions. When we love, we worry about the loss of the beloved one. And if we have a great gift, and we know it, our greatest fear is having that gift abandon us. (Of course, there are those who neglect or abuse their gift: the sellout songwriter without a thing to say after a string of popular hits, the monster athlete who loves bars and strip joints and can’t find the gym. This is not about that.) The imaginary designer, the doctor, the tycoon and the educator above, through no fault of their own, have had their way to shine snuffed out far too soon. We all agree that this would be awful for them, to say nothing of the loss to society.

But then, why dwell on a hypothetical sudden loss for imaginary professionals? Such things happen, of course, and hey, it sucks, but it’s just one of those weird things, we would probably say, just a lonely little box of bad luck. Most of their peers, and most of ours, work for as long as they want, potentially well past standard retirement ages. But listen: imagine if this happened to everybody in a given profession. It’s not difficult, actually. It happens to every professional athlete.

Given the absurdly high salaries that the top jocks pull down, it’s not fashionable to spare much pity in their direction, but it’s hard for them, all the same. Money can’t buy happiness, and fame doesn’t take away the pain (“it just pays the bills”, as Fred Eaglesmith sings). I think about this a lot.

“Beijing Spirit”

Posted by :James Howden On : May 6, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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Here is Beijing Spirit (as codified in a subway display ad):

Patriotism. Innovation. Inclusiveness. Virtue. Quite apart from the questions of who developed this formula, what the public purpose is, and whether anyone in the citizen audience for such encouragement pays even the remotest attention (and indeed, whether there is any reason that they ought to), I found this intriguing. I thought about this on several long walks between subway lines, and sandwiched among my fellow humans who were Going Places on the Beijing Metro.

I am all for sane and non-toxic forms of patriotism. I still love me some Canada as I learn to love the world.

Innovation is a grand thing, the yang to tradition’s yin. (Or vice versa.) Bring on the new; in China, for all its reverence for the 5000 years of civilization, change is a high-speed train. Wisdom is needed to keep it on the rails.

It’s hard to see any dark side to inclusiveness, so long as it’s about more than holding one’s nose in tolerant contempt – say, for the migrant workers who build the luxury highrises and supermalls – or smiling for the foreigners who buy and spend, and then muttering darkly about them in private.

Virtue seems such a quaint idea, and is all the more lovable and necessary for it. Chinese respect for virtue runs deep, and let’s hope it’s a renewable resource in this furiously competitive, deeply wary society.

Think. Ask. When does patriotism collide unkindly with virtue? Can it co-exist with inclusiveness? Must virtue and innovation be at odds, or can there be new and creative expressions of the truly and deeply good? (Pray for ‘yes’.)

These are thoughts from an afternoon on several subway lines.

In the Village

Posted by :James Howden On : May 5, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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I went to Beijing and all I got was this gorgeous chocolate…

I wrote recently about the extremes of wealth and poverty that may, at a certain level of unremitting seriousness, be the essence of professional sport. Sport is not the reason I came to Beijing, but here I am, in one of the Chinese capital’s many little shrines to conspicuous wealth.

SanlitunVillage. I assume there must have been a village here once, but now it’s something rather other: sexy Adidas megastore with giant photos of a steely-eyed David Beckham; Godiva Chocolates, where I lost

The shopping heart of Sanlitun, from the street. The “bar street” is to the right, Soho luxury highrises are behind and to the left of us, and spending is dead ahead.

my mind and my dietary determination just twenty minutes ago; Starbucks, naturally; McDonald’s, ubiquitous and inevitable, but almost shamefaced in the basement among the more glittering expressions of European, American and Chinese wealth; a Megabox cinema (five posters of a kneeling, battered and helmet-less Robert W. Ironman are leering at me as I write, but I ain’t goin’); and, off to the side, “Sanlitun Bar Street” which I walked towards after leaving Godiva’s in a chocoholic swoon – two quick solicitations for “lady bar, mister? lady massage?” got me back into the den of conspicuous consumption and away from the pits of addictive loneliness. Ah, escape.

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