Impervious

I place my finger in the Ginko tree's wound
Where you practiced breaking a man's xiphoid process.
I wonder if the microfractures
took you to higher consciousness.
If we stood in opposition, and I crumpled in defeat and blood
Would you achieve the Buddha Mind?
Could I die and forgive you?

Imagining Joseph

"Joseph, her husband, was a just man and not wanting to make her a public example, was minded to divorce her secretly (Matt. 1:19)."

I can't believe these stargazers went to Herod first. Told him they were looking for a “King of the Jews.” Now they’re here gawking at Mary's son and all of Bethlehem saw them - with their camels and gifts and strange accents and questions. Centurions will bust through that door any minute and we’ll all hang on trees. That star doesn’t help either. To get out of this one, I’ll have to move to frickin’ Egypt.

When Mary told me, I thought even she couldn't be so gullible. Poor, naïve Mary fell prey to some lecher. I could hear it all before she said it, “everything happens for a reason and God doesn’t allow anything to happen without his approval so in a way, this is God’s perfect plan.” I didn’t expect the fantasy about angels and immaculate conception – what pathetic, childish escapism.

Did she think the Nazarines would buy that concoction? They would say “oh, well in that case, we’ll make you our queen until the King is born”? She’s so idealistic and quixotic and pious; she’s lost in the world without me. But what was I going to do? I’d be the one fool who believed the lies and a cuckold too! She’d gone too far. I had to let her go, though she had nothing but her delusions and pitiful ruin.

Then I had a dream.

And people will shut their pie holes about you when they need their cabinets fixed…

Imagining Mary

“Now Mary arose and went to the hill country with haste to a city in Judah (Luke 1:39, italics added)”

I’m going to live with my cousin. She’s older and married to a priest, but he’s lost his voice so won’t be able to say anything about it. Mom says I’ve ruined my reputation in Nazareth and I’ve got to go out of town “so you don’t flaunt it.” I tried to tell her that I’m not flaunting it, I just told them about the angel so they wouldn’t think I did anything wrong. She said that’s not what she meant.

They ripped their clothes and called me a blasphemer too.

Rachel and Sarah where whispering in synagogue. They asked me if I liked it and when I told them I was visited by the Holy Spirit while I slept, they said “don’t lie, we know what you’re really like.” I tried to tell them about Gabriel and the promise and how honored I feel to be favored by God, but they just giggled and asked if it was Simon.

Daddy said I can’t come back home because I’ve shamed his household. Joseph just had eyes of inevitability. He said he wasn’t going to make a big deal about it, but Mom is right and I should go live with Elizabeth. I told him it would be alright; that God will work out the details, we just have to have faith – like the patriarchs. Joseph was hollow and told me I should go with haste.

I just felt wings like butterflies in my womb.

Christmas List

Well, it would seem that it's that time of year again. Yes, Christmas (or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or, if your a Satanist, the Worst Day Ever). I feel all kinds of goodwill towards men, mostly so that they'll like me enough to buy me gifts.

So in order to help out, Here's my list of this year's trend-setting must-haves:

Gift Rap is essential to any gift-giving.

Remember the reason for the season.

I like practical gifts.

Can I get one of these that says "Don't be jealous, Han"?

It doubles as a fallout shelter, safe room and doesn't look that much like a coffin!

Nothing says "Christmas" like an ejector head!

Happy shopping!

Things I missed about America

Saturday, Nov. 28

We're on the plane back to the U.S. Here are some things I miss about America:

- English background conversation. I don't listen in, but I could if I wanted to!

- Copyright laws. Did I tell you that there was this familiar coffee shop with a green circle, white font and a woman at the circle's center? It was Leymo Coffee. And appropriately named (wish I had a photo of that one).

- Bush. Gavin's just not as good by himself. Has nothing to do with China, but I still miss them.

- Driver's education. I'd take any American 15 year old with a permit over a Chinese driver - unless I'm missing the emotion "terror" for some reason.

- Anonymity. Screaming Chinese children and expressionless stares aren't as fun as you might guess.

- Thanksgiving. Yeah, we totally missed it. We said "Happy Thanksgiving" to each other, but no cranberry sauce (in the shape of the can) or sweet tato pie this year.

- Pizza. Seafood sushi "party pizza" with BBQ sauce didn't quite hit the spot.

Chinese Srix Frags

Friday, Nov. 27

Another day where you either laugh at yourself or seethe. This resort is a sucktastic example of halfassism. Maybe when construction is complete, they'll have things like working escalators (the non-functional ones are everywhere for the convenience of the guests) and operational rides (we got to go on one in the whole place).

My son's appetite is back and there's a Pizza Hut at the resort. Pepperoni Pizza! We sat down and there's only one kind of "Party Pizza" - no description. But it's called "Party Pizza" so it's got to be good, right? umm...not so much. A party pizza has the same crust you're used to, but instead of tomato sauce they put on an oyster/BBQ sauce. Add on the cheese and then cut the square pizza into nine slices. The toppings are corn, carrots and bell peppers. On each slice is a special topping - either shrimp wrapped in seaweed or scallops on chinese broccoli or clam in a bed of bean curd. Authentic Italian pies need not apply, we're catering to a distinctly non-American palate.

I've decided the Chinese must like this resort because they can't get travel visas. They have fake Interlaken so they can see pseudo-German architecture. They go to the fake Grand Canyon (man made) because no way will the Chinese government allow its people to come to the U.S. They should really finish building the place before they allow tourists in.

On the funny side, I was a superstar at this place. All these schoolchildren where there and were very enthusiastic about seeing a Westerner. They would wave and giggle and some would say "Herro!" I passed by a whole herd of them, giving them high-fives and smiling even though it may make me look foolish to the adults.

Detained by Hong Kong Immigration

Thursday, Nov. 26

My son's still sick. He's burning up with fever and still has an upset stomach. My father-in-law had plans to take us all to a resort in China and was disappointed that we wouldn't be able to go. We took my son to the doctor who said he just needed rest. "Great! He can rest at the resort!" said my F-I-L.

We had already missed the tour bus, so we took a cab to the border. We were turned away because we didn't have the permits to drive into China. We then went to cross the border on foot only to discover that upon entering Hong Kong, our passports weren't stamped. Three hours in detention. I reframed the experience as better to discover the problem now rather than in the airport trying to leave the country. Furthermore, better to be detained on the Hong Kong side than in China...

The resort was laughable - still under construction! Our hotel had a sign that said they were still building the hotel, but promised that the noise would stop after 6pm. Thankfully, my son was so tired from the travel that the noise didn't phase him. FIL wanted to go to a show that night and wanted to wake up my son so he could enjoy it. I suggested I stay with him. When my son finally woke, he was fever free.

As for the humor, the whole day was darkly comic with a FIL having all these fantasies and fate standing in the way.

Chinese Soap Opera

Wednesday, Nov. 25

Still a little sick today. My son was told by his grandparents he could have anything he wanted in the store. I was so proud he didn't take advantage and just chose a Rubick's Cube. He had every opportunity and even permission to go crazy, yet he still was frugal and modest.

We had Dim Sum for lunch and there was a wide screen TV showing a Chinese soap opera. I leaned over to my son and began to "translate" for him. He quickly joined in telling a silly story that went a little something like this:

Scene 1: Granddaughter, Father and Grandmother are in an argument. Grandmother is crying. Father and Granddaughter are trying to teach her how to have a proper, throw yourself on the floor and wail kind of fit. Grandmother isn't a good student.

Scene 2: Two older women walk arm-in-arm with a younger woman between them. Their conversation is very serious. A new Olympic event called the "Four Legged Race" has been invented and each of the middle woman's legs has been tied to one of the other womens' legs. They're practicing for the gold.

Scene 3: Father, Grandmother, and Granddaughter are in a restaurant with Mother and another lady. The family is wondering why this unfamiliar lady has unexpectedly joined them for dinner and is eating their food!

Dinner was with more non-English speaking relatives. My son got sick and threw up in the bathroom. There was discussion that I gave him my illness. Furthermore, we took the train home and had to get off and on at every stop along the way so that my son could hurl.

The picture is of a pass on Song Mountain. You can see the old path below, covered in snow. There's an iron chain against the mountain face to hold on to and keep you from slipping. The new path is above, with the guardrail.

I'm on a boat!

Tuesday, Nov. 24

We cruised around Kowloon Bay on a boat that belongs to a family friend. He's a retired police chief of Hong Kong during British leasing of the island. Apparently, there's a good buck in that gig because he owns a single family dwelling with a yard and carport (most people live in high-rises and a parking spot can cost as much as your apartment), a car, two boats and a Philippino maid.

Afterwards, I took my son swimming against my protestations and better judgment. We ate - this group was smaller and it wasn't seafood, so I did better saying "no" and holding what little I did eat.

People speak Cantonese so quickly that I can't keep up. There was plenty of laughter, but I missed the jokes and I'm in a humorless mood. Usually, that's a great time to rely on my son to do or say something funny, but he's been consumed with a Nintendo DS game he hasn't been able to solve.

On returning to the U.S., I discovered that the above song was nominated for a Grammy. That's pretty hilarious considering the whole song is a satire poking fun at a particular genre of rap.

To Hong Kong

Monday, Nov. 23

I'm sick again today and worse than yesterday. I didn't sleep much at all and I'm physically weaker than I've been on the whole trip. Fortunately, no sight seeing today - we're flying to Hong Kong. But that also means I lug our suitcases around here and there. I couldn't take a mountain pass to a temple today.

I saw a Chinese Subaru commercial where the couple is driving through an idyllic countryside. They scatter autumn leaves and demonstrate superior handling while avoiding magpies. Upon arriving at their seaside destination, we discover he's in a tux and she's wearing a wedding dress. He places a ring on her finger and the camera zooms out. The shot reveals it wasn't a ring at all - he wed her with the keychain to the car!

Arrived in Hong Kong to a seafood banquet. I ate enough to be polite and regretted it. The in-laws got wind I was feeling ill and I was given a foul-smelling herbal remedy. The stuff is made from Philodendron bark, citrus peel and licorice root and I couldn't get the smell off my hands even though I only touched it for a second. It's a pill, so it landed in my hand then it was popped in my mouth and washed down. Still, the smell was on my fingers until morning. I suppose it worked because I didn't throw up. However, I was nauseated by burping up the stuff.

Chinese Jews

Sunday, Nov. 22

I've been sick for several days, and today has been the worst so far. My father used to joke that wherever we went travelling, I'd have to "leave my mark." He meant that sometime on the trip I would vomit. So far, that's been true of every long trip I've been on.

However, I'm not going to let a little stomach bug keep me from seeing China. I've walked and climbed and even Kung Fu'd a tree all with a queasy stomach, so I wasn't going to quit now.

The biggest surprise of the whole vacation came on this day. I'm suspicious of our "personal tour guides" and the relationships they have with the government. I've not expected to see any slums or poverty or anything that might reflect bad on China. So when we went to the "Old Jewish Quarter" of Kaifeng, I was taken aback.

The old synagogue was destroyed by flood and now a hospital stands on the spot. However, there is still "Teaching the Torah Lane" and it's in an impoverished part of town. The tour guide knew a Jewish ancestor named "Chao" who still lived at 21 Teaching the Torah Lane. The guide called her "Nah-Na" and she welcomed us into her home. It was just two rooms with a pot for cooking outside. One room was the bedroom and then there was a common room. The whole house was as big as an average master bedroom in the U.S. In the common room, she had a bit of a museum with menorahs, a painting of what the synagogue used to look like, a National Geographic article from 1910 about the Kaifeng Jews and about half a dozen brochures. Nah-Na seemed over eighty and smiled easily to foreign strangers.

Today's bit of humor: My wife can't allow herself to use a squatting toilet, so whenever my son goes to a bathroom, he checks the stalls. He dutifully reports to her if there are sit-down potties.

Shaolin Temple

Saturday, Nov. 21

So ever since David Carradine did the show "Kung Fu," I wanted to visit the Shaolin Temple. I wanted to lift boiling pots with my forarms and snatch pebbles from blind monks' hands. Shaolin began Zen Buddhism and its Kung Fu is the grandfather of all martial arts.

I was surprised to find that it rests in a valley of Song Mountain, not at the peak. There are about 300 monks who live there and they can choose to learn Kung Fu or not. But seriously, who would choose to join the Shaolin Temple, of all the dozens of local monestaries - the one with the longest and most famous history of fighting styles, and then say "No thank you, Kung Fu isn't really my thing"?! Apparently the current abbot! The abbots are only selected from monks devoted to Shaolin. Monks from other monasteries would be rejected for that particular job. So this guy spent his entire monastic career at the Shaolin Temple and never took a Kung Fu lesson!

That's just about the saddest thing I've ever heard. If I were the abbot admitting him for the first time, the conversation might go something like this:

Raesh: ...and this will be your dorm. Kung Fu lessons start promptly at oh-six hundred, right after morning meditation.
Future Abbot: I don't really want to do that.
Raesh: I'm sorry; are you ill?
Future Abbot: No, I just am not all that interested in Kung Fu. Maybe I could sweep the courtyard or something.
R: You want to sweep?
FA: Sure! Or maybe I could cook while you guys are working out.
R: Cook...? Son, you realize this is the SHAOLIN temple, right? Here at the Shaolin Temple we kick ass. Not only was the phase "ass kicking" coined here, we stardardized and developed metrics to evaluate the severity of delivered ass kickings. And you're here to sweep and cook?
FA: Yes sir.
R: Some advice for you, son. Pack up your apron and make-up bag and go to the temple monestery at other side of the mountain. I hear they founded Jazzercise there.

After you enter the front gate, there are all these stele telling the history of the temple and its monks. Interspersed among them are Ginko trees (of Ginko Biloba fame) with all these divots in them.


These divots were made in a simple 4 step process:

1) Make a gun with your hand like you did as a child
2) Shoot the "gun" leaving your thumb down
3) Extend your middle finger directly under your pointer
4) Jam your fingers as hard as you can into a Ginko tree over and over again until you make a divot

Yeah, I know! Crazy. Of course I did it. Once. Instead of deepening an existing hole, I decided to start my own. I'm pretty impressed with myself that I broke off a piece of bark and my finger stopped hurting after only 10 minutes. My son wussed out. He wouldn't even stick his finger in a pre-made hole to pretend for a picture.

Did you know that the official snack vending partner of the Shaolin Temple is "Youcky Food Co, LTD"? True story.

Longmen Grottos and White Horse Temple

Friday, Nov. 20

Longmen Grottos were on the agenda today, which are a series of man-made caves all devoted to Buddha. The largest is the size of Mount Rushmore/Stone Mountain and the smallest is about 2cm. Our guide said few were carved out of devotion, many of them were carved for political reasons (the Mount Rushmore Buddha is said to have the face of an Empress). Only the oldest were carved by the faithful.

I've been a bit of a celebrity in China. This is off-season for tourism and many Chinese visit these places because of lower prices and fewer crowds. As a result, I'm just about the only Westerner around. My coat is blue, so my eyes aren't their normal grey. They're blue and the provincial Chinese haven't seen much of that. Smiling is considered foolish, juvenile or unseemly and the Chinese are giving me a lot of blank-faced eye contact. I've had my picture taken half a dozen times by young Chinese and at the Longman Grottos there were a few Red Army soldiers who waved at me like schoolchildren.

The oldest Buddhist temple in China is nearby, called the White Horse Temple. Originally called the White Horse Bar and Inn, the first monks stayed at the Inn at the request of the Emperor. In time, the Emperor remodelled the tavern and made it into a temple. Every summer, the monks here save turtles and carp from the market with their spare change. They release them in the temple pond.

Our hotel is by far the most Western we've had, with all the amenities like recessed lighting and a sit-down toilet. However, the shower had a sign that reads:

Night Train to Louyang

Thursday, Nov. 19

We had a last visit on Wudang Mountain to the Prince Palace. It wasn't built for a prince nor is it a palace. This area of the temple complex was named because the brightest children were educated here - ostensibly to become government officials (princes). It's really a large dormitory (palace) with a temple. They built the main street to follow the contour of the mountain.

Wudang is like a shanshui painting. The mountains don't rise above the treeline, so they're all capped with evergreens. Mists roll in alternately obscuring and revealing the landscape and when they're thick the peaks look like islands in a sea of vapor. The temples are built as part of the mountain rather than trying to dominate it. In fact, the whole of human occupation is insignificant to the enormity and majesty of the nature surrounding it.

We took a night train to Louyang, but arrived shortly after dark. The train was easily as old as me and it had this old-world charm. If it were at night, you might walk by a cabin and find a gypsy telling a businessman's fortune in one car. In another, a man wearing a linen suit would be seducing a young wife while her new husband sleeps in the bunk above. Another car might have grifters - men with crooked smiles and women with bright, flowing skirts - playing a game of chance. A missionary couple with too much luggage and a secret, a man who smokes cigars so you can't tell his sweat smells like stone, a linguist with an unnerving twitch carrying a sheathed sword he never lets go of, a preteen Chinese girl dressed for a party with a bow in her hair but with her fingertips chewed up, a big Texan with a big hat and a big mouth travelling with his Hungarian accountant (half his size, who looks suspiciously like a bodyguard), a woman says her name is Spring but she has three personalities named April, May and June...

Sadly, none of these people were on our train. Maybe they got on at our stop, but our leg the ride was largely banal - full of cigarette smoke and an overactive radiator. We did get to see this sign, though:

Wudangshan

Wednesday, Nov. 18

Today we're at Wundang Mountain - the birthplace of both Taoism and Tai'chi. This temple complex suggests the kind of remote mountain temple you see in the movies. There are thousands of snowy steps up the mountain and it's altogether picturesque. Most of the temple complex was built at the same time as the Forbidden City (if nothing else, those Ming Dynasty Emperors did a lot of building) and has similar architecture.

The picture taken above was from a guardtower with the standard camera from my son's Nintendo DSi. I wish it could capture the the mountains that were surrounding the lens and the mists and the chill and the smell of evergreens mixed with incense and the wonder of the entire experience.

I was hoping to hike my way up, but it was so cold and the path so steep that the family voted to take the cable car to the highest peak. Even so, there were plenty more stairs. At one point, my son refused to climb any further and he and his mother turned back.

I continued on to the highest temple, the "Golden Palace." It's about the size of a toolshed in the U.S. and the brass gate that gave the shrine its name in antiquity has since tarnished. There was a single Taoist priest manning the altar, but my tour guide said he wasn't taking questions from tourists.

I'm not sure I believe him. For one, this is the same guide who explained the tenants of Taoism as "the Ming Emperor used Taoism to keep the poor people in their place. You must be content with your vegetables (vegetarians are not strong; they can't overthrow the government) and you have some work, so you should be happy and content." And another thing, what priest doesn't like to talk about his religion? I think the tour guide didn't want to waste his time, breath and the precious firing of neurons translating all that religious drivel.

I'm sure something humorous happened, but I've had an attitude of reverence and awe most of the day.