Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan

We spent a long time at the small galleries in Asia Society New York early this week viewing the exhibition. Without any preconceived expectation, I came out with a complex feeling of profound sadness and triumph at the same time. When art increasingly becomes another global commodity and the target of trophy hunting, it is beyond amazing to see again the art that is made as a mere self-expression, as a reaction to reality, and as a way of survival. A well documented war-torn country, one would think it is the last likely place for contemporary art to blossom. When the possibility of death becomes a daily reflection, imminent and random, art and what it represents, logically ought to be remote. Yet the exhibition radiates a powerful energy that is on the verge of emergency. There is so much to be expressed that it must be proportional to what has been suppressed.
Considered the forerunner of the contemporary art in Pakistan, Zahoor ul Akhlaq's work is moody yet rationale, his muted palates and calculated proportion seem to ridicule the turmoils of that country, yet somehow mysteriously forebode his violent death. When some gunmen broke into his house and shot him and his daughter. One survivor of that gathering, Anwar Saeed, spent next few years recovering from his injuries. In the following months during which he underwent surgeries and lost the function of his right hand, he started painting with his left hand on a book called "I Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual", which is the true story of a seventeen-years-old Frenchman who was arrested and kept in concentration camps by German forces in World War II. On the hospital bed, his drawing all deal with his inner fantasy of homosexuality. He hid the book for the longest time as a personal journal. The drawing is filled with such an earthly yearning that it can only possibly be drawn by someone who can never realize that yearning. There is something profoundly humane about a bullet-ridden gay muslin man, laying in the hospital, secretly express his longings in such a lucid and honest manner. No holding back. Obviously if the book ended in the wrong hand, it would not be hard to imagine what would have happened to him.
One of our favorite piece in the show is a photography by Arif Mahmood. On a typical Pakistani street, a man with a sack on his side was drawing a mysterious ladder that appeared without beginning or ending. The moment caught by his camera has a strange spell that demands the decipher of a social meaning. What was in the man's head when he was making such an endeavor. Where did he hope the ladder to lead from and to? and after all, would there even be such a place for the citizens of that country or the mankind in general?
Other artists we loved are Adeela Suleman, who probes into the gender issue in the society and Rashid Rana, whose monumental image of a rug made of collages of the slaughter house challenges the western view of famed Pakistani craft.
Throughout the show, there is a fresh sense of art-making by these artists, who bravely confront the issues of the society that are in desperate need of confrontation. Not only did I find that they have voices, but they have an overwhelming power to move. After the emotion of the chaos and suppression, what I ultimately ended up with was a feeling of long lasting courageous humanity.

Vicunea vs Apaca: Baby Apaca vs Maybe Apaca

I instantly felt in love with Apaca when I put my hands on the softness and warmth of a black scarf made of super fine baby apaca for the first time. That was in a store called Sol on a narrow ally in Cusco. We would of course go back later and bought it. As a matter of fact, I think we systematically combed the whole Cusco for apaca. Pete, our friend who traveled with us, was a shopaholic, not that he liked to admit it. He even crated things that we must look for, sort of like a theme shopping. Yeah, we all absolutely need a crazy apaca hat for ski this winter!

All over Andes in Peru, one can see three major exotic mammals: llyma, apaca and vicunea. They have been domesticated by Incans for thousands of years for their hair. Llymas produce a thick and coarse fiber that is mostly known for its strength. It makes great ropes for instance. Apaca is the most commonly used fiber for weaving. Baby apaca is more sought after due to the conspicuous reason, it is a lot softer. There are many grades: super fine baby apaca is followed by baby apaca which is better than just apaca. There is also royal baby apaca, which by touch, I think it's more or less like teen apaca, falling in between super fine baby and just baby. After that, there is venerable Vicunea, possibly the cutest mammals I have ever seen. Big sensitive eyes, soft short hair, and a delicate deer like build with an equally delicate and shy disposition. Their hair worth a fortune though. First, they cannot be easily domesticated like Apaca. Second, they just don't produce a lot of hair. Yet what is harvested from them are the softest natural fiber in the world.one scarf we had the honor to touch cost about 3000usd. We never bothered to check the price of a coat. Not that we didn't want to. It was locked away like gold jewelries anyway.

We were warned by many locals about baby apaca because it can be maybe apaca. So we steered away from most of the stores and headed straight to the two very best, Kuna and Sol. It was an addictive experience. After exhausting all the stores in Cusco, we managed to add the weight of our luggage in Puno (two apaca blankets) and Lima (a woo-so-soft jakcet for pete and a few more scarfs for us). In the end, I don't think there was any apaca left for us to buy. I told myself I was going to import them in my future art/design store and share with all Bostonian, which made a lot easier for me to justify my purchasing as merchandise "sampling".

Cusco: the leftover of the Incan Capital

The air in Cusco was extremely dry, at least when we were there, that, plus the 11000 feet (3360 meters) altitude, the town was a harsh place to breathe for people del sea level like us. But what can I say? One has to brave the thin air for the beauty of that place. As the old Inca capital, it is the getaway to the Incan heartland. Without much distraction of tress or plants, the old town glistened in orange tiles on roof, sort of naked, hugging the equally naked mountain-scape. Many of these buildings were constructed on the Inca stone foundation dated back to the 16th century. Spaniards were surely good at destroying indigenous culture yet they were also quite practical in terms of recycling. Incans were incredible builders. They perfectly cut and fit the rocks together without mortar, some of the rocks weight tons. The Incan wall withstood earthquakes for the past 500 yrs while the spanish wall, mocked as "incapable", fell and tumbled.

The truth is that Inca is the most well-known historical and cultural export of Peru, which has naturally overshadowed a 5000 yr civilization before it. There was Moche, there was Chimu, there was Nazca, but only after we visited the two archaeological museos in Cusco and later the third in Lima, did we gained a panoramic view of the rich history of the country and its colorful ancient dwellers. In Cusco, some amazing textile, which appeared contemporary, complex and sophisticated, was dated back to over 1000 yrs; And in Lima, the famed Chavin Estela Raimondi in The National Museum of the Archaeology, Anthropology was carved in 1000 BC.

Back in Cusco, we climbed up the mountain at the edge of the town as a warm-up for the Inca Trail. Where we headed was a mysterious ruin called Sacsayhuman. Huge blocks of stones were set into impressive wall foundation. Again, no mortar. But one cannot even insert a blade between the two fitting stones. That's how extraordinary the Incan builders were. Many theories hovered over the functions of the place, yet no one knows exactly what the place was for. As a matter of fact, no one knows how Incan emperor ran his massive country. What was the political and administrative structures. No one knows if there was a written language of Quechua, spoken by Incans, or how one interprets the knotted "messenger's ropes", a device that was believed to encode all the necessary information back then, like a letter.

Sometimes it seems hard to understand how could a significant culture was completely erased from the earth without leaving any residual knowledge. Our guide shed some light on this. Obviously the Spaniards systematically killed all the persons with power who also happened to be the guardians of the knowledge. When those people got slaughtered, the knowledge died with them. So technically, that was how such a long civilization had such a quick death. Through the interaction with many Quechua people we met in Peru, we sensed an anguish that was deeply rooted in the lost of their identity, an anguish of not knowing where they were from. That pain, I think, is harder to bear nowadays when everyone is searching for some sort of identity, whatever it may be.

Peru: what it means to be an Incan

So we are back from a 2-week adventure in Peru, I didn't write a thing there. Having only occasional internet access was not really an excuse. I was just too tired! and busy catching my breath, due to the 3-4K above sea level altitude, well, and the stunning vistas of course. My body was doing wired things there, trying to adjust its machinery to be a highlander. I am sure my red blood cell count shot up a great deal.
Now I am back to sea level living, I sense an euphoria. Maybe it's the lingering endorphins triggered from all the trekking, maybe it's just the oxygen.
The bottom line is that we all have to endure some hardship to appreciate comfort. Now sitting in my comfortable chair, I can start blogging about the trip, which more or less changed my trepidation of being a real backpacker. Who I am kidding? After all, I only loved hiking when I didn't have to sleep in a tent. And imagine going without shower for a few days! The trip was a big leap of faith, but luckily at the end, I was converted.

Hearing loss

Last week, we went down to Palm Beach to visit Curtis' mom. We booked ourselves a surfing class on Delray beach because it always seems so fun to us, especially when it's sunny and high 90s. After an hour tossing and hurling myself around in the ocean, both of my ears were blocked. For the past 5 days, I lived in a strange state of the muffled-land. Regardless of the ten different tricks I tried, including a bob pin down my ear canal and many other compulsive bodily maneuvers, nothing worked. I lived in this eerily quiet world and have these two little water jugs in my ears. I am often overwhelmed by the sounds of my own chewing when I eat, to a degree that makes me disgusted. I have never lost my hearing before and this makes me somehow think how much we take ordinary things for granted, like our ability to simply see, smell, hear, speak and touch. They can be appreciated on a theory level, but it really takes the loss of one of them for me to truly understand how lucky I am to have them.
The real horror is that we are going to a Coldplay concert tonight. I missed it last year when they toured in the Northeast, so I will absolutely be devastated if I go there half-deaf and listen to Chris Martin singing as if out of a broken radio from my across-street neighbor. So I called my doctor's office this morning at 8am desperately to get an appointment. 30 minutes on hold later, I was able to talk to a human being and luckily got an appointment with a certain Dr. Cahill. Not my primary, but that will do. I hope that she can get the stuffs out of my ears, water, sand, wax, chunks of plant, a miniature sea life, whatever it may be, for I need my hearing back by tonight's concert or I will, well, go to the concert with my two muffled ears.
I found how brave and extraordinary is it for one of my friends who has hearing deficit to navigate the world, to get a Ph.D., to learn foreign languages, to fall in love and have a beautiful daughter. Compared to her, I am definitely a cripple. So this is for you, C.

MOMA Waste Not

It is a moving ordeal for me to see the installation "waste not" in MOMA by Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong. A skeletal section of his mother's old house stands amidst all the items kept within it for 30 years, down to a single button, a pair of shoe string. Holland Cotter in NY times thinks the exhibition "is at once a record of a life, a history of a half-century of Chinese vernacular culture and a symbolic archive of impermanence". It is well said, yet I also found that the installation poignantly shows a marvelous and curious case of a preservation in an extreme unstable country. The truth is that to me only a few lucky ones like the artist's deceased mother had the luxury to hold onto her possession ritually to the end. For the past 30 years, life in China has been nothing but stable. The foundation of the society has been shaken time and time again. Massive population has been moved across a politically and then later economically turmoil landscape. Willingly or unwillingly, few people were able to live in one place for so long and created a personal emporium, despite clutter-filled and obsession-driven, ironically, it is also proven to be extremely comforting.
It is a record of a person's life, and luckily, a record that is still extractable from a country that nothing lasts long at all.
My mom moved four times in the past decade. It was originally because of a large civic project. The whole neighborhood I grew up had to be demolished in whole sale style for a river-side park and a bridge that links to the free way. Along with it, gone with the memories of my childhood, or more precisely, the physical evidence of my earlier existence. When I went back, I couldn't recognize the place at all. My mom was forcibly relocated, first to a school dorm, then to an apartment bordering a farm land, and finally to a seventh floor apartment without an elevator. The last move was to a first floor apartment because she could no longer climbed the stairs. Along each move, she couldn't possibly hold onto her belongings, so gradually she learned to lighten her load by shedding the weight of a life she has lived. Each move, she had to let something go in order to adjust to the new situation. By the time she was in her current apartment, she had remarkably little from the past, which likely or not, have all been scattered and lost.
And that, is the opposite from "waste not". It is another side of the reality in China.
Fortunately, last time I went home, I found a book that belonged to me when I was in middle school: the complete Tang poems. "Take it with you," my mother said, "for I don't know how long I can hold onto it." So I did just that, savaging a piece of my own memory from a place that things tend to get lost, and appropriately, that piece of memory happens to be a book of poems written long time ago, which not many Chinese would be interested in reading.

Berkshire House

It rained all week last week when we were in the Berkshire house, but we were thrilled because two miraculous things happened. One was that on Wednesday, after drizzling all morning, a huge rainbow emerged in front of the house. We have seen amazing rainbow in Hawaii one time, in the remote resort of Hana, Maui, but because we were so high up on the mountain this time, the rainbow appeared to hang on the same horizontal plane as our house. Instead of raising head, we could simply look at it straight on. And what an incredible sight! The rainbow anchored on two hills and straddled the entire valley in between. From the east side of the house, which was basically all glass, it displayed a complete panoramic profile. Then when we stepped out to look at it more, we realized that it was actually a twin-bow. The twin was much fainter and was blocked by our eve. I ended up jumping up and down, more excited that my 17 years-old nephew.
The second was on Sunday night, we came back from NYC and Philly. It was already dark when we pulled into the garage. But we realized that there were a lot of little lights on the lawn. When we got into the house, I looked at from the second floor, oh my god, the meadow slope in front of the house was sparkling like a light show. Obviously, overnight, all the fireflies in the world got hatched and now they were dancing all over the hill! I poured myself a drink and just sat on my porch looking at them. In front of me, it was the darkness of a summer night and the sounds of all the inhabitants of a forest, upon which, a sea of sparkling light made up of little creatures who seemed to be celebrating something more mysterious that I could ever understand.

Francis Bacon at Met NYC

We are having my nephew James visiting from Atlanta these two weeks. At a sensible age of 17, he finally seems to embark on the initial adulthood which is sparkled by occasional conversations on the "real stuffs" and intellectual curiosity about things like art and culture. A huge leap from the hip hop/gangster culture he left behind. Yes, he wears clothes I wear now, clothes that actually fit and made by Ralph Lauren.
So among everything else, we decided to take him to NYC to see the Francis Bacon exhibition at Met. Honestly, it was a kind of selfish motive because I have been wanted to see it for a while.
Francis Bacon is one hell of a painter. Like all great ones, his painting is basically himself, his tormented emotional life, his compulsive-obsessive psychic, his addiction with love and sex, his borderline schizophrenic relationship with this world. And he did it with conviction and success, simply because he didn't take into pleasing the viewers into account. He did what he had to do and for himself, and miraculously he achieved great fame.
Many of his contemporaries found his painting repulsive and yes they probably still remain so to many people nowadays. They are tormented, twittered, fragmented, foreboding and disturbing. Yet they are also honest, naked, vulnerable and therefore endearing. They take the viewers beyond the paintings to a person's life, which reflects the ethos of our society in those particular eras.
One can't avoid the fundamental issues like religion, war, homosexuality and morality when looking at his painting. He chose to confront these issues because regardless being addressed or not, they exist, and by a large degree, they define us as human beings.
James basically "liked" the exhibition. One thing he certainly got was that the guy is weird and not all expensive art has to be eye-candy. I am happy with that. He doesn't need to understand more than that yet at this moment, but at least he witness the existence of such things, just because they exist.

Dia NY: a silent converation between Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois

The past weekend we went to Curtis' nephew's wedding in upstate NY and took the time to visit Dia at Beacon, the Riggio gallery of the Dia art foundation established to collect modern and contemporary art since 1974. The gallery is in a 1920s Bauhaus-style printing factory. Its minimalism vast space and flooding natural light sets up a surreal stage to present the artwork in its collection.
Needless to say, there are many pieces that are landmarks of modern art, such as Chamberlain's monumental sculpture The Privet, Sol Lewitt's wall drawings, and Donald Judd's untitled wooden boxes, to just name a few. What I found mostly visceral was the presentation of Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois' work. Serra's work is known for its complexity masked by the simplest forms. His deployment of steel provokes an impersonal, rational feeling when first approached, yet with each minutes spent with them, one was more and more absorbed into its organic forms and gigantic proportions, maneuvered to overpower the sense of being. The feelings when one walks into his sculptures becomes very much personal, so intense in a way as if one embarks on a psychic journey, a little bit unpredictable, intriguing and repelling at the same time.
I think Serra's work (especially the Torque series in Dia) deals with our emotion in reaction to the outside and everything within its scope, an intuitive emotion that we are born with, which through his work, is reduced to the absolute abstract. Louise Bourgeois' work, like the shadow of Serra's, the ying to the yang, complements strangely well with Serra in both scale, material and concept, by dealing with our emotions in reaction to the inside. It digs deep into our primordial memories that we build and then suppress in order to live on. Compared to Serra's work, her form is bodily instead of celestial, her dimension is personal rather than imposing, yet their work both provoke the visceral feelings, one of inside and the other outside, which ultimately is the same fundamental thing because emotion, regardless lies within ourselves and often stay with ourselves.
I have been a fan of Bourgeois for a long time. In 2007, we spent a whole day in Tate Modern London to look at each piece of her work in the retrospection exhibit. In Dia, with Serra's work looming nearby, I was somehow able to discover yet another layer to the psychic and emotional aspect of her work. To me, that's the beauty of art.

Let's talk about money, not politics

My friend told me that my blog was banned in China. "No long accessible", he said.
That's kind of funny actually. Does that mean I can now write whatever I want? Good timing, because June 4th is coming. The 20th anniversary of the student movement on TianAnMen square .
The other day, I read an article about an autobiography by the former prime minister of China, Zhaoziyang. Zhao died 4 years ago after more than 15 years of house arrest in Beijing since the summer of 1989. He secretly taped his own biography on top of Peking operas. The records were later smuggled out of the country and is now published. The book comes timely to reveal the inner political struggles within the communist party. Zhao's pro-democratic stand was crashed along with the students on the square.
Then two days later, two simultaneous articles in NYtimes and Financial times reported a recent pool from interviewing students in major universities in Beijing. The Result: the memory of TianAnMen is distant and blurry if there is anything at all. What students care, after 20 years, is no longer politics, but personal development, that is, what's good for ME.
Maybe this is a good sign of individualism in an otherwise long-time totalitarian society. But we must remember that they are university students in Beijing, the front runners of the intellectual. If anyone cares about politics, it would be them. Can you imagine what the common people care?
One thing clear now is that the government succeeded in getting people's mind completely off politics. Big time. For what else would be more interesting than thinking and talking about money! Maybe I haven't been back for a long time, my three-week stay in China was full of over the top money talks.
First off, money has never been a taboo in Chinese culture. Friends and family openly discuss salaries, bonuses, numbers in the bank accounts, gain and loss in stock market. It is like the national pass-time. In general, money talk seems also to be a good way to break the ice and start off a conversation between strangers. I had many taxi drivers asking me how much I make after they found out that I am from US. Then one taxi driver proceeded to tell me exactly how much he lost in his investment in a restaurant business. I didn't even know his name.
My friends, some of whom I haven't seen for years, would call me up and wanted to meet for a meal. We would talk about many things yet the conversation would eventually turned toward economy before heading straight to personal salaries and asset. And at the same time it all felt strangely nonchalant and benign, if conspicuously nosy. After a while, I dreaded for such meeting to catch up because I found that I took pleasure in it myself by telling them about our newly acquired mountain house, including how much we had to pay for it.
Money money and money. Kevin and I spent a good deal of time talking about money too. When I got a little fed up and pointed it out to him, he got defensive, saying that I looked down on him and his vulgar talks of money. The truth was that I'd want to talk about something else, like some books, or a movie we saw, even celebrity gossips. He promised not to talk about money with me anymore and his promise was kept exactly for 12 hours.
Finally, I think I understood. The money talk is part of the social fiber now in China so we must face it. It is largely a reflection of the politics that focused on getting wealthy, aka, making money, for the past three decades. At the same time, deep down, the Chinese attitude toward money is nothing but practical. Credit card debt is a rare thing there and saving is still a fortunate national virtue given how much allures out there in that huge bedazzling commercial market. It may be a natural step of the so called market economy, a term coined by the government. Where is it heading? I am not so sure, but hopefully not to a place where money is speculated and air-castled, like in this country.

Thoughts on coffee

Are we what we drink?
Am I a bipolar if I alternately prefer mellow skim latte and tongue-numbing espresso?

I am not a coffee snob by any means. If I go to 1369, an independent coffee shop in Cambridge more than the Starbuck down the street, mostly because it's one block closer to my house, plus the guys who make coffee there are kind of cute.
I don't shun Starbuck by any means, not when I am in need of a C-boost. While the omnipresence of the green logo on American cityscape does take away the delusion of an exclusive taste, there is no statistics based on blind tasting showing which coffee is superior. I certainly don't think it necessary to elevate the phenomena of its popularity into the demise of our contemporary culture. (like we still can't accept who we are as Americans?) But that doesn't mean I don't appreciate the coffee culture in places like France or Italy, but again, those are foreign countries where straight men appear gay and talk about operas.
The rule is that I basically submit to my physical needs, wherever, whenever. How can a beggar be a chooser?

In China, my conquest for good coffee has been proven as a lost battle. Obviously, Chinese don't drink coffee on a national level, and on rare occasion when they do, it morphs into something else. I learned this during my recent China trip.
To begin with, it was hard to find a serious cafe in China. Coffee tends to be treated as a marginal drink, confused with cocktails, or a kind of capitalist lifestyle in general. It was presented in tall glasses, garnished with twisted straws, and came with shocking price tag. Most of all, the names were as puzzling. Latte is translated into iron-holding. I got that because it was phonetic, but what kind of coffee is Palm Tree Sunset? or Love in Paris?

It may sound surprising, but the most expensive coffee I have ever had in my life was not in Paris, nor Rome, but in an airport coffee shop in GuiLin. The cocktail-wanna-be cost me 9 US dollars and tasted funny. In Chuongqing Airport I had to submit to another craving and had no choice but to settle with Hagan-Das's ice latte. I was served in the style of a high-end restaurant. It was a sweet flute-y drink, from which I did obtained enough caffeine to go on. I was told that I could have the table all to myself as long as I want because of my consumption of the drink. Clearly, in addition to the coffee, I also paid for a piece of temporary real estate, an oasis in a chaotic and noisy airport.
When I got to the Hongkong airport at the end of my trip, I was almost in tears to see the green fairy logo of STARBUCK.
No more guessing of what I would get! With 4 dollars, I got my skim latte, and with the first sip, a familiar taste enthralled my being. Consistency never felt so good.
Right there, I regained myself and officially started my journey home.

Posers

Kevin is a great poser for pictures. And I couldn't catch up with him.

JiuZhai Paradise: The intercontinental

One of my favorite hotels in China. The setting amidst the snow-capped mountains is truly spectacular. The postmodern glass architecture is curiously yet seamlessly blended with the local tribal masonry. The whole structure appears like an alien spaceship assimilated into the land, flora and culture.
One strange thing was that they won't let me swim in that gorgeous pool until 8pm and even then it was packaged into the hot spring deal and I will have to pay 20 dollars. I certainly protested in vain.

Tibetan Dinner - JiuZhaiGou

One evening, we were highly recommended by the taxi driver to attend a family style Tibetan feast in one of the villages. It sounded like a great idea to me because I’d like to see some real Tibetan culture and life, not mentioning some authentic cuisines. And it turned out to be one of the most bazaar experiences I've ever had. We were greeted at the gate by a Tibetan girl who presented us Hada, a silk scarf, as a welcome gift as a Tibetan tradition. After told by the house hold owner not to discuss the fees with the other guest (according to him, we paid much much less than the others because they are in tour group), we were ushered into a gaudily decorated dinning room on the second floor. A woman who looked dubiously Tibetan was our hostess. She was there to entertain, but she was neither a good singer nor a decent dancer. Most of her songs are Chinese pop songs and in between she performed an Indian dance, a belly dance and a tap dance. The rest of the time, she cracked vulgar jokes in bad tastes using superficial Tibetan cultural references to please the crowd. She called all men SeLang which means horny wolves, all women Semo, a Tibetan slang roughly means a pretty woman who is horny. She also played with the rare and old tradition of Polyandry and took several guests as her "husbands". I was her number two husband the moment I walked in. For the next one hour, I was tortured to get up to sing and dance, given a Tibetan name something sounds like Yak Diarrhea in Mandarin, and then being dressed in a woman’s robe and cap that were more Mongolia than Tibetan to perform the wedding ceremony with our hostess, together with her first husband, who was in a wig. In the end, we had to exchange gift and because I had nothing small with me, she took my polo belt.
I don’t know what to say about the whole thing. I was amused by the fact that I was amusing other people. It was one of those ridiculous situations that I had no choice but stringing along in order not to spoil the party, while Kevin and everyone else happily snapped the pictures away, yes, with me in drag and a microphone forcefully stuffed into my hand.
While laughing most the time, I was also kind of outrageous and acutely aware that that so called cultural experience was nothing but a tourist entertainment trap that cashed out the Tibetan culture and the curiosity ignorance of the tourists. It was not only pseudo-culture but also a bit anti-culture.
It was a strange, outrageous experience for me, hilarious and also a bit sad. When I looked around, everyone was having a good time. I told Kevin what I thought. He told me nonchalantly that that was what entertained people here. That’s what the tourists wanted to see. That’s what was normal there.
Later the taxi driver told us that these kinds of business brought huge income to many households in this region, the estimated household income exceeded 100,000 USD per year, and that’s why they never wanted to be independent. This confirmed that the operation was purely commercial. It made me think that our host was probably jia de (fake ) as well as everything else in that country, someone who simply works here and draws a salary. Who am I kidding? She didn’t even have an accent speaking mandarin.

JiuZhaiGou

Jiuzhaigou is located on the border of SiChuan and Tibet. The three valleys were originally populated by nine Tibetan tribes, therefore the name Nine Tribe Valley.
It is probably one of the most beautiful and non-polluted places in China nowadays. In contrast to Chengdu which was permanently shrouded by a thick layer of smog, it is a paradise of blue sky, white clouds and snow-capped mountains. One can indeed breathe here, that is, if one can deal with the high altitude. The airport is located on a plateau that is about 3000 meter high, which is close to 10,000 feet above sea level.
Coming to JiuZhai, water is what one should see. The three valleys between the snow-capped mountains stretch out as a Y. Water flow through the valleys, forming strings of lakes, pools, streams and waterfalls. Depending on the geography, the lakes took different shapes and forms. And further depending on the depth, the types of microbes growing in them, the lakes display a wide range of colors, from the most dramatic emerald, to a kind of turquoise that is beyond words. The water seems to take on personality. In some lakes, it is completely motionless and free of wrinkles. In others, it is brooding and moody, getting ready to flow down a cliff to form a waterfall. And the water also plays with the land and the plants. Many fallen tress in the water become “Water coral”, a fossil like corpse of the high calcium content in the water. For two days, we hiked along the valleys for a total distance of about 15 miles so that we got close and intimate with the scenery, while most tourists prefer riding the bus and get off at the scenic point. Perhaps the images will be more effective in showing the beauty of the place.

One river, two cruises, paradise and hell

Once and a while, I come upon a place clearly favored by nature in all regards. GuiLin is such a place. As a sheet of thick limestone that was the ocean floor, it later rose above the sea level to be sculpted into 30,000 peaks by millenniums of erosion. The result is a fairyland, a prototype of Chinese landscape ink painting. Being in GuiLin, one feels the presence of nature more acutely, simply because the landscape communicates a certain impression of being designed and manufactured, instead of occurred randomly. Perhaps, nature does have spirit and crafts the place with a poetic tenderness. With that, it is easier to explain why the landscape literally moved me.
It just so happened that in two days, I took two river cruises. one is the worst in my life and the other the best.
The worse one happened on the first night. A project was started in 1998 right after Curtis visited GuiLin (he went without me because he hasn’t met me yet). Some millions were spent to link the Li River and Peach Blossom River together with four small lakes in the city. Years of silting have made the passage non-navigatible. The idea to generate a city waterway cruise was not a bad one actually, yet the way they “crafted” it was nothing but compelling. Thousands of lights were installed to illuminate the landscape and various structures along the way, but the lights were just a bit out of ordinarily too colorful to be called good taste. I encountered a miniature Golden Gate Bridge right next to a small version of Zhaozhou bridge, the first arch bridge in China. Then a Venetian bridge accessorized with plaster nude Italian sculpture came out of the place, quickly followed by a miniature Brooklyn bridge, which was juxtaposed to one that was clearly modeled after London bridge. It seems that the person who designed this place had a tremendous fantasy on bridges and most likely considered it is so cool to have all of them built. Having those weird-looking things across the river in a landscape that is nothing but Chinese was beyond ridiculous, it was criminal. The person should be taken out to be shot. Just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, it did. To add more “beauty” to it, they implanted clusters of music performances along the way. Groups of Chinese women dressed in traditional clothing would start playing Chinese traditional music when our boat approached. But then I also had a Jazz trio performance under one of the European-looking bridge, a Chinese opera performance with a large crowd, and finally the disaster ended with a Bellagio’s like fountain dancing with techno house music, with some Chinese pavilions in the back. That was a dumbfounding moment.
Then it hit me. Under the skin of the project, they were trying to create a theme park, yet when I came to think about it, there wasn’t any clear theme either. All it was there was some atrocious bad taste. One that felt more grotesque in a city like this where nature has been so generous. Humans seem to be ready to ruin it. When I got back to the hotel, I took a long shower as if it could wash away everything I had seen.
With lots of worries, I embarked on the second cruise the next day. It was to get to YangShuo, a smaller town downstream from GuiLin. I prayed that they didn’t do anything outrageous to disrupt the natural scenery. For I would not be able to survive it being on the boat for 4 and half hours.
As it turned out, it was the best river cruise I have ever taken.
The scenery was surreal and beyond words. Li River literally wanders through thousands of Lime stone peaks rising up in the countryside. The banks were often covered thick bamboo forest, called Phoenix tail bamboos here. Occasionally, a flying eve of a village would peek out of the forest, or a herd of buffalos were gazing on the bank, signaling an otherworldly utopia hidden within. .

All gay

We passed through ShengZhen to go to Guangzhou yesterday. ShengZhen is one chaotic place, I must say. The outlying industrial zones were full of migrant workers, temporary bazaars selling everything, the dream to make it big by millions and also reality that is always less beautiful than dream. The city is a vast spread and it took a good 2 hours by bus to get to Guangzhou from where we were. We stopped to have breakfast at Real Kungfu, a Chinese fast-food chain that now fights for a piece of the big pie with KFC and McDonald’s across the country. Kevin happens to work for it. The food is completely Chinese and processed with high-temperature steaming. The price is in competition with the other chains and the taste is nothing extraordinary but definitely acceptable.
Later that day, I got news from Taki that for this reason or that, she and her husband won’t be able to go on the trip with us. So I am going to GuiLin on my own and meet Kevin later in Chengdu afterward to visit JiuZhaiGou, then l will take the three gorge cruise on my own again to Wuhan to visit my mom. It sounds actually like a good idea for I will get time alone on my own. The truth is that sometimes I feel I need a little bit space and privacy.
Being back only for a few days, China once again impressed me as a complicated place. Everything seems to have another layer that is waiting to be peeled and revealed. People definitely tend to put their noses into each other’s business yet there is a lack of sharing in a deeper level. The pursue for wealth, probably like US or anywhere else, predominates people’s mind, but people here seem to mind less to lay the money issues openly on the table. There is also a strong sense of general insecurity because of the lack of social security plan and less than desirable medical insurance policy. This insecurity appears penetrating through different economic sectors of the society, poor and wealth alike.

Because of the cheaper labor, one can always manage to get great service with less spending. We went to a chic hair salon to cut hair in the afternoon. The service was disgustingly good. A girl washed and messaged my hair for an eternity that I felt that I probably would never need to wash my hair ever again. The stylist then spent over an hour to meticulously cut and stylize my hair. The price about 10USD. After we got out, Kevin made a sudden announcement "They are all gay". I was not sure whether that means they are good at cutting hair or just something totally irrelevant that came up to his mind at that moment.

MBA or DAA

Yesterday before leaving Hong Kong, I met this "cousin sister" of Kevin. She is the daughter of Kevin's father's cousin, originally from Hunan provience and currently lives in Hong Kong. She insisted on taking us out for lunch. According to Kevin, she married an older man from Hong Kong in a sort of mysterious circumstance. The details of the marriage or the man are sort of blurry, belonging to that "nobody knows" category. We met her at her apartment complex Harbor View Plaza next to Hong Kan Stadium, a deireable neighborhood. I was not quite clear of the purpose of the meeting because Kevin had gone to see her the night before, but I decided to string along.
Sometimes, some Chinese people open their mouth and you are shocked to hear everything. Things American would consider completely private, such as how much is your apartments, how many apartment does one own, what much rent does one gets, how much money did one make from the last transaction, one's opinion on buying gold, ect. None of these seem to be the materials for conversation with someone you just met. But those were exactly what we talked about over the Dim Sum. Yet often under the veneer of all these "intimate and private" conversation, one also feesl that you actually know nothing about the person. Everything is sort of abstract and encoded and a lot of deciphering seems necessary. The cousin definitely appeared to be a smart woman who picks up things quickly and makes her own (she learned Cantonese by watching TV). Without a college diploma, she works in some place as a broker to invest in gold and other stocks. The minimum to invest with her is 50,000 HKD. Yet I never learned where she works exactly. She called herself a MBA: married but available, yet she also said she was divorced. "So shouldn't you be DAV? Divorced and available?", I asked her. "Doesn't matter", she replied, "MBA is what we call here". As some woman from mainland arriving in Hong Kong merely three years ago through a marriage, she is considered quite made. Her apartment cost a little less than 2000 USD to rent per month and she has two other rental properties, one is HK, on in Sheng Zheng. And of course, she trades gold. She talks about her vacation in England and Australia, buying high-end fashion in some outlet in London, "You know that all check check brand?" "Buberry?" "Yes, that is, Buberry."

Later, the curious cousin ended up taking the train with us to ShengZheng to visit her parents while we were heading to Taki's place. Later, Kevin said that her mother was a very smart woman too, one of the first who resigned from her job in 80s and started a tailoring business. So there you go, like mother, like daughter.
Still later, we were sitting around and talking in Taki's place. She commented: "those girls, especially those from HuNan, they seem always know who to marry." She turned around and then asked Kevin a profound question, "so are you going to invest gold with her?"

Ten Chickens in a Row

After three in-flight meals and five in-flight movies, I am finally in Hong Kong. Consider traveling for 20 hours and sitting by an extremely talkative Chinese man who continually ate roasted sunflower seeds, it was not a bad trip. (He did offer me some, and I resisted the temptation. It just seemed to be a strange place to munch on sunflower seeds). Kevin met me at the airport. He is one of those lucky few who never gains weight no matter what a lifestyle he leads. It was really nice to see him after 2 years. We were good friends back in middle school and after all the supposed “growing-apart”, we still manage keep our friendship across the pacific ocean to this day. After all, with whom can I share such an old story of skipping night class, climbing out of the gate of to watch two movies in a row?

Last time Curtis and I were in Hong Kong two years ago, we were on our way back from Australia. The city does seem to be unable to change anymore physically, especially the downtown. Every inch of real estate has been exploited while a significant vertical expansion has already been achieved. Neon signs have already saturated and people barely have anywhere else to go. What did change was probably a mentality after it became part of China. The mysterious physically and psychological boundary of mainland and Hong Kong is long gone. Now one can get around by speaking mandarin without being looked down upon. As a matter of fact, mandarin is so hot now that many people try to learn it because they can have more employment opportunities, especially in the service industry. People from mainland are now all over Hong Kong for all sorts of purposes. So the city became more national in a sense.

Over dinner in a street restaurant, Kevin and I talked about random stuffs and we came upon the subject of sex. He disagreed my opinion that sex is still a taboo in China. Maybe gay sex but definitely not straight one. I had to pay attention to him. After all what do I know about the real deal in China nowadays, not mentioning sex? He told me that in Zhong Guan, a city between Guangzhou and Sheng Zeng which he is familiar with, prostitution has become a completely open item on the hotel menu. He said that one can order ten chickens ( they call female prostitute chicken, male, duck) from the entertainment department. They will come to the room, line up in a row, strip naked, move around to show the 3D view. The client will choose one. The chosen one will bow and say “thanks for choosing me”. The other nine will also bow and say “hope you will choose me next time”. The image of that polite commerce of sex-trade is both ridiculously grosteque and inappropriately satire. I am not against prostitution. As a matter of fact, I think since we can not remove the oldest profession from our society, we should legalize (Amsterdam is a very good example). That is not the case in China. Prostitution is illegal here, yet there are many Chinas and Zhong Guan is a different china straddled in capitalism and socialism, : in certain area, it probably gets the worse of both. Kevin told me those girls are all from poor villages inland. I can not imagine them not to be exploited or abused. The question becomes darker when I start to consider how many of them are volunteers and how many of them were trafficked and put in the job by forces.

What stuck me more was how the majority of Chinese trained themselves to live with all the ridicules like this and view them as part of the normal fiber of the society. Maybe it is a good way to survive I suppose. When one feels powerless or irrelavent to change, one has to adapt, which may includes telling a story sometime about the ten chickens in a row as a prove that sex in china is no longer a taboo.

China China

So i did a marathon blogging for the past two days to finish up our trip in Italy so that I can get ready to blog about my trip to China.
I think the trip most likely will be a disaster because I am supposed to travel with two old friends from my middle school, one has no tendency for any sort of planning (Kevin), and the other, a tendency to faint easily (Taki). Yet perhaps it will also be the most fun.
I have no idea where we are heading except that we are meeting in HongKong to plan things out. it seems that everyone agrees to go to Guilin at least. I persuaded Taki to bring her husband Henry along so that he can carry her suitcase, and in the case that she faints, her.
I look forward to and am quite determined in taking a cruise down the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Wuhan, and there I can visit my mother (Mama Mia!). Kevin told me that there was nothing to see on Yangtze and that's exactly why I am going, because we see things completely different. I am bringing my ipod that is filled with lots of Coldplay. I think it will come handy when I visit my mom since she tends to talk about lots of things that I don't care to listen.

#10 Rome the Eternal City overflown with Humanity

Again, what can we say more about Rome? The eternal city where the western civilization spread far and beyond, where Christianity became a deciding force that has shaped and is still shaping our world. History was steered by the decrees from Rome for many centuries and the subsequent events largely led us where we are today. Rome is a city for history lover. A monument is often not just a building but the beginning or the end of an event, the effect of which can still be viewed somewhere in the world.
Rome is also a metropolitan, full of everybody and full of noise. To love Rome, one have to love humanity, the good, the ambiguous and the bad.

#9 Pompeii

Buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in one morning in 79AD and wasn't discovered until more than 1500 years later, Pompeii was a roman town frozen in time. Not just the buildings but also the lives its residents were leading.
The buried town testified the whole spectrum of that bygone Roman society: from lavish villas, street-side cafes to enslaved prostitution. Even the equivalents of nowadays graffitis were preserved as a conspicuous testimony of what people grudged and fantasized about.
I think the images would convey the best of this place more than words.

#8 Vallery of Temples and the best stone street in Sicily

The main reason for our spontaneous endeavor to go to Sicily is to visit the famed Greek ruins at Agrigento. I had a photographer friend many years ago told me that the ruins in Sicily was so much nicer than those in Anthem in his opinion. I was kind of convinced after seeing his photos.
The ruins used to be ancient Greek city Akragas, famous for the luxury lifestyle of its residents. The ruins nowadays stand largely on a low ridge between the city of Agrigento and the ocean and it is the largest Greek ruins outside of Greece. We decided to stay inside the park and visited the ruins in the early morning. At night we could see the illuminated temples from our window.
The temples were dated from 5th century BC and was first destroyed by Carthaginians in 406BC then later by Christian for they viewed the temples as the worship of pagan. Nowadays, the complex has nine out of ten original temples that are still visible. The morning visit was a good idea for we managed to avoid the large crowded descended at noon and sometimes in the archaeological zone we felt we had the temples all to ourselves. The best preserved one is Temple of concord, partially because the Christians converted it to a church. The situation of these monument is truly specular with the ocean as a backdrop.

We drove further later to Palermo in order to catch the overnight ferry to Napoli, on the way we visited a curious hilltop town called Erice. There we found the most beautiful stone streets in all Italy. The town was situated on a crag like many other towns yet what set it apart is that all the houses are built with stones with natural color that gives the town a very pleasant aesthetic. The same stones were used to pave all the tiny roads intersecting the town. We spent a lot of time walking on these poetic pavements, playing with our own shadows.