eating brussel sprouts with chopsticks

i am eating brussel sprouts (and jiachang dofu (family-style tofu) and majiang mifen (sesame-paste rice noodles)) with chopsticks at the moment. 'tis the night before the night before christmas and i travel tomorrow. so i needed to eat what was in the fridge, and it has resulted in this fusion meal. a combination like this may be on the menu at some trendy place in nyc. (i had olives and mala huasheng (spicy peanuts) while the brussel sprouts were roasting which i realize is equally east-meets-west.) being reflective after saying goodbye to my colleagues for the year, i think eating brussel sprouts with chopsticks is perhaps what i am always doing in some sense.

today the trial of a prominent chinese "dissident" began. (i put "dissident" in quotes because i have come to think of it as a problematic term, especially because of the immediate association with illegal or criminal behaviour. if the rights to free speech enshrined in china's constitution mean anything, he has committed no crime.) poet and activist liu xiaobo has been one of china's most vocal advocates for democratic reform. he is currently charged with "incitement to subvert state power" for advocating for open elections and free speech. although prosecutors also cited six recent articles he published on overseas web sites*, liu’s greatest offense is his role in crafting charter 08, a manifesto which called for rule of law, expanded human rights and an end to the communist party’s monopoly on power. more that 10,000 people signed charter 08 before the censors removed it from the internet. perhaps most poignantly, it sought to guarantee the right to free speech and the abolition of the very law under which liu is being prosecuted. why he is being prosecuted when many others had a role in drafting, promoting, and signing charter 08 is an open question. perhaps the government wants to make an example of him. many had hoped obama would raise his case during his visit. clearly the government waited until after the president's photo-op on the great wall to start liu's trial. and denied US and european diplomats entry.

on monday zhang boshu, a senior political philosopher and constitutional scholar at the chinese academy of social sciences - CASS, china's most important (state-run) think tank and academic institution - was asked to resign after being there for 18 years. this move is understood as a government rebuke of his advocating for constitutional reform in contravention of the "political discipline" of the communist party committee at CASS, which requires adherence to the central government's position.

oh tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy. oh tidings of comfort and joy.

and yet despite all the heaviness, i feel as though i am ending the year on a light note. i am thankful, despite all the obstacles, to be observing the struggle for rule of law here. i am moved by courage and compassion almost daily. and humbled. and troubled. and overwhelmed. there has been much about this year that has been incongruous - eating brussel sprouts with chopsticks. there has been much movement - both literally and less so. emotionally i have grown in ways that i never expected or imagined. i can say this especially now as i am planning to see little trouble in a week and hope that we can move towards one another once again.

and yet despite all the growth and goodness, i still find myself restless at times. then again, i wouldn't know what to do with myself if i weren't. by now i have moved on to dessert (chocolate pocky and dutch dark chocolates, unintentionally although appropriately as culturally cacophonous as the rest of the meal), and ought to move on to getting myself sorted for tomorrow's trip. i wonder whether brussel sprouts can be packed for a snack on the plane. i think yes. i dwell in possibility.

*according to his brother six out of the more than 490 articles he has published since 2005.

a path with heart

for some reason, flurries of friends affirming my strength seem to be in my forecast of late. (i also appear to be relating my emotions to the weather once again, but didn't realize that until this very moment!) it is of course very loving encouragement to tell someone they are strong. and, thus far, i have weathered life's storms. but i do not feel as though i am any more or less strong than your average spider princess*. i am always surprised, by myself and by sister-friends** whose heartaches i have shared, at the inner strength we all have if only we open ourselves to it, if only we allow ourselves to follow that path. a path that always leads to and through the heart.

i have been thinking about following a path with heart for as long as i can remember. although in this case, i am speaking more about generally choosing a way to be in the world than the specific process of choosing or finding a way to be strong through stormy times. (i do think of both processes as choosing to some extent. truly, the trick is in what one emphasizes. we either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. the amount of work is the same.) the idea of following a path with heart was something my father introduced me to when i was quite young. he was very much into carlos castaneda, particularly journey to ixtlan, and was trying to teach me how to lucid dream as a four-year old. (oh how i wanted to be able to do it and please him. but i never could. i could never find my hands!) the dreaming didn't pan out, but desire to lead a life with purpose, and follow a path with heart, did. in journey to ixtlan, through the teachings of don juan castaneda reveals a way of being a spiritual warrior in this world. his discussion of a path with heart there is simple - "Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use." asking those questions in practice can be more complicated. or at least we can make it so.

but what does this have to do with strength? or with the paths i am pursuing now? tomorrow i am very fortunate to be able to attend a program on public interest lawyering in china with attorneys and others who do work with tremendous heart. it is very sensitive for them to have foreigners at this program, and i am honoured to be one of two obvious lao wai - foreigners - able to attend. in thinking about tomorrow's program, i considered about the different paths people can take in the legal profession - paths with such great heart! (paths with tremendous profit!). i also reflected that it was in following my own path with heart - in multiple senses - that lead me here. and to tomorrow's program. and as i find myself tenderly considering my current path and its potential tributaries, i feel secure that i already possess whatever strength i need to find the right path(s).

castaneda also speaks of how warriors never worry about their fears. i sometimes wonder if that is true of the weiquan - rights defending - or public interest lawyers in china. they are warriors - both spiritual and otherwise. (incidentally, many of them have converted to christianity. this is an interesting discussion for another day.) there can be no space for fear on such paths. perhaps more appropriate for we lesser warriors is the idea that the true art of a warrior is to balance terror and wonder. that much i can do. even if the balancing act never ends.

i think that balancing of terror and wonder - that open-heartedness - is what sometimes is mistaken for strength. really it is less strength than just the audacity to insist upon following a path with heart.

*a once upon a lifetime nickname of mine. from a brian andreas quote: If I was a spider princess, she said, I would spin webs the color of sky and catch drops of sunlight to give to children who watch too much TV and then everyone would remember to come outside to play. If I was a spider princess, she said, things would be different.

**sister-friends can also be men, i have recently discovered thanks to a late night phonecall.

under pressure

i have just had acupuncture / acupressure done for the first time and am amazed at the spaciousness. i feel as though my spine will never be the same. and i cannot wait to go back. i went in to see about treatment for some neck and back pain. but have come out joyful and with a sense of wonder about life. i also surprised myself this evening. after shen daifu - doctor shen - did an initial assessment, she asked me if i was a afraid of needles. some brave self i did not know existed answered no. wo bu pa - i am not afraid. and so it began. with just three needles in each foot and calf and one in each hand, the muscles in my back released entirely for the first time in probably more than a decade. and then the real work began.

shen daifu is a very small, very warm woman. but incredibly strong. she spent a good hour while the needles were in standing on my back and legs and applying pressure or massaging me with her feet. it was unlike anything i have ever experienced. even when she was using her hands i was amazed that such a tiny person could produce such strength, could apply such pressure. she worked on me for two and half hours. we chatted some but during the quiet spaces i found myself thinking about pressure - about the pressure we allow others to apply to us and that which we apply to ourselves. pressure, applied properly, can push or release us to greatness, to spaciousness, or to both at once. improperly applied, it can crush, hobble, or diminish us.

once upon a lifetime i was much harder on myself that i am now. (the song "under pressure" was in fact something i would sing in my head while stretching to psyche myself up during my pre-race ritual when i was a swimmer. what does that tell you? although, to be fair, it was more about rhythm than message.) at that time, the pressure i applied to myself to be perfect was tragic and laughable. i have sometimes wondered where that pressure came from. why do we create our own pressures and what drives us to do so? doesn't the world give us enough already?

my transcendent experience with shen daifu tonight reminded me of another moment in my life when a stranger's pressure set me free. i must have been 16. a few friends from the united states had come to visit me and my family in beijing during the summer. it was a hot, sticky beijing august day and i was taking my guests to the ming tombs. about 45 minutes into the 1.5 hour drive, i started to feel incredibly nauseous. i willed it to pass. that didn't work, so i had to ask our driver to pull over. i was green and woozy by the side of a road in the beijing countryside with a car full of people relying on me to orchestrate the day. of course they were caring and sympathetic and suggesting that we simply turn back. but, this being deep in my perfectionist stage, i was putting pressure on my sick self to pull it together and continue. i recall staring up at the sun and not thinking clearly. at that moment, a chinese woman going by on a bicycle stopped and came over. she told me that she was a doctor of traditional chinese medicine and waved some sort of identification or badge before my face. she asked me a few questions, which i did my best to answer. she then proceeded to apply pressure to specific points - my temples, my inner wrists, my ankles. the waves of nausea receded, my head cleared, and i recovered completely. we thanked her profusely. i tried to offer payment, even if only in the form of the basket of fresh, ripe peaches we had packed as part of our picnic lunch. but she would accept nothing. she said seeing me recover was her payment. and then she hopped on her bicycle and rode off into the shining heat. i remembered her refusal tonight when shen daifu refused payment for the extra half hour she spent working on my impossibly knotted shoulders and neck.

shen daifu and i spoke a lot about balance this evening. the principle of balance really underlies a lot of chinese medicine. (and chinese philosophy, religions, and traditional thinking, i pointed out.) perhaps the still point we strive to reach with our pressures - both those we apply ourselves and those the world places upon us - is finding the right balance. an appropriate balance of pressures can be positive, transformative. an ill-balanced or wobbly balance of pressures can be negative, destructive. striking this balance seems a constant process.

memories and magical thinking

i have been thinking lately about the nourishment of memories. how they can sustain and inspire us in moments both unexpected and carefully arranged. whether they push us over in unguarded moments or whether we seek them out, collect and order them in tidy mental rows, they can provide a quiet sustenance. they can of course also haunt us, but i am not speaking of those kind of memories here. i am speaking of the friendly ghosts. the memories that float up and embrace you or stroke your hair from your face, look you in the eyes, and tell you you are loved.

some say that life is nothing but a series of moments, of those memories that nourish us, i suppose. perhaps this is true because moments (memories) are wholly our own. and we can edit and rearrange them to suit our constantly evolving personal narrative. that process gives us a sense of control* over our experiences and how they influence and help us to interpret who and why we are. this was something i struggled with a great deal in trying to come to terms with an experience i had as a young girl that i simply wish had never happened but couldn't deny had forever altered me. how can you love yourself and who you are without accepting said experience? how can you take ownership of something impossibly heavy and incorporate it into your sparkleicious lightness? . . . for what other purpose do we have an inner life?

another reason memories can nourish is they are among the most personal parts of our inner lives. which, incidentally, are generally underrated. of course, having a vibrant inner life is not something that can be measured and thus valued by society, your peers, anyone. which is precisely the point. but 'tis still a shame. i sometimes have moments of wanting to be deeply ambitious. (and i suppose in a sense i am.** but not in a terribly conventional sense. i have moments of wanting to rise to the top of some commercial, male-dominated industry. or make buckets of money. as a woman. just to prove that i can. as a woman. (it actually has very little to do with me personally.) but i can never ultimately see the joy or purpose in that. and i don't think spite is a very compelling motivation.) but, those moments aside, i feel the way our accomplishments are judged are all so outward and ignore the riches that can and do lie within. you can't exactly put "vibrant inner life" on your resume.

and i fear i may be starting to sound dangerously new-agey. although, to be fair, i'm not really sure what that means. little trouble used to tell me sometimes that i had hippie in my dna and he thought it was cute when that showed through, when certain cultural assumptions of mine would startle him.

something i have noted about my own inner life is my capacity for wonder and fantasy. perhaps we all share this. but i have always had a vibrant and not-easily-contained imagination.*** possibly more universal is our capacity in times of grieving to veer towards what joan didion calls "magical thinking".**** my current confusion and grief pales in comparison to the loss of a husband and a daughter's coma that she wrote about in establishing the idea of magical thinking - that grief makes us crazy. i have watched my already too-creative-for-where-i-am mind think (improbably! beautifully!) magically of late. i have observed the lines between what is actually happening and what could, what has already happened and what never will, sleep and awake, possible and other worldly, accurate and mystical, become blurred. and not been all that surprised or disturbed by it.

yet i also wonder if i think magically even when not grieving. among the many reasons that i thought little trouble was the one was his capacity to accept my imaginary pets. or roll right along with me when i veered from this reality off into another dimension and described it excitedly. he always came along, and in fact encouraged my capacity for magical thinking. i have never known another man to do so.

it is only fitting, therefore, that i am thinking magically now. and i am still wishing to share it. both the thinking and the magic. instead, i am being sustained by memories.

* can't resist a brian andreas quote: If you hold on to the handle, she said, it's easier to maintain the illusion of control. But it's more fun if you just let the wind carry you.

** i resolved, btw, the cities dilemma of a few posts back. as long as i call new york the big apple, i can maintain the alliteration / aural appeal and still build a life dividing my time between beijing, beirut, and nyc.

*** why i chose a career path that very often involves its active suppression is another story. and to illustrate that point, a story. my legal writing tutor during my first year of law school opened our first writing feedback meeting by telling me that i wrote beautifully. the problem, she noted, was "you write like flower" (complete with a large, two-handed gesture recalling petals), and "lawyers don't write like flower; we are linear thinkers." (confession: i still write like flower when i can. they couldn't stomp it out of me.)

**** last starry footnote i promise. the review of her book, the year of magical thinking is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/09pinsky.html. incidentally, speaking of memories, i remember seeing the version of this book made into a play and performed by vanessa redgrave with some very dear friends in nyc. how far we have all come since that night! how many storms we have weathered! and still we beat on, boats against a current..... and the rest.

as though i had wings

i have been thinking about love and fear a lot of late. and freedom. and how they are all woven together inside us somehow like criscrossing veins on some exotic fruit. for some reason, the image of a pomelo comes to mind. perhaps because there is so much peeling involved. so much work to get through the layers of misunderstanding and confusion and to arrive at the delicious, textured, seemingly contradictory epiphany about how these three relate. not that i have it all figured out. i think that this is a constant process. an endless peeling. and discovering. and re-discovering. i love pomelos enough to especially welcome this idea. and i also love life enough to continue to peel through both joy and pain.

i wonder if i retreat behind images of produce because i am still processing my thoughts on these matters in a manner far too subtle and personal to share here. or perhaps it is recognizing that i do not at present have the faculty to be articulate about them. a beloved friend wrote to me this week, and among her thoughts was the idea that love liberates. love frees us. (i imagine it as love providing the spaciousness to be ourselves, to be really whole. and it reminds of my thinking lately about discipline as freedom.) this same friend had written not so long ago about love and fear, noting that choosing love doesn't mean there is no fear, in fact, to choose love we have to face our fears. one of my wonderful brothers-in-law used to say "love is the absence of fear". i think i am now beginning to understand what he meant.

a line from a mary oliver poem spoke to me yesterday morning - "I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings."

it is from a poem (improbably! beautifully!) about birds on a wire. and also, grief.

ahem:

Starlings in Winter

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.


- Mary Oliver

productivity and sugarplums

i was up early as usual this morning, but somehow didn't want to do yoga or run or ponder the moon in the still dark sky (the activities that typically occupy my time between 6:00 and 7:30 am). i almost wanted the time to be unproductive, and thought about going back to sleep. in the conversation i mentioned the other day about what 'being gentle to yourself' means, one friend said that being gentle to herself meant allowing for unplanned or unproductive time. i thought it an interesting observation. in our crowded, sunlit lifetimes we can forget to take time to just be. another friend of mine in new york used to add two-hour blocs of "do nothing" into her blackberry schedule just to remind herself to once in awhile let go. while i am not quite at that level, i need to remind myself that taking a morning to just be with myself (and my most recent whirring thoughts) is in itself productive.

'tis the season for productivity in a sense. elves are meant to be working overtime. we are encouraged to consume, consume, consume. and therein find some connection with the ineffable. perhaps not. once a upon a lifetime, one was fairly cushioned from christmas chaos in china. not so anymore, i have discovered. christmas has barfed all over beijing. that's the best way i can describe it. or at least barfed all over the shopping complex / mixed use office building in which i work such that i have to elbow my way through the ooze just to find a quiet corner to eat lunch or go to the atm or buy a snack. and even in the quiet spaces you can hear jingle bells playing. china's embrace of christmas is at once entirely baffling and utterly predictable. baffling because this is technically an atheist country* and the current christmasness is in marked contrast to the utter lack thereof when i was growing up here. predictable because, spirituality aside, if there's one thing the people's republic currently worships, it's consumerism. so i think china's dreaming of a very commercial christmas - more about sugar daddies than sugarplum faeries.

a british friend who is here with one of the EU projects recently recounted her experience around this time last year when she decided to ask a few colleagues if they knew what christmas was about. (short answer: they didn't.) she then told them the story of the birth of christ. they were amazed. "that's a really good story," one said, "but what about the fat man, santa, was he also one of the wise men?"

beijing has come along way from the bleak cabbaged christmases of my youth. i still remember the first year christmas trees were available in beijing, and my father and i were sent off to find the family tree. there was only one place to go for trees – the parking lot next to the german hotel which housed beijing’s best international supermarket - and there were certainly not fake trees encouraging consumption all over town as there are today. ba and i set out on our family kwau zi - a motorcycle inspired by German military models from world war II, with a very fetching sidecar and fake BMW insignias - with some twine in the sidecar’s small trunk. i rode in the sidecar as we set out. (i loved the sidecar.) we discovered that the christmas tree market was not very robust. nonetheless, we took our time. my father and i were perhaps not the best choice for this mission. having similarly contemplative natures, the was much to consider. the first tree we saw was excellent in a relative sense – decently shaped, not entirely unevenly distributed branches, moderately covered in needles, and at four feet high, a good size for our flat. but we didn’t want to go with the first tree we saw. we wanted to be sure that we found the very best tree. so we inspected each and every other tree in the lot, considering and commenting on their merits, much to the amusement of the staff. still not satisfied, we got back on our bike, adjusted our helmets and goggles, and drove to another place rumoured to possibly have shrubs resembling christmas trees in stock. they did not. so we returned to the original lot and re-examined the trees there. then, exhausted from all of this examining, we had a snack. eventually, we selected the first tree we had seen.

tree selected, there was the issue of transport. the plan was that we’d load the tree into the sidecar, securing it with twine. christmas trees, even petite ones, are not really designed to sit comfortably in motorcycle sidecars, twine or no twine. so i ended up riding home on the seat behind my ba, holding onto the bike with one hand and leaning slightly to the side, holding onto the tree with the other hand. this was probably not the safest way to travel. when we finally made it home with the tree hours after we had set out, my mother was not impressed. she could not fathom how it could have possibly taken us so long and was worried about the fading light for the family christmas picture. we tried to point out that we had found the very best tree in beijing. she looked from the tree to us and back again and said nothing. she didn’t need to speak, her look exposed us for having spent an entire saturday staring at scrawny, shapeless piney things in the freezing cold just as an excuse to ride our kwau zi. we didn’t care though; we were really impressed with our transport job. and the tree looked good-ish when hidden under layers of ornaments in the corner, even if the shadows in the christmas photo were longer than planned.

i am sure there is a surplus of christmas trees in beijing this year. there seems to be a surplus of everything. although the magical christmas market seems to be hiding somewhere with the elves. when i asked a server at our lunch restaurant today where she got her fabulous headpiece - a red headband with two springs supporting santa heads which bobbled delightedly as she moved - she said she didn't know. the restaurant had got it at the same place they got all of the other christmas baubles that were covering the walls and the rest of the waitstaff and she didn't know where it was. oh well. i pushed my way past the tree, the giant santa, five golden rings, partridge and pear tree blocking the restaurant's entrance, and went on with my day. i will be content to just be and not worry about productive decoration this season.

*one of my favourite alleged li peng quotes is his using china's atheism as a shield at a press conference. i cannot verify the veracity of this statement and this may very well be an urban myth spread by the active imaginations of the beijing expat community in the 1990s. it's telling even so. the then premier's statement was in response to a journalist pressing li peng on china’s human rights record and asking about how the government could justify a particular recent action. li peng calmly listened to the question, didn’t even blink, and stated: “we’re atheists; we can do that.”

paying attention

so i have been overbrimming with things to express these past few days. but i have purposefully been holding them back. this is rather like trying to contain one hundred unruly baby swans in a puddle. it is also perhaps misguided given that a purported purpose of this blog is to encourage me to write regularly. why then, would i suppress my writing? 1 - i wanted to observe the rise and fall of my emotions and thoughts without interpretation or presentation. 2 - out of a sense of privacy. little trouble and i have managed to lose each other. this probably does not come as a surprise given comments about my preference for crying in corners and such things. but i haven't fully expressed it until now. it has been very hard and sad. and yet. we continue....

when i haven't been actively containing my thoughts, i have been channeling them into gmail status messages. i realize that they have become a bit much. when we were at this fashion open house this saturday, i fell into a conversation with the milliner (heart that word!). she was an american woman who makes fabulous and outrageous hats. imagine everything from baby dinosaurs to feathers, fans to giant leaves. i'm not sure why, but during conversation something about my manner of speaking convinced her i was a fellow artist or a creative sort. and she asked me as much. i said yes, i was involved in the creative arts and my current medium was gmail chat status messages. i said its a very narrow genre, but often neglected. you can do so much with so little if you really put your mind to it. i don't think she found this quite as amusing as i did. and it made me realize i really need to find a wider space in which to exercise my creative muscles. although my friends thought it was pretty funny. we were drinking mulled wine even though it was before brunch and before noon (11:45). when a friend pointed that out, i said that i was deep in a phase of being gentle with myself, so i was allowed to drink before noon. (not that i have otherwise done so!)

over brunch that day we contemplated that idea - being gentle with yourself. and questioned what that might mean for each of us. i was a little taken aback because i thought it would be enough just to say that and get away with drinking mulled wine and eating gingercake before brunch. at some point when i was explaining what "being gentle to mattie" meant to me, i mentioned that i've found what makes me most happy is making others happy. a friend who was there commented that, although she doesn't know me well and of course this is a good quality, it may be something to pay closer attention to. she had learned about herself that she is a giver and can give a great deal with little in return, except on occasion when she really needs it. and she questioned whether the give, give, give dynamic is healthy. while of course we all navigate these subtle emotional terrains distinctly, i have found myself watching her point rise and fall amid the waves of my mind a few times since. there may be a point at which one cannot or should not give any further. (and even as i write this i can recall having reached that point. although this memory is not in the context of a romantic relationship.) what is challenging about my current situation is that my impulse is to continue to give.

although there are many ways to give. my gift to my office building has been to single-handedly become the 15th floor anti-smoking swat team. i mentioned that we moved offices recently. the comrades on the 29th floor were content to adhere to building regulations and refrain from smoking in the hallway by the lifts. (even though there is an ashtray there above the rubbish bin, smoking is not permitted except in the hallways by the stairwell.) the 15th floor is another story. when we first moved there was a constant lingering smell of cigarette smoke in the hallway. it was distinctly unpleasant. my first tactic was stalking. i would try to catch the culprits in the act and then have our office manager call the building's management office to complain and send someone to investigate. but that tactic proved largely ineffectual. so i decided to deploy the direct confrontation approach. whenever i came out of our office to discover men smoking in the hallway while waiting for the lift (it's always men and always the same few), i would tell them they needed to cease and desist (a.k.a. move to the hallway by the stairwall and close the door). last night i took on four slightly drunk comrades who did not move immediately after i informed them that it was forbidden to smoke in the hallway and they needed to go to the stairwell. so i told them that their behaviour was uncivilized. and threatened to call the building management. that did the trick. today, when i was stepping out for lunch, the smokers saw me coming and hightailed it to the hallway by the stairwell before i even had a chance to say anything. which made me smile.

i have received some other unexpected gifts in the last day. a neighbour returned a baking dish he had borrowed filled with freshly-made brownies. and a friend sent me this rushdie quote: "Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention." i really think that concept it is a gift - what is expected of you is attention. perhaps that's what my withholding of thoughts is about. more than denying writing, i have simply been paying attention. may i always create the space to do so.

and now, the gift of poetry on a tuesday:

astonishment

why after all this one and not the rest?
why this specific self, not in a nest,
but a house? sewn up not in scales, but skin?
not topped off by a leaf, but a face?
why on earth now, on tuesday of all days,
and why on earth, pinned down by this star's pin?
in spite of years of my not being here?
in spite of seas of all these dates and fates,
these cells, celestials, coelenterates?
what is it really that made me appear
neither an inch nor half a globe too far,
neither a minute nor aeons too early?
what made me fill myself with me so squarely?
and why am i staring now into the dark
and uttering this unending monologue
just like the growling thing we call a dog?

- wislawa szymborska

the full catastrophe

in zorba the greek * nikos kazantzakis gives us the wonderful image of life as “the full catastrophe”. although i think in that moment, he was speaking more marriage, kids, a house, i think it's more universal than that. even without those particular tornadoes, the winds of life will rock us no matter where we are. we all have our full catastrophes. zorba's way is to dance in the gale of the full catastrophe.... to celebrate life, to laugh with it and at himself, even in the face of personal failure and defeat. in doing so, he is never weighed down for long, never ultimately defeated either by the world or by his own considerable folly. of course, zorba himself must have been quite a catastrophe for his wife and kids and the others in his path. a loving and outrageous and wonderful one, but a catastrophe nonetheless. what i appreciate about that phrase is that it captures the human spirit's capacity to smile into the winds that blow us about, to come to terms with life's howling difficulties and find within them space for growth and grace. and i love the imperative to dance through the full catastrophe.(note to self: another mantra! use it.)

it has been a full catastrophe of a weekend so far and it's not even saturday night yet. people will be coming over in a few hours to eat cheese and drink wine and smile at life. i've just made hummus. and the early pattern of the tree branches against the early evening sky out my window is like dripping laughter. spent both last night and this morning in the company of wonderful women friends. well, and an italian football team and a room full of outrageous, whimsical hats (not at the same time). but those are stories for another time. in other miraculous news, my partners learned how to use emoticons. and a newly engaged friend is happily glowing in the joy and challenges of it all. so many gorgeous winds blowing!

in this quiet eye of the storm, i find myself wanting to stay very still and listen to my thoughts. almost like listening to my breath in meditation.** it has been an overwhelming week. with the winds of life's wonder and terror whirling about. as ever.

one of the more unfortunate winds that has been forcefully blowing through beijing these days is the continued suppression of public interest lawyers. i had lunch on friday with some of the leaders of china's women's rights movements and the founders of a women's legal aid organisation. i am humbled by how much they have accomplished. their uncompromising commitment to justice, their tenacity, their thoughtful approach to their work, and their playful spirits. their centre was at beijing university (beida) since it was established fourteen years ago. but earlier this week, the university told them they could only stay at beida if they stopped doing cases. they could continue to do research, but, as the centre's founder pointed out, their entire purpose was bringing cases. you can hardly champion women's legal rights much outside the courtroom. and, as i said to her, what they presented you was not an option. they had no choice but to go. this was devastating news to me. it was clearly the government directing beida to silence them. the organisation had no choice but to disassociate from beida and is now considering other options for registration. being associated with a university gives legal public interest organisations such as this one the political cover necessary to enable them to work. by being cast out, it's a clear signal from the government that it does not welcome their cases. and there are myriad obstacles to registering as an NGO in china. luckily, they have a law firm as part of their centre with independent registration so they can continue to work on their cases even as they try to resolve how to move ahead. their cases are vital to trying to push the legal charade of china's legal system towards justice, legitimacy and rule of law.

they recently tried to get involved in a horrific case here in beijing. a 20-year-old rural woman from anhui province came to beijing as a petitioner under china's system allowing individuals to petition the government for wrongs and express grievances. sadly, many of beijing's petitioners end up being detained and imprisoned in "black jails" where they are often abused, tortured, and intimidated into silence before they are trucked back home. (the chinese government official denies that they exist, but they are well-documented. a recent human rights watch report on china's abusive black jails: http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/11/12/alleyway-hell-0.) another tactic (and the experience of a woman represented by the centre in a separate case) is for the authorities to declare petitioners mentally ill, imprison them in psychiatric hospitals institutions and heavily medicate them. (see a friend's excellent report on this here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/share.html?s=news01s3066qb75.)

this particular young woman's fate was even worse. she was raped by the guards in the black jail. others were in the room at the time (there are a large number of petitioner-prisoners per room and genders are mixed), but they were too afraid of being beaten to do anything to stop it or even scream. someone in the prison reported the story via sms and soon the black jail and soon the place was swarmed by NGO representatives and reporters. the guards tried to clean up the blood and destroy the evidence and sealed the room. the young woman was returned to her village in anhui and told not to petition again. she has decided to bring a lawsuit against her attacker(s). the women i was lunching with had tried to become involved in her case, but she was only permitted to have a government-appointed attorney. they were furious because that attorney said nothing at all during the initial court proceeding they had just attended. and they also learned that the local government was offering large sums of money to the young woman's uneducated parents to buy her silence. the case will go forward, but it already such a perversion of justice.***

but, as we considered the current situation for public interest lawyering over lunch, we concluded that there is no justice in china. it was a heavy meal, and not just because of all the delicious dofu. i was really just so distraught to hear about this group's being booted from beida. i tried to provide some lightness by joking "who needs public justice when there's such good food in china?" only my work wife laughed. sarcasm in general and my jokes in particular don't translate particularly well. i am aware of this, but resist ceasing my amusing commentary in chinese. even if it is only amusing to me. it's all part of the full catastrophe.

this feels a very heavy place to conclude. but our capacity for both for goodness and disgrace, compassion and despair are all whirling in the gales of the full catastrophe. and to dance through it is to know them all.

*this was also the name of my first cat - zorba the greek. although i apparently couldn't quite pronounce "greek" so ended up calling him "zorba the geek". in the end, he was "zorbie". he was a great companion and an old soul. i am sure we will meet again in other lifetimes.

**confession: i am not skilled at meditation. in fact, i can't really do it. so i feel a bit guilty about even writing that sentence lest it give a false impression. but i aspire to meditate. or do so in the abstract. but actually sitting myself down and doing it is really beyond my abilities at this point.

***although today's news reminds us that the chinese haven't entirely cornered the market on the perversion of justice. apparently doing cartwheels is evidence of murder in italy these days: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/world/europe/05italy.html?ref=global-home; http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/amanda-knox-revisited/?scp=2&sq=amanda%20knox&st=cse. and principles of open government and accountability are quietly being strangled the states: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/opinion/05sat2.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

firefighting

after spending a good portion of this morning putting out yet another potential fire sparked in relation to our most problematic funder, i stop a moment to ponder. why oh why is USAID such a disaster? it's really quite embarassing. and it needn't be this way. the international development agencies of other nations are culturally aware, coherently structured, staffed with competent and intellectually curious people, respected and held in high esteem. i have even contemplated - in moments in a dark room wondering what i will really ultimately do with my sparkly self during this lifetime - joining the canadian foreign service just so i could work for CIDA (canadian international development agency). [ahh the joys of being a dual national! i can always distance myself from the tornado ballet that is USAID by gracefully deploying the canadian card. hard to do that, though, when you work for an NGO with "american" in its name and when some of your projects are funded by USAID....]

incidentally, the major drawback to the canadian foreign service plan (aside from the obvious questionable career path issues and probably having to be initiated into the service with a class of fresh-faced 20-year-olds and the potential harm to my self esteem from being around so much supple young skin) is that i don't speak french. although you get an entire year in which to become profficient in the national language you don't speak, and i suppose there are worse ways to spend a year than studying french in ottawa. if you are asking why i would go to ottawa to learn french, that is an excellent question! i think better places for me to learn french would include: paris, the french riveria, on a french vineyard where my jobs included learning french, flirting, and sampling champagne, or beirut. confessoin: i have had a passionate secret crush on beirut for years even though i've never been there. it has long been on the list of cities i would like to have as a partial home despite my having never set foot on lebanese soil. beirut just seems to me so hopelessly romantic, gorgeous and complex, swirling at the center of so much: an elaborate, ancient past, a breathless, dazzling future, an alluring present, beauty, pain, terror, wonder, art, ecstasy, despair, freedom. i don't know why i ascribe so much to a city i've never met. it's a lot of pressure. but i have faith beirut will not disappoint. (although i suppose recent experience suggests that i should not have faith that i will not be disappointed. hmmm. too bad, i'm a believer.) in fact, a few years ago when i was (once again) in a dark room* wondering what i will really ultimately do with my sparkly self during this lifetime, i decided that my ideal situation would be one in which i could divide my time between cities i love and use all of my languages. i decided on beijing and beirut and new york. for alliteration's sake, i briefly considered boston. but i don't love boston. i also thought i could add berlin if i needed a european base. so many b's! so much that is aesthetically and aurally pleasing about that! and such a nice arc around our spinning orb. then i realized it was ridiculous to think of cities to live in based on their first letter. and even more ridiculous to spend time thinking about how to maintain homes in so many cities without a real purpose. i was at that time unemployed are really spending a lot of time in that dark room wondering. i still think it sounds like a great plan to divide your time among beijing, beirut, and new york. i simply need to sort out a way to actualize it.

but that is for some future me. (maybe the one who would come back and take the present me out for a sisterly glass of wine and tell me to calm down and keep on dancing! we would laugh, eat cumin-roasted almonds [this is a very vivid detail in this particular fantasy, so do indulge], toss our better-than-we-really have hair about, and smile at life.) for now, i am simply trying to actualize rule of law promotion for an international NGO despite all of the obstacles presented by USAID. as noted above, CIDA is so respected i spent a year in ottowa in my mind learning french for them. (in actuality it was about 7 minutes. this was unfortunate, because i like to do things in 8s, but i think i only thought about it for 7 minutes.) DFID is dignified and their staff always cordial and smart and at the top of their field - a healthy foxtrot. the other SIDA is equally impressive - a brisk nordic breeze of efficiency. and then there's the tornado ballet, dear old USAID.

an example of what it's like to work with them. we are transparent with our local partners about the fact that we receive US government funding. we are able to explain that although we receive government money, we are independent and not beholden to or representatives of the US government in any way. then the regional USAID "folks" as they would call themselves show up. (aside: i really can't stand it when people use the word "folks" in a professional setting. it's a very american thing and i know its meant to intimate of intimacy or cowpies or some combination thereof, but it makes me cringe.) while in china, in front of our local partners they continually call us their "agents". this is (1) not true, (2) insulting, and (3) deeply problematic because of the message it sends to the chinese. to wit - that depsite our protestations to the contrary, we are in fact agents of the US government. needless to say, there were a lot of fires to put out after that visit. to be fair, the USAID "folks" declined to call us their "agents" on their next trip. but still. we can do better, "folks".

we were fighting fires of a similar nature this morning. and i just had to stop and question why. why? there is no need. not all international development agencies are so inept. sigh. nothing to be done except keep on dancing.

*a clarification - the dark room is metaphorical. i don't really sit in a dark room and think about these things. more like i collect myself into a dark corner of my mind to contemplate as i am aimlessly walking around on a sunday afternoon.

surprising joy

i realize that i have spent a lot of time cultivating joy. discovering it sprouting up from the sidewalk. or stumbing into it in the fruit stall as i knock over the eggplants. or actively affirming it within. (really the inner is so much more than the outer!) and this cultivation is a good practice. but an email exchange w/ my ba this morning made me realize that there is a certain quality of sheer joy that you cannot create. it's not something you can choose, but has to sneak up and paint you gold and send you off dancing into the stars.... or some approximate equivalent. here is the exhange:

ba:
OK. All I really want for you is for you to be surprised by joy one of these days. But that's the catch. It has to sneak up unexpectedly and then surprise the beejezus out of you!
me:
oh me too, ba, me too. i rather tragically thought in some small quiet corner of my heart that that would happen now. : /
but it's ok. i'll be ok.

and i will be. i hadn't realized until he said it that, despite all my efforts to create and find and cherish joy, to be really whole, to be thankful, to see beauty everywhere, one day i would love to experiencing that kind of surprising joy.

live to the point of tears

that is apparently a quote from albert camus - "live to the point of tears". i imagine he knew a thing or two about tears. or life. or both. i don't think the one means much without the other. which is precisely the point. i would rather live boldly, bravely, dance wildly, love deeply, fall swiftly, cry out loudly in joy and pain than do any of those things less fully or be meek and avoid the many tears that will inevitably result from all the passionate jumping, dancing, falling, loving.

i say this to comfort myself now. all of my clever strategies failed me today. even my own mantra in moments! and i found myself completely blindsided by sadness so powerful it took my breath away. i am also comforting myself with mediocre red wine and chocolate. in the not so distant past, i decided that life was too short for bad wine. and that i would only drink really delicious wine. but this policy has been modified for two reasons: (1) i live in china, most of the wine is bad and (2) i do public interest work and cannot actually afford to live much of a fine wine lifestyle, even if i aesthetically aspire to do so. the modified policy is "drinkable wine", which is to say it is not necessarily always delicious and excellent but it is always drinkable, usually good, but never bad. it's a compromise. but so is life. especially life in china.

i just got home from a fascinating dinner with two of the most venerable legal scholars on rule of law china - one chinese, one american. they have known each other for many years and call each other "brother". they were both born in 1931, 4 months apart. and they have both been engaged in china's legal reform for as long as it has been going on. i was moved to tears just seeing their camaraderie. and it was such an honour to be at the table while they were discussing the current state of criminal law reform in china or the implementation of the amended lawyer's law.* it's most remarkable how life can find ways to remind you of what is good and true and make some part of your soul sing even when you are close to quietly drowning in your own personal pool of heartbreak.

i had a similar experience walking home from the dinner. i needed to buy some fruit, but had been crying softly in the dusk as i walked down the hutong. something about turning the corner did me in. but i pulled myself together and i went to fruit lady. she was especially friendly tonight and i was the only one in her stall. the stall cat was there, sitting up on a ledge rather than prowling about amid the cabbages as usual. this cat was really content and seemed to be smiling down at us in that way that cats can smile, purring. i asked if the cat had a name. fruit lady said "mi mi". i asked if it was the "mi" in "mifan" or "rice", but she said that all chinese cats were named "mimi". (i though about explaining that i have an imaginary pet chinese cat named "pangpang" (fatfat), but realized that even if i could say the words, it wouldn't translate.) fruit lady then made a two-syllable sound, a kind of "mewmew" and mimi responded making the same sound. they did this back and forth a few times as she weighed my bananas, apples, and winter dates. i was very impressed and rather delightedly exclaimed, "you are really having a conversation! did you teach her that?" fruit lady shrugged, and asked if i had already eaten. i assured her that i had. i said goodnight to her and to mimi the cat. and i couldn't help but smiling at life as i walked away.

of course i broke into heaving sobs after i closed the door. but i was able to remember my mantra, recall the evening's moments of perspective, and focus on small tasks like putting away the fruit and doing the neglected breakfast dishes to pull myself together. i also found myself thinking of this camus quote. because, truth is, i wouldn't live any other way. may i always live to the point of tears.



* i have been berating myself lately for not writing enough about serious things. and i think this exemplifies my problem. my entry point - for connection, meaning, pondering is always people and their stories. what is more compelling than personal narrative?!? even though it was an interesting discussion, i was most moved by the way these two men would grasp wrists or pat one another on the back or toast. and i end up recounting that they called each other "brother" and not the substance of their comments....

be light and love

among the more useful invisible skills i have developed during the course of my time on our spinning orb has been, in essense, spin. most importantly, the capacity to dance myself to a better place when i am down. for example, my current gmail status message (sadly the narrow sliver of creative space in my daily life these days) reads: "deciding everything is falling into place perfectly as long as you don't get too picky about what you mean by place. or perfectly." that about sums it up.

this weekend i also stumbled across a personal mantra i had given myself accidentally about a month ago. i was searching through some past writings to give myself something solid to hold onto in a slight downward spiral when i found myself startled to run into sadness in my living room and stare down the abyss on the street corner. the mantra: "be light and love". it was nice to discover among my own words. it was especially nice because i have been yearning for a mantra lately. and all the ones i tried on didn't really fit. too snug, too cute, too smug, too spacey, too much. and, as i have mentioned here, because i found myself yearning to receive a letter from my future self not so long ago. i suppose this is as close as i can come in the here and now. and as far as mantras can, it fits. it challenges in the right amount - i most often am light, but not always, and sometimes i need to remind myself to choose lightness. and is suitably philosohpical - just love. for really love is all there is.

sadness slyly seeped in through my window this afternoon. he's all mixed up with the pollutants these days! appropriately filthy company for him. there's still a bad aftertaste in the air, but i'm determined not to let him triumph. this evening or ever.

rather, i will be light and love.

the legal charade offers an opportunity

i celebrated thanksgiving yesterday with a warm and wonderful collection of "beijing family". we were american, canadian, chinese, german, french, italian, australian. it was the first thanksgiving for some, a familiar tradition for others. after the meal, i encouraged everyone to go around the table and share what they were thankful for. that sharing seems to me to be the whole purpose of the holiday. (although i understand that some say overeating is the real agenda.) in any case, when it was my turn, after being thankful for my nephews, my family and friends and other blessings of the past year, i said i was thankful for the legal charade in this country has given me the opportunity to do such meaningful work. a bit cynical, perhaps, but i stumbled across the expression this week and it more accurately captures my work here than any other term.

i came across the "legal charade" concept in philip pan's excellent 'out of mao's shadow', which i have been meaning to read for some time but only just did so. it's very well arranged, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. in a chapter about one of the weiquan (rights protecting) lawyers there is this illuminating passage:

given the city's reputation for corruption, it seemed doubtful he had much of a chance of winning the case, and i asked him why he was even bothering. he laughed, and acknowledges that he didn't expect to win. "i still have to do a good job," he explained. "that's my obligation to my clients." but there was more to it than that. the party claimed to govern by the rule of law. it debated legislation, set up courts, hired judges, held trials - it wrapped itself in the trappings of the law, because doing so conferred an aura of legitimacy on it. it was a charade, of course. the party spent three times more on its riot control police than it did on courts and prosecutors, and when push came to shove, it believed it had the authority to do whatever it wanted, legal or not. pu understood this as well as anyone. but he believed the legal charade offered an opportunity. using the courtroom as a stage, he intended to present a convincing case to the public. if he did a good job, the party could still rule against him, but it would have to drop the charade, expose its commitment to the law as a fraud, and pay a price in damage to its image. the stronger the case he presented, pu believed, the higher that price would be, and if it were high enough, party leaders might think twice about putting themselves above the legal system. in that moment of hesitation, something remarkable could happen. the charade could become a reality and the party could be constrained by its own sham laws.

i recognized my own work, so humble in comparison to the courageous work of the weiquan lawyers, in this passage. we are also well aware of the charade and operate by ceaselessly finding spaces where that hesitation might allow justice to rush in.

i didn't mean to be insulting when i said i was thankful for the charade. the chinese people deserve so much better. but without the charade the situation would be much bleaker. at least the illusion of the rule of law provides hope that one day the party will be compelled to live up to its own laws. what progress has been made in recent years - what freedoms and rights the chinese people now enjoy - has come only because individuals have demanded and fought for it, and because the party has retreated in the face of such pressure. the hope is therefore essential to securing even greater freedom in china. and for that hope i am thankful.

i seem to be having a number of conversations about china's future lately. what else is there to talk about, really? ; ). i am always surprised at how easily outsiders are willing to overlook or throw a shiny gloss on the situation here. how there's a subtle cringe that certain people make when i call this country's government what it is: authoritarian. i understand china is seen as the land of incredible, limitless economic opportunity. (and the corporate authoritarian government wants you to see her that way.) but are the opportunities credible without rule of law? and is market access worth wearing blinders for? i sometimes wonder why it seems that the world coddles china and swallows the governments glossy images. she doesn't coddle us.

it is an interesting time to be back here. i am curious to see whether the charade will ever unravel and am intrigued to see how such events it will unfold. in the meanwhile, we beat on, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

season for spices and suppression

the sky out my window today is a sickly grey. the buildings are also grey. decidedly uninspiring. but i have ceased to look to the weather for inspiration.

'tis the season to be thankful. plus, i am being grateful each day (now that's inspiring). today i am thankful for freedom of speech. the lastest supression 'round these parts was the three year sentence handed down to a citizen who was crticial of the shoddy school construction (due to local corruption) in sichuan province that caused the deaths of thousands of children's during the earthquake last year. (the government refuses to release the exact figure for the number of children killed.) huang qi, who assisted parents who lost children in the quake press the local government, was convicted of the illegal possession of state secrets and sentenced to three years. his trial was closed and supporters were barred from entering the courtroom. more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/world/asia/24quake.html?scp=2&sq=huang%20qi&st=cse

i wonder what the state secrets he possessed were? the truth? or at least a desire to unearth it amid the rubble? people say that the first casualty of any conflict is truth. and, in some sense, the chinese model for developing the current corporate authoritarian state has been creating a sense of constant conflict and completely controlling information. (mr. huang forgot that only the party has the truth here. he will now have a few years to "improve his thinking" while in prison.) the conflicts have shifted over the years - from rightists, capitalist roaders, intellectuals and landlords to foreigners, independent media, the dalai lama and "mastermind" rebiya kadeer. but the essential formula hasn't been altered all that much. of course, why mix up what has been so successful?

speaking of mixing up, i am somehow going to three thanksgiving dinners in four days this weekend. and will be attempting to make pumpkin pie. (my obssessive baking has been tempered by other interests of late.) which has me thinking about spices. i love having them about in the kitchen. even the ones i barely use or buy randomly on a whim. there's a great security in spices. what exactly i'm not sure. variety? freedom of flavour? the safety that when all else has been destroyed you can subsist on oregano and cumin? just looking at the spice rack puts me in a good mood. re-arranging it is downright therapuetic. so i look forward to seasoning the pie on saturday. and maybe making some bread as well. (confession: the other reason for the baking lull is my inability to light my oven without calling the compound mr. fixit (or, as we say, the "master craftsman") to assist. it's really rather embarassing and he thinks i am hopeless. although there really appears to be something wrong with the oven. this is the same fellow who, when i've had to call about computer issues, bruskly enters my flat, gives me the once over and asks, "did you turn it on"? he really thinks i'm not the brightest crayon in the box. but no matter.)

if not the brightest, i am feeling bright despite these grey skies. and, although not graceful, i will bravely return to ballet class this evening. (unless a roasted sweet potato detains me..... tis the season after all.)

spaciousness

the more space you cultivate in your life for beauty and joy, the more they will rush in and fill that space, overwhlem it. same is true for adventure. i have been thinking lately about making space for what matters and cultivating a sense of spaciousness within myself. (ok, confession - i am almost always thinking about this.) this weekend was expansive. both experientially and lingamentally. ;). i discovered my new favourite place in beijing. and i took a ballet class.

i almost backed out of ballet at the last minute again, but decided to bravely choose the path which would push me in new directions, loosen up some space in my mind, heart, and hips. i would like to say that beauty and joy rushed in and i was a vision in the studio. but i would be lying. pain and cramping rushed in and i was all awkward jerky movements across the floor. but no matter. i wasn't concerned with what was reflected in the mirror. my purpose was more than the mirror, or rather had nothing to do with it. my sore muscles are today still reminding me to leap. and laugh about it, no matter what happens. i am going back to class again on wednesday.*

when i went to class on saturday, i was already creatively inspired after a great friday night at beijing's best live music venue (my new favourite place). dedicated to supporting all kinds of music as long as it's independent, this platform for creativity welcomes local and international bands, screens films, throws parties, and i hope one day will let be do some political theatre.** we were there to see a brooklyn-based indie rock band, au revoir simone. (i hope that's the correct way to describe them.) they were fantastic and the energy in the crowd was warm and vivacious and daring on a cold winter night. the characters collected in that spot were interesting, and i couldn't help but wonder how we had all drifted into this darkened space in the center of this sleeping dragon of a city. the second act involved a tiny, tiny italian man with very large hair jumping up and down and incomprehensibly scream-singing as his balding friend in a blazer moved around a giant, silver inflatable rocket-penis twice his size with his name (silvio) emblazoned down the shaft in blue letters. it takes all kinds. and somehow there is space for all of us.

in thinking about both inner and outer spaciousness, i have also been thinking about the times of the day in which to cultivate them. i did yoga this morning. i of course spent some moments hesitating about whether to do it or not. i have not fully actualized my discipline as freedom concept. (or is it discipline as a means to a greater sense of spaciousness, which is in and of itself freeing?) while in that statis, i noticed the calmness of the early morning. and that light. i love the early morning light. and the quiet. the possibility. i'm grateful for those early morning moments, even when i forget to appreciate them and am caught up arguing with myself about whether or not to practice yoga. i've always liked the time before dawn because there's no one around to remind me who i'm supposed to be, so it's easier to remember who i am. there is such spaciousness there.

in less uplifting news, there was a(nother) horrific mining accident in china this weekend. i've been reading lately about the government's suppression of the modern labour movement in china (ironic for the state that was meant to establish a workers' paradise). that movement was lead by coal miners. and they were crushed, just as brutally as they regularly are in the mines because both (corrupt) state-owned and (corrupt) privately-owned mining companies find it more lucrative to pay a pittance to dead miners' families than to invest in and implement safety standards and adequate equipment. it infuriates me and just makes certain spaces in my heart ache. i have been feeling that way a great deal lately. i cannot help but notice, and want to call attention to, the dark side of china's dazzling economic rise. i want to make more space for it in the common china discourse somehow.


*the most profound learning point of the first class was re-discovering that there are certain bum muscles you only use in ballet. that and the truth of the statement 'if you don't move it, you lose it'.

**in another exciting development this weekend i have finally settled on my next writing project! and (unsurprisingly) it hit me with the subtlety of a hurricane. very excited about seeing where this will lead.

finding space(s) for faith

yesterday one my colleagues asked me what i thought of obama's visit to china. after expressing my disappointment, i asked what her impressions were. she said that she hadn't paid much attention to the particulars of what the leaders of the G2 said, but she was struck by her personal experiences as a christian leading up to his arrival. she is a member of one of beijing's many "home churches". these are unregistered congregations that seek to worshio free from government interference or control. as she explained, they don't want to be registered and her small church in fact recently broke off from a larger unregistered home church so as to be less visible and therefore have greater space for their faith. faith is something that the party fears. they fear antyhing that can threaten or usurp their absolute authority. but faith is especially dangerous because it can lead to expansive thinking and spiritual awareness that can completely overwhelm the party's soulless, corporatist, nationalistic dogma and reveal it for the empty rhetoric and thinly veiled means of maintaining power that it is.

members of beijing's home churches were closely watched for two weeks prior to obama's visit. people were followed (especially pastors and church leaders), their communications monitored, and church meeting places were closed. one sunday prior to obama's arrival, the larger home church my colleague had originally been a member of was prevented from holding services in their normal location because the police had barricaded the building and informed them that they were not permitted to worship there. the congregation gathered in a nearby park instead. it was bitterly cold and snowing (thanks also to government interference, although the weather modification office was operating independently of the public security church suppression task force*). my colleague described to me how they held services in the falling snow, with the police observing them nearby. i found it so moving, and so symbolic somehow.

symbolic in the sense that faith is at once greater than the snow and the snow itself. and it is certainly stronger than the watchful public security. there occasionally rises chatter about the current struggle for the 'soul' of china. the ccp has had an iron efficient vise-grip on the country's spirit for so long. and although some say economic growth required some loosening, i think of it more as just a strategic shift. rather than clap down directly, the party carefully crafted a steel net to contain her people - allowing enough from for corporatism and greed, but controlling information and thought sufficiently to secure their power. faith slips through that net, though.

the conversation with my colleague inevitably turned to the falungong. no conversation about religous freedom in china is complete without at lease some mention of this most curious collection of spiritual practitioners. i confessed that i find some of their beliefs quite strange, but said that doesn't make them a cult. the chinese government's brutal response to this group demonstrates their fear of faith. or at least faith that involves worship of anything other than china, getting rich, and the communist party.

my colleague wondered why she hadn't heard mention of obama bringing up the suppression of christians or religious freedom. i suggested that it would be part of february's us-china human rights dialogue as it has been in past dialogues. she noted without surpirse that the suppression of beijing's home churches in advance of the president's visit was not reported in the local press. i assured her that it received some foreign coverage. i also told her that the pastor who leads the home church alliance was detained in advance of the visit. she didn't believe that though. maybe faith can only provide so much perspective. :).

faith is most miraculous and, much to the ccp's dismay, cannot easily be contained. and yet, in our pathetic way, we are always trying to conain it or measure it or squeeze it into a frame of reference we can readily understand. i found myself thinking about this morning as i read an article about competitive yoga tournaments and a movement to have yoga added as an olympic sport. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/fashion/19fitness.html?pagewanted=1) the promoters acknowledge that the competitions only judge the physical aspect of yoga, not spirituality. indeed, how to you measure inner growth, wholeness, goodness? while running this morning, i was thinking about those subjects and whether i am able to cultivate the same sense of spaciousness through running as i can through asana. once again i resolved to practice daily. though i yearn for a teacher (and thus far have had no luck finding one in beijing), that is not an excuse.

there are always ready excuses to avoiding true spiritual growth. but doing so i believe eventually comes back to haunt you. i hope that one day the ccp learns this lesson the hard way.


*the former (weather modification office) is real, the latter (public security church suppression task force) is a term i made up but it very well may exist!

still point

i have been feeling lately as though i am at an invisible precipice of some kind. not in the sense of being in peril, but in the sense that i suspect my life will look dramatically different in the not so distant future in ways that i cannot at this time foresee or fathom. i sometimes see myself wandering amid the clouds at some very high cliff somewhere. a sense of being at this overhang has been especially prevalent in dreams of late, but this feeling also comes over me as i'm walking down the street or waiting in line at the airport. i don't know what the change will be, and whether it will be positive or negative or some combination thereof. (though of course it is always a combination thereof and being a wide-eyed optimist at heart, i can only think things will only get better. they always do.)

i only recently acknowledged this feeling over being on the verge of something, although i suppose i have been writing quite a bit about wanting to move ahead and look back at my present self with a contented, compassionate smile or to receive a letter from my future self. i even tried to write that letter. [bad blogger confession: i haven't expended the time or energy to determine how to link back to other posts / thoughts, otherwise i would do so now. mea culpa.] incidentally, the desire to fast forward has nothing to do with the brave new world of us-china relations on human rights obama and hu have just ushered in that i wrote about earlier. and it is not an expression of discontent in the present.

to the contrary, i am feeling very calm with where i am at the moment. in spite of some of the large question marks in my life at the moment. [although perhaps there is only one, rather pressing, most important question mark.] i am contented with observing and watching how things unfold, loving and giving as best i can. (it's the only way to live!) and i am not afraid of these impending changes i am imagining once i leap off my invisible precipice and into the clouds. i am quite sure that the clouds will catch me. or rather that i will catch myself. or have no need to be caught.

most of us spend a great deal of our time stressing out about changes. (i have been guilty of this myself. probably for many lifetimes.) the curious aspect of that is that change is our only constant. impermanence our only permanence. accepting that, and letting go. not grasping is the deepest lesson i have learned. and one that i often need to re-teach myself. it is so easy to get caught up in grasping! and once you are caught up in it, it is nearly impossible to realize that your hold on something is much more tenuous when you are grasping it. as you as you loosen your fingers, it can slip away. whereas if you don't grasp, but keep an open palm, you can securely hold something resting on the palm of your hand.

my ba recently sent me a 'glimpse of the day' that recalls this concept:

Although we have been made to believe that if we let go we will end up with nothing, life itself reveals again and again the opposite: that letting go is the path to real freedom.

Just as when the waves lash at the shore, the rocks suffer no damage but are sculpted and eroded into beautiful shapes, so our characters can be molded and our rough edges worn smooth by changes. Through weathering changes, we can learn how to develop a gentle but unshakable composure. Our confidence in ourselves grows, and becomes so much greater that goodness and compassion begin naturally to radiate out from us and bring joy to others.

That goodness is what survives death, a fundamental goodness that is in each and every one of us. The whole of our life is a teaching of how to uncover that strong goodness, and a training toward realizing it.

****

ok, so that thought takes it a step further than i did here. but i'm not enlightened yet. i suppose i will just have to be patient and see where this imaginary leap will lead me. (or whether in fact it is all my own melodrama and there are no great changes on the horizon.) i do like the idea of realizing our fundamental goodness as our life's teaching. no matter what happens, i hope that i will progress further along that path. for not, i am going to stay calm while i am at this still point.

team america: -1

the nobel peace prize committee acknowledged even as it announced obama as this year's shocking upset recipient, that it was aspirational award. it was an expression of hope (desperation?), a fervent wish that he will be the change we want to see in the world. (incidentally, gandhi, whose words i am borrowing here and who basically cornered the market in living your principles, never received the peace prize.) i wonder if when they were deciding to award him the prize, the committee members had lofty aspirations for obama's engagement with china on human rights. that might have helped convince them to overlook the chinese human rights activists being considered for the award, the choice of whom this year would have sent a powerful message to china as it celebrated 60 years of CCP suppression. i wonder if those lofty aspirations might have included a joint statement at the end of obama's visit in which "both sides recognized that the united states and china have differences on the issue of human rights". so much for human rights being universal. that's the best our world crusader for peace could do?!? yowza.

as his ever so stage-managed visit in china comes to a close, i find myself wondering whether the nobel peace prize committee has buyer's remorse. indeed, whether we all do. i confess i am deeply disappointed in the president's seeming acquiescence to all of the chinese concerns and his failure to stand up for the very principles - the universal nature of human rights, speaking truth to power, not compromising american principles of justice in the name of political or economic goals, a commitment to the rule of law, openness and candid dialogue, an end to politics as usual - that were the foundation of his campaign.

yet, some will say, obama faces unprecedented challenges and he just needs more time to actualize the above. in other words, the chinese own us. or at least the majority of our debt. so the united states is in a deeply compromised position.* is that sufficient justification to kowtow to both the form and the substance of the chinese arrangement of and priorities for this visit? i wonder what gandhi would say.

i only hope that things can improve from here. i would say it would be difficult for things to worsen, but i don't want to tempt fate. the title of this blog is a nod to the universality of the human condition and my failed attempt to express that idea to chinese university classmates. once upon a lifetime i spent a year at the training school for the chinese foreign service and so was immersed in political conversations about international affairs. one afternoon hanging out by the pingpong tables, i found myself making a pitch for the universal. i was arguing that we are all more alike than we are different, regardless of nationality or race or religion. “we’re all red on the inside,” i explained to blank stares. this image entirely failed. i was talking about blood and trying to speak poetically about our common humanity. my classmates thought that i was talking about communism. team universal: 0. team china: 1. i gave up then and went back to watching the pingpong. i feel as though obama is doing the same now. unfortunately, there's a lot more at stake.


*leaving aside for now the human rights issues that continue to dog us at home which further compromise america's discussion of human rights abroad. perhaps most distressing are those related to the so-called war on terror: guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, the shameful ruling last week undermining our own rule of law and denying maher arar due process: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/nyregion/03arar-web.html?scp=2&sq=maher%20arar&st=cse

creative day(s) in the northern capital

last night i went to the american ballet theatre's china premiere. it was simply exquisite. to be in the presence of such creativity, experiencing moments both tender and whimsical, was bliss. and the dancers were incredible - so precise, so moving. it was all just very finely wrought. i was filled with unbounded joy just to be living those moments and seeing such beauty. i am about to go back for a second night tonight! although the programs are different - last night was contemporary ballet, tonight is don quixote. still, i am thankful for dance. for all it has been in my life and continues to be.

watching last night's pieces and reflecting on them afterwards, i found myself struck by our endless flow of creativity and spirit. that we can ceaselessly gyre forward in our means of expression and art. and again i found myself i want to find myself closer to that widening gyre (in a positive sense). closer to creativity somehow. which of course requires discipline. something else that the dancers reminded me of. i have at times run my fingers through the idea of discipline as freedom. recently a lovely friend recalled for me a passage from 'a wrinkle in time', a favourite book of mine as a sweet young thing:

Mrs. Whatsit compares life to a sonnet:

"It is a very strict form of poetry is it not?

"There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That's a very strict rhythm or meter, yes?

"And each line has to end with a rigid rhyme pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet, is it?"

Calvin: "You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it?"

"Yes. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you."

such a charming way of circling around and into the discipline / freedom flow! i suspect that tonight's performance will be similarly inspiring.

in other news, i thought it quite noteworthy that obama's speech in japan was basically about china. it's a good thing the united states does not intend to "contain china"; the chinese keep the american economy float insofar as i understand these things and i doubt america could contain china even if it wanted to. a very clever strategy to mask your reliance / strategic weakness as magnanimity. once again, rhetoric to the rescue!

i also couldn't help but marvel at the strategic carpet the chinese threw down this morning, equating the situation with tibet with the american civil war and noting that obama, as a black president and an admirer of lincoln, should really understand their need to maintain control over tibet.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/world/asia/14beijing.html?scp=1&sq=china%20tibet%20civil%20war&st=cse

really, it's just too good. it seems that creativity abounds in the northern capital these days! not just on the stage at the national centre for performing arts.

dancing on the inside

in the weeks leading up to thanksgiving, i have decided to be grateful each day. akin to my borrowed love,love,love agenda (being open to falling in love with three things in life each day)*, i am aiming to start each day giving thanks for something. maybe these two projects are cousins who like to walk hand in hand and swing on the playground together. they are certainly related.

one thing i was not thankful for this morning, however, was the snow. yes, it is snowing again in beijing. this is the third big snowstorm since halloween! i just cannot believe that this is natural and am convince that the furious ballet of snowflakes i'm seeing out my window is courtesy of the weather modification office. i couldn't find any people's daily articles affirming that the last 'gift' of a storm was the result of modification. but there was thunder so loud i thought we were being bombed the night it began, which makes one wonder. aside from the eerily disturbing and strangely sinister idea that the government is tampering with the weather on a weekly basis, it's a bit of a logistical nightmare. this city is just not equipped to handle this much snow.

a recent article in the SCMP on the nightmarish conditions at the beijing airport during the first storm demonstrates this well. mind you, as per usual, you need to go outside of china to get the real story. local coverage commended the airport staff for handling the situation so smoothly. the article:

man-made chaos, but no man-made solution
*****************************************************

Source: South China Morning Post (11/9/09):
Wang Xiangwei

On the morning of November 1, when my parents set off for Beijing Capital
International Airport for a flight of less than three hours to Guangzhou,
little did they know they were about to face more than 30 hours of hell.

Both in their late 60s, they were stranded in the cold airport waiting area,
then boarded the aircraft, then were kicked off the jet back into the cold
waiting area. When they finally took off, it was the afternoon of the next
day, last Monday.

Like tens of thousands of passengers that day, they became hapless victims
of the massive man-made chaos triggered by a huge man-made snowstorm.
Ironically, highly respected Conde Nast Traveller magazine had just named
Beijing's one of the best 15 airports in the world for its layout and flight
information, among other things.

My parents' horrible experience says a lot about the mainland's
crisis-management mechanism, lack of co-ordination among government
departments and utter failure to put into practice the government's much
trumpeted motto of "putting the people first". The cash-rich mainland may
have the best facilities, including gleaming modern airports and new jumbo
jets, but its soft power, as projected in services, is still way off.

When my parents arrived at the airport more than an hour before the 11am
scheduled take-off of Air China flight 1315, the snow was already heavy. But
the airline's ground staff mentioned nothing about a potential delay and
checked them in.

Lacking the wisdom of frequent fliers, they then began a long wait in a cold
waiting area. They were given no food or drink, contrary to state media
reports of such a service provided to delayed passengers. And they were
stonewalled when seeking flight information.

At around 5pm, they were told their flight had been cancelled, and they were
bumped to another flight. Then they were taken by bus to a Boeing 747 along
with more than 300 other passengers. From 6pm to 2am, they sat in the plane
before being told the flight had been cancelled and they had to leave.
Confused, hungry and angry, my parents, along with other passengers, engaged
in intensive arguments with the airline ground staff, who refused to say
when the next flight would be available and would not take them to a hotel.

At 5am, the airline staff relented and put them on a bus to a hotel nearby.
Then my parents were told to get ready to meet a bus going back to the
airport at 8am, but the bus did not turn up until three hours later. They
finally managed to get a China Southern flight to Guangzhou at around 4.40pm
last Monday after more than 30 hours.

To their great dismay, one Beijing newspaper they read on the flight was
full of articles praising the airlines and airport staff for initiating
emergency systems and going out of their way to help stranded passengers. A
weather forecaster at the Air Traffic Management Bureau was quoted as saying
such an early snowfall had not been seen for 22 years, and it was totally
unexpected.

But it was not. According to the state media reports, the snowfall - which
dropped more than 16 million tonnes of snow on Beijing, delayed air travel
and left city residents shivering - was man-made. From 8pm on October 31 to
2am on November 1, the Beijing Weather Modification Office blasted 186
sticks of silver iodide into the clouds to induce snow to help ease the
drought in the city.

But the officials apparently failed to notify other departments, including
aviation authorities. A China Daily commentary fumed that "this arbitrary
government decision disregarded the interests of the people".

The Beijing weather office was not the only one. The airport and airlines
may have launched their own emergency management systems, but there appeared
to be little interdepartmental communication. The result was total chaos,
with little information available from anyone.

The bad service made the situation even worse. For instance, Air China
offers a toll-free hotline, which was understandably jammed that day, but in
this age of the internet, its website provided no updates on the status of
flights, leaving anxious passengers and relatives in the dark.

As well, even after the flights resumed on the afternoon of November 1,
airport controllers cleared the backlog of flights not according to the
length of their delays, but by the ranks of officials on board, according to
insiders.

A week has passed, and nobody has come forward to take responsibility or
apologise for the made-made chaos, let alone learn any lesson. Future chaos
can be reduced if Beijing learns from other countries by setting up an
interdepartmental task force to handle airport delays resulting from unusual
weather.

As the Beijing weather officials yesterday forecast more rain and snow on
the way today, and over the next few days, passengers need to brace
themselves.

**************

a friend who was travelling through beijing en route to wuhan that day spent 10.5 hours on a plane without food as they beijing airport staff struggled with the de-icing equipment and refused to feed the captive passengers. i am so thankful i arrived at the airport that afternoon, took one look, and left. perhaps my most brilliant decision this month.

whether any of these decisions to blanket beijing in snow are brilliant, alleged drought or not, remains to be seen. apparently the weather modification office finally admitted that today's snow is their doing, but had previously stated that tuesday's was 'natural': http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26335967-23109,00.html. i suppose that depends on what your definition of 'natural' is.

in this moment, i am thankful for warmth. i no longer have any urges to rush out and dance in this. instead i will be dancing on the inside (as always).

* borrowed from a lovely friend started a blog in the spirit of a poet she heard at a conference this spring. the poet said that in order to write poetry you must be open to falling in love at least three times a day. i love that concept! and my wonderful friend with her thoughtful blog: lovethreethings.blogspot.com.

as if long prepared, as if courageous

it's funny how emotion or memory can catch you unawares. such as when you are filling these pages with idle chatter about root vegetables or self-righteous rants about justice and then suddenly you remember that there is a huge hole in your heart at the moment. and you immediately want to write that. for writing it releases somehow. but then you don't want to write that for it is too personal and, overly open-hearted as i am, little trouble is not and i want to respect that. and besides i didn't start this blog to be another intelligent woman who only writes about her romantic woes. i suppose i had wanted to be substantive although to be honest there wasn't much of an agenda except to write. but perhaps it's time to step away from things personal and focus on justice and jiaozi once again. or step back entirely and finally take on one of the 12 creative writing project ideas i have dancing about. (note to self: something to do during the 12 days of xmas.) thankfully, i think that only my parents read this (hi!). as if long prepared, as if courageous, i am going to take my internal conversations offline and do the real work alone.

on conquering fears, connection, and happiness

there is a school of thought that suggests you should do one thing that scares you each day. i do not subscribe to said school. then again, i do not easily frighten. (or so i tell myself.) i do believe that you should continuously challenge yourself and expand your horizons. which is why i almost ended up in a leotard on a freezing wednesday night in an adult ballet class. oh, i was so prepared. this was a personal challenge i can been considering for some time. i had brought ballet shoes back from my last visit home. i had purchased the leotard last weekend. i had called the studio. i had made evening plans at 9:00 to enable me twirl away the time from 7:00 - 8:30. but there are challenges, and there is happiness. as i was leaving the office, struck by the bite of the cold air, thoughtful, i realized that the idea of changing into a leotard and attempting to dance tonight was not appealing. and that i was hungry. and that the classes would still be offered in the springtime. and that even though i hope that i will be able to find joy in dancing again, i didn't need to find it this week. so i went and ate a roasted sweet potato the size of my face instead. and was very happy with that choice. (eating a warm sweet potato while there is snow on the ground is somehow extra delicious!)

the women's lunch event i spoke at today was quite interesting insofar as it highlighted the importance of connection (and interconnectedness) and mentoring. the connection bit basically came from a fascinating chinese lawyer who had spent many years in the corporate law world, including 11 as the general counsel and then also a VP at a major US corporation in china. she left essentially to find meaning and now spends her time focusing on nature, tibet, the interconnectedness of people, and environmental issues. (if that sounds a little vague, it was.) she uses the connections from her past life to help her in these new endeavours at times and apparently still practices law occasionally. oh and she is also an artist. she just seemed much calmer than everyone else in the room. (and perhaps was subconsciously my inspiration for choosing happiness in the form of sweet potato sustenance this evening.) the mentoring discussion grew out of exchanges about making it professionally as women lawyers. (or just making it professionally at all.) i've long seen the value in mentoring, even if i don't always fully actualize it.

as evidenced by tonights decision not to dance, actualizing the visions of sugarplum faeries we have for ourselves is easier said than done.

rule of law is not market access

once upon a time there was the leader of a large american business association in beijing that was dedicated to expanding opportunities for and representing US corporate interests in china. in a cleverly opportunistic ploy timed to coincide with an impending visit by the US president, said leader wrote an op-ed piece in a major american newspaper using talk of the rule of law / legal developments in china in a thinly veiled effort to further to promote US corporate interests. his conflating of the rule of law and market access for / the economic interests of US corporates was infuriating to one humble human rights lawyer in beijing because it belittles and cheapens the concept of the rule of law and also the reasons that rule of law promotion is part of US foreign policy and should be something that the president raises on his trip. in a curious twist of fate, this lawyer was slated to give a lunch-time presentation at this large business association on the very day that she spent her morning commute fuming over this piece. happily ever after.

big surprise - the lawyer is me and the op-ed was by the president of amcham and it was published in the nytimes. ahem: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/opinion/11iht-edwatkins.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss (oh and i am speaking an at amcham event during lunch today. a program by the women's professional committee on 'women in legal affairs'. i am the public interest pony.)

what troubles me so much about this piece is that he twists around ideas about the rule of law to suit commercial purposes. the issue of chinese lawyers practicing at foreign firms is not a rule of law issue, but a market access issue. it is not something that is of concern to chinese lawyers (who can now receive comparable salaries and do comparable work at chinese firms) as it is to american law firms wanting to expand the scope of their practice in china. it also has nothing to do with the integrity of the chinese legal system. i acknowledge that there are significant economic rule of law issues to be addressed in china and that mr. watkins represents the business community. however, by focusing only on the commercial, he misrepresents the concept of the rule of law and the reasons why its promotion is a significant portion of US foreign policy. to ignore entirely the human rights and civil liberities issues that are central to rule of law work, while trying to stretch the concept to cover US corporate interests, is insulting. rule of law promotion can be an effective long-term antidote to poverty, conflict, endemic corruption, and disregard for human rights. these are all things that i believe amcham's members have an interest in, even if only because of the potential to improve their bottom line. perhaps i am too sensitive or too much of a rule of law purist, but i was offended by his article. would be curious to see what others think.

interestingly, i had dinner last night with two of china's leading environmentalist and a foundation person from HK who has been supporting work on water issues in china and is launching a new project aimed at investors. she was in town to participate in two programs on socially responsible investment and wanted to speak with us about supporting this new project. the goal (simply expressed) is to influence they way investors approach china and getting involved in companies or initatives that impact the water sector. we had a very interesting conversation. between that and reading the amcham op-ed this morning, i am struck anew at the need to get the business community onboard with a vision for a sustainable future. of course that will never happen until it becomes profitable. so, dear readers, how do we make that happen? and how do we make it happen before its too late? of course, there is growing momentum towards the development of 'green' industries and socially responsible investing. but that is still the fringe and a feel-good movement at the periphery, rather than the core, of commerce and investing. (i think partially because of the way flows of financial information are controlled.) if a sustainable approach could be mainstreamed, oh what a wonderful world.

and with that, i ought to go consider what i will say at this lunch event. i am still fighting off a lingering sickness (the second round of snow didn't help) and am realizing that i am ill much more here than i was before i moved to beijing. i am wondering if the pollution has an impact. it must. i will try not to snozzle too much while speaking.