the answer is blowing in the wind

so, national day is just around the corner. i am back in beijing and impressed by how thoroughly the city has been blanketed in flags. especially the hutongs – a gorgeous crimson carefully planned display of spontaneous nationalistic sentiment has flags blowing in the wind every few feet. i leave it up to you decide whether flags are the answer or whether china is. (telling you the question would really make it easy.)

i will not be here for national day, so will be missing an even more grand fluttering of flags, the tumble of tanks, and the smart step of PLA soldiers in swank new uniforms. my absence will be in keeping with a theme of heavy travel of late which has me currently hiding out in my flat rather than seeking treatment for a terrible sore throat due to fear of quarantine. i fear that once i walk into a clinic with a fever and confess to having been abroad, i will promptly be thrown into beijing’s swine flu quarantine. this is my idea of purgatory. perhaps even more so than weekend shopping trips to ikea (which is right up there on my list of personal purgatories). not that i believe in any of that, but if i did, i imagine there would be room for both. dante had many layers to his inferno, didn’t he? ikea-shopping on the weekend and swine flu quarantine would both be in mine. not so gruesome as someone eternally gnawing on your head, but nightmarish in their own way.

this illness aside, it’s been quite nice coming back to beijing this time around. it is starting to feel more like home (again) now. it was especially nice to realize that there were people i was looking forward to seeing, treats i was looking forward to eating, neighbours’ cats i was looking forward to spying on. my flat here also really feels like my space – a room of my own. (with a room to spare for visitors!) the (oh so conventional) anxieties that consumed me a month ago have dissipated and left me humbly wandering in the calm blue acceptance of who and where i am at the moment. (at least for a few minutes each day anyway.)

in all seriousness, i am trying more than ever to simply be present. more than ever to appreciate: the blue skies when we are graced with them, my work even as i endlessly contemplate creative tributaries, friendship in all its forms and complexity, compassion, and love. that could be my thought of the day if i were a little inspirational calendar. slightly more than a week after my birthday, i remembered to open the card my parents had given me. in it, they enclosed a description of my chinese zodiac sign, the horse. ahem: a person born in this year is said to be cheerful, popular, and quick-witted. he has raw sex appeal rather than straight good looks. earthy and warmly appealing, he is very perceptive and talkative. his changeable nature may lead him to be hot-tempered, rash, and headstrong at times. the unpredictable horse will fall in love easily and fall out of love just as easily. in most cases the horse will leave home early. if not, his independent spirit will goad him to start working or to take up some career at an early age. an adventurer at heart, still he is noted for his keen mind and ability to manage money. self-reliant, vivacious, energetic, impetuous, and even brash, the horse is a showy dresser, partial to bright colours and striking designs to the point of being gaudy on occasion. the horse loves exercise both physical and mental. you can spot him by his rapid but graceful body movements, his animated reflexes and fast way of speaking. he responds quickly and can make snap decisions. his mind works at remarkable speed and whatever he may lack in stability and perseverance, he will certainly make up for by being open-minded and flexible. basically, he is a nonconformist.

naturally, this says everything and nothing all at once. (it is meant to describe everyone from anwar sadat to barbara streisand, neil armstrong to me.) but of course i see glimpses of myself here and there, and something about the last line i found comforting. while i would hardly call myself a nonconformist, i have tended not to follow conventional paths, and find myself contemplating even less conventional ones of late. somehow being labeled a nonconformist by whatever milk carton my parents clipped this from was soothing. it made my quiet urges to manage a political theatre, or write / dance / create, or run off to somewhere sacred and sit in silence and my flashes of resisting convention, never wanting to settle or stay still, or refusing limits seem downright day-to-day. the label was liberating. for a nonconformist, i'm doing really well.

part of doing well for me is falling in love easily, every single day. a dear friend of mind started a blog recently (lovethreethings.blogspot.com – it’s fantastic!) after she heard a poet talk about how, in order to write poetry, you must be open to falling in love at least three times a day. i love that idea. so did my friend, so she now blogs about what she falls in love with. i have taken to sometimes writing them in my notebook. i used to have an ideas notebook that i carried around, but found myself judging whether ideas were worthy of being recorded or worrying about writing things other than ideas in the ideas notebook. so now i just have a notebook. anything can go in. not much has come out so far. but here are two lists of three things i loved:

- raindrops on gloriously twisted old trees; my unique parents; coffee & pastries in a stolen moment alone thinking
- the lilt of the nordic english accent (a snowy sing-song!); the furious reckless beauty of a typhoon; an embrace so deep it is quiet

i forget to do it every day, but it is a nice practice. in this and previous notebooks i also like to collect shards of thoughts, images, ideas. perhaps to be used one day. perhaps not. i think i just appreciate the act of recording. these are things i have read, or thought, or seen, or felt, and didn’t want to let go of right away. a sampling:

- trust that runs as deep as joy
- longevity depends not so much on the firmness of your undertakings as on the permanent reexamination of your own certitudes
- one country can fall in love with another, get involved with it, grow tired of it and break its heart
- there is nothing picturesque in treachery or distrust
- politics like saggy breasts
- suffering is another bad habit
- sometimes don’t you just wish you could eat jazz? subsist on air & notes alone
- a man is as good as his fantasies
- about someone one understands, one doesn’t have to make lists of words
- intellectual pleasure in paradox / enjoyment of incongruity
- terror of being trapped and tamed by domesticity
- she made up stories about life & told them to herself & she didn’t know what was true & what wasn’t

so i'm not sure why i would share such a private thing here. perhaps it’s a personal test of sorts. to see whether i am really writing this for myself and whether it really matters if anyone is reading. the answer, i imagine, is blowing in the wind.

falling asleep to the sound of rain

there is something uniquely soothing about falling asleep to the sound of steady, deep, tropical rain. it's calming, reassuring, insistent. (and we can weave our unspoken wishes of what the rain insists into our dreams.) it was streaming dreamy rain for the last two nights in chiang mai. i was there for a conference of sorts – the mekong legal advocacy institute – a week-long gathering of environmental lawyers and activists from the mekong region to exchange ideas, share stories and consider strategies for environmental justice along the mekong and in our countries. participants came from thailand, cambodia, laos, vietnam, china, burma, and the Philippines, with a few aussies, americans and brits thrown in. the foreigners were mostly expats who had already waded into the river of expat life working on these issues and their presence was simply part of being swept along with that particular current. i suppose that is true for me as well.

but the carefully ordered chaos of life in beijing bears little resemblance to the teeming merry trot of life in southeast asia, or at least in chiang mai. i realized as i arrived, happily bouncing along the roads of sunny chiang mai chatting to my driver and watching the motorbikes whiz about in the warm mud, that i had not been to the region for many years. i had forgotten the warmth, the complexity, the grace. so it was nice to spend a few days succumbing to the embrace of this region’s beauty while immersed deep in its tragedy.

although our little collection of committed individuals was hopeful, i would describe the environmental degradation in the region (and indeed the world) as nothing less than a tragedy. i’m still green in the environmental game. i arrived on this chequerboard by way of human rights. concerning myself with how humans mistreat each other, i was less focused on how we are trashing the planet. and i wasn’t particularly focused on the connection, except in scattered, illuminated moments (a class here, some volunteer work there, an article or three along the way).

the participants in our program included a filipino judge / lawyer who has become a warrior for the environment. tony oposa thinks of god as his client and reminded us that even when were are fighting for environmental justice, advocating for the rights of poor communities to healthy and safe drinking water, we must not forget nature, remembering we must also speak for the fishes. tony has a contagious energy and raw, unruly passion for his work and for living each moment. but living it simply. he is a man who can speak of how none of us really need much, and admonish us all to live simple lives, and in the next breath insist that we all sing karaoke with him that night, and convince me to dance the chacha with him. his message of simplicity, and similar sentiments from others, were important connecting points for all of us. all of the nations represented are caught up in fantastic and constricting forces of consumerism and nationalism. so it was inspiring to collectively acknowledge those binds and loosen them, if only for a few days.

my first night did indeed involve dancing the chacha with the world’s most charming filipino environmental crusader as the rest of the group looked on. we also learned a cambodian line dance whose name one-two-three-kicked itself right out of my head. we were taught by a charming and precocious young cambodian lawyer named piseth who looks about 16, is ready to risk his life for land rights in his country. we were an interesting collection of dancers – a lawyer and member of parliament the burmese government-in-exile was deliberate in each step, a brooding journalist from laos with tattooed hands and striking glasses sat back and watched with his arms crossed, a gorgeous vietnamese environmentalist currently working on a phd in paris who danced with abandon, just as she peppered each speaker with spicy questions during our meetings, an australian attorney working to promote public interest law in phnom penh good-naturedly tripped all over himself. that first night there was no rain, but no matter. its song would have been drowned by the karaoke machine.

my last night was spent drinking the local leo beer with a crew of these new comrades. i attended the conference to give a presentation on china’s environmental courts, mainly because a colleague didn’t want to travel. i couldn’t help but think, as i laughed over our leos, how fortunate i am to being doing this work. i only wish i could do more. that we all could do more. there is a follow up meeting in january to continue to build regional momentum. it would make more sense for my colleague – who is a chinese attorney and actually from the region – to attend, but i selfishly would love to reconnect with this group. we will see.

there is a lot of time for rainfall between now and then. for now, i am off to hong kong to spend some time with little trouble and live in the moment.

red china blues

so a sweet message from a sweet old beijing tongxue now in south africa inspired me to tooter once more to the brink and consider collecting my thoughts. naturally, i questioned again (and then again) about who or what this is for. but i've decided that’s no matter. there is something lost in me when i am not writing, or creating, in some small way. i’ve recognized that. and i can’t always find that place through work, or even through witty emails, or poems about imaginary pets. not even yoga brings me there (that’s a journey of a different, albeit related, sort). so, i’ve decided to just write. and not worry about whether anyone’s reading. or whether i make insightful or instructive comments about justice or whether i spend too much time getting lost in the stirrings of my hummingbird heart. (though isn’t personal narrative what makes justice worthwhile or interesting in the first place?)

personal narrative. it's what makes the world go ‘round. or at least allows us to relate. ‘red china blues’ was the title of a memoir about china i read several years ago. it was the typically cultural revolution tale, told through the eyes of one woman. (when we lent the book to my auntie jung, she covered it with newspaper so that if she was seen reading it on the bus, no one would know.) it feels belittling to say that in a way – “the typical cultural revolution tale” – because how could the intensely traumatic and brutal experiences of that one young women ever be “typical”? but they are. like that one woman, millions of teenagers saw their families torn apart or destroyed, witnessed the humiliation, brutalization or murder of their parents, were sent to remote areas of the country to work punishing hours in fields and factories without compensation or food. these individuals, each of whom suffered unique and terrible traumas, are now in their 50s. some fled and wrote best-selling memoirs detailing the horrors they experienced. i hope that they found some release in that. but for those who have stayed behind, there has never really been any public katharsis. and to speak of your own pain seems strange in a nation where nearly everyone your age has a similar story. how to you privately heal in such circumstances? one close family friend of ours provides economic support to educate the children of the village that he was “sent down” to during the cultural revolution. he says he is alive only thanks to the generosity of this impoverished tiny community that spared two potatoes a day for him for three years. as smart as he is big-hearted, this friend secured a coveted spot in the first class at beijing university when it reopened after the cultural revolution crumbled. i wonder if finding a way to give back is somewhat more than an expression of gratitude. perhaps it is part of a healing process, acknowledging those years of hardship and the six years he was unable to contact or locate his parents or three siblings. perhaps it is just kindness.

i recalled the enticing title of that book recently because i’ve had a case of the red china blues. although i think i may be recovering. i was quietly happy to be returning to beijing last night (although i am writing this en route to hong kong and then chiang mai, where i’ll be visiting little trouble and spending a week considering environmental legal advocacy in the mekong region, respectively). this case of the blues, if you can call them that, is a broader consciousness and growing concern about china. i am perhaps more
critical now of this government than i ever have been. i think this is healthy because i spent many years to enamoured with or protective of china to see clearly or think critically about the implications of this regime or its polices. (it is hard to clearly see things that we are too close to.) with time, distance, education, adulthood, travel (take your pick), my perspective has shifted. whereas once i was the one always singing china’s song, i know find myself cast as the shadow of doom in china conversations. the world seems so ready and willing to embrace china without question these days, and it frightens me. this is not a benign government. and they are quietly amassing power in subtle and complicated ways. i worry about china becoming the dominant superpower in the world. (and for those who say she lacks the creativity to do so, who needs creativity when you have seemingly limitless (opaque) markets?)

i had a rewarding two weeks back in the states. personally, i was able to connect with friends and family. professionally, a study tour i had helped to pull together for chinese judges on domestic violence and civil protection orders was just fantastically successful. so much better than i had even imagined. but my partner-in-crime (an anti-violence advocate and a researcher at the institute for applied jurisprudence, a think tank attached to the supreme people’s court) and i had to be all cloak-and-dagger about my involvement and obscure our relationship. she and her colleague even had to sneak out of their hotel to attend a meeting i arranged with one of the experts who will be part of our upcoming judicial training on domestic violence. the night before the group left, the foreign affairs bureau informed them that the tour they were going on, organized via the state department’s international visitors program, was political and was an effort by the united states government to brainwash them. they were given strict marching orders about how they were to conduct themselves while on the tour. when this was recounted to me, i couldn’t help but wonder when the cold war became chic again. oh, and just to be safe, the foreign affairs bureau planted one of the participants who was surely a spy (and none too subtle about it!)

my blues – professional frustrations and personal reflections – will dissolve, however, in moments that some how go beyond them. the study tour coincided with labour day weekend, so the state department planned on arranging a “home hospitality” program with an american family as part of the program. naturally, i volunteered my parents. so we had the group of nine judges and scholars over for a pool party and bbq. perhaps the best part was when one of the judges was admiring our yard, and my father responded by saying, “yes, but in china you don’t have to worry about cutting the grass.” the judge replied by saying, “but we want to cut grass; i have always wanted to cut grass.” ba immediately jumped up, saying, “you do? come on. follow me.” a few moments later we heard the sound of the lawnmower starting and soon judge luo was pushing it, or more accurately being pulled by it, around the back yard. two more judges then ran down for turns cutting the grass. it was a classic cultural exchange. one man’s chore is another man’s great new tourist experience.

the most fascinating cultural exchange of the trip happened in boston. among the many excellent program activities in boston was a meeting with the founder of common purpose, a local batterers intervention program. the founder, mitch, arranged to have a few facilitators from the program accompany him and also put together a panel of men who were in the process of going through the program because they had been sentenced to do so by a judge. when they walked into the room, there was a great pause in my thoughts for a moment. in all my anti-violence work, we toss around terms like “abusers” or “batterers” without thought to those labels. and suddenly, here they were. real, live “batterers” walking into a sunlight side room in the dorchester district court. they were a curious combination of swagger and shame, testosterone and nerves. i measured my own reaction and noted the moment of fear. but that fear quickly gave way to empathy, “batterers” or not, these were people and worthy of compassion. i made a point of introducing myself to and shaking the hands of each man, thanking them in advance for their willingness to participate. for participating in that panel, sharing about the deeply personal, painful, and shameful process of being ordered to participate in this program and how it is influencing them, cannot have been easy. the chinese side was at first a bit shell-shocked and i worried for a moment that they would not engage. but once they did, the exchange was fascinating and, i hope, meaningful for both sides. the judge who boldly asked the first question was a complete surprise to me. a conservative sort with a terrible combover, he usually seemed more interested in videotaping than asking questions. but he asked the men about the methodology the program employed, explaining that in china, they value balance – yin yang – and that anger is a natural human emotion, so if the methodology of the program was to teach them to suppress their anger, he thought that might eventually lead to problems or illness, but if the methodology was to help them to develop other means of releasing their anger, he wanted to know what those were and whether they were effective. my heart smiled to judge yi in that moment because that question was the perfect opening for a thoughtful discussion on anger and so much more, but it also was respectful of the assembled men. the group gave each of the program participants chinese stamps depicting the longest bridge in china, and the men seemed genuinely please with the gifts. i hope that in some small way their experience with us in that sunny room helps them constructing their own bridges to better places. bridges which, like those in stamps, i imagine must be very long.

so now i am full of hope, watching lazy clouds out my window. maybe i don’t have the red china blues after all. or maybe, just maybe, a moment of reflection is all i need as a remedy.