The Next Three Months in Shanghai
Putting the Backpack on a Shelf

Bookshelves! A desk! A bed! Hot running water! Whole wheat bread at the French bakery! Cheese for sale at a store only three minutes from my domicile! These are only some of the luxuries I enjoy after nine months of living more or less out of my backpack.

I don't have a lavish lifestyle now, but I have a washing machine and I dry my clothes on bamboo poles outside my window instead of washing them in leech water and hanging them on a dusty Dhaka balcony. I can use the internet as I please, but I cannot yet afford a computer. I can use the air conditioner when it gets too hot and turn my music up loud or watch 80 cent DVDs.

Or I can open the windows and sweat it out. I have a private garden over the wall next to where I hang my clothes to dry. Every night when I come back, my neighbor's cook smiles like her mouth is full of ping pong balls and says, "you're back." When she attempts to say more than that, I don't understand her and she doesn't understand me. We're lost in one another's strange noises. As a general rule, I try to avoid long discussions with the neighbors who give me cooking instructions in incomprehensible Shanghainese, but it's often impossible. I'll slowly augment my Mandarin with these new sounds.

After finishing with the neighbors, I often meditate in the silence of my old neighborhood to the sounds of piano playing, occasional squabbles, or my neighbors' birds. The cicadas hum in waves.

Cicadas

I found a cicada on its back on the sidewalk yesterday. I thought it was dead, but when I picked it up, it started twitching. I looked into its hammerhead eyes and it began making use of its instruments without fear. (I want to call the noise makers "twitchers" which probably isn't a word, but is as exact a description of a cicada's violin as you're going to get from me). I put the bugger out of harm's way on a nearby branch.

Funny men sell the insects from tennis ball-sized straw cages strung together on sticks. The cicadas nibble on soybeans stuck between the bars. I can't help but see these cage-loaded sticks as sorts of humming talismans, perhaps useful in divination, humming ancient sounds amidst a city that has no time for history. Magic wands in the hands of the desperate and the profane. What is it about these insects that makes them seem wiser than the men who sell them?

Striking a New Balance

I spend lots of my spare time studying Chinese. My favorite place to do this is in the guqin store chatting and drinking tea till my teeth feel like they'll fall out. Now that I'm not working as a gardener to save money for travel, I'm trying to grow the fingernails long enough on my right hand so I can play the ancient block of wood and strings without finger picks. If I can indeed grow my claws without gnawing them off, I'm well on my way to becomming one with an enigma. I'm curious to see how my life as a stitched sleeve split sleeve leaves me feeling after six months.

I'm beginning to taper off my posts to this blog. You're seeing not the end of nine good months, but just a break. When I hit the road again--in China or elsewhere--I'll write more frequently, but for the time being, I'm stationary and quiet. Also, I'm going to try my hand at blogging in Chinese. Hopefully I'll be able to avoid the censors, for there's no reason to silence me. I've learned well enough when and where to keep my keyboard tappings to myself. ;)

Peace

The substance of your mind is apart from annihilation and apart from eternity; its essence is neither polluted nor pure. Calm and complete, it is equal in ordinary people and sages, functioning responsively without convention. All realms of experience and all states of being are only manifestations of your own mind--do the moon reflected in water or images in a mirror have origination and extinction?

If you actually know this, you are fully equipped. The reason that the sages have manifested a spiritual presence to provide exemplars, and have set forth a wide variety of puzzling sayings, is simply to illustrate the fundamental peace of the body of reality, bringing about a return to the root.

-Shih-t'u
From "The Pocket Zen Reader," edited by Thomas Cleary, 1999. Reprinted without arrangement from Shambhala Publications, Boston, www.shambhala.com.

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Cicada

In drooping willows they drink the clear dew.
Sulphur sounds, intermitent, from from Tong Oil Tree.
Living high, noise itself from afar.
The fall wind is not borrowed from the song.

A fragile Shanghai peace has enveloped this mind/body like a sweet dream.

The backpack is at rest while your narrator (乔舒华) translates Tang Dynasty poetry and gathers the right elements to make a comfortable life in China.