The Journey:
Your Narrator's First Attempt at Semi-Autobiographical Fiction

Read "The Journey" on my flickr account, written in 1992 by your narrator, age 11.

This story has everything you could ever want: cannibals, recess, platonic love...


Large-format pics here:
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If you Can't Attend the Peace Rally in Washington This Weekend, Do the Next Best Thing:
Look Your Legislators in the Eye--Online


My mom, gram, and me.

There's still time to sign up for True Majority's Photo Petition for Peace.

Post your photo and comments here: http://www.truemajority.org/photopetition

A Quote of the Day You Can Live By

"Happiness cannot come from hatred or anger. Nobody can say, "Today I am happy because this morning I was very angry." On the contrary, people feel uneasy and sad and say, "Today I am not happy because I lost my temper this morning." Through kindness, whether at our own level or at the national and international level, through mutual understanding and through mutual respect, we will get peace, we will get happiness, and we will get genuine satisfaction."

--His Holiness the Dalai Lama
From "The Pocket Dalai Lama," edited by Mary Craig, 2002. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Boston, www.shambhala.com.

This comes from beliefnet.com's "Beliefnet Buddhist Wisdom" daily email digest service.

Now, I don't like beliefnet because I don't really like belief. So I ignore that part. I'm interested in the Buddhism.

Buddhism as a practice requires only faith in the method, which is different from belief. Because I have faith in the meditation practice I have and see results in my own life, I want to pass this on.

If you sign up, you can get a daily piece of Theravada, Tibetan, Mahayana or Zen Buddhist wisdom in your mailbox. It's easy to digest. You can also get emails about other paths.

I don't remember exactly how I first got signed up, but when I first started, I wanted emails about Islam, Christianity, Taoism, and Jainism. I then quickly narrowed it down to one. Then it was manageable.

Beliefnet is not paying me in any way. Like I say, I don't really like their New Age/Conservative Christian feel, but I do like their daily qoutes. And they won't spam you, so you can sign up worry-free. Then learn step by step about the institutionalized practice/religion/path of your choice.

Sign up on this page.

Much love,

Your ne'er rater

Fines, Fines, Everywhere Fines
Something in this World is Changing My Lines
Chicago, USA

Old Laces

I kept telling friends that I'd see them in DC or NYC--"provided my shoestrings don't break." After getting smacked with unforeseen charges in Shanghai, San Francisco and Sacramento (granted, my own fault), I've decided that, well, they've broken.

In Shanghai, with my four bags, I was two bags over the check-in limit. Each bag was going to cost $110US. I baulked. I stood there stunned for several minutes asking the counter girl what I could do. "Well, you can cry, but that won't help."The counter staff at All Nippon Airlines helped me and Yutian break open the bag of clothes and stuff a box of books inside. Then we taped the mess up. The zippers wouldn't even meet.

I paid the fine for my guqin. She's a special girl and worth it. I couldn't be without her long enough to mail her.

Beijing Duck: Straining, but not Breaking

In San Francisco customs, I got selected for the "agriculture" line. I thought this was because of my recent exposure to farm animals, but no, something much more sinister lurked in this vegetarian's taped up bag of books and clothes.

"Do you have any animal products in here," the stern Homeland Security frontliner said pointing to my close-to-bursting bag of mystery.

"Not that I know of."

"Well, I'm interested in what's in the bottom of this, so we're gonna have to cut it open," he said, brandishing a bowie knife and cutting dangerously close to my suit. He pulled out a bag of DVDs. "These wouldn't happen to be pirated DVDs would they?"

"I bought them all in stores," I said, knowing full-well that some of them came from the kind of stores that lurk under bus stops. "If they're pirated, I didn't know."

"Well, they're all pirated, and that's illegal, but I'll let you off this once." He reached further into my gaping, wounded, prideless plastic luggage bag. "And what do we have here? Fake Nike shoes."

"Oh, those are for a friend who wanted me to pick out some ambiguously-branded shoes." They had a fake swoosh.

"Anything with a shwoosh that isn't Nike is illegal too."

"I didn't know." I wasn't lying.

Finally he pulled out a department store bag. "This is what I'm interested in."

"Oh, that's a bag I'm taking for a friend's mother."

"Just as I suspected! A roast duck! We have machines that help us detect meat products. What with all the Avian flu going around, this is definitely not allowed inside US borders. That's a $250 fine. I'm gonna need to see your passport."

"But I..." stammering and slack-jawed, I watched him continue searching.

"You shouldn't carry things for people. They often hide drugs. You don't wanna be somebody's drug mule, do you?"

"No, I don't think my friend would--"

"--Sir, this person is not your friend."

I handed over my passport and he entered the contraband and my name into the computer.

"Since this is your first offense, I'm gonna let you off this time, but no more fake shoes or pirated DVDs."

We stuffed things back into my poor little bag and taped it up with Department of Homeland Security tape. Behind us, minions were opening vacuum-sealed packets of Indian curries and dumping them into a large trash can. I felt defeated, but not yet depleted.

My Shoelaces' Next Enemy: High Gas Prices or China?

While I found $120 Sacramento to Detroit tickets three weeks earlier in Shanghai, that was before Katrina. Plus, I had thought I'd be able to get even better deals by snagging up last minute seats like I'd done from DC to Detroit in February on Northwest (for $50US). No suck luck. Tickets were $300US.

To consolidate bags, I bought a huge army duffel and stuffed my backpack, clothes, and everything else but the guqin inside. Buying it at the army surplus store was a story in itself.

When paying for the bag, I discovered a new nickel and asked when they started making them. The goon behind the counter didn't know and wondered why I didn't. My best friend Jon answered, "because he's been in China for the last year."

"Chiner, eh? Did you get any strategic information?"

"Um, no, I wasn't really in a military area. Why?"

"That's too bad. China's gonna be the next big enemy."

"I hope that we can maintain our cooperative attitudes."

"No can do. There's too many people and too few resources. And when there aren't enough resources, there's strife. We gotta get them before they get us. I just wanna be on the top of the food chain."

I backed away with the bag. The next morning I was checking in.

So I had this huge duffel stuffed with everything but the guqin. The woman behind the counter said, ok, you're gonna have to take out ten pounds. There went the yoga mat and the shit I was carrying for my "friend."

"Sir, you're still 100 pounds, so you're going to have to pay an overweight charge."

It was no use arguing that the guqin was only ten pounds, which meant I was only ten pounds over the overweight limit if I had had my possessions evenly distributed in two bags.

"80 dollars. How you gonna pay for this?"

"With my teeth," I said, almost collapsing.

"Are your teeth gold? No, well, then you'll have to pay with cash or credit."

"Cash."

So now I'm in Chicago, depleted, but alive, planning to travel overland from now on. With the $200 shipping charges I paid to mail books plus the $200 in overweight charges, that means I paid about $200US in moving charges for each year I spent in Asia. This tells me I still have a bit of work to do before achieving an attachment-free existence. And that I buy a lot of books. And that I probably won't be going to Washington DC next weekend.

And it makes me think that fat people should pay overweight charges. It's not fair that a 140 pound creature like me pays more than 300 pounders.

Beauty



Nothing hits the tastebuds quite like a custard-filled longjohn after two years of little but spongecake.

If You're Going to San Francisco...
Remember to Look at the Dahlia Beds


Somewhere in Golden Gate Park (near the glass plant conservatory) you'll find San Francisco's Dahlia gardens. (Even if I hadn't been extremely jet-lagged when I saw them, I still wouldn't know how to get there)

Dahlia, in addition to having cool names, also have interesting shapes and colors. They're also the official flower of San Francisco. Your narrator used to dig Dahlia gardens and plant specimins like "Queen Victoria's Panties" for this character.

Sacred Works:
maestro John Nelson and the greatest choral show on earth
Story by Joshua Wickerham

Imagine this. The Shanghai premiere of Felix Mendelssohn's last major work, Elijah, the dramatic sacred oratorio celebrating the prophet, is an overwhelming success. More than 1,000 amateur and professional singers entrance a massive audience at a sold out show in Luwan Stadium. Baroque recordings, heretofore unavailable in China, fly off the shelves at local CD shops. The culture of spiritual music comes alive in China and nothing is as it was.

A far-fetched scenario? Perhaps not.

"It is important to recognize that Elijah is a very old story," says Irving Berlin Prize-winning conductor John Nelson, founder of Soli Deo Gloria, a non-profit organization which encourages composers and conductors to promote great sacred works, and the current director of L'Ensemble Orchestral de Paris. "Elijah is about a man very devoted to his ideals, a man of the desert, of great courage. Elijah is a story about father figures. The further you look back, the more you realize every culture has these archetypes."

"Though I could count the performers at the Shanghai Opera House who believe in God on one hand," Nelson continues, "the important thing to remember is that composers gave their greatest effort to choral music. Beethoven, Mozart, and Handel believed that everyone is endowed with a desire for spiritual understanding. When they dealt with a story above ordinary world situations, they lifted themselves and their audiences to another level."

However, lifting a Chinese audience to similar heights means fulfilling some very specific needs. When you talk about the development of choral music in China, you have to put it in the context of its overall decline in the world. In China, there is no tradition of the music that most Westerners have experienced through the church.

Zhang Guoyang, President of the Shanghai Opera House, one of the event's organizers, echoes that assessment. "Most Chinese like Western classical -- and especially romantic music -- but they don't know anything about Baroque and spiritual music." Because of its religious themes, Zhang thinks Elijah might be a little difficult for Chinese audiences to understand.

Perhaps, but Shanghai-born New Yorker Shirley Young, who is the main organizer of the event, says the need to introduce this kind of music to China is simple. "In China, there's a local tradition of choral music, but sacred music is non-existent and experience has been fairly limited."

Indeed, "China’s history with traditional European music only really started in the 1950s," says Yu Zhen, head of the Shanghai Musicians' Association. Of course, it faced a few disruptions in the interim. But even during the turbulent years of the late 60s and early 70s, the Shanghai Music Conservatory maintained a professional choir, though it finally disbanded in the 90s.

Says tenor and Elijah soloist Warren Mok: "The premiere of Elijah on the [Chinese] mainland is artistically and culturally and religiously a breakthrough. It's really very meaningful. Twenty years ago, this couldn't have happened."

Indeed, China is changing and the event's organizers are optimistic that the time is ripe for a spiritual music awakening. Says Young: "Our hope is that this goes beyond a single performance event. We want to create a lasting impact."

For which Elijah is perfectly suited. And not only because it's one of the great choral pieces. It's also a thrilling dramatic statement, and very challenging for the performers. Tian Hao Jiang, the Beijing-born bass playing Elijah's title role, says he finds inspiration in the human voice. "In Beijing, there are over one thousand choral groups. I was invited to hear an amateur group and a third of them were blind. Now I'm someone who always looks into a singer's eyes. The eyes can become so passionate, so human, warm, so bright. Even with their sunglasses, even though they were blind, I felt I could see their eyes. The level of professionalism and dedication in Chinese amateur choral groups is amazing."

Equally amazing is the community choral event at Luwan Stadium, where Elijah's soloists will join New York Choral Society singers, amateur local and expat groups, and professionals from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Shanghai Musician's Association, and the Shanghai Opera House.

Mok is especially excited to be performing with the Shanghai Opera House again. "In terms of pure sound, the Shanghai Opera House is the best in the whole Chinese territory. People need to hear it live because the human voice, when well sung, is the best instrument."

Four of Elijah's principal parts will be performed by American-trained professionals of Asian descent. Soprano Huang Ying and mezzo-soprano Liang Ning, despite being newcomers to the choral scene, are well-known names in the opera world. Moreover, both Huang and Liang made their film debuts in director Frederic Mitterrand’s version of the Puccini opera Madame Butterfly.

Huang has performed widely in the US; she made her Shanghai debut at the Grand Theatre in 2004 and is currently with the New York City Opera.

Liang got her Masters from Julliard, and later became a member of the American Opera Center. She's enjoyed a successful European career, singing at the Hamburg State Opera and Vienna State Opera.

Bass Tian Haojiang, who graduated from the Chinese Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, went on to get his master's degree at the University of Denver. Tian is excited about his title role in Elijah. "It's not an easy part and I like working on it," he told us from his home in New York.

Tian has sung around the world with greats like Placido Domingo and Pavarotti. He has performed with the Metropolitan Opera every season since he joined in 1991. He says he's happy to sing again in Shanghai because "Shanghainese audiences are well educated in classical music."

Tenor Warren Mok is also a veteran of the Shanghai stage; he co-produced his first opera a decade ago. Hong Kong-born, Mok attended school in New York and Hawaii, and has since appeared on stages around the world. He currently serves as artistic director of the Macau International Music Festival.

With a world class roster of talents, many of them Asian, spiritual music may very well come alive in China, by inspiring a new generation of adherents. "The larger cause is creating a relationship," says Young. "We're trying to do something beyond just performance, especially through young people."

"I could give you hundreds of examples from the letters people write me of this kind of music transporting them to other levels," says Nelson. "It always manages to inspire and trigger something. China is becoming such an open society. It is thrilling to be able to communicate with an audience that receives this work freshly. Every time I perform, it's something new. But in China, the audience is experiencing it for the first time, so it's really very special. Our hope is that we can inspire a generation, maybe even -- if I may be so bold -- an entire country."

copyright 2005 that's Shanghai.

View my flickr photoset here.
To hear a rehearsal, click here.

Two Leaders:
On the Ground
Shanghai, China


Mao: Zhou, you got the time?
Zhou: No, my Gucci stopped again.
Deng (to himself while imagining free-market reforms): Comrades, I think your time's up.

The Frontlines of the American Refugee Crisis:
Sheltering and Turning Away the Homeless, Being Shut Down by Laura Bush, "the Cajundome is 95% Black Right Now"

Note: This is a personal email your narrator received from his former roommate in Thailand. He is a grad student in Louisiana. The last missive I published on my blog is here.

As you know from the news, it looks like it's worse than anybody could have thought, and so I figured it was time for another update. Lafayette got our first refugees on Wednesday night, even as I was writing my last e-mail, and I spent a good chunk of the night manning a door at the Cajundome as they wheeled stretchers (sometimes occupied) and medical supplies in and out.

The big irony is that I moved to Lafayette in part to get away from refugee work, but with something like this on our doorstep, it's obviously been time to get back in practice, as it has been for nearly everyone else in my town.

I've always been frustrated by America's ability to ignore crises from abroad (such as the ongoing, largely-ignored genocide in Sudan). At the same time, I've always cherished the belief that Americans are fundamentally good people who may be good at shielding themselves from news of other people's problems, but that if they came face-to-face with those problems, they couldn't help but respond.

As it turns out, this is about half true. Which is to say that about half the people I know here said "Jesus, 7,000 refugees in our town?!? How can I help?" and about half said "Wow, that blows. So, wanna go out tonight?"

I've been working an information table at the Cajundome for the past two days and it's amazing how little information we actually have to give them. FEMA, notably, has yet to appear on the scene even once, which raises questions like, why bother to have a federal emergency agency at all?? We hit capacity at the Cajundome before the end of Wednes night, and then we doubled capacity on Thursday, and now we're turning people away. We can feed and house everybody's who's under the roof, but those that we can't we're simply handing a list of area churches and wishing them luck. So far about a third of the churches I've talked to are stepping beautifully up at the plate; the others are hanging out their "No Room at the Inn" signs, at least until their committees meet to discuss the issue. I'm hoping, though, if enough refugees call or drop by even the most reluctant ones, they'll inevitably be shamed into helping.

More than anything people are looking for their loved ones. The typical volunteer arc seems to be to spend the first few hours on the edge of tears at the scope of the devastation--you can't imagine what 6,000 American refugees packed into that small space look like until you've seen it--then to spend a few hours numb, then to get incredibly cheerful as you realize that at least you're still whole and healthy and you have your family and house, and no matter how bad it is out there, we're pulling together and helping. In contrast to Superdome footage, the people I've talked to have all been incredibly thankful and patient for what's happening; we're all frustrated at the lack of federal response and the bleakness of the big picture, but they realize that we're just volunteers and that we're lost and scared too.

Incidentally, CNN's not kidding; the Cajundome is 95% black right now.

It goes to show how overwhelming things are here right now that I encountered the First Lady yesterday and I almost forgot to put it in this e-mail. It actually couldn't have been a worse experience; a team of us were working to put up a website with directions to every Red Cross shelter in the region when we were evicted from the computer room by the Secret Service. There's only one room in the Cajundome with telephones and internet access for refugees, and Laura Bush shut it down for eight hours (along with the food service rooms to the side and the women's showers). You may have seen it on CNN; apparently seven refugees were allowed back so Laura could help them in front of the cameras. If you saw that footage, that's where I put in half my volunteer hours. Not knowing Bush was still back there later I tried to insist on being allowed back into the room to a "Red Cross" guy who must have been a Secret Service agent undercover. A hint for future Secret Service agents: The real Red Cross guys don't look like they want to break your legs for walking too close to the barricade, because they're too busy passing out food and helping people. They're also less likely to use phrases like "Stand fast, sir!" Now, I know this is the sort of thing that happens whenever a VIP tours a disaster site, and maybe Laura Bush handing out that loaf of bread really will lead to an increase in donations. All I can say is, to have paralyzed a third of a day of operations at this stage of the game, it fucking well better. And I tried to position myself to say this to her in front of the television cameras too, but instead I only got a wave and a smile as she hurried past me. Looks like I'm going to have to become nationally infamous another day.

The Cajundome seems to have enough volunteers now but I'm still scared to death about it. We have to get people out of there as fast as possible so we can move new folks in from the Superdome and the Convention Center, where, unbelievably, they are still dying. A bus came by last night and tried to unload; when they heard we were over capacity and couldn't take any more, they began to riot. When I went in this morning the Cajundome was in such lockdown that it took me a half hour to get in, and couldn't have at all if I hadn't been recognized by a Red Cross official. An increasing amount of attention is having to go into keeping people happy and feeling that things are moving along so we don't get a Superdome kind of violence all of the sudden. The truth is that I don't know what's happening down here, and nobody does. Any time I remember that they haven't even counted the dead yet I want to sit down and cry. Statistically, most of the people we're talking to will find their familiies. Statistically, some of them won't. I can't imagine what that dome will look like when that list is released.

I also hope heads will roll in the government for what's happened here this week. I agree that now's not the time for that, but there is no conceivable excuse for having let thousands of people preventably die on our shores. You can't imagine the shock in people's eyes as we explain again and again that there's still no federal agency here to help them, no state agency, only a handful of Red Cross workers and a bunch of utterly untrained volunteers.

On a more personal note, John, Lib and I have taken in two refugees of our own, who weigh less than a pound each: two-week old kittens a cop friend of ours found abandoned on a bus. We're still feeding them from a dropper, but they've finally opened their eyes and every sign is that they're going to pull through. The white one's going to be named Yeti if I have my way. Black one, who knows.

Anyway I'm off to dinner and to try to unwind for now. To sum up, hurricanes suck, give more money if you can, and I hate Laura Bush,

D

PS A 17-yr-old student of mine is single-handedly coordinating an animal shelter at the Coliseum that is housing hundreds of evacuated animals. She hasn't slept in three days. Sometimes human beings can really pull through.