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My teacher died last night. Death hasn’t touched me often; in fact since the passing of my grandfather almost thirty years ago I haven’t lost anyone very close to me. So I’m going through unfamiliar waves of sadness and something much like bewilderment. Pondering the whole “what-does-it-all-mean”-ness of death is almost banal, but this news coming as it does on Hiroshima Day is bringing up a lot of thoughts. Writing this, I guess, is a way of trying to get it straight in my head.
Rōshi as I remember him, on the lanai at Kaimu wearing palaka
Robert Baker Aitken was born on June 19, 1917 in Philadelphia, not far from where I’d be born forty-nine years later. I don’t remember what, if anything, he ever told me about his early life, but I know he lived in what was then the Territory of Hawaii as a boy. He went to Guam for work after high school, and was there when the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese took him prisoner and brought him to Kobe, where he was kept in a hotel with other Westerners.
One of them was Dr. R.H. Blyth, a British scholar and Zen practitioner with a Japanese wife who sought – and was denied – Japanese citizenship when the war began. Blyth sensei, who had been a student of the legendary Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki, was always called “Dr. B.” by the internees, and Aitken Rōshi used to remark on how the old expat loved the mix of respect and informality that the nickname conferred. Aitken learned about haiku, Zen and anarchism from Blyth sensei, and would spend the war years learning Japanese and poring through the small remnant of Blyth’s library, which was destroyed in a US bombing raid. After the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – sixty-five years ago today – the prisoners were released.
After the war, Blyth sensei stayed to help in the reconstruction, and helped write the ningen sengen declaration that the Americans demanded the Emperor recite. Blyth sensei was crafty enough in court Japanese to leave enough wiggle room in the statement so that the more conservative elements of society wouldn’t revolt. Aitken returned to Honolulu, got a Bachelor’s in literature and a Master’s in Japanese at UH, and went to the Bay Area to study at Berkeley. When Senzaki Rōshi brought his ‘floating zendo’ to town, Aitken was there, and he ended up leaving with Senzaki when the zendo floated down to LA. He studied with Senzaki Rōshi for years, and from him got the Dharma name Chotan (“Deep Pool”).
Senzaki Rōshi told Aitken he should go back to Japan to study haiku and Zen, and so he did in 1950. He ended up in Ryūtaku-ji, the temple built in the foothills of Mount Fuji by Hakuin Zenji, the great Zen master, poet and painter. Practicing the koan mu for days and weeks on end in dirt-poor postwar Japan, Aitken came down with a case of dysentery that almost killed him, and he headed back to Honolulu in 1956.
When he got back he met Anne, the love of his life. The two opened a bookstore together and began hosting meditation groups in their little apartment, using a mixing bowl and a wooden spoon for a meditation bell. Punning on the similarity between the Japanese word ここ and Koko Head, the nearby hill overlooking Hanauma Bay, they called their zendo Koko-an, which means “the little temple right here.” Robert Aitken began to study with Yasutani Rōshi, who had dropped out of the Soto sect and was creating a new school of Zen that included Rinzai practices, like koan work. Aitken received Dharma transmission from Yasutani in 1971, becoming one of the first – if not the first – Westerners to attain the title Rōshi. Back in Hawai’i, Koko-an had grown into the Diamond Sangha, which now has hundreds of members with dozens of teachers in the Americas, Oceania and Europe. Amusingly, most of Aitken Rōshi’s followers in Europe are Catholic monks, nuns and priests.
Anne died in 1994, and even though I never met her I always felt her presence, as well as Rōshi’s pain at her loss. Rōshi was diagnosed with thyroid cancer soon after, and didn’t respond well to chemotherapy. He went into retirement, moving to the Big Island, where his son Tom built a small house next to his own in Kaimu. Tom’s house had been on the ocean until lava from the ongoing eruption of Kilauea extended the shore about 200 yards further away. Rōshi’s house sat on black, ropy pahoehoe lava, and as you did kinhin (walking meditation) on the lanai, you could usually see the big plume of steam where lava was entering the sea a few miles down the coast.
I met Rōshi in 1997. We were fairly sure that he only had a little while to live, especially given that a Swiss student of his had taken him off the chemo and put him on a strict macrobiotic diet. But his hair grew back and his strength returned, and his mind never faltered. I will never forget him ringing the bell for dokusan, and me walking down the tiny hall, doing prostrations by the door to his study, and taking my position knee-to-knee in front of Yasutani Rōshi’s Dharma heir. Trying to meet the piercing gaze of his blue eyes as a voice that seemed to come from Bodhidharma himself inquired “What is mu? Show me mu” may have been some of the hardest shit I will ever have to do.
Rōshi came to my wedding, and gave a Buddhist dedication before the meal. His gift to us was a copy of Blyth sensei’s Zen in English Literature & Oriental Classics, with the inscription “Love, Rōshi” inside. He always had that paradoxical mix of dignity and warmth that he so admired in Blyth sensei. Even when I saw him in town – where he was to all appearances just Bob Aitken, an absent-minded professor buying groceries – he had a solidity and a depth of presence to him that I’d never experienced before, and never since.
Rōshi died yesterday at 93. Born at the tail end of one World War, he lived through the next in “enemy” territory, and was at the center of the profound mixing of cultures that took place in the second half of the 20th century. He was a deep and penetrating student of the Dharma, and played a pivotal role in bringing Zen to the West, adapting it to a non-Japanese context without diluting its essential teachings. He was a pioneer of ‘engaged Buddhism,’ helping create the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and advocating pacifism: not because he was a former POW, but rather as an expression of his essential humanity. He was a steadfast crusader of equal rights for all: not as the father of a gay man, but as someone whose heart had been opened by compassion.
He was my teacher and my friend and the world is poorer without him. But right now, what I’m mourning is my loss, and my broken heart. I’m not that enlightened… not yet, anyway.
I finally found the John Clare poem that Rōshi used to recite all the time: “Little Trotty Wagtail,” he used to say, just showed things as they are, without trying to tell you what to think or feel about them. This was Rōshi’s Zen, then; as Wordsworth put it, “coming forth into the light of things:”
Little trotty wagtail he went in the rain And tittering tottering sideways he near got straight again He stooped to get a worm and look’d up to catch a fly And then he flew away e’re his feathers they were dry Little trotty wagtail he waddled in the mud And left his little footmarks trample where he would He waddled in the water pudge and waggle went his tail And chirrupt up his wings to dry upon the garden rail Little trotty wagtail you nimble all about And in the dimping water pudge you waddle in and out Your home is nigh at hand and in the warm pigsty So little Master Wagtail I’ll bid you a ‘Goodbye.’
Little trotty wagtail he went in the rain And tittering tottering sideways he near got straight again He stooped to get a worm and look’d up to catch a fly And then he flew away e’re his feathers they were dry
Little trotty wagtail he waddled in the mud And left his little footmarks trample where he would He waddled in the water pudge and waggle went his tail And chirrupt up his wings to dry upon the garden rail
Little trotty wagtail you nimble all about And in the dimping water pudge you waddle in and out Your home is nigh at hand and in the warm pigsty So little Master Wagtail I’ll bid you a ‘Goodbye.’
Goodwin was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.
Content © 2010 The Somerville News
It’s a bit odd to sit down and write just for myself. Twice a day (sometimes more often if I’ve fallen behind), I research a subject, marshal my facts, dig for a snappy lede and start building the old inverted pyramid. It’s liberating to step outside that rigid structure, but it’s also disconcerting: kind of like walking after you’ve been cycling all day.
I’m continue to wrestle with the idea of becoming a science journalist. I see the need, but the challenges are almost overwhelming. On the climate change issue alone, coverage in the popular media and the blawg-o-sfear has essentially taken on the trappings of religion: one believes what one believes, and people take any argument as a grave insult. Any issue that requires some understanding of the underlying science to discuss meaningfully – 9/11, vaccinations, vegetative states, alternative power, animal testing - have devolved into rigid controversies that seem almost theological. Arguments are by assertion, nothing more. If necessary, people cherry-pick research that they think supports their position, and discard anything that contradicts it.
People on both sides of these debates do that, by the way. I’ve seen blog posters defending the global warming hypothesis with the same sort of blind faith in scientists that my great-grandparents had in the Pope. And just try talking a 9/11 believer out of the proposition that Dick Cheney personally set the thermite charges on the core box columns of WTC 1.
My point is not that I know what the “truth” is about these or any of the other controversies of our time. It’s that everything is just so damn personal. To some extent, I think it does have to do with the fact that American society has always had a strong faith-based element, and that now that religion rings hollow for most educated people, something else needs to take its place. Thus: the culture wars. There is now a liberal and conservative take on pretty much everything: Red science and Blue science, coastal medicine and flyover-country medicine.
I don’t even think that one perspective is “wrong’ and one is “right,” or even that the truth lies somewhere in between: in fact, I think that “let’s split the differences, average it out, and call that the real story” is one of the greatest sins of modern journalism. I think it’s more a case like the old “blind men and the elephant” fable: each perspective sees a bit of it, while missing the bigger picture.
Problem is, I don’t know how to describe the bigger picture, because I’m still yanking on the elephant’s tail myself trying to convince everybody that it’s a rope. It’s important, it’s a question much more interesting than the things I’m paid to write about… but I just don’t quite know how to wrap my head around it yet.
Well, the pressures of a daily deadline, plus lingering exhaustion and aversion from writing a 50,006-word novel draft in November… and on top of that meeting a woman, falling in love and pretty much full-time cohabitating have played hell with my blogging schedule.
I’m planning on resurrecting this here blog so I can write more about subjects I have a genuine interest in, for two reasons: first, the not-making-jack-a-dull-boy angle, and secondly, the hopes that I can build up a portfolio so I can get paid to write about what I’m interested in. To that end, I’m crash studying atmospheric science and basic hydrodynamics so I can understand and write about climate issues. I’m doing dharma talks with my meditation group, and also beginning to think about societal theories I’ve been gestating over a long, politico-geek existence. So expect this hodge-podge of ideas and notes to get even hodgier and podgier in the coming weeks and months.
It should be interesting. At least to me.
Writing too much and living too large to make a real blog post… so in lieu of that, I just figured I’d do my part to spread the word about the new jun-ken-po, taking rock-paper-scissors to the next level:
How to play:
From a dharma talk I gave at Profound Existence/Dharma Punx Boston, October 4 2009:
“The Blessed One said, “When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows; in the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental.” — Sallatha Sutta: The Arrow (SN 36.6)
The first arrow is just things as they are. When I refuse to accept the first arrow, getting pissed off or woe-is-me… that’s the second arrow, that’s where I shoot myself in the foot. It’s the idea that we can control things, that we can make them into something other than just what they are, that causes suffering. What I think of as my “self” wants more of what the self likes, and less of what it doesn’t like. Pure and simple. The heart of our practice is that there is no self…. and so there is no need for suffering.
The Buddha taught that there is nothing in any living being that is permanent, fixed, unchanging… nothing that could be considered one’s “true self” or soul. What we think of is an individual person is really a changing process of mental and physical qualities combining temporarily in one particular way.
We cling to this idea that there’s something permanent to our “selves” or our souls. We think because we think we know what we are, that we really do know who we are. I look at my thumb, and think it’s a part of what makes me ME, but if I someone chopped off my thumb, wouldn’t I still be me? And you say: of course not, that’s dumb, you’re not your thumb. But our bodies are constantly changing. Skin cells flake off and are replaced; hair grows and is cut; a cut heals; I grow old; I get sick. Over 15 years, every single cell in our body has been replaced with another cell. I am not my thumb; I am not my body. My thoughts change in an eyeblink: I am not my thoughts. Neither are my opinions, my prejudices, or my memories somehow an unchanging “me.” We cling to what we think we know and say: this is the truth. We make up a story of a character in our minds and convince ourselves that it’s real. This is all illusion. As we sit, as we deepen our practice, over time it reveals to us that we are changing, we are in transit, that there is no permanent self.
This doesn’t mean that there is literally no me, which is kind of silly. I need to know who “I” am and who “you” are so I can function in the world, but it’s important to have a light touch with this, and remember that the things we have been raised to think of as “self” are not the self. Our “selves” are not our bodies, not our feelings, not our perceptions, not our ideas, and not our consciousness. All of these things are not self.
All we have that we will always have is this one, undying flame of awareness.. and the ability to focus that awareness on things as they are, rather than how we think we want them to be.
This is a radical teaching, and it’s beautiful in its simplicity. Now this simplicity can be misleading, because saying it’s simple is not the same as saying it’s easy. This practice should not be constant effort, though, and I want to emphasize that: if you’re busting your ass trying to meditate, you’re probably doing it all wrong. It shouldn’t be hard. It’s subtle, though. It’s tricky. What we think of as our “selves” are very protective of their imaginary existences and so we have to be crafty and outwit the fake “self” and not allow it to throw us off. In Zen, as in most schools of Mahayana Buddhism, there’s a great tradition of what’s called skillful means or, basically, tips and tricks for not shooting yourself in the foot.
As we sit, as we quiet our minds and forget about the day-to-day crap, bills to pay or personal drama, whatever, what we often find is that, rather than this wonderful sense of peace descending over us we are just inundated with a shit-flood from our psyches… unresolved issues, deep wounds that remain unhealed, maybe an ongoing situation that is causing us a lot of pain. The point is not that you are supposed to ignore these things, and the fact that there is no self as we conventionally think of it does not mean that horrible situation is not, in fact, causing you real pain. What meditation gives us, though, is the ability to face whatever difficult situations arise in our lived with more equanimity, with more compassion for other and for ourselves, and with greater and greater amounts of insight and wisdom. So it’s incredibly beneficial to work with these emotions when we sit, for two wonderfully interwoven reasons: allowing ourselves to be open to these emotions deepens our practice, and being able to practice in the midst of difficult emotions strengthens our ability to deal with things in a more skillful way.
So what do we do when painful emotions arise? It’s not a one size fits all kind of thing, but there are a couple of techniques that I’ve used in the past. You may discover more as you practice. One thing that can be really effective if you are able to stick with it is to move into the bodily experience of the pain. If its a sadness, really feel into the dull ache in your heart. Notice how your breathing is shallow. Feel the way your heart beats, the sensation of temperature. Stay with the feeling, allow it to arise and pass naturally. It’s a really delicate trick, though, because the key to it is not to focus on thoughts associated with the pain, and that’s really hard to do.
Another technique that works well is to do labeling as difficult emotions come up. The trick here is to leave out the “I” and simply label “angry, angry” or “sad, sad.” Return to the breath and continue to sit with it, labeling it as it arises. What you’ll find is that the process of labeling – again: without involving the word “I” in it or getting wrapped up in whatever the story may be – actually reduces the intensity of the emotion. There have been studies of people doing this labeling while having their brains scanned in an MRI, and scientists saw that activity shifted from the part of the brain that deals with emotion to the part of the brain that deals with rational thought. So as you continue to label, the intensity of the emotion will decrease and you’ll be able to stay with it, and investigate the sensations in your body as they arise.
Deepening awareness of your inner life really does, over time, allow you to see that all these emotions and judgments, as powerful as they may be, are not “self” any more than your thumb is your self. They are a part of you, and they will from time to time require some attention, just as you have to pay attention to your thumb when you cut it. But just like sitting around crying will not stop your amputated thumb from bleeding, neither will marinating in negative emotions resolve the situation that caused them to arise. Reacting from emotion almost always makes the situation – and the emotions – more painful and difficult.
The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa said, “let yourself be in the emotion. Go through it, give in to it, experience it …Then the most powerful energies become absolutely workable rather than taking you over, because there is nothing to take over if you are not putting up any resistance.”
I spent my first free day in China getting blissfully lost in the narrow streets and alleys of the Huángpǔ neighborhood right across the river from Pǔdōng. All the construction and modernization in the area since — oh, the 1930s or so — hasn’t seemed to have affected the area at all. It is an island in time and space: backdrop out of a Jackie Chan movie, filled with weird smells, fish swimming around in plastic tubs with airhoses bubbling, people passed out on lawn chairs and little hole-in-the-wall shops selling things I could only guess at. I was still interested in finding the City God Temple, but I didn’t have a map, just a vague idea of where it was relative to the Bund.
I love walking a new city. You get a feel for the rhythm of people’s lives, the coming and going, where the meeting places are. The old neighborhood is hemmed in by the riverfront office towers and warehouses on one side, and the massive, modern downtown on the other. Shànghǎi has whole zones dedicated to particular kinds of trade: pearls, electronics, fabrics, what have you. The fabrics district alone is probably bigger than Boston.
I needed some work clothes for the climb on Monday, so I checked out the Shànghǎi South Bund Soft-Spinning Material Market on Lujiabang Road figuring I could pick up a pair of cheap jeans I wouldn’t mind getting dirty or torn. The place was packed with stalls, people selling everything from scarves to tuxedos. I wasn’t looking for dress clothes – and I wouldn’t really have any place to wear them – but I did see a really bad-ass collarless blazer. Maybe in some future life where I go to a lot of formal events…
I stopped in at a stall with a hand-lettered sign that said JEANS. I asked the guy if he had a pair in my size, and he just looked at me and pointed to the rolls of denim that lined one side of the stall. I told him no, that I just wanted a pair of jeans, today. He asked me how soon I really needed them, and I told him Monday. He said he’d deliver them to my hotel. I asked him how much. He quoted me ¥140, or about $20. For tailored jeans. I said sure.
I happened to be wearing a pair of jeans at the time that I’d bought in Rome (for €100 or about $160 at the time), jeans that fit me well and that I particularly liked. He told me he could cut them in the same style, and measured me in like a dozen places. He said he’d have them delivered by 12 noon on Sunday.
I walked around the place a little more, still kind of stunned that I was getting tailored jeans for less – a lot less – than a pair of Levi’s. Down the hall was a guy selling woolen coats, and I figured I’d check it out. I have wanted a long cashmere coat since I moved to the Northeast, but the price was just too much. I found a black calf-length cashmere, in my size, with a nice, narrow waisted cut and I just went for it. Talked the guy down to the equivalent of $100, and walked out with it. Hellzyeah.
I’m at my most Italian when it comes to my relationship with clothes. Oh, and food. Okay, and I guess driving too. Anyway, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Probably I paid even more than I could have, but I was happy, it was a sunny day, and I was in China. I kept looking for that City God Temple – even asked a Caucasian I ran into – but not having much luck and not too unhappy about it. I was just enjoying going down narrow streets and getting stares from the locals.
I eventually eased back onto the ferry, feeling the kilometers I’d walked in the soles of my feet. Back in the ‘telly, admired the way my new coat looked on me in the mirror, and wondered about getting a whole new wardrobe to match it. If I end up getting sent back to China, I’m bringing a fistful o’ yuan for the Soft-Spinning Materials Market.
With what was left of my jetlagged energy, I got myself dinner (OK, nothing special) at the Yammy Café down the street. A couple cups of soju at the bar afterwards did me in, and I rested my tired legs in bed with a Kirin Ichiban I’d bought at the Family Mart for about fifty cents, and watched a documentary about the Three Gorges Dam on CCTV until I flat passed out.
The next morning I hauled my tired ass out of bed and dragged it down to breakfast. I had another weird sleep – up at 2am checking work emails – but I couldn’t stay in bed. My last free day in China. I carbo-loaded like a fiend and headed out.
I’m a freak for tall buildings, which is kind of weird when you think about it because I’ve had a major fear of heights since I was little. I always have this mad paranoia that I’m going to have the uncontrollable urge to throw myself off whatever high point I’m on. But I was staying a half-mile from the 2nd and 5th tallest buildings in the world, and I had to go check it out, acrophobia or not. The day had dawned clear… it seemed like the greyness we’d had all week wasn’t weather, or wasn’t only weather: it was as if the sky was filled with the dun-colored clay dust. When construction stopped for the weekend, the air cleared.
Lùjiāzuǐ showed off its wealth by building big. Interpret that as you will. First there was the 468m (1,535 ft) tall Oriental Pearl TV tower. Then came the Jin Mao (“Golden Prosperity”) building at 421m or 1,380 ft and the Shànghǎi World Financial Center at 492m (1,614 ft). Next up is the Shànghǎi Center, supposed to be done by 2014, which will be, at 632 metres (2,073 ft), taller than any building on earth except for the insane, 818 m (2,684 ft) tall Burj Dubai. I was headed for the World Financial Center. No plans ever to be in Dubai, but you know I’ll be climbing that monster if’n I ever go.
The WFC observatory is way, way over the top with the Star Trek decor. The walls glow purple and the elevator is tricked out with a swirling light-show in the ceiling and space-age electronica playing low over the sound system. The observation deck, at 1500 feet, is gleaming white and offers a pretty good view to the north and south.
What struck me most about Pǔdōng from above is what I noticed on the street: the whole area is covered with rank after rank of the big mid-rise apartment towers, quite literally as far as the eye can see. I think it was that view, more than anything else, that really brought home to me how massive the human migration to Pudong had been over the 20 years since it was all rice paddies.
I crossed again on the ferry, buying two tokens for a yuan. This time, I was coming with a map which I’d bought at the Family Mart. But when I unfolded it on the ferry’s foredeck, I found that the City God Temple was nowhere to be found. I was destined to wing this. Cool.
Zhongshan Road forms a ring around Shànghǎi Pǔxī, the hypertrophic old part west of the Huángpǔ where four-fifths of the city’s twenty millions live. The part of it near the river was getting torn up and resurfaced in preparation for Expo 2010, and I walked through the dust and rubble, guided only by a vague sense that the temple was somewhere near Yuyuan Garden. That was on the map, and I cut down a side street, glad to be out of the construction mania and into the much more interesting chaos of Shànghǎi markets.
The whole area around Yuyuan Garden is made up of tourist-trap shops, and although it’s mostly the cheap crap we’ve come to associate with “Made in China” that they’re selling, it’s pretty colorful and amusing in its own right. A lot of dudes insistently tried to sell me watches, but most of them gave up when I growled bú yào. Too many easier marks who didn’t even speak crappy Mandarin, I guess.
I wandered all around the area, but didn’t find any signs for the Old City God Temple. I found the New City God Temple, and the Garden itself – a Ming-era jewel – but no Old City God Temple. No big deal. I headed off towards People’s Square.
The old horse racing park in the center of the city was the top moneymaking business in the 30s, before the war. After the Communists banned horse racing, the area was turned into a public park and the clubhouse became the Shanghai Art Museum. It’s a very clean urban park now, and a nice break from the wild capitalist frenzy that surrounded it. I paused to take a picture of the fountain in front of the Shànghǎi Museum, but had to wait while some local kids ran up to take a shot with the fountain as a backdrop. They turned out to all be English speaking, and asked me to take their picture. We ended up chatting for a bit as they practiced their English with me. They offered to take me to a Chinese tea ceremony “they had seen advertised on television,” and I said why not. It seemed almost too carefully orchestrated, but I figured there was only so much trouble an East Coast boy could get into at a teahouse.
Turned out the “kids” were in their late twenties: one supposedly from Qīngdǎo, the beer capital of China, one from Húnán, and one was supposed to be from Shǎnxī – from Xī’ān, where the terra cotta soldiers are – who lived in Shànghǎi now, and was hosting her friends. Their English was really good, and I was struck as I had been all week, how Chinese people seemed to be more like Westerners than different. There were, of course, subtle (and not-so-subtle) cultural differences, but overall, it seemed to me, modern urban people anywhere are like modern urban people everywhere. I mean, these were people whose job it was to work with Westerners, but even so, it was entirely familiar.
The tea ceremony was really cool, and I got to taste a number of different teas and learn a little bit (in translation) about ancient Chinese tea culture. I remembered hearing something about the Book of Tea at some point in my life, and the woman who was leading the tea ceremony made reference to it. There was kind of a synthesis of the three religions or traditions of China: Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The tea-drinking was somewhat stylized, but not so much so as in the Japanese tea ceremony. Of course, I bought overpriced tea: I have some awesome jasmine oolong that I’ve been enjoying (along with my beloved espresso) since I’ve been back.
The Shǎnxīese woman said she was an instructor of Chinese linguistics and that she would help me learn Mandarin over Skype. We’ll see how that goes, but I decided that I had to learn the language now that I got a start. It sort of started to make sense to me after a week in the country, and I figure I should really take advantage of the opportunity. Being in China really gives you the sense that this is the rising power, and that the US is in a decline that may take many years, even centuries… but the future largely belongs to the Chinese.
Exhaustion hit me. I ended up taking the metro back to the telly, after saying goodbye to the “kids.” I was also a little concerned about the climb, and my last shot at making the system work while I was inside China. They were going to the circus, but something
I ended up having a 25-cent Tsingtao beer in honor of my new “friend” from Qīngdǎo.
My Chinese colleague arrived after 11 in the morning, having missed her flight out of Shēnzhèn. Qing wears Jimmy Choo and totes a Prada, and I admit I made a slight misjudgment based on her style. I assumed she was more salesy, but her technical chops are sound. She understands networking and quite a lot of RF, and this really ended up helping me.
I had pounded about a dozen little cups of coffee at the hotel’s Continental breakfast, which was more a sort of bi-continental breakfast. There was an omelet bar and a row of chafing dishes with Western and Chinese grub. I knew damn well I wasn’t going to sit at table in Shànghǎi and eat fuckin eggs and bacon. I went straight for the Specialty Fried Rice and piled at least three little dishes high with it (I later discovered there were regular sized plates). “Greengrocery” was stir-fried bok choi or ong choi… and they also had “Shanghai steamed bun:” the famous xiao long bao! I casually grabbed a couple and then skulked up later for a couple more.
We caught each other up, briefly, and headed out to the customer site. You get around Pǔdōng by taxi… it’s a huge, sprawling area that used to be the agricultural lowlands east of old Shànghǎi. Imagine an industrial park the size of Rhode Island. The local office of our customer was just a kilometer and a half away, but it took fifteen minutes at least… plus Qing didn’t know exactly where it was, so we wandered the streets for a while until we found the entrance.
Since it was lunchtime by the time we got there, our customer contact brought us to the company cafeteria for lunch… after inquiring nervously if the American could use sticks. I assured them I could. 12 years in Hawai’i had given me a lot of practice, and I still like to eat rice with chopsticks, cause otherwise I shovel it in at an obnoxious rate. I had been cool with anything in bite sized chunks, but larger pieces defeated me… by the end of the trip, though, I was devouring chicken legs and pork chops with sticks, and hunching down over my rice bowl like a local.
They were kind enough not to order Shànghǎi stink fish with lots of needle-like bones for me. I’ll eat anything once, but I made a lot of runs at Asian fish, and I don’t dig it. They were duly impressed with my chopstick skills, and I promised them I liked Chinese food, and had come with every intention of eating a lot of it.
This was the first day where I was really immersed in Chinese life. My Mandarin was still close to nonexistent… I had downloaded a podcast that I listened to on the plane to learn the courtesy words: please, thank you, may I, etc. I figure you can’t lose by being polite, and the customer contact was enormously amused every time I said duìbùqǐ for “excuse me.”
The expression nèi gè in Mandarin, meaning “that one,” gets used a lot… it seems like it’s more or less a throwaway word when you’re referring to something and the other person knows what you’re talking about. It kind of gets slurred in fast speech and it kept cracking me up, because out of the jumble of syllables and tones I kept hearing neige neige neige, and it sounds like all these Chinese people are calling each other the N-word. Felt like I never left my neighborhood.
We caught the 1:30 company shuttle to the office park where some of the gear was located. Golden Bridge was a lot like any American office park, surrounding a nice stream and landscaped carefully and well. The buildings were all new, and featured a Best Buy with architecture straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey or some other 60s vision of the future: all rounded edges and bold primary colors. I was feeling more and more like a native of some run-down broke-ass country. It was kind of a cool (and kind of a sad) feeling.
I’ll spare the tech details, but what I saw was pretty depressing. They were using our equipment in a way we’d never intended for it to be used, and I wasn’t sure if the system was going to work at all, let alone work well. We took another shuttle to the next site – think of these sites as like holes on a miniature golf course: one to the next to the next to the next. This was even more jaw-droppingly weird, and after I clambered up onto the roof of this dilapidated office building, I was wondering if I had been set up to take a major fall.
In the attic at the top of the building was the testing gear. It was probably the crappiest equipment room I had ever been in, and I had seen some serious dung.
It was impossible to tell what was connected to what, and after a few minutes in there with the local staff I was convinced none of them could figure it out either. Cables everywhere, hardly anything labeled. The day had grown hotter and more humid, and this concrete room with its one little window and stacks of whirring equipment was a sauna. I began to wither in my ridiculous long-sleeved business shirt and Italian wool suit.
The guy who had taken us to lunch showed me the problems they were having, and it was fairly obvious that they were going about some things all wrong. I made a suggestion that we simplify things down to the absolute minimum, and discovered an incompatibility with a particular piece of equipment was causing most of their trouble.
I did some tuning and adjusted some settings that just seemed odd and jacked up. They ran a test, and I was amazed. We were moving data across this clusterfuck of a network with a packet loss rate of 0.4% - no more than four packets out of every thousand dropped. Again, won’t go into the details, but I was expecting the thing to seize up and start puking electrons all over the concrete floor and it was purring like a catnipped kitten.
The problem: they wanted 0.1% loss.
One packet out of every thousand dropped, max. Through the middle of a Chinese megacity, with probably hundreds of sources of interference blasting my poor gear. My guts turned to water.
We ran every combination of every setting available on the system. Nothing could tip that error rate down even a tenth of a percent, and most things we did made it worse. Qing came up with some off-the-wall ideas which were great (I refuse to call it “out-of-the-box” thinking… how about “inspired engineering?”) but it was no use. We were stuck in the mud.
The light was fading, and we had to go. We climbed down the steel stairs from the attic, me racking my brains to think of what we could do to improve the system. I hadn’t had anything to drink all day since the gallon of coffee I’d had at breakfast, no water with lunch, nothing. I was feeling seriously dehydrated, and was looking forward to my air-conditioned hotel room and maybe a nice Tsingtao. Then, our contact, the guy in front, started shouting something.
They had locked us in.
The equipment room was rented space at the top of this half-empty office building, it didn’t belong to our customer. There was a roll-down steel door, like you find in some stores in worse neighborhoods in the US. We were on the wrong side of that. And alone in the building.
Nobody was freaking, so I didn’t either… but I was wondering what it would be like to spend the night in this dump, and how dry I’d be in the morning. Fortunately, everyone in China has a cell phone, so a rescue call was made and we settled in. I asked Qing to translate posters on the wall, some workgroup motivational crap: part Jonathan Deming, part Chairman Mao. One poster showed the international standard graphic for an emergency exit: the Man Fleeing In Terror icon, over an arrow pointing to a doorway that was, humorously, chained and barred shut with a piece of wood that had once been a door. Having nothing to do, I poked around the door and pulled the wood away, discovering that the chain was just looped metal packing straps. The exit door fell open, revealing a totally rundown stairway filled with garbage and moisture damage.
I didn’t care. It was freedom.
We escaped down the back entrance, and all four of us piled into a taxi back to town. We dropped our contacts off at different bus stops, and returned to the hotel in the cab. Day One had kind of sucked, but I chugged a bunch of water and got Qing to take me out for some authentic food, which was actually not all that easy to find in the financial district.
We found a place in what amounted to a multistory food court on Fuxing Road. The ground floor was all sweets and pastries, but upstairs on the second level there was Chinese food, or, as they call it in China: food.
The duck blood soup was kind of cool just for the weirdness factor, but my favorite was the beef with hot pepper and mushroom stems like I had never tasted before, a northern dish apparently:
I napped, as I would for the rest of that week, rather than sleeping. I woke up in the middle of the night to catch the engineers midday in California and try and get some support on what was seeming to be, increasingly, an impossible task. They agreed to run tests in the lab to simulate our results. I went back to bed.
The rest of the week unfolded pretty much the same. Every technical trick we threw at the problem – and we did a lot of software tinkering around under the hood – failed to move the numbers at all. Thursday they took me out to the last site, a little concrete block structure – it had apparently once been either a bakery, a foundry, or a crematorium – with a fifteen-meter steel tower on the roof. Our two radios were mounted one on top of the other: they were trying to play fucking handball with the microwaves. Again, not to get lost in the technical details: this, however, is not kosher. I urged them to move the radios apart. They said no dice. The tower could only be reached by clambering up a rickety bamboo ladder to the roof of the block house. This looked like a killer.
By Thursday night, the test engineers had come up with three magic bullets that I could use to solve the problem. I was really encouraged. Each of the tweaks seemed like they’d work pretty well to move the numbers down at least a fraction, and I felt like the combo would do wonders for the test. If we couldn’t reach the 0.1% threshold, we’d get damn close.
I was shot down in flames by midmorning Friday.
We discussed our options over a lunch of hot Hunan chicken, with an interesting side dish of jellyfish:
Qing tried to sell the customer on the idea that, if we couldn’t reach their minimum threshold, that they should run the test plan anyway and see what performance was like. It seemed like we got some traction, because we were apparently returning to the site after lunch.
We dropped off the dude that was running the tests for us, which kind of surprised me, but it was cool: always better to do experiments without someone looking over our shoulder. Unfortunately, though, they’d left the cables in a really weird state, and we didn’t realize until like an hour later that we realized it wasn’t our gear that was taking a shit, it was their awful network.
We got halfway decent numbers, and Qing called it in. The customer, surprisingly, agreed to move the equipment that was crammed together on the tower out in the sticks on Monday. The catch: I’d have to do it myself.
Looked like I wouldn’t be going home on Sunday after all…
Shànghǎi is a giant construction site, with 20 million people living in the middle of it. All the earth-moving raises a fine clay dust the color of cement, and it gets everywhere. Street cleaners are all over, pushing the stuff around with bundles of twigs tied to long handles, like witches’ brooms. All they seem to succeed in doing is evenly spreading out a thin layer of dust. If you’re outside for a while, you can feel its grittiness in your mouth. My black shoes were the color of slate by the end of the week.
The snaggletoothed bastard that picked me up at the airport pushed his rattly Chinese VW Santana down the highway at about 100-110 km/h, though it felt like he was going faster: this was my introduction to the particular Chinese attitude to lane discipline. You kind of drive wherever, and if there’s room to squeeze through two vehicles – even if it’s inches – you just go.
The city starts not far from the airport, and just goes on being a city for miles and miles. There are fungal blooms of mid-rise apartment complexes everywhere – and I do mean everywhere, in wads of ten or fifteen hulking identical towers. Every so often there’s a busy extrusion of skyscrapers in wild, Jetsons-style designs, all sweeping curves and spheres and spires. And what really surprised me is that almost every sign – from billboards to company names to car nameplates, and every street sign – was written in both Chinese and English.
My customer’s office was in the financial district of Lùjiāzuǐ, so I had booked a hotel there. Right up by the river near old Shànghǎi, Lùjiāzuǐ is where all the money piles up. The towers are bigger and shinier here, and the stores sell real Gucci and Dior. Most of it is newer than ten years old, and the pace of construction is slower, if only because almost every inch is totally built out.
Snaggletooth dropped me off, and charged me about twice what he should have. Traveler FAIL. I hadn’t felt like comparison shopping, haggling or arguing: I had just got done with thirty hours of travel, and I was charging this back to my company. Sixty bucks. Not the end of the world.
My hotel had a total retro swanky vibe, with little egg-shaped chairs in the lobby and downtempo electronica in the halls. It was called the “H” Hotel, with H apparently standing for “Happy, Healthful, Hip, Hong” (beautiful)… the slogan, depicted on the wall behind Registration was “Diversity Without Borders.”
The room was pretty tight for $40. Nice big bed, glass shower, HDTV. I just wanted to get cleaned up and go look around a little bit.
The difference is pretty stark between Pǔdōng – dong means “east,” so the name is “east of the (Huang)pu” – and old Shànghǎi or what is called Pǔxī. Pǔdōng is new, relatively tidy, and fully planned and organized. Old Shànghǎi is… old: organic, messy, chaotic. I loved it.
I didn’t have time or energy to really explore it: I just figured I’d head out on the Metro and wander a little. I didn’t have a map or anything, but I have a pretty good sense of direction, so I started walking in the general direction of the Metro station and figured I’d see what I saw.
First: the city is going crazy getting ready for the 2010 Expo. Like the Olympics was for Beijing, this is going to be for Shànghǎi, or so the central government believes: a coming-out party, a chance to show off Shànghǎi’s status as a world city. The whole area along the river is being completely revamped, and older buildings along all the major streets are crawling with bamboo scaffolding as they’re getting their facelifts. The little cartoon mascot, a waterdrop or something named Haibao, is everywhere.
The “main drag” of Pǔdōng is Century Avenue… a six-lane-wide boulevard that cuts through the heart of the money part of the city and runs from the big supertall skyscrapers to the start of the sprawl. The metro station is right by, and I am not making this up, the Shanghai GM dealership. With a bunch of Buicks on display.
I have never seen a subway as nice as the Shànghǎi Metro. I like trains, and I still ride the T in Boston sometimes even if I have a better way of going, just because I like it (even though the T totally sucks). Shànghǎi’s metro trains are superfast, new, and the stations have glass walls separating you from the tracks. Digital displays above the gates have the wait times for the next train, and the thing shows up on the dot, like every 4 minutes at rush hour.
I wandered around Xuhui, looking for the Metro City electronics mall, which I’d heard was the place to go for your score. I got lost in the home improvements neighborhood – Shànghǎi’s commercial life is pretty rigorously organized – which is approximately the size of… oh, the Bronx. And I do mean it literally: every store sells furniture, appliances,paint, tools… I saw Stanley logos everywhere, which was humorous.
Eventually, through trial and error, I found Xujiahui. Once the kitchen shops turned into electronics stores, I knew I was headed in the right direction. I kept my eye on a looming Best Buy in the distance, and I rounded a corner to see the massive glass globe.
You go through a pretty familiar mall environment – eyeglass shops, cosmetics shops, a food court – to a manic bazaar deep in the building’s guts. The activity is neatly subdivided into neighborhoods: second and third floors are mostly laptops and game gear, but what I wanted was on the first floor in the back, down an escalator you have to reach from the Playstation Pro village on level 2: camera equipment.
I worked the different vendors, trying to see who had the best price: the Canon EOS 450 I wanted ranged from ¥7400 down to ¥4350. I started haggling at ¥2000 but wasn’t able to get anyone down below ¥3500, which was way more than I wanted to pay for questionable hardware without a warranty valid in Boston. I bailed.
Walked back to the Metro Line 2 stop I had gotten off at, even though I could have caught Line 1 right there in Xujiahui and tranferred (or ‘interchanged’ as the robot voice says in English). It was worth it just to wander, even though I was getting pretty tired. All the voices, the sights and smells… old Shànghǎi was definitely where I wanted to be. And I saw my first expat: tried to make eye contact, but he was too city for that.
I went back to the hotel and crashed. Work night. I didn’t know what I’d be walking into, so I slept as much as I could.
My flight out of Logan was at 4pm… plan was to gut out the flight to LA and sleep across the Pacific, with the hope of waking up on Chinatime Tuesday morning. Generated a custom packing list, left room in my bag for Shanghai scores – a short trip! – and dropped my car of in the economy lot. Flying from Boston to LA is easy, I can do those standing on my head. It freaks out the other passengers, but what the hell.
I’ve been through LAX a few times in the last bunch of years, but I guess it’s only been for connections. Actually arriving at and getting around the airport, though, you get a real sense of what a shithole it is. It’s like a bus station with a food court. Plus, there’s really no simple way of figuring out – if, say, you just got off a transcontinental flight and it’s late at night for you – how exactly to get to the international terminal from domestic. The idea that, as is actually the case, you need to leave the building completely and walk along the curb for a quarter mile or so, is manifestly non-obvious.
The crumbling Tom Bradley International Terminal was nothing short of depressing. I really felt like I’d be disappointed if this was my first view of the US. Really, Los Angeles World Airports? Linoleum floor is the best you can do? And the (no lie!) $18 sandwich wraps… please, guys.
The contrast couldn’t have been more stark when I stepped on the gleaming Asiana Airlines 777 that took me from there to Seoul. It felt like stepping through a time warp… everything on the plane was sleek and shiny, the flight attendants all dressed in some ’60s fantasy of 21st century stewardess kit. Even the john on the plane was tricked out, with free toothbrushes, toothpaste, lotion and aftershave like a hotel bathroom. There were two free meals on the flight(steak or bi bim bap for dinner, omelets or kimchi for breakfast), no bag charge, free wine service (OK, it was Crane Lake, but still) and bar service from real bottles, not nips. Just over a grand round-trip Boston-Shanghai, and Star Alliance code share, so I got the miles.
You definitely feel the difference between a growing economy and one in recession. Korea’s right next to that big mountain of Chinese cash, and Seoul airport is a clean, airy place with soaring high ceilings and sparking tile. Kind of how I remember American airports being when I was very young, or at least how they seem to be in memory. It even has a Dunkin’ Donuts in the international waiting area. I’d come all that way and what did I find but a chain from Quincy, serving green tea lattes. Thomas Friedman would pitch a tent in his pants if he saw it. I just wished they had TurboShots.
And finally, after a two-hour hop across the Yellow Sea: the People’s Republic of China brings you Pudong-Shanghai International Airport! Which, rather than being a grim, shabby, Maoist hellhole was actually a polished, efficient, totally modern facility. I felt like I’d come from the third fucking world.
Now, I just had to get through Customs.
