I guess I’ve been waiting for apocalypse since before Y2K. This is why being a history buff is dangerous: you look down through the ages and all you see are societies rising and falling again. Sheep grazing in the Roman Forum. The sun setting all over the British Empire.  The steady decline of hip-hop. And so on.

What I’m starting to realize is that things are both better and worse than I used to think in my Mad Max nightmare fantasies. I’m not expecting a collapse in my own lifetime, really. But the game is changing, slowly, in such a way that we probably wouldn’t recognize the world we’re leaving to babies now being born. And it’s not going to be al-Qa’ida or the Chinese or even global climate change that will do us in, but simple mathematics:

Economies can’t grow forever. Cancers eventually kill their hosts.

This is as close to heresy as it gets in our modern age. The idea of constant growth is at the heart of mainstream economic theory: the worst thing imaginable to an economist is a halt – a “recession” – in growth. But it stands to reason (or it should, at least) that you just can’t keep growing on a finite planet with finite reserves.

Richard Heinberg, in his excellent upcoming book The End of Growth (which is already available on Kindle, so I’m not using a crystal ball here) points out three dynamics that mainstream economists completely ignore:

• we’re blowing through our supply of resources like fossil fuels and minerals;
• we’re going to spend more and more every year on the consequences of our environmental rampage: cleaning up oil spills and toxic runoff, as well as dealing with depleted soils and climate change
• because of #1 and #2, paying the massive financial debts we’ve built up will get harder and harder.

These things are both a consequence of our heedless growth and a major roadblock to the ongoing metastasis of industrial civilization. Now, a wise and enlightened society would see the inherent contradiction between what we believe and what is actually happening and begin the process of transition to a more sustainable way of living. But obviously, we’re not wise or enlightened, so what seems more and more likely is that simple mathematics will hit us upside the head with a cluestick. Unfortunately, though, the harshest consequences will fall on those people least able to cope: the poor, the sick, and the very young and old.

There has been a lot written down through the years – especially since the 1970s, when people like Donella Meadows began pointing out the limits to growth – about the nature of the problem and how to go about solving it. I haven’t found a better framework for thinking about the subject than the “Buddhist economics” proposed by E.F Schumacher. In a collection of essays called Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, Schumacher talked about the aim of Buddhist economics being  “to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.”

There are examples large and small of alternative economic structures that work, provide quality of life, and are sustainable. We may not be able to avoid the crash, but we can find a way to pick up the pieces afterward.

These are dark days for privacy.

Facebook is selling your personal information – and that of your friends – to the highest bidder. The Obama administration adopted the Bush policy of warrantless wiretapping, and demands even greater freedom for oversight. And a new policy of the TSA requires select passengers to be either body-scanned or submitted to humiliating pat downs. Even though the media hyped stories of outrage, with women and small children being subjected to what was clearly abusive behavior, the overwhelming majority of air travelers rejected calls for resistance. Over the holiday, most people I talked to had already lapsed into acquiescence: “it’s invasive, sure, but whatever keeps us safe…” Evidence that the scanners are both ineffective and hazardous is ignored. Dual fears of terror attacks and missed flights won out over civil rights. And so it goes.

Meanwhile, the latest WikiLeaks document dump is revealing the secrets of the global elite, including a US plan to spy on the leaders of the United Nations, Arab leaders begging the US to bomb Iran and a top Chinese official hilariously ordering a Google hack after finding disrespectful comments about himself online. What’s interesting about this is how it parallels the hack of climate scientists’ emails almost exactly a year ago. I for one criticized the people who hyped the so-called “Climategate” thing using a lot of the same terms that government apologists are using today: you can’t take private comments out of context, hacking an email server is theft, etc. And let’s leave aside whether the two events are reasonably comparable or the motives of the different hacker/leakers. Exposure is now a tool of asymmetrical warfare, rather than a power that only governments possess. And this leads to some interesting possibilities.

Back in the PGP days, smart kids like me advocated strong encryption for the masses as a sort of my-home-is-my-castle defense from government surveillance. And while that had – and still has – some merit for dealing with individual communications, key exchange never really caught on, and we’re exposed in so many areas of our online lives that encrypting your emails or even proxy browsing and avoiding social networking is little protection. I’m increasingly won over to the ideas on write David Brin, who’s been proposing something called “the Transparent Society” since the 1998 Wired magazine article (and, later, a book) by that name.

Basically, the idea is this: the increasing sophistication of surveillance methods makes the pursuit of privacy a cat-and-mouse game that average citizens can’t win (or, as Brin quotes Heinlein as saying, “‘privacy laws’ only make the bugs smaller”). However, rather than giving up on civil liberties, Brin advocates that this cut both ways: advocating ‘sousveillance’ of government by people as well as the other way around. Additionally, he uses the analogy of a restaurant to show the benefits of a more ‘transparent’ approach to privacy. When you are in a restaurant, Brin notes, other patrons are dissuaded from eavesdropping because you can see them leaning over, cupping their hands to their ears to listen in on you. If you were surrounded by screens, contrariwise, it would be easy for others to listen in on you without you knowing about it.

If you can watch them watching you, in other words, you at least have the power to know what information might be used against you. Moreover, you can have your own record of where you went and what you did to combat against government intentionally or (as is more often the case, accidentally) accusing you of something you didn’t do. There could be reasonable exceptions carved into the law for intimate privacy, for example, or to protect victims of abuse. But the idea that privacy is a wall that protects you has been revealed as a tragic fiction.

There’s gaps in the idea, obviously. But giving up the illusion of privacy in favor of real, genuine, verifiable accountability is something that free people should not be afraid to take a serious look at, in this age of porno-scanners and secret emails on the Internet. We need to open our eyes.

This was done without consulting Dr. Tobis, so any errors introduced by my redaction are mine alone.

One brief note: I am turning moderation off in the spirit of allowing a freewheeling debate. This of necessity means that all of the posts on this personal blog will be unmoderated, including many that are of a fairly personal nature. I’d ask for your restraint in responding to any of those.

You can read her essay “Doubt” for some context on this:

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.’

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.

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.

How to play:

Monkey

• Monkey fools Ninja
• Monkey wrenches Robot

Robot

• Robot zaps Ninja
• Robot crushes Zombie

Pirate

• Pirate drowns Robot
• Pirate skewers Monkey

Ninja

• Ninja chops Pirate
• Ninja decapitates Zombie

Zombie

• Zombie eats Pirate
• Zombie savages Monkey

“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 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.