Another Year to Heaven

Last Friday I visited a small museum dedicated to the life and work of Xu Beihong 徐悲鸿 (1895-1953) , the first president of the PRC's Central Academy of Fine Arts and one of the most influential Chinese painters of the 20th century.

The museum is wonderful, but actually I found myself there more or less by accident. Last Friday was my birthday. I had planned to celebrate it by exploring the newly refurbished Capital Museum in downtown Beijing. There are a lot of museums in Beijing, but the Capital was a natural first choice. It's just off Tiananmen Square, right in the heart of the city center. The building is sleek and imposing -- ultra-modern, über-chic. From the outside, at any rate, it looks like a precise reflection of the kind of city into which Beijing has begun to shape itself, the kind of country China is hoping to become.

And, according to reports, the interior of the museum only adds to this effect. Special exhibits from all over the world are displayed in wide halls equipped with state-of-the-art, ecologically responsible systems for regulating temperature and humidity. There are cafes, lounges, conference rooms and restaurants. Admission is free. This is the new New China. She's not taking a backseat to anyone.

As I checked bus routes and closing times, it suddenly struck me that, actually, the Capital Museum hadn't attracted me because it is glossy and well-appointed. What I was really drawn to was the desire it seemed to embody -- the determination to inhabit a world characterized by a confluence of the graceful and the functional, the right-minded and the urbane. Or, more precisely, the desire not merely to inhabit such a world, but to belong there, to contribute to it. No doubt this desire is attractive partly because the world it projects is so appealing, but I think the allure stems still more from its seeming to define modernity itself in such welcome, beckoning terms -- sleek, civilized, inventive, knowing. It invites a sense of delighted arrival: So this is what the new century looks like!

But then, just before setting out, I discovered that the Capital Museum requires its patrons to make reservations at least a day in advance. So, I started thumbing through my guidebook to Beijing and eventually settled on the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum, which is tucked away on a narrow street in the western part of the city.

I knew the Xu Beihong Memorial would be a far cry from the Capital Museum, and so it was. The galleries were dingy, institutional and mostly ill-lit. If the building was heated at all, it wasn't so you'd notice. I paid a reluctant visit to the toilets and found -- with chagrin but small surprise -- that it certainly wasn't the new New China there.

But, in another sense, the Memorial turned out to offer a vision of modernity that was at least as compelling as the one suggested by the Capital.

Though Xu was perhaps best known for his traditional ink-and-brush paintings of galloping horses, he also had a profound capacity for innovation. As a young man, he travelled around Europe and studied art in Paris. On his return home in 1927 he helped introduce Western techniques into the Chinese art world, devoting the remainder of his life to the creation of a new national aesthetic based on a combination of Western and Chinese approaches.

The collection on display at the museum reflects this versatility. The first and second exhibition halls feature traditional brush paintings. There are clumps of bamboo, austere in black ink. There are stands of pine and cypress, pure, massive, and commanding. There are cranes and sparrows, cats and oxen; there are magpies and one magnificent eagle. And, of course, there are the famous horses, some running and some at rest, so beautiful they stop your breath.

On the second floor there are dozens of oil paintings, including some vast canvases depicting epic scenes drawn from myth and history. One such scene features a peasant woman in the dress and headscarf of early China. She is seated on the ground cradling a nursing infant. Something in her expression and attitude, in the scale of her body and her placement amongst the rest of the composition, suggests a curious kind of unfleshed Dutch realism, firm and precise but sparing of detail. Striking an entirely different note, there are several smaller studies of seated women whose veiled but glowing colors and quiet, almost remote intensity put me in mind of Edward Hopper. Different again but equally arresting, Xu's colleague Ren Bonian gazes shrewed-eyed out of an unassuming portrait. I don't know what creates this effect -- whether it is the way the subdued colors bring out the planes of his face, or the angle of his head against a certain degree of back lighting, or what -- but he looks for all the world like a Renaissance burgher, or perhaps a minor functionary in the court of Henry Tudor.

There is also a hall devoted to scenes of old Beijing. These paintings are executed with a fine brush on small canvases. I think the school or style is French, though I didn't recognize it. At any rate, I kept getting the same kind of shock each time I approached the pictures: what first looked like a standard Parisian cafe with windows open to the street would prove, on closer inspection, to be an old-fashioned tea house or a medicine stall. The Arc de Triomphe, seen from across the room, turned out to be the Drum Tower. And so on. (Of course, no one in their right mind could really confuse Beijing's old Drum Tower with the Arc de Triomphe, but I kept catching myself in the same kind of crazy mistake.)

There are also hybrids of different sort, whose fusion resides not in a combination of Chinese subjects and Western media, but in an integration of Chinese and Western techniques. In one particularly unusual painting, a human figure sits, hands clasped around his knees, beneath a giant tree. The tree is executed in a more or less traditional ink-and-brush style, but the human figure is in Western perspective. He is sketched rather than fully detailed; it is not his form but his place in the composition that is so suggestive of depth and foreshortening. It is almost as if he and the tree under which he meditates occupy different dimensions. I couldn't decide if the effect was pleasing or disturbing, but it was certainly hard to look away.

After I finished my tour of the various exhibition halls, I returned to the horses on the first floor. I looked at them more carefully this time, trying to work out what it was that made them so compelling. I couldn't identify anything in particular. In the end I decided that somehow they just reflected the essence of horse, the way a dirge on the bagpipes captures the essence of mourning, or a sonnet by Shakespeare the essence of desire.

These reflections reminded me of a famous passage in the eighth-century poet Du Fu’s 杜甫 ballad “Painting Song” (丹青引), addressed to the master-painter Cao Ba .

弟子韓幹早入室，亦能畫馬窮殊相。
幹惟畫肉不畫骨，忍使驊騮氣凋喪。

Your pupil Han Gan soon achieved the greatest mastery:
He too could paint horses, giving expression to every possible look.
But Han Gan only paints the flesh; he does not paint the bones,
Thus suffering royal, fiery chargers to fade into spiritlessness.

As I considered Xu Beihong's horses, and Du Fu's remarks on Han Gan, I thought about the idea that there is an essential, ineffable quality that differentiates the competent from the sublime. Of course this is hardly a new concept. In my family we've always called it the "dun-colored mare," after the Po Lo story cited in J.D. Salinger's "Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters." And, indeed, this idea is basic to Chinese critical theory. In Du Fu's poem it takes the form of "painting the bones," but generally speaking it consists of a premium placed on the expression or actualization of an interior essence, unseen but crucial. So, to take just one of many possible examples, the ninth-century poet Bai Juyi 白居易 complains

古人唱歌兼唱情，今人唱歌唯唱聲。

In the olden days, when people sang songs,
they were also singing feelings;
Nowadays when people sing,
they only sing the notes.

As I thought these things, and reflected on the painstakingly mastered foreign techniques that the paintings upstairs in the oil-gallery embodied, I found myself a little out of sorts. After a while I realized that my dissatisfaction sprang from a sense that something was missing, that there was a bias in the way I was understanding what I was seeing. Or perhaps not a bias so much as a vacuum. After all, the idea that artistic excellence relies on an unseen, ineffable mechanism insists on framing artistic creation as an interior process. It leaves no room for the community of skill that sustains culture of all kinds, artistic and otherwise.

At this point in my meditations, my eye was caught by a glass case standing in the middle of the room. I had been giving all my attention to the paintings on the walls and hadn't noticed it before. Inside the case was a handwritten letter, Xu Beihong's reply to a student's request for instruction. The letter was punctuated by illustrated details and explanatory captions: “raised hoof, angled backwards, the stroke commences here; hock, three-quarter view, lift the brush here; muzzle, quarter view, keep the lines short.”

I don't know if Xu's student profited from these directions or not. Who can say whether he went on to "paint the bones?" But, after reading the letter and looking at the illustrations, I realized two things. First, Xu's paintings of horses do not just reflect the essence of horse: they make the viewer think "How good it is to live in a world with horses in it." And, at the same time, "How good it is to live in a world in which people paint horses."

Second, the Parisian paintings of Beijing, and the Xia woman in her headscarf, and the shrewd-eyed Ren Bonian all represent the dissemination of skill, its transplantation from Europe to China. Xu Beihong's letter to his student represents the preservation of skill, its communication from master to disciple. Whether the results of these two kinds of transmission are sublime or merely proficient, the process itself is nothing less than that which feeds humankind: it is culture, the act of sustained community.

And that, I think, is what we want the new century to look like.

Parasol

While I was out running errands this morning, I saw a mother leading a toddler by the hand. The two of them were headed in my direction. As they drew near, the toddler stared at me, reaching up with his free hand as if he wanted to clutch at my skirt. I guess his mother noticed that something about me had captured his attention, because, rather than simply passing by and continuing on her way, she stopped and told him, "Say hello to the lady."

The little boy didn't say anything, but he didn't seem at all shy, and he continued to reach up and stretch out his fingers. It was almost as if he were a kitten wanting to bat at a dangling toy.

After a minute it struck me that he was looking at my parasol. I furled it, moving slowly so as not to startle him, and held it down so he could inspect it more closely.

"That's a parasol," his mother and I told him. "Parasol."

When it became clear that looking wasn't quite enough, I held it down still further, close enough for him to touch. He felt it gravely, rubbing the material between his fingers.

"Well, that's all right then," said his mother briskly. We nodded at each other, our transaction complete, and she led the little boy off.

I resumed my own progress a little more slowly. I was puzzled. Beijing is full of parasols at this time of the year. There's nothing special about mine. Not now, anyway. It's true that when I first had it I was very fond of it -- at that time it was a bright lemon-yellow, festive and sunny -- but over the years it has become grubby and faded. As I walked along toward the shops, I realized that I'd been discontented with it for a while now.

This set me thinking about the different kinds of parasols I would get if I could. Perhaps a navy-blue-and-white striped one, like a French sailor's shirt. Or a smart red, yellow and green one, like a cafe awning. Or, for very hot days, a pattern of cool green leaves, like the wallpaper in an old-fashioned drawing room.

The trouble is, the last time I looked in the catalogue that sells the sort of parasol I require -- it's made from cloth specially treated to block ultra-violet rays -- the only colors on offer appeared to be two shades of yellow (butter and lemon), a deep, dark blue, something between navy and indigo, and a rather nasty porridge-grey the manufacturers called "stone." They don't make anything else.

Actually, I do have one other parasol back home in the States -- lemon yellow trimmed with blue lace, left over from a friend's wedding. It is very pretty, but I wouldn't want to carry it on ordinary occasions, and anyway frilly lace isn't what I'm after now. I want something smart and sporty, or possibly something elegant and understated, but anyway something very fine and satisfying. It seems a great pity not to be able to have it.

I was feeling a little sorry for myself by the time I reached the shops. This was ironic, because my principal reason for visiting the shops this morning was to buy clothes hangers for some new summer skirts my mother had found at a sale and sent to me in a package that also contained anise cookies shaped like fish with currants for eyes. If I can't have the sort of parasol I would like, certainly my closet is overflowing with many other good things.

Then, while I was choosing hangers, something unexpected happened. An old lady standing near me in the aisle began chatting casually to me. "Look at this hanger. What were they thinking? All these hooks and doodads! Completely unnecessary! These plain ones are much better, don't you think?" As a matter of fact, I had been thinking exactly the same thing at exactly the same moment, but that wasn't really the strange part. The strange part was that she was the one who had started the conversation. Not many people here do this with foreigners, unless it's to ask where you're from or if you understand Chinese. But this old lady seemed not to care where I was from. We were just two women, shopping for hangers in a neighborhood supermarket.

On my way home, I began to feel a bit better. I'd been on the receiving end of some active friendliness from a total stranger. I had some new hangers for the skirts my mother had sent me. And a passing toddler had admired my parasol.

I found myself wondering if the little boy had been too young to notice the spots and blotches that seemed so evident to me, or if he'd seen something I couldn't, some bright blaze of possibility -- the parasol as it could be, perhaps, sunny and glowing, careless as a dandelion.

I suppose I suspected this last because it had been so easy to satisfy his wants. All he'd had to do was feel the thing, rub it between his fingers, and his needs were answered.

After thinking about it a little longer, I decided that it was too early to give up on my own wants. What is desire, after all, but an acknowledgement of prospect? Want need not always be accompanied by a sort of desolate hopelessness; we need not always turn our backs on the view that our hearts have awakened. Sometimes the things we wish for do come to us if we are patient. I almost feel I can see my new parasol now, as trim and fetching as a sailboat, bobbing on the horizon.

Smile

Last week we had a record heat wave. It was 80 degrees Farenheit and we were barely into the second week of April. The air managed to be both parched and sultry at the same time, as if a kettle of ashes had decided to see what it would look like dressed as fog. For a few days I was really afraid that spring was over for the year.

During this period I kept finding myself thinking of a favorite couplet by the medieval Chinese poet Xie Lingyun. He was a great hiking enthusiast and is said to have invented a kind of clog specially designed for climbing mountains, but poor health often confined him indoors. After one such illness he complained:

未厌青春好，已睹朱明移。

I had not yet had enough of the green spring's joys;
Now I must see the summer passing too.

Sometimes it seems to me that these lines say all there is to be said.

But then on Wednesday the weather turned round. Light winds blew the soggy dust from the air. Sunlight slanted on the deep green pines. The new leaves on the poplars looked impossibly fresh and cool against the bright blue sky. Chastened by the memory of the recent heat, I tossed all my work to one side and set out on a late-afternoon ramble through a nearby park.

This park -- it's actually more of a garden -- is really something else. It includes a kindergarten and two playgrounds. It has a small ornamental hill criss-crossed by flagged footpaths and terraced with small green plants, two stone bridges (though the stream they span is almost always dry) and dozens upon dozens of weeping willows. And, as I discovered this spring, it has an almost indecent profusion of flowering trees and shrubs.

There are peach trees, cherry trees, plum trees and flowering crab-apple trees. There are lilacs, both purple and white. There are dogwoods and magnolias. There is a wisteria trellis and a hawthorne hedge. And those are just the ones I recognize. There are also bushy plants with yellow flowers something like fluffy anemones, little purple bulbs something like a cross between an iris and a hyacinth, and many other things as well.

In order to furnish my ramble with a sense of order and purpose, I decided to start by visiting all the clumps of lilac in the park and then work my way through the peach trees down to the unidentified yellow bushy things.

The park was full of people. Late afternoon seems to be a popular time of day for airing toddlers, I suppose because they're just up from their naps. Their grandparents sat chatting on benches, turning their faces to the sun. The afternoon session at the kindergarten was drawing to a close; parents stood waiting by the gate.

At first I was too engrossed by the lilacs to pay much attention to the park's other visitors, except as a pleasant backround to all the flora, but then I noticed something. No one was returning my smiles. Every time I passed someone I smiled in the rather mild, sunny way you do when you want to suggest that it's a nice moment to be living in the world and you're glad the person you're smiling at is there to share it with you. And each time I smiled, all I got back was a blank stare. Deflecting the minor complicity I offered -- hello, there, comrade, God speed you -- the stare took nothing in, offered nothing back. It was very dispiriting.

The thing is, this particular expression used to be a standard experience for foreign visitors to the Middle Kingdom. I first heard about it from a teacher in high school who had traveled all over Asia. She told me that the only country she hadn't liked was China, and she hadn't liked it because of the way people looked at her. Sometimes the looks were merely blank -- taciturn, inward, unsmiling -- but other times they were actively hostile. I didn't quite believe her at first, but not long afterward I visited China myself and found that she had been telling the truth.

Though it was disappointing to feel so unwelcome, there were compensations. Plenty of people were eager to make friends. One had only to find them. "The China look" as I came to think of it, usually managed to remain part of the background, part of what made China what it was, like third-world toilets and pebbles in the rice.

But on this trip I have generally met with very different treatment. Until Wednesday, I had thought that the China look had vanished from Beijing, perhaps driven away by China's meteoric rise to wealth and power, or perhaps swept away by the pluralism that might be expected from an Olympic city. I'd been imagining telling all my friends about it when I went home for the summer: "You'd never believe how friendly people are. When you smile, they smile back. Sometimes they even talk to you. It's as if they think you're a real person. It's like a -- well, it's like what it is, a modern country."

So, my experience in the park was particularly unsettling. It set off a chain of resentful memories and began to eat away at my pleasure in the flowers. For a few moments, I found myself wondering if something had happened -- if President Obama had said something inflammatory about Tibet, or Taiwan, or silenced dissidents -- and imagining what I would do if the situation really got out of hand.

Then, after a few more minutes, I found myself thinking of something that had happened in one of the lessons I taught during my last sojourn in Beijing. I had asked the class to invent an English word and explain its meaning, and one of the students came up with the word "pandasmile," which she said described the face that China showed towards the world. I remember thinking at the time how ironic it seemed: "smile" was the last word I would have used to describe the way the Chinese faced the rest of us.

Later, though, I began to see the word my student coined in the very different context provided by Peter Hessler's remarkable book River Town. The book contains a number of descriptions of the "Chinese smile," all of them suggesting a tough and understated ethos -- brave, controlled, suppressed-- but the one I find most haunting is last, near the end of the book:

After our last meal the family lined up at the door and waved goodbye, standing stiffly and wearing that tight Chinese smile. I imagined that probably I looked the same way -- two years of friendship somehow tucked away in a corner of my mouth.

Every time I think of this moment, I feel as though I've seen that smile myself hundreds of times -- I can almost see it in my mind's eye -- but then it slips away and I realize that I am only imagining it.

I thought of these things, of pandasmile and River Town, of confusion, hope and disappointment, as I made my rounds among the lilacs. Then suddenly the scene changed. My path was blocked by a mother who stood waiting near the kindergarten. She was chatting to another mother, and, as I edged past her, she gave me a bright, absent smile -- the sort you might give to a stranger when your attention is taken up elsewhere but you are glad to spare some cordiality. My heart fluttered. This is what I mean, I thought. People are so friendly now. They treat you like a real person. Not an intruder, not an alien, not a foreign guest, just someone who passes you on the road.

It was as if a spell had broken. By the time I turned for home, several other people had smiled at me. There was an old lady trundling a toddler on a sort of combined pram and tricycle, and a young girl in a school uniform, and one or two others as well. As I passed a clump of the unknown bushy plants with the bright yellow flowers, Mr. Hessler's tight smile flashed again across my mind's eye, but, before I could quite get hold, it was gone.

Salad Seasons

Spring is here. Forsythia spatters the parks and gardens with speckles of bright yellow. Cherries have begun to bloom, both the pale pink and the deep. Light zephyrs whisk through the greening willows. Magpies hop about, looking hopeful.

And, more importantly, the local supermarket has begun selling pasta salad again.

It was during my last trip to Beijing that I first realized pasta salad has actual, you know, seasons. That was a dozen years ago, when I first made the acquaintance of the Beijing summer specialty known as liangpi 凉皮, "chilled skin." The name may not sound terribly appetizing out of context, but in the gasping, humid heat of a Beijing August, anything with the word "chill" in it is pretty welcome.

Or so it seemed to me, as I stopped by the street vendor's cart and peered at his display: neat cubes of diced wheat gluten, fresh green-and-white heaps of shredded cucumber, slivers of tough beancurd peel, bouquets of fresh coriander, six or seven different sauces and, of course, the "skin" itself, which is actually wide-cut fresh pasta made of mung bean starch.

"Try it," said one of his customers, a middle-aged woman who was digging into her portion right there by the cart. "This is real Beijing fare, a traditional summer snack. You'll love it." I didn't need to be asked twice. I stepped right up and requested a helping, plenty spicy and with all the trimmings.

The middle-aged woman was right. I did love it. Chewy, tender and slippery-cool all at the same time, fragrant with coriander, rich with sesame and breathing a curious, heady, almost perfumed heat -- I had never tasted anything like it. Soon I was visiting the cart almost every day, bringing my own metal rice box so as to avoid using the styrofoam cartons supplied by the vendor. (Who thought I was off my rocker. "It's to protect the environment," I told him, but he just shook his head. Crazy foreigners.)

But, before the mooncakes left from the Mid-Autumn festival had been quite eaten up, the streetside liangpi gave way to luzi 炉子, "stovelings," which turned out to be sweet potatoes roasted in their jackets and sold from makeshift ovens fashioned out of large barrels and lugged about the city by bicycle. There were also chestnuts, both fresh and roasted. A friend taught me how to make chestnut-chicken soup. With its pale slices of chicken floating in a deep, dark broth seasoned with ginger, clove and juniper, it seemed the essence of autumn.


Then the winds rose. Yellow leaves fluttered to the sidewalks. The skies grew high and blue. Frosts set in. Piles of pale winter cabbages lined the streets like stacks of firewood. Local eateries served a rough and warming concoction of dried mung bean noodles and pickled cabbage, with pork or without according to taste. The steamed buns at the local state-run bakery were equally hearty, filled with pork and seasoned turnip.

Then, long before I was tired of turnip buns, the winds changed. Willows fluttered pale green branches. Little round toddlers were gradually divested of their magnificently colored woolly coats and jackets, one layer at a time. The luzi man told me that this was his last week selling sweet potatoes. He was most apologetic, but actually I didn't mind. The buns and pancakes at the local bakery were now filled with a pungent chutney made of chopped fennel greens, extraordinarily addictive.

When I had eaten my fill of the fennel buns (which took a while), there were tiny, leaf-green cabbages about the size of a softball. Cooked with ginger and vinegar, they made a delightful accompaniment to the miniature guotie 锅贴 or "pot-stickers" sold just outside the university gate. Unlike the various sorts of "pot-stickers" or "Peking ravioli" sold in the West, these had wrappings made of a yeasted dough rather than a pasta. They were cooked in a large press something like a waffle iron (but without the cleats), producing a delicious, intensely flavored little gobbet that managed to be crispy on the bottom but, as Mr. Woodhouse might have said, "without the smallest grease."

The days grew warmer and another kind of guotie appeared, this time wrapped in pasta and filled with a mixture of minced pork and summer squash. You could almost feel the sunshine on the broad-leaved vines. It was like eating a garden.

I was home by the time liangpi season was in full swing again. I returned for a couple of months in the autumn, but, before I had a chance to make any chestnut-chicken soup, and I found myself back home again. I didn't return for a long, long time.

Nowadays the snack stalls have nearly vanished from the streets of Beijing. If you want liangpi salad you have to visit the deli counter in a supermarket. Most people blame the grand municipal tidying effort that preceded the Olympics, during which nearly all street food was banned or at least greatly restricted, but I think we were headed in that direction anyway. Outdoor markets are disappearing. We shop indoors now. Heaps of exotic produce decorate the supermarkets all year round. They hail from every region and represent every season.

There are gleaming mounds of multi-colored peppers, purple eggplants and deep green cucumbers. There are leafy branches of kale and rape, celery cabbage and spinach, watercress, lettuce hearts, rocket, mustard, fennel, chives, cilantro and many other things I don't recognize. There are impossibly slender scallions and thick leeks, lotus roots and fresh bamboo and mushrooms of every variety. There are apples, pears, peaches, lemons, melons, berries and pineapples. Some of them are packaged in plastic, some of them are sold loose. They are nearly all spotless.

The maids soak all our produce for an hour or two before cooking it, in an effort to leach out the pesticides. My hosts import as much of their fruit as they can, for the sake of their children. But the imported fruit isn't organic either, and of course the fuels burned in its transportation merely add to the burden assumed by earth and air, seed and water.

It is natural to be tempted by the prospect of having what we want when we want it. It is hard to ask the question:

Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry, thirsty roots?

And it is harder still to answer it.

Elephants on the Metro

If you stand on platform 13 at Zhichunlu Station just opposite the stairs, you'll see a number of posters lining the divider between the inbound and outbound rails. One of them shows a pair of elephants walking away from the viewer across a wide, green-brown plain. The sky is streaked with pink. One of the elephants is full-grown. The other is a calf.

When I first saw the poster, I thought it was intended to provide metro passengers with something pleasant to look at while they waited for their trains. "Well done, Beijing!" I thought. "What's nicer than elephants?" Then I saw the copy:

Mom! I've got teeth now!
Mom, I've got teeth now!
Hey Mom, I've got TEETH now!
Mom?
Mom, aren't you happy for me?

And, to the far right of the poster: "It should be a happy event, when a baby grows its first teeth. But, because people are greedy for ivory, countless elephants are needlessly slaughtered."

I've loved elephants all my life, and I'm on about a hundred lefty email lists, so I'm familiar with the story. Nevertheless, as I looked at the poster and read the copy, I felt my eyes begin to water and my throat begin to swell. The feeling lingered long after I had boarded my train and left the station.

No doubt this was partly because that's precisely the effect the ad was intended to elicit. The spectacular beauty of the picture, too sweeping and glorious for sentimentality, the rhythmic economy of the imagined dialogue -- this ad's authors really knew what they were doing.

And I think that's another reason I felt such a substantial response. I'm the daughter of a former speechwriter and communications consultant. A powerful respect for the friendly art of persuasion is bred in my bones. When I was eleven or twelve years old, I memorized Mario Cuomo's keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention. This had nothing to do with political commitment -- I didn't have any at that age, apart from a transient and imperfectly formulated regard for the Communists. I memorized the speech because very little makes me happier than really good rhetoric.

But I'm pretty sure it wasn't just the combination of quality advertising and a sympathetic message that left such a marked impression on me. I think it was something else, something altogether larger and at the same time more personal.

On my first trip to China in the summer of 1990, I lived in a student dormitory at the Harbin Institute of Technology. For no particular reason that I can think of, except that conservation was much on my mind in those days, I decorated my door with handmade notices advising their readers to "Protect the Planet: Plant a Tree," "Save the Rainforests," and, in pride of place, "Protect Our Elephants: Don't Buy Ivory."

I suppose I wanted to practise writing slogans in Chinese. That was probably the main part of the attraction. But I think I also wanted to put down roots, short though my visit was to be. I think it seemed to me that if I transplanted, through communication, the thoughts and wishes that I had at home, then I would somehow be at home in Harbin as well.

I don't know that I ever felt at home in Harbin -- I was only there about a month. However, I did communicate; I did elicit a response of sorts. A student in the English department, a very nice young man who came to visit the dorm quite frequently, eventually scrawled the following riposte: "Protect Young Girls: Don't Let Them Go Crazy." Shop-worn at home, my slogans were apparently too eccentric to be taken seriously in a Chinese context, even on a college campus.

Later on the same trip, my classmates and I were taken shopping in Beijing. We visited all sorts of places selling all kinds of Chinese artifacts. Eventually a shop assistant led me over to a counter selling exquisite ivory carvings -- figurines and palaces and rural idylls, all in the most meticulous detail imaginable. Small wonder that some have said, "Wisdom hath alighted on the hands of the Chinese." But when I saw the carvings, and the shop assistant's pleasant smile, I pitched into her. "How can you sell this stuff! Don't you know that elephants have died for these things? Do you really think they are worth the life of a beautiful animal! How can you think I would buy this trash!" She was quite surprised, but she nodded politely. I wonder if she still remembers now.

If she does, I wonder what she thinks about it. Was I just rude? After all, she wasn't the one who killed the elephants and hacked out their tusks. She was just working in a shop that sold the results, and it's not as if she had a lot of choices in her life. No one had invited her on a summer exchange program to study language and culture in a foreign country.

Or does she look back and think that she saw one of the first pebbles drop into the pond? Does she pass that poster, ever, and think to herself, "This is commonplace now, but I remember when it was as bizarre as the blue-eyed foreign ghost who came from across the ocean to wave her finger in my face and tell me what she knew?"

Of course, I wouldn't really claim to have thrown one of the first pebbles. I have played virtually no active role in environmental conservation. I sign petitions, that's about it. But I do have this funny feeling, being in China now and seeing the stupid, pen-and-ink ads I posted on a door in a dormitory in Harbin nearly twenty years ago done properly, done by experts, and posted in a bustling metro in the middle of a world capital. I feel rather as if I had been waiting for a friend to arrive, waiting a long time, and now at last I am hearing a knock at the door.

"The Heart That Must Not Be Lonely"

One of the maids is leaving tomorrow night. She's going to catch a night train to her hometown in Shaanxi so she can spend the New Year with her husband and young son. I don't know how long it has been since she last saw them. Months, anyway. Maybe a year.

To celebrate her visit home, we gathered around the kitchen counter -- my host, her two children, the other maids and I -- and opened a big crate of lucky tangerines. They were round and tiny, bright as carp. Most of them still had their stems and leaves. My host urged us to eat as many as we could. "I bought three boxes," she said. She also told the maid to take some on the train with her. "Even if you don't eat them, take them for the sweet smell."

Then my host asked the maid what her son's baby name was. Baby names are nicknames that Chinese families use -- nothing to do with a child's real name. I think the tradition stems from a belief that evil spirits who might wish to harm the child will be confused by the multiplicity of names and end up leaving the baby alone. "Kaikai," the maid said. I thought I heard her voice catch, but when I looked over she was smiling.

This kind of scenario isn't at all unusual in China. The other maids both have families at home too. They are part of the huge population of migrant workers who flood the cities in search of jobs. Conditions in the countryside must be very hard, for these long stretches away from their families to seem worth the cost.

The maids' uncomplaining acceptance of their situation makes me ashamed of my own intense homesickness. Or partly ashamed, because of course we can't help what we feel, and after all I suppose the maids feel it too. Even their stoicism, praiseworthy as it is, may be as much a matter of necessity as it is elegance of character.

It also makes me wonder about the nature of home, and homesickness, in these nomadic days. I suppose people's minds configure the idea of home in all sorts of different ways, really, so perhaps there is no single, critical difference between the way we thought of home in our more parochial past, and the way we think of it now that seas and deserts are no longer any real barrier.

A couple of days ago a middle school student who is applying for admission to my old boarding school asked me about my experience there. I found myself telling her that, while I was there, Andover always seemed the best, most important place in the world for me to be. I never had any real wish to be anywhere else. Sure, sometimes I wanted my cat and a fireplace and my mother's cooking, but I never felt that sense of dislocation and desolate rootlessness that marks a real, desperate longing for home.

Later that day, my thoughts kept alighting on my answer to this young student's question. This was partly because it seemed to me to encapsulate what had been most important about Andover to me. I was glad to have been able to articulate my views, and glad to share them with someone who might find a use for them. But I think it was also because it suggested a possible answer to my own questions about home and homesickness: when the place you are in feels like the proper center of the universe, you feel no pressing hunger for the far away. You may admire distant mountains, or firelit windows, or ancient cities, but only as possible "adventures and contentments," not as a cure for the sense of being cramped in a narrow and unworthy place, or forsaken where "her nis non hoome, her nis but wildernesse."

Because that's the other thing. Even far-flung travels are essentially earth-bound. I suppose some people still feel that there's a certain romance to air travel, but, even if you are one of those lucky ones -- one of the ones who actually taste the pleasure of being aloft in the clouds -- quite soon you always have to land again. Then you are back on the ground. Unless you feel that the place you have landed is now the center of the universe, how are you to escape the sense that you have merely exchanged one wilderness for another?

But then this conflict between the desire for far travels and the yearning for home, for a focus of understanding and in-placeness, is nothing new. If old poems are any gauge, warring centripetal and centrifugal forces have always ruled our interior compasses. Even assuming all Odysseus really ever wanted was to get back to Ithaca as quickly as possible with no adventures on the way, he was not, after all, the primary character in his story. It is the rocks and spray, the circuit of islands in the wine-dark sea, that chart the blueprint of his days.

One of my favorite poems, sometimes called "China's epic," though it is only 92 verses long and is in every sense a true lyric -- modal, reflective, interior, musical -- touches on a number of these ideas. In this poem, the idea of home is characterized in two ways: it is at once the ideal seat of trust, of understanding and being understood, and the scene of a terrible sense of deceit and betrayal. Between them they produce an intense bitterness. Still more importantly, the poem speaks to the imagined power of unfettered journeying, featuring a magical itinerary through the sky. And most importantly of all, that journey is halted, in the end, by an overpowering longing for home:

陟升皇之赫戏兮，忽临睨夫旧乡。 仆夫悲余马怀兮，蜷局顾而不行。

But, in the aurorean glory ascending,
I glimpsed, on a sudden, my home far below.
My coachman was saddened, my horses were longing
And back their necks buckled; they would not go on.

I wonder if perhaps the key -- the key for our times, anyway -- is not to have a center of the universe, but to rather regard everywhere as a part of everywhere else. Of course, this is hardly a new thought, but it is comforting. And, the more we understand the material nature of our cosmos, the more true it seems.

At any rate, Caleb Milne seemed to think so. In his last letter to his mother before he was killed administering first aid to a wounded soldier during the Tunisian campaign in World War II, he described his surroundings abroad as "a vivid, wonderful world so full of winter and spring, warm rain and cold snow, adventures and contentments, good things and bad." But the strangeness of it all -- such a remarkable time, such an outlandish place -- apparently had no power over his capacity to think himself elsewhere, at other times, beyond longing:

How often you will have me with you when the wood smoke drifts across the wind, or the first tulips arrive, or the sky darkens in a summer storm. Think of me today, and in the days to come, as I am thinking of you this minute -- not gone or alone or dead, but part of the earth beneath you, part of the air around you, part of the heart that must not be lonely.

Encounter

A couple of days ago I found myself in the vicinity of Maizidian Road, home to a truly outstanding dumpling restaurant. It was midday. My only trouble was, I couldn't quite remember which way to turn on the Third Ring Road after emerging from the metro. So, I asked a passing woman for advice, and it turned out that she was headed for Maizidian as well.

At first we walked along in a kind of companionable silence. Then I asked her what she was doing in Maizidian. I thought she was probably going to meet a friend for lunch, or perhaps she was heading back to work after a morning out, or something like that, but she told me that she was going to visit her father in the hospital.

I didn't like to ask what the matter was, so I asked his age instead. The answer surprised me. I'd have thought my companion was some years older than me (and perhaps she was) but her father turned out to be nine years younger than mine.

She explained that they were from Inner Mongolia. I still didn't like to inquire too closely about her father, so instead I asked if she thought they would be able to get home for the new year. She said no, that seemed unlikely. "They still have to take the tumor out. It looks like it will be a while before he can stand up to surgery, and then after that -- you know."

Thinking perhaps I might take her mind off things for a minute, I told her, "You know, when most Americans hear the name 'Inner Mongolia,' it conjures up quite a romantic image."

She laughed. "Galloping horses."

"Yes, and grasslands, with the grass waving in the wind."

We parted at an intersection. I wanted to ask her to pass my greetings on to her father, but somehow I didn't get a chance. I suppose she must have gone straight into the hospital, probably up some stairs, past a nurses' station, into a ward. Or maybe she stopped and bought some flowers or a card.

Earlier that morning I had met a young man who volunteers at his local hospice, bringing medicine to terminally ill patients, sitting and chatting with them to raise their spirits. "I've learned that some people are unlucky," he said.

My dumplings were delicious: wood ear, forest mushroom and bamboo shoots in one kind, garlic chive in another. Not too far away, a daughter was sitting by her father's bedside. They won't be able to get home for the new year. I don't think I really have anything to say about that. I just wanted to mention it.

Du Temps Perdu

The shop around the corner has finally gotten its act together and started selling date biscuits. They have a crumbly exterior, something like shortbread, and a paste filling made of Chinese jujubes and crushed walnuts. I fell in love with them the last time I was in Beijing, when I came here right after college.

Actually, back then they were not quite my favorite kind of Beijing sweet. My very favorites were little pastry shells filled with rose-flavored sugar. They were so evocative of their Central Asian origin that, biting into one, you could practically hear the bells jingling on the camels' harnesses as they humped along the Silk Road, tramping over grassland and desert, plodding across wind-riven ridges and picking their way through stony valleys haunted by lizards and tumbleweed. They were most inspiriting. "How very wide the world is, and I am at large in it." That was how they made one feel.

But the more pedestrian date biscuits were almost as good in their way, and much more readily available. They were to my first sojourn in Beijing what Carr's Digestives were to my years at boarding school: they both marked and epitomized my days here with the placidity of a sundial.

I'd been trying to find them ever since I arrived back in Beijing a couple of months ago. Then a few days ago I finally saw them in the bakery section of the local grocery store, so I bought some and ate them dipped in tea. They were even better than I remembered.

But that was all. They didn't bring the past back to me. As I ate them, I didn't really think about my earlier year in Beijing at all. I just thought, "Boy, these are good."

Well, Nature may imitate Art now and again, but I guess she can hardly be expected to do so on command. Besides, it is surely a good thing to be able to enjoy date biscuits in such absolute terms, to be able to take them as such a thoroughly present pleasure that one feels no particular reliance on whatever history one might happen to share with them.

Still, the incident left me feeling puzzled and a little uneasy. I've always thought of myself as practically defined by a powerfully nostalgic bent. My "senior quote" in my high school yearbook , taken from Book II of Vergil's Aeneid, reflected this view:

forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Perhaps hereafter even this will be a pleasure to recall.


Of course, it's a common enough reference for graduating seniors, and, with its wry applicability to the travails of school life, its general appeal is easy to understand. But I meant it seriously. Even at seventeen, I had already had plenty of experience with an apparently unbounded capacity for affectionate regret, which was usually directed indiscriminately towards whatever lay behind me. More significantly, my understanding of both the past and the present often seemed to be principally delineated by that feeling, and by its attendant sense of irretrievable loss.

The years since then have introduced me to many variations on this sensation. Life in one place has repeatedly given way to life in another; with each transplantation I am little more laden with retrospection. Last week my students asked me what my favorite word in Greek was (we were doing Favorite Words as a conversation starter) and I found myself replying, without hesitation, "εντροπαλιζομενη," as Homer says of Andromache, who "turns and turns again" as she leaves her husband on the walls of Troy.

I don't quite know when my periodic visits to the Harvard campus began to leave me feeling rootless and dispossessed, but it happened fairly soon after graduation, certainly while I was young enough and connected enough feel that I still belonged there, had I been able to find my way to that point of view.


Yesterday I went to a conference at Beijing Normal University, where I taught English right after college. I wondered if the visit would produce the same forsaken feeling that I had come to expect from my trips to Harvard. In a way it did, but what I really felt was just rather numb and dreamlike.

This detached feeling was itself a little frightening. The vague sense of disorientation associated with the date biscuits and their failure to evoke my first year in Beijing quickly crystallized into a specific concern. I found myself wondering whether, without being aware, I had begun to protect myself so thoroughly against memory's incursions as to become a kind of fortress.

I thought these things as I found the conference hall and settled into my place. But then something rather unexpected happened. One of the other participants came over to me and asked me if I were on the foreign languages faculty at BNU. "Didn't you come here right after graduating from college?" he asked. "I remember you. I was in your class. You've hardly changed at all."

Once I had got over my initial flutter of pleased surprise, something else captured my attention. My former student told me that he was now a professor of history at a university in Shandong province and asked if I had been all this time at BNU. Well, he has only made a few trips back to campus since graduating; I suppose for all he knew I could have been a fixture here for the last dozen years.

I think one reason returning to an old school can be so fraught with emotion is that schools seem so unchanging. Some faculty do come and go, of course, but many of them stay for whole lifetimes -- or whole careers, anyway. We are the ones who change.

It gave me quite a start, thinking that I might have assumed the character of an institution -- temporarily, at any rate -- for this professor from Shandong. I found myself spending a long moment wondering how he felt about coming back to BNU.

I felt a little sad on the bus ride home, but not as sad as I might have felt, and not as numb as I had been feeling. I had spent a little time thinking of someone else, and of course that is almost always the answer.

"Anglers and Honest Men"

Gentle Anglers --

Flyingfish is pleased to report that she is back to skimming the surf after a few weeks running deep and quiet.

I'd like to be able to say that I was busy with something particularly exciting or worthwhile during these last few weeks, but, though I did meet with some excitement of a modest sort down on the ocean floor -- auditing a lecture on World Literature at Peking University, for example, and finally finding out what wildherb dumplings taste like after over a decade of unsatisfied curiosity -- the main reason for the protracted silence was nothing more than writer's block.

Here's the way I look at it, though. We are given to understand that writer's block from the desk of Ted Sorensen once saved the entire planet from total annihilation. I don't mean to suggest that my writer's block has anything like that much going for it, but at least while I've not been running my computer I've been saving electricity. And that, in the shadow of the local cooling towers, seems rather worthwhile after all.

It seemed particularly worthwhile a couple of days ago, when I paid a visit to the Purple Bamboo Garden. While I was there, I met a pair of young women who turned out to be quite knowledgeable tea-fanciers. They were seated on a balustrade in a hillside pavilion overlooking a lake. They were enjoying some tea, and when I came to explore the pavilion they very civilly offered me a cup. As we discussed its flavor and aroma, one of the young women remarked that the water was rather hard and slightly brackish. This led to a rehearsal of the various sorts of water used in making the best tea: water from rivers, from lakes, from wells and springs, and, best of all, water swept as snow from the branches of the winter-flowering plum. This last was my contribution to the discussion, recollected from a favorite passage in Cao Xueqin's famous novel The Dream of the Red Chamber:

黛玉因問: "這也是舊年的雨水?" 妙玉冷笑道:「你這麼個人，竟是大俗人，連水也嘗不出來。這是五年前我在玄墓蟠香寺住著收的梅花上的雪，共得了那一鬼臉青的花瓮一瓮，總捨不得吃，埋在地下，今年夏天才開了。我只吃過一回，這是第二回了。你怎麼嘗不出來﹖隔年蠲的雨水那有這樣輕浮，如何吃得。」

Dai-yu asked, "Is this last year's rain-water as well?" Miao-yu gave a withering smile. "Can you really be so vulgar? Fancy not even being able to taste the difference in the water! This comes from snow I swept from the branches of a winter-flowering plum tree when I was living at the Coiled Incense Temple on Darkbarrow Mountain five years ago. I stored it in that demon-green jar and, as I couldn't bring myself to use it, buried it in the earth and didn't open it till last summer. I have only drunk it once before; this is the second time. You really can't taste the difference? Whenever did last year's stored rainwater have this sort of lightness and effervescence!"


(Gentle Anglers will please note that I owe my translation of 鬼臉青 as "demon-green" to the late David Hawkes. I do not have his remarkable translation Cao Xueqin's novel before me, but, if memory serves, that was the way he rendered it. As I felt his choice could not be bettered, here it is before you.)


My companions in Purple Bamboo Garden agreed with me that tea made with swept snow is indeed the height of refinement -- or rather, the idea of it seems to be the height of refinement, for, as one of them pointed out, such pure tastes are beyond us now. Our water is polluted. It is dirty even as it patters down from the sky; it is dirty, even when it settles in white, crystalline flakes on the branches of the winter-flowering plum.

As I left the park and caught the number 534 bus home, I thought about how often I had encountered the idea of a life close to nature presented as a literary aesthetic, and how often this aesthetic had been linked with the ancient world. I suppose this is partly because, years ago, I wrote an undergraduate thesis about the description of trees in a selection of antique poetic traditions, and a central element in this thesis was a discussion of the various ways in which the relationship between nature and culture emerged in those traditions.

And, no doubt, it is partly because I am attracted by the aesthetic itself. Of course this is scarcely surprising, since more or less everyone from Vergil to Tao Yuanming to William Bulter Yeats has professed himself terribly keen to cast off the madding crowd and get down to planting some beans. I don't mean to say that I plan to go in for the material culture associated with this aesthetic. The realities of the rural life are probably not for me. I can't stoop and I can't be in the sun, so gardening is pretty much off the table in any case. But the poems are nice. I've always liked them, especially when hungry (that is when it is particularly pleasant to read about vegetable gardens), and I suppose I always will.

That my frame of reference is largely confined to the ancient world does not mean, of course, that I suppose this aesthetic to be missing from the modern world. Quite the contrary. Just last Saturday I was invited to hear a lecture on eco-poetry at Peking University's Institute of World Literature. I wasn't able to go, but, even without having heard the lecture, I know for sure that one particular difference between the aesthetics of then and now would have emerged. The literary value of a life lived close to nature used to lie in its simplicity, its deliberate rejection of ambition and strife. The personal refinement associated with choosing such a life was based partly on an ideal of finely-tuned sensibilities and a keen awareness of pure beauty. But now the natural world has become problematic -- not just in real terms, but as an aesthetic. A keen awareness of beauty has been supplanted -- or at least supplemented -- by a keen awareness of fragility. Whether or not a "nature" poem is about the earth that crumbles away beneath the poet's feet, the crumbling earth is its inescapable context.

As I thought these things, I was reminded -- not for the first time -- of E.B. White's remarks on a related subject in his essay Sootfall and Fallout:

These nuclear springtimes have a pervasive sadness about them . . . The rich brown patch of ground used to bring delight to the eye and mind at this fresh season of promise. For me, the season has been spoiled by the maggots that work in the mind. Tomorrow we will have rain, and the rain falling on the garden will carry its cargo of debris from old explosions in distant places. Whether the amount of this freight is great or small, and whether it is measurable by the farmer or can only be guessed at, one thing is certain: the character of rain has changed, the joy of watching it soak the waiting earth has been diminished, and the whole meaning and worth of gardens has been brought into question.

When I think of this passage, I always find myself picturing President Kennedy standing by the window in the Oval Office, watching the poisoned rain slanting down outside and soaking the White House lawn. I don't know where I saw this picture. Perhaps it was at the Kennedy Library. Or perhaps I just imagined it after reading a description or hearing an interview.

It is not possible to reach either Mr. White or President Kennedy now, or I would try to offer them some words of comfort. What I have to say is not much, but sometimes a little is enough.

On Saturday (when I failed to attend the lecture on eco-poetry) I taught a lesson on modes of transportation. It was rather heavy going after a bit, so, to keep the conversation rolling, I asked my students what they thought the vehicles of the future would look like. Well, that got plenty of action. Apparently there will be lots of electric cars and hybrids, cars that run on solar power, other (new word) "eco-friendly" cars, and -- the piece de resistence -- a solar-powered robotic flying unicorn. When I asked the student who made this last contribution "Why a unicorn?" she responded, "It's aerodynamic." (Not that she knew the word either in English or in Chinese -- hey, she's seven -- or even paid attention to the word when I taught it to her, but she's sure thinking about the concept. As well she ought: she plans to be an inventor.)

Both Mr. White and President Kennedy spoke of the blight our activities would one day bring down on "generations yet unborn." Earlier in Sootfall and Fallout, Mr. White remarked that the Cold War was being fought with the lives of future generations, rather than with those of living, existing young men. It is a ghastly thought. I don't deny the truth of it, but I offer this observation: perhaps those future generations are up for the fight.

"Basic Common Link"

What is more agreeable than the discovery, in a strange land, that the means of supplying all one's essential wants lie ready to hand -- if not in a familiar guise, then in a style that is only the more pleasing because of its unaccustomed character? In particular, what is more likely to give rise to the reflection, "What a good place the world is!" than a little foreign trafficking in nice things to eat?

I think Dorothy Dunnett understood this. In the historical imagination she unfolds for us, it is traders who make "the whole world to hang in the air." Though she does not exactly identify it as the best end of the best men, commerce does seem to provide fuel for that which is best and most constant in the best and most constant among us -- that is, the instinctive and persistent search for truth, as a compass searches out the pole. Of course, truth takes various forms, but, as Dunnett remarks, "God hath eighteen thousand worlds," each turning on its own "bright axle-tree."

And one of these, certainly -- perhaps more than one -- is made up of the fellowship found in common wants. It is essentially a fellowship born in a great metaphysical mess-hall, where we inspect one another's rations amid the steam and cabbage-smells, and where we gather together to be filled and made easy.

Thus Dunnett summons a malediction based precisely on the annihilation of this fellowship:

Je prie a Dieu, le roi de Paradis
que mendiant, votre pain alliez querre
seul, inconnu, et en etrange terre
non entendu par signes ni par dits.

I pray to God, the King of Paradise,
That you should be a beggar, seeking for your bread
Alone, unknown, in an unfamiliar land,
Not understood; not by speech, not by signs.

(My translation; apologies to those of my readers who actually, you know, speak French.)

Anyway, I found myself particularly susceptible to this sort of material comfort when I ran across it yesterday. It happened like this.

As my students have a break from lessons for the national holiday, I had planned to spend a good part of the day visiting the Summer Palace. The slanting autumn light on Kunming lake with its fringe of yellowing willows, the groves of massive cypress and the long, interlocking galleries painted in a happy mixed aesthetic -- chalky Indian pinks and yellows and the deep, clear crimsons and forest greens that would be at home as far east as Japan -- are all among my most cherished recollections from my last sojourn in Beijing, more than ten years ago.

But when I woke up yesterday I was conscious of a familiar sort of uneasiness and disorientation, and these vague symptoms soon gave way to nausea, stumbling and miserable chills (I put on two layers of wool and one of silk and I still felt them, though the weather here is warm for the beginning of October), so I was obliged to postpone my sightseeing and return to bed. When I woke up a few hours later I felt considerably better -- enough better, anyway, to think that a pancake would do me some good. So I went out in search of one.

I hoped the nearby supermarket to be open, but didn't really expect anything of the kind (it was a national holiday, after all). But it was open. I bought a fennel bun and a cabbage pancake, seaweed salad and steamed peasant rolls for dinner. Also some bottled peach juice, which was undoubtedly loaded with sugar but tasted delicious and was a very pretty pink. Also some scallions, slender as stalks of sourgrass, some cilantro, three limes, a sack of green bell peppers, a knob of ginger, some ready-made curry powder, some ground cumin and some ground red pepper.

Then I went home and ate the bun and pancake and a good bit of the seaweed. Also some of the peach juice.

While I was walking home, I was quite laden with things, and some of my layers of clothing began to feel thick and hot. Nonetheless, I felt quite buoyed up, as if my purchases had actually lightened me in some way. And, in fact, I think perhaps they had.

I think part of what made these purchases so heartening was that they did not consist entirely of ready-made foods, but also included ingredients that I would use in my own preparations. Still more to the point, I was planning to use them not to prepare a meal that would conform to the local style, but a dish of my own design, a vaguely Indian curry, which I like to have with hot buttered toast and strong tea, either as a sustaining breakfast or a comforting sort of high tea or supper.

For curious readers, here is how you make it:

Boil some lentils until they are just done. Drain them, reserving a little of the water. Then stir-fry some chopped onion, minced fresh ginger and, if you like, a little garlic, in either flavorless vegetable oil or clarified butter. Add a dry masala prepared to your own taste. I generally use a combination of cumin, coriander, cayenne sometimes turmeric and sometimes black mustard, or just a good prepared curry powder, such as the kind sold by Dean & DeLuca. Even when I use a prepared curry power I always add quite a bit of cayenne, as I like my curry very hot. Stir the masala into the onion mixture. Also add some salt -- pure sea salt or kosher salt is best. Then add some chopped vegetables, such as peppers (sweet, hot or both) and celery. Cooked cauliflower is good here, if you have some left over. Cook all these vegetables till they are nearly done, then add the lentils, water and the juice of a lime. If you have some cubes of paneer, they make a very good addition to this dish. Serve hot, topped with a heap of chopped cilantro.

This dish goes very well with crisp toast, English muffins or crumpets. Sometimes I have it with milky tea, sometimes I have the tea straight up. Sometimes I add sugar to the tea, sometimes not. It's always good.

In my Beijing version of this dish, I think I will have to substitute mung beans for the lentils at least some of the time. Mung beans are readily available, but I may have a bit of a job finding lentils.

Well, anyway, I didn't get to prepare my curry right away. After I returned home and ate my bun and pancake and seaweed I was so tired that I just went back to sleep for the rest of the day and well into the evening.

But perhaps tomorrow I will have a chance to make the curry. I am planning to join the Beijing Hikers club on a little ramble outside the city on Saturday, and it strikes me that this curry might be just the thing to bring along as a packed lunch. It is very sustaining, even without hot tea. (Of course, I might be able to bring the tea in a flask.)

While I was lumbering home with my satchel of nice things, a memory struck me. The event to which the memory referred had occurred only a week before, but somehow I hadn't quite paid attention when it happened. Last week, while I was out hailing a cab, a man with a wife and child in tow drove to the side of the road. The man got out of the car, walked up to me and asked me for directions.

Charades

I've now taught two English lessons. Both of the lessons have proven to be de facto exercises in vocabulary, though in each case I had plans for a more well-rounded class in which vocabulary would be thoroughly integrated into the other aspects of the lesson.

The involuntary focus on vocabulary seems to have happened not because my students' skills fall significantly short of the tasks I set them, but rather because I've chosen to deal with unfamiliar vocabulary through a modified form of the Total Physical Response system, and this approach has been so time-consuming that it threatens to swamp everything else on the agenda.

According to the method I have (for the moment) adopted, I write the vocabulary on the whiteboard along with its Chinese translation, then call on the students individually for one of three possible "responses:" a short English explanation of the vocabulary word, a picture illustrating the word, or a charade demonstrating the meaning of the word.

Thus, for a pronounciation drill focusing on the sounds "l," "r," short "i," long "i" and long "e" I created the following sentences:

Lizards really like to lie in the sun. Leapfrogs really like to sit on lily pads.

I was pretty sure (and I turned out to be right) that my students would not know the words, "lizard," "leapfrog" or "lily pad" so I put them up on the whiteboard before class:

lizard 蜥蜴

leapfrog 青蛙

lily pad 荷叶

asked the students for their responses, and the rest, as Genghis Khan might have noted on turning to survey his ravaged wake, is history.

Well, no, it wasn't that bad. By the end of the lesson the classroom floor was carpeted with (providentially green-covered) spelling workbooks -- lily pads, obviously -- and the spillage from the odd pencil jar overturned in a festival of hopping, but that was not really the problem. The problem was that that the fairy tales gloss over the true mechanism of metamorphosis -- embarrassed, probably, knowing that after all it isn't really as simple as a kiss between true hearts -- and once you have transformed your students into frogs it is very difficult to turn them back into children who sit at their desks and do the next exercise in their workbooks.

It makes a person think. At least, it made me think, something along the lines of, "Were the old-school table-chanters onto something?"

The primary purpose (I submit -- I'm not an expert in language pedagogy but I think this is pretty elementary) of TPR and similar approaches is to short-circuit the internal translation process that generally attends the early and middle stages of foreign language acquisition, so that the students develop a mental context for encoding and storing the meaning of the words they learn that is entirely independent of their native language. This seems to be so widely regarded as a desirable end in itself that I hesitate to question it, but, on the other hand, I am not sure it really is quite all it's cracked up to be either.

I reckon to speak on this question with the authority consequent to a peculiar range of experience (though with no other basis): when I have studied foreign languages, I have always been taught through conventional methods, but from the very beginning of each course of study have automatically skipped the internal translation process, apparently being naturally geared to learn language without it. This has sometimes earned me a reputation amongst teachers and classmates as a formidable linguist, but, as is so often the case with reputations, the reality has been another thing entirely.

I have found that two main problems arise from skipping the internal translation process. The first is that language learned in this fashion seems particularly vulnerable to the removal of the environment that gave rise to its aquisition. One only has to think of the way children forget their cradle tongues on entering a school in which another language is spoken to see the truth of this.

The second problem is that certain words do not lend themselves to the non-verbal storage matrix, making it harder to learn them in the first place, and easier to forget them once they are no longer in constant use. For me, this was particularly noticeable in the case of what I used to think of as the "little words" in Latin: iam, enim, mox and so on. I wouldn't quite say that I had trouble learning these words, or that I forgot them readily, but I certainly was conscious of an uneasiness in their presence; they were not my friends.

Of course, another reason for using TPR or similar methods is that this form of study may be more palatable to some students. When I was in high school a classmate once told me about her Russian instructor's classroom antics: apparently he would caper about the room, snatching all kinds of props from desks and tables, hardly ever going near the blackboard. I can still see my classmate's face as she told me about his pretending to burn his hand on a desk, then dashing a cup of white confetti over a student, so as to illustrate the words for "hot" and "cold." I think it was the surprise of the gentle flutter of confetti, when the students expected iced water, that impressed me most. It is one of my sharpest memories from that time -- and, strictly speaking, I wasn't even there.

But, of course, if such methods are more palatable to some students (and perhaps more interesting for some teachers), they may also simply get in the way. They may be a distraction or a waste of time even when the don't actually fail to provide adequate storage tags for the new information. Earlier today I noticed a debate on a discussion forum for Latin teachers regarding drilling methods for verb conjugation and noun declension. One contributor offered a series of songs (first declension endings sung to the tune of "Joy to the World" and that sort of thing), while another came down strongly in favor of a no-frills approach. I expect the debate will continue for quite some time, as it has become embedded in the larger, hotter issue of grammar- versus immersion-based teaching, with at least one advocate for immersion pointing out the importance of actually being able to use Latin, rather than merely to translate it, and implying that grammar-based teaching fails to achieve this end.

I don't quite know where I stand on any of these questions. Certainly I remember being irritated enough when, during my first year in grad school, a Japanese instructor insisted that singing verb synopses to the tune of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" would help us remember the critical endings. But then I was particularly irritable in those days, and after all musical mnemonics are as old as Homer, and older.

And, since I'm writing a dissertation on (among other things) the conjunction of orality and literacy in the transmission of performance, I can't help being reminded of the related idea that, since music itself may serve as a mnemonic carrier for orally transmitted performance text, it is reasonable to begin with the premise that the musical and textual aspects of song transmission are interdependent. This offers a striking analogy to the idea that oral transmission is characterized by the inseparability of the performance from the transmission, compared with the relative independence of written transmission from the performance that it transcribes.

In a suggestive case study concerning two performers of the Higo Biwa ballad tradition (“Relations between Music and Text in Higo Biwa: The Nagashi Pattern as a Text-Music System,” Asian Music 26.1: 153-154), Hugh de Ferranti argues that a performer’s initial acquisition of a piece incorporating both text and music from a written source seems to enable the recollection of the textual element of the piece as a separate entity from the musical element; but where the piece is initially acquired by means of oral transmission alone, the recollection of the text appears to be much more dependent upon the recollection of its accompanying music. In other words, even in its final stage (i.e., retrieval from memory), the oral transmission of the piece requires a certain degree of “performance” in order to take place at all.

Well, anyway, I haven't yet started my young pupils on Latin (I expect we'll get going with that sometime in the middle of October), but I welcome the prospect of a little rote chanting. In spite of the alternative methods discussed on the Latin teachers' alias, a reiterated singsong seems indispensible to me. It seems an essential part of Latin itself, because it links us not merely to the Romans (who fade, mirage-like, at our approach -- their cradle language will never be our own) but to the generations of Latinists before us, to Shakespeare's unwilling schoolboy with his "shining morning face" and to everyone else who has chanted and pattered, all participants of one sort or another in the ceaseless struggle for indelible memory.

That sort of chanting is poetry, as much as the verse of Horace or Vergil is poetry. Certainly as much of life, one way or another, is "caught in its meshes." Or at least it seems so to me. And no wonder. If one of the clearest memories I have of my years at Andover is based on a language lesson I never took, I remember even more sharply hearing Derek Walcott give a reading in the Underwood room:

The bronze dusk of imperial palms . . .

I taught Love's basic Latin

Amo, amas, amat.

It was a chill autumn evening early in my first year. Listening to that warm Caribbean voice in the lamplit room, I thought to myself, "This is going to be good."

Triple Moon

Last night I spent my first Moon Festival on Chinese soil in eleven years. I celebrated the occasion at a banquet given by the parents of my young pupils.

The banquet took place at a restaurant specializing in roast duck. It's a famous place, but I’d never heard of it. I’m not up on my Beijing haute cuisine, my low tastes usually being drawn more towards the bluff, crusty, salt-of-the-earth sort of food you get from street vendors. The sort that makes no apologies for its garlic content and reckons that two chilies are always better than one, particularly since the heat can generally be mitigated by plenty of mantou, the delicious steamed peasant bread my hosts are generally too polite to offer me whenever I am dining out.

Nevertheless, even I could tell that this duck house was quite special. The ducks came with certificates of breeding, and I don’t suppose you can really get much swankier than that. Unless perhaps you count its inversion, exemplified in the recent fad that requires hip restaurants in Union Square to authenticate their heirloom tomatoes by featuring their delivery (complete with muddy-booted farmer) through the dining room instead of at the kitchen door, as if the delivery were a kind of dinner theater – perhaps a morality play in which the farmer represents Sustainability.

Anyway, I couldn’t really tell if the ducks lived up to their pedigree. I was too distracted by the accompanying pancakes, which were out of this world, yellow and eggy rather than the usual floury white, and paper-thin but surprisingly firm to bite.

Perhaps it was fitting that the ducks should have been eclipsed by the pancakes, since they looked a little like representations of a hunter’s moon. And it was fitting on another analogical level that there should be such a correspondence, because I had primed my pupils with a hasty rehearsal of Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Moon Is The North Wind’s Cooky” so that they could read it aloud for their assorted friends and relations.

The reading fell a bit flat, actually, but I am hopeful that there will be another poem for another season. There’s always more Vachel Lindsay next Moon Festival, I suppose – these same young students should certainly be ready for “The Moon? It Is A Gryphon’s Egg” by next year, even if I am not here to teach it to them.

It’s funny, I always seem to be surprised by the kind of moon celebrated at the Mid-Autumn festival. Of course it’s a harvest moon, golden, low and glowing, but I always find myself expecting a frosty winter moon, remote, high and silver. I have a feeling that this misapprehension stems from the image of the magic toad who is said to live on the moon. He’s called the “silver toad” (银蟾) and I remember first encountering him in a poem celebrating the Moon Festival in Cao Xueqin’s novel “The Dream of the Red Chamber.”

宝婺情孤洁， The Ladystar stands in loneliness unstained,
银蟾气吐吞。 Silver Moontoad gapes and gulps the skyey airs.

(Not a very literal translation, but I hope reasonably faithful if regarded with a tolerant eye.)

I remember being much taken with the idea of a faery toad. Certain animals just seem to signal the uncanny, don’t they, as if they were ambassadors of some shadowy otherworld, and the "silver toad's" association with the moon seemed to exemplify that essential "confluence" of rightness (to borrow from Eudora Welty) that occurs when the various resonances evoked by things and images echo one another.

There were many other dishes as well, including bird’s nest, which I have always wanted to try, various fishes both stewed and raw, straw mushrooms cooked with broccoli, duck feet with mustard sauce, clam broth and batter-fried pumpkin.

Perhaps classic cuisine has a certain universal characteristic, for all these dishes, iconic as they were, reminded me of nothing so much as eating out in Normandy. (Except the pumpkin, which I suppose might have put me in mind of Tuscany, if I had ever been there.) Though the sauces were certainly different for each dish, there was a sameness about them, as if they were different songs all played by the same instrument. In any case, grateful as I was to be invited out to such a splendid feast, it’s not the sort of experience I’d want to repeat too often. I still like chilies best, and I still prefer the sort of "distressful bread" with which Hank Cinq supposed the enviable laborer must be cramm'd.

And if that's a class thing, well, there it is. I'm a Democrat.