Entering Mesoamerica (5): Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - A Traveler's Note

by Shenzhan/申展

Cover photo: A Street in Oaxaca, Mexico. May 2019 by Shenzhan/申展

Now, after all the experiences, research and writing, it is time for a literal traveler’s log: what, when, how and how much. 

Day 1, May 22: New York - Dallas, Texas - Oaxaca, Mexico

In the street of Oaxaca, Mexico. May 22, 2019 by Shenzha/申展

• Waking up at 4 am to catch a 6: 29 am flight from LGA airport in New York was not as bad as I thought. A less-than-one-hour layover at Dallas was great. And the airport at Oaxaca City, Mexico is lovely yet surprisingly tiny for an international airport! A MX$90 ride per person to Centro Oaxaca was NOT BAD at all! (AND a friend by the name of Ben, whom I just met in New York City two weeks ago came to the airport to meet us and helped with transportation. Isn’t life full of surprises?!)

• My Airb&b had a water problem, which might have been a dire situation, as the hottest season here just started. But we got an upgrade to a nicer Bed & Breakfast, Estancia De Valencia, owned by the same owner, which was amazing! And we soon found out the homemade breakfast here was out of the world! 

Resting in the courtyard of the Airb&b. May 22, 2019

• Walking in Centro, Oaxaca could be as brief as one hour, or the entire afternoon (which we did after dropping off our luggage around 3 pm local time - one hour difference between NY and Oaxaca), or endless hours getting lost in the streets and boutique shops and a variety of markets (which I made several attempts in the following days).

• Got some Taco (MX$18 each) and Guava juice (MX$35) from the street, some fruits (MX$44) in the market, dinner somewhere (MX$350 for 2) that I couldn’t remember, and ended the day at Gozobl with Mezcalines, a cocktail with pineapple, jalapeno and mezcal (MX$85).

Women selling Chapuline (crickets, grasshoppers and locusts, a delicacy in the local diet). May 22, 2019 by Shenzhan/申展

Chapuline with Guacamole on a plate. May 22, 2019 by Shenzhan/申展

• Somehow I felt pleasantly surprised that very few people speaking English.

• Mexican dollar to USD exchange rate is about 19:1.

• Read more about the first day : Entering Mesoamerica (1) : Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - Preface

Day 2, May 23: A Bike Tour with Carlos in Oaxaca

Carlos giving an explanation of a street mural. May 23, 2019 by Shenzhan/申展

• Booked the tour (9 am - 2: 30 pm, $30) from Airb&b prior to the arrival. 

• Started the day with breakfast made by Male, our amazing chief chef and everything else of the house. Name: Tamale (Banana leaf with corn beef)

• Got a latte (MX$45) while waiting for Carlos at Punto Paz Cafe.

• See details in WORDS: Entering Mesoamerica (2) : Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - from the Street to the Church

• Lunch at a local market (MX$35)

• Visited Santo Domingo (free) at 4 pm, as it’s closed between 1 pm and 4 pm for siesta. 

• Visited the Botanical Garden of Santo Domingo (MX$50)

• Dinner at an unmemorable place (MX$375 for 2) 

• Post dinner ??

Meeting a local wood-print artist in a studio on the bike tour. May 23, 2019

In the Botanical Garden. May 23, 2019 by M.J.

Day 3, May 24: Monte Alban and Markets

Home-made breakfast chillaquiles con huevos (eggs on chilly) by Male the chef. May 24, 2019 by Shenzhan/申展

• Started the day by jogging in Centro Oaxaca and ran into kids doing rehearsal for a dance competition at Zocalo Oaxaca (a central plaza at Oaxaca)

• Had Chillaquiles con huevos (chilly with eggs) for breakfast, of course, made by Male

• Joined a van from Rivera del Angel to Monte Alban (MX$75). See more details in WORDS: Entering Mesoamerica (3) : Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - A VERY Brief Glance of the Ancient Civilizations

• Talked to Ben, my new friend from NYC and went to the food market for Tlayudas for lunch (and ran into a new American friend Nick from the bike tour there!) upon his recommendation;

• Got a beautiful bag (MX$180) from the Artisan Market near the food market, and some more fruits (Gunaana, Ranbutan, Durazno, and more Guava), fruit juice (Aguas Susi)

• Wondered in Zocalo Oaxaca again and found it’s packed with a dance competition the kids were rehearsing for in the morning. And a seperate parade followed the competition for no apparent reason!

• Did I mention it’s the graduation season for high school students there? Temple Santo Domingo was the place for the graduates to take photos, of course!

• Ended the day after two bars: Bienvenidos, where we met a young man called Alfredo selling his photographs (which I bought a few), and Bulenc, recommended by Nick the American.

（Slide: from the market. May 24, 2019 by Shenzhan/申展）

Tlayudas Con Tres Carnes, a tradition Oaxaca food. May 24, 2019 by Shenzhan/申展

Day 4 (really just Day 4?) , May 25: A Day Trip to Hierve el Agua

Tacos Dorados. May 25, 2019 by Shenzhan/申展

• Breakfast: Tacos Dorados

• Booked a day trip to Hierve el Agua with the same tour company at Rivera del Angel, led by a nice tour guide Miguel, who spoke fluent Spanish and English. (And I was the only person on the tour whose Spanish is basically just “Hola”!)

• Stopped by a number of places all very different and interesting, in the following order:

  • Santa Maria del Tule, a giant tree that got on Guinness World Record (and where a public bathroom costs MX$5.00)

  • Teotitlan, a textile village where vibrant colors based on plants like Indigo (blue) and grana cochinilla (an insect living in cactus) are handmade for dying.

  • A mezcal vineyard and tasting. Distilled from agave, the alcohol was obviously on every tourist route;  

  • And finally Hierve el Agua, a natural spectacular with lime-stone waterfall and water holes to swim in, surrounded by unbelievably beautiful mountains.

Hierve el Agua， May 25, 2019, by Shenzhan/申展

A traditional way of making natural color from grana cochinilla (a bug in cactus). May 25, 2019 by Shenzhan/申展

A discussion on site at Mitla with Miguel. May 25, 2019 by Shenzhan/申展

• The day trip was long and I had to reschedule a planned dinner with Ben; got into a fight with M about finding a place for dinner and ended the day with a pineapple pizza from a street stand. 

• And finally booked a flight to Mexico City on May 27.

Day 5, May 26: A Day on My Own in Centro, Oaxaca

A street in Oaxaca. May 26, 2019 by Shenzhan/申展

• Breakfast: Molletes

• Tried and failed to find postcards

• Visited Museo Del Templo Mayor (MX$75), with pre-columbian and colonial exhibitions next to Templo Santo Domingo. Fascinating!

• Went to the food market for lunch again, this time ventured into the “alley of smoke” where grilled meat and veggies were freshly ordered and made from vendors. I eventually managed to order beef and chorizo, with a few plates of veggies (total MX$124). An unforgettable experience for the delicious food, beyond reasonable price, and navigation with ZERO Spanish.

• Walked up through a street of art galleries and got myself an art work, “Peonia I” by Violeta Juarez from Mexico City (now in my living room with a frame costing twice of the art! Ridiculous!)

• Had dinner with Ben and M in a restaurant with hot stone soup of seafood. Found out M would take a bus to Mexico City the next day.

• Ended the day with a big fight with M on the travel schedule and EVERYTHING in life. M “fled” to Mexico City on a 1am bus.

Peony I, Violeto Juarez, Mexico. Photo by Shenzhan/申展

Day 6, May 27: from Oaxaca to Mexico City

With Male the chef. May 27, 2019 by Shenzhan/申展

• Breakfast: Empanadas de Vegetales

• Had my last stroll in Oaxaca City and a BIG surprise to run into Miguel in Zocalo Oaxaca! 

• Chatted all the way on the flight with Paco, a gentleman who had a quarts business and works for the government. The flight encountered some bad turbulence but was nothing serious compared to the flight back to New York.

• Settled in an Airb&b in Condesa; Walked around the upscale neighborhood and went to a rooftop bar and a local hangout for international visitors with M. We both agreed that the neighborhood felt like Madrid, Spain.

Running into Miguel at Zocola Oaxaca, May 27, 2019 by Shenzhan/申展

Day 7, May 28: A City Tour in Mexico City

• Breakfast: a restaurant in Condesa (unmarkable)

• Went on the North Route of Turibus

• Got off the bus and jumped on a 3-hour call with Department of Education in New York State (unbelievable!)

• Jumped back on the bus and went on its South Route (A university hosting a Confucius Institute was on the way!), which took over 4 hours to complete! 

• Ended the day with entering a gentlemen’s bar for dinner by mistake! The service was nice, music was entertaining and the experience was oddly fantastic!

Day 8, May 29: La Casa Azul/Frida’s House

• Moved to Coyoacan, southwest of Mexico City and hometown of Frida Kahlo

• Checked in at La Concepcion, an Airb&b

• 0complex with individual apartments. Quite modern and nice!

• Visited La Casa Azul (MX$230) at 3: 30 pm and managed to get myself a ticket (MX$120) to the evening dramatization with the help of a museum staff Andrea! Amazing experience and can’t recommend highly enough! See more details at WORDS: Entering Mesoamerica (4) : Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - La Casa Azul/ Frida’s Blue House

• Ended the day in the apartment, spending some final hour trying to figure out the plan for tomorrow!

Day 9, May 30: Teotihucan

• From Coyoacan, I figured out the public transportation to Teotihuacan: from line 3 to line 5 to the Autobuses del Norte (the North Bus Terminal), where I got a ticket (MX$52) to Teotihuacan. The subway experience was quite smooth. There were carts just for women and children, which was nice during peak hours ( I hate filthy men touching you by accident, or just breathing!)

• Hired an English speaking tour guide, Manuel, which cost me MX$1,500 but it’s worth the money to hear Manuel talking about local legends and beliefs. See more details on Teotihuacan (MX$75) : WORDS: Entering Mesoamerica (3) : Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - A VERY Brief Glance of the Ancient Civilizations

• Got back to Mexico City early afternoon and paid my tribute to Roma. Ended up in a beer garden in an upscale international market called Mercado Roma. 

• Ended the day with a dinner by myself in an upscale restaurant Los Danzantes in Coyoacan with the following menu:

  • First: Hoja Santa, a soup-like appetizer with Mexican pepper leaf with melted goat cheese with spicy tomato and chilli source

  • Second: Sopa de Guias, a VERY nice soup based on a traditional Oaxaca recipe, zucchini and its flowers in a broth with tender corn kernels. Absolutely delicious with rich flavor from the corn yet not overpowering the crunchy zucchini. The flower is more for the look than the taste, I guess.

  • Entree: Huachinango Estilo Tikin-xic (don’t ask me how to say it!): Red Snapper accompanied by tacos with plantain and avocado in black mole, a chocolate based source. The fish was juicy and the Tacos added a right touch of natural sweetness; the avocado was a nice lubricant. I am not a big fan of Mole but it’s nice to have something so international and so traditionally Oaxaca!

  • My end word: I finished everything! The young and Spanish-speaking waiter overcharged my tip but it’s all good in the end. 

  • I took a cab back to the AirB&B, packed everything and got myself ready for an early flight tomorrow.

Day 10, May 31: Back to New York City

• The Uber driver was on time and pleasant.

• Never felt unsafe the entire time in Mexico.

• The most unsafe time was on the flight (through Viva Aerobus) back to New York City, which apparently had some landing issues and got everybody talk to each other to ease the nerve (and I got to know the good-looking gay man sitting next to me flew to NYC every month to be with his partner and this was his worst flight too!)

• I landed in NYC safely and was happy to see Xiaomi, whom, as a cat, was naturally mad at me for being absent for 10 days. 

  The End

THE LOG: July 20, 2019 Too Much Culture, Too Little Time!

by Shenzhan/申展

It might not be a very good idea to see two exhibitions on one visit to the MET, but it does save time. So, here I am, one day after, still quite overwhelmed. Even worse, now I feel I have to write something about the exhibitions before they fade in the memory of the hottest weekend in the summer of 2019. 

Two special exhibitions at the MET this summer are of my particular interest. 

CAMP: notes on fashion is almost entirely based on Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp'” ,which kicked off her career as a literary critic in the U.S. by getting in mainstream the word “Camp”, originated from the reign of the French King Louis XIV in 17th century (btw: his reign is over 72 years, the longest in European history! He certainly dwarfs Kang Xi, whose reign lasted 61 years, the longest in China’s imperial history). In her own words, the essence of Camp is “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Over time, there are variations of the definition, but the artificial, exaggerated, flamboyant fashion is surely on exhibit at the MET.

“Cauliflower” Headpiece, by Deirdre Hawken, 2013

The other exhibition, Play It Loud, presents 130 instruments from legendary musicians of Rock and Roll. While it appears to be completely different from CAMP, I find, in fact the essence is quite similar. The 60s not only got Camp in the mainstream, but also witnessed the golden time of Rock and Roll. Some of its biggest stars style, like Prince, is undoubtedly campish (if that is a word…). For those who love music, especially Rock and Roll, it would be thrilling to see up close their favorite singers instruments, each specially designed, storied, and often worn out by the musician personally. For me, it’s the Beatles drum set, and guitars played by Jimmy Page, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin.

Downbeat four-piece kit in black-oyster-pearl finish with crymbals, Ludwig Drum Co., Chicago; Avedis Zildjian Co., Norwell, Mass.; Boosey and Hawkes, Edgeware, Longdon 1963

Jimmy Page’s Rig

Of course, an exhibition of instrument can’t be without the music itself. And it’s definitely a good education on Rock and Roll. Below are the songs on the gallery list:

“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, the Beatles

“Shapes of Things”, the Yardbirds

“Layla”, Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon

“Fire on the Mountain”, the Grateful Dead

“Woodstock”, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

“Gimme Shelter”, The Rolling Stones

“All Along the Watchtower” Jimi Hendrix

“Pride (In the Name of Love)”, U2

“Rattlesnake”, St. Vincent

“Seven Nation Army”, The White Stripes

And the MET curator Jayson Kerr Dobney has a 71-song playlist on spotify!

I guess I’ve got plenty of music for Sunday. 

And did I mention I had my first Qin class at China Institute on the same day?

Astoria, New York

July 21, 2019

Proof of Living Moments: A Message to "My Dear Child"

by Shenzhan/申展

A summary of fragmented thoughts during the week, Proof of Living Moments (PLM) intends to have an account of what comes to my mind when I am reading on the subway, walking in the street or listening to a podcast. Thoughts often appear, then disappear into the ocean of unconsciousness, as if they have never existed.

As if that living moment has never existed.

I hope these notes are at least a proof of those living moments.

I was reading an article from New York Times on June 15, 2019, “Nazi Killed Her Father: Then She Fell in Love with One”, a story of a family history deeply complicated and disturbing. Immediately after reading the article, I wrote down the following message. Today, July 5, 2019, as I am reading the message again, it still strikes me of its relevance. 

My Dear Child,

When you grow up, you will discover that disregard your humanity, intelligence, kind will, personality, you will be judged, at some point, by race, class, ideology, religion, etc. Is it fair? Absolutely not! But shall we live with anger, frustration or despair? No. My dear child. I challenge you to live a life that’s full of joy, love and kindness in spite of the unfairness. Just remember, such a life is not given. Sometimes you have to fight for it from others. Most of the time, it’s a fight with and within yourself. 

Always humble. Always thinking of the fact that ON ONE is innocent. 

The thought of this, to me, is a living moment. And now I have a proof. 

Astoria, New York

7/5/2019

Entering Mesoamerica (4): Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - La Casa Azul / The Blue House of Frida

By Shenzhan/申展

Cover photo: Viva la Vida (Live Life), Frida Kahlo, Frida Kahlo Museum, 1954.

该文有中文版本 “走进中美洲（四）：Oaxaca与墨西哥之旅——La Casa Azul和Frida的“蓝房子”

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is perhaps the most famous Mexican artist that I know before this Mexico trip. I remember my first Christmas in New York, walking in the cold crisp air passing by a midtown gallery, my attention was caught by a large-sized oil painting of a brown-colored woman, short-haired with a rather serious look on her face, a light mustache above her upper lip, and two strikingly thick eyebrows touching each other. Not too long afterwards I got to know it was a portrait of Frida, THE Mexican artist who is internationally known for her tragic life accident, complicated romantic relationships with, among many others, Diego Rivera (1886 - 1957), and her passion for life and art, which was deeply rooted in the indigenous Mexican tradition. Two weeks before the trip, I tried to get into “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Ben Deceiving”, a special exhibition on Frida’s life and work at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. The tickets were sold out until the end of the show. (WELL, I am going to Mexico City anyway !)

La Casa Azul (the Blue House), Frida Kahlo Museum, Coyoacan, Mexico City, May 2019.

At 3 pm on May 29, 2019, I was waiting outside of Frida Kahlo Museum, in Coyoacan, a historical town in southern Mexico City. The museum is where Frida was born, and where she breathed her last. It’s a charming two-story house with a large beautiful garden, surrounded by a wall painted electric cobalt blue. Some of Frida’s art works are displayed here, as well as her kitchen, the art studio Diego built for her with volcanic rocks, her daybed and night bedroom, and Diego’s room (the couple had separate bedrooms later in life). There is always a line getting into the museum. Mexicans adore Frida and affectionately call the museum “La Casa Azul” (the Blue House).

La Casa Azul does not collect Frida’s most famous art works, which would have been in the hands of private collectors and museums. Though standing in front of “Viva la Vida” (Live Life), I was overwhelmed by the strong, genuine longing for life Frida demonstrated in the painting - a still life of watermelons, some cut open with the red juicy meat exposed with black seeds. It is the last painting Frida did. A few days later, just moments before she passed away, Frida added the words “Viva la Vida” in one cut-open watermelon at the very front. Despite all she had to suffer -- her life had been subject to pain, medication, corsets, fragile health, and a constant longing for the freedom her body couldn’t allow ever since the devastating accident that fractured multiple parts of her body when she was 18; her complicated relationship with Diego Rivera, who’s 20 years in her senior and already an internationally famous muralist when they married in 1929. While both had love affairs throughout their marriage, Frida was more expressive in art of her frustrations about Diego’s affairs, one of them involving her own sister -- in the last moments of her life at the age of 47, despite all the pain, frustrations, heartbroken moments, life was still worth living. Viva la Vida!

Viva la Vida (Live Life), 1954, Frida Kahlo Museum, Mexico City

In spite of her love for Diego, Frida’s affairs with men and women certainly add color to her international fame. Her many lovers include Nickolas Muray (1892-1965), who photographed some of the best pictures of Frida during their 10-year on-and-off affair starting in 1931, shortly after her marriage to Diego. One of the photographs from 1939 is on display at La Casa Azul. In the photo, Frida radiates a beauty with a soft smile that carries a fading tenderness, which I rarely see from her most famous self-portraits or other photographs.

Frida Kahlo, photographed by Nickolas Muray, New York, 1939

Her brief affair with Leon Trotsky (1879 - 1940) has a dedicated section in the gallery of La Casa Azul. Trotsky, in exile from the Soviet Union, stayed with Diego and Frida for two years here from 1937 to 1939. He later moved to a house nearby after a quarrel with Diego ( I wonder why!) and was assassinated there, now the Leon Trotsky Museum (Needless to say, Coyoacan is a storied town because of Frida and Trotsky!). Their tumultuous relationship is demonstrated in a 1937 self-portrait  Frida dedicated to her lover at the time.

My favorite discovery though was her yet another passionate affair with Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), a critically acclaimed Japanese-American sculptor. Every morning on weekends, I pass by the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York on a bike but have never thought there was a connection between these two artists. Their affair was brief, yet they remain friends until Frida’s death in 1954. Noguchi sent to Frida a collection of butterflies, still in a case hanging on the ceiling of her nightbed. On the blue wall around a corner in the garden printed the lyrics of a song left by Patti Smith in 2012, titled “Noguchi’s Butterflies”:

by Shenzhan, May 29, 2019

Noguchi’s butterflies above Frida’s nightbed, by Shenzhan/申展, May 29, 2019

A sculpture at Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, New York.

In the end, it’s her deepest love of native Mexican folk art that completes Frida Kahlo 's international fame. Through her art, she finally broke free from the corset that restrained her body, the relationships she had herself entangled, and made the native folk art from her beloved land stand out in the post-colonial Mexico and the world. In Paris, London, New York, she was celebrating her native culture, brilliantly, unapologetically, and rebelliously. Like her famed husband Diego, who’s known for making communist murals, Frida was deeply committed to the cause of communism (at the foot of her night-bed, there are portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao!). And yet, her self-portraits and other paintings, tell a much more personal story of her as an individual - perhaps, the struggle she endured between a fragile body and a mind longing for freedom, can be viewed as a symbolic one between a Mexico with thousands of years of pre-colonial tradition in heart and soul and a colonial history that still dominates every part of Mexican life today. That said, as the physical struggle is so essential as a human experience, it could be viewed as a symbol for almost any type of struggle. For better or worse, Frida made native Mexican folk art cool in the world -- if you happened to try to get a ticket to the Frida show at the Brooklyn Museum this May, you would know exactly what I mean.

After dawn that evening, I found myself walking with a group of 20 or so people in the garden following a middle-aged woman, who dressed up in traditional Tehuana fashion that Frida is known for, and a plump round-faced man in western suits playing violin. It was a dramatization of Frida’s life played in the garden every last Wednesday of the month. The show was entirely in Spanish, yet the actress deftly acted out scenes while taking the group through the garden, sometimes with a monologue when she stood on the steps of a pyramid Diego built for Frida; sometimes a dialogue she suddenly turned to the audience; and, sometimes a song as the violin played a melody in the background. I could only guess that the performance was quite engaging from the response of the audience, but nevertheless enjoyed the music, singing, and the fact that I was walking in Frida’s garden after sunset, when this unusual yet enchanting experience was unfolding. The green lush plants and the cobalt blue wall grew darker and softer in the twilight.

A dramatization of Frida, Frida Kahlo Museum, May 29, 2019

A garden in the twilight, Frida Kahlo Museum, May 29, 2019

Walking out of La Casa Azul, I can now claim myself a true fan of Frida Kahlo.

Astoria, New York

6/30/2019

Related essay：

Entering Mesoamerica (3): Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - A VERY Brief Glance of the Ancient Civilizations

Entering Mesoamerica (2): Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - from the Street to the Church

Entering Mesoamerica (1): Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - Preface

Read more of Shenzhan Liao’s blog Making Sense. 意

Entering Mesoamerica (3): Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - A VERY Brief Glance of the Ancient Civilizations

By Shenzhan/申展

Cover photo: Shenzhan standing on top of the Sun, Teotihucán, San Juan, Mexico, May 2019

该文有中文版本 “走进中美洲（三）：Oaxaca与墨西哥之旅——古文明一瞥”

I went to Monte Albán in the morning of May 24, 2019, a hot and dry Friday. It’s an archaeological site of an ancient city over 6,400 feet (1,900 meters) above the sea level, higher than Oaxaca City. After a 20-minute ride in a small yet comfortable van from Hotel Rivera del Angel, M and I entered the site from its north-east corner, with a 2007 Lonely Planet as our guide.

A city from 500 B.C. is below us. To the south is the Main Plaza, the largest and tallest among all stone structures on site. Small buildings are laid out in the vast flat space between the Main Plaza and a north plaza. Scattering in the space, there were a group of students led by their teacher explaining the drainage system running underneath the ground; random vendors with small artifacts to sell; and a couple of tiny lizards sunbathing on the side. The space is said to be an ancient court for the Mesoamerican Ballgame*(more in Shenzhan’s THOUGHT BUBBLE), a ritualistic game dated back to 1200 B.C.. Covered by only grass (there is one lush giant tree standing at a corner to offer some shade from the brutal sun in the high land), this court now is still lined up with platforms, stone structures probably built for aristocracies to watch the game, and for priests to perform sacrificial rituals. One structure nearby was identified as los Danzantes (the Dancers), as carvings of dancers were discovered inside.

Monte Albán from the Main Plaza to the south, Oaxaca, May 2019

“Shenzhan’s THOUGHT BUBBLE: I am fascinated by the ancient Mesoamerican Ballgame. According to archaeological discoveries, the Mesoamerican Ballgame was highly symbolic: the ball might represent the sun, and the court the sky. Evidently it was very sacred and popular among all Mesoamerican civilizations (Omelc, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, etc.) since similar courts were built in almost every ancient city discovered. The game is said to be played by two teams chasing a rather heavy ball made of hard rubber. Over centuries, there were variations in different regions and at different times. Some later courts would have a ring in the middle for goal. While the purpose of the ballgame and exactly how it was played are still a mystery, it’s almost certain that they were symbolic and religious. Some even argue that they were also for settling disputes among tribes in order to avoid wars (how civil!). One object called the “yoke”, often in the shape of frogs or toads and carved with motifs of local gods, is associated with the game. I tend to believe that the yoke was only used for rituals as I can hardly imagine any player could wear it while chasing the hard rubber ball. It does look powerful and full of magic, though.”

A Ballplayer, Mexico, Jalisco, 100 B.C. to 300 A.D., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Frog Yoke, Mexico, Classic Veracruz, 6th - 8th Century, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

All the structures on the site are along a north-south axis except for one, uncharacteristically named in Lonely Planet as “Edificio J” , in front of the Main Plaza. Its 45-degree angle is said to be built for astronomical observations in order for the priests to track the passage of the sun and calculate the seasons. Standing on top of the steps of the Main Plaza, I tried to imagine the priests standing on these structures to provide guidance for agricultural activities in ancient times. Mesoamerican civilizations in general followed a 360-day solar calendar (plus 5 unnamed days to make it 365 days in total)  for agricultural cycles and a 260-day calendar for ritual activities, which is remarkably similar to Chinese yin-yang calendars!

“Edificio J”, Monte Albán, Oaxaca, Mexico

Not surprisingly, unlike Oaxaca City, there is little trace of colonialism except for a new fresco of Alfonso Caso (1896-1970) at the entrance of the site. Caso is called the “Discoverer of Monte Albán”, and was responsible for the 1931 archaeological excavation of the site, which by then has been abandoned for centuries since 850 A.D. Caso appears in the fresco with a pair of glasses, western-style shirt and pants, and knee-high boots. But at least he’s Mexican!

Even with very brief time in Mexico, one could tell its history is essentially divided into two by the year of 1521: pre-colonial period and after. Like many old empires encountering Western European colonialism (including China's Qing Empire), it is the year when Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire and current day Mexico City fell under the attack of the Spanish general Hernán Cortés , who started conquering Central America with a couple of ships, 600 soldiers, a few cannons ( not always functioning but nevertheless very scary to the natives), dogs and horses (creatures natives haven’t seen before), etc. Today when one walks in the streets of Oaxaca and Mexico City, its colonial past is quite obvious: the language spoken is largely Spanish (I guess, since I couldn’t tell if an indigenous language -- there are over 68 or more of them -- is spoken anyway…), the buildings are mostly in European style*(more in Shenzhan’s THOUGHT BUBBLE), and the churches are by and large Catholic.

“Shenzhan’s THOUGHT BUBBLE: Mexico City was rebuilt by the Spaniards after the conquering. In its recent modern history, Mexico City underwent many construction projects erecting structures by architects from Italy and France, especially during the 31-year presidency of Porfirio Diaz (1876–1880, 1884–1911), who was determined to build a modern, sophisticated capital of Mexico that could rival Paris or London. Sitting on the top deck of the Turi City Bus touring around the historical district of Mexico City, I learned most of the buildings, monuments and statues were built during the Porfirio. A major street in Oaxaca City is named after the president too. Porfirio is controversial though: his presidency is for sure too long; Major cultural projects can easily be controversial anyway. Plus he ended up in Paris and is still buried there!”

However, for a land where ancient civilizations can be traced back to 3500 B.C. and earlier times, its colonial history is the only very recent. Like other regions in the world, civilizations here clustered in certain geographic areas, goods and people were traded and exchanged, cities like Monte Albán were built, reached their peaks as the center for certain civilization, and were abandoned when the civilization collapsed. Unlike China, Rome or Egypt, no single Mesoamerican civilization overcame the entire region of Central America. Obviously civilizations in this region shared lots of similarities such as their religions, calendars, architecture, etc. However the word “Mesoamerican civilization” is merely a concept for the convenience of western-eccentric archaeologists, anthropologists and historians.

Historians generally divide pre-Columbian Mesoamerican history into several major periods: Archaic era (before 2600 B.C.) when archaeological discoveries suggest agricultural settlements already existed; Pre-classic or Formative era (2000 B.C. to 250 C.E.) when Olmec (1200 B.C. to 400 B.C.) centered around Veracruz and Tabasco in the Gulf of Mexico came to known today for their colossal heads and jade masks. In the south, Zapotec people in the Valley of Oaxaca started to build Monte Albán and the process continued for centuries; Classic era (150 - 900 C.E.) during which Zapotec continued to flourish while Maya civilization started to dominate the east part of the Gulf of Mexico, eventually compassing a large area from modern-day Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Campeche, Tabasco, and Chiapas in Mexico and southward through Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. In today’s Valley of Mexico, the ancient city of Teotihuacán was built, though its founder was a long debate. At the end of this era, several civilizations declined or collapsed. Cities like Monte Albán and Teotihuacán declined and eventually were abandoned; Post-classic era (900 to 1521) saw a few civilizations continued such as Maya and Zapotec, and the rise of newcomers such as the Aztec. The Aztecs were late to the political scene in the Valley of Mexico but managed to start its empire in the 15th Century and was on its way to dominate Central Mexico until it was met (and stopped) by the Spaniards. The history after is changed by colonialism.

This super simplified history of the Central America region obviously fails to include many important details, peoples and civilizations, as well as the complex relationships among them. However, keeping this rough timeline in mind did provide me a helpful historical orientation on day trips to ancient sites like Monte Albán in Oaxaca and Teotihuacán near Mexico City. Not only it was helpful, it was also inspiring to realize that Mesoamerica has much older civilizations that have completed many cycles in the pre-colonial period. Yet, the stunning signature of their wisdom has survived thousands of years, numerous wars, and cultural genocide when civilizations clash.

Olmec Colossal Head, Museo de Anthropologia de Xalapa, Xalapa, Mexico.

Source: TripAdvisor

Jade Mask, Mexico, Olmec, 10th - 6th Century B.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In a much larger scale, Teotihuacán to Mexico City is like Monte Albán to Oaxaca City. Leaving at 6: 40 am on May 30, 2019 from Cayoacán, I took an Uber, a subway and a bus from Mexico Norte Bus Terminal. By 9:00 am, I was standing (somewhat proudly, for my skill navigating the public transportation system in the humongous Mexico City)  in front of the entrance to Teotihuacán. To get the best of the trip, I managed to hire Manuel, an English tour guide. Whenever Manuel wanted to call my attention, he would start with “hei, lady!” (versus “Ladies and Gentlemen”, as he would usually do to address a group). Teotihuacán, named by the Aztecs as “the birthplace of the gods”, was built around 100 B.C. and at its peak the largest city in America with a population likely surpassing 250,000.  Its three main pyramids, the Moon, the Sun and Quetzal (bird) Coatle (serpent), “the Feathered Serpent”, are positioned according to the three stars of the Orion, the same constellation which guided the ancient Egyptians to build their great pyramids, over 2,500 years earlier. The luxury of having Manuel was to learn many amazing tales of ancient science, symbolism and astrology. However, being the only one bearing the cost, I literally gave him my last MX dollar in cash when we departed, amusingly, at the central sacrificial platform in front of the Moon! After Manuel left, I climbed up the Moon, which offers the unparalleled view of the magnificent axial avenue; and the Sun, which was most tough as it is the tallest of all the structures at Teotihuacán. Looking up from the foot of the Sun, the steps literally looked like the stairs to heaven! With the temperature rising as the day went, and absolutely no shades, the journey certainly reminds me that the Aztecs called the pyramid “the Sun” for a good reason!

the Moon, Teotihuacán, San Juan, Mexico

the Moon and the Avenue of the Death, from the Sun, Teotihuacán, San Juan, Mexico

the Sun, Teotichuan, San Juan, Mexico

I love ancient sites. It’s exciting to know that ancient people might have been standing exactly the same spot as I was, as if energies mysteriously overlap with each other, several thousand years apart. It is also a tremendously humbling experience to realize that ancient civilizations, despite the fact that they have disappeared long time ago, did leave these amazing structures standing in front of my eyes, telling me, an individual who doesn’t speak their language and hasn’t encountered a single soul of their time, their ways of thinking and understanding of the universe. I am not sure that any nation, state or cultural groups today, no matter how powerful they appear on media, will be certain to achieve the same.

Seriously, what can we leave behind for people after thousands of years to visit, and to admire?

Astoria, New York

6/17/2019

Related essay：

Entering Mesoamerica (2): Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - from the Street to the Church

Entering Mesoamerica (1): Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - Preface

Read more of Shenzhan Liao’s blog Making Sense. 意

Entering Mesoamerica (2): Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - from the Street to the Church

by Shenzhan/申展

Cover photo: Carlos from Oaxaca, May 2019

该文有中文版本“走进中美洲（二）：Oaxaca与墨西哥之旅——从街头到教堂”

At 9 am on May 23, 2019, Carlos, a slender and handsome young man managing a touring business called COYOTE Aventuras in Oaxaca, started a day of 4-hour bike tour of street art in Oaxaca around the corner of a quiet street behind Templo de Santo Domingo. A small group of visitors, including M and me from New York, the rest from San Diego, have gathered around him, listening attentively.

Pointing at a black and white image of a Mexican woman hugging tightly a heart with vines forming number “43”, referring to 43 university students murdered in 2014, allegedly, by the city of Iguala government from Guerrero, a neighboring state of Oaxaca, Carlos jumped right into the most recent bleak political issue in Mexico, the corrupted government and its anti-drug war that for many are violent and murderous to its own people. Carlos surely brought up a surprisingly serious topic for me to digest after a delicious breakfast of Tamale -- corn and beef steamed in wrapped banana leaf, a traditional Oaxaca home-cooked food by my Airbnb hostess Male-- nevertheless, muralism in Mexico became a movement after the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) to reunite people by conveying strong political and social messages. One of the most famous mural artists is Diego Rivera (1886 - 1957), whose pro-communism anti-capitalism murals are still on display at the Detroit Institute of Art, and of course, his national gallery in Mexico City, among many other places.  With such an origin, Carlos’ politically loaded beginning of the day was perhaps unavoidable.

Street Art, Oaxaca, May 2019

Some murals only speak to people who know the background, like the ones Carlos started with. Some are strikingly colorful and artistically expressive with interesting details that could be appreciated by anyone with a glance. For example, a large mural covering the entire corner of a street in Jalatlaco, a neighborhood right next to Centro, Oaxaca, puts the “Day of the Dead” parade on display. A tradition traced back to pre-colonial time, this national holiday now starts on October 31 and ends on November 2, when people offer to the dead food, possessions and respect, while celebrating among the living with hot chocolate, music, tacos , mezcal, and fireworks! In indigenous Mexico culture, there might not be a clear line between the dead and the living. Many murals have a surprising level of comfort with the skulls and skeletons, which are of course symbols of death, but amusingly enjoy everything that life gives - peeing, drinking, dancing, fighting, playing music, etc.

“the Day of the Dead”, Jalatlaco, Oaxaca, May 2019

My favorite ones are mostly contextual: a giant monster coming out of the hallucination one might have after consuming one or more Mexican mushrooms, partially covered by the branches from above and partially disappearing because of the decaying of the wall itself; a mural telling the story of the neighborhood, where a thief was caught and hung (isn’t there a strange acute sense of humor?! Not for the dead thief, sadly. ) while deftly using the living tree behind the wall as part of the painting; or a sexy half-octopus half-female creature romantically kissing a masked human(??) in a quiet, almost deserted street where trees fell down and piled up in front of the mural -- a tender resistance and loneliness. Carlos warned everyone to wear comfortable clothing, sunscreen, and keep hydration, and he was not kidding!  

Street art, Oaxaca, May 2019

Street art, Oaxaca, May 2019

Street art, Oaxaca, May 2019

Most street murals do not last very long, only for weeks, or for the lucky ones, months, which makes them interesting and relevant, as you could feel the concern, humor, passion and stories as walking by. Many art studios scatter along Porfirio Diaz, a north-south street packed with restaurants, bars, and art galleries, presenting a forever changing scene of Oaxaca to both locals and visitors, all within walking distance from Templo De Santo Domingo.

Templo de Santo Domingo, Oaxaca, May 2019

In contrast, the highly decorated baroque-style Templo De Santo Domingo, now standing with its full glory and stature in the heart of Centro Oaxaca, represents an establishment exactly the opposite of the street mural art -- permanent, distant, and power from higher up. Built over 200 years starting in 1575,  its sanctuary covered with 60,000 23.5-karat gold leaves does not fail to instill a sense of awe even I possess very little knowledge of the Dominican Order, which founded the church about 50 years after the fall of the Aztec Empire.

Interior of the Sanctuary, Templo de Santo Domingo, Oaxaca, May 2019

In retrospect, the arrival of Columbus in 1492 to Central America was really the beginning of genocide of Mesoamerican peoples and cultures. The ruling Aztec Empire at the time was certainly far from ideal. In fact, it was so unpopular that many native tribes helped Hernán Cortés (1485 - 1547) and his Spanish army to defeat the Aztecs in 1521. The natives might feel relieved to see the tribunal system imposed by the Aztec Empire gone, but would soon find themselves living in a much worse situation: the Spaniards created a Colonial Casta System with people of pure Spanish blood on the top enjoying most legal rights; natives were essentially slaves of Spanish lords who own the land and its product; smallpox ravaged the native population as they didn’t have the immunity to the disease….. By 1600, the native population shrank from 20 million before Cortés to 2 million. African slaves had to be brought in to supplement the labor shortage. (in the end, the Game of Thrones are not at all original!) While gold and glory were taken by Spanish conquerors, natives gods were replaced with GOD -- A Christianized New Spain was what the Spanish Empire wanted.

When three hundred years of colonialism ended in 1820, Mexico was by and large a Catholic state. The Spaniards may have left Mexico, but their GOD stays. The saints of Dominican Order preaching the gospel are all sitting in Templo de Santo Domingo, showered with gold, literally.

Today Templo de Santo Domingo is essentially divided into 3 parts: the sanctuary is open to the public free of charge; the former monastery now is the Cultural Centre of Oaxaca, a museum where the pre-colonial gods of indigenous people are under the same roof as the Christ, in one statue wearing a crown characteristically native; the garden attached to the monastery now is the Botanical Garden of Oaxaca, with a very impressive collection of cactus, agave, corn, trees with a variety of beautiful flowers unique to the region. A charming young lady wearing a summer hat gave a 1.5-hour tour in Spanish, guiding the group through the paved paths in the garden, calmly gave an alarming instruction: you are allowed to pick up flowers falling on the ground, but many are poisonous (i.e. please act with your own judgement!). Today, I am glad to report that M was kind enough to translate this very important warning into English for me.

A Xipe Totec god from 900 A.D. and a statue of the Christ, the Cultural Centre of Oaxaca, May 2019

from the Botanical Garden of Oaxaca, May 2019

I was overloaded with everything for the first full day in Oaxaca, its past, present, and perhaps future (in hallucination?) and effectively forget what I did for that evening. I just hope that I don’t miss anything important.

Astoria, New York

6/9/2019

Related essay：

Entering Mesoamerica (3): Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - A VERY Brief Glance of the Ancient Civilizations

Entering Mesoamerica (1) : Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - Preface

Read more of Shenzhan Liao’s blog Making Sense. 意

Entering Mesoamerica (1) : Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - Preface

by Shenzhan / 申展

该文有中文版本“走进中美洲（一）：Oaxaca与墨西哥之旅——前言”

Cover photo: Oaxaca, May 2019

One might say the best to bring home from a trip are the memories. But I fear memories will fade before I know it.

Less than a week after I came back from Oaxaca and Mexico City, I stand at the bus stop on Broadway in Astoria, waiting for Q101 to take me home while flipping photos on my phone nonstop. There is a fear growing in me that those still pictures, and only the pictures will replace my memories. I fear because I believe there should be something more than that.

In Oaxaca the streets are lined up with colorful 16th-century Spanish style two-or-three storied buildings in red, blue, yellow, pink, etc.; the bright red flowers blossom on top of the trees outside of Santo Domingo Catholic Church as if someone is screaming on top of the lungs; the bleak black and white wood-prints on the wall of a street corner cry to condemn the corrupted government for brutally murdering its own students and teachers; the cloudless clear blue sky seems very far and very close at the same time, with dazzling bright sunlight everywhere; the agaves, of course, the agaves, thrive in this dry highland (being over 5,000 feet does have an effect on some people) with all their teeth and claws, yet hundreds of years ago  people figured out ways to tame these animal-like plants to get what they need for a good life here: fiber for weaving goods, vegetable for food, and Mezcal…

Agave in Mitla, Oaxaca, May 2019

It’s the end of the dry season here, I was told. June is the beginning of the rainy season in Mexico, which could last till November. Sitting in the well tree-shaded Zocalo Oaxaca where “beggars, vendors, locals and visitors” (in that order, from a 2007 Lonely Planet) all gather and supposedly you could watch the world passing by endlessly, my friend M and I only experienced a very brief sprinkle of rain that was largely unnoticed as we tried to decide whether we should try Chapuline (the Mexican name for crickets, grasshoppers and locusts, essentially a delicacy in the local diet) with guacamole ---- and we did.

Zocalo Oaxaca, May 2019

When the first night arrived, M and I were sitting at Gozobl, a rooftop bar near Templo de Santo Domingo sipping Mezcalines, a cocktail with pineapple, jalapeno and Mezcal. From the top of a 2-storied building, we could see the shadows of giant dark blue mountains as the backdrop, a reminder that the city is located in the Central Valley of southeast Mexico, the very heartland of indigenous Mexican people and culture, as well as a colonial past, and present.

From Gozobl, Oaxaca, May 2019

It was only 8 hours after we landed in the very small Oaxaca airport via a 3-staff (1 pilot and 2 very friendly flight attendants) airplane from Huston, Texas. With a Mezcalines in hand watching the scattered lights blinking halfway through the mountains surrounding us, it felt as if I have been here for a very long time, if not forever.

Astoria, New York

6/5/2019

Related article:

Entering Mesoamerica (2) : Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - from the Street to the Church

Entering Mesoamerica (3): Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - A VERY Brief Glance of the Ancient Civilizations

Entering Mesoamerica (4): Exploring Oaxaca and Mexico City - La Casa Azul/ Frida’s Blue House

Explore more of Shenzhan/申展’s blog: Making Sense. 意

Proof of Living Moments: The Cranberries and Waiting in Walthamstow

by Shenzhan/申展

Cover of Roses, The Cranberries

A summary of fragmented thoughts during the week, Proof of Living Moments (PLM) intends to have an account of what comes to my mind when I am reading on the subway, walking in the street or listening to a podcast. Thoughts often appear, then disappear into the ocean of unconsciousness, as if they have never existed.

As if that living moment has never existed.

I hope these notes are at least a proof of those living moments.

April 26, 2019. In the End, the 8th and last of album by The Cranberries is out.

I heard this through “All Songs Considered”, a podcast on today’s music, with an ear-mug BOSE attached to my head on the way to work in downtown Manhattan. Like many New Yorkers, I nowadays walk in the street wearing a big BOSE headset, which was quite good in the winter as it worked as a pair of ear mugs. Now it becomes questionable with the warm weather. On crowded subways, I take it off as it might appear to be a bit obnoxious since the BOSE seems to scream “DON’T TALK TO ME! I AM IN MY OWN WORLD!”. Sometimes I enjoy it so much and choose to stay annoying people around me, like this Friday.

An internationally successful Irish band since early 1990s, The Cranberries has always been a household name among Chinese, especially in Hong Kong. Chinese singer Faye Wong’s “Dream Lover” (梦中人), a cover of “Dreams” by the Cranberries in 1993, was made hugely popular in Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 film Chungking Express (重庆森林). Today as In the End is released, the lead singer, Dolores O’Riordan has already passed away in January 2018 after drowned herself in a bathtub due to intoxication by alcohol.  It’s almost a miracle that with recordings made by Dolores before her tragic death this album was made, as a tribute to the great singer from Ireland.

To me it’s working like a miracle too. It was raining hard that day after work. I was walking home from the train station, feeling good about my body, a bit sore but satisfied after twisting and stretching with Nick, one of my favorite yoga instructors at Yoga Agora in Astoria. The BOSE infused the Cranberries into my ears:

I got this thing in my head, when I awake in my bed

While I was thinking about when I wondered if you thought about me

…...

I am not in my bed and I often don’t keep thinking about this kind of questions. With my hands full with two bags and an umbrella, walking down Steinway Street to my apartment in the rain, Dolores’ angelical soft voice suddenly struck me.

“I was thinking about when I wondered if you thought about me”...

Right at this moment, I wonder who’s thinking about me, and I wonder whom I am thinking about. Memories flashed as I was having her music in my ear, watching a car on Steinway blinking its head lights. The street smelled  like rain in spring, wet, fresh, with a touch of lingering coolness from the winter. It’s New York in April. Spring is still not fully here yet. I found myself walking very fast, surprised by how good the song is, and tears, just a little, came to my eyes.

Back in my apt, I searched for the song, Waiting in Walthamstow, and below is the lyrics:

I got this thing in my head, when I awake in my bed

While I was thinking about when I wondered if you thought about me

I’ve got a pain in my heart whenever we are apart

I’ve got a pain in my head when I awake in my bed

And I was waiting there for you, you were waiting there for me

I was waiting there for you, you were waiting there for me

Ah-ahah ah-ahah ah-ahah

I took the underground, I went eastbound

I went to Walthamstow

While you were waiting to see me there, I really really want you to know

I’ll never forget your kindness (ah ah), I’ll never forget your grace (ah ah)

I’ll never forget your honor (ah ah), you make the world a beautiful place (ah ah)

I was waiting there for you, you were waiting there for me

I was waiting there for you, you were waiting there for me

Lalalala, lalalala-la, lalalala-la

(Ah-ah-ah) In Walthamstow, in Walthamsto-ow-ow, Walthamsto-ow-ow

I was waiting there for you, you were waiting there for me

I was waiting there for you, you were waiting there for me

Lalalala-la, lalalala-la

Lalalalaa lala, lalalalaa lalalalala

Lalalala, lalalala, lalalala

Released in a 2012 album Roses, Dolores wrote the song herself. Walthamstow is a district in north-east London and was mentioned in a few songs before the Cranberries. I didn’t find any particular connection between the Cranberries or Dolores and Walthamstow. And I don’t know why I got so sentimental at that particular moment.

But it’s a living moment. And now I have a proof.

Astoria, New York

4/27/2019

Proof of Living Moments: Loyal to yourself or your family?

By Shenzhan 申展

This is a summary of fragmented thoughts during the week. Often these thoughts come to me when I am reading on the subway, watching something happening in the street or listening to a podcast. Thoughts appear, then disappear into the ocean of unconsciousness, as if they have never existed.

As if I have never lived that moment.

I hope these notes are at least a proof of those living moments.

Loyal to yourself or your family?

In Your Loyalties Are Your Life, a New York Times Op-Ed on Jan. 24, David Brooks writes Josiah Royce is the kind of philosopher that we need more in today’s world. Royce is an American Philosopher in 1900 who thinks “the good life meant tightly binding yourself to others - giving yourself away with others for the sake of a noble cause.” His views are not so popular today as the world has been singing the songs for tolerance in a pluralistic society and giving each other space for being themselves. Brooks continues, for Royce, the good human life meant loyalty, “the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause.”

It resonates with me as I recently spoke with a dear friend of mine (Tuzi) the other day about my anxiety - the fact of me being in New York appears not to bring good to anyone else (perhaps even including myself) after living alone here for over 10 years. Meanwhile Tuzi shared her frustration of juggling between two families, hers and her husband’s, during the Spring Festival - she had to make herself available, reluctantly, to her husband’s family reunion, instead of going back to her own family to celebrate a time together.

It’s about loyalties. Being alone in New York, I am looking for the reason that I can be loyal to, a cause bigger than myself to stay here. For Tuzi, or many of my friends in China who are married, with often too many families and relatives to attend to, loyalty seems not a choice, but a responsibility by nature, sometimes can be a little overbearing.

For Chinese in general, the question of loyalty is relatively pre-defined: you have to choose to be loyal to your family, which is bond by principles according to the Confucian tradition. Of course, it’s not always the case as the tradition changes over time, and young generations find ways to push the boundaries, especially in today’s world full of choices, distractions, and temptations. For example, I am in New York, single, and will likely not give birth to my own child. Traditionally all these are considered to be taboos. But at least in my family and among my friends, it’s tolerated, which in part is the reason that I’m able to stay in New York. Nevertheless, one’s family is a cause bigger than oneself. Compared to aimlessly roaming in the world and feeling the burden of searching for the cause, Chinese seem to find a way, early on, to anchor oneself even before the philosophical quest of loyalty surfaces. It may be a relatively apparent cause (in the end, who can say there is anything wrong with being loyal to your own family?), but if it’s a predetermined cause, it limites one’s own quest when negotiates loyalty and at the same time could be the source of frustration: in the end, we are creatures always trying to keep the balance between loyalty and freedom.

January 27, 2019

Astoria, New York

Landscape Photography: An International Symposium and a memorial for Wang Wusheng

by Shenzhan 申展

Wang Wusheng （1945 - 2018)

Huangshan A104, 1984

Taken at Lion Peak, Mount Huang

Inkjet print

on view at China Institute Gallery in New York until February 17, 2018

I didn’t know that Mr. Wang Wusheng (汪芜生）had passed away in April until I attended the International Symposium: Photography and China at China Institute on Sep. 22, 2018. Wang’s landscape photography is a big part of the exhibition, Art of the Mountain: Through the Chinese Photographer’s Lens at the China Institute Gallery in New York from February 9, 2018 – February 17, 2019. In a sense, the symposium was truly a memorial for the late photographer.

With his great works in the gallery next door, no memorial could serve Mr. Wang better than a symposium with speakers including his close friends, scholars, photographers, and packed with a group of audience genuinely interested in China and photography. Having lived overseas in Japan and U.S. since 1980s before moving back to Shanghai in 2010, Wang is better known outside of China with his black and white “landscape photography”, poetically and artistically depicting Mount Huang (in Anhui, Wang’s home province in China),  in an aesthetic form resonant with traditional Chinese landscape ink painting. Such connection is easy to establish with the juxtaposition below:

Wang Wusheng (1945-2018)

Huangshan W34, 1984

Taken at Lion Peak, Xihai area, Mount Huang

Inkjet print

on view at China Institute Gallery in New York until February 17, 2018

Shi Yizhi (17th century)

Tiandu peak in the yellow mountains (黄山天都峰 )

Presented by Prof. Joseph Chang at the symposium

Dr. Jonathan Chaves (齐皎瀚）, a good friend of Wang and Professor of Chinese Literature at the George Washington University, pointed out, Wang’s work captures the nature and its spirit in a way rooted in the very ancient Chinese cosmological philosophy, Taiji, with yin and yang as a force-and-antiforce pair that forms the source of energy in the universe. Oddly it reminds me of Stephen Hawking’s theory on quantum physics that everything in the universe comes from the energy released from the particles and the anti-particles at the quantum level, which, in my view, fundamentally very Taoism.

In a dialogue on “Black and White Landscape Photography” between Wang and Xia Zhongyi (夏中义）, professor at China Academy of Art and Vice President of the Chinese Association of Literature and Art Theory, who flew to New York for the symposium, the feeling of awe regarding the universe is in the center. Wang talked about the moments when he was trembling in awe at his first visit to Mount Huang in 1974. He subsequently went back numerous times to capture the right moments and develop his own artistic language with his camera to articulate such emotion, and transcend others. It took him over 30 years to mature his “language” with a unique style and technique, with which he meticulously applied a pitch darkness to the body of the mountain in order to create a sharp contrast to and a powerful tension with the cloud.

Wang Wusheng (1945-2018)

Huangshan W25, 1991

Taken at Lion Peak, Mount Huang

Inkjet print

on view at China Institute Gallery in New York until February 17, 2018

To me, Wang’s photography perfectly represents how the essence of Chinese culture is expressed through a non-Chinese technology. The lens may be the product of the West, the eyes and heart behind the lens are undoubtedly Chinese. Wang was not the first Chinese photographer who successfully made such reputation internationally known. Dr. Mia Yinxing Liu, Assistant Professor in Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts, gave a rather thorough academic account on Lang Jingshan （郎静山, 1892 - 1995）, who is considered to be the first (and greatest!) professional photographer in China in 1920s and created “composite photography” (集锦摄影), a collage technique to precisely express Chinese aestheticism through photography.

Lang Jingshan (1892-1995)

A Panoramic Embrace of Landscape, 1993

unknown source online

It’s not difficult to see the similarities between Wang and Lang’s work. And it is certainly not a coincidence that while their photography is deeply rooted in Chinese tradition and culture, their work is celebrated internationally. Lang, “Father of Asian Photography", was named one of the top 10 master photographers by the Photographic Society of America in 1980. For Wang, while it is yet to know whether he would enjoy wider posthumous recognition in China, his favorite photography works are permanent collection in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, one of the top three museums in Europe. According to Prof. Xia, after passing away quite unexpectedly, Wang left behind some twenty thousand negatives in his refrigerator to be sorted out, selected and printed. Those are his “children” yet to be brought to light, literally.

A memorial without mourning would be incomplete. Indeed there was a silent mourning before the symposium started. A touching moment came when Prof. Chaves read a poem he composed for Wang, “Mourning for the Master Photographic Artist Wang Wusheng”, in Chinese Ballad form (古体诗), which I record below in traditional Chinese characters and its English translation to conclude this article:

吊攝影大師汪蕪生 diào shè yǐng dà shī wāng wú shēng

兼示子寧老友 jiàn shì zǐ níng lǎo yǒu

齊皎瀚 qí jiǎo hàn

漸江升天半千崩 jiàn jiāng shēng tiān bàn qiān bēng

蕪生世間作品稱 wú shēng shì jiān zuò pǐn chēng

今日訃告淚雙垂 jīn rì fù gào lèi shuāng chuí

無再攝影千裡鵬 wú zài shè yǐng qiān lǐ péng

知音此世萬有一 zhī yīn cǐ shì wàn yǒu yī

汪公唯實吾心朋 wāng gōng wéi shí wú xīn péng

高士宇宙作行者 gāo shì yǔ zhòu zuò xíng zhě

黃山輸於天堂登 huáng shān shū yú tiān táng dēng

Mourning for the Master Photographic Artist Wang Wusheng

--also sent to old friend Zining (Joseph Chang who introduced us)

Jonathan Chaves

Jianjiang has ascended the skies, Banqian has expired;

In this world, Wusheng’s works have matched those of these men.

But now arrives his obituary -- tears fall in two streams,

No longer flies the 1000-mile Roc of photographic art!

Those who “know our music” in this life?

One out of thousands,

Master Wang indeed has been a bosom friend of mine.

The noble one is still a pilgrim in the universe:

The Yellow Mountains yielding now to the peaks of Heaven.

Astoria, New York

9/22/2018

THE LOG: May 20, 2018： Strawberry Field

Shenzhan

It sounds strange but while I was writing for a Wechat column about Central Park (说道西东：亲爱的孩子，我想带你看世界）, I rediscovered the Beatles.

The rediscovery process starts with a research on the Strawberry Field. Built in 1985 after John Lennon was murdered in the nearby Dakota Apartment building just across from the Central Park West Avenue, where he resided with Yoko Ono at the time, the memorial field is built with mosaics from Naples, with “IMAGINE” written in the middle, inviting people to stand, sit, or play music around, while showing respect to the most famous singer in the world.

In front the quiet and peaceful Strawberry Field today, it’s hard to imagine the bloody night of December 8, 1980, when John Lennon was shot 4 times with fatal wounds, right in front of the entrance of the Dakota building. Today the castle-like building quietly watches people passing at its foot to and from Central Park. Flowers and candles often are displayed at the Strawberry Field to express people's respect, seemingly so uneventful now.

But why is it named "the Strawberry Field"?

“the Strawberry Fields Forever” was a song released by the Beatles in 1967. If you listen to it or try to sing along with it, you would find it’s not the most harmonic music in the world. But it’s still beautiful and powerful, especially with Lennon’s voice, pure, innocent, and young.

In fact, the song was inspired by Lennon’s childhood memory: as a child in Liverpool, England, Lennon and his friends often hung out at an old Victorian house called Strawberry Field, converted for Salvation Army orphans. They always had a good time there. Lennon told Anthology years before his death.

Perhaps there isn’t too much to read into. However, it’s just comforting to know how the field commemorating Lennon’s death is connected to his childhood - as if it could bring Lennon back to the beginning of his life.

Astoria, New York

May 20, 2018

Entering Egypt: Exploring the oldest ancient civilization together

Shenzhan申展

此文有中文版： 入埃及记（二）：共同探寻最古老的文明

Fragment of a Queen's Face, Egypt, Dynasty 18

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

I am planning a trip to Egypt and London for 2 weeks (specific time to be decided). If you or your family are planning to visit one or both places in the next few months, would you like to meet up there for some activities or travel together?

In the beginning, it seems a merely crazy idea.

In recent months, I am spending a tremendous amount of my leisure time studying Egyptian civilization. Living in New York, I am lucky to have the access to one of the largest Egyptian art galleries in the world conveniently located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the MET). As a Chinese, I am naturally proud of the VERY long history of China, with written records dated back to the oracle bones in Shang Dynasty (around 1600 B.C.). As I started spending some time at the MET, where the Egyptian Gallery has a collection of over 30,000 objects between Neolithic time and around 332 B.C., when ancient Egypt was taken over by Alexander the Great, I was stunned (which I don’t know why) when I realized the Narmer Palette, the first written record in Egyptian hieroglyphs, appeared in  3100 B.C., if not earlier. It is over 1000 years earlier than the very existence of China’s first recorded legendary dynasty, Xia (2100 - 1600 B.C.). By then, Egypt already passed some early undated dynasties, the Old Kingdom (2686 - 2134 B.C.), and moved towards the beginning of the Middle Kingdom (2050 - 1710 B.C.).

Narmer Palette, Egypt, 3100 B.C.

Photo credit: Unknown

As I dive into the Egyptian civilization (learning mostly from Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Youtube, and the MET Heilbrunn Art History Timeline), I can't help but to compare the grand Egyptian civilization with that of China in order to answer a simple question: While Egyptians were busy creating the Narmer Palette in 3100 B.C., building the Great Pyramids during the Old Kingdom (before 2280 B.C.), producing all kinds of sophisticated architecture, statues and statuettes, jewelry, utensils, ornaments, containers, etc. before almost any humans on planet earth, what did my Chinese ancestors leave behind? The quest makes me dig into Chinese ancient history before 221 B.C., when the First Emperor, Qin Shihuang, officially started an empire by uniting the seven warring states for the first time. The dynasties in China comparable to ancient Egypt are those legendary early dynasties including Xia, Shang, and Zhou Dynasty, even cultures such as Hongshan, Liangzhu, and Ma Jiayao, which were contemporary to Dynasty 0 in Egypt (ok, that’s crazy old…), and two thousand years before any named  Chinese dynasties.

It’s certainly an endless journey, given the fact that Egyptologists spend their entire lives devoted to this fascinating subject.  As much as I enjoy digging deep in and for this journey, I am, by no means, aiming to become a self-taught Egyptologist. I essentially started with two innocent quests, the first of which, in fact, has nothing to do with Egypt:

1. How to create sensible meaningful stories with the overwhelming data available in today’s world, taking the 30,000 objects at the MET Egyptian Gallery as an example? It starts as a methodological quest but ends with a philosophical angle.

2. As I was enchanted by the Egyptian civilization since childhood, as many people probably are, I do want to create an understanding of this particular civilization that makes sense to me at a reasonably intellectual level.

Then one day in February, after the Year of the Dog kicked off, the idea sort of hit on me while I was standing in my kitchen in Astoria, New York, with a cup of coffee to start a Saturday morning:

Why not travel to Egypt (for obvious reasons) and London (as the British Museum has a vast collection of the Egyptian art, including the famous Rosetta Stone)? And if I were to do this, why not call for friends or friend’s friends to join me for a partial or the entire trip, if time and interest coincide?

Certainly, it’s not all about looking back into the oldest civilizations vanished long time ago, irrelevant to our lives today. What’s preserved and represented in the relics, records and objects in museums all over Cairo, Luxor, London and New York (and the list can go on) from ancient Egypt, in fact, offers surprising insights for one’s life today, relationships with the nature and the universe, as well as the connections between this life and the afterlife.

As most of the objects from ancient Egypt are dug out from the tombs, the afterlife is, of course, one HUGE central topic. It’s how ancient Egyptians made peace with death. One weekend I came across the most insightful reading from The Scepter of Egypt, written by William C. Hayes, a Princeton educated American Egyptologist who spent most of his life with the MET first as a member of its Egyptian expedition, and later as the curator of the very Egyptian Gallery at the MET in 1950s until his death.

In one chapter, “The Religion and Funerary Beliefs in Ancient Egypt”, Hayes explains how ancient Egyptians view “the being of a man” in 5 immortal elements in addition to the body: his name, i.e., identity; his shadow, representing protective power; “ba”, or animated force, or his soul; “ku”, probably his characteristics or qualities; and “akh”, the divine superpower in his afterlife.

Hayes further writes,

“At death the spirit (the 3 spiritual elements “ba”, “ku” and “akh” - SZ’s note), released from the body, was free to go whithersoever it chose. Since...it was felt that the spirit required a visible and tangible form in which to dwell. This form was preferably the body itself, and from the earliest time, every precaution was taken to protect the corpse of the deceased from disintegration...To combat disintegration due to natural causes the Egyptians, at least as early as the Second Dynasty (that is, like, between 2900 - 2650 B.C. - SZ’s note), developed the process of mummification, at first merely the application of preservative salts, later a complicated taxidermic operation. To protect the body from damage wrought by evil spirits, by the malevolent forces of nature, and by the ever-prevalent tomb robber, it was ringed about with magical spells, encased in sturdy coffins and stone sarcophagi, and buried deep beneath a massive tomb monument, the passages of which were closed by ponderous stone blockings, or hidden away in a secret cache deep in the western cliffs.”

Indeed, what’s displayed today in the museums full of the monumental statues of Egyptian pharaohs, gods, steles inscribed with hieroglyphics, meticulously decorated coffins for the mummies, etc., tells the history of the ancient Egyptians for thousands of years battling with the very nature of death. In visitors' view today, they are indeed art, history, ancient technology, etc.. For ancient Egyptians, they are the materialized manifestation of the battle between one’s “being”, which was perceived to be immortal, and the limits of the physical body. They are the concept itself that one’s being continues to exist while the body disintegrated or disappeared.

Standing in front of the creations of the ancient Egyptians thousands of years ago, in addition to be amazed, and oftentimes puzzled by the sophisticated techniques, advanced manipulations of materials, artistic expressions and forms made for the pharaohs, royalties, and aristocrats, we, today’s visitors, still face the same questions the ancient Egyptians battled with:

How to make sense of this life? And how to make peace with what comes after?

Are we still looking for answers to these questions? The ancient Egyptians have lived in this world, and from what they have left, we know they were trying to answer these questions, which, I believe, are not only for ancient people. However, even with today’s technology, science, and understanding of the material world, I’m not sure what’s left by us will tell people thousands of years later (if there are any) what questions we are still asking, and what our answers would be.

And I am not sure how much progress we, as human beings, have made over all these years. Perhaps we are even more confused, and lost, than the ancient Egyptians.

About me as a traveler:

Born in Chongqing, China, educated in Beijing and New York, bilingual in Mandarin Chinese and English, I’m a passionate world traveler, life-long learner, writer, and educator. I have traveled independently and with friends and families in North America, Europe, and Asia. I research and make my own travel plans, not extensively luxurious, but safe, interesting, and unique at a personal level. Besides exploring all fun things a new place offers, e.g., historical sites, people, food, drinks, music, art, sometimes unexpected adventures, etc., intellectual quests always make the journey much richer.

Experiencing different people and cultures;

Following one’s intellectual curiosity, and

Growing as a person along the journey.

These are my motto for traveling.

I love to share what I have learned, experienced, and be passionate about, in exchange for a journey with like-minded travelers.

And I am not a travel agent.

Astoria, New York

THE LOG: March 18, 2018

Shenzhan 申展

THE LOG is a periodical series about daily encounters giving inspirations for thinking and writing. 

“THE LOG” 的中文版本为近处。

Untitled, Oskar Fischinger, 1942

Reading the New York Times Obituary for Stephen Hawking

In “Stephen Hawking Dies at 76; His Minds Roamed the Cosmos”, the New York Times obituary by Dennis Overbye, first published on March 14, 2018, I found one part talking about the quantum principals, one of Hawking’s greatest discoveries, very inspirational philosophically:

“According to quantum principles, the space near a black hole would be teeming with “virtual” particles that would flash into existence in matched particle-and-antiparticle pairs --like electrons and their evil twin opposites, positrons - out of energy borrowed from the hole’s intense gravitational field.

They would then meet and annihilate each other in a flash of energy, repaying the debt for their brief existence. But if one of the pairs fell into the black hole, the other one would be free to wander away and become real. It would appear to be coming from the black hole and taking energy away from it.”

It is generally accepted now that black holes exist and strange things happen near and in them. Hawking, in his Ph.D. thesis, further proves our universe begins with a black hole. So in this logic, if I’m not awfully off track, the reason everything in the universe, including us human beings, that can ultimately be broken down into the smallest quantum particles, exists in the way as we know and experience, is because “the other” falls into the black hole. The energy we feel originally comes from the particles wandering and fleeting the black hole, which the other half of their pairs fall back into.

So in a sense, death is a real return, not only in the philosophical or religious sense ( Hawking himself doesn’t believe in God), but in the sense of physics and cosmology, that the particles reunite with their other half, and in the process annihilate each other, resulting in nothingness.

Perhaps this can help to explain, as the being to think and feel, we humans feel the never-ending quest for “balance”, or “reunion” - as we come from the original cosmos loss.

And I have a feeling that Stephen Hawking would really like Daoism.

Astoria, New York

THE LOG: October 9, 2017

THE LOG is a periodical series about daily encounters giving inspirations for thinking and writing. 

“THE LOG” 的中文版本为近处。

Joan Didion. Goodbye to All That.

Joan Didion with her Corvette, 1971. Julian Wasser New York Times

It all started with one sentence I read this morning from “Letter from the Editor” on Vogue, October 2017.

“…strength of character is everything, and age irrelevant.”

Anna Wintour, Vogue’s Editor in Chief, opens the letter talking about Hillary Clinton’s “gracious and eloquent concession speech” after November 9, 2016, and her recent memoir, What Happened, published on September 12, 2017. Then the letter goes on about other women with strong character, including Joan Didion.

It’s hard not to know about Hillary Clinton, whether or not living in New York. But I don’t know who Joan Didion is, except for what’s stated in the letter that at 82, the acclaimed writer, journalist, and former Vogue employee still has a sharp and sensitive gaze, “attuned to the local particulars and the broader implications.”

Convinced that Joan Didion was a name never coming across me before, I naturally turned to her Wikipedia page. She is a prolific writer moved to LA after living in NYC for some years…wait, why does this sound so familiar?

A few years ago I bought Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, from Strand Bookstore at the corner of Broadway and 12th Street as I was walking downtown to the Village on a warm spring day. It’s an easy-read book of 28 writers’ personal stories coming to New York, trying to stay in New York, and eventually choosing to leave New York. The book sat on the nightstand next to my bed for a while. Every night I found myself amused by a few pages before going to bed.

For some reason, I started looking for the book in my recently rearranged apartment. Luckily, it’s not too hard to retrieve it from my bookshelf. Sure enough, I found Joan Didion there. In fact, the entire book is inspired by Didion’s 1967 essay, Goodbye to All That. On the front page of the book, there is a quote from her essay,

“All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore.”                 

I easily downloaded a pdf version of the short nine-page essay and read through it for the first time, sitting in front my new giant desk in Astoria, New York, my cat Xiaomi quietly accompanying this morning reading.

It’s Columbus Day. A rain early in the morning brought a real sense of autumn after two-week unusual warm temperature. Pumpkins and leaves are turning colorful, the air cooling down accompanied by a touch of the heavy fall sentiment. I had just obtained a new desk and was thrilled to be able to sit upright and concentrate on reading and writing. Xiaomi apparently loves the desk too – she made herself very comfortable in a chair next to mine, just sleeping and purring the entire time, with occasional patrols among my notebooks, computers, iPad & iPhone, teacups, pens and books on the desk. With David Bowie’s Five Years (1969 – 1973) in the background, working on THE LOG about Joan Didion seemed to be the best version of my New York story. Like Didion and all the 28 writers, I tend to look back at my years in NY from time to time, and often question (more often these days than before) whether I should stay or leave.

I found a few more quotes from Didion’s essay that speak to my heart this particular morning:

“ …I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street.”

“It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came here from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.”

"…I was in love with the city the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never loves anyone quite that way again."

 “ You see I was in a curious situation in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there.”

“…New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”

Didion makes it very clear that New York is for young people. It perhaps is the best city for many to spend their youth, me included, though I came here already halfway through my twenties (and I didn’t really start living in the city until my 30s). Everyone has the time when you have nothing but youth and dreams. New York is all about that. Whether the dream is about freedom, money, power, love, or fame, it’s all about being young and wondering in the Big Apple feeling all you dream are within the touch.

Didion moved away from New York after married in late 1960s. Speaking of “strength of character”, I also learned that Anna Wintour refers to Didion very specifically. Didion lost her husband to an unexpected massive heart failure at their dinner table one night after living together inseparably for over 40 years. Shortly after she lost her adopted daughter too. With her role of being a wife and mother ceased to exist, Didion struggled to regain her sense of identity, all reflected in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, an example of “fictional journalism” she is widely known and acclaimed for.

In a picture published in the New York Times in 1971, Didion reminds me of 三毛，the Taiwanese writer most famous for her witty essays about youth and travel, her heavenly happy marriage (as depicted in her books) ended tragically with her Portuguese husband died in a work-related accident, and her suicide in the bathroom of her own home. They both have long dark hair, piercing eyes, and intelligent look with melancholy, except that at 82, with white hair and wrinkles all over her face, Didion still carries her sharp and sensitive gaze. And now she has many years to pierce back too, if she wants.  

In 2005, Wiki says, Didion moved back to NY and has been living here since. 

Somehow it’s a comfort for me to know. 

Astoria，New York

"Your Majesty, bad news for you."

A Time Traveler’s Message from NYC to a Chinese King

I recently watched 4 episodes of “the Fabrics of the Cosmos”, a PBS documentary led by celebrity Physicist Brian Greene narrating a story about the relativity of time and space in our universe. The mind-binding part is, what is in science fiction about time travel is not entirely unfounded. In theory, if time and space work the way Einstein predicted, there should be a way travelling back in time.

Let me imagine a theoretically possible time-space travel back to Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – A.D. 9) some 2,300 years ago. If I had a chance to meet the king from the Chu (楚) Kingdom (BTW: I CANNOT think of any reason to meet him. I am merely entertaining the PURE theoretical idea.), how would I have told him what happened to his jade suit, which, made before 175 B.C., with over 4,000 pieces of high-quality Hetian (和田) jade sewed together through gold thread, was believed by the king to preserve his flesh and soul for eternity.

The king might have been VERY surprised to know his jade suit is currently on view in New York City (NYC) at the China Institute Gallery in lower Manhattan from May 28 until November 12, 2017.

2,300 years ago, there was no NYC, no United States. None of the current European countries would have existed yet. Roman Empire is known as the equivalent civilization in the West when Western (or Former) Han Dynasty emerged on the other side of the northern hemisphere. The king might have not heard of the Roman Empire, while there might have been a slim chance that he saw objects of Hellenistic styles and patterns made their way through the Silk Road to his Chu Kingdom, a powerful, wealthy and culturally rich region along the north-eastern coast of China, the birthplace of Liu Bang (刘邦，256 – 195 B.C.), the first emperor of the Han Dynasty.

To begin with, it would be almost impossible to explain NYC to the king. The king and his people believed that they were living in the center of the world, a popular belief among almost all civilizations until Columbus discovered the world is a globe more than 1,500 years later. Such fundamental concept is reflected in the name “中国” (literally mean “middle kingdom”) later appeared in Eastern (or Later) Han Dynasty (A.D. 25 – 220) , referring to the region under the ruling of Han Emperors. How the world has changed in 2,300 years! To make sense, the king must comprehend that not only China is not in the center of the world, but also there is a whole continent on the other side of the ocean (the Atlantic Ocean) and a cosmopolitan city called NYC is hosting his jade suit.

Nevertheless, I would be happy to tell the king that his jade suit was magnificent. A jade coffin made to cover him from head to toe in the shape of his body, the suit is among the 116 total unearthed jade suits in China and arguably the best of all. Placed in a glass case in the inner corner of the gallery, the suit is glowing as if the king is wearing it and lying in the chamber of his mausoleum complex. In addition, just like in his mausoleum, he is accompanied by miniature terra-cotta soldiers, civil attendants, dancers, musicians, etc., each with amazingly vivid details individually captured by his craftsmen. Having survived through over 2,000 years, some still have the original paint. Above all, I would give my highest compliments to the jade pendants. In addition to the jade suit, the king brought to his afterlife many jades such as disks (玉璧), grips (玉握), rings(玉环), headrests (玉枕), facemasks(玉面罩), all with meticulously designed and highly stylish dragons, tigers, cicadas, mystic creatures, clouds, knots, or geometric patterns. Sitting in their individual cases on the wall of the gallery, or in the middle of the room, the jades are lifted from above the ground and floating around the suit, as if it’s a scene in the king’s dream. Exquisite and elegant, jade in Han Dynasty was widely believed to be able to preserve the corpse and the spirit of the deceased; hence jade suits were common at the time among the royalties and aristocrats.

S-shaped dragon jade pendant, early Western Han Dynasty

Photo from the catalogue, Dreams of the Kings: A Jade Suit for Eternity, China Institute Gallery / Xuzhou Museum, 2017

While it is farfetched for the king to dream of coming to NYC, it’s almost certain that he dreamed of living a luxurious afterlife: numerous jade wine cups, bronze cooking utensils, bathing baskets, and so on, were buried with him; a full banquet was in a chamber next to him; the remains of his chief chef were found in the same tomb, so as two females in two separate chambers right next to the king. The arrangements were obviously made for the king to continue what he enjoyed in his lifetime. In fact, he might not consider all these to be in a dream: after all, the jade suit should have protected the king’s body from decaying and preserved his spirit to ensure his luxurious life in eternity!

Here comes the sad message, surely more difficult for the king to swallow than the idea of NYC: the jade suit actually didn’t work. When discovered, the tomb was already previously looted, the jade pieces piled up in the chamber, the gold thread mind-bending gone, and the king’s body long decayed (as we truly don’t know about what happened to the spirit, I can’t talk about it.). Since jade suits were proven not working (with the looters’ help, ironically) while making one (and build a mausoleum complex around it) cost a fortune, which subsequently enticed loads of looters to disturb the tomb owners,  extravagant burials were banned later during Cao Wei (曹魏，220 - 265) period. No jade suits after Eastern Jin (东晋，317 - 420 ) were unearthed so far.

Jade suits unearthed are mostly exhibited in museums in China, some traveling around the world. There are currently two in New York City alone, one at China Institute, the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until July 16, 2017, less than one hour apart from each other on the subway (assuming the traveling is not delayed as it routinely happens nowadays). A third suit is on view at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Archeologists and art historians are almost certain there are more underground. The first emperor of Han Dynasty, Liu Bang (刘邦), was VERY LIKELY buried with a jade suit but is yet to be proven. While China’s policy banned any tomb excavation, it’s possible one day a construction truck might dig into the dream of another king, or a farmer might find a Terra-Cotta soldier’s oddly small head in his own rice field, just like the accidental discovery of this Chu King’s tomb in the Lion Mountain of Xuzhou in 1986.

The king’s body may be decayed, however, his jade suit and all the other burials survived are excellent authentic materials for people in NYC to appreciate Chinese fine art, history and culture. However, I would imagine the king would be more concerned about eternity, less about helping others understand China, Han Dynasty, or even his own kingdom. So all these would be truly terrible news for him, and not so good for me to be the messenger: after all, given his extremely high-profile jade suit and mausoleum, he was surely an all-powerful king when I met him in this time-travel.

That said, I would congratulate the king for what was created for his eternity. In the end, while it turned out to be a mere dream for him, his jade suit, along with other objects, are truly the messengers of the past that have disappeared 2,300 years ago.

In this sense, the jade suit, not me, is the real time traveler.

Fangsuo Bookstore, Chengdu, China

2017/6/20

THE LOG: April 14 ~ 23, 2017

THE LOG is a periodical series about daily encounters giving inspirations for thinking and writing. 

“THE LOG” 的中文版本为 近处 . 

Tibetan Green Tara, China's Dynasties & The End of History?

Green Tara, by Karsang Lama, Tibet House, New York, 2017

Out of the sheer fear that one day I will lose memory of the great places I visited, the great people I met, and the great readings inspired my thinking in the past 10 days, I’m keeping this LOG: it starts from April 14, the Good Friday when I had the chance to visit the Tibet House for a Tibetan Tangka exhibition by Karsang Lama, a Nepali Tangka master who I met in person at China Institute in March, and ends on April 22, when I was inspired by reading Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 monograph, “The End of History?”, while sipping a glass of red wine in my apartment in Astoria, Queens. These two seemingly drastically unrelated activities, in the end, are also very closely connected, as I will explain in this LOG.

The Tibet House is located very nicely on 15th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue in Manhattan, only a few blocks from the magnificent Rubin Museum of Art. However, its entrance is not hard to miss. I first walked in the hotel sharing the same address and was told the real entrance was next door.  Nevertheless, the Tibetan Tangka exhibition was fantastic. Tangka, a Tibetan Buddhism art form with a mesmerizing meticulous style, paints on silk or canvas of Buddhist deities, scene, or mandala (Xue, 2016) in natural mineral pigment of bright colors. My favorite one is the Green Tara (Syamatara in Sanskrit), undoubtedly because of the astonishing artistic representation of this graceful, elegant goddess, and partially because I took the time to learn about Green Tara as “the mother of all Buddha and savior of all sentient beings from worldly miseries” (quote from the exhibit handbook). It was the first time I ever walked into the Tibet House, which might indicate my sub-consciousness of the fact that Dalai Lama is the top patron of this cultural-political organization. Nevertheless, I was extremely happy when browsing through the amazing Tangka masterworks. Admission free, I was for a while the only viewer there. A couple of staff talked loudly while adjusting a computer for an event later in the exhibition room, where in the middle a number of chairs were set, surrounded by beautiful Buddhas, Tara, Deities, the Wheel of Life, etc.

the Wheel of Life, by Karsang Lama, Tibet House, New York 2017

Since I didn’t have to look for decorated Easter Eggs this weekend, I decided to make this weekend even more culturally enriched by spending the next day visiting the Ages of Empires, a new exhibition at the MET opened in early April. Ages of Empires is about the Qin and Han Dynasties, allegedly the “classical period” of China, extremely important in shaping the “Chinese identity” during a time roughly equivalent to the Greco-Roman period in western civilization. The exhibition of 160 objects included a few Terracotta soldiers of the first Emperor of China, Qin Shihuangdi (259 – 210 B.C.), and a well-preserved jade suite of Dou Wan, the wife of Prince Liu Sheng in Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – A.D. 9). This MET blockbuster exhibition captures apparently not only the imagination of the non-Chinese, but also many Chinese who happen to be in NYC (including me!). In fact, on this Saturday afternoon, I would say about two-thirds viewers in the packed gallery were Chinese.  For someone working at China Institute, which brings to NYC another jade suite in a couple of months, I found it’s highly impressive that the MET managed to bring these 160 objects from over 20 museums in China. Imagine the bureaucracy of such operation to assemble the pieces together as they are now in the MET gallery on 5th Avenue: each piece, probably the most valuable treasure by the individual Chinese museum (otherwise what’s the point of showing at the MET?) , requires careful and quite often time-consuming negotiations in order to be moved from its home in China and placed in its exact final representation here at the MET. As I’m hosting a professional development workshop on the Han Dynasty for a group of K-12 Chinese language teachers in a week, a visit to Ages of Empires seemed a must-to-do homework – the Chinese national treasures normally thousands of miles away and all over the country were now in one place and only a few subway stops away.

As if the weekend was not intellectually stimulating enough, in the following Thursday evening at China Institute, there was a screening of a Chinese documentary film about craftsmen restoring antiquities collected by emperors of Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1912), Masters in the Forbidden City, which surprisingly went viral in China since released in 2016. Prof. Lei Jianjun, producer of the film and a faculty at the renowned Tsinghua University in journalism and communication, would be there for Q&A. I decided to attend the event though was torn as Thursday was my PRECIOUS weekly badminton night at the nearby Stuyvesant Community Center. Mid-height with a solid build, Prof. Lei’s subdued yet eloquent style was well received by the audience. So was the Q&A moderator, Dr. Ming Xue from the Museum of Natural History. As it turned out, Prof. Lei and I both were alumni of Beijing Normal University and even shared common acquaintance(s), in addition to Prof. Yibing Huang (also well known as a contemporary poet with a pen name as 麦芒 Mai Mang), who introduced Prof. Lei and the film to China Institute. At one point, Prof. Lei pointed out the unusual popularity of the documentary in China while the majority of Chinese documentaries struggled to appeal to a large, young audience. At the very least, the simple and caring relationship between the craftsmen and the precious antiquities in the Forbidden City where Chinese emperors resided seems so authentic and rare in today’s China where ideological void has become an increasing concern, especially for the young generation all too familiar with the overwhelming consumerism. Such authenticity offers an opportunity to discover an alternative meaning between people and materials, to the point that it’s almost spiritual, if not religious. Not surprisingly, as the documentary catching fire in China, the Forbidden City Cultural Relic Restoration Department received overwhelming job applications the following year, a pleasant turning point to build the pipeline for a future generation of craftsmanship.

Finally on Friday evening of April 21, the workshop I was in charge for Chinese language teachers, Han Dynasty in China and World History, started and ended as planned.  Prof. Yu Renqiu, Senior Lecturer of China Institute and Professor of history at SUNY Purchase College, gave a brilliant lecture on Han Dynasty (and Qin) for about 1.5 hours. A well respected historian on China and U.S. with a charismatic scholarly appearance, Prof. Yu highlighted the importance of the unification in Qin Dynasty, and managed to cover such details in one and half hours of Han Dynasty including its rather complicated 400-year history, its advanced political system, the establishment of the state doctrine of Confucianism and the its great significance in shaping China’s 2,000 years of imperial history. As a historian, Prof. Yu's face was lit up when introducing the great historian Si Maqian (145 or 135 – 86 B.C.) , who technically was the very first great historian of China who produced the Grand Record of Historian. Apparently after thousands of years in New York, there was still a sense of instant connection shared among historians.

It is because of Prof. Yu’s lecture, quoting Francis Fukuyama to point out the brilliant political system of Han Dynasty virtually fulfilling Max Weber’s classic definition of modern bureaucracy, I found myself reading Fukuyama’s 1989 monograph, The End of History?, the night of Saturday. A renowned professor writing widely on democracy, development and international politics, Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, which has appeared in over 20 foreign editions, was an extension of this monograph, in which, Fukuyama claimed the “end of history”:

“The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called for the caring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, but the perpetual care taking of the museum of human history.”

Of course, human activities will continue along an irreversible moving timeline. And history books will always add new chapters as events unfolding, just like headlines (and much much more of them nowadays than ever!) appear on daily newspapers and social media outlets.  By claiming “the end of History”, Fukuyama essentially argues liberal democracy as the “final form of human government”, which as an ideal has nowhere to progress towards. In the world of 1989, it seemed western liberal democracy has secured as the ultimate ideological form for all human societies, with Fascism effectively destroyed after WWII, and Communism diminished to an unthreatening position in both Soviet Union and China. Yet, this ultimate triumph is unlikely leading to a forever-happy ending: While I am not entirely convinced that liberal democracy is the end of the History, I share the pessimism that the sense of meaningfulness produced by the very ideological struggle will cease to exist, ironically, as soon as the triumph is achieved.

Neither an historian nor a political science scholar, I may not have liberal democracy often in my vocabulary. However, the omniscient media reports of the recent political dramas in U.S., Europe and Asia forcefully make me think, or even feel, liberal democracy (like the evening of Nov. 9, 2016 when Trump won the U.S. Presidency) on a daily basis, not in a way that it has reached its final ideal form, but all the flaws it could carry in reality. On the other hand, it’s awfully accurate that without the imagination of certain idealism, societies as a whole could run like a headless chicken: issues on economy, technology, environment are all very important, however none could offer an ideological core for all to center around. Reading Fukuyama, I couldn’t help but to reflect on my own very trivial life activities in this past 10 days. While each seemed to be incredibly rich in content, at least in cultural sense, it is hard to connect those individual events in a narrative that would make sense in a bigger picture. Once the excitement at the moment fades, the void of a core is felt immediately. Ironically, speaking of “sophisticated consumerism”, I just booked a ticket to Vancouver in search for a yoga retreat…

It’s not new that human life, whether taken individually or collectively, is said to resemble an endless flow of meaningless events (e.g. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time). Maybe such sense is inescapable for anyone and everyone. And yet life must go on, and as a sentient being we all need to endure such misery. Thus I’m seeking the comfort in the arts and culture conveniently available in NYC (special thanks to Green Tara) and the writing of them, during which I enjoyed the tranquility and satisfaction the craftsmen may feel in the Forbidden City. The only difference is, sadly, my comfort is only momentary.

Rhinoceros, Han-dynasty China (206 B.C. - A.D. 220), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2017

April 24, 2017

Astoria, New York

_____________________

Ming Xue, "The Rise of the Individual through Tibetan Thangka Painting", CUNY Forum, 2016.

THE LOG: February, 27 ~ March 5, 2017

THE LOG is a periodical series about daily encounters giving inspirations for thinking and writing.

“THE LOG” 的中文版本为 近处 . 

“There Will Be Pie In The Sky When I Die!”

I was amused reading this line on the W train to work in the morning. The train was packed as usual in peak hours, but I was lucky to get lost in readings as sitting through from the first stop until getting off at Rector Street near my office in downtown Manhattan. Thinking of how close this is to a Chinese saying “天上掉馅饼!”, I was smiling, or even laughing out loud at my iPhone, which of course, is completely normal on the subway in NY, or any cities on planet earth where subways and iPhones have “colonized”.

I was reading China Hands: The Adventures and Ordeals of the American Journalists Who Joined Forces with the Great Chinese Revolution, a book of stories on western journalists who were searching and reporting their own stories of China in the early twentieth century. I was immediately drawn to the book by the beautiful writing of Peter Rand, a professor at the Boston University. The first chapter of China Hands is about Rayna Phrome and her revolutionary journalist friends (including Mikhail Borodin)  in China, around the time when Chiang Kai-shek broke up with the revolution by killing workers and communists in 1925 Shanghai.  A young American woman with striking red hair and a passionate revolutionary dream to be sought after in China, and obviously very attractive, in both appearance and character, Rayna was one of the only two western women left in Wuhan when workers in Shanghai were massacred and the optimistic atmosphere of Chinese revolution went downhill. At the time, with her journalist friends, equally passionate about Chinese revolution, they were singing "There Will Be Pie in The Sky When I Die!" together.

In fact, the line came from "The Preacher and the Slave", a song written by Joe Hill in 1911 for the Industrial Workers of the World, a labor's union started in Chicago, U.S. There is a very good chance that the Chinese version indeed came from this line, as "Pie in the Sky" became so famous and often replaced the real title of this song. 

On a NY subway, reading Rayna and the Russians, Americans, and Chinese in the story, it truly feels globalization is not just a recent trend at all!

March, 2017

Astoria, New York

A Cat Lover's Last Words to Her Cat

SZ @ New York

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Drawing of Chino, December 2, 2016 by Shenzhan Liao

I loved Chino.

I will always love Chino.

There is a soft spot in my heart for cats. Walking in my neighborhood in Astoria, Queens, New York, I would stop any time when I spot a stray cat crossing the backyard, sitting on a stoop next to the sidewalk, or jumping from the top of one car to another in the small garage across from my living room window. I took a lot of pictures of cats in Istanbul, where the streets were full of them, in various colors, shapes, attitudes, ages…I draw cats too. I haven’t had any good models yet, not even Chino. Instead, I followed some cat drawings or pictures of Chino to get the most of the shape right first, and went on my own way.

I love to see their faces, furry bodies, elegant moves, investigating eyes, pointed ears, paws, tails…I quickly got so used to Chino after he was handed to me from my downstairs neighbor George. He was probably only a little over 6 months at the time, a playful kitten. A regular tabby cat adopted originally from a shelter, without any “noble” or expensive blood, Chino instantly took my heart, with his perfect stripes, two piercing yellowish eyes, and black paws. Perhaps the fact that he was a cat was enough. He could have been in any color, shape or pattern. He walked up and brushed against me the first time George brought him to my apartment, while keeping her distance from me most of the time. But I quickly got used to him, expecting him behind the door asking for food when I came back home from work, jumping up to the sofa arm and sitting next to me for a while, making his “cookie-dough” steps and purring and touching my face with one of his paws to wake me up in the morning, finding his way up to the dinner table when I ate chicken, beef, seafood, or, almost anything (He loved ice cream, and cheese too!), meowing for attention if I read or played piano or drew for too long…Chino was not a lap cat and I respected him for that. After almost 6 years, I sometimes felt we became so much alike and our profiles started to look alike. I am a version of Chino without hair and whiskers.

There was a cat Callie, in my life before Chino, from my old landlord in East Hampton, Long Island. The first impression she made on ANYONE was “She is GIANT!” It was not exaggerating that Callie was HUGE. She was almost 9 years old when I met her, with a big furry belly that made her head disproportionately small. She had to pause to gather momentum (big time!) before she could jump on the little table for food. Even today it still puzzles me how she could manage to jump on my bed. We spent a lot of time together, especially during the quiet winter in East Hampton. But technically Callie was not my cat. I didn’t feel too bad about leaving Callie when I moved back to New York. Still, I shed tears when I heard that she died of jaw cancer a few years later.

So Chino was really my first cat. And since I had him almost 6 years ago, my strong affection towards cats only has grown. There were more “cats” in my apartment: cat chopstick holders, cat plate, cat soap holder, even a toilet brush holder in cat shape…I started a research project to learn more about the history of cats, and learned a great deal of their glorious days 5,000 years ago in Egypt and how their images turned dark in Medieval time. I bought “The Cat in Art” by Stefano Zuffi (Abrams, New York, 2005), a really heavy book collecting cats in great arts throughout the ( (mostly Western) history. I truly don’t know what magic cats have to turn a human like me so obsessive with them.

Katze und Vogel (Cat and Bird), 1928

By Paul Klee (1879-1940)

And Chino was really the only living companion I had for the past 6 years. There were men coming and going, none staying long enough for Chino (or for me) to grow real attachment. But Chino tolerated all of them. He might have liked some more than others, for he would come over for some, and just hide himself somewhere for others. After they left, he would come to me, in his quiet, non-demanding way. And I always felt happy when it was time for us enjoying each other's company.

Living in New York as a (somewhat still?) young, professional, independent person with a cat like Chino, I completely forgot the down side of this relationship: that Chino could leave me forever and I would be heartbroken.

On December 1, 2016, when I took Chino to the emergency hospital to treat what I thought perhaps a cold or stomach problem, I had to fill out forms listing me as the “owner”. “Owner” sounds carrying a lot of the “ownership” and assurance. If I “own” a pet, how can I loose him/her if I don’t choose to “disown” him/her? Unlike a relationship with a human, who can change his/her mind or heart, a pet hardly turns away from a loving owner. And you can’t really claim on paper that you “own” another person no matter how much you love each other. That evening, as Chino’s owner, I felt completely powerless when the doctor told me the worst news: It was an aggressive cancer and Chino was in a lot of pain and the doctor couldn’t do much and I had to make the decision right there whether to put him to sleep.

I took Chino in around 1pm that day. The ASPCA hospital on 91st street and 1st Ave. in Manhattan had its waiting room packed with pet owners. “Find a seat,” the nice front desk girl paused for a second, “if you can.” There were three rows of silver metal chairs in the waiting area. I found a corner close to an EXIT and two vending machines. An owner with his bulldog was sitting in the chair next to the EXIT, apparently trying to stay as far as possible from anyone else as the dog would jump and growl furiously at anyone near him. In the middle of the afternoon, the waiting room got even busier, with more dogs and cats brought in and out. Gradually, as the day winding down, people were leaving, with their pets, carrying medications and instructions, or paying the last visit to their pets staying over night. By the time Dr. Glass emerged from behind the door separating the waiting and treating areas, there were only me and a big black woman in a wheelchair with her cat in a carrier. I started crying as Dr. Glass spoke. The woman looked at me and murmured to herself, or her cat,

“Oh she is so sad. Oh she is really upset.”

I asked for staying with Chino alone and found myself in a small room with dim lights and a shining silver metal table in the middle. Chino was brought in by Dr. Glass in a red towel. We found us in this room after 7 hours separated from each other, the longest time ever I felt since from a long time ago. He didn’t look miserable or stressed, even with a piece of his fur in his belly shaved for the medical exams. I could only imagine how hard it was for him to go through all of these, as he has never left my apartment for almost 6 years. His most outdoor time was stepping out to the balcony and scratching his back on the floor with his belly up. But he didn’t say anything. He was quiet, moving slightly more slowly than usual, turning his head towards my chest for a minute when I held him in my arm, while I was crying uncontrollably.

Oddly, it reminded me of the afternoon more than 14 years ago when I found my boyfriend then had liked another girl. I was crying so helplessly, knowing something was broken but couldn’t do anything about it. I guess I loved Chino as my first love, without any reservation. I was so not prepared for Chino’s death, just as I was shocked to know that a person in love could change his/her heart. Both were first-time experiences.

I went home empty-handed that night around 10:30pm, and sent an email to friends about the sad news late night. I didn’t go to work the next day, and refused to take any calls from friends. For the following two days, I stayed as long as I could to be away from the apartment, where pieces of memories of Chino were everywhere. Three days later I went back to office for one day, and jumped on a plane to China for a month-long business trip.

While I was in China, where I found myself constantly in meetings, with friends and families, I would occasionally think how scary it would be when I return New York this time. For the past 5 years, the first thing I did once stepping back in my New York apartment was putting my arms around Chino, who apparently missed me terribly. I wept one night in a hotel in Shanghai, thinking of Chino. In fact, at the moment, I didn’t feel sorry for Chino, nor for myself. I just suddenly got caught in the middle of a deep sorrow, and cried. Then I felt better.

Goodbye, Chino. I hope you had a good time with me.

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With Chino, 2014

12/23/2016

Rongchang, Chongqing, China

Personal Notes: In a Time of Chaos

SZ @ China Institute

Art in the Time of Chaos, China Institute Gallery, 2016

Photo credit: Perry Hu

“What a shock to wake up one morning and find armed men, who spoke no language you knew and looked like no people you’d ever seen, roaming the streets of your city.” With these words, Holland Cotter, the Asian art critic of New York Times, opens his review on China Institute’s fall 2016 exhibition, Art in a Time of Chaos: Masterworks of Six Dynasties China, 3rd to 6th Centuries. (Chinese History, Writ in Stunning Stone, 11/17/2016).

It’s New York on November 17, 2016. I can’t help but think Cotter does not just refer to the nearly four hundred-year division and chaos in China more than 1,500 years ago.

Standing next to “Art in a Time of Chaos: Masterworks of Six Dynasties China, 3rd to 6th Centuries” written in burning red letters against a deep blue background, I often tell visitors before entering the gallery, “There are 115 objects from 3 museums in China in this gallery behind me, and the youngest is from fourteen hundred years ago.”

I would pause for a few seconds to let the historical distance sink in before silently push the heavy glass door open. Walking into a tiny room with all four walls in dark purple, everyone would suddenly face a small group of Celadon musician figurines from 3rd A.D.

Each figurine is less than 3 inches tall, some playing Qin (an instrument associated with cultured elites from ancient time China till today), some just standing or sitting with folding or open arms. They all share similar facial features with almond-shaped eyes, round cheek and hair tied up on top of the head with a stick.

Except for one.

He is notably shorter, standing with his right foot stepping forward, arms missing. His nose is pointier, cheekbones higher, and most unusually, he wears a triangle-shaped pointed hat. Art historians like Annette Juliano, guest curator of the exhibition and professor of Asian art history at Rutgers University, would immediately identify him as a huren, a non-Han (or non-Chinese), from a nomadic tribe in northern China.

Six Dynasties were in chaos precisely because China back then was divided into southern dynasties with Chinese courts ruled by Han, and northern dynasties controlled by mainly Xianbei, among many other northern nomads. It was a period of almost 400 years of political division, wars and murders, and frequent social upheavals. While politically defeated and yet with an obvious sense of privilege of the Han culture, Chinese, or hanren (汉人), referred to their northern neighbors “huren” (胡人), often with a derogative connotation. In fact, the term “Six Dynasties” is Han-centric in itself as it refers to only the dynasties with capitals in Jiankang (today’s Nanjing), the center of the Han power in southern dynasties. While some hanren during Six Dynasties would strongly resist huren influence (and some are still insisting even today), there is plenty of evidence from Chinese history, as examples in this exhibition, that hanren, after this chaotic 400-year cultural integration with northern huren, and foreigners from Central Asia, Indian, or regions even further in the west, were no longer the same hanren in Han Dynasty, the big, powerful, united empire lasting about four hundred years prior to Six Dynasties.

Besides the celadon musicians from the south (unearthed near Nanjing), I often would point to the visitors a yellowish celadon flask discovered in the north. On its body are two sitting lions, with a slim male figure with deep eyes and curly beard in between, presumably training the two lions for entertainment. “Sogdians and Sasanians from Central Asia were very active along the Silk Road, traveling, trading, and exchanging religions, arts and skills wherever they went.” For someone who didn’t know much of Central Asia history in 3rd A.D. before studying for this exhibition, I would enjoy secretly the little pleasure for being able to talk about Sogdians and Sasanians at all. Morris Rossabi, a renowned scholar on Inner Asian and East Asian history at Columbia University, and working with China Institute for years, gave a 3-hour lecture to K-12 educators on Six Dynasties one Saturday and spent a good amount of time talking about these two groups, unknown to many Americans and Chinese. The figure on the flask, probably a Sassanian, together with a silver plate depicting a Persian prince hunting three boars (according to stories from Zoroastrianism, the state religion of the Persian Empire), and the stone panels and mural from the sarcophagus belonging to Yu Hong, a Sogdian and elite official in the court of Northern Qi, a later northern dynasty, collectively present a time when people, cultures, and objects flew in and out of China.

Picturing the world map during China’s Six Dynasties is fascinating too. In the West, a powerful empire established by Constantine was rising after the Roman Empire came to its end. Byzantine Empire, with its peak around 5th and 6th A.D., would “watch” from afar its contemporary Chinese dynasties trying to figure out in what shape they would come out of the chaos. In Central Asia, the Sassanian would have just risen into power around 3rd A.D. in southern Iran as the last powerful Persian Empire. By 6th A.D., before China came together in one piece again (as this was not the first time China was divided, neither the last time), the Sasanian Empire would have been weakened by conflicts with Byzantine Empire and lost their battles with the Arab armies of Islam. Their rulers would seek asylum in China, probably the Northern Zhou, or Northern Qi (the last two northern dynasties). Meanwhile, in the Indian subcontinent, a good part of this period witnessed the rising and falling of the Gupta Empire, which, according to Wikipedia (“the source of all knowledge” as I would joke these days), was the “Golden Age of India” when extensive innovations in science and developments in arts, religions, literature, philosophy, and all aspects of human life imaginable at that time period, flourished. 

That probably explains the flourish of Buddhism in China during the Six Dynasties. My favorite of all pieces in this entire exhibition is a sandstone head of a Bodhisattva from around 550 C.E. from Northern Qi Dynasty (today’s north-eastern region in China including Shandong, Henan, Hebei, etc.). In a feminine image with plump round cheek and eyes gently closed, the Bodhisattva, radiating peace and calm in a quiet corner on a tall stand against the brick-red wall, would instantly yet quietly shed the noise most visitors carry, vocally, or in their minds.

Don’t get me wrong. Chinese culture with its core established by hanren was still predominant and thriving. Wang Xizhi, the Sage of Calligraphy, and the legendary “Preface of the Orchid Pavilion”, were from this period. His original writing of the Orchid Pavilion might be lost in the tomb of a Tang Dynasty emperor, though the running and cursive style of calligraphy he started and the true artistic spirit his works expressed, were set to be followed by generations of Chinese calligraphers, artists, and in general, all well educated Chinese. The same spirit is also exampled by the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, who appeared on the rubbings of a tomb mural and four panels of the brick mural itself. Whatever the history books say about these sages, I would tell people they were the fashion leaders of the day. They were philosophers, musicians, artists, poets, and wine lovers.  The so called “Neo-Daoism” escaping from the suffering reality for an idealistic peaceful world closer to the nature, was best represented by their life style and tales (as recorded in the “New Tales of the World” 《世说新语》by Liu Yiqing), and preserved on the mural for the visitors in New York 1,500 years later to admire, and surprisingly, to resonate. Cotter mentions one particular sage, Liu Ling, who is most known as a wine lover and legendarily hired a servant carrying a shovel following him around, with a standing order to bury Liu immediately on the spot if he drops dead. Liu Ling ended up retreating from the court and passed away peacefully at home. However, not all of the seven sages were so lucky. Ji Kang (嵇康), the most famous one, was in fact sentenced to death after losing a political battle. Regardless, thousands of years later, they were still in the mural, sitting under ginkgo trees in loose robes, drinking, playing music, and probably enjoying their “witty conversations” that would make them forget about the chaotic reality for a moment.

Drinking is not a recommended alternative of the chaotic world. Art and literature are. On the evening of Nov. 9, a public lecture on literature in Six Dynasties was given by Mr. Ben Wang, Senior Lecturer on Humanities at China Institute for over 30 years. As usual, I opened the evening with a brief introduction of Mr. Wang, and also said,  “Thank God we have art and literature to turn to in a world of chaos.” It was the day after the election. To many New Yorkers, it was still a shock to wake up in a world with Trump as the President-elect. The audience didn’t say anything, but smiled and continued to listen to Mr. Ben Wang’s lecture, on Returning Home (《归去来辞》)，by Tao Yuanming (陶渊明), who’s known to many Chinese since middle school with his “Peach Blossom Spring” （《桃花源记》）, describing a fictional world secluded from the real world and thus enjoying peace undisturbed by wars and sufferings for generations.

A forever-peaceful “Peach Blossom Spring” could only exist in Tao Yuanming’s poem. However, I could truly enjoy a peaceful moment by standing in front my favorite Bodhisattva in the gallery for a few minutes, ignoring the busy work in office just next door, or other visitors walking around (which are not many anyway).

At China Institute, people have joked that next time, Willow Weilan Hai, Director of China Institute Gallery and the curator of this exhibition, MUST select a much more peaceful and serene theme, given how accurately this exhibition predicts what’s happening now in the world.

11/27/2016

Astoria, New York

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Related links:

A resource collection on the exhibition: http://china360online.org/?property=introduction-to-dark-ages-in-china-220-581

A Day in New York: Chinese Contemporary Poetry and Subway

SZ @ China Institute

R Train in Rector Street, New York City

Of course a story about New York has to have something to do with the subway.

Recently I am reading a book “ Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York” (not that I’m thinking of leaving New York, or am I?), and almost every single one of the 28 writers talks about New York subway ----how old, cramped, smelly, and unbearably frustrating it is----and yet, it has became so quintessentially New York, even a story on a day about poetry can’t avoid it.

It was October 22, Saturday. I went to China Institute for the first seminar of a series: Expanding the Boundaries of Chinese Poetry, given by Yibing Huang, known by his pen name Mai Mang (麦芒) , who established himself as a poet in China in the 1980s and came to U.S. in the 90s.

……

告诫我的不是一个人，而是

两个人、三个人……

先微笑，然后是沉默和迷惘

在数着星星的过程中

也许会忘记了自己眉毛底下

两颗最有人性的眸子

它们离我一样遥不可即

而我多么疲惫，多么恍惚

就像白昼一个未结疤的

伤口，有着腐败的肉和新鲜

的血，无人用嘴吮吸

手指，手指在跳动，仿佛

弹着一根并不存在的琴弦

我的诗啊，请埋进浓重的黑暗

不要为谁而唱，也不要为我

你只需叹息，像一场梦

你只需存在，哪怕被毁灭

这一切已经足够幸福了

就不要再追求什么不朽

—— 麦芒，1990年4月1日，《今夜的火花今夜就会熄灭》

English Translation by Mai Mang

…
Not just one person warned me
But two, three…
First smiling, then silent and lost
 
In the process of counting stars
Perhaps will forget beneath one’s own eyebrows
Two most human pupils
They are as far and unapproachable as the stars

And how fatigued, how unfocused am I
Just like an unhealed wound
Of the day, having rotten flesh and fresh
Blood, no one would suck it by mouth

Fingers, fingers are jumping
As if plucking a non-existent string
Oh my poetry, please bury yourself into the thick darkness
Don’t sing for anyone, not even for me

You only need to sigh, like a dream
You only need to exist, even if perish
All this would already be enough to be happy
Then please pursue no more so-called immortality

(Tonight's Sparks Will Die Out Tonight, by Mai Mang, April 1, 1990)

A faculty at the Connecticut College now, Mai Mang, a middle-aged man with long hair in a style surprisingly similar to mine, had to drive to a station in Connecticut to catch a Metro-North train, and switch to a New York subway to get to China Institute in order to give this lecture to a dozen participants (and who knows how they got there on a Saturday afternoon!).

My story of getting to China Institute was a typical New York subway story, that is, a frustrating one. I was planning to take the  #7 train from Queens into Manhattan after having lunch with a friend. The lunch was pleasant, which made me stay longer than I probably should. Only after swiping into the station, I found out the Manhattan direction platform was blocked (obviously no train went to Manhattan from that station). I could either take #7 to the next station OPPOSITE direction of Manhattan and switch back, or…… there were really no other options without alternative subway lines around. Instead, I stood around the corner of Sunny Side and Bliss Street for 20 minutes waiting for an Uber, which somehow didn’t show up and yet charged me $5 cancellation fee, and finally got myself into a green cab to 59th and Lexington Ave., only to get stuck in the traffic on Queens Borough Bridge. After getting off, I submerged to #4 train, the express line (and hence the most time-saving to get to China Institute on a NORMAL day), which, didn’t fail to disappoint me this time by only running to 42nd Street. It was only the beginning of a chain of switching trains underground from #4 to #6 (a local line taking twice as much time to get downtown) then to R, which finally went to Rector Street, a station closest to my office. Like most (if not all) New Yorkers, I particularly hate the walk from #6 to R at Canal Street. The connecting tunnels are as filthy as others and exceptionally long. Among all the semi-relaxing locals going out on weekends and confusing tourists who typically move slowly even when trains are running smoothly, I knew I appeared to be uncharacteristically impatient for a Saturday. Well, who cares?

I lost track of time. The mission of the day seemed not about the poetry seminar anymore, but to overcome all the barriers in the subway system between Queens and downtown Manhattan.

And of course, it was a rainy and windy Saturday. After an oddly warm and beautiful week, New York finally felt like late fall on this VERY Saturday, with falling yellow leaves, dreary rains, and almost everyone in black, depressing.

Thirty-minutes before the two-hour poetry seminar ended, I finally walked into China Institute. I dropped my two bags (did I mention that I was carrying two big bags all this time?) in my office, changed my flats to high heels, and stepped quietly into the library with beautiful traditional yet sleek Chinese design and walls of books (some from over 100 years ago) surrounding Mai Mang and the audience.

啊，亲爱的，让我们

再看看外面的世界吧

看看傍晚时分的烟酒店

雨水打湿的街道，车辆和情人

再看看起风的时候，城市多么荒凉

没有果实的树，又多么孤单

你就会感到： 我们应当在一起

我和你在一起的时间

就是家庭的时间

你就会停止在玻璃窗上写字

再不沉默，再不犹豫

也再不看我，就扑回我的怀中……

—— 多多，1973 - 1980, 《感情的时间》

Translation by Gregory Lee:

Oh my love, let's

look once again at the world outside the window

look at the wine and tobacco shop as night draws in

the street wet with rain, the traffic and lovers

look once again as the wind gets up, the town is so

desolate

fruitless trees, and how alone

you can just feel: we are meant to be together

our time together

is a homely time

you can stop and write (or "stop writing"? - by Shenzhan) words on the window pane

never again silent, never again hesitant

and never again looking at me, just throwing your arms

around me (or "throwing into my arms"? -- Shenzhan)...

Duoduo, born in 1951 and considered to be one of the most important contemporary poets in China's poets' circle, was the topic of the seminar.  When I walked in, Mai Mang was reading this poem in Chinese (and it was an amazing performance). An audience followed to read its translation in English. Was Duoduo talking about ONLY Beijing? The corner deli for cigarettes and drinks; the streets in the rain with cars and lovers (are they walking down the street holding hands? with an umbrella? Or riding a second-hand bike in yellow rain ponchos? ); the trees with leaves falling in October and soon to become bare branches……all were so charmingly familiar to me not only because of my 7-year life in Beijing prior to New York, but its surprising  resonance to the life in New York, even a hectic one I just had.

Did Duoduo ever live in New York? If yes, there must have been at least one day like mine he would have gone through. How would it appear in his poem? What would be included? The eyes and faces of confusing passengers packed on the platform? The headlight of the R train finally inching into the Canal Street Station after a long wait? The mumbles from the radio in the train announcing yet another route change “due to planned construction”? The filthy tunnel filled with bright white light that hurts eyes and gives headache?

There is really a poem in everything. My favorite Chinese writer, Wang Xiaobo, referring to Nietzsche, once wrote,

“一个人只有今生今世是不够的，他还应当有诗意的世界。” (It’s not enough for one to just have this life and this world. One shall own a poetic world.” - translated by Shenzhan)

你已经迟了

久等的地铁缓缓驶进站台

好像在嘲讽

——你忍气吞声

迫不及待地

扑进张开的门

—— 廖申展，10/2016, 《诗与纽约地铁》

BTW: next seminar by Mai Mang will be about Wang Xiaobo.

(Thanks to Mai Mang to provide poems and translations on Duo Duo and Mai Mang.)

10/23/16

60 Beans, Astoria, New York