Friday, August 13, 2010
Thursday, August 12, 2010
In which I Resist the Urge to Describe Everything in Existence
A quick update on the present moment may be in order here - Jane and I and the kids have been at home studying Chinese for the past two weeks, as part of a required (and welcome) independently-arranged summer language program sponsored by our organization. We've settled into a routine: Jane and I head of to a classroom with Wang Tong, our friend and tutor, while the kids have "Chinese School" at home with a rotating cast of friends and students. Lunch goes on for a while with everybody, after which it's naptime for Ysa and Zekey (and yes, often Mom and Dad). If we're feeling inspired, Jane and I fit in an hour or two of studying the material we've crammed before heading off to the university's pool in the late afternoon. Zekey has an official Best Friend, Yang Dong Qi, so they are often out and about together playing during the evening hours. Dinner is late and snack-like, followed by bedtime for the kids and then a mix of internet surfing and/or Chinese studying for Jane and me.
Oh, yeah, and today Jane is taking off to go grape picking all day with friends, and is expecting to come back with 50-60 pounds of fruit, enough to fill up to massive ceramic jugs that she bought for a year's supply of homemade wine. (Anyone who knows her will not be surprised in the least reading this..) I now know her well enough to simply sigh a bit, plan a day out with the kids by myself, and look forward to a nice glass or two (or three or six hundred) before going to bed this fall.
It should also come as no great surprise that I am spending more time at home comfortably puttering around. Because I've been lucky to have the time, this blog has become my minor obsession this month, and I am always thinking of things to write about and dump into the Ether for the pleasure of my family members and a few imaginary friends. If I follow through with every idea, you've got lots of reading ahead of you - more stories from our travels, some interesting links from here and there, a few things left over from last spring's media class, and even a rant about badminton.
Which brings up a problem that I've often faced in my artwork - an urge to make a work of art that Describes Everything in the Universe. (Or, more precisely, an interest in how attempts to Describe Everything in the Universe always fail, and why we keep trying to do so anyway...) So I'm warning you in advance (and telling myself as well) that you may not hear about a story or sixteen.
As I'm going through my notes and mapping out all of the things I'd like to describe about life in China, I'm reminded of this short snippet by the author Jorge Luis Borges, about a kingdom that took its map making very seriously...
On Exactitude in Science . . .
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
From Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999
Another story
While we've been traveling this summer, another family that we know in China has been traveling a much different route. Like us, James and Jessica were MCC volunteers busy raising their kids in China - in their case, two boys ages two and four. They were working in Beijing with MCC, and we met them during our first days in China.
One day, Jessica had an unexpected seizure during a language class. A visit to the hospital and several brain tests later, and they found out that she had a rare form of brain cancer. They are now back home in Canada where she is, at the time of this post, awaiting chemotherapy. Their story is still unfolding day by day, and they have been on our minds a great deal in the past couple of weeks.
They have both been blogging about their experiences in the last two months, and I'm posting the link here not just because I'm sure that they would appreciate your prayers, but also because they are both writing very clearly and honestly about what it means to be human. It is very easy to want to wish away all of the terrible things in the world, but no matter how hard we try, nobody is able to make themselves immune to suffering. It is another thing entirely to face our humanity with honesty and faith, and I admire their courage in doing so.
Message from the Mainland
One day, Jessica had an unexpected seizure during a language class. A visit to the hospital and several brain tests later, and they found out that she had a rare form of brain cancer. They are now back home in Canada where she is, at the time of this post, awaiting chemotherapy. Their story is still unfolding day by day, and they have been on our minds a great deal in the past couple of weeks.
They have both been blogging about their experiences in the last two months, and I'm posting the link here not just because I'm sure that they would appreciate your prayers, but also because they are both writing very clearly and honestly about what it means to be human. It is very easy to want to wish away all of the terrible things in the world, but no matter how hard we try, nobody is able to make themselves immune to suffering. It is another thing entirely to face our humanity with honesty and faith, and I admire their courage in doing so.
Message from the Mainland
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Putting your money where your mouth is, part 2
Okay, so there aren't many people in the world who have a $10,000 reward they can return to make a stand for peace and justice. So what can you do? How about buying less stuff?
Consumers Find Ways to Spend Less and Find Happiness.
From the article:
New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences [italics mine] instead of material objects, when they relish what they plan to buy long before they buy it, and when they stop trying to outdo the Joneses.Gosh, you think...?
Putting your money where your mouth is
This may be as good a time as any to post a couple of links I've been thinking about lately. First up is the story of the proposed mosque being built within three blocks of Ground Zero in New York City. One advantage of being an expat is that raging controversies in the news back home get filtered in to minor curiosities heard over the internet here, so while I can imagine the rants and counter rants about the subject on the scream-and-polarize talk show circuit, I'm largely spared the grief.
But still. A "stab into the heart of America"? Puuh-leeze! What many people don't realize is that the World Trade Center wasn't destroyed by Islam - it was destroyed by fanaticism. So what did the Anti-Defamation League do when it supported the Mosque's removal? Why, cave in to fanatics, of course! (Dang, I do feel like going off on a rant here...)
That's why I'm impressed with Fareed Zakaria. I don't know how much coverage this got at home, but he returned an award (which included $10,000 cash) that he recieved from the ADL. You can read his (calm, well-reasoned, unfanatical) comments here.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Bigger connections
A year and a month or two and what seems like forever ago, our family arrived hot and slightly bedraggled to the Philadelphia airport. We had just finished a long hike and reunion in a remote corner of New Mexico, and were on our way to a tiny town called Akron to begin a couple of weeks of training with MCC, our sponsoring organization.
After we connected with our ride and were on our way, we started making small talk with Marvin, our volunteer driver, who turned out to be very friendly and interesting. One of the first things that we found out was that his son was in Afghanistan. Immediately, I assumed that he meant the Army, but then realized after a second or two that we were talking to a Mennonite here. Since a central tenet of the Mennonite faith is a strong belief in nonviolence, of course his son wasn't in the Army - he was in Afghanistan as the MCC's only service worker there. Marvin then started to tell us a few stories about his son's experiences, and we started to imagine what the challenges and joys of living in Afghanistan as a peacemaker must be like.
Now comes word that Marvin's son, Glen Lapp, was among those killed in last week's ambush of medical workers in the Northeast of the country. Our first response is of course of sadness - for Marvin and his family, for Glen and the people that he was working with in Afghanistan, for those close to the other aid workers that were killed in the attack. I'm also sad that Afghanistan, for a number of reasons, continues to be a place where people suffer from the results of years of violence.
Another reaction I have is one of guilt. While I've been blithely chatting away about our family's (incredibly privileged) trip to the Expo, another MCC worker lost his life while doing what he believed in. It's the age-old question: what is our response to suffering in this world?
Many of you know that, when we originally signed up for MCC, we had wanted to go somewhere in Central or South America. Our Spanish was good enough that we felt we could get up to conversational speed in a month or three, and more importantly, we wanted to make a difference in the world. We pictured ourselves in a remote village, maybe... helping with a sustainable agriculture project? Starting a microloan program for local craftspeople?
Instead, one thing led to another, and now we're in China. Teaching English, the language of industry and commerce world-wide. When we look at some of our co-worker's blogs, (especially the blogs that aren't updated as often because their authors are, in fact, Busy Doing Things) it's very easy to feel trivial and irrelevant.
This is the point where I suppose I should be summing things up with a conclusion of some sort, except I can't come up with one that doesn't feel trite or self justifying to me. Maybe the only thing I can say is that if I hadn't signed up with MCC, an ambush of aid workers in Northeastern Afghanistan would have barely registered as another blip in the headlines to me.
Now, I realize that one thing I can do is to pass on what I know about Glen to the rest of the people I know, and tell you that yes, we are all connected in some way. And yes, we need to know more about what connects us to the rest of the world. Maybe that's one reason I keep cranking out little bitty blog posts about a small corner of the world that I don't quite understand yet...
More information about Glen, from MCC, here. More about the Mennonites, and their tradition of service here.
After we connected with our ride and were on our way, we started making small talk with Marvin, our volunteer driver, who turned out to be very friendly and interesting. One of the first things that we found out was that his son was in Afghanistan. Immediately, I assumed that he meant the Army, but then realized after a second or two that we were talking to a Mennonite here. Since a central tenet of the Mennonite faith is a strong belief in nonviolence, of course his son wasn't in the Army - he was in Afghanistan as the MCC's only service worker there. Marvin then started to tell us a few stories about his son's experiences, and we started to imagine what the challenges and joys of living in Afghanistan as a peacemaker must be like.
Now comes word that Marvin's son, Glen Lapp, was among those killed in last week's ambush of medical workers in the Northeast of the country. Our first response is of course of sadness - for Marvin and his family, for Glen and the people that he was working with in Afghanistan, for those close to the other aid workers that were killed in the attack. I'm also sad that Afghanistan, for a number of reasons, continues to be a place where people suffer from the results of years of violence.
Another reaction I have is one of guilt. While I've been blithely chatting away about our family's (incredibly privileged) trip to the Expo, another MCC worker lost his life while doing what he believed in. It's the age-old question: what is our response to suffering in this world?
Many of you know that, when we originally signed up for MCC, we had wanted to go somewhere in Central or South America. Our Spanish was good enough that we felt we could get up to conversational speed in a month or three, and more importantly, we wanted to make a difference in the world. We pictured ourselves in a remote village, maybe... helping with a sustainable agriculture project? Starting a microloan program for local craftspeople?
Instead, one thing led to another, and now we're in China. Teaching English, the language of industry and commerce world-wide. When we look at some of our co-worker's blogs, (especially the blogs that aren't updated as often because their authors are, in fact, Busy Doing Things) it's very easy to feel trivial and irrelevant.
This is the point where I suppose I should be summing things up with a conclusion of some sort, except I can't come up with one that doesn't feel trite or self justifying to me. Maybe the only thing I can say is that if I hadn't signed up with MCC, an ambush of aid workers in Northeastern Afghanistan would have barely registered as another blip in the headlines to me.
Now, I realize that one thing I can do is to pass on what I know about Glen to the rest of the people I know, and tell you that yes, we are all connected in some way. And yes, we need to know more about what connects us to the rest of the world. Maybe that's one reason I keep cranking out little bitty blog posts about a small corner of the world that I don't quite understand yet...
More information about Glen, from MCC, here. More about the Mennonites, and their tradition of service here.
Monday, August 9, 2010
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