Years of Poems and Spirits

HK: human congee, the bookstore guy, meeting GQ, BD story, evening on the beach, football and dinner

GD: place names, Jin (泾), Cao (漕), Bang (浜) in Wu, Cantonese dialect (氹 Dang4)

Macau: Da San Ba Pai Fang, the island name, bastardization

SH: road signs, Pete, expat life, bars, the Expo, “I shit in a hole”

Milton Friedman money mischief, examples of inflation and politics, questions about fiscal policy and high-power money, fed regulating m supply vs int. rate

HZ: resort during a major holiday. Rained in in Tao Guang Si. Restoration of the temples, lack of stories. Staying in a hotel, worried about being spied on

SH: family tension, failed 15 year project, global financial center building, open hostility toward Japanese, dusty view of shanghai

Hai Yan – peasant’s apartment

Hai Ning/Yan Guan/Xia Shi – pi pa, Qing history, fight against flooding, hero worship, hai wang temple, wang guowei old house, his view of acquiring knowledge

Xu Zhimo: a pampered life

Qian Tang wave: spectacular

misc: how difficult it is to plan anything in China today. road sign, map, asking for direction on the road

Google research

Where I started this blog

Two weeks passed and I still remember everything I meant to say behind those hints. Do I still need to write anything down after all? Somethings are worth writing down. For others? Maybe those short handed keywords suffice.

I need to write down this line before I lost it -

“A culture is an Existential Choice. An Existential Choice is one such that it is its consequence. And that consequence is what people call Truth. ”

Here I said it.

Waiting for my flight to HK in Vancouver.

Arrived in late afternoon on a small propeller. Passengers had to walk a long way to get to the Custom. I took a wrong turn and found myself alone in a long hall way. The northern sun lingered low, casting a long shadow of everything. The walls are dressed with washed-out pictures of panoramic views of landmarks in Canada.

I felt like being transported back to a day 20 years ago when I first landed in the States. Forgot where it was, but it was an airport, also in a long walk way. I bet there were plenty of people around me yet I didn’t see anyone. It was the building, the white wall and faded beauty–the overall strange environ–that had all my attention. I felt alone too, perhaps because I came to the States almost naked. The hope and anxiety was intoxicating. I was only aware of myself.

Now that I have fewer dreams, a lot less hair but much more trepidation of the people around me, it takes an empty hallway to bring myself back to my own consciousness.

It has been fun. If I had to live the past twenty years again, I doubt I’d live any more differently, except I’d have lived more intensely. I always hated a banal life and it only deepens as I age. The adrenaline rush twenty year ago is still intoxicating today.

The last year has been intense. I started with MF with high hopes. Although it is apparent now that things will not work out, I never felt so close to action before.  Think back a few more years, other than a few month in business school and the torturous last lag of Jackson School, it was intense too.

But I have yet to create something. The ability to create is a gift: some have it, some don’t.  It is not just the ability to envision things, but also to be able to execute.

At this age, I think I have a deeper vision of the world than most. Yet, I tried but failed to materialize the vision, at least, into some kind of academic achievement.

In one of Sara C’s class, one of the girls wrote a paper on woman’s education in SE Asia or something. I knew it was a “machine” paper, a work without a soul. Yet it was a creation. She was able to see something in the web of data, and saw a market for her argument. I bet writing came naturally after.

Similar enlightenment didn’t come to me until much later, after much more agony. I did see “something” but wasn’t convinced (and now am convinced not) that there was a market for it. In the end, much of my labor came to nothing.

Now I am on the cusp of trying again in another field. Would it work this time?