Little Man

Today has been a good day. above is a pic of lil man and his brother -- the other boy was born in the same room, Yushi and the mom knew each other and she gave birth a few hours before Yushi did.

Beginning to feel the 安

安 means peace and is represented by a woman under a roof. I always figured this character was a bit patriarchal ... but now that i have a mama and a lil one under my roof ... i know what them old sages were talking about.

Its the 30th according to the Chinese Lunar calender, so its a new year, out with the OX in with the Tiger. All is good. here are some pics from the last few days ... from contractions to today's chill session ... Holla:


It all started with a game of Risk ...


... then the contractions started.


Got worse.


Next thing I know, me and Pops are peeping through windows.


Josh and Heather showed up with Aixi and we checked up on mama ...


Then Lil Bean aka Lil Man aka Ninja aka the Boy aka Dorian aka aka aka was in our arms




and now he's a part of everything we do ... what a trip ...

Bean's Belly

Some pics from this evening:

My man Fu Qiang

Has just opened up a shop selling his CDs (compilations of music he digs) and art. He takes pictures and uses software to make his own impressions. pretty interesting stuff. You can check his site out right here.

Here is a picture of Fu that he manipulated into an oil painting-type image:



Here is a picture that he put together of his shop:



And here is my lady and Chen Lin, chillin in the tea foyer of Fu's shop:

Yunnan Trip

So i finally got my camera battery from the Bad Monkey. I left it there on the last day of me and Bean's trip to Yunnan, so I haven't been able to access my pics since then. So here are some pics and descriptions of the trip we took 12/27 to 1/2 ...


This is my friend Huang Jun, a Kunming native, and his lady Thearanee, from Thailand. They came up from Thailand to celebrate his father's 60th birthday and before the festivities we had some local 挂桥面 Cross the Bridge Noodles.


Story goes, a loving wife brought her man noodles on the daily. He worked a little bit away from home, and she had to cross a bridge to get there. When she showed up, the noodles were always cold. This angered them both. He didn't say anything, being a good man and all, but she wasn't about to have her man eating cold noodles. So she thought about it and came up with a plan: she would cut up all the ingredients and put them in the bowl and bring a pot of boiling hot water along with her. So when she got to his place of work, she placed the bowl in front of him, poured in the hot water and mixed it up. Worked just fine.

That night, they made passionate love.










Me and Bean went to the 翠湖 Cuihu Lake in the middle of Kunming and walked around it three times. Siberian black-headed gulls migrate through here every winter and everybody loves it. The gulls eat good, the kids squeal in the winter sun and i get to take pics with my lady.

I got a bit more, put them up in a day or two.

redemption is just one way of saying

my job is
to pull you back from the brink of darkness
protect you from the prince of shadows
show you the flower in all seasons
keep you fed, fat and giggling
give you a blanket when its cold
build a home for you to waltz in
shore up the foundation when it crumbles
so that i might be
the man i've always wanted to be

A new leaf

As you can see, I have changed a few colors on the blog. let me know what you think.

I have been writing for Antiwar.com again, have a regular column coming out, not yet sure exactly which days, but I will let you know. The first one I wrote in a while got me called an asshole and a racist. *yawn* happens all the time.

Things are good on the home front. Yushi is hating the way pregnancy is treating her body right now. she is a huge pumpkin. her hips are moving in weird positions and what hasn't grown is sagging. takes a lot of hugs to make a woman feel better.

Free to Post

I wrote an essay a while back about censorship in China, for Antiwar.com, and I basically said that within the parameters of black and white, all life transpires.

Well i am now, thanks to Freedur, safely within the gray. Freedur is a VPN protocol that allows me to surf through a proxy and avoid sneaky, evil Chinese censors. If you have problems with haters or just wanna be anonymous, check it out.

If you are interested in buying the service ($60 for one year), type in "chengduliving" and you will get 10% off. chengduliving.com is a website I am working on with my friend Charlie and it should be going live in a few days. Check it out when you have the chance.

So it is a trip to be back. The sky is always gray, which makes me feel completely isolated from the world, like the movie Dark City. I feel enveloped by the grayness and the thing about gray fog is it stretches on forever and has no borders, no shapes, no delineating lines -- it just is. So that can get kinda old.

And walking around is one of those things I forgot about. You have to get into a "China state of mind" to handle the throngs and swarms of people and vehicles passing in and out of your path with missions and dreams and plans and fears of their own. I miss being inconspicuous and part of the scenery.

Bean is plump and healthy. We brew up warm milk with anti-viral honey and sleep in late. The apartment we are in now is just a two-minute walk from the hospital. Tomorrow I will go to Dujiangyan house hunting.

GUA

Ni zai kan ma??

Ni GUADEBUDELIAO! dajia dou xiaode.

My Rainy Poem

Zhang Yushi -- Yu means rain, Shi mean poem or poetry or poet ... depending.

i met her for the first time back in the days when i was a real rake and rastabout. tenzin my man and i were playing chess in the ole cafe in Fanghua Gai in Yulin. I remember two giggling girls watching us play the fools for them. that was about 7 years ago. a little over one year ago, we bumped into each other again. i didn't remember it, but you know when you get that feeling, like something is about to change forever? well i had that feeling but i didn't really know it, i just thought it was a chance for me to -- for one time -- not seduce a girl and just be her friend and brother and confidante. so for a time, Yushi came to my rundown country house and hung out. she brought her stanky dog around, stole tenzin's steak, frowned at the weird shit i was cooking, listened to me preach, became my Shifu's favorite, impressed my sage homie Zhuang with her quick mind and ability to pierce through the bullshit.

she helped take care of my kitties, rolled with me into the earthquake spot, helped me mend fences with my neighbors, took walks with me at night in the last days of the village i lived in. she became friends with Andreas and Julia the photographers and one by one my friends wondered aloud to her and me, what plans did we have? where was this going? I loudly proclaimed that i was her protector and brother and teacher and friend and all that. she just kinda looked at me.

i made her lose her job at the newspaper, when i asked her to help me with a story i am working on and she decided to come with me rather then to her job. i never heard her mother's voice, she died in february, but i spoke to her just minutes before she did and i can feel her. her pops came up with a name for my tea house Ma Bang Cha Yi, which means ... Horse Camp Tea Tent. He feels me. He once told Bean (her nickname, which she got on a ride through the mtns to my Shifu's school) "nide ba de zhongguo wenhua xvyao liangge ren zai bi de shang!" which means ... your pops got game!

She tells me about myself in way that hurts because its all true. its like looking at a painting and seeing a red woman and then tilting your head and seeing the house and hills behind her and maybe the expression on her face if you tilt another way. i can only see red, at best, she points out all the other stuff.

at one point, i rolled to beijing for the olympics and before i did i asked my boy how did he know about his girl and he said, when you roll somewhere, she's the one you think about. i thought about her all the time. Still do.

we gonna write books together, raise a god together and grow shrooms and bud in china and spread the Word together.

I'm done with work and in a week i fly out.

A long hiatus makes for a rambling post

So i will begin with an introduction:

hi, this has been inaccessible for me for some time, but now i have hotpost shield so its all good (addendum: not all good). I am still in Chengdu and fly out of here on the 30th to Shanghai and then back to SFO for a while.

Now straight to the business. this blog is vital to me and my spiritual and mental well being. it has replaced pen and paper as my muse and medium and dumping grounds for all that i see and hear and think every day. so i have a bout 10 days of thoughts locked up in my domicile and they are starting to cause a ruckus. breaking shit. throwin chairs and bottles.

(This is a continuation of a post that got lost in the ether due to Chinese censors. Fuck a censor)

So I am backtracking through my brain to get to a spot that will result in its own post/story so I might as well start from just a few minutes ago:

Sat and watched a couple of guys play chess and I learned three new openings. First move, push the right side inner pawn. Next move, bring the cannon to the center. Third move, push the right side horse up. Fourth move, bring the left side cannon right up next to the center cannon. Last move, bring the left side horse to the left side. Then, put your tank into play. right side tank.

The key to that opening is to push the pawn first and bring the cannons together.

This morning, i talked with my man in Chiang Mai and he told me about a kiwi porn star he met that had gotten into a car accident and scarred her face up so bad, now she has other things to do besides freak on film for cash money. The reality of her face laid him down flat and he woke up on the floor in the morning wondering wondering.

this morning i slept in cuz I haven't been sleeping well so I "watched" the nuggets play the lakers on espn play by play. fell back asleep. the nuggets were up when i fell asleep, but then i dreamt that they lost 103-97. check the score. That type of ether-knowledge seeping into my brain as i lightly sleep used to be remarkable.

then i sent bean the last 20 pages of this book i am working on called 8 years in china. i want it to be a collection of blogs, antiwar.com essays, my thoughts AND words and pics from my peoples. i think its doable .. to have like a really rounded out picture of what the hell i was doing out there. big project, when you think about ALL of the possible content. anyway, there is one passage where i describe my first impressions of her -- we met in a weird way. that, of course, was all she saw and it pissed her off. she cant see yet that a story, just like a relationship, DEVELOPS over time and towards the end attempts to RESOLVE certain things. and plus i am leaving in a week so its getting to crunch time. my funk is all up in her apartment -- i smell really strong for those of you who dont know -- and this ... well ... its a girl-boy thing man.

Last night i aint got nuthin to say cuz i was just staring at a computer.

Day before, well the night before i went to the panda club and inhaled the old dirty du scene., aint nuthin changed for real. same bitches same foolz same homies on the decks providing good tunes and train wrecks to remind me that this is a shadow world.

day before that i was in Qingcheng with my tea people checking out this yummy bittersweet local tea and a locally produced jiaogulan ... very good teas and the man in charge, peng qi, is a good man and i think we can def. work together. my long time tea homie chen shui yuan told me of his dreams and let me play with his silly lil 4 year old daughter. he also brought his father in law with him and i was reminded that a lot of east coast older men are quite elegant and composed.

before that i was in qingcheng again and that trip deserves its own post with pics and thoughts.

stay tuned.

mad love

One Last Roast

Indeed, I wrote a lot about how perfect my "Leaving" is, as it comes almost to the day when i arrived 8 years ago. I spoke a lot about how everything seems pre-ordained.

Well, now I am beginning to experience what that actually means. These days in Beijing will be a further searing of my soul to the point where i will wonder what exactly it is that i believe. Who exactly I am.

My patna Beanmilk told me today that I have to leave, before i become too Chinese. She said this after that post "The Good News Is" ... what she means is that my original self is American, and the longer I stay here, the more Chinese I become. This Chinese sense of self is, in her words "originally not yours" so I should and have to leave and go back to the US in order to recover that which I am. Or else I will be wrestling with this "foreign" entity in me till it pops out my chest in a bloody mass ... she says me wrestling with myself in that post is proof that i need a rest from all this.

Last night a friend asked me rhetorically: "Who are you?" because I spoke German to one kid, American to another, Chinese to another and so on ...

I welcome all of this. When i was young, Whitman's poem "Song of Myself" had a great impact. I am German and Turkish because the blood of those people runs through me. I can't help any Turkish-ness or German-ness which I display.

America is a state of mind, a set of principles, a way of living that is as much a part of me as any blood relationship I have. But it is because I lived as an American. Surrounded by America, feeding on the tit of America, raised by a True American, I can only be a chip off that block.

Now, after 8 years in China, a whole new set of mind states, principles and ways of living are filtering through my self.

After suckling at the Chinese tit for so long, can I walk away and wipe my mouth with no effects whatsoever?

I think not.

And why would I: In my song of myself I too contain multitudes, I contradict myself and in the end can be nothing but me myself and I.

So these next few weeks will be my final roast above the spit of China.

Grease me up, yo!