The number one reason to spend time in China is something that cannot easily be put into words. I’d love to find some foreign word that we don’t have in English like, “Fahrvergnügen” or even “Je ne sais quoi” (ironically) that perfectly describes it, but I want something that fits a little better, something that gives a real sense of the buzzing, buoying energy of the place, that magical charge that infects some foreigners for life.

Huángshān

Years ago my friend Vince Zappa and his wife (Americans) spent the first half of their honeymoon visiting some fellow Americans who were teaching in a small village in China. She had a decent time, but when the second half of the honeymoon arrived she was ready to head down to the resort in the Philippines. He was, however, entranced and had no interest in leaving a dirty little town to go to a fancy resort. Vince couldn’t get enough of just being in China. He got ripped off at a restaurant he liked and decided he didn’t care enough to stop going, that instead he’d just be more careful. He was willing to put up with hardships in this weird new place because something captured his heart.

When I first visited China many years ago, it was only for a few weeks but that was enough to trap me. Before we went I liked spending time around my Chinese friends in college and being around Weíshí’s parents and relatives. Weíshí’s second aunt taught me how to play Májiàng and I learned the numbers and directions. I liked the sound of the language, the beautiful characters, and the endless (and I do mean endless) “old Chinese sayings”. But something different happened when I arrived in Běijīng and later visited Xī’ān and Huángshān. I was hooked. I couldn’t get enough of the beautiful mountains, the scrappy street venders, the peach orchards, and above all the endlessly chaotic nature of everything around me. The magic hook is somewhere in that chaos and the way that people are so energized to make things happen. The Chinese people of today don’t bother with safety or laws or aesthetics: they charge ahead and build and make and haul and try.

When Weíshí and I visited the Great Wall we walked the whole length of the top of the restored wall. As we reached the far end, we heard grunting and whispers somewhere on the other side of the large stones that surrounded us. The sounds continued and got closer. The section of wall we stood on was a huge distance from the ground. We walked over just in time to see a hand grasp for the top. I leaned over and saw a series of people standing on each others’ shoulders and the person on top struggling to pull themselves up. Mystified, I grabbed onto his arm and helped him over the wall. He breathed heavily for a moment, then reached inside his jacket as a few more people pulled themselves up behind him. He fumbled a bit more and then, like a magician pulling flags from his sleeve, began heaving out pile after pile of “Great Wall” t-shirts. He immediately tried to sell me one. Apparently there was a fee to sell things on the wall, and they were either too poor or too scrappy and cheap to pay it.

Of course in the midst of this scrappiness and chaos there is still a swirling undercurrent of ancient history spinning through the signs, bricks, buildings, language and culture. It’s all still there, like the old tent that holds the circus. Something in the beauty of this whole mess is the China magic, the magic that entrances, lures, and captures the hearts of people like me.

But the image of two young lovers leaning into the wind isn’t what stuck with me about my experience. Walking through China I felt like I was climbing on board the Titanic as the nose was plunging into the dark ocean. Every person I talked to was running past me, trying desperately to find a way off the boat. There I was, strolling around with my head up and an inflatable life boat under my arm asking, “hey, where’s this great band I’ve heard about”?

I asked about wéi qí (Go) playing. Some people had heard about it, but almost no one knew how to play. Traditional music? Maybe I could try the big theater in town. Kung Fu? I am training with an absolute treasure of China. Master Lǚ has incredible skills earned over a lifetime of intense practice and he’s one of the only heirs to a fascinating branch of Kung Fu. These skills can only be passed down orally and through direct instruction. The small group of people I train with, the people who will carry this knowledge to the next generation if it is to survive at all, are almost all foreigners: American, Canadian, French and Japanese students. His old Chinese students, from a time when his school was huge, are running businesses now. No one in China has any time to mess around with anything that doesn’t make money. They are running for the lifeboats.

It disappointed me greatly, but I can’t blame the Chinese people. Their lives have been wrecked by revolution, violence and starvation for decades. Now that they have a chance to get out, the air is thick with poison and the food and water are equally questionable. Money is the life boat that can literally save the lives of their family and they will stop at nothing to get it.

Fairness

But pollution and poisonous food aren’t the only reasons people want to escape. Even more so is the sense that there is a complete lack of fairness. No matter how hard you work, if you don’t have the right connections it means nothing. The people I talked to felt that in Germany, Canada or the US they would have a fair chance to earn a living through hard work without having to be related to someone in power. They felt like the laws would be fair. They felt like things that weren’t working could be fixed because they could gather with people and make change.

I grew up in a place where I’ve been taught to believe that if I don’t like something I can work to change it. That ideas is deeply, deeply ingrained in me. It’s still difficult for me to think about being completely paralyzed, as many feel they are in China. I’m not talking about petitioning a Senator to make big change, I’m talking about feeling like a street is dangerous and should have a stop sign, and knowing that I can get the community together to get that fixed. Or that I can get a group together and get some land to start a small community garden. If you can’t talk to the people in power (or they don’t have to listen) and you can’t form or gather in groups, there is nothing you can do that won’t get you shot or imprisoned.

In the end, I don’t think China will sink. Many will die in the icy water. The fortunate few will escape to western countries and live out the last days of prosperity there before those places sink. Ultimately China, like the US before it, will slowly make efforts to clean up the disastrous mess they’ve made while building the empire. In a couple of generations, the children or grandchildren of the people who escaped will be looking for a way to get back on board. If I’m still alive I’ll be happy to teach them all of the culture, kung fu, and wéiqí I’ve been saving for when they are ready.

Over time I discovered that it wasn’t just a weird fashion statement. In the U.S., women are obsessed with finding new ways to burn themselves like rotisserie chickens: not too much, just the right amount of brown. They spend their hard earned money on places that will let them sit inside, in artificial sunlight, and rotate and cook just long enough to look like they’ve been outside.

In China, the aesthetic of choice is the whitest possible skin. The sunscreen (although most people don’t use it) actually makes your skin lighter with bleaching chemicals. The umbrellas protect the carefully preserved skin from the ultraviolet and… there’s more. As I started to walk around with girls, as I am wont to do, I found myself underneath their little protective domes. Mysteriously, I noticed that every time I was walking around with a girl, life was more pleasant. It was ten degrees F cooler! Not only that, but when it rained instead of wrapping my body inside a jacket, trapping more of the 90 degree heat, I was nice and cool and dry.

It took a few months to break down a lifetime of American hipness training, but I finally picked up an umbrella and never looked back.

In fairness, I have to point out that Ray Jardine, ultralight backpacking freak and guru, was the first. He’s not one to fear fashion risks, to say the least, and in Beyond Backpacking: Ray Jardine’s Guide to Lightweight Hiking he talks about how much he loves umbrellas on the trail. I thought it was one of his freakier ideas when I read it years ago and had forgotten about it. Now I’m sold. Despite carrying as little as possible when I travel, I keep a little friend called the “Happy Rain” that I picked up in Taiwan tucked into my backpack and it’s a permanent part of my ultralight travel collection.

• Most likely hypothesis: On a twelve hours overnight bus back from Hong Kong, China to Fuzhou, China the bus circulation wasn’t working properly and/or there was a carbon monoxide leak into the bus. (CO poisoning)
• I arrived to two days of extremely intense headaches that made everything feel like a fog.
• For the next two weeks I had a hard time focusing and my brain felt really tired and confused.
• I went to the hospital and they weren’t much help.
• I suddenly deteriorated rapidly to the point that I couldn’t use a web browser.
• My friend helped me get at ticket to Taipei, Taiwan, where the hospitals are much better.
• By the time I tried to get to the hospital, I couldn’t open a door or speak clearly. I was experiencing the same symptoms as advanced Parkinsons combined with confusion.
• I saw three doctors, including two neurosurgeons, and got another MRI.
• By the end of it all, when the last doctor was seeing me, I was coming out of the worst of it. The MRI looked clear. I was given blood flow drugs and told to chill out and see if it improved.
• I could now open doors, walk around, and talk at almost full speed.
• Basically functional, I decided I couldn’t miss our movie opening at IDFA and, although weird, flew to Amsterdam.
• During the time in Amsterdam I overdid it enough to have the shaking and confusion come back for little visits. I decided to return to the States and rest and recover in a safe environment.
• I am now at my parents’ place outside Chicago recovering from a combination of jet lag and the poison, hoping to be feeling much better in a month or two. I’m still a little shaky here and there and my brain gets tired but nothing like the near-death experience I was having in China.

There is a lot to process emotionally. I really thought it might well be my last few days, if not of life then of being a functional human being. At this point it looks like at best I’ll be right back to myself and at worst I’ll have these minor shakes and slightly diminished mental capacity for the rest of my life. Carbon Monoxide poisoning is a gnarly and unknown beast. So, you know, avoid it!

amsterdam



dad

My head and blood are still in the process of clearing. This place is both comfortable and familiar and subtly strange during the times when my perceptions are slightly off. I’m hoping once the jet lag clears this too will fade. I’ve started small bits of ashtanga yoga to keep the blood flowing and I’m slowly building up work on the elliptical to get my knees back to kung fu.

There are a lot of reminders here, along with the heavy tile and brick and wood, of what has shaped me. There is a pipe organ built into the house, the console completely refinished in oak to match the rest of the house. What seems crazy is so comfortably familiar to us. We carried the pipes out to a rental truck as children. My mother plays it and my father keeps it working. There is now a second pipe organ in the process of being rebuilt and I sleep near its frame in the basement. It, too, is of old wood, extracted from a church. For a hundred years the huge pipes’ deep tones shook the chests of singing faithful. Now the two of us are quiet, resting together, waiting patiently for recovery.

There is a sports car in the garage, but every other thing in the house was bought at a garage sale for less than five dollars or built by my parents by hand. There are stereo systems, some with 8-track cassette players, that cost less than two dollars but are now nestled into custom oak housings and mounted against oak cabinets. There is a 486 computer still being used in the front room to teach my mother’s piano students. It’s attached to a casio keyboard from somewhere in the 1980s. There are curious brass bells tucked around the house and visitors are welcomed by a huge gong, sent by my uncle from Thailand and mounted on a custom wood stand my father built.

Everywhere are reminders of frugality, of hand made things, of old europe. It is a place that speaks of a joy of creation, of novelty, and yet of connection with the past. Before my mother left her library career and started selling them online we had books and oak bookshelves throughout the house. Now there are literally thousands of books filling every space in which we once played. Tucked in the back I can still see the originals, classic books like, “Freedom of the Hills” that taught us rope belays and camping tricks.

Before I return to the earth, before I am clay and brick and old stories, I have another moment to pause. I didn’t plan for it, but no one ever does. It feels like the slow birth of the next round of adventure, a reassuring touch of the sandy bottom of the sea to be sure of its solidity before being carried away by the waves once more. To deepen the appreciation of the ocean’s movements, I’ve been given another glimpse of how lucky I am.

Ironically, I have a different way to experience this place now. My knee is improving and I can walk freely and climb stairs. I can see a place and walk to it fearlessly. The constant stress of school is also suddenly gone. I can enjoy a moment for what it is, without the terror that I’m hurtling ever further behind in every moment that I’m not staring at a book. Together, these two things open this place in a whole new way that wasn’t available before. All of this helped make last night such a surprising delight.

I wanted to see the park. I wanted to be around all of those Fuzhou people enjoying the evening. In the bustle of travel I had somehow lost the tiny sim card for my phone and suddenly had no way to contact anyone. Apparently they had been calling me and gave up and went out to eat without me, leaving me alone to wander. I found one friend, Angela 张萌, who was free and insisted that she go with me to 五一广山 (wu yi square), the park at the heart of Fuzhou. As we waited for the bus she told me about 11/11/11, that day, a day with so many single 1s that the Chinese people call it, “singles day”. Single people are supposed to pair up and have a date that night. I immediately picked up her arm, dropped it into mine, and declared it a date.

I tried to make it as Chinese as possible. First we went to the massive, Burning Man scale statue of Mao Zedong and saluted. The banyan tree is the official tree of Fuzhou, so we found a wise old banyan dripping with beards and asked it, in Chinese, to make tonight perfect. He said sure, and to drink plenty of water. Thus blessed, we walked around the park and the city (after buying some water) just talking and playing and seeking out little places to buy sweets. We danced under the trees and over the steps. We watched drunk groups of Chinese people singing lonely songs to one another in the street. We ended in perfect style in a tower on top of a roof, at 5:00 am, looking out over the city and sipping walnut milk.

The whole night… the simple walking and talking in the light rain, the spontaneous smiles, the people we bumped into… all of it something that only a few days ago I thought would never be possible again. It made everything tingle with an electricity that sang, “just one more.” Just one more magic moment before I go. Just one more silly joke before I go. Just one more dance before I go. Just one more look at a fountain before I go. Just one more smile from a pretty girl before I go. Everything I see, taste, hear or feel now is a bonus, an extra, a treasure. Life has always been this way, so full of treasure. Life will always be this way. It’s so good to notice, feel, and remember this again.

photo links to photographer’s site

The report is in. Both my friend Dr. John Edwards and Dr. Ling here at NTU Hospital thought the MRI of my twisted noodle looked pretty much like the twisted noodles of most people who don’t claim brain failures. IE: Normal. So, that’s good. Dr. Ling was actually a Parkinson’s specialist and she doesn’t even currently see residuals of the Parkinsons symptoms we saw earlier. She prescribed:

1) Some medication to stimulate blood flow in the brain for 1 week
2) Drinking water like it’s Burning Man
3) Two short (10 min) exercise sessions a day
4) More of this confounded rest

So I’m on this routine for the next week and then we’ll see. On the plus side, there is a Taipei film festival coming up and that should provide me with motivation to sit still for extended periods. My brain also gets tired quickly, so that’s helping slow me down too.

And now, to be good and get some of the sleep I’m supposed to be so excited about. Sigh.

This morning I lifted my spoon to my mouth and it felt a little less like a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. That’s a good thing. It definitely seems like mornings are worse and evenings are better. Last night I was able to keep up a nearly Kai speed of conversation for many hours with a series of people. (Some quite interesting humans, actually, including a Thailand flood-stranded Hungarian psych professor and a professional German designer fresh from teaching a conference.) It definitely took some energy, and my brain was being pushed hard, but it was worth it to feel like a normal me on a roll. Given that success I had high hopes for this morning but, while lessened, the pattern repeated. I opened my mouth to tell Nikita how well it was going but the words took their time meandering out of the barn. The tremors were minimal, though, and I did some yoga and kung fu to see what I could manage.

Working around my fuzzy brain, my still recovering knee and my balance was an amusing trick and, of course, a fascinating puzzle. I did pretty well. I could hold tree pose and extend my leg out completely to the side without much trouble. I could throw some pretty fast punches, although my blocking movements seemed a little odd. This could also be from the fact that, because of the knee, I haven’t been able to train for a long time anyway. The hand clenching and wrist flipping tests the doctor used on me were quick and I could hold a pretty steady palm.

After a shower I’m feeling a little tremor-y again and I’m wondering if it’s the oxy zipping down to my muscles and forgetting my brain. There’s definitely some balance between getting my blood and body moving and making sure there’s enough oxy left over, but I really feel like the movement helps overall and may be why I do better in the evening.

Yesterday I dropped by the children’s Go school again and the enthusiastic teacher, still convinced I speak perfect Chinese, loaned me another book and gave me a huge printout of Go term translations. I bought a children’s book of Go problems (level 2, I’ll have you know) for about $6. As soon as I’ve worked through enough of them I’ll go hit her up for a lesson and another teaching game. I think that working on these is a good break from looking at a screen and provides a good challenge to keep my noodle wriggling.

So that’s today’s lesson to all of you, straight from the adorable vocabulary of Chinese people who learn from old textbooks. Keep using your noodles. Keep your noodles wriggling and growing. The Chinese people believe that long noodles on your birthday bring long life, and I think that from udon to linguini to pho to mian to pasta, it’s our noodles that keep us all connected.

photo links to photographer’s site

The Upside?

At first I thought it would be a problem that my speech is incredibly slow and that I sometimes have to simply stop for a moment mid sentence to pull it together. Then I had to explain to my first doctor in Taipei that I wasn’t normal, that something was broken, that normally I talk much, much faster. It suddenly occurs to me that this debilitating situation has reduced me to… normal speed. When I speak Chinese, I now speak slowly and clearly, which makes sense because I’m still learning the language. When I speak English it’s not anyone’s native language and so they assume, while in my head I’m raging behind my slow moving tongue, that I’m being oh so kind by choice. It dawned on me today that I’ve been unwittingly turned into an adorable, kindly old Japanese man.

I’ve also realized that I’m going to still be in Taipei for Halloween, and for that I’ll make the perfect Zombie!

I’ve already said it a thousand times and I don’t think I’d feel bad saying it a thousand more. Every time I walk these streets, and even more profoundly true now that I sometimes need basic help to get around, Taiwanese people are the kindest humans on the earth. I swear today an older man lied to me about being on his way to a bank just to walk me there. We chatted (in Chinese, thank you!) all the way there and as soon as we arrived he dashed off in another direction.

To continue the superlatives, I am the most insane human on earth. Can I not chill out? I of course took it as a personal challenge to make it by myself all the way to another distant bank and back to the hospital. I had to stop here and there to, well, concentrate for a moment to get my bearings. But I made it. And it was a beautiful day. And, honestly, I think the walking helped. Especially after what the doctor said. Oh yes, that.

Well, the Neurologist and five of his furrow-browed students had fun playing the “Kai puzzle” today. He loved my two pages of cartoons explaining my case history. Me sleeping on a bus. Me looking dazed. Me getting poked in the butt with needles. He had the nurse photocopy them for his collection. He asked me if I was an even better illustrator when my brain worked.

The doc ran me through my paces, having me demonstrate slow halting speech and hand tremors, looking up each time to say, “eh? eh?” to the students. He then pulled one of my favorite tricks. He held up my left hand and told me to clench and unclench it each time he counted. “Yi!” I told my hand to close. It thought about it. It closed. “Er!” The hand slowly opened. “Yi! Er! Yi!” It got a little faster, but always lagged a second behind. I focused all of my attention on my left hand. “Kuai yi dian!” (faster). I grimaced and focused all the harder. At last he let me stop. He told me to move them as fast as I could. He then explained that it was a test of rigidity… in my other hand. The tricky devil had been yanking my right hand around in all directions and wanted me distracted so I wouldn’t affect his test. It worked… far too well. Bonus point: doc.

Eventually he summed all of his poking, playing and questions. He decided that there was a good chance I was right about the carbon monoxide poisoning. A big dose, and I would be dead. But a medium dose… would produce this. Basically, Parkinson’s like symptoms with the additional difficulty concentrating. For the fun of the class he then had me stand up and try to walk. He immediately took my arms, which I hadn’t realized were raised, and yanked them down. “See? The classic Parkinson’s stance.” He imitated it and, to my chagrin, I was going right into it. Hunched slightly, forearms up. I stood up straight and let my arms fall. There was no way I was going to let that happen again. I paced around for the students, faster a bit, and we called it a day.

He set me up with an MRI of my basal ganglia. The thinking is that if this confirms his suspicions, we can begin drug treatment. Rapid success with the drugs should further confirm the diagnosis. The downside? He left me with just enough time to get into trouble. This is no China, where I could walk down the hall, get an MRI, and walk back in less than 45 minutes. My MRI is on Saturday and the next appointment on Monday. This set me up for a classic Kai move.

I worked my way back towards the hostel where I’m staying. It’s only two subway stops away, but I needed a little help finding the station. Honestly, I would have needed the same on any normal day. I came out the other end continuing my new walking technique. Do a few kung fu punches and shoulder rolls, loosen up, stand up straight, walk normally. After a few minutes, check my stance. If I was starting to hunch or my arms came up I repeated the shake up and went back to normal. I swear this actually seemed to clear my head a bit. At least, that’s probably why I noticed the huge sign.

On one side, there were two circle people holding hands. One circle person was white, the other black. As my eyes rolled along the sign my heart began to pound in a familiar, normal way. Children’s Go University. I forgot about food, about walking normally, and, well, anything but the giant grin on my face. I leapt through several of the wrong doors before beaming out onto the second floor. It was glorious. A huge space with classrooms full of excited children learning Go. I burbled in random Chinese at the women at the desk who tried to explain that they only taught children. (In Taiwan they call children, 小朋友 (little friends). I thought this was just an adorable address but, in fact, they say this instead of 孩子。)

At last we worked out that they would have a women give me a call. I made it downstairs to have my first ever squid in squid ink pasta when she gave me a ring. Afterwards I wasn’t sure, but I thought perhaps I had agreed to watch a go class. Or take one. Or something. I was pretty sure it was at 7:45pm and made a point to be early.

Do you remember when you believed that if you could just stretch your body long enough, longer than you ever had before, until you almost reached the ceiling, the teacher would call on you? The little girl in front of me almost popped her arm out of her shoulder shouting, “wo zhi dao! Wo zhi dao!” (I know! I know!) She and three boys were all about to explode with certainty that they could solve the Go problem the bouncing teacher was popping up onto the big board with huge magnetic Go pieces. She teased them and toyed with them, playing them like a harpsichord. It was so beautiful to watch. When each child went up and made a wrong guess she would grin and shout, “Hao. Zai jian.” (OK. Good bye.) This was the “nope” that sent the child “oohing” and waving their arms back to their seat. She kept them riveted with her explanations, she drew in the slower children, she dangled the troublemaker like a ball on a string. The energy level was amazing. At the end I wanted to applaud. But it was my turn.

I didn’t tell her about my brain. I wanted to see what I could do and I paid for it. I used every muscle to keep thinking as I tried to understand her Chinese and her explanations of Go. Fortunately, she only dropped her persona ever so slightly for me. When she wanted to show me how bad a move was, she made huge crying sounds and rubbed her eyes. I laughed and told her to keep treating me like a big kid, I needed it. She was fantastic. I actually managed to learn several new josekis, some great closing strategy, and a new way of counting. I left with a borrowed game board, a huge book of professional games to play out, a promise to return tomorrow to pick up a list of go terms and a problem book, and a vague sense that I was forgetting something. Something about…

resting. I’ll never learn.

I spent all day running around a hospital, ranting nonstop with Gunter, strategizing with my parents and sister, exploring the meaning of life with Nikita, trying to walk, struggling to learn Go and understand Chinese… my brain hurts. And yet, dear reader, I knew that I must power through a last effort to get you this update. I built up to it by playing guitar, something that terrified me (I didn’t know if I’d be able to do it) but it went… incredibly well. It really gave me hope. There were plenty of challenges today but I really do feel like I was better off than yesterday and being able to move my fingers fast enough to play guitar was a huge relief.

Love to all. I’ll keep these updates coming. My apologies for not having the energy to edit them, or keep them short!

photos link to photographer’s sites unless they’re mine