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.

People often ask me where I’m from. I tell them, “Austin, Texas”. But I grew up outside of Chicago. Some would say I was “from” Chicago. But of course, I was born in Hamburg, Germany, even though I only lived there for a year. I suppose most accurately I’m “from” my parents.

Both of these questions seek to quickly know a person. When someone asks me, “where are you from,” the core of the question is about understanding what shaped me, what kind of person I am, if I can recommend good restaurants there, and if I might know their brother in law. It’s a conversation piece (in terms of restaurants and brothers in law) but also a way of putting me into a convenient box, the “midwestern” box or the “hippie” box. It’s for this reason that I use Austin as their reference point. Despite traveling all over the world, Austin, like no other place, felt like home the minute I arrived. As a box, it fits well enough. I like natural food and hippie things like yoga, but I also like to throw on a cowboy hat and work hard building things in the sun. The suburb where I went to high school has fewer of those things, and wouldn’t stand a chance at giving someone that visual.

Despite the fact that I’ve spent the last few nights sleeping in a basement in Chicago, and the nights before that in D.C., people still refer to me as “living” in China. It certainly best defines my headspace at the moment. I’m taking a break here to recover, but I have a long way to go learning Chinese and extra pairs of underwear in a garage in Fuzhou. If I really thought about it, I’m not sure I’d say I live anywhere at the moment.

I do believe that places shape us as well as represent us. In all of this talk about “moving”, “living”, and being “from” places it’s interesting to think about what list of places would best give someone a sense of me. If I were going to get a list of places tattooed down my ankle, that would define me to someone who found me sleeping, what would they be? Through my parents I’ve been heavily influenced, and defined, by places I’d never been in Europe. I would have listed China long before I began “living” there these last nine months. Austin and St. Charles would have to be on the list along with the Punjab in India.

What would your list be? Do you wish there were more places on it?

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!

Update 2012-04-20

I was gifted a ticket to Austin and I’m currently spending a little slow time around friends and trying to finish some work I have to do. I don’t, and can’t have, any plans right now because everything is a question mark. My life is on hold. I don’t know how long it will take to recover and I don’t know what I can commit to without knowing how much energy I have on any given day. That said, things aren’t bad. I’m in Austin, a place filled with sunlight and good people and I’m alive to see them.

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.

On the desk is some kind of survival spork and I carry metal chopsticks at all times. A long line of parachute cord is stretched tight across the length of the room from the door to a gas line. It’s continuously dripping with socks and long underwear. In a wild attempt to overcome wasteful weight in travel, Kevin and I have stripped our wardrobes to the barest essentials. We arrived with nothing but a book bag of clothes that we wash with hotel soap in the sink each night. Anything else we need to keep warm or look good can be produced with duct tape and towels.

The posters have been a master tool for meeting people. Everyone loves asking me about the guy on my chest and I have a pocket of postcards with the dates of our screenings at gunslinger height. I have it down to a smooth snap and the cards are in their hands. If I talk enough about our insane twelve years of working on this film their eyes glow and their grip on the cards shifts like they are more likely to survive the trip home.

Our second screening of, “Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah” went pretty well. Kevin wasn’t able to get an HD tape made in part because that Tsunami you heard about destroyed the factory that makes tape. He decided that the Beta copy of the film didn’t look nearly good enough and so he got them a digital copy of the film by using the sd card in his pocket camera and a laptop. A good sized crowed stuck around past the QA to hear Gurf Morlix perform and while the funny but crude, “Wouldn’t That Be Nice” got a few on the run they all loved the beautiful songs like, “Ooh Love” and most made a point to meet us afterwards. The legend of Blaze is definitely continuing to spread.

As a random bonus I ran into Andrew Berends at one of the schmoozfests. I still insist that it was my blog post that finally tipped the scales and had Hillary Clinton calling for his release. He doesn’t disagree. Fortunately Kevin hasn’t thought up a scheme to get us arrested in Amsterdam for the same kind of publicity. Yet.

Above: Kevin Triplett sporting a custom duct tape tuxedo made by a fan of Blaze and Kai Mantsch with the poster. We’ve been telling people that it’s a playfully told, fun and uplifting movie about a homeless musician who gets killed.

And yet, the worlds continue. People stand cold and shaking, smoking behind barroom exits, too lazy to end the addictions that continuously pull them away from time with friends. Meaningless relationships continue, neither person willing to make the first step to improve or end them. Everyone’s universe exists when their eyes are open, and ends when they drift off to sleep. My own sleep has no effect on them.

But this is not true either. Some of the earth’s humans were very aware of my potential sleep and cared that I existed, that I continue to exist for a bit longer. The outpouring of concern and affection was truly wonderful and my response to it was, sadly, an old pattern of mine played out yet again.

It took a long time to go public with my plunging health. For some reason I have always been obsessed with putting my own needs behind the needs of others and I refuse to become a burden or worry to anyone, to the point of absolute absurdity. The more I need help, the more fervently I refuse, captured most vividly in a moment years ago when I was homeless.

I was emotionally upset because of a breakup and without anywhere to go was living in a car, as one often does. (Well, OK, this one.) I managed to get internet access by going to the public library with a tiny parade of homeless people each morning and washed my face in restaurant sinks. At some point I stopped by my friend Eric Peterson’s house. As we were talking, he noticed that I hadn’t eaten much and pulled out a bowl of grapes and put them on the table. They were fresh and cool and I love the feel and sweet taste of grapes. When I didn’t take any, he began offering them to me. I refused. The more he insisted, the more angrily I resisted. I couldn’t possibly accept the grapes or anything else.

It was Angela Lee who used her shrewd powers of human understanding to trick me. She explained that she needed help. Her lawn needed mowing and she needed someone to watch her dogs while she was away. If only someone would live in her spare bedroom for a while and take care of the place… I couldn’t possibly refuse to help a friend. I moved in and suddenly had a roof over my head and a kitchen to cook in. I had dogs to care for and a way to earn my keep.

Posting publicly from China to let people know the severity of my situation was extremely difficult. It was an acceptance that something really was horribly wrong. It put the burden of worry onto my friends and family. It implied a need for help.

By the time I had to get to a hospital or buy a ticket out of Fuzhou, I had no choice but to accept help. I couldn’t even type well enough to buy a ticket and I was too confused to find my way around a hospital. At the same time, people from around the world began flooding me with concern and offers to fly in or fly me out. I was overwhelmed by both the outpouring of concern, the sense that my situation mattered to other people, and a tremendous sense of guilt. I was forever trying to find ways to keep people updated, and assure them that things would be fine, at the same time I was working towards an acceptance that there was every chance I might not recover. (Carbon monoxide poisoning has an extremely variable recovery rate. Many times the damage is permanent, while just as many times people recover over years.)

Once in Taipei I made two big counterintuitive decisions. The idea of struggling through a 23 hour flight to the US and fighting lawyers and doctors through cold heartless hallways to an almost certain debt for life made the decision to not fly home easy. The oddest decision, for me, was around who might have flown to my aid. Following the same pattern as above, allowing my parents to come meant accepting that something was terribly wrong. It meant bringing people I cared about into a situation where they didn’t know the language or culture and wouldn’t have anything to do but worry about me. I would, effectively, be a burden. Allowing my friend Ori to come, a guy who has sworn to travel to Asia for a year and never left, a guy who can delight in sleeping on a train station floor, was a way to help him get into motion and do what he’s wanted to do for so long. There was no guilt in that, in helping a friend, although in the end I decided against having anyone fly in.

I still have some recovering to do. I’m here in Amsterdam because I couldn’t possibly miss the opportunity to help show a film that I’ve been a part of for twelve years. In classic form, now that I’m stronger and more able I’m now exhilarated by the idea of having my parents in Taipei. But following this I am going to do my best to slow down and give myself a break for a while. I’ll give myself a few grapes that, perhaps, I’ve earned. One day maybe I’ll learn to accept the grapes when I have nothing to offer in return.

photo links to photographer’s site

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.