tried, but to tell you the truth, I didn’t really like it. It dragged on too long. The characters spent their lives playing mind games.”
“That’s exactly what China is about,” I said. “Fabrications. Mindgames have been the essence of this culture since ancient times. The way to figure it out is to quit thinking about it. ‘A wise man makes provision for the stomach and not for the eye,’ which is to say that you can only feel the truth. Like how trees show the form of the wind, and waves give vital energy to the moon. You will never be able to physically locate the truth. You have to judge by the concrete content of your experience, and not by its conformity with purely theoretical standards. It is a skill that would be blocked if you tried to master it with western methods and techniques.”
I recited an ancient poem to her.
The centipede was happy, quite
,
Until a toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg goes after which?”
This worked his mind to such a pitch
,
He lay distracted in a ditch
,
Considering how to run.
Katherine blinked her eyes with her unusually long eyelashes. I remembered then that I once had a dream about her eyelashes. They turned into bushes, the earth’s eyelashes.
Katherine turned to me and said that she found conversations with me inspiring. She asked if we could talk more. I told her that I did not wish to be interviewed. She asked why and said that sometimes I confused her in a strange way.
I suggested we learn from the centipede, let things take their natural course.
* * *
P ersimmon Village was an extraordinary place in the mountains. Extraordinarily poor and extraordinarily beautiful. The villagerswore rags, and their houses were primitive-looking, mostly made of granite stones. The village was surrounded by persimmon trees and strange-looking plants the villagers called “soap trees.” Soap trees had brown leaves and bore half-moon-shaped, peapodlike fruits. When the fruit ripened in autumn, the children would shake them down, collect them, dry them, and put them in baskets to be used as soap. The villagers didn’t believe in the kinds of soap we used. They bathed their children with soap-tree fruit and washed clothes and dishes with it. The fruit had a wonderful smell, almost like lilac.
The villagers were full of warmth. They made their living by growing tea trees and selling dry persimmons. They had hardly seen city people before. They sent their kids to bring us homemade sweet potato chips and dry persimmons, food they stored for the New Year celebration. In return, we gave the children gifts of fancy notebooks, pencils, and colorful nylon bags. The villagers let us use their elementary-school classroom as our base.
In the evening, with a cup of fresh tea in hand, we went to sit on a mountaintop that overlooked the village. It looked like an ancient Chinese painting, with streaks of gray smoke coming out of the chimneys. We smelled the soap-tree fruit and watched the villagers being greeted by their children as they returned from the day’s work with hoes and other farming tools on their shoulders. Laughter and singing filled the air.
It was here we learned more about Katherine, the girl from Michigan, America. We walked back to the playground of Persimmon Village Elementary School and Katherine showed us her cartwheels.
We watched her with fascination. It was not the way she did the cartwheels that surprised us, it was our own lack of imagination: none of us had expected her to have the movements of a deer, andto turn cartwheels like a professional gymnast. Katherine finished before memory’s claw had a chance to grasp the image. We dared not ask her to do it again. We were afraid she would say that she hadn’t done a thing, that it had all been our imagination.
“Hey, what’s wrong with you?” Katherine shouted. “It wasn’t that bad, was it?”
Our curiosity soared. We asked, in broken English, where she grew up, how long it took her to
“That’s exactly what China is about,” I said. “Fabrications. Mindgames have been the essence of this culture since ancient times. The way to figure it out is to quit thinking about it. ‘A wise man makes provision for the stomach and not for the eye,’ which is to say that you can only feel the truth. Like how trees show the form of the wind, and waves give vital energy to the moon. You will never be able to physically locate the truth. You have to judge by the concrete content of your experience, and not by its conformity with purely theoretical standards. It is a skill that would be blocked if you tried to master it with western methods and techniques.”
I recited an ancient poem to her.
The centipede was happy, quite
,
Until a toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg goes after which?”
This worked his mind to such a pitch
,
He lay distracted in a ditch
,
Considering how to run.
Katherine blinked her eyes with her unusually long eyelashes. I remembered then that I once had a dream about her eyelashes. They turned into bushes, the earth’s eyelashes.
Katherine turned to me and said that she found conversations with me inspiring. She asked if we could talk more. I told her that I did not wish to be interviewed. She asked why and said that sometimes I confused her in a strange way.
I suggested we learn from the centipede, let things take their natural course.
* * *
P ersimmon Village was an extraordinary place in the mountains. Extraordinarily poor and extraordinarily beautiful. The villagerswore rags, and their houses were primitive-looking, mostly made of granite stones. The village was surrounded by persimmon trees and strange-looking plants the villagers called “soap trees.” Soap trees had brown leaves and bore half-moon-shaped, peapodlike fruits. When the fruit ripened in autumn, the children would shake them down, collect them, dry them, and put them in baskets to be used as soap. The villagers didn’t believe in the kinds of soap we used. They bathed their children with soap-tree fruit and washed clothes and dishes with it. The fruit had a wonderful smell, almost like lilac.
The villagers were full of warmth. They made their living by growing tea trees and selling dry persimmons. They had hardly seen city people before. They sent their kids to bring us homemade sweet potato chips and dry persimmons, food they stored for the New Year celebration. In return, we gave the children gifts of fancy notebooks, pencils, and colorful nylon bags. The villagers let us use their elementary-school classroom as our base.
In the evening, with a cup of fresh tea in hand, we went to sit on a mountaintop that overlooked the village. It looked like an ancient Chinese painting, with streaks of gray smoke coming out of the chimneys. We smelled the soap-tree fruit and watched the villagers being greeted by their children as they returned from the day’s work with hoes and other farming tools on their shoulders. Laughter and singing filled the air.
It was here we learned more about Katherine, the girl from Michigan, America. We walked back to the playground of Persimmon Village Elementary School and Katherine showed us her cartwheels.
We watched her with fascination. It was not the way she did the cartwheels that surprised us, it was our own lack of imagination: none of us had expected her to have the movements of a deer, andto turn cartwheels like a professional gymnast. Katherine finished before memory’s claw had a chance to grasp the image. We dared not ask her to do it again. We were afraid she would say that she hadn’t done a thing, that it had all been our imagination.
“Hey, what’s wrong with you?” Katherine shouted. “It wasn’t that bad, was it?”
Our curiosity soared. We asked, in broken English, where she grew up, how long it took her to
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