Encounters

Since KJ #41, we have featured personal accounts of experiences, and most importantly, interactions with local people, in various places in Asia societies. These sketches do not not necessarily fit the genre of traveler's tales — often the writer is a resident too.

We encourage our readers to send us their stories of Asian experiences and insights.

#71 Tea at Shaolin – Bill Porter (From Zen Baggage, Counterpoint, Berkeley; used with permission)
Once the tea was ready, he poured me the tiniest of cups and a mug-sized cup for himself. We both sat there for a minute enjoying the fragrance and then the taste. Yen-ying didn’t wait for me to ask questions. He jumped right in. He said, “When new monks at Shaolin ask me about the Dharma, I tell them to have a cup of tea. If they still don’t understand, I tell them to taste the tea. The Way is in everything we do. Drinking a cup of tea, eating, shitting, it doesn’t matter, it’s all the Way. You can read all the books you want, but unless you find the Way in your daily life, you’re wasting your time.

#70 Edith Shiffert – Jane Wieman
Edith Shiffert has lived in Kyoto, writing poetry and teaching English, since 1963. She has published some twenty books of poetry, including both translations (Haiku Master Buson, White Pine Press) and her own poetry. She has now “retired to the mountains” and is living in Carehouse Yamabiko (“Mountain Echo”) in Ohara, to the northeast of Kyoto, where despite failing eyesight, a right hand crippled by arthritis, and other physical limitations, she still writes and enjoys poetry, in her early nineties.The hillsides and the changing seasons, the small animals and birds, the flowers and mists continue to inspire her, despite the knowledge that she can no longer hike into the hills, follow a stream or a path and find something unexpected.

The whole landscape goes
and then breaks through from the mists
pouring down Mt. Hiei

#69 In the Valley of Lijiang – Or Giladi
Dr Ho, a small mercurial man who appeared to be in his early eighties, shook my hand and immediately burst into a monologue about his achievements. Despite being suppressed by the authorities during the years of the Cultural Revolution, he had carried on his work and cured many thousands of patients from a variety of ailments, using locally sourced herbal medicines. His crowning achievement was curing an American patient of leukemia, and as he was telling me about it he pulled out a photocopy of an American pathology lab report as proof that the patient had been actually cured.

#69 Kashgar to Tashkurgan – Notes from Far West China – Scott Ezell
We sit on the floor eating hand-made noodles, Mahoi’s sister gives me a shy smile and an extra scoop of sauce, consisting of goat meat, peppers, and pickled greens. She places coals from the stove into a steel basin for heat; we sit in a circle with our food in our hands. When the broadcast ends the radio lapses back to static. Mahoi turns it off, and the only sound is the wind sharpening itself like a blade against the corners of the hut..

#68 In Mandalay, Franz Kafka Meets Lenny Bruce — Roy Hamric
The Moustache Brothers, three plastic-faced comedians — Par Par Lay, Lu Zaw and Lu Maw — and their band of family members and friends have spread laughter across Myanmar for decades. But, in this bizarre, benighted land, if the joke’s about the generals, laughter can be dangerous. The price to be paid can be hard labor crushing rocks in a labor camp where people die from overwork and malnutrition. Par Par and Lu Zaw each served six years as political prisoners, including hard labor and solitary confinement.

#67: Little Soman’s Little War – keith harmon snow
Children not yet ten push on the barrel and run with it, rotating the turret and running with it, around and around. The barrel rises and falls across their chests or bellies or noses as the ground rises and falls beneath their feet, and when they reach a certain point in the cycle they throw their bodies over the barrel and tuck their legs and together they are carried forward on the momentum of a long steel pipe cast with the intent to commit murder.

#66:Filming the Foreigner – Wendy Nakanishi
This being Japan, the TV crew is determined to wrench the greatest emotional poignancy from their program, to dredge up any vulnerabilities possible. Y-san dreams up scenarios and my husband and I and occasionally our children adopt the unaccustomed role of actors. Y-san is able to make me weep twice, which I find almost unforgivable.

#63: Boi Mela, Kolkata's Festival of the Written Word – Maura Hurley Basu
Organized annually by the Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Guild, this all-age attraction, which draws a total of 14 million book fans, can only be described as colossal. Over 600 international and national publishers are set up in a maze of temporary stalls and no less than 200 “little magazine” presses take part — the fair is so vast that you can simply never see everything.

#62: The Barber – Dustin Leavitt
My goatee and shaved head perplex many Vietnamese because in their country beards are for venerable old men like Uncle Ho and bald heads for monks, and I am neither. Their confusion revolves, as so often with Americans in Asia, around my role in life and what deference I am owed.

#58: Biung Back Home – Scott Ezell; painting by Tang Min Sho
Biung is from Hong-ye, half an hour north of Taidong City along the valley road, and his albums are everywhere in villages along the coast and up the central rift valley. Aboriginal dance groups from all tribes practice and perform to his songs. He’s got a TV show, all the kids can play his songs on the guitar and when they talk about him they shake their heads and grin and say the words idol, star.

#54: Dogs Barking at the Full Moon – Rey Ventura
“Comrade Rey,” he began, “it must be clear to you that you are now under the jurisdiction of the people's revolutionary government, spearheaded by its advance forces, the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People's Army.”
How could I disagree?

#52: Mediating Between Nature & Imagination: Sudo Hisao – Deidre May
All sorts of creatures riding the hazy border between life and death, heedless of our human time, coming back and forth leisurely across the border of fantasy and reality -- they have been at the heart of the struggle between people and nature all along. I have chosen as my subjects these creatures abused and neglected by the dream of progress. Each is like a discarded aspect of humanity, for we are a part of the natural world. By rediscovering these missing faces from nature, we rediscover the lost or dimmed sides of ourselves.

#51: Forgetting, Remembering: Japan & Brazil – Terry Caesar
Few countries appear to have less in common with each other than Japan and Brazil. Consider only the woman in which each country is personified. The geisha is a figure of culture: exquisitely robed, accomplished in several arts, hushed in manner, and refined in behavior. The samba dancer is a figure of nature: gloriously unrobed, accomplished in only one art, exultant, and exuberant.

#49: Looking for No-Gun Ri – Valerie Perry
The truth of the events at No-Gun Ri — and up to twenty other similar incidents — remained hushed up by the South Korean government for almost 50 years, and the U.S. Army had long denied that American troops were anywhere near No-Gun Ri at the time of the alleged massacre. When I first heard of the AP report that raised this issue, while teaching at a large university in South Korea, I expected many of my Korean friends and students to share their reactions. Surprisingly, no one seemed to even know anything about it. I set out to find for myself the village no one was talking about.

#47: Being American-Asian - Naomi Luttio Wolff
"When I turned four, we moved to rural Kyushu, Japan's southern-most island.  There, it was easy for me to feel Japanese.  In fact, the children in my nursery school had no concept of a foreigner and one boy asked our teacher why my parents dyed my hair blond."

#46: I Spy: Learning from Pyongyang TV – Philip J. Cunningham
What’s it like watching North Korean TV day in and day out?
“We are learning a lot, because the pictures inadvertently reveal things, even though the coverage is quite controlled. For example, we have found that one-quarter of the people we see on TV wear no watches, about half are not wearing socks. Workers in factories often have no gloves or safety equipment.”