In Pursuit of Tai Chi

I was in Boston for a short trip and my old friend Mary, whom I hadn’t seen for a year, visited me from Philadelphia. Over the weekend, she could not stop talking about Tai Chi.

I took my first English writing class from Mary 12 years ago. We have been close friends since. She witnessed my various attempts to fit in America, and I kept her company through her various heartbreaks. Still, her fascination with Tai Chi took me my surprise.

Mary grew up in the Midwest a pious and liberal Christian. After receiving her Ph.D. in a humanities field, she taught writing at universities and was heavily involved in community building and social justice. Despite our great friendship, she would only smile politely each time I sent her books on Chinese history or invited her to visit China. What had suddenly drawn her to the Chi?

You know that I went to Taiwan in 2008 for research on Eastern Healing, said Mary. I arrived in Taipei with my knee and back badly hurting. Dr. Lin, my host, did acupuncture on me and the pain went away! He also suggested that I took up Tai Chi, as a way to change my lifestyle and my health.
After that trip, Mary started taking classes at a dance studio set up by a gay Taiwanese dancer in Philadelphia. The Tai Chi teacher, an Italian American from South Philly, also taught at the community center where most of the students were African American and Muslim women with their faces behind veils.

The South Philly teacher sent Mary, a slow but tenacious student, to classes by his master. Master Ching came from China. He was in the same generation of Jet Li and appeared in many of Jet Li’s early martial arts films. Now he owns a martial arts school in Philadelphia in order to have his two kids educated in America.

I mused at the people of various colors and background threading the story of Tai Chi in America. We were having brunch on the porch of the hotel restaurant overlooking the Charles River and the Boston skyline. Mary was asking how to pronounce the Chinese names of the different moves, for Master Ching could not speak English.

We took a break. Mary read me an I Ching passage she liked. Besides health reason, what else drew you to the Tai Chi oneness? I asked.

Mary was silent for a beat. It’s almost like fate, she said slowly, that the invitation for that research trip came out of the blue from a former student of mine. I had never had any interest in Eastern medicine but I needed a chance to get away. Remember Marcos, the capoeira teacher from Brazil? I thought I had helped him much, trying to get the his non-profit going and helping him with his immigration. In the end he and his wife kicked me out of the organization, telling me that I was too pushy in my desire to help. That experience shook me up. I had always considered it necessary to actively go out and help others. But with Marcos…?

She borrowed $8000 from her high-interest credit card to hire an immigration lawyer for Marcos. She’s still paying it back, having never asked Marcos to pay back.

The church was of little help, Mary continued. I had tried two churches in Philly. Each time I spent my time and energy in building the community, and each time the leadership politics disappointed me. I stayed away, meditating and praying on my own. Then there came Tai Chi. How to maintain a balance between the community and the self? The action and the reflection?

Young and old jogged by the river. The sun shone warmly. It was a beautiful day in Boston. I marveled at the journeys we undertake, across East and West, in pursuit of happiness and peace of mind. Mary used to be my English teacher and my guide; now it is my turn to help her with the little I can.

I taught Mary how to say Open, Close, Push, and Breathe in Chinese, and in her booklet, she earnestly wrote every pinyin down.

To Catch a White Wolf with Bare Hands

The cliché goes—in the new Wild Wild East of China, anything is possible. Tiring as it is, clichés do seem to exist for a reason.

In early 2006, Betty, a Chinese screenwriter friend living in Los Angeles, forwarded me a movie script in English and asked if I could help rewrite. I was having a two-year filmmaking stint then. There was a small circle of bilingual filmmakers in Beijing who, like me, were trying to leverage the West’s growing fascination with China to work on co-production projects.

But few seemed ever to pan out. Some American independent producers I knew made frequent trips to China, visiting film studios and attending film conferences as “Hollywood experts.” The scripts that they pitched varied from mediocre to trash. One such meeting that I attended was about a 3-D film of humans battling giant alien lizards in the Gobi desert. I admired the Chinese studio head for his patient smile throughout the session.

The central issue, like always, is about money. The most difficult for independent producers is to find the “first money”— usually with nothing more than a script, suggested star castings, and a fantasy revenue forecast—to attract later investors. In an industry well known for its crapshoots, this routine always reminded me of the Chinese saying, “to catch a white wolf with bare hands.”

None of the stereotypes seemed to apply to the project referred by Betty, however. For one, the producer had a real office (albeit in an apartment building) staffed with young faces apparently busy in front of computers. Secondly, he did not mention the need for financing once in our two-hour conversation.

“During my most recent trip to Hollywood, I met with executives from Warner Brothers and Dreamworks,” he said with a deep southern accent. “Your friend Betty helped me a lot. She recommended you to help clean up the English translation of the script.”

No wonder—Betty, an established screenwriter, would never associate herself with such a project. It was a story about an American stranded in Beijing, having a relationship with a Chinese girl while still pining for a Middle-eastern girl whom he had met in Paris and who was now trapped in her war-torn home country. It had all the clichés of a Chinese melodrama and none of the cultural understanding of foreign countries. Structurally, it also needed a complete rewrite.

“I wrote the script myself,” the producer announced proudly. He looked like your average Chinese businessman with his chubby face, faded zipper jacket, and a man-purse on the coffee table. “The West has Gone With the Wind and the Titanic. It’s time that we Chinese have a similar movie classic. Once the script is finished, I’ll go back to Dreamworks and ask Steven Spielberg to direct it.”

That made me gasp. I gathered that he had made a fortune from somewhere; he was an avid movie fan and it was his first time at filmmaking. But hiring Steven Spielberg?

Soon after the meeting I had to leave Beijing for six months and forgot completely about the project. In late 2007, while having coffee with a French filmmaker friend, she told me that she had been working on pre-production for a tri-country love story set in Beijing.

It shocked me that the project had survived this long. Then a year later, after the Beijing Olympics, posters for the movie suddenly popped up at all the Beijing subway stations and bus stops. The entrepreneur-writer-producer ended up directing the film himself. He invited the biggest Chinese movie stars to the premier, and in the press, there was orchestrated fanfare of the movie going to the Oscars!

That the movie opened to a box-office disaster did not shock me. Internet users gossiped that he made the movie on borrowed money and was now in big trouble with the debtors.

I never watched the movie. But the more I think about his story, the more my respect for him grew—fool or not, bare-handed or not, he had a great dream of the white wolf and he went after it persistently until catching it.

With people like him, no wonder people call China the new Wild Wild East.

The Lesson of Happiness

Ben was my Ph.D. advisor in Boston. I have forgotten all of what he had taught me about evolution and molecular biology. One thing I do remember clearly was what he had said to me once at his house party, back in 1994.

His family had just moved into a beautiful colonial house in Cambridge and invited everyone working in his lab over for a party. While all the adults chatted over free flowing white wine, his preschool twin girls chased each other around, scattering pearls of laughter in every room.

“They are so cute,” I said to Ben. “Which one is smarter?”

Ben immediately pulled me aside and whispered: “We shouldn’t say anything putting either down. They are both great in their own ways.”

I remember being very embarrassed by my cultural faux pas. To us Chinese, to be put down, by parents and by our peers, is a natural part of growing up. In high school, my grades were never good enough for my parents. When I was number 2 in my class, they pointed to number 1. When I reached number 1, they pointed to some genius who had just won the Maths Olympiad.

But Americans tend to believe in the power of encouragement and positive outlook on life. Thus one often hears enthusiastic “super,” “awesome,” “fantastic,” and “good job!” To us Chinese, how could that kind of seemingly superficial praise really encourage hard work and achievement?

Ben seemed a prime counter example to that Chinese prejudice. In his teenage years, he dropped out of school and worked in hospital, construction and boat building. Then he went to a community college for his associate degree. It was there, at the age of 23, that he discovered his passion for science. He studied hard, received top grades and transferred to Berkeley. After finishing his bachelor’s degree, he studied at Harvard for his Ph.D. and later did post-doc work at the prestigious Mass General Hospital.

As a balding tenure-track professor, he still sported a child-like grin in the lab. He spent most of his time in his small office, among piles and piles of littered paper, reading, thinking and every once in a while, jumping out into the lab area and proclaiming another breakthrough in his thinking. Sometimes I wondered whether he could have come this far if his American family had not supported his early wandering, or if he had been raised in China, being constantly put down and laughed at as a vagabond.

However, Ben’s positive attitude did not get him to the top. He chose an exciting yet extremely risky research topic. After six years, he did not find any major breakthrough and thus did not get his tenure.
I left graduate school before he did. Ben did not try to convince me to stay. Unlike the other professors in our department, he had never frowned upon my taking French lessons or auditing psychology classes. He must have sensed that in some way I was following his footstep.

I wandered—worked in biotech company, moved around the US, went into business, moved back to China to take up filmmaking ... Every time I made a change, my Chinese friends tended to put me down, while my American friends cheer me on. Some days I felt lost and worthless, and others ecstatic at being able to do what I loved.

Now many years later, I am back in business, older, calmer and happier. A week ago, I searched online to find Ben’s whereabouts. Apparently he had started a biotech company that appeared somewhat successful.

Still, what a pity that Ben did not become an academic star with all his intelligence and hard work? I thought.

Then I remembered his child-like grin. I knew regardless of how other felt about his path, he had been enjoying what he did all along.

It was then that I realized what Ben had taught me is not that encouragement and positive attitude beget success; rather, they allow us to try things appealing to our hearts, which, ultimately, make us happy.

Shredded Pork with Sweet Red Pepper

I went back to Chengdu, my hometown in southwest China, for my dad's big 69th birthday over the weekend. Since it's big, we basically ate for two days--Saturday lunch and dinner with close family, and Sunday lunch and dinner with extended family.

On Sunday we lunched at a very nice restaurant in a private room, with two tables for 24 people. Then befitting the image of leisured Sichuanese who spent their days away at mahjong tables, we moved to a crowded tea house by a muddy river to play mahjong. We had three tables of mahjong blocks, one table of nuts and fruits, three kids running around, one baby crying for mommy, and non-mahjong-playing adults whispering family gossips, all under the swaying new green leaves of the willow trees dense with dust.

I had not seen some of my distant relatives for a few years. I used to see them at least twice a year--once during Chinese New Year, and once more during summer break. Time then was also spent over dinner dinner tables and mahjong tables, except that we were all poor then and we had more things to talk about.

Now a veil of silence hanged over the mahjong tables. My grand-uncles and -aunts had all retired with puny pensions. My aunt was worried that her daughter might not test into college next year and asked me for any connection in Beijing. Neither the step-son of my grandpa nor his wife uttered a word. Their daughter is graduating soon but has no job in sight; she had joined the communist party to gain more trust from prospective employers. My grandpa asked if I could help.

The most awkward was with my two distant cousins whom I used to be close to. They were only a couple of years older and always behaved like big sisters to me. In the past, they would jump up with huge grins whenever they saw me. "What do you want to eat this time?" "How did do at your final exams?" "How was university life?" "Ready to play mahjong?"

They shot out questions like cheerful firecrackers. And what little mahjong techniques I know, I owe it to them.

Now they appeared subdued at the table. They might have lost their jobs from their work units. Both had kids who have no access to dancing rehearsals, piano classes or french lessons as kids in my circle of friends. Both of their families still dined at my grand-uncle's old apartment. I did not dare ask how they were doing; nor did they about me. Perhaps it was already obvious how differently we had fared in life.

My sister and I dutifully paid for everything. Dinner passed with small talks about kids. I was bored -- how dreadful it was that, in order to maintain the facade of a harmonious family, we had to waste time over small talks and pretend we all enjoy each other's company. There had been past grudges between the families, about who hadn't treated whom well enough and who had been stingy with money, which I only began to know as an adult.

But to a kid, these relatives were always ready with a smile and red envelopes stuffed with cash for firecrackers. Now, it seems all irreversibly gone, burdened with past differences and growing gaps of the present.

We said goodbye to each other in the dark parking lot. My grand-uncle pushed a bagful of sausages and fermented tofu into my mom's hand. "Something I made," he said, "for the kids to take back home."

"Take them. They are very tasty," one of my cousin chimed in. "His students often came to our house to taste his cooking."

I remembered then the wonderful home cooking that my grand-uncle and -aunt used to prepare for Chinese New Year. "I loved the shredded pork with green peppers you used to make," I said.

"No. It's shredded pork with sweet red pepper that you used to love," my grand-aunt corrected me. "Remember we used to make a big bowlful for you each year?"

Yes, I remember. And that tiny dark dinning room of yours which was always filled with laughter and lively discussion of mahjong tricks, relatives' dating gossips, and what we, as kids then, would turn out someday.

"Come visit us in the summer and we will make it for you again," my grand-aunt grinned. "And bring your girlfriend this time."

"Yeah, come. Definitely come." My two cousins added enthusiastically. Finally everyone was beaming with excitement. Finally we appeared to be a big harmonious family for real.

For that shredded pork with sweet red pepper, I'm planning a trip back to Chengdu this summer.