Religion
Thursday, April 01, 2004
Bleeding Edge
Here it is, the bleeding edge new version of Brightwind (also accessible from China), hosted on a different server and powered by a different weblogging engine. Right now, it’s very raw (and pink, too), but I’m just so excited and I want to let you know that Brightwind is still alive and kicking, and before long it will be restored to all it’s blueness, with all or most of it’s current entries imported over to the new system. Sooner or later here, when you go to http://www.brightwind.org, you’ll go to those servers there, and not to this one. You’ll be able to see the difference. That system is the better one!
Stay with me here… I’ll be trying to get everything ready over the weekend, but I’m really not sure how much work will be involved. Already, I’ve found some parts of the migrating process confusing and strange, but we’ll see how things go.
In the mean time, I went and got myself a .Mac account, and I put up some new photos there. It’s really simple and temporary, but it works. Check it out by clicking here.
Monday, March 22, 2004
Beautiful Homework
Another big news is that I’ve officially signed up to get an MFA in graphic design from Nanjing Arts Institute (where I happen to be writing this evening). My dream is write my own stories and illustrate them. As it is, I’ve been drawing pictures of my story ideas for years and years, but I never really thought that I could make a living at it. Anyway, I think I can have a chance at it if I get the skills I need to make it happen. And with the skills I do on the road to this goal, maybe I’ll be able to do some professional photography and other art as well! (The photograph associated with tonight’s post was an experiment in how close I can get to the flame without burning my camera—Thank God I still don’t know. Imagine how lucky I would be, though, if someone actually paid me for this!)
Today I just talked to my professor here, and I got my first real homework assignment! I am to work on a logo for a student of mine, and also design a new introduction to myself on this website. I need to try to use style as much as content to give you the kind of impression of me that I would like you to have.
For a long time, I always thought that a web page that was just about me would be a “vanity page,” a fruit of my own self-love and an attempt to show the world how great I was. But now, my professor has helped me understand it as something like an expanded electronic business card on the web. It’s as much a service to all of you out there as it is to myself, in that it helps you to understand what this particular person is all about as he offers his writings and photos to you in this manner.
Not only that, but it’s homework, too! How wonderful art school is!
Photos • Wuxi • Way of Life • Religion • (61) Trackbacks • Permalink
Friday, March 19, 2004
Back in Business
I haven’t written for Brightwind for over a month. In the meantime, a group of American students from my old high school came for a school-sponsored trip to China. The school here where I teach hosted them for a while, and during that time, they met with Chinese students here, danced, played and talked with them, and also visited nearby cities in the daytime. After about five days there, I took them on another adventure to Beijing. We saw the Great Wall, the Forbidden City (which is hardly forbidden anymore), the Ming Tombs, the Summer Palace, the Beijing Opera, and some Chinese Acrobatics.
I was lucky that the two teachers, husband and wife, that came with the students to China both happened to be artists. The man was my art teacher when I went to school there almost 10 years ago. Both of them gave me lots of really neat tips on my photography, and I feel much inspired from meeting them.
The students also proved to be fascinating people. They were very mature, and they embraced their new experiences with open-minded enthusiasm. I’m very proud to have attended the same school as them.
I have much more news to share, but I will save it for my next entry, which, now that I have a bit more time, will be coming much faster than this one has.
Photos • Beijing • Way of Life • Religion • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
One Month, Two New Years
The fireworks burst all around, rising up between the apartment buildings and all around them, firecrackers booming into the earliest hours of the morning. The land where fireworks were invented has little fear of using them to full effect when the occasion calls for it, and for centuries, there has been no greater occasion than that of the Spring Festival.
For Chinese, the Spring Festival actually comes in the winter, but it signalizes that spring is coming. Moreover, according to the traditional Chinese Lunar calendar, the new year starts today. So Chinese first celebrate the international new year, wishing all their friends a happy new year, lots of good luck, all the best things in life, happiness everyday, and so on, and then about a month later, they wish everyone the same thing again for the more important Chinese version of the same holiday.
As I begin writing this, it’s already 1:30 in the morning, and the fireworks are still going. They’re much less than the cacophony of the midnight hour, but it’s not unlikely that if you were sitting here at this moment, looking out of any given window in a Chinese city, you might be able to see more fireworks too.
But maybe this is almost the last of it. Maybe Shanghai is ready to sleep now, and begin living the new year it has just celebrated. There are just a few drunken fireworks now, as if straggling home from a big party, totally unwilling to let it end for real, still singing on the road when everyone else has gone to sleep.
Monday, January 12, 2004
Pandora's Hope
In a previous entry, I wrote about how rare it is that someone really finds “true love” in this world. For a long time, I had cherished the idea that I might be able to create a truly happy and successful family, but after some disappointing experiences, I began to believe that I had failed. I seemed to be, like so many other people, condemned to live my life in solitude, or at best, in a pale shadow of my impossibly idealistic dream.
My dear mother took issue with that. In an email, she wrote to me:
Minor criticism: I wished that the article on marriage would have been more upbeat. There are some good things about being single.
At first, I wanted to respond to her that I didn’t feel upbeat about marriage at the time I wrote that article, and how could I have written something that I didn’t feel? But then I started to think that my negative attitude was the fruit of a belief that, for whatever reason, I was chosen to suffer in this life, to have my dreams dashed to the ground instead of fulfilled. It seemed impossible that things could have happened as they did if this were not true.
But then I happened upon a very special film in a local DVD store, and it started to make me think again, about the great stories that people have always told and remembered through the ages. How many of them ended with the hero realizing that he was simply chosen to fail and suffer in this life? How many of them allowed our hopes to die? Nearly each story which lasts in our hearts is a Pandora’s Box of turns and disasters, most of them far worse than anything I have known. And in so many of them, the main characters feel exactly the same things that I have felt, and for a moment, they too lose sight of what dreams they know are still worth holding on to.
In the end, that may be the purpose of stories—all of them must contain tension and conflict, or else our hearts will not acknowledge them as true or interesting. Our very lives are about resolving the tensions and conflicts we detest so much, and we require that a story bring out in us a new knowledge or a new faith in our power to be the heroes that our lives require us to be.
Because, while the characters of our favorite stories may be up against all the forces of evil combined, their journeys are just reflections of our own, blown up bigger for us to understand and relate to in a new way. Might it not be heroic to keep on believing in the possibility of love and happy family life—while at the same time appreciating the beauty of being single? In some ways, we are always alone—in our secret thoughts, and in the dreams that even we forget upon waking in the morning. Yet in so many ways, it is only through the others, whom we dare to allow into our lives and hearts, that we learn to make sense of who we are, and come to understand what being alone in a healthy way really means.
We began the journey of life at our mothers’ breasts, drinking on the milk of dependence. Slowly, we have learned to be individuals. And yet we must transcend even that independence in order to become interdependent on those whom we love. In that glorious adventure of relying on others as well as ourselves, hope is indeed a most valuable thing.
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