Progress

I suppose the first thing you'd notice is the visa.  Back in my day - mid-'90's - a visa to China was a little hard to get, didn't last long, and when it came in it was a chop (a stamp, to you Yankees) and maybe a grid with some writing.

Now, my visa is slick, uncounterfeitable, high-tech.  It's for a year and multiple entries.  Came back in a week, using a travel agent less than a half-mile away.

The photo (from my Android) could be clearer, but I'm not sure I want it to be.  I suppose my entire life is in those numbers.  Oh, but wait... whatever data is there, it's known to the governments of the USA and the PRC.  Ay-ya.

Shenzhen

We used to laugh at this place, kind of a honky-tonk version of Hong Kong.  Now it's got 16 million people and its own dark signficance.  As complicated as the rest of the China story.  An example from This American Life:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=454

My first stop, after Shanghai, when I get over there.

Back to China

In 1994 I moved to China.  The first person is intentional.  My family came too, but they never really moved there - for them it was just a two-year stay, always looking back to America.  I don't recommend the mixture.

It was Hong Kong, actually, when HK wasn't legally China - under British law, in any event.  My beat was the PRC, plus the rest of East Asia.  Call it all China.  Really, it all is.

The family made it back, bless 'em.  As I've said here before, however, I died in Hong Kong in a typhoon in 1995.  Someone who looks like me did come back, and has played out this strange atonal coda for the last 15 years.

Though a set of coincidences I (or the guy who looks like me) is now going back, to Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, I hope Macau, then up to Changzhou and I hope Nanjing.  Nine days total, pretty much all business.  I'm told it will be different from the world I left behind, but I doubt it. All the promise was there in the '90's, just the buildings hadn't yet been built.  I think the smells will be overwhelmingly familiar, not strange.

And I'm sure the Star Ferry still runs.   When I dream, and live that life I never lived, I am usually on it, going back and forth, Kowloon to Honkers and back.  I keep leaving something on board that I fail to retrieve.

Kleos

An idea long gone.  A reputation so profound that it becomes the son's obligation to carry it on.  No modern counterpart.

Who's to say whether the smartest, the noblest, only lived long ago, and we are just in a long descent into mere survival.

Achilles chose death and glory.

One More, I Guess

The advent calendar thing means I got to almost-daily, a first.  In theory if you want to be read you have to post daily, if not more.  But I don't know - as a reader, with dailies, I wonder if there are episodes I've missed.

But the continuing theme here, and I bloody well mean it, is that it isn't about attracting readers.  (A good thing - currently I have maybe five.  I guess.  I don't know how to ascertain that, actually.)

What this is about is writing, and waving my arm over my head and saying "Here!"  As in second grade.  (Where I really took off as a hand-raiser.  I didn't stop until the second year of prep school, where coolness trumped everything, and hand-raising isn't very cool.)  (OK, no more parentheses...)

It's also about risk and choice, of course, and about the passage of time, and about searching for the Deity.  On the last front, last night as I worried my way through my nightly 3 am wakeup, I reencountered Martin Buber and I-thou.  He may be onto something.  At least it's a process, and lord knows I need one.

And Goodbye To All That

Sometimes this is just spilling, sometimes free-form thinking, sometimes with an agenda, sometimes just a compulsion to be here.  I'm here.  I'm breathing.  I'm typing with my eyes closed, but editing with them open.

There is not much good about the end of the year, a great pile of things left undone and ought not to have done, and I have only seldom loved the arrival of the New Year.  This one, 2012, has every indication of being just another in the pack.  But what a number - what a science fiction number.  By 2012 we were all going to be travelling on light beams and living forever in 28-year-old bodies and wisdom of the ages.

Still waiting for the light beam, with 32 hours to go.  As for wisdom, if it comes, all I know so far is that it won't come from some damn computer.

Christmas Eve and the new moon

A sliver of light that set early.  A long cold night but with stars, those sad remote stars.  Leading to daybreak, the third morning after the solstice.   Another year, another redemption.