Thursday, August 28, 2008
If I had a time machine...
If I had a time machine, and were told I would have 10 minutes to go for it, I would give up the chance to talk to any number of famous musicians and other luminaries if I could go back to August 28, 1963, the day that Martin Luther King Jr gave his “I Have a Dream" speech, and tell Dr King about the speech I am listening to right now.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
BANG!
So I’m sitting at the junction of the Loop and Slide Road this morning, minding my own business and waiting for a break in the traffic so I can head north on Slide Road, when BANG! A huge jolt, with a simultaneous huge thundercrack of sound, scaring me half out of my wits, and I realize: holy crap, I have just been rear-ended.
It was not that serious. Of course, it was some youngster driving his Dad’s car, or at least the car was in his Dad’s name. I have no idea what distracted the kid; when I looked in the rear view mirror I didn’t see a cell phone, but he could have dropped it by then, or he could just as easily been fiddling around with the radio, or taken the ramp too quickly to stop, or he could have just been in La-La Land. Either way, he got the worst of it -- I have a Honda CRV, and that big spare tire on the rear end of the car saved my car’s bacon, but did quite a pitiful job on his; I had a teeny little dent behind the tire, but his right front lights were smashed and the hood and front fender bent up.
An interesting thing happens to me in unexpected situations like this. I’ve only been in one other wreck – MUCH more serious – but I observed the same thing. When it happens, I feel an initial surge of shock and intense anger. (Like today, when I whirled around and yelled “What the &*%$ is the matter with you!” although I doubt he heard that, unless he reads lips.) This dissipates in about 5-10 seconds, after which I feel pretty calm and go into a sort of “OK, now what needs to be done” mode. I don’t know if this would be true if I were bleeding all over the place or had a dead passenger, but fortunately, knock wood, I haven’t had to find that out.
When I got out of the car I didn’t yell at the kid or even chastise him; I just looked over both cars with him, took his information, gave him mine, and told him that “these things happen” and “we were both very lucky that no one got hurt,” and “It could have been much worse.” I did scold him a little and tell him that he needed to be more careful, but at that point I think he was just relieved that I wasn’t screaming at him, or that I wasn’t some cowboy with a shotgun. I didn’t call the police; I decided that it wasn’t serious enough to cause a traffic jam on the busiest street in Lubbock at 10:45 in the morning, so we just drove away. My guess is that I will probably hear from his insurance company, or his Dad, or both.
After that, I calmly drove away and did the following:
1) visited my mechanic to make sure I was correct that there was no damage;
2) called my insurance company to report that it had happened and tell them my side of the story, just in case Junior gets creative with his explanation of the incident;
3) at the insurance company’s request, filed a crash report with the police, who told me that I did everything correctly and it was not necessary to call the police in the case of a fender-bender where there were no injuries;
4) called the insurance company again to report that I didn’t have some of the information they asked for, and was assured that I had enough info and it was OK.
So basically it was not that big a deal. But during the course of all this, I realized that this “calm” thing that happens is actually not cool level-headedness. I think it’s some kind of protective biological thing. You may not be freaking out, but you’re actually not thinking completely clearly. I realized that although I had felt “in control” (hah), I was actually quite shaken up – for example, I didn’t notice what make of car the other guy was driving, and you’d think that would be a no-brainer. I only knew it was crumpled in the front, and it was red. I also realized that my neck hurt. Shit! How can I have whiplash when my car isn’t even damaged? I also felt very disoriented. That’s when I started to feel really upset. Coyotebanjo graciously offered to have lunch with me, and after that I went to the chiropractor (whom I had just seen, since I managed to give myself a slightly swollen disk sitting on the diabolical chairs at Viol Conclave wrestling with an instrument I didn’t know how to hold yet.) He re-adjusted everything and put my neck back where it was supposed to be quite handily. (Digression: I’ve heard there are bad chiropractors out there, just as there are bad doctors and everything else, but chiropractors have improved the quality of my life consistently since the first time I managed to yank my 3-year old arm slightly out of its little socket and old Dr Fiske stuck it back in; I thought he was Jesus. Over the subsequent years I watched him put my stonemason Dad back together dozens of times. I have had nothing but good luck with chiropractors ever since, including the two I see now, one of whom once brought Coyotebanjo from being an immobile agonized wreck lying on the floor to a condition of walking upright in the space of about 20 minutes.)
So I’m OK now; I’m sitting in a comfy chair, with an Advil doing its work. But the real thing that stays with you after an incident like this is how fast and how unexpectedly something really screwed up can happen to you. We all know this, of course, and see examples of it every day, but until it hits you on your own noggin, it doesn’t really sink in. We have all these great plans for our lives, and of course that’s not a bad thing, but at the same time we don’t know what the hell is going to happen to us from one moment to the next.
About 12 years ago I was in a serious car accident in Bloomington, Indiana. I was going down a main road at about 25-30 mph when some cub scout in his Firebird ran a stop sign on a side street and T-boned my car on the left. Fortunately I saw him shooting out from behind the trees just in time to swerve my car sharply to the right, so he hit me an angle instead of directly hitting the driver’s side. (The cops told me this quick-thinking move is what saved me from serious injury or worse.) The sound of two vehicles colliding like that is indescribable; it gave me nightmares for weeks, and brought the inhabitants of the neighborhood at 10th and Lincoln streaming out of their houses like ants. Both cars were totaled. After climbing out of the steaming wreck, I stood there bewildered; my car was a complete accordion, but I appeared to be suffering nothing more serious than a seat-belt welt, a torn dress, an aching toe and a jolting but not-serious bump to the head. My hands and my head hurt, but nothing else hurt. I could not believe that I could be uninjured. I was so flabbergasted by this that, having read one too many near-death-experience books, I actually walked over to the totaled car and looked into it to see if my dead body was in it (my Tibetan monk friends laughed uproariously when I told them I had done this.) When I realized I was in fact not dead, I opened the car door and started gathering up all the junk in the back seat, because I had a bunch of CDs in there, some of which I had borrowed and needed to return. At the time, I felt like I was being very level-headed; I realized later that it was crackers. (My car’s a steaming wreck; let’s check to see if our physical body is still in there, and oh by the way let’s get the CDs out.) When the paramedics came, they all rushed over to both cars; half of them started removing the poor bleeding (but OK) kid from the Firebird, and the others looked confused, and then ran over to me a said “Where’s the driver of the white car?” I said “I’m the driver of the white car,” and they just stared at me for a moment. One of them finally said (in disbelief) “You’rethe driver of the white car?” I guess I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. At that point they all went bananas with questions, but all I remember is saying “My hands hurt, and I think I bumped my head, but I’m not injured.” They tried to drag me to the hospital, but I steadfastly refused – can’t they see that I’m fine? They kept asking me my name, how old I was, and questions like “Who is the President?” while I stood there thinking “Why are they asking me all this crazy shit? The kid in the Firebird is covered with blood!” Finally, after the cops came and took all the reports, the cops put me and the driver of the Firebird in the squad car. I remember asking the kid if he was OK, and he said “Yes” and said he was sorry, and I said it was “OK.” I insisted on being taken back to work, which they did; when I got to work, Coyotebanjo ran over to me and said “What happened?” and that’s when I collapsed sobbing in a chair.
That night, I remember thinking that I could have been killed in a flash; and when the enormity of that had sunk in, so did the dharma lesson that comes with it, which is that any of us could die at any moment. I remember thinking that if I had been killed, and if in fact any part of our consciousness as-we-know-it survives death (a big if), I would not have regretted the way my life had gone. Even though I was a penniless graduate student, I had followed the path I wanted to follow, and I felt pretty good about the choices I had made and the things I had accomplished. I told several of my friends about this, and in fact one of them reminded me of it many years later after he had a health scare, and said that he had felt the same way.
The sad mystery of this is that it is no longer true, and I can’t quite articulate why. Oh, I still believe that my life for the most part has been fine, and very fortunate -- as I said in my “Great Wall of China” post, I had an experience up there that reminded me that I have had a lot of remarkable experiences, and enjoyed the fruits of a lot of good karma, and that I am deeply grateful for all of it and for the life I’ve been privileged to lead. But, whether because of more focused spiritual practice, or because more people I love have grown old and died (or didn’t grow old and died anyhow), I seem to feel a greater awareness now of all the things I could have / should have done, or said, or decided differently; of the consequences of my actions and choices, and of things that I have not done. And when I have an experience in which one is reminded of the tenuous nature of our existence, I seem to have the overwhelming inner response I’m not finished with this one yet. Why? Perhaps there is something urgent that still needs to be done; but at the same time, I feel quite convinced that most of us will still feel as though we’re “not finished” while lying on our death-beds. I only know of one way to deal with that conundrum, and that is to muddle along and try daily to remain mindful of the old Zen dictum: do not waste your life. That holds true whether you believe that you will simply become compost, or if you believe that in addition to becoming compost your "continuum of consciousness" will continue in some way. For that matter, if you believe the latter, you aren't finished, are you? And if you've taken the Bodhisattva vow to return and help other sentient beings "as long as space remains," you ain't gonna be finished for a long, long time.
It was not that serious. Of course, it was some youngster driving his Dad’s car, or at least the car was in his Dad’s name. I have no idea what distracted the kid; when I looked in the rear view mirror I didn’t see a cell phone, but he could have dropped it by then, or he could just as easily been fiddling around with the radio, or taken the ramp too quickly to stop, or he could have just been in La-La Land. Either way, he got the worst of it -- I have a Honda CRV, and that big spare tire on the rear end of the car saved my car’s bacon, but did quite a pitiful job on his; I had a teeny little dent behind the tire, but his right front lights were smashed and the hood and front fender bent up.
An interesting thing happens to me in unexpected situations like this. I’ve only been in one other wreck – MUCH more serious – but I observed the same thing. When it happens, I feel an initial surge of shock and intense anger. (Like today, when I whirled around and yelled “What the &*%$ is the matter with you!” although I doubt he heard that, unless he reads lips.) This dissipates in about 5-10 seconds, after which I feel pretty calm and go into a sort of “OK, now what needs to be done” mode. I don’t know if this would be true if I were bleeding all over the place or had a dead passenger, but fortunately, knock wood, I haven’t had to find that out.
When I got out of the car I didn’t yell at the kid or even chastise him; I just looked over both cars with him, took his information, gave him mine, and told him that “these things happen” and “we were both very lucky that no one got hurt,” and “It could have been much worse.” I did scold him a little and tell him that he needed to be more careful, but at that point I think he was just relieved that I wasn’t screaming at him, or that I wasn’t some cowboy with a shotgun. I didn’t call the police; I decided that it wasn’t serious enough to cause a traffic jam on the busiest street in Lubbock at 10:45 in the morning, so we just drove away. My guess is that I will probably hear from his insurance company, or his Dad, or both.
After that, I calmly drove away and did the following:
1) visited my mechanic to make sure I was correct that there was no damage;
2) called my insurance company to report that it had happened and tell them my side of the story, just in case Junior gets creative with his explanation of the incident;
3) at the insurance company’s request, filed a crash report with the police, who told me that I did everything correctly and it was not necessary to call the police in the case of a fender-bender where there were no injuries;
4) called the insurance company again to report that I didn’t have some of the information they asked for, and was assured that I had enough info and it was OK.
So basically it was not that big a deal. But during the course of all this, I realized that this “calm” thing that happens is actually not cool level-headedness. I think it’s some kind of protective biological thing. You may not be freaking out, but you’re actually not thinking completely clearly. I realized that although I had felt “in control” (hah), I was actually quite shaken up – for example, I didn’t notice what make of car the other guy was driving, and you’d think that would be a no-brainer. I only knew it was crumpled in the front, and it was red. I also realized that my neck hurt. Shit! How can I have whiplash when my car isn’t even damaged? I also felt very disoriented. That’s when I started to feel really upset. Coyotebanjo graciously offered to have lunch with me, and after that I went to the chiropractor (whom I had just seen, since I managed to give myself a slightly swollen disk sitting on the diabolical chairs at Viol Conclave wrestling with an instrument I didn’t know how to hold yet.) He re-adjusted everything and put my neck back where it was supposed to be quite handily. (Digression: I’ve heard there are bad chiropractors out there, just as there are bad doctors and everything else, but chiropractors have improved the quality of my life consistently since the first time I managed to yank my 3-year old arm slightly out of its little socket and old Dr Fiske stuck it back in; I thought he was Jesus. Over the subsequent years I watched him put my stonemason Dad back together dozens of times. I have had nothing but good luck with chiropractors ever since, including the two I see now, one of whom once brought Coyotebanjo from being an immobile agonized wreck lying on the floor to a condition of walking upright in the space of about 20 minutes.)
So I’m OK now; I’m sitting in a comfy chair, with an Advil doing its work. But the real thing that stays with you after an incident like this is how fast and how unexpectedly something really screwed up can happen to you. We all know this, of course, and see examples of it every day, but until it hits you on your own noggin, it doesn’t really sink in. We have all these great plans for our lives, and of course that’s not a bad thing, but at the same time we don’t know what the hell is going to happen to us from one moment to the next.
About 12 years ago I was in a serious car accident in Bloomington, Indiana. I was going down a main road at about 25-30 mph when some cub scout in his Firebird ran a stop sign on a side street and T-boned my car on the left. Fortunately I saw him shooting out from behind the trees just in time to swerve my car sharply to the right, so he hit me an angle instead of directly hitting the driver’s side. (The cops told me this quick-thinking move is what saved me from serious injury or worse.) The sound of two vehicles colliding like that is indescribable; it gave me nightmares for weeks, and brought the inhabitants of the neighborhood at 10th and Lincoln streaming out of their houses like ants. Both cars were totaled. After climbing out of the steaming wreck, I stood there bewildered; my car was a complete accordion, but I appeared to be suffering nothing more serious than a seat-belt welt, a torn dress, an aching toe and a jolting but not-serious bump to the head. My hands and my head hurt, but nothing else hurt. I could not believe that I could be uninjured. I was so flabbergasted by this that, having read one too many near-death-experience books, I actually walked over to the totaled car and looked into it to see if my dead body was in it (my Tibetan monk friends laughed uproariously when I told them I had done this.) When I realized I was in fact not dead, I opened the car door and started gathering up all the junk in the back seat, because I had a bunch of CDs in there, some of which I had borrowed and needed to return. At the time, I felt like I was being very level-headed; I realized later that it was crackers. (My car’s a steaming wreck; let’s check to see if our physical body is still in there, and oh by the way let’s get the CDs out.) When the paramedics came, they all rushed over to both cars; half of them started removing the poor bleeding (but OK) kid from the Firebird, and the others looked confused, and then ran over to me a said “Where’s the driver of the white car?” I said “I’m the driver of the white car,” and they just stared at me for a moment. One of them finally said (in disbelief) “You’rethe driver of the white car?” I guess I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. At that point they all went bananas with questions, but all I remember is saying “My hands hurt, and I think I bumped my head, but I’m not injured.” They tried to drag me to the hospital, but I steadfastly refused – can’t they see that I’m fine? They kept asking me my name, how old I was, and questions like “Who is the President?” while I stood there thinking “Why are they asking me all this crazy shit? The kid in the Firebird is covered with blood!” Finally, after the cops came and took all the reports, the cops put me and the driver of the Firebird in the squad car. I remember asking the kid if he was OK, and he said “Yes” and said he was sorry, and I said it was “OK.” I insisted on being taken back to work, which they did; when I got to work, Coyotebanjo ran over to me and said “What happened?” and that’s when I collapsed sobbing in a chair.
That night, I remember thinking that I could have been killed in a flash; and when the enormity of that had sunk in, so did the dharma lesson that comes with it, which is that any of us could die at any moment. I remember thinking that if I had been killed, and if in fact any part of our consciousness as-we-know-it survives death (a big if), I would not have regretted the way my life had gone. Even though I was a penniless graduate student, I had followed the path I wanted to follow, and I felt pretty good about the choices I had made and the things I had accomplished. I told several of my friends about this, and in fact one of them reminded me of it many years later after he had a health scare, and said that he had felt the same way.
The sad mystery of this is that it is no longer true, and I can’t quite articulate why. Oh, I still believe that my life for the most part has been fine, and very fortunate -- as I said in my “Great Wall of China” post, I had an experience up there that reminded me that I have had a lot of remarkable experiences, and enjoyed the fruits of a lot of good karma, and that I am deeply grateful for all of it and for the life I’ve been privileged to lead. But, whether because of more focused spiritual practice, or because more people I love have grown old and died (or didn’t grow old and died anyhow), I seem to feel a greater awareness now of all the things I could have / should have done, or said, or decided differently; of the consequences of my actions and choices, and of things that I have not done. And when I have an experience in which one is reminded of the tenuous nature of our existence, I seem to have the overwhelming inner response I’m not finished with this one yet. Why? Perhaps there is something urgent that still needs to be done; but at the same time, I feel quite convinced that most of us will still feel as though we’re “not finished” while lying on our death-beds. I only know of one way to deal with that conundrum, and that is to muddle along and try daily to remain mindful of the old Zen dictum: do not waste your life. That holds true whether you believe that you will simply become compost, or if you believe that in addition to becoming compost your "continuum of consciousness" will continue in some way. For that matter, if you believe the latter, you aren't finished, are you? And if you've taken the Bodhisattva vow to return and help other sentient beings "as long as space remains," you ain't gonna be finished for a long, long time.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Final Installment, China Trip Notes, Chapter 14: Beijing 05.27-28.2008
OK – it’s true; I didn’t finish posting all the China Trip Notes, having been waylaid by Massachusetts, family visits, and a desperate attempt to learn the rudiments of the viola da gamba (see previous post.) Since historically one of my character flaws is not finishing things that I start (see all previous references to the doctoral degree), I feel it would be good for the continued progress of my particular mental continuum to bring the Trip Notes to a close…so here they are, from the pub session we played at Paddy O’Shea’s to the last concert in at the PLA Military Band Hall. They should be a good lead up to your Olympic viewing activities later this week.
Beijing: 5.27.2008 Evening
There is an Irish pub in Beijing. That may sound a little weird, but having traveled around quite a bit, I am now pretty much convinced that there is probably an Irish pub in Ulan Batar and maybe even a few in Khazakstan or Antarctica. There’s even an Irish pub now within a 3 mile strike of my childhood hometown, and there isn’t even a damned Borders or Starbucks there yet.
Paddy O’Shea’s is a very attractive area of Beijing, with tree-lined streets. The front is open in a kind of Euro-boulevard-café style that permits folding back the doors so that the sidewalk tables and the interior are contiguous. It was a strange sight, in a way; suddenly, in the middle of this extremely foreign city, there’s a typical-looking Irish pub full of white people drinking Guinness and eating pub food, presto! as if we had just clicked the heels of our ruby slippers and said “There’s No Place Like Home.”
But enough about Oz, and down to the business at hand: Guinness and pub food. I don’t even like Guinness (I think I ordered a Newcastle Nut Brown), but oh Lord the food. Salad, by God, and chips, and Irish-style vegetable soup…at least one of the guys had fish and chips; someone had a club sandwich, I think. I don’t remember anything for about a half-hour after that except grateful hoovering of food that had not been soaked in oil or have a previous life as an invertebrate.
The publican was a gentleman who obviously had some skills in the pub business. He seemed to understand both the thing he wanted to create and the local environment, and how each would have to accommodate the other. He was incredibly friendly. The situation had enough of an Irish context that one felt secure in proceeding exactly the way you would in Ireland, and that everyone would have a set of perspectives in common; you felt as though you could relate, and as though Glen had that same respect for the music and the musicians; you trusted that he would take care of you the way an Irish barman would. And he did, from the food and drink to the posters he had made for our appearance there, featured prominently on the door.
We didn’t know exactly what to expect in terms of who might show up. Before we left for the trip, we had found a clip on YouTube that suggested a very high caliber of music was being made at Paddy O’Shea’s; it later transpired that the players on YouTube ringers brought in from Ireland for Paddy’s Day. On the evening that we were there, it was mostly the three of us playing. We had located ourselves at a table near the front of the building, but it wasn’t an ideal placement, because we had our backs to the sidewalk (no corner tables were available.) But it was fine. We played typical Irish session music (jig and reels, mostly); it was too noisy to play songs, especially as it got very crowded after awhile (a large contingent of our Band Student Fellow Travelers eventually showed up for the festivities, as we had hoped they would.) There was also a variety of people who had made a special effort to come hear the music. Among the interesting folks we met:
1) A Scottish gentleman who was a professor and a consultant for a Chinese education agency. Coyotebanjo noticed him singing along, and it turned out that he was Glasgow-born of a Donegal singing family. He had come especially as a result of the advertising Glen had done.
2) A young Californian and his Chinese wife, with several of their friends, sitting at the table next to us. They were in the embassy district because they were headed to the American Embassy the next day to try to get her a visa so she could visit the US with him. They were anxious about this impending meeting; and, perhaps in an attempt to relieve the pressure, became drunk as lords.
3) A fellow from the US Embassy, who had tried to book us for an embassy reception on the same night as our concert, but failing that, had come along to listen (and brought reinforcements in the form of several young female friends who attempted a few Riverdance moves.) Mind you, we only knew he played because he approached some of the Band Students present, and asked if they thought we would mind if he were to ask to play. Turned out he was a whistle player. If I remember correctly, there was some problem with the whistle, because Coop ended up loaning him one of the extra D whistles he’d brought. He played enthusiastically along with us, and it became quite clear that he wanted to sing as well. We agreed upon a song we both knew (he knew mostly pub songs) and whoa! didn’t he have the loudest, most piercing, huge Clancy Brothers tenor voice you’ve ever heard. You could hear him over the entire lot of the hollering masses in the bar.
In all, it was a lovely evening and pretty much a success; I certainly think the Band contingent greatly enjoyed themselves. (They were probably so elated over having fish and chips and real beer that we could have sung Happy Birthday all night and they would have been content!). As we were leaving, a woman came up to me and told me that she had loved the music, that it had taken her back to Galway and reminded her of the music at the Crane (for those who are not familiar with the whole Irish music culture, this is extremely high praise). She asked me if we’d ever played there; I said that the guys had done some sessions there. Turned out that she lived in Australia for a long time, and I don’t remember what had brought her to China – all I remember is that she then asked me my name, and it transpired that we both had the same first name; we both marveled over that coincidence.
Our driver, a Chinese fellow named John with excellent English, had assured us that we could call him for a pick-up and drive back to the hotel “even if it was very late.” Further questioning about “how late” seemed to suggest that anytime was OK, so we took him at his word and called, although it was midnight. He did come to pick us up promptly, and although I had the distinct vibe that we may have pushed the envelope on “how late” was acceptable, he was perfectly courteous about it – and back to the hotel we went.
Beijing, 5.28.2008: Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City
Reflections on Tian’anmen Square, with polemic
The first week of June 1989, I was driving from Massachusetts to Indiana with an early music friend. We were on our way back from an early music camp. Every time we turned on the radio, more horrible reports came in about the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on student protests in Tian’anmen Square, Beijing. The protests, by students, intellectuals, labor, and others calling for democratic reform, had been gaining steam for a couple of months before that. The matter came to a head the first week of June, when the movement was crushed with great force by the Chinese army.
This is the incident that most over-35 Americans think of instantly when someone says “Tian’anmen Square.” The image of that defiant student became world-famous, and is emblazoned on the collective memory.
But today, May 28, 2008, I am standing in Tian’anmen Square, and Coop has just asked our tour guide where the “world-famous picture of the student standing in front of the tank” was taken, since he wants to take a photo. She has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. She has never seen this picture he describes.
It’s interesting to examine one’s first reaction to this. It’s a kind of knee-jerk American guns-up reaction: "of course, the Commies have suppressed this information from their people." But is our guides’ lack of knowledge genuine? Do they really not know about the 1989 protests, or have they been trained that they must under all circumstances avoid any discussion of this event? Many Americans would assume the latter, but I would just as quickly believe the former. Why? Because when I teach History of Rock and Roll, and I play Neil Young’s “Four Dead in Ohio,” I have to explain Kent State to my American students. A sobering majority of them have never seen the 1970 photographic image of the young Kent State co-ed screaming while her friends, protesting the Vietnam War, are shot down by the National Guard. In fact, not only have they never seen the picture -- they don’t know it happened. They are shocked. That photo was also famous, and I would have thought that it was also emblazoned on the collective memory. Our tour guide’s perplexity, just like my student’s lack of information, is a wake-up call: we cannot continue to allow the suppression of history. We cannot stand around and point the finger at places like China while our own students barely know that a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. We can not, we must not continue to allow the suppression of history as it is happening here, in our own country.
End of polemic.
Today, Tian’anmen Square is full of tourists, Chinese people queue-ing up to see Mao’s Tomb, and vendors selling hats and watches whose face features images of a hand-waving Chairman Mao. (I wonder if anyone during the Cultural Revolution could have imagined that scenario in their wildest dreams.) They descend on our tour group as we stand there. Coop buys several Mao watches, and when he is finished haggling, another vendor comes up and tries to sell him three more. (As Coop said, “He needed those three, he might need three more!”)
This absolutely huge, paved area is clearly a source of civic pride to the Beijing-ers. At 100 acres, it’s the world’s largest open-air urban public square. We saw a whole team of workers whose job is apparently to weed and clean out the cracks between the squares of pavement (think about this when you have a day when you hate your job.) Our tour guides herded all of us into a group for a photo shot, and I noticed that there were other groups involved in this same activity. It became apparent that the organized tour companies bring their large groups here for the “group photograph.” In the case of our company, they develop the photo and put into a nicely bound tourist booklet which you can order and pick up the next day for about 14 bucks. (Of course I bought one.)
At the end of the square is the entrance to the Forbidden City. In fact, “Tian’anmen” means Gate of Heavenly Peace, so Tien’anmen Square is the Square that leads up to the Forbidden City gate. Above the arched opening that leads through the gate into the Forbidden City is a huge picture of Mao. We spent some time trying to get humorous photos posed as if the picture of Mao was between Coop’s thumb and forefinger (the place had so much historical import, and such heavy vibes, that a little comic relief was really welcome, for me at least.)
The Forbidden City
From the DK Eyewitness Guide to China:
Forming the very heart of Beijing, the Forbidden City, officially known as the Palace Museum (Gugong), is China’s most magnificent architectural complex and was completed in 1420. The huge palace is a compendium of Imperial architecture and a ;asting monument of dynastic China from which 24 emperors ruled for nearly 500 years. The symbolic center of the Chinese universe, the palace was the exclusive domain of the imperial court and dignitaries until the 1920s. It was fully opened to the public in 1949.
I must begin by admitting that by this point in the trip, I was pretty much totally overwhelmed, and it was difficult to soak in a lot of new input. That being said, the Forbidden City is a marvel. It inspires some interesting emotions: like a lot of the Hapsburg extravaganzas that one sees in Vienna, one is sort of torn between admiration and wonder for the artisans and laborers (a million plus, apparently) who hauled rare and precious wood and stone from all over China to create it – and disgust over the fact that it was all built for one very small group of privileged aristocrats to enjoy. The “palace” is actually a complex of 980 (!) buildings, all containing a number of treasures. Everywhere you turn there is some new wonder – carved walls, exquisitely painted exterior screens, stairways, statues, sweeping courtyards, gorgeous gardens.
If by some weird stroke of fate I should ever return to Beijing, I will go back to the Forbidden City by myself, or maybe with one or 2 other traveling friends, and I will go in the early morning and take my time seeing the whole thing. I say this because it was so incredibly beautiful and awe-inspiring that having to whiz through it at such a breakneck pace was actually a rather frustrating experience for me. It was incredibly crowded, it was extremely hot, and we were absolutely rushed through in a big group. There were 60-something of us trying to follow the tour guide, and even with her little flag held high, I couldn’t always see her. I also didn’t really want to stay with the group, but at the same time I didn’t want to lose them either. I couldn’t see into any of the buildings because I couldn’t see over anyone’s head, and there was no time to really investigate anything. The tour included no time at all to see the gorgeous garden at the end, and very little time at all to even browse in the gift shop (which normally isn’t really a big deal for me, but with only one day left, I had been hoping to grab a couple more presents.) Thank God Coop took a whole slew of outrageously good pictures of it; they have really helped me remember how amazing it was, even if I was zooming through it at the time.
The Tour Continues...
Our next event was a ride in the bus over to the Olympic Village. This was amazing, and I’m glad that they brought our buses over there so that we could gawk at it. Architecture freaks will have a field day with this: the Chinese have gone all out. The Bird’s Nest Stadium, which is literally shaped like a bird's nest, holds about 100,000 people. These pictures simply can’t portray how massive it is. The swim stadium looks like a giant luminous blue rectangular cube that has been bubble-wrapped.
There’s another very striking building, a high-rise actually shaped like the Olympic Torch, that will house the athletes; this caused quite a stir among all of us. They gave us a few minutes outside the buses to gawk at the Olympic Village and take photos (all from a distance – not allowed to go in yet). It is really quite magnificent – but I have to admit that none of it can solve the problem of how on earth the athletes are going to breathe in China’s staggering air pollution. That remains to be seen.
After leaving the Olympic area, we were escorted into a large Teahouse. This is not something that we were expecting; we knew we were going to have lunch, but that’s all. For those who are headed to China: be aware of this when signing on for guided tours – I feel quite certain that the tour companies have agreements with certain establishments that count on tourist trade, and you may very well be spirited away to a silk factory, pearl market, or other consumer opportunity that was not mentioned on the day’s itinerary. I’m not saying that these excursions aren’t enjoyable – they are, but you need to know what you’re getting into.
This particular Teahouse had nothing to do with the actual eating-establishment teahouses we encountered, and is actually a large organized entertainment for western tourists. It’s a large structure with many rooms, including several that are dedicated to demonstrations of the traditional preparation of various kinds of tea, and a kind of “tea tasting” demo. You are greeted by the “Ni haos” (hellos) of a huge gaggle of gorgeous young women, all decked out in pink traditional-looking silk costumes. They are very charming and funny, and give a very entertaining tea-brewing and tea-tasting presentation, in which you are shown the traditional and quite complicated methods of preparing cha. After, you are given the opportunity (of course) to buy the teas that you have tasted (which you do, even though they are basically price-gouged for the tourists.) You are then whisked into the main store (more shameless consumerism), and then escorted downstairs for a meal. Just as you’re about to partake, music starts, and to our surprise, it’s a floor show, complete with costumed dancers doing various ethnic dances, songs, etc. It’s a little bit Disneyland, and a little surreal – but if you just go along with the game and accept that it’s all aimed at the western tourists, (which you are, after all), it’s actually quite entertaining. (And the food was very good.)
We would then have been whisked away to the Pearl market, but the Band Director wisely explained to the tour guides that we all had an important concert that night, and it was extremely important to give us all an opportunity to rest. I personally also needed some time to absorb all the experiences – it was, in hindsight, an awful lot of input for one day.
Beijing, 5.28.2008: The Last Concert
The final concert of the tour took place that night, in the People’s Liberation Army Military Band Hall in Beijing.
You know, it would have been easy, as an American Buddhist with several Tibetan teachers, to be a little freaked out by playing this particular gig. In fact, when I first found out that I was going to China, I told one of my Tibetan teachers that I was having ambivalent feelings about the trip because of the politics. He told me that I shouldn’t be concerned with the politics; that I was “not playing for the Chinese Army,” but that I was playing for people, for sentient beings, and all sentient beings want to be happy, and all people want to be free from suffering. And, to the extent that music can lessen people’s suffering, at least temporarily, playing music for people was a good thing to be doing, anywhere.
Well, my dharma lesson turned out to be this: hello, you are playing for the Chinese army. More on the dharma lesson below, but first, the tale of the concert.
The tour organizer was clearly excited and not a little nervous about this; he was dressed more formally than the other concerts, and he told us that there would be various dignitaries there, and some very prominent Chinese musicians. He was obviously quite concerned that everything be perfect.
The hall was big, but not huge. It was beautifully kept, as you would figure for a military band hall, and it was acoustically by far the best hall we played in. It’s a fantastic performance space. They put an ambient mic on our small acoustic group, as usual, but we barely needed it – the sound carried really well. They had coffee and snacks backstage for the players.
Just as we had done in the 2nd and 3rd concert, we three Irish music persons played out in the lobby before the concert. We drew a very large and appreciative crowd, including one guy who video’d the whole thing on his cell phone. As happened on the other evenings, many people asked about the instruments; they were always especially interested in the wooden flutes.
There were a lot of musicians in the audience. One of the notables was a very gracious older woman who, it turned out, had been the first woman to hold the rank and post of Conductor of the People’s Liberation Army Military Band. Another was the current conductor of the PLA Military Band. The “Small World” award for the evening went to an older American ex-pat who came to the concert by himself. He introduced himself to us and told us that he used to teach at a large University in the Midwest. When he found out that the three of us in the Irish group were all affiliated with Big Flat Place University, he told us that before he was in the Midwest he had taught for many years at a university that is a 3-hour drive away from us – next door, by Texas standards. Now what in hell are the chances of that? One American comes to the concert, and he used to teach at Neighbor of Big Flat Place. As if that weren’t enough, he and Coop started exchanging names of mutual acquaintances, and they discovered that the fellow had known the father of Coop’s best friend. Six thousand miles from home…
The concert was a great success. The students and faculty performed brilliantly, the audience was enthusiastic, and there was a lot of good energy flying around. The audience loved the Irish set, and clapped along enthusiastically. The band did their two encores – the Stars and Stripes Forever, and the PLA March. However, this time they invited the director of the PLA Marching Band to come up and conduct the UK Band for the PLA March He was a very dramatic conductor and he went for it, and the crowd went crazy.
Afterwards, our tour guides told us that the concert was very emotional for the audience, and that during the PLA March in particular, there were tears in the eyes of many of the audience members. I understand. How can we overestimate the power of music to bring people together? From my point of view, I was still playing for a bunch of individuals – people who want to be happy, too, and don’t want to suffer. God knows many members of that audience had recently suffered, since we were told that most of them had spent the previous week pulling dead bodies out of the earthquake rubble in Szechuan Province. Sure, they’re soldiers -- is the average American soldier responsible for some oil baron’s decision to start a war in Iraq? We aren’t catering to policymakers here – we’re playing music for men and women, probably yanked out of high school either because they had to do compulsory service or because they had the talent to play in the military bands, and now they’ve been pulling bodies of children out of demolished buildings. You damn betcha I’m going to play for them. You know, when I got back to the US, I had the opportunity to tell the same aforementioned Tibetan teacher about this experience, and how we had in fact ended up playing music for military people as well as civilians, and about the fact that many of them had spent the previous 2 weeks doing earthquake rescue. I told him that it reminded me of exactly what he had told me, and what the Buddha had said – that all beings suffer, and all beings want to be free from suffering. He told me that this was indeed a very great dharma teaching.
After the concert, we were given a huge banquet in the Military Band’s Mess Hall. We were seated at various tables. It was the usual set-up: communal food placed on round revolving serving trays (and the food was excellent.) In addition, on each table there were 4 or 5 large bottles of Chinese beer. But wait – one each table there was also one bottle of (you guessed it) some kind of white baijiu, Coop’s so-called Chinese Bang Bang. He and Coyote instantly introduced this to the percussion and brass guys, who choked it down (several times), defending their manhood bravely.
Well, this party got very merry very fast. There were two things we didn’t know until later: 1) This is the hooch the Chinese soldiers give to their young recruits as a sort of mild hazing, and 2) our Chinese hosts were probably shocked that a large number of the American females drank it too – apparently that’s not polite company behavior. Oh well. I can’t choke down the stuff, so I was sober as a judge; and no one else had to do anything more complicated than sleep on a 13 hour flight the next day, so all was well.
In all, the night was a great success, and a great way to end this extremely unusual voyage.
Postscript
The story of the journey home is pretty straightforward. We were totally exhausted.
We left from the new International terminal at the Beijing airport, which like Shanghai was huge, incredibly modern, architecturally fascinating and impressive. We got through ticketing and security without much hassle. Coyote, Coop and I spent most of the wait in the Starbucks, which was very nice (and where else could you get a Red Bean scone, but a Starbucks in Beijing?)
The flight was long and incredibly uncomfortable. We were in the LAST seat in the airplane, and the flight had several periods of pretty considerable turbulence. Thank god for Dramamine. (I took a second hit somewhere above the Pacific, and I don’t even remember last leg of the flight.) We got to The Big Flat PlaceThursday evening.
We were home.
Beijing: 5.27.2008 Evening
There is an Irish pub in Beijing. That may sound a little weird, but having traveled around quite a bit, I am now pretty much convinced that there is probably an Irish pub in Ulan Batar and maybe even a few in Khazakstan or Antarctica. There’s even an Irish pub now within a 3 mile strike of my childhood hometown, and there isn’t even a damned Borders or Starbucks there yet.
Paddy O’Shea’s is a very attractive area of Beijing, with tree-lined streets. The front is open in a kind of Euro-boulevard-café style that permits folding back the doors so that the sidewalk tables and the interior are contiguous. It was a strange sight, in a way; suddenly, in the middle of this extremely foreign city, there’s a typical-looking Irish pub full of white people drinking Guinness and eating pub food, presto! as if we had just clicked the heels of our ruby slippers and said “There’s No Place Like Home.”But enough about Oz, and down to the business at hand: Guinness and pub food. I don’t even like Guinness (I think I ordered a Newcastle Nut Brown), but oh Lord the food. Salad, by God, and chips, and Irish-style vegetable soup…at least one of the guys had fish and chips; someone had a club sandwich, I think. I don’t remember anything for about a half-hour after that except grateful hoovering of food that had not been soaked in oil or have a previous life as an invertebrate.
The publican was a gentleman who obviously had some skills in the pub business. He seemed to understand both the thing he wanted to create and the local environment, and how each would have to accommodate the other. He was incredibly friendly. The situation had enough of an Irish context that one felt secure in proceeding exactly the way you would in Ireland, and that everyone would have a set of perspectives in common; you felt as though you could relate, and as though Glen had that same respect for the music and the musicians; you trusted that he would take care of you the way an Irish barman would. And he did, from the food and drink to the posters he had made for our appearance there, featured prominently on the door.
We didn’t know exactly what to expect in terms of who might show up. Before we left for the trip, we had found a clip on YouTube that suggested a very high caliber of music was being made at Paddy O’Shea’s; it later transpired that the players on YouTube ringers brought in from Ireland for Paddy’s Day. On the evening that we were there, it was mostly the three of us playing. We had located ourselves at a table near the front of the building, but it wasn’t an ideal placement, because we had our backs to the sidewalk (no corner tables were available.) But it was fine. We played typical Irish session music (jig and reels, mostly); it was too noisy to play songs, especially as it got very crowded after awhile (a large contingent of our Band Student Fellow Travelers eventually showed up for the festivities, as we had hoped they would.) There was also a variety of people who had made a special effort to come hear the music. Among the interesting folks we met:
1) A Scottish gentleman who was a professor and a consultant for a Chinese education agency. Coyotebanjo noticed him singing along, and it turned out that he was Glasgow-born of a Donegal singing family. He had come especially as a result of the advertising Glen had done.
2) A young Californian and his Chinese wife, with several of their friends, sitting at the table next to us. They were in the embassy district because they were headed to the American Embassy the next day to try to get her a visa so she could visit the US with him. They were anxious about this impending meeting; and, perhaps in an attempt to relieve the pressure, became drunk as lords.
3) A fellow from the US Embassy, who had tried to book us for an embassy reception on the same night as our concert, but failing that, had come along to listen (and brought reinforcements in the form of several young female friends who attempted a few Riverdance moves.) Mind you, we only knew he played because he approached some of the Band Students present, and asked if they thought we would mind if he were to ask to play. Turned out he was a whistle player. If I remember correctly, there was some problem with the whistle, because Coop ended up loaning him one of the extra D whistles he’d brought. He played enthusiastically along with us, and it became quite clear that he wanted to sing as well. We agreed upon a song we both knew (he knew mostly pub songs) and whoa! didn’t he have the loudest, most piercing, huge Clancy Brothers tenor voice you’ve ever heard. You could hear him over the entire lot of the hollering masses in the bar.
In all, it was a lovely evening and pretty much a success; I certainly think the Band contingent greatly enjoyed themselves. (They were probably so elated over having fish and chips and real beer that we could have sung Happy Birthday all night and they would have been content!). As we were leaving, a woman came up to me and told me that she had loved the music, that it had taken her back to Galway and reminded her of the music at the Crane (for those who are not familiar with the whole Irish music culture, this is extremely high praise). She asked me if we’d ever played there; I said that the guys had done some sessions there. Turned out that she lived in Australia for a long time, and I don’t remember what had brought her to China – all I remember is that she then asked me my name, and it transpired that we both had the same first name; we both marveled over that coincidence.
Our driver, a Chinese fellow named John with excellent English, had assured us that we could call him for a pick-up and drive back to the hotel “even if it was very late.” Further questioning about “how late” seemed to suggest that anytime was OK, so we took him at his word and called, although it was midnight. He did come to pick us up promptly, and although I had the distinct vibe that we may have pushed the envelope on “how late” was acceptable, he was perfectly courteous about it – and back to the hotel we went.
Beijing, 5.28.2008: Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City
Reflections on Tian’anmen Square, with polemic
The first week of June 1989, I was driving from Massachusetts to Indiana with an early music friend. We were on our way back from an early music camp. Every time we turned on the radio, more horrible reports came in about the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on student protests in Tian’anmen Square, Beijing. The protests, by students, intellectuals, labor, and others calling for democratic reform, had been gaining steam for a couple of months before that. The matter came to a head the first week of June, when the movement was crushed with great force by the Chinese army.
This is the incident that most over-35 Americans think of instantly when someone says “Tian’anmen Square.” The image of that defiant student became world-famous, and is emblazoned on the collective memory.
But today, May 28, 2008, I am standing in Tian’anmen Square, and Coop has just asked our tour guide where the “world-famous picture of the student standing in front of the tank” was taken, since he wants to take a photo. She has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. She has never seen this picture he describes.
It’s interesting to examine one’s first reaction to this. It’s a kind of knee-jerk American guns-up reaction: "of course, the Commies have suppressed this information from their people." But is our guides’ lack of knowledge genuine? Do they really not know about the 1989 protests, or have they been trained that they must under all circumstances avoid any discussion of this event? Many Americans would assume the latter, but I would just as quickly believe the former. Why? Because when I teach History of Rock and Roll, and I play Neil Young’s “Four Dead in Ohio,” I have to explain Kent State to my American students. A sobering majority of them have never seen the 1970 photographic image of the young Kent State co-ed screaming while her friends, protesting the Vietnam War, are shot down by the National Guard. In fact, not only have they never seen the picture -- they don’t know it happened. They are shocked. That photo was also famous, and I would have thought that it was also emblazoned on the collective memory. Our tour guide’s perplexity, just like my student’s lack of information, is a wake-up call: we cannot continue to allow the suppression of history. We cannot stand around and point the finger at places like China while our own students barely know that a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. We can not, we must not continue to allow the suppression of history as it is happening here, in our own country.
End of polemic.
Today, Tian’anmen Square is full of tourists, Chinese people queue-ing up to see Mao’s Tomb, and vendors selling hats and watches whose face features images of a hand-waving Chairman Mao. (I wonder if anyone during the Cultural Revolution could have imagined that scenario in their wildest dreams.) They descend on our tour group as we stand there. Coop buys several Mao watches, and when he is finished haggling, another vendor comes up and tries to sell him three more. (As Coop said, “He needed those three, he might need three more!”)
This absolutely huge, paved area is clearly a source of civic pride to the Beijing-ers. At 100 acres, it’s the world’s largest open-air urban public square. We saw a whole team of workers whose job is apparently to weed and clean out the cracks between the squares of pavement (think about this when you have a day when you hate your job.) Our tour guides herded all of us into a group for a photo shot, and I noticed that there were other groups involved in this same activity. It became apparent that the organized tour companies bring their large groups here for the “group photograph.” In the case of our company, they develop the photo and put into a nicely bound tourist booklet which you can order and pick up the next day for about 14 bucks. (Of course I bought one.)
At the end of the square is the entrance to the Forbidden City. In fact, “Tian’anmen” means Gate of Heavenly Peace, so Tien’anmen Square is the Square that leads up to the Forbidden City gate. Above the arched opening that leads through the gate into the Forbidden City is a huge picture of Mao. We spent some time trying to get humorous photos posed as if the picture of Mao was between Coop’s thumb and forefinger (the place had so much historical import, and such heavy vibes, that a little comic relief was really welcome, for me at least.)
The Forbidden City
From the DK Eyewitness Guide to China:
Forming the very heart of Beijing, the Forbidden City, officially known as the Palace Museum (Gugong), is China’s most magnificent architectural complex and was completed in 1420. The huge palace is a compendium of Imperial architecture and a ;asting monument of dynastic China from which 24 emperors ruled for nearly 500 years. The symbolic center of the Chinese universe, the palace was the exclusive domain of the imperial court and dignitaries until the 1920s. It was fully opened to the public in 1949.
I must begin by admitting that by this point in the trip, I was pretty much totally overwhelmed, and it was difficult to soak in a lot of new input. That being said, the Forbidden City is a marvel. It inspires some interesting emotions: like a lot of the Hapsburg extravaganzas that one sees in Vienna, one is sort of torn between admiration and wonder for the artisans and laborers (a million plus, apparently) who hauled rare and precious wood and stone from all over China to create it – and disgust over the fact that it was all built for one very small group of privileged aristocrats to enjoy. The “palace” is actually a complex of 980 (!) buildings, all containing a number of treasures. Everywhere you turn there is some new wonder – carved walls, exquisitely painted exterior screens, stairways, statues, sweeping courtyards, gorgeous gardens.
If by some weird stroke of fate I should ever return to Beijing, I will go back to the Forbidden City by myself, or maybe with one or 2 other traveling friends, and I will go in the early morning and take my time seeing the whole thing. I say this because it was so incredibly beautiful and awe-inspiring that having to whiz through it at such a breakneck pace was actually a rather frustrating experience for me. It was incredibly crowded, it was extremely hot, and we were absolutely rushed through in a big group. There were 60-something of us trying to follow the tour guide, and even with her little flag held high, I couldn’t always see her. I also didn’t really want to stay with the group, but at the same time I didn’t want to lose them either. I couldn’t see into any of the buildings because I couldn’t see over anyone’s head, and there was no time to really investigate anything. The tour included no time at all to see the gorgeous garden at the end, and very little time at all to even browse in the gift shop (which normally isn’t really a big deal for me, but with only one day left, I had been hoping to grab a couple more presents.) Thank God Coop took a whole slew of outrageously good pictures of it; they have really helped me remember how amazing it was, even if I was zooming through it at the time.
The Tour Continues...
Our next event was a ride in the bus over to the Olympic Village. This was amazing, and I’m glad that they brought our buses over there so that we could gawk at it. Architecture freaks will have a field day with this: the Chinese have gone all out. The Bird’s Nest Stadium, which is literally shaped like a bird's nest, holds about 100,000 people. These pictures simply can’t portray how massive it is. The swim stadium looks like a giant luminous blue rectangular cube that has been bubble-wrapped.
There’s another very striking building, a high-rise actually shaped like the Olympic Torch, that will house the athletes; this caused quite a stir among all of us. They gave us a few minutes outside the buses to gawk at the Olympic Village and take photos (all from a distance – not allowed to go in yet). It is really quite magnificent – but I have to admit that none of it can solve the problem of how on earth the athletes are going to breathe in China’s staggering air pollution. That remains to be seen.
After leaving the Olympic area, we were escorted into a large Teahouse. This is not something that we were expecting; we knew we were going to have lunch, but that’s all. For those who are headed to China: be aware of this when signing on for guided tours – I feel quite certain that the tour companies have agreements with certain establishments that count on tourist trade, and you may very well be spirited away to a silk factory, pearl market, or other consumer opportunity that was not mentioned on the day’s itinerary. I’m not saying that these excursions aren’t enjoyable – they are, but you need to know what you’re getting into. This particular Teahouse had nothing to do with the actual eating-establishment teahouses we encountered, and is actually a large organized entertainment for western tourists. It’s a large structure with many rooms, including several that are dedicated to demonstrations of the traditional preparation of various kinds of tea, and a kind of “tea tasting” demo. You are greeted by the “Ni haos” (hellos) of a huge gaggle of gorgeous young women, all decked out in pink traditional-looking silk costumes. They are very charming and funny, and give a very entertaining tea-brewing and tea-tasting presentation, in which you are shown the traditional and quite complicated methods of preparing cha. After, you are given the opportunity (of course) to buy the teas that you have tasted (which you do, even though they are basically price-gouged for the tourists.) You are then whisked into the main store (more shameless consumerism), and then escorted downstairs for a meal. Just as you’re about to partake, music starts, and to our surprise, it’s a floor show, complete with costumed dancers doing various ethnic dances, songs, etc. It’s a little bit Disneyland, and a little surreal – but if you just go along with the game and accept that it’s all aimed at the western tourists, (which you are, after all), it’s actually quite entertaining. (And the food was very good.)
We would then have been whisked away to the Pearl market, but the Band Director wisely explained to the tour guides that we all had an important concert that night, and it was extremely important to give us all an opportunity to rest. I personally also needed some time to absorb all the experiences – it was, in hindsight, an awful lot of input for one day.
Beijing, 5.28.2008: The Last Concert
The final concert of the tour took place that night, in the People’s Liberation Army Military Band Hall in Beijing.
You know, it would have been easy, as an American Buddhist with several Tibetan teachers, to be a little freaked out by playing this particular gig. In fact, when I first found out that I was going to China, I told one of my Tibetan teachers that I was having ambivalent feelings about the trip because of the politics. He told me that I shouldn’t be concerned with the politics; that I was “not playing for the Chinese Army,” but that I was playing for people, for sentient beings, and all sentient beings want to be happy, and all people want to be free from suffering. And, to the extent that music can lessen people’s suffering, at least temporarily, playing music for people was a good thing to be doing, anywhere. Well, my dharma lesson turned out to be this: hello, you are playing for the Chinese army. More on the dharma lesson below, but first, the tale of the concert.
The tour organizer was clearly excited and not a little nervous about this; he was dressed more formally than the other concerts, and he told us that there would be various dignitaries there, and some very prominent Chinese musicians. He was obviously quite concerned that everything be perfect.
The hall was big, but not huge. It was beautifully kept, as you would figure for a military band hall, and it was acoustically by far the best hall we played in. It’s a fantastic performance space. They put an ambient mic on our small acoustic group, as usual, but we barely needed it – the sound carried really well. They had coffee and snacks backstage for the players.
Just as we had done in the 2nd and 3rd concert, we three Irish music persons played out in the lobby before the concert. We drew a very large and appreciative crowd, including one guy who video’d the whole thing on his cell phone. As happened on the other evenings, many people asked about the instruments; they were always especially interested in the wooden flutes.
There were a lot of musicians in the audience. One of the notables was a very gracious older woman who, it turned out, had been the first woman to hold the rank and post of Conductor of the People’s Liberation Army Military Band. Another was the current conductor of the PLA Military Band. The “Small World” award for the evening went to an older American ex-pat who came to the concert by himself. He introduced himself to us and told us that he used to teach at a large University in the Midwest. When he found out that the three of us in the Irish group were all affiliated with Big Flat Place University, he told us that before he was in the Midwest he had taught for many years at a university that is a 3-hour drive away from us – next door, by Texas standards. Now what in hell are the chances of that? One American comes to the concert, and he used to teach at Neighbor of Big Flat Place. As if that weren’t enough, he and Coop started exchanging names of mutual acquaintances, and they discovered that the fellow had known the father of Coop’s best friend. Six thousand miles from home…
The concert was a great success. The students and faculty performed brilliantly, the audience was enthusiastic, and there was a lot of good energy flying around. The audience loved the Irish set, and clapped along enthusiastically. The band did their two encores – the Stars and Stripes Forever, and the PLA March. However, this time they invited the director of the PLA Marching Band to come up and conduct the UK Band for the PLA March He was a very dramatic conductor and he went for it, and the crowd went crazy. Afterwards, our tour guides told us that the concert was very emotional for the audience, and that during the PLA March in particular, there were tears in the eyes of many of the audience members. I understand. How can we overestimate the power of music to bring people together? From my point of view, I was still playing for a bunch of individuals – people who want to be happy, too, and don’t want to suffer. God knows many members of that audience had recently suffered, since we were told that most of them had spent the previous week pulling dead bodies out of the earthquake rubble in Szechuan Province. Sure, they’re soldiers -- is the average American soldier responsible for some oil baron’s decision to start a war in Iraq? We aren’t catering to policymakers here – we’re playing music for men and women, probably yanked out of high school either because they had to do compulsory service or because they had the talent to play in the military bands, and now they’ve been pulling bodies of children out of demolished buildings. You damn betcha I’m going to play for them. You know, when I got back to the US, I had the opportunity to tell the same aforementioned Tibetan teacher about this experience, and how we had in fact ended up playing music for military people as well as civilians, and about the fact that many of them had spent the previous 2 weeks doing earthquake rescue. I told him that it reminded me of exactly what he had told me, and what the Buddha had said – that all beings suffer, and all beings want to be free from suffering. He told me that this was indeed a very great dharma teaching.
After the concert, we were given a huge banquet in the Military Band’s Mess Hall. We were seated at various tables. It was the usual set-up: communal food placed on round revolving serving trays (and the food was excellent.) In addition, on each table there were 4 or 5 large bottles of Chinese beer. But wait – one each table there was also one bottle of (you guessed it) some kind of white baijiu, Coop’s so-called Chinese Bang Bang. He and Coyote instantly introduced this to the percussion and brass guys, who choked it down (several times), defending their manhood bravely.
Well, this party got very merry very fast. There were two things we didn’t know until later: 1) This is the hooch the Chinese soldiers give to their young recruits as a sort of mild hazing, and 2) our Chinese hosts were probably shocked that a large number of the American females drank it too – apparently that’s not polite company behavior. Oh well. I can’t choke down the stuff, so I was sober as a judge; and no one else had to do anything more complicated than sleep on a 13 hour flight the next day, so all was well.
In all, the night was a great success, and a great way to end this extremely unusual voyage.
Postscript
The story of the journey home is pretty straightforward. We were totally exhausted.
We left from the new International terminal at the Beijing airport, which like Shanghai was huge, incredibly modern, architecturally fascinating and impressive. We got through ticketing and security without much hassle. Coyote, Coop and I spent most of the wait in the Starbucks, which was very nice (and where else could you get a Red Bean scone, but a Starbucks in Beijing?) The flight was long and incredibly uncomfortable. We were in the LAST seat in the airplane, and the flight had several periods of pretty considerable turbulence. Thank god for Dramamine. (I took a second hit somewhere above the Pacific, and I don’t even remember last leg of the flight.) We got to The Big Flat PlaceThursday evening.
We were home.
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