Brush Talks Vol. 1 No. 1 Winter/Spring 2016 A Journal of China E U S S I L A R U G U A N I E H T Brush Talks: A Journal of China Vol. 1 | No. 1 | Winter/Spring 2016 BRUSH TALKS STAFF Founder & Editor Brian Kuhl (Boston) Contributing Editors Duan Hongwei (段红伟 , Shanghai) Yang Zhengxin (杨正昕 , Boston) Brush Talks publishes compelling nonfiction, along with photographs and occasional poetry, about China. We publish two issues per year and accept unsolicited submissions on a rolling basis. For more information, please visit www.brushtalks.com. Copyright © 2016 by Brian Kuhl. All rights reserved. Brush Talks is set in URW Garamond No. 8 and produced in Scribus. Cover image: Luo xia gu wu tu (落霞孤鹜图 ) by Tang Bohu Because I had only my writing brush and ink slab to converse with, I call it Brush Talks. SHEN KUO 沈括 (1031–1095) Table of Contents Winter/Spring 2016 Molly Gleeson 9 ESSAY The Monks of Ta’er Si Zhou Cheng (周呈 ) 15 PORTFOLIO Photographs of Kingston Yuan Changming (袁昌 明 ) 27 POEM One Tree That Makes a Whole Forest C. E. Wheeler 29 LETTER FROM QUZHOU When Thunder Came Emily Strauss 39 POEM Memories Nick Sinclair 41 INTERVIEW & PORTFOLIO Photographs from Megacycle Zhang Yanjun (张燕军 ) 59 POEM Mourning Mr. Wang Guozhen on April 26 [English translation followed by the original Chinese] Editor’s Note Welcome to the first issue of Brush Talks. As our mission statement says, our aim is to share with our readers compelling nonfiction, photographs, and occasional poetry about China. The name of the journal comes from Shen Kuo, an official and scholar of the Song dynasty. His knowledge was expansive and eclectic, spanning subjects from astronomy to literature to zoology. In later life, Shen retired to a large estate in Jiangsu that he named “Dream Brook,” where he wrote his masterpiece, Brush Talks from Dream Brook (梦溪笔谈 , sometimes translated as Dream Brook Essays). He was said to have remarked, “Because I had only my writing brush and ink slab to converse with, I call it Brush Talks.” As a modern-day Brush Talks, we strive to examine an equally wide range of subjects related to China as well as to include a diversity of voices in that endeavor. A bit of explanation is also in order about the format of Brush Talks. It is published only in electronic form (at least for now) and only as a PDF. The former stems from cost constraints, but the latter is a deliberate choice. A PDF document allows for a precise and uniform layout. And while dazzling effects can be created on the Web, our vision for Brush Talks is a bit more traditional. Its more conventional look is by design: generous margins and the display of just one photograph per page, for example, are intended to allow the reader a slow and contemplative experience. Brush Talks is for xian ren (闲人 ) everywhere, those who feel that a day roaming one’s garden, drinking tea, and reading is time well spent. So we invite you to get comfortable, pour that cup of tea, and linger over the following pages. A heartfelt thanks to our contributors, whose work, we think you’ll agree, makes our inaugural issue worth lingering over. Brian Kuhl Contributors Molly Gleeson spent five years teaching English in China, living in Chongqing, Gansu Province, and Jiangsu Province. Back in the U.S. for the last three years, Molly now resides in Bloomington, Indiana. Her work has appeared in the Sun and the Apeiron Review, among other publications. Her website is www.mollygleeson.com. Nick Sinclair is a photographer based in the UK who has worked for numerous publications and agencies. The National Portrait Gallery in London has exhibited his work and holds many of his portraits in its permanent collection. In 2007, he received a travel bursary from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, enabling him to visit China. His website is www.nicksinclair.com. Emily Strauss has written poetry since she was in college, and her poems have been anthologized and published online in the U.S., Macao, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Australia. She lived and worked as an ESL teacher and trainer of teachers in China for eight years, in Chengdu, Suzhou, Zhuhai, and Macao. She is now semi-retired and lives in California. C. E. Wheeler has been working in China since 2007. He was formerly a managing editor and lead writer for a monthly magazine and weekly newspaper in Hangzhou. He has been a freelance writer and editor for many years. When Thunder Comes is the title of a book he is writing about the Doolittle Raid, the introduction to which appears in these pages. Yuan Changming (袁昌 明 ) grew up in rural China, began to learn English at 19, and published monographs on translation before moving to Canada. His poetry has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry and Threepenny Review, among other publications. Currently, he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver. The journal can be found at poetrypacific.blogspot.ca. Zhang Yanjun (张燕军 ) was born in Shandong Province and now resides in Hangzhou, where he is a researcher and lecturer at the Institute of International and Comparative Education at Zhejiang Normal University. Zhou Cheng (周呈 ) is originally from Hangzhou and now lives in Ontario, Canada, where she attended Queen’s University as a graduate student. The Monks of Ta’er Si by Molly Gleeson he Tibetan Buddhist monks chewed pink bubblegum. All four of Tthem were under the age of 25, and all four of them giggled about my pretty young friend Zhang Meng. Their shaven heads glistened in the sunlight, and billowing robes of maroon and yellow flapped in the wind from the windows. We were traveling by bus to Ta’er Tibetan Monastery outside of Xining, Qinghai Province, China. Surrounded by barren brown rolling hills, ramshackle buildings and farms pockmarked the landscape. The sun rose high in the sky and blazed down on the barrenness with the relentlessness of a young child tearing through brightly wrapped Christmas gifts. The altitude was also high, and I could feel the thin, clean air filter through my lungs. This was my fourth year in China as an English teacher, and this trip to Qinghai Province was a brief escape from my small, exhausting, and provincial city of Xifeng in nearby Gansu Province. I had read about Ta’er Si (also known as Kumbum Monastery in Tibetan) in a guidebook, and I was excited to see the place. I was also intrigued with Tibetan Buddhism in general because it represented a kind of peace for me, and I was badly in need of some peace. It was our good fortune to see the young monks at the bus stop, and to ask them which bus to take. Only one of them spoke Chinese, and none of them spoke English. They whispered Tibetan among themselves. And giggled. We laughed, too, so delighted were we to find the right bus and to sit near our intriguing fellow passengers. They were no less interested in us—a foreigner traveling with a beautiful young Chinese woman, with her long, curly black hair and broad, inviting face. Zhang Meng’s enthusiasm for life was infectious, and she happily babbled away to her newfound friend, the one monk who understood 9 BRUSH TALKS her. While the other monks played with their cell phones, he asked her a few questions about me — where I was from, what I was doing here — but mostly he answered Zhang Meng’s questions. I watched the monks and the one who spoke Chinese chat with my friend. I was completely content to be silent. “They’re going to study at Ta’er Si,” Zhang Meng translated for me. “They were studying at another monastery. They travel all over China to study.” “Where were they before this?” I asked. “Hunan Province. There is a monastery there as well,” Zhang Meng explained. “Wow. They’ve traveled a long way,” I said. I learned, too, that they had spent most of the day at an Internet bar. The bus, with its scarcity of passengers, was a Spartan specimen of transportation, with hard seats covered in brown Naugahyde, the back of them supported by rounded metal “hold” bars. The floor was dusty, and the whole thing smelled like maybe sheep had spent some time traveling in it. The few passengers carried odd assortments of packages — large burlap bags tied with twine, old suitcases. They took the bumps of the road with equanimity, and companionably collided with their seatmates. We pulled into a dirty little town an hour later. We then discovered that we would need to walk over a mile to get to the monastery. The monks were fast walkers; I trailed behind with Zhang Meng. We raced to keep up with them. The main thoroughfare to the monastery was being completely torn up, with tractors and diggers sitting in the ditch in the middle of it. We walked on dirt paths along the construction site. The street was lined with little shops, about half the size of a one-car garage, open to passersby. They were full of the trappings of the 10 The Monks of Ta’er Si Buddhist life — wooden prayer beads and prayer books covered with fake leather, the black suede boots monks wear under their maroon and yellow robes, cloth for the robes, and pointy hats with yellow fringe falling off the top of them. Our monks stopped to shop, examining the goods, but in the end bought nothing.