Met a very poetic poet in HK. He's all long-haired, soft-expressioned, and hard-pressed lips from years of semi-exile. In his poems he writes about the motherland and the women he's loved, romanced, poeticized. And I'm liking his poetry because it's got side-by-side translation, and such good translations where curse can be translated to stain. And they all think he's pessimistic but I'm still romantic enough to believe he's idealistic. So I'm copying his poem in my little brown notebook because it is a good poem. It might be the first poem I liked, well, second.
A Painted Scene
I know very well the vocabulary of table talk Dignity dished by charitable forks and cups while a word-river pours from the mouth Humanity, a tiny species Simplifies under the vault of heaven Into a heap of patterned clay urns
Begging power from holy messages Stringing suspense between book pages An Abyss of thought Overdone with never an ending
And well, Hong Kong really is a strange place. It's like New York's Chinatown 100times cleaner, more developed, more Cantonese, more overwhelming. Well, Hong Kong is a funny place and I'm not loving it in a way that I think I'll probably like it after I get used to it. Well, Hong Kong makes me like New York less and Beijing more. Well this place being the love child of Canton, England and Japan both amazes me and makes me wince. Except my eye is swollen again so I'm hating life. And I also hate life because I'm trapped in the south... but I try to salvage wasting time with interviewing, meeting with friend of friends...
kimi wa boku no mono datta~ ima wa dare no mono datta? (you were my thing, whose thing are you right now?)
I'm pretty much done with traveling though. You won't find me in Tibet or Europe with a backpack ever. You always realize there's no place like home when you leave it, and I'm missing Tianjin like I miss the cold when I'm wearing a T-shirt under a perfect blue sky. I miss the dust and the bikes and er yi and xue hai and the market. Floating about these couple of weeks (has it been two? Only two? Feels like a lifetime) has been fun. I ate a lot of things, walked a lot, complained a lot, been happy a lot, been exhilarated twice (although those were the result of emails~ shoo).
I can't wait to go back home. I can't wait see my brothers~ and eat a lot~ and watch lots of telly~ and read a lot~ and study a lot of English and bloody Chinese~ and when I'm done I'll be off to Beijing starting intimidating and exciting jobs. Friends say I'm too gracious, and meself I don't know whether it's the independence from the years in America (oooh, that makes it sound so past tense, how sweet) or the distance Libras retain, but I am in fact incredibly gracious+thankful to some incredible people I've met in China. So that's that... that's to the boys who really do sleep at 4:57am in the morning and get up at 2:00pm unless there's a 9:00am presentation, that's for his toothy grin and flashy dreams. I can't wait to work with these people. I've waited my whole life for smart, ambitious, hip, good-looking (yes, I'm sorry, I'm serious) people. I know I'm vain, and I know we are vain, but as long as we know who we are, I bet we'll be okay.
We'll take it on as we go love.