tour de south

I am not a sport-biking fanatic, but my very athletic friend Tim from Northern California left a peachy road bike of his at my garage earlier this year and encouraged me to ride it as often as I want. I leave it laid idle there most of the time as I can't figure out where I would ride it other than the harbor/coastal highway area Tim and I had been to a couple of times already. I did use it once to a local bank that's one freeway exit away from my home, meandering through residential short cuts to get there in 15 minutes that would normally take me 5 minutes by car through freeway. I also rode it to a home in nearby community across one major parkway and up a coastal mesa a few times for some men's group meetups in early Saturday mornings--the toughest part of the ride was not in going up hills, but charging down a steep slope from my home when the early morning cold combined with the howling wind created a wind-chill factor that cut right through the bones of my bare hands.

Then one Sunday morning my friend Brian, who I knew had picked up riding with a group of bikers in Irvine for a year or two, called me and said he and a couple of his riding companions were heading toward my home for a venture ride and thought he might stop by and visit me, since he's been wanting to see my new home for a while. So I welcomed them and when they arrived and found out I had this fine French-made bicyclette piece lying in waste in my garage, they started proselytizing me all the great benefits bike riding can bring to the health of my body and soul, until I agreed to give it a try with them.

So I went out and bought some biking gear--suit, helmet, gloves, etc.--and started biking with them, for a couple of times in the past few months. The reason I didn't go more often than that was because their Sunday morning riding schedule usually conflicts with mine, and Irvine is a bit too far a place for me to drive to--burning a couple gallons of gas just so that I can burn off a few hundred calories of mine doesn't seem that altruistic or green to me, to play the role of an environmental activist for a second. 

But this past Thanksgiving weekend they decided to have one of their annual long trips to Oceanside, a little seaside town in north San Diego County right off Camp Pendleton, and the ride would start from Dana Point Harbor, right down my alley. So I decided to join them, even though I knew the distance would be a stretch for me and I was not as physically well tuned as a regular biker would be.

We met at the harbor's parking lot. Besides Brian, there were 4 others, all but one I had known and ridden with before. Brian brought me a right-size water bottle that snugged tight in my bike's bottle holder so it wouldn't jitter out during the ride, and a hood liner for my head for comfort and wind protection. I also found out my bike's tires were low on pressure and the air pump I brought would not work because its air cap didn't match the tire's intake pinhole, but they helped me hold down the air cap so I could successfully pump my tires to the right pressure.

Off we went then. It's a sunny day, and the first few miles were along the beach and the coast highway that I had ridden a couple times myself before, so it all seemed nice and easy. Then we turned into the city of San Clemente, still on the coast highway, but now right through its downtown district, along with some climbing up that gave us our first physical checkup of the day. "That was about the only up-slope we are going to have for the trip all day today," said the team leader at our first rest stop. Right, that was about the first of 3 or 4 such remarks I heard all day that day.

San Clemente is not a big town, so it took us about 15-20 minutes to traverse through, then we turned into a bike trail of San Onofre State Beach. It's an old trail, but wide and clean, with no city or highway traffic to compete with, only a few fellow bikers and occasional picnic tables scattered along the way. I took peeks at the scenery as much as I could steal time to--we were riding at the average of 15-20 miles per hour so if I dawdled I immediately got left behind and would need to play catch-up to rejoin the team.

We then headed into the Marine base territory, first breezing through a wide, long runway, then roaming inside the heart of the camp, barracks on one side and target practice ranges on the other, all along the Pacific coastline. This is probably the largest training camp for the US Marine Corps in the West Coast (many troops were sent to Iraq or Afghanistan from here), yet other than the check point that inspected our ID when we entered and those beach head structures, there is nothing really unusual here that makes it look much different than a quiet little town somewhere in midland America.

And the light traffic on these country roads made our ride safe and easy. After a couple of the usual toiling slopes and winding turns, what do you know, we were there already!! A small shopping center near the southern end of the Marine base was our destination point. It's been 27 miles, 2 hours, since we left Dana Point Harbor this morning, according to our team leader's meters.

We parked our bikes outside a McDonald's and went in to relax, chat, and have lunch, for about 45 minutes, then headed back. 

The ride back was easier, mostly because mentally we were familiar with the road (or I should say I was the only one that became familiar with the road, the rest of the team had all ridden this route before), therefore didn't feel pressured or as high-strung as when we came. The only thing a little different on the way back was when riding through downtown San Clemente, there were more traffic on the streets than in the morning, and we had to stay really close to each other so we wouldn't get broken up by the traffic or cut off by the light. But the cars were all very friendly with us and the traffic signals seemed well synced to accommodate exactly speeds like ours that we hardly needed to stop at the lights at all. 

We got back at Dana Point Harbor around 3:30. The sun is still shining bright, and other than sore legs and painful butts, every one was still in high spirit for an after-ride coffee. I didn't join them because I needed to rush home. But hey, now that I know the route, maybe next time I'll just ride casually down San Clemente pier and have a morning coffee there myself! 

Anyone wanna join me?

At the beginning of the off road trail                        On the runway tarmac of Marine base

      

Destination McDonald's                                           Brian fixing disengaged gear chain

Returning to Doheny Beach, Dana Point Harbor in the background. The bike to the right is mine, or actually Tim's, and is the second one he left in my garage because it fits my height better than the first one he left. (Yes I now have two fine bikes sitting in my garage).

* This is one of my favorite songs, happens to have something to do with bicycle riding: Les Bicyclettes De Belsize by Engelbert Humperdinck, 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g5M5YhB4IQ

blah blah.. blog

It all started about 7 years ago, when after attending a men's ministry seminar at the church, I was "set up" to form and host a men's fellowship group. After a year of wandering in the wild, meeting at cafeteria outdoors, church patio, park gazebo, etc., haphazardly and lackadaisically, I decided to open up my home so to have more regular, permanent-sited get-together every other Saturday morning at my backyard with my brothers in exile.

And I started sending out those reminder emails every other week for the meetings. Being a person who hates receiving machine-generated, lifeless emails myself, I tried to suit up my notices with personal notes and opportune comments, things I found interesting or worth sharing at the time, on top of that boxed announcement of time and place to meet.

People didn't seem to object. As a matter of fact, I soon realized open-letter writings like these could be a good way to keep in touch with people I care to. So I gradually enlarged my mailing list to include friends and family, men and women, old buddies and new acquaintances, cousins in Canada and sister in Taiwan, etc., people who I thought might be interested in what I think or do from time to time, and vice versa, even though we may live far apart or have little chance to meet, in this so-close-yet-so-far digital day and age.

And that's been a span of 6+ years by now. Last week I finally spent some time assembling these past emails, organizing them into chronological order, assigning them subject titles if none were there, and then posted them to a Google blogger account that I had registered long ago but never used. 

Going through these writings, I myself am a little surprised by the variety of things it covered, from spiritual and intellectual musings (holy wholesome, wiggle room), to travel journals (PEACE trips China, trip to northern california), events of my life (father, transition), books I read (wooden, karamazov brothers), things and people I recalled (japan, all my boys), jokes and fun pieces (adam's wish, valentine stories, word play) ... etc. 

So, my friends, if you do like my writings, and like to take a second look at them, or catch up on those "past issues" that passed you by before you were included in my mailing list, then feel free to go to http://cdwong.blogspot.com/ at your leisure, and maybe leave some comments after you finish reading them if you like--that's one benefit blogger site offers, making this a true two-way communication between you and me, and maybe all of us.

Hope you'll enjoy it.

* From the first (shy particles, 7/31/2007) to the last (where the rain stays mainly in the plain, 10/28/2013), the total number of postings comes up to be exact 100, no more, no less, no design. If I put this one up there, it will be Posting #101 ... interesting!

where the rain stays mainly in the plain

We took a two-week vacation to Spain with a tour group recently. As a believer in "vacation is for fun, not work," I stayed away from studying the itinerary or reading the tour guides before we got on the plane (well, I printed out the guides for my wife and planned to read it on the trip only to find we lost it). We landed on Madrid, the geo-center of the country, then galloped through a few cities to its northwest,Toledo to its south, then further south to a few historical/cultural heavy-weights such as Cordoba, Granada, Seville, as well as a bull-fighting town, the Don Quixote country, a wine factory, and a couple Mediterranean coastal cities, then flew all the way to big town Barcelona in the northeast, before coming back to LA. All told, 13 cities in 13 days we whizzed through!

So how can I remember them all, like which cathedral sits in which city, or from what town did we buy those "local flavor" souvenir cookies, etc.?

Through "categorize and conquer," I am going to try:

Regions & History

From the outset, Spain looks like a fair size country occupying the lion's share of the Iberian peninsula in southwestern Europe, and with that powerful colonial empire it built in the early Age of Discovery, I imagine it be one contiguous, well integrated country at least. I was surprised to learn, then, the country is actually divided into 17 semi-independent, autonomous regions, each with its own political and cultural identity. So, Madrid and its neighboring country form one autonomy region, those cities to the northwest belong to another autonomy region (Castile-Leon), and Toledo and the central high-land that sports windmills for "Man of La Mancha" Don Quixote belong to yet another region (Castile-La Mancha), and those famed, Muslim influenced old towns in the south belong to the Andalusia country, while Barcelona, the big, modern metropolis in the northeast, is the capital of Catalonia which, like the Basque Country to the north (yet another autonomous region), is trying to break away from Spain for good to become a fully independent country of its own.

Historically, starting early 8th century, the southern half of Spain had been invaded and reigned by the Muslims from North Africa (the Moors), and it took the Catholic kings and queens from the north almost 800 years to "re-conquest" the south back to Christendom. As a matter of fact, modern day Spain owed its formation to the unification of two major kingdoms of the north in the year 1492, when King Ferdinand of Aragon married Queen Isabella of Castile and together kicked out the last remaining Moorish resistance in the south. It was also in this same year Queen Isabella sponsored Christopher Columbus for his exploration to New World, thus starting the great Spanish empire that dominated the world through 16th and 17th centuries.

Castles & Cathedrals

Castles are everywhere in Spain. Here is a castle nestling on a cliff, like one in a Disney movie where a princess is incarcerated on the high chilly tower waiting to be rescued; there is another that is a city all by itself, its watch towers looking exactly like the "castle" (rook) piece made for the chess game. And Toledo viewed from the mid-hill of the hotel we stayed was the most picture perfect, beautiful classy old city I've ever seen!

 

           

Cathedrals are everywhere, one grander, shinier, or older than the other. One thing unique about some of those in the south is they started as Christian churches, then got converted into Muslim mosques when the Moors came, then converted back to Catholic cathedrals after the re-conquest. That's property time-share at historic proportion, you may say.

Arts & Architectures

Museums and palaces are everywhere, each hoarding houseful of paintings and art works of its own. Back in the days when there was no print or mass media, and the worshiping mass were illiterate anyway, paintings and sculptures on the church walls and ceilings served as educational tools to tell the stories of Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, angels and demons, while those hanging in the palaces displayed the life and portraits of the rich and the royalties, with hardly any one smiling.

We also visited the modern art museums for Picasso and Dali, and architectures of Gaudi in Barcelona. I had not been a fan or enthusiast of modern art, but after seeing these works up close and personal and hearing their interpretations, those abstract "cubistic" drawings of Picasso's don't look that wacky to me any more, and the mishy-mashy, holographical pieces of Dali's do look quite innovative even today. And Gaudi was yet one other lucky guy who got to realize his artistic talent in the commercial world, whether it be a failed planned community in urban Barcelona, or the grand Church of Holy Family that is still under construction today.

                           

I also enjoyed the statues, fountains, arches, and grand old Romanesque buildings around Madrid and other cities. I remember on the first evening in Madrid, walking through downtown thoroughfares, seeing those majestic old buildings and statues lime-lighted against the lively crowds, the tall trees, and the wide roads, I felt buoyant and optimistic, and somehow got the sense how empire and artistic minds were inspired here...

                    

     

Tapas & Wines

The food in Spain is in general good. They have plenty of farm produce, great tasting pork, and fresh sea food from the surrounding Atlantic and Mediterranean oceans. Our tour package included all meals, that means typically full course big plates for lunches and dinners (that stored up fat in my body fast), but I was most impressed by those small plate dishes they call "tapas" that exemplified local specialties and were most delicious.

  

And they served wine with every meal. The Spanish wines we had were blended instead of vintage stock as we usually get in California, therefore tasted smoother and fruitier, to my liking. The wine factory we visited is in the city where the world's first Sherry wine was created--the city name Jerez was Anglicized to "Xeres," then "Sherry." No need to buy the wines there and lug them all the way home with you if you like them, though. I found out later that you can get them at local liquor stores such as Bevmo here in Southern California. 

Guides of All Feathers

The guides we met in Madrid were pretty grand-motherly and spoke with heavy accent; the one in Toledo was an energetic hearty-laughing woman who was a devoted Catholic but didn't mind making a joke about some dead cardinals buried underneath the cathedral she was showing us; the guide in Cordoba was a dark, heavy-build man who I suspected may have some Moorish blood in him who always started his session with "ladies and gentlemen"; the guide at Seville was a witty, articulate English speaker who's a seasoned world traveler himself; the guide in Ronda, the bull-fighting town, was a short, stodgy man with Frank Sinatra-ish smiles; the lady who took us around Alhambra palace in Granada spoke slowly but with a mesmerizing Euro-woman charm; and the young girl who guided us through the wine factory was so sweet and bubbly that I should have given her a hug at the end!

                                       

  

New is Old, Old is New

While meandering through one of those Mediterranean towns, seeing its up and down city streets lined with red roof and white wall buildings, back-dropped with bright sunny skies and calm blue ocean, it dawned on me "Doesn't this look just like San Clemente, the city where I live by, whose founding fathers set out to build a 'Spanish village by the sea' on Southern California coast?" And while strolling down downtown Barcelona, the tour guide told us one of the busiest streets here is called "Las Ramblas", which, surprise, is exactly the same name of the major roadway (a Freeway exit, actually) right next to my community! It's not a far-fetched idea that some early Spanish settlers to my city might have come from Barcelona area some 200 years or so ago then.

                                      

  

Have Friends, Will Travel

Our tour group was organized in Taiwan, for the alumni of the mountain climbing club of my college in Taiwan. As non-members, we tagged onto this group through our friends Ray & Jenny who are members and have been enjoying the outdoors ever since their college days, as well as most other members on this trip. I was quite impressed by the camaraderie and the inbred outdoorsmanship of these "mountain people" along the way. They always seemed able to find a little hill to climb or a new place to explore wherever we went, and some of them woke up early to do their daily jogging even during our busy traveling schedule. Doing outdoors surely is a worthy hobby to keep that'll keep you physically and mentally healthy for life, judging from what I saw in these people.

We also met people of various backgrounds: doctors, scholars, media workers, fund manager, art performer, etc. Talking to them and traveling with them expanded our life perspectives and struck up new friendships. As they say in the Chinese proverb: "Rather travel ten thousand miles of road than read ten thousand reams of book." (讀萬卷書不如行萬里路). We all should get out more!

And note it down, so when I look back in five or ten years, everything won't be just a blur!

men, stars, earth, sun, and pope

A couple of recent remarks by the new Pope Francis turned some heads these days: On the plane back from Brazil, he told reporters "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” and in a letter to an Italian newspaper he wrote “You ask me if the God of the Christians forgives those who don’t believe and who don’t seek the faith. I start by saying – and this is the fundamental thing – that God’s mercy has no limits if you go to him with a sincere and contrite heart. The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience."

Long perceived as the stodgy, gloomy, ultra-conservative old guard of Christian faith, you might be surprised, but such remarks are in total agreement with the Catholic Church's doctrinal stand for at least the past 50 years, if not longer. In the Vatican II Council (1962-1965)'s "Dogmatic Constitution on the Church" it states:

"Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience."

Sounds a bit drab and stuffy still, but quite a contrast to the bible thumping "believe or burn in hell" shouts coming from some Evangelical Protestants sometimes.

The Catholic Church is also often times accused of anti-rationalism and suppressing scientific development throughout the Medieval Europe period (500-1500 AD), the so-called Dark Ages between the end of Western Roman Empire and the beginning of Renaissance and modern Age of Enlightenment.

The truth of the matter is even though early Christianity did have concern about "pagan knowledge" from the Greek philosophers and their Roman successors, it soon accepted that just as God had given the Jews a special insight into spiritual matters, so He had given the Greeks a particular insight into things scientific, and that if the cosmos was the product of a rational God then it could and should be apprehended rationally. Throughout medieval history, the Church was actually the greatest promoter and sponsor of early universities and "natural philosophy" study all over Europe and laying the foundations for the rise of modern science as we know it, according to historical records and scholastic studies.

How about that infamous "trial of the century" "Religion vs Science" persecution against the great astronomer/physicist Galileo, that the all-mighty Church going after one scientific purist who insisted on saying that "the earth circles the sun" (the heliocentric theory), rather than the long held "the sun circles the earth" (the geocentric theory) view of the world?

To begin with, Galileo did not "invent" the heliocentric theory, nor was he the first to propose it. It was proposed by another astronomer/mathematician Copernicus 32 years before he was born, and was among a few world models suggested by many "natural philosophers" (later called "scientists") at that time. What Galileo brought into the debate was his observation through his telescope (that he did invent) of the phases of Venus and satellites orbiting Jupiter. 

Due to the lack of convincing evidences and opposition from many of fellow natural scientists at that time, the Church decided to stand by its traditional geocentric position--which incidentally was one of the pagan Aristotelian ideas that the early Church adopted--and ordered Galileo in 1616 not to "hold, teach, or defend in any manner" the Copernican theory regarding the motion of the earth. Galileo obeyed the order for seven years, partly to make life easier and partly because he was a devoted Catholic.

Things made an interesting turn, however, when Galileo's long time friend and admirer Cardinal Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII in 1623. He allowed Galileo to pursue his work on astronomy and even encouraged him to publish it, on condition it be objective and not advocate Copernican theory. In 1632, Galileo published a book titled "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems", in which he used three fictional characters engaging in an imaginary conversation. One character, who would support Galileo's side of the argument, was brilliant. Another character would be open to either side of the argument. The final character, with a pejorative name Simplicio ("fool" in Italian), was dogmatic and foolish, representing all of Galileo's enemies who ignored any evidence that Galileo was right. Worse yet, whether knowingly or deliberately, Galileo put some of the arguments used by Urban VIII into the mouth of Simplicio. 

Angered by this, the Pope effectively withdrew his support for Galileo and allowed him to be tried by the Inquisition for breaking his agreement of 1616 in the way he argued in the Dialogue. The Inquisition found that he had and he was punished for this. He was placed under house arrest in his villa in Florence for the remaining nine years of his life, where he completed several of his most important works before he died. 

In retrospect, the Catholic Church did not (and does not) teach that the Bible had to be interpreted literally. The Catholic Church, then and now, taught that any given Bible verse or passage could be interpreted via no less than four levels of exegesis--the literal, the allegorical/symbolic, the moral and the eschatological. Of these, the literal meaning was generally regarded as the least important. This also meant that a verse of Scriptures could be interpreted via one or more of these levels and it could potentially have no literal meaning at all and be purely metaphorical or symbolic.

All this means that the Church was quite capable of changing its interpretations of Scriptures that seemed to say the earth was "fixed" (e.g., Psalms 104:5 says "The Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved."; Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.") if it could be shown that this was not literally the case. It just was not going to do so before this was demonstrated conclusively--something Galileo had not done. As Cardinal Bellarmine, who was a well qualified natural philosopher himself and acquainted with the state of the heliocentric/geocentric debate, as many of the clergymen were at that time, noted in his 1616 ruling on Galileo's writings:

"If there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the centre of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false. But this is not a thing to be done in haste, and as for myself I shall not believe that there are such proofs until they are shown to me."

In conclusion, the Galileo affair was a complex series of events that involved a lot more than just science and religion. It occurred during the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation when the Church needed to re-assert its authority, between a brilliant but at times arrogant and abrasive man and his jealous fellow scientists, and last but not least, his unnecessary snub and humiliation of a personal and political ally, the "infallible" but all-so-human Pope of the day!

and an anniversary

Tim and I went to the same elementary school in Taipei, then the same private junior high, public senior high, and then the same grand old university in Taiwan. Other than that, honestly, we didn’t go that close. He’s more like a jock while I leaned more toward the nerdy side, to borrow kid’s term today. Our paths may never cross after we graduated from school, just like many other people we met in life.

But fate has a mysterious way of bringing us together. Just after I came back from my wife’s high school reunion cruise in New York a couple years ago, he called me out of the blue. What happened was I took a picture with a group of guys who accompanied their wives to the reunion just like I did, and one of them happened to be acquainted with and lived in the same neighborhood in Northern California as Tim. He spotted me right off the picture and got a hold of my contact info through him, thus we reconnected with each other.

He’s been coming to Southern California on occasions since and I met him and his wife about every time they came. He’s a super energetic guy, and very athletic: He surfs and bikes, knows every nook and cranny of Southern California coast more than I do. And he has a tremendous memory: he can spew out names of our high school teachers and classmates, down to the berth tag numbers of our dorm room, without a second’s hesitation. Plus all the little details of the crazy things he did during those young and restless years of his, of course.

He came in town a couple weeks ago again, this time from Hawaii after returning from Taiwan visiting his sick-bed ridden father. And as usual, he found time in his tight, dynamic schedule here to come down to my home for biking and boogie board surfing, along the harbor and on the beach, in early morning and late afternoon, Saturday and Monday. He wanted me to come boogie boarding with him again Tuesday in Newport Beach, “where the surf is better,” he said. I would if not for an urgent Website cut-over my project happened to be in.

“I am retiring at the end of this month,” he told me when I half-jokingly checked about his retirement plan when we met this time. Though he mentioned a couple of times before that he would retire right after 55, I was a little surprised he’s actually going to do it now. 

What would you do after you retired, I asked him. He said he’ll spend 8 months in Taiwan every year, to care for his father, who has been in vegetative state for over the past 20 years and for whom he flew back every year using up his vacation time just to be able to sit next to him in the hospital. He said he’ll rent an apartment near the hospital so he can walk to the ward every day. And “I may be able to spread Gospel in the hospital too,” he smiled. He’s a devout, compassionate Christian brother, by the way. More the “prodigal son” type than the up-tight one, you know.

I admire his energy, devotion, and genuine affections towards people. People like him make us connect and reconnect, explore and expand, and enjoy the fun in life. God bless him and his family, and may we all have more biking and surfing together for years to come—even though my feet hurt badly after that first ever boogie boarding of my life the other day.

The above picture was taken after the celebration dinner for Tim and his wife’s 25^th anniversary at his cousin's home in Irvine. Tim is the 3rd from the left in the back, standing right behind his wife Lily.

Long live marriage, friendship, love, hope, and faith in all these and beyond.

an accident

I had been driving a Toyota Highlander for over 5 years. Happy with it, everything ran smooth and swell, and I kept it in great shape, as if I would keep it forever. I might as well do, except I met my childhood friend Sunny one day last month when he came back from his factories in China and Vietnam and asked me for a little get-together at his office.

“Sell me your car,” he practically yelled at me when he saw me and my Highlander. Why? “This car is ideal for my factory in Vietnam. It’s a 7-seater, in good shape, isn’t it?” he said. “I’ll pay you Kelley's Blue Book full price for it,” he added.

My first reaction was bewilderment and rejection: Why would I part with my good, old-but-still-shiny-looking, reliable SUV and replace it with… what? I have to admit, when it comes to cars, I am not one of those who always dream of or plan on what their next fancy one would be.

But a thought had snuck into my mind. Long story short, I started shopping for a new car after I confirmed with Sunny I would sell and he would buy my Highlander to export to Vietnam as he proposed, and finally landed my eyes on and purchased a BMW X3, a “German engineered” cross-over that brings back the driving sensation I used to have with a Mercedes I owned a few years ago. The funny twist of event was my Highlander ended up not sold to Sunny, because the Vietnamese government told us at the last minute that they won’t allow import of any cars older than 5 years (and mine was just 3 months over the edge), but traded in to the BMW dealer I bought my X3 from.

All is dandy and fun, nonetheless. I enjoy the handling and the bells and whistles that come with a new car, and my wife loves the look and the nice LED lights that automatically shine up before doors are opened.

Then a couple of weekends ago, we had a little party at our home with some friends of new and old, and we decided to go to the nearby beach for a stroll. I had in my new BMW full load of 4 ladies. Yakety merrily they chatted all the way, and just a couple of blocks before we reached our destination, on an ascending slope of the busy Pacific Coast Highway, the car gave up on me: All of a sudden I lost power, it couldn’t accelerate, and started slowing down. Within seconds all I could do was veer the car to the left-turn lane, where it stopped completely, and the navigation screen lit with the message “Drive train malfunction…”

My friend, who drove another car following me with another full load of people, called me from his cell, asking me what’s going on. I told him I had car trouble and asked him to drop off his passengers at the beach park ahead then come back to pick up mine. Then I pressed the “SOS” button on the headliner right above my driver seat, pretty James-Bond-movie like, and made an “Emergency Request” call, as the complimentary BMW road side assistance service is named.

The BMW operator got online right away and identified me and my vehicle and where I was, then instructed me to stay there for a tow truck to come in about 30 minutes.

A Good Samaritan on his bike approached me and asked if I could put the car in neutral gear so he could help push it out of the middle of the road. “Otherwise those cars are going to hit you from behind,” he said, pointing to the phalanx of vehicles whooshing by. Unfortunately the gear wouldn’t shift because it’s electronically locked dead already, so I thanked him and he left. A police patrol came minutes later, and after a few friendly chats with me, understanding what happened, he summoned another police car, whose officer had on his uniform inscribed “Community Service” and started putting those little red fiery torches on the road to block out the lane, potentially preventing cars from hitting me and my car…

I got a call the next day from the BMW dealership where my car was towed. “What was wrong with your car?” he asked. I told him it quit on me right in the middle of the road and the engine wouldn’t run and the transmission wouldn’t shift. “Well it’s running perfectly fine here now after I put a couple gallons of gas in its tank,” said the worker. I couldn't believe it. The car’s fuel was at its tank bottom yesterday, as its gauge indicated, I knew, and though I thought about refueling it in the morning I got side tracked and decided to do it later, as often the case. But could it be as simple a cause as that? Don’t the gauges usually lie when it tells you you have no gas in the tank when in fact you still have a good one or two gallons left to go for another 20, 30 miles or so?

I picked up my X3 and told my friend about this the next day. He laughed and postulated maybe it was indeed the case: that my car was running very low on fuel, and when it went on an uphill climb as happened that day, it had trouble siphoning up the fuel from the tank due to the tilt, therefore it died.

The above picture was taken by the young community service police officer who spread the safety torches on the road for me. I joked with him that if I post this photo on my Facebook or Twitter page, “it would be bad publicity for BMW,” and he laughed in total agreement with me. But no, BMW, I bear no ill will against you and am still in love with my new X3, and your emergency service is every bit you advertise it to be. Just hope I won't have to use it any more.

I have to apologize to those ladies in my car for the scare, though. But rest assured, I had already got my earful of condemnation from my wife, even for the yet to be 100% proven theory that the cause of this (unnecessary) accident was due to the negligence on my part!

a wedding

Ray is a buddy friend of mine since college. His first born child, Michael, who actually came to this world 26 years ago the same year we and Ray and his wife moved down to Orange County and whom we practically watched grow from toddler to boy, to a Stanford graduate and then a mature young adult working in Wall Street, New York, was getting married. We were invited to his wedding held in Park City, Utah last month.

As is customary here, the wedding was planned months ahead by the jolly young couple and "sponsored" by the bride's family. The bridegroom side's family and guests basically just need to "show up for the show," so to speak. But Ray and his wife Jenny being such nice people, they booked and paid the hotel rooms for us beforehand, so all we really need to do as guests was to plan and book the airline tickets to Utah months ahead and show up with good will and jolly mood for the occasion.

We arrived in Salt Lake City one day before the wedding, took time for a little tour at the downtown, visiting the Mormon temples and museums, then headed back on the highway to Park City about 45 minutes away.

Park City is a (winter) resort town, famous for its many splendid ski runways, and was the host city of the Winter Olympics Games in 2002. Me and my wife had been here before, but only as occasional tourists. Now we'd stay for the next two nights at one of its more prestigious hotels, St. Regis, to enjoy its beautiful outdoors and scenery, and the grand wedding.

The wedding program actually started the night we arrived, at an old Western bar in downtown Park City. All guests were encouraged to dress up as cowboys and cowgirls, and a hired country & western band played music and taught all how to line-dance, with beers and drinks and desserts and walls flashing with pictures of the bride's and the bridegroom's, etc. We got to meet Michael and his soon-to-be wife, Parilee, at the bar as well. Parilee is a young, (relatively) tiny Caucasian girl we met briefly once in Taipei last year, who looked spritely different tonight. Dressed in white, elegant gown, greeting and embracing every guest with pleasantry and passion, she looked more like a typical, well cultivated middle class American family hostess than the quiet, shy little young woman we met last time. We took turn to take pictures with them and other guests, then chatted, drank, and (I) had quite some delicious chocolate fondu, before heading back to the hotel in the shuttle provided near mid-night.

The next day started with a casual brunch buffet at the hotel. Afterwards, I went for biking in the wild and my wife for shopping at downtown for the afternoon, to each his/her own heart's content. Then we got back to the hotel to get ready for the wedding.

The ceremony was held outdoor, in the mountain-canopied garden of the hotel. Luckily the weather was cloudy enough to be cool, yet not too moist for the rain or drizzle to appear. The officiant of the ceremony was interestingly the grandfather of Parilee's, a sagely and humorous gentleman who seemed well versed in world affairs than most American people I know. He said as the first grandchild of their family, Parilee had been outstanding in every aspect since a kid. She earned 5 top awards out of 10 when she graduated from school, with a Taikwando black belt on the side. Naturally they all wanted the best for her, and were intrigued when she picked Michael as her life partner. But then Michael proved to be as brilliant in his own way as she is, and they couldn't be happier for both of them now. Then Parilee's and Michael's best friends spoke in turn at the podium, including one young man reciting a Chinese poem from 詩經 (窈窕淑女,君子好逑), whose well done English translation was printed on the back of the wedding's official program for all to view.

What touched me most, though, was at the end when Michael and Parilee exchanged their vows to each other. You may say they were just love promises from two passionate young man and woman at the consummation of their long term courtship, but I could tell the words came from their hearts and they meant every ounce it carried. "I promise you, Michael, no matter what lies ahead in our life together, our family will always be my first priority," says Parilee, a modern female, raised in a very well-to-do family, graduates from Stanford and Harvard, with a great professional career ahead of her, still subscribing to the good old value of marriage whole-heartedly. Amazing!

The politically correct question for a husband to ask with regards to this picture is: Ignoring the dresses they wear, can you tell which lady in the picture is my wife, and which other is the bride?

enlightenment 2.0

I'll call it "When High-Tech meets Ole Wiss(dom)," but did you know there are over 1000 and hundreds of Google employees who have attended or waiting to attend company sponsored meditation and mindfulness classes; Facebook is experimenting and following ancient and modern-day sages' advices to instill more humane ingredients in its service to 1 billion netizens over the world; some self-taught enlightenment achievers in the Valley think the way to Nirvana is here and now and its knowledge and practice should be open and sharable to all as much as possible, hence the "open source enlightenment" movement through web sites and mobile apps. And this being the Silicon Valley, there is an annual "trade event" called "Wisdom 2.0" ("How do we live with greater awareness, wisdom, and compassion in the digital age?") whose attendance has jumped up five folds since inception in 2010... All these are covered in a report titled "Enlightenment-Engineer" in the July issue of WIRED magazine. The following are some excerpts:

Google's on-campus "emotional intelligence" training class--called "Search Inside Yourself"--was started by Chade-Meng Tan, a Singapore born engineer who joined Google in 2000 as employee number 107 working on mobile search. He got turned on to Buddhism by an American nun and for years his attempts to bring meditation into the office had been met with limited success. It was only in 2007, when he packaged contemplative practices in the wrapper of emotional intelligence, that he saw demand spike. Now there are dozens of employee development programs at Google that incorporate some aspect of meditation or mindfulness, including a bimonthly series of “mindful lunches,” conducted in complete silence except for the ringing of prayer bells, which began after the Zen monk Thick Nhat Hanh visited in 2011. The search giant even recently built a labyrinth for walking meditations.

It’s not just Google that’s embracing Eastern traditions. Across the Valley, quiet contemplation is seen as the new caffeine, the fuel that allegedly unlocks productivity and creative bursts. Classes in meditation and mindfulness—paying close, nonjudgmental attention—have become staples at many of the region’s most prominent companies. There’s a Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute now teaching the Google meditation method to whoever wants it. The co-founders of Twitter and Facebook have made contemplative practices key features of their new enterprises, holding regular in-office meditation sessions and arranging for work routines that maximize mindfulness.

Repeated studies have demonstrated that meditation can rewire how the brain responds to stress. Boston University researchers showed that after as little as three and a half hours of meditation training, subjects tend to react less to emotionally charged images. Other research suggests that meditation improves working memory and executive function. And several studies of long-term practitioners show an increased ability to concentrate on fast-changing stimuli. One paper cited by the Google crew even implies that meditators are more resistant to the flu.

But Googlers don’t take up meditation just to keep away the sniffles or get a grip on their emotions. They are also using it to understand their coworkers’ motivations, to cultivate their own “emotional intelligence”—a characteristic that tends to be in short supply among the engineering set. There is in fact little data to support the notion that meditation is good for Google’s bottom line, just a few studies from outfits like the Conference Board showing that emotionally connected employees tend to remain at their current workplaces. Still, the company already tends to its employees’ physical needs with onsite gyms, subsidized massages, and free organic meals to keep them productive. Why not help them search for meaning and emotional connection as well?

Search Inside Yourself might have remained a somewhat isolated phenomenon in the Valley if a mindfulness instructor named Soren Gordhamer hadn’t found himself divorced, broke, out of a job, and stuck in the town of Dixon, New Mexico (population 1,500). Gordhamer, who had spent years teaching yoga and meditation in New York City’s juvenile detention centers, was feeling increasingly beleaguered by his seemingly uncontrollable Twitter habit. He decided to write a book—Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected—that offered tips for using technology in a mindful manner. By providing constant access to email, tweets, and Facebook updates, smartphones keep users distracted, exploiting the same psychological vulnerability as slot machines: predictable input and random payouts. They feed a sense that any pull of the lever, or Facebook refresh, could result in an information jackpot.

So he got the idea to host a conference where the technology and contemplative communities could hash out the best ways to incorporate these tools into our lives—and keep them from taking over. The event, billed as Wisdom 2.0, was born in April 2010 and the attendance has shot up 500 percent in 3 years. In 2013 nearly 1,700 signed up to hear headliners like Arianna Huffington, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Twitter cofounder Evan Williams, and, of course, Meng talk about how they run their enterprises mindfully. 

One of the reasons that Wisdom 2.0—and the broader movement it represents—has become so big, so quickly, is that it stripped away the dogma and religious trappings. But it’s hard not to consider what gets lost in this whittling process. Gautama Buddha famously abandoned the trappings of royalty to sit under the Bodhi Tree and preach about the illusion of the ego. Seeing the mega-rich take the stage to trumpet his practices is a bit jarring. It also raises the uncomfortable possibility that these ancient teachings are being used to reinforce some of modern society’s uglier inequalities. Looking around Wisdom 2.0, meditation starts to seem a lot like another secret handshake to join the club. “There is some legitimate interest among business people in contemplative practice,” Kenneth Folk says. “But Wisdom 2.0? That’s a networking opportunity with a light dressing of Buddhism.” And several established Buddhist leaders who came to this year’s conference were openly wary of what they saw as an unhealthy fixation on the brass ring of enlightenment. “If someone really wants it, I’ll teach it,” says Kornfield, cofounder of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center north of San Francisco. “But a strong goal orientation can heighten unhealthy ambition and self-criticism. It doesn’t really heighten wisdom.”

Arturo Bejar, an engineering director at Facebook who was a reluctant guest at the first Wisdom 2.0 conference in 2010, but changed his mind after witnessing an onstage conversation about kindness with American Buddhist trailblazer Jon Kabat-Zinn: "If people truly see one another," Kabat-Zinn said, "they’re more likely to be empathetic and gentle toward each other." Bejar then began looking for ways to bring some of that compassion to Facebook, where bullying and flame wars were all too common among users and the tools for reporting offensive content weren’t terribly effective. Bejar set up a series of “compassion research days” at Facebook and brought in Buddhist-inspired academics from Berkeley, Yale, and Stanford to see if they could help.

Their advice: Make the tools more personal, more conversational, and more emotional. For instance, let people express their vulnerability and distress when asking for a problematic picture or status update to be removed. The changes were small at first. Instead of tagging a post as “Embarrassing,” users clicked a new button that read “It’s embarrassing.” But those three letters made an enormous difference. It turned the report from a seemingly objective classification of content into a customer’s subjective, personal response. Use of the tool shot up 30 percent almost immediately. This in a field where a change of a few percentage points either way is considered tectonic.

Further fixes followed: personalized messages, more polite requests to take down a photo or a post, more culture-specific pleas. (In India, for example, online insults directed at someone’s favorite celebrity tend to cut deeper than they do in the US.) “Hey, this photo insults someone important to me,” reads one of the new automatically generated messages. “Would you please take it down?”

It’d be easy to be cynical about this effort—to laugh at people who over-identify with a Bollywood starlet or to question why meditation teachers, the masters of directing attention, are working with the social networks that cause so much distraction. But when you sit with Bejar and his colleagues at Facebook as they review these reports—when you see all the breakups, all the embarrassing photos, the tiffs between mothers and daughters—it’s hard not to feel sad and awed at the amount of confusion and hurt. Over a million of these disputes happen every week on Facebook. If you had a God’s-eye view of it all, wouldn’t you want to handle that pain with gentle hands?

Kenneth Folk’s journey toward enlightenment started in 1982 when he ran out of cocaine. An addict, he took the only drugs he could find: four hits of LSD. He saw a glass tube open up into the sky and merge with beautiful white light. “My drug addiction vanished in that moment,” he recalls. It sent him on a decades-long journey to re-create the experience. He spent three months on a silent retreat in Massachusetts and another six at a Burmese monastery, wearing a sarong in winter and eating his final meal of the day at 10 am. He found himself hitting ecstatic heights. But he also found that, at times, meditation could lead to rather horrible depression.

The monks of Burma told Folk that the depressive episodes were the completely predictable result of his meditative work and that they would soon be over. He was on a well-worn path through 16 stages of insight, each one bringing him closer to enlightenment. They laid out a map of his inner voyage and told Folk precisely where he was. Folk followed their plan and, he says, eventually became enlightened.

It was a radical shift from the method traditionally used by mystics to impart wisdom, in which a master cryptically pointed the acolyte in the direction he should go. And Folk loved it. Enlightenment wasn’t some completely mysterious, ungraspable goal. He returned to America ready to preach a gospel of jail-broken enlightenment: The source code for spiritual awakening is open to anyone. “Enlightenment is real. It is reproducible,” he says. “It happens to real human beings. It happened to me.”

He and his co-believers started contributing to a web forum called the Dharma Overground, a place online to share tips on the most effective means to promote enlightenment, to brag about the mystical powers that come with intensive meditation, and to chart their progress through the four rounds of 16 stages that lead to a final awakening.

Back in one ordinary class of Search Inside Yourself Institute, one of Meng’s students raises her hand. This saintly training, this randomly wishing for others’ happiness—it doesn’t seem all that genuine, she says: “It felt like I was saying the words, but I wasn’t actually doing anything by thinking that.”

A co-instructor tells her it’s OK to feel that way. The practice will help you later, he says, even if it comes across as empty at the time. “There’s definitely a fake-it-till-you-make-it aspect to it,” he says.

Oh no, Meng answers. It’s the first time in the whole class he’s corrected anyone. “It’s not faking it until you make it,” he says. “It’s faking it until you become it.”