a little trip

We drove north to the Bay Area to a high school friend of mine Michael's home the week before last, stayed there overnight, then went to visit another high school friend Joseph who was recuperating from a cancer surgery and a couple of chemo treatments since early this year. Joe was my best friend in high school who drew me to Christian faith in Taiwan. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just last August. Shocking news to us all and I'd wanted to visit him but could not until now. He looked even thinner than his usual thin self and was still adjusting his diet trying to gain back weight but seemed very well taken care of by his wife and hired help and in good spirit. We had long, vigorous conversations (wearing masks, at their yard outdoors) for the whole morning, before finally bidding farewell and wishing him a smooth recovery and left. 

We then drove northeast to a little rural town in inland California for a wedding. It was for the son of my best friend from elementary school Sunny who passed away almost three years ago. It was a lodge in the woods with a little pond, volleyball, mini-golf fields, pine trees and lawn, etc., a modest but relaxing environment. We stayed there for two nights, attending the pre-wedding rehearsal dinner the first night, then taking a stroll in the woods, attending the wedding ceremony and the reception dinner party the second day. It was a very happy occasion. We knew the young couple for some time (they'd dated for over seven years), but met the bride's family and friends for the first time. All very nice, folksy people. I was also impressed by the maturity the son had become and how blessed this marriage looked to be, and happy for Sunny who must be looking down in heaven smiling.

We then drove back to Michael's home in the Bay Area again, and had dinner with him and his wife and another college/high school friend in the area, Ching-Cheng. Ching-Cheng was one of the early achievers to the monumental "Grand-Pa" status ("做人成公") among our class, whose cap-headed picture at his grand child's birthday party inspired me to create and make "Come Spring Again" hats (回春帽) for all our classmates a few years ago. His knowledge broad-span and witticism entertained us as usual, but nothing soothed my ears more this time than hearing him say that new studies had found high cholesterol levels do not cause harm to Asian males...

Michael took us to a grand dim-sum restaurant for early lunch before we left town the next day. I so admired this "side-kick" friend of mine since high school and his wife who had hardily and beautifully raised an autistic son and a wonderful daughter Carol whose wedding I just witnessed last year in New York City. Carol and Andrew, their new son-in-law, had planned and booked a joint vacation for them and Andrew's parents for the coming months in Canada...  The start of a rewarding second half of their life they well deserve, I could tell.

Happy Summer!

war and peace (3)

Conventional wisdom says Napoleon Bonaparte was a military genius who won every major war and battle until got devastatingly crushed in his Russia campaign by the severe winter, poor logistics, and the scorched-earth strategy of his Russian opponents. While conceding weather and terrain being a major factor, Tolstoy has nothing but contempt for the so-called military genius and strategic maneuvering of the generals: “What theory and science is possible about a matter the conditions and circumstances of which are unknown and cannot be defined, especially when the strength of the acting forces cannot be ascertained?"

One unascertainable force he refers to is the morale of the troops, the skittish human psyche that can easily flip the outcome of a battle one way or the other: "Sometimes—when there is not a coward at the front to shout ‘We are cut off!’ and start running, but a brave and jolly lad who shouts ‘Hurrah!’—a detachment of five thousand is worth thirty thousand, as at Schön Grabern (where the Russian army triumphed), while at times fifty thousand run from eight thousand, as at Austerlitz (where the Russians lost)."

That same morale, applied to all Russian people, peasants and soldiers alike, was what drove them to expel the French out of their fatherland by way of guerrilla warfare and self sacrifice, not any smart strategies or military maneuverings by the generals.

It is probably for the same reason Tolstoy gives a much more sympathetic light to the Russian commander-in-chief, Kutuzov, a one-eyed war veteran field marshal who had been accused of leading tardy, evasive retreats instead of confronting the French army head on to stop their advancing. In Tolstoy's mind, Kutuzov did what he did because "he knew that the result of a battle is decided not by the orders of a commander in chief, nor the place where the troops are stationed, nor by the number of cannon or of slaughtered men, but by that intangible force called the spirit of the army, and he watched this force and guided it in as far as that was in his power" without incurring unnecessary casualty on either the Russian or the French side.

The greatest antipathy Tolstoy shows toward in his novel, however, is the inhumanity war imposes on ordinary people.

During Pierre's imprisonment by the French in Moscow, he himself as well as other prisoners struck friendly, buddy-like relationships with their captors. But as the retreat from Moscow started, a mysterious force seemed to completely control their guards. "From the officer down to the lowest soldier they showed what seemed like personal spite against each of the prisoners, in unexpected contrast to their former friendly relations." And as the long march continued and the simple, happy Russian peasant soldier Karataev whom they all used to like got sick and could not keep pace with the procession, they shot him to death.

Pierre also recalled how a French officer examining his case was about to release him but was interrupted by his staff member and went on to care for other business thus leaving him in prison along with others to be executed. Both the officer and his staff member showed no intention of killing him, Pierre could tell.

Then who was executing him, killing him, depriving him of life—him, Pierre, with all his memories, aspirations, hopes, and thoughts? Who was doing this? And Pierre felt that it was no one. It was a system—a concurrence of circumstances.

A system that kills, not only human bodies, but humanity itself.

**********************************************************

Two docu-videos on Napoleonic Wars for those who are interested: 

Napoleonic Wars 1805 - 09: March of the Eagles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91OmO2YMiDM

Napoleonic Wars 1809 - 14: Downfall:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBSGSkIasRY

war and peace (2)

Pierre was an illegitimate son of a very rich aristocrat who was recalled home from France to appear at his father's death bed in Petersburg and inherited tremendous wealth upon his death.

Shy and socially awkward, he was coaxed into marrying the beautiful but shallow daughter of a conniving old aristocrat who pretended to be his elderly benefactor. He went into a duel with a young officer who was rumored to have an affair with his socially active wife and decided to lead a separate life from his wife afterwards.

Always in search of life's true meaning, he joined the Freemasonry Society and became a devoted member, contributing his wealth to help achieve the lofty goals of brotherly love and welfare for the poor, with little or counter effect as people took advantage of his naivete and lack of pragmatism.

As Napoleon's army approached, he decided to stay in Moscow to have a chance to assassinate him when he came to town. A fire accident turned him into a prisoner by the occupying French, where he witnessed innocent people being executed and he himself barely escaped that same fate; he saved a French officer who deemed him a lifetime friend and had a heart-to-heart conversation with; he refused to be in company with other high ranking prisoners but stayed with lowly soldier prisoners where he witnessed a peasant soldier conducting a simple but happy life under the meagerest circumstances:

Karataev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood them, but loved and lived affectionately with everything life brought him in contact with, particularly with man—not any particular man, but those with whom he happened to be... To Pierre he always remained what he had seemed that first night: an unfathomable, rounded, eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.

The enlightenment he had long searched for finally arrived:

He had sought it in philanthropy, in Freemasonry, in the dissipations of town life, in wine, in heroic feats of self-sacrifice; he had sought it by reasoning—and all these quests and experiments had failed him. And now without thinking about it he had found that peace and inner harmony only through the horror of death, through privation, and through what he recognized in Karataev.

He was rescued by the Russian army from the retreating French and regarded as a legendary hero when he returned home.

He met Natasha, a girl he had long loved but dared not admit. They talked about their mutual friend Andrei and his death, and Pierre's extraordinary ordeal. They eventually got married and had four children.

Pierre of old vs Pierre of new:

Formerly he had appeared to be a kindhearted but unhappy man, and so people had been inclined to avoid him. Now a smile at the joy of life always played around his lips, and sympathy for others shone in his eyes with a questioning look as to whether they were as contented as he was, and people felt pleased by his presence.

Previously he had talked a great deal, grew excited when he talked, and seldom listened; now he was seldom carried away in conversation and knew how to listen so that people readily told him their most intimate secrets.

Previously he had equipped himself with a mental telescope and looked into remote space, where petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen.

Now, however, he had learned to see the great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and therefore—to see it and enjoy its contemplation—he naturally threw away the telescope through which he had till now gazed over men’s heads, and gladly regarded the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him.

war and peace (1)

A docu-video on the Napoleonic Wars piqued my interest in that early 19th century period of European history and made me decide to take on that world famous literature classic "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy, a historical novel that centers on Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812.

It seemed a daunting task at the beginning, to read through a 1800+ page long story set on a different land at different times by an iconic author of a different era, but once I got over those confusing Russian name look-alikes (Bezukhovs and Bolkonskys, Denisov and Dolokhov...), vintage military regiments and titles (dragoon and hussar, aide-de-camp and adjutant general...), the many princes/princesses, counts/countesses that seemed to come and go in one soiree after another, and the at times long, segmented sentences Tolstoy (or the book's English translator) liked to use elaborating human state of mind, it became an enjoyable read. I made it a daily pastime by going through two or three chapters a day (if I could refrain from going overboard when being carried away by the story at hand) and finished it in a couple of months.

Several Russian aristocratic families form the core of the story. One main character, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, hailed from a country estate headed by a retired old soldier, a strict disciplinarian and ill-tempered patriarch. A thoughtful and brave (if somewhat arrogant) young man dissatisfied with his married life and the vanity of Petersburg's high society, Prince Andrei embarked on a military career with a tinge of hero worship of Emperor Napoleon who's on a tear defeating European monarchies while nominally spreading French revolutionary ideals across the continent.

He soon met his imagined hero at a battlefield after being injured and taken prisoner, right at the same time an epiphany from his near death experience brought him an ever clearer visions of the world above and the one below:

"Looking into Napoleon’s eyes Prince Andrei thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain."

The delusion of the glory of war gone, the hero image shattered, he became despondent with life, but as a capable man and a caring son went on to care for his father's estate, and observed how infinite power destroyed the ruler (such as his father) morally than the ruled physically:

"To liberate the serfs is a good thing, not for the serfs—for even if they are beaten, flogged, or sent to Siberia, they lead the same animal life, and the stripes on their bodies heal, and they are happy as before. But it is a good thing for the liberator, for if they hold on to unlimited power, they in time grow more irritable, become cruel and harsh, are conscious of it, but cannot restrain themselves and grow more and more miserable.”

Then he met Natasha, a young, energetic girl with an angelic singing voice from another well-to-do family. He fell in love and found purpose in life again. He proposed marriage and she accepted, with a young girl's (perhaps over-zealous) infatuation of love and romance. However, in light of Andrei's father's objection to the marriage, the wedding had to be postponed for one year while Andrei went away on military duty.

A playboy son of a corrupted aristocratic family came to seduce the love-craze, distraught young Natasha to break her engagement with Andrei and elope with him. Though the plot fell through at the last minute, Andrei was heart broken and Natasha attempted suicide and became seriously ill afterwards.

At a fierce battle outside Moscow with the French army Andrei was seriously injured and escorted to Moscow along with the withdrawing Russian army, where Natasha's family were preparing to leave town. Though her family tried to keep her from knowing, once Natasha found out Andrei's presence with the family's processing out of town, she braced herself to meet him at his sick bed and started ceaseless nursing for his recovery with fortitude.

The following is to me the most romantically touching and spiritually stirring section of the book:

“Ah, she has come!” thought he. And so it was. Since she had begun looking after him, he had always experienced this physical consciousness of her nearness. She was sitting in an armchair placed sideways, screening the light of the candle from him, and was knitting a stocking. The needles clicked lightly in her slender, rapidly moving hands, and he could clearly see the thoughtful profile of her drooping face. She moved, and the ball rolled off her knees. She started, glanced round at him, and screening the candle with her hand stooped carefully with a supple and exact movement, picked up the ball, and regained her former position. He looked at her without moving and saw that she wanted to draw a deep breath after stooping, but refrained from doing so and breathed cautiously.

At the Tróitsa monastery they had spoken of the past, and he had told her that if he lived he would always thank God for his wound which had brought them together again, but after that they never spoke of the future.

“Can it or can it not be?” he now thought as he looked at her and listened to the light click of the steel needles. “Can fate have brought me to her so strangely only for me to die?... Is it possible that the truth of life has been revealed to me only to show me that I have spent my life in falsity? I love her more than anything in the world! But what am I to do if I love her?” he thought, and he involuntarily groaned, from a habit acquired during his sufferings.

On hearing that sound Natasha put down the stocking, leaned nearer to him, and suddenly, noticing his shining eyes, stepped lightly up to him and bent over him.

“You are not asleep?” “No, I have been looking at you a long time. I felt you come in. No one else gives me that sense of soft tranquillity that you do... that light. I want to weep for joy.”

Natasha drew closer to him. Her face shone with rapturous joy.

“Natasha, I love you too much! More than anything in the world.”

“And I!”—She turned away for an instant.

“Why too much?” she asked.

“Why too much?... Well, what do you, what do you feel in your soul, your whole soul—shall I live? What do you think?”

“I am sure of it, sure!” Natasha almost shouted, taking hold of both his hands with a passionate movement.

He remained silent awhile.

“How good it would be!” and taking her hand he kissed it.

Natasha felt happy and agitated, but at once remembered that this would not do and that he had to be quiet.

“But you have not slept,” she said, repressing her joy. “Try to sleep... please!”

He pressed her hand and released it, and she went back to the candle and sat down again in her former position. Twice she turned and looked at him, and her eyes met his beaming at her. She set herself a task on her stocking and resolved not to turn round till it was finished.

Soon he really shut his eyes and fell asleep. As he fell asleep he had still been thinking of the subject that now always occupied his mind—about life and death, and chiefly about death. He felt himself nearer to it.

“Love? What is love?” he thought.

“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.” These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former agitation and obscurity. He fell asleep.

He dreamed that he was lying in the room he really was in, but that he was quite well and unwounded. Many various, indifferent, and insignificant people appeared before him. He talked to them and discussed something trivial... Gradually, unnoticed, all these persons began to disappear and a single question, that of the closed door, superseded all else. He rose and went to the door to bolt and lock it. Everything depended on whether he was, or was not, in time to lock it. He went, and tried to hurry, but his legs refused to move and he knew he would not be in time to lock the door though he painfully strained all his powers. He was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear was the fear of death. It stood behind the door. But just when he was clumsily creeping toward the door, that dreadful something on the other side was already pressing against it and forcing its way in. Something not human—death—was breaking in through that door, and had to be kept out. He seized the door, making a final effort to hold it back—to lock it was no longer possible—but his efforts were weak and clumsy and the door, pushed from behind by that terror, opened and closed again.

Once again it pushed from outside. His last superhuman efforts were vain and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. It entered, and it was death, and Prince Andrei died.

passing

A friend of ours, a devoted Buddhist, passed away a couple months ago, just a few days after his 65th birthday. Moments after he rolled out his car onto the road at the end of a workday, he lost consciousness and the car glided to a slow stop with the help of some bystanders. He passed with a calm, peaceful smile on his face, they said.

Nothing is more certain than the fact that we are all going to die one day. Yet rarely do we think about such gloomy endings, which is a good thing–imagine what a chaotic world it would be if everyone worried about their coming demise everyday. The (illusionary) permanency of the world is achieved because people are set out to live as if they were not going to die tomorrow, until one day when it comes without them knowing.  

And when that day comes, not to us but to someone else we know, we are shocked and saddened by the precariousness of life and the loss of a precious relationship. Then after some mourning, we pick ourselves up and resume our "not for me today" living as if nothing had happened.

Immediate demise we don't expect, gradual aging we do experience. Our hair turns gray, joints get stiff, memory fades–our body cells die and regenerate with increasing chances of mutations and defects every day... Most of us do not "rage against the dying of the light," but "go gentle into that good night"–that peaceful sounding ending is yet another good thing for the world and the people, I suppose.

We like to say when losing our loved ones that we'll remember them forever, but the cruel truth is that we forget, sooner or later, our emotional attachment to them, the same way our pain and sorrow is taken away from our memories as time goes by.  

And even if I met them in heaven before I forgot them, what would I say to them? Telling my parents that I have walked through the path of life as they did and feeling more like a peer to them... "Catching up" with my best friends with things I wanted to share but didn't have chances to... Then what? With earthly relationships and common experiences existing no more, how (spiritual) lives move on in eternity remains a mystery to me.

Perhaps the worst emotional damage we experience after learning of a loved one's passing is the void we feel inside, like a part of our life that's been taken away, forever lost with the departure of their life from earth. But maybe we are misdirected, because "what we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us," to quote from Helen Keller. Our loved ones do stay with/in us forever, after all.

And instead of "living like you are going to die tomorrow," that supposedly positive-living encouraging, but contrived, false-alarm sounding motto I dislike, I wish you all a good night's sleep, and waking up treating "tomorrow as the first day of the rest of your life!"

Happy Lunar New Year

meditation quotes

Every morning, when I open my meditation app (yes now they have apps for everything) for its timer function, it pops up with a quote for the day. I ignored them at first, but then I find some I do like:

"Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears."
– John Lennon 

"Don't go through life. Grow through life."
– Eric Butterworth

"Our journey is about being more deeply involved in life and yet, less attached to it."
– Ram Dass

"The secret to living well is: eat half, walk double, laugh triple, and love without measure."
– Tibetan Proverbs

"Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well."
– Voltaire

"Only in the darkness can you see the stars."

– Martin Luther King Jr.

"The sun will rise and set regardless. What you do with its light is up to you."
– Alex Elle

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
– Theodore Roosevelt

"Reminder: a sign of growth is being okay with not being okay."
– Yung Pueblo

"Write your sad times in sand; write your good times in stone."
– George Bernard Shaw

"Love will sometimes look like letting go."
– Alex Elle

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."
– Cicero

“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the greatest intention."
– Kahlil Gibran

"In every religion, there's love, yet love has no religion."
– Rumi

"Trust the wait. Embrace the uncertainty. Enjoy the beauty of becoming."

– Mandy Hale

"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes... Including you." 

– Anne Lamott

"Everyone shines, given the right lighting." 

– Susan Cain

"All things must pass."
– George Harrison

40, 65

On one mid-August day, 1982, just one month short of my 25th birthday, I took my first-ever flight abroad, out of the country I was born and raised in, Taiwan, to a strange new land, America. First I studied, then I worked, got married, bought a house, ran businesses with bosses, clients, companies, young kids... then gradually eased out.

And just like that, 40 years have gone by. Not a tremendous long time, on a historical scale of things, but not too short either. 

Many things have changed, like:

Gasoline price was 91 cents per gallon. I remember hearing people say "so good to see the gas price drop below $1 again," as it fluctuated back and forth during those days. It is now more than $6/gallon in California.

Dow Jones Industrial was at around 1,000 points, before it took off and went through several bull markets to reach over 30,000 points (and finally seemed to start declining) recently.

But some things remain singularly unchanged (with good reasons):

In 1982, a Sony 19" color TV cost $499;
Nowadays, a Samsung 65" Smart 4K Crystal HDR UHD TV also costs $499.

Prince William was born in 1982;
He is still a prince today (except one generation closer to the throne).

And there were things that portended what was to come:

In 1982, the most popular emoticon was :-)
It is now , among 3600+ other emojis conforming to the Unicode Standard.

Time magazine's "Man of the Year, 1982" was a computer;
Today, people are beginning to suspect machines/AI are sentient.

America is still the land of opportunity (record high illegal immigrants still trying to bang in) and the most powerful country in the world, but I would never have imagined there would be a riot in its capital and people distrusting its democratic process or having foundational doubts about its democracy.

Taiwan, that tiny, beautiful island of my birthplace, is still under big bully China's existential threat, just like 40 years ago, but through it all, it has survived and thrived, economically and politically, built a semiconductor manufacturing company that makes 90% of the world's most sophisticated electronic chips, and a democracy whose politicians bicker every day on everything just like the Republicans and the Democrats do in the United States.

And lest I forget, in 1982, there was also a war started by one country invading another. On March 19, Argentina sent troops to occupy the Falkland Islands, a self-governing overseas territory of the United Kingdom in the South Atlantic Ocean. The UK sent its Royal Navy, RAF and the Army to retake possession of the islands in three months. Britain won, Mrs. Thatcher won. Let's hope Mr. Zelensky and his people win this time, too.

***********************************************
And I turned 65 in the middle of this month. Unlike turning 50 or 60—those magical year-marks that seem to carry proverbial wisdom or symbolic meanings—such in-between age progression seems insignificant, except this time, by law, age 65 means I become officially a "senior citizen", and am eligible for Medicare.

So I signed up with a Medicare insurance plan and went on to see the primary care doctor I selected for the first time.

Dr. Lu was eight years my junior and also came from Taiwan, arriving in the US around the same time as I (a couple years earlier than I, actually) when he was 15 years young. He didn't really speak Mandarin Chinese or Taiwanese but seemed friendly and chatty enough so I asked how he ended up here.

It's a bit unusual story, he said. You see, his father was sort of a child prodigy who was sent to a seminary school to become a minister. However, he showed no interest in studying what they taught but a great talent for languages, picking up English and French and various Southeast Asian languages expediently just by conversing with people from various parts of the world working at the school. So instead of keeping him there, they sent him over to the UK to study linguistics and law, then to the US where he worked as a military lawyer, then for a US airbase in Taiwan when he returned to his mother country and got married and had family, before he took them to the US in the early 1980's when Dr. Lu was 15, where he studied medicine and became a physician...

Dr. Lu's father had since passed away, but his mom, who is in her 80's now, has never been back to Taiwan since they moved here over 40 years ago. He was going to take her back there for a visit a couple years ago, but then came the COVID pandemic, and now she's got symptoms of Parkinson's, so the trip doesn't seem possible for her any more.

But Dr. Lu still plans on going to Taiwan once the pandemic restrictions are lifted, with his girl friend, who is a Caucasian woman he met after his wife passed away some ten years ago and who is very fond of and eager to visit Taiwan, according to Dr. Lu.

"I wish my mom could go with us, so she could show us the places where we grew up..." said Dr. Lu, who grew up in the same city as I did.

"Maybe I could show you some places if you did go and we met there next time," I imagine I'd say to him next time I visit his office.