China pictures

 Street meat vendors in Jinhua

 Solo fishing, Jinhua

 Shanghai

 Anniversary celebration at Jinhua Number One School

Live frogs for sale

Americano

Americano

Compressed by crowds

on a National holiday.

walking the Bund, like

a straight jacket,

stifles movement.

Infinite humanity

Along Nanjing Road

The only reprieve,

Escape to a cafe

to order an Americano.

Sit and watch the human

tide flow

like the dark Huangpu River

edging to the sea.

On a Fast Train from Shanghai

On a Fast Train From Shanghai

Tentative

a shy peak,

a finger between

the seat,

finally a quiet

“hello”

a giggle,

a young boy

breaks the cultural divide

makes contact with a 

“Big Nose”

from their perspective

we all look alike.

The train flies

on cement pillons

a hundred feet above

fields cultivated

twice yearly

by calloused peasant hands

on micro plots

paralleling a new

super highway.

Bill boards American style

boast unachievable consumer

goods viewed against

a dirty night sky.

Oblivious the little boy 

peaks over his seat.

Movie theatres then and now...

In Black and White

The quiet comfort of thick upholstered seats,

a cloistered feeling as lights dim,

ushers with flashlights held low escort late comers

to their seats,

the smell of hot buttered popcorn

in old downtown theatres with

balconies with racoco embellishments,

where tickets are sold from a large roll

by young girls in glassed in wickets

talking through small holes in partitions

causing patrons to bend low

and talk too loud,

then receive change dispensed into

a stainless steel bowl

embedded into the counter top.

The marquis displays one, sometimes two movies

to the street crowds:

“Storm Warning”

and

“The Damned Don’t Cry”

No Dolby sound check, Pano-vision, Techno Colour,

or subliminal seduction, 

before the movie fades to a Black and White

news reel narrated by a disembodied resonating voice

describing world events to a sheltered audience

shocking the world as they hear Hitler has invaded Poland,

tanks face off against cavalry, or the Korean War

begins in the simple world of then served up in Black and White.

Now. 

We walk to our seats on sticky floors coated with years of

soft beverages,

carpeted with super sized buttered popcorn

A giant sized fire breathing dragon in some

mythical Silver City

over sees the sale of thirteen dollar tickets

far away from my simple world of Black and White

with sub titles and a 

little

white

bouncing

ball.

Northern Forests

Etchings

Walking the long meandering trails

through the northern Spruce Forests

one moonlit winter eve,

I noticed upon looking up

the trees were all

at least ten degrees off centre.

Nothing grows straight

or

true

as life just doesn’t work that way.

The forest knows this lesson

and so I learned it too.

Bent branches only etch

what the winds allow them to.


Fort McMurray, Alberta

Canada for Sale!

Oh Canada!!

The Wheat Board sold to Saudi Investors,

Cirque d’Soleil,  went to the Chinese,

Tim Horton’s, a Brazilian Hedge fund...

Oh Canada!!

What have you done?

Getting Old

Timely Comparisons

At fifty-five my father was told

that he could not shovel snow any more,

turning 63 I have the same directive.

He smoked a harsh cigarette-Daily Mail

which he rolled himself from the age of 14.

I smoked at 14 to be cool and stopped somewhere 

in university because it no longer was.

He drank red wine a concoction that be brewed himself

using Niagara grapes from my uncle’s vine yard.

I drink Corona with lime on those summer days that I barbecue

He died at 79.

Shopping in China

Fish Bones and Canadian Sausage

It was a perfect day in the neighbourhood even though the temperature this morning was zero the significant factor was the absence of rain. It had stopped raining, there was no precipitation.  We could come out of our little hole and squint and marvel at the sun.  It was also scooter weather, but first coffee.  

We had brought several pounds of black gold, President’s Choice coffee from far off Canada, Zehrs in fact.  Let me get ahead of myself, it is now evening and we are preparing a dinner of Mennonite smoked pork sausages from Detweiller’s.  We packed them frozen in a collapsible freezer poach inside Cheryl’s suitcase and lied to every customs official we could about not carrying any food across international borders.  “No Sir, no food, none, nothing, not a morsel.”  Off course when our tiny reserve of coffee and sausage runs out we may revert to primitive ways.  Have you ever seen that movie about the soccer team whose plane crashes in the Andes.  I’ll say no more. 

We also brought over spices, dried soup mixes, over the counter drugs, oven mits, garbage bags, protein bars and protein shakes, DVD movies and much more.  Yes, the DVD pirated movies available also across the counter in China, although of relatively good quality, are mainly action adventure movies with aimless chase scenes, gratuitess sex, no dialogue and lots of killing.  We are more into the “Sleepless in Seattle” theme and therefore the numerous downloads, hard drives and DVD’s in our luggage, if nothing else we watch lots of TV. 

Okay so we had our coffee now when Matt, a teacher at CTC and his wife Van, ask us to meet them downtown in front of Walmart to go to a Japanese style restaurant for lunch, we quickly check our social calendar and see that it is blank for March and so quickly agree.  The sun is still shining and it is therefore still not raining.  This is after all a semi-tropical monsoon climate.  We bring our back pack, with reusable shopping bags, grab our yellow and orange helmets, which are not CSA approved, and head for the parking area below the building where our mighty SNOW brand electric scooter has been patiently waiting for the past month.  It has been dusty and lonely . 

I fire up the engine and the many highly polluting lead batteries make not a sound, even in motion the scooter is like a stealth bomber.  As a pedestrian I tend to hate scooters because they can silently come up behind you and scare the hell out of you.  As a driver I love scooters because you can silently drive up behind pedestrians and scare the hell out of them. I have written about the zen of scooting before, but my ying and yang is out of sync with the universe because I have not driven for a month, none the less I soon learn to warp and weave and flow with the motion. Soon I am one with the universe.  I am a molecule in turbulent waters and I feel free.  Best of all we did not have to have my secretary call a taxi for us to get down town.  

The scooter is our freedom machine in China.  Unlike Chinese drivers I adhere to basic courtesy, random rules of the road and signal lights when in my favour.  We meet Van and Matt and they escort us over to the Japanese restaurant staffed by Chinese and full of Chinese.  We are the only westerners and people briefly look up and stare.  Van is actually Chinese and she helps us order.  I go for the picture menu with Matt, who like me does not like fish, raw fish, the smell of fish, fish bones, or the sea.  

Food is placed on an assembly line and travels the oblong counter.  Van and Cheryl dig in and have squid, sea weed, octopus, eel, prawns, dumplings made with tofu and numerous other things I could not identify.  Matt and I wanted to sneak out to Pizza Hut but we had beef over fried rice and vegetables with onions. 

 It was a great meal and after we went to, and I am ashamed to admit, that we shop with regularity at Wal Mart, but we do, where we bought some groceries. Like Canada everything here is made in China. Today we scored big and found cheese.  Yes, Jinhua, our city has no cheese, there are few cows in China, most of them defected or died on the long March with Mao. 

 We quickly phoned Mat and Van and told them to come to the dairy section to get some mild cheddar cheese as it was going fast, mainly because we were buying it all and if they didn’t come really soon we would have it all.  The meat department at Wal Mart looks like a pet store mainly because everything for sale is still alive: eels, turtles, fish, frogs and other of God’s creatures that I have not as yet identified but may have originated from the Galapagos Islands.  

Cheryl got some fruit and it all has to be weighed.  Sadly this is a culture that does not know how to queue.  It is basically every man for himself.  I would have thought communism would have taught certain lessons concerning the greater good, but apparently this is but another urban myth, so Cheryl taught them lessons in Q etiquette. One man she noted had been waiting a long time to have his produce weighed while others pushed in front.  There was a mad pack of people with Cheryl in the middle. Like a traffic cop with white gloves she raised both arms effectively blocking the crowd and in particular an aggressive Chinese women with water chestnuts and lotus root. 

Cheryl pushed her bags aside, like parting the Red Sea, allowing the first customer, this lone outlier and his vegetables and next Cheryl to get her things weighed.  After followed a flurry of what may have been vindictive Chinese  the pack fell upon itself in a self destructive fury.  We paid for our groceries at cashier 12.  I always have to mime that I want bags and Cheryl always has to prevent them from over filling the bags.  It takes two. It really does.  

Walmart is a subterranean cavernous structure literally built underground.  We took the escalator to the surface.  I often have a panic anxiety attack thinking what would ever happen to us if the escalator just stopped.  Think about it.  

We got to our bike parked in an area with 400 similar looking bikes.  Here we reposition our groceries into the various compartments on the bike ie under the seat and the little trunk like space behind the passenger, there is a bag holder and some things fit on the floor between my legs. 

We drove to the old section of town where they sell jade and jewelry.  This day a flea market of sorts was going on, so I made a U turn in traffic and I angle parked rural Alberta style by the curb.  People like looking at us because of our rock star good looks or maybe our Western characteristics and large noses as we are told. We do stand out in a crowd at any time.  

We toured the stalls and the stores where we saw everything from Mao posters, porn, ceramic, swords and every type of jade on the planet.  Again kids came up to us smiling to say “hello”.  One store had beautiful calligraphy and detailed nature paintings Robert Bateman would envy, another, a portrait of the Obama family.  When we had enough “window shopping” we crossed the street and sat in a beautiful park by the river.  The country is denuded of nature,  but they do know how to landscape a magnificent park to somewhat compensate for  their monumental environmental degradation of their country. 

On that pleasant and judemental note we mounted our trusty scooter and drove along the river, across the bridge and back to the campus.  Did I mention it was a wonderful sunny day and we had Canadian sausage for dinner.

Deep Thoughts on Prayer

Really Deep Religious Thoughts

I have grown up in the Mennonite World and for the past two years I have lived in the Muslim world. It was my students who gave me the best insight into their culture and religion.  I was struck with the many similarities between growing up Mennonite and Growing up Muslim. I have had two long years in this little desert country to think, ponder, research and delve into the complex intricacies of these two religions, Mennonite and Islam. For example, did you know that the names of the followers of these two religions each begin with the letter M.  Don’t let that I in Islam fool you.

It is impossible to separate religion from the culture.  The two form an intricate interwoven fabric of values and norms that would be about as easy to separate as Siamese twins using 17th century surgical technology and know how.  The Islamic faith and virtually the entire basis of their belief system is often referred to as the Five Pillars. It is a rich architectural analogy that really seems to work, although I think it was Samson who pulled some pillars down in a rage over a really bad hair day he was having, but that could be more a Biblical than a Koranic reference.

The first pillar of Islam deals with prayer, ironical as I wrote that word prayer, I happened to be sitting in my office in Kuwait, in fact I can go one further, the call to prayer sounded at the same moment my I-Pod blasted out Placido Domingo singing Verdi’s Celeste Aida.  How ironic is that?

Personally, I have adjusted to the call to prayer and often wage a war of attrition with my I-Pod or TV set to drown out the call to prayer in its entirety  as it is projected from two giant minarets, sounds like a contradiction, I know.  Each tower is mounted with four loudspeakers so the Iman can be heard in surround sound. The minarets are situated directly across the street from our apartment at about the fourth floor level. Fortunately, our apartment is on the eighth floor and this affords us a small measure of acoustical relief.

During the call to prayer, each of the approximately 1000 mosques in Kuwait is actively broadcasting a similar message in 1000 different voices.  I have always felt, since living here, that Cat Stevens, now called Yousef and a devout Muslim, should be hired to make a Call to Prayer CD with a little acoustical guitar added in, so that all the mosques could pump out an identical message that had some musical merit.  Some Iman’s sound rhythmic while others just wouldn’t know their way around a Gregorian chat if it bit them in the ass.

The sound begins to bounce off buildings, echoes, and recoshes in every direction, like a 22 caliber bullet off a cement wall, to the point that the “call” morphs into an incomprehensible jumble of Arabic that I doubt many Kuwaitis could discern in any logical fashion. Yet it seems to work because as I look out my bedroom window I see the faithful begin to assemble from the four points of the compass and know exactly how to align their prayer mats with Mecca.

I have often wondered what the call to prayer actually means.  And I know as a reader what you must be thinking at this point, if I am such a hot shot Islamic/ Mennonite scholar/theologian why don’t I know what the call means.  The best way to interpret the meaning to the call to prayer, other than googling it, is too simply use sound recognition and basic phonetics. Its quite simple.

If your biological clock is not tuned into the schedule of the call to prayer, one only need get a copy of the Arab Times in which the prayer schedule is posted.  I am at the point at which my bladder is synchronized with the 3 am call to prayer. Sometimes I am up and semi awake and just tooling along the dark hallway to the washroom before the call even starts. Most often I could be back in bed before the “call” is finished.  I took it as a personal quest to do so.  During  many nights I don’t even hear the call to prayer any more.  I have hardened my heart.

Mennonites, like Muslims, are also expected to pray.  We are not on an exacting schedule and it is more up in the air (pun) as to what we say in our personal relationship to God and even when we say our prayers. Thank God we lack structure in regard to prayer.  I don’t want to be told when and where to pray.  We may pray in the car, in bed, kneeling down, on or off of a tiny rug, while walking, before meal time, at bedtime in rhyming couplets, free verse, or just as an inner monologue in traditional speech bubbles.  Basically, prayer is a free form open ended communication with out a cumbersome service provider and bad reception, using completely integrated and Apple compatible software.  The point is as Mennonites we probable pray a lot and for any number of reasons.  

As kid I prayed long and hard for a puppy, a new bike, a rifle, cap guns, snow days, White Christmas, a long and happy life for the Easter bunny and a heavenly host of other similar items, events or products.  I had mixed results with my praying and so the verdict is still out as to its effectiveness.  

I know as a kid, my brother and I shared a bedroom, actually we shared until we were in our twenties, despite the fact I had prayed for a separate room since grade 7; so I guess you can better appreciate my point relating to prayer effectiveness.  Perhaps praying for selfish things is not acceptable and if there is any pre screening or editing process for prayers on the way to heaven some of these more self centered wishes may get filtered out.  I don’t know for sure I can only pray for understanding. 

When my mom was in my room at bed time we always prayed on our knees beside the bed, in what I would term a regulation pose.  When mom wasn’t there, if I did pray, I would pray in a prone position in bed, under the covers moments before falling asleep.  As a teen ager I think my prayers grew to be even more self centered and often had sexual themes about girls I had crushes on in grades 9 through 13. In retrospect I believe this era of prayer was probably verging on blasphemy and explains why I had pimples into my twenties and was very awkward with girls.  God works in mysterious ways.

As a university student I had a moratorium on prayer.  University days were a time of self doubt, religious doubt, a lack of faith in governmental institutions, a fear of nuclear war, and sexual transmitted diseases.  University was a time during which many Mennonite youths likely drifted from their faith. It might be safer to say that I didn’t so much drift away as much as I escaped in a high powered speed boat, like the ones used by drug runners in the Bahamas, and I made a dramatic rooster tail as I temporarily sped away from my religious roots.  The problem with drifting or speeding from your faith is that it is difficult, if not hypocritical to pray for guidance along the way.  

You see the thing about prayer I think is that we have to become vulnerable, have faith and trust in God.  As a student, and even now I still have core questions as to whether prayer can be answered.  One school of thought is that God did not create Man.  We created God and in our own image, but in some circles I could get shunned for even having that thought.

Recently, I had a excellent opportunity to reconnect with my Mennonite roots while trying to explain just exactly what Mennonites were to a class full of my own Muslim students.  How on earth could they possible relate in any meaningful way to a conservative  based religion founded by holy prophets from isolated Middle Eastern desert countries?  How could they grasp a religion, such as mine in which women were often covered and dressed in black, a religion in which men held dominance and controlled everything from finances to family planning and who often had long beards and wore sandals.  It all seemed so absurdly theoretical.

How could I convey to my students the subtleties of my religion that originally had an agrarian base and a very nomadic existence as Mennonites in their diaspora settled around the world from Paraguay to Alma Ata on the Chinese border?  How could Muslim kids connect with the idea that we read from a holy book and often went to special classes, frequently held during the hot summer months, to memorize long passages of scriptures? How does one try to elucidate the concept of the importance of family and extended family over the importance of the nation state?  In so many ways explaining the characteristics of Mennonites to questioning Islamic students was like getting a camel through the eye of a needle.  It can’t be done.  My students just thought I was making it all up like I did most of my other lessons.

I soon grew to realize what a bizarre religion I had sprung from, even some of the stories we were taught in Sunday School don’t really hold up under heavy scrutiny.  I have heard these Bible stories over and over again to the point that it is difficult for me to write a piece of fiction without including Biblical allusions. Do you remember my reference to Samson in the introduction?

Bottom line is that I’m thankful I live in a multicultural tolerate country (Canada) which embraces religious freedom. I am most thankful that the Christian Bible was first written in English, I refer of course to the King James version, and not in some difficult foreign language that is read from right to left and from the back of the book to the front.  I believe, like most Christians, that the Bible was divinely inspired.  Had it been written in other languages like say latin, (no longer on the curriculum), Hebrew or even Greek each time it was translated it would lose some potency as meanings were lost in translation and before long it would be rendered almost meaningless.

Was the Earth really completely flooded?  Did Noah actually gather up 2 of every species or just a partial representative sample?  Does God answer prayer?  Why is there suffering in the world?  Why was my 2005 tax return audited?  Religions create more questions than they answer.

I can only be reminded of the words of the Dali Lama who once said, “ ..test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” I just pray the next time he is reincarnated the Chinese will give him his country back.

Amen.

### American Revolution

Hashtag###  Refugees

(After the American Revolution)

She quietly inquired if any

Apartments were available

For rent

She looked tired 
Older than

her years,

Probably another of the new

Refugees from

Across the border.

The trickle was getting more 

Flood proportion as people left

As they could.

I directed her up the stairs

To the office.

Coming down she looked 

Defeated

like she had walked those

Stairs many times before. 

Her story sad,

Not unique any more

The middle class had been 

Shrink wrapped

And freeze dried,

Her words.

A former journalist who spoke

The truth.

Her home town looked

Like a third world

Grave yard

Desolate, war-torn

Forgotten,

Out-sourced,

Down trodden.

She had been mugged 

By a 15 year old

With a hand gun

She had given up then

On a generation of decay

Privlidge with decadence

Poverty with shame.

Politicians hypnotized with

False hopes

Truth was dead

No fact checking

Social media said it all.

There were hollow cries

For bank reform

The rich laughed,

“The buck stops here.”

It started in our own

Country when elections

Were won on fear

And peace keepers were

Replaced with front line

Soldiers

Not the only traveller 

“Give me your huddled masses”

Discrimination legalized

Refugees crossed the bridge 

In numbers

After the riots of ”17”

Police shots kids

The reverse was true.

Corporations paid even less tax

The survivalists shot to kill

Is that a gun 

In your purse lady?

“America, where a cop shoots a guy

in the back and plants a weapon on him

on video and we’re like asking,

‘Is he gonna get convicted?’ ”

I fear to tred

After the Revolution.