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| The Orchid Pavilion, Lanting, Shaoxing (near Shanghai). Taken with my iPhone. |
Assignment: Re-download the Counterculture packet. I’ve edited and adapted the translations to give them what I consider a better voice than the original translations. I’ve also thrown in some more images.
You got enough of American counterculture from the Summer of Love readings.
Now read the Ruan Ji, Xi Kang, Wang Xizhi, and Tao Qian sections (pp. 9-21).
Some of you will blog (see list at bottom of this post), and the rest of you will reply to the blogs, so all of you, as you read, do the following:
- highlight whatever details or uses of language strike you—positive or negative—about each writer. (And don't let Xi Kang's letter or poem scare you. If you trust him, that 7'8" giant of a lute-player will take you places.)
Bloggers:
B1: Kevin, Cillian, Natalie, Angela
B2: Zach, Joy, Hansen, Summit, Lars
B3: Aimee, Jeffrey, Adam, Ding Wei, Billy
- write a quick, informal paragraph about three of the four writers you liked most that:
- includes three of your highlights for each
- includes one image that enhances the mood of your post
- briefly explains why you highlighted what you did
- closes with the paragraph about the writer you liked best.
- has a title worthy of a writer
- can you note any essential differences between the lifestyle of these rebels compared to those of the American 'sixties?
I intentionally chose only ethnic Chinese students for this one because a) it's their heritage, and b) they might find more to add from talking to their parents or relatives. Have they heard of these writers? Do they have anything interesting to add? It’s optional, but if they do, it would make your writing more interesting for the newness.
Closing Note
This short experience offers you an opportunity to become truly educated--instead of merely schooled--about Chinese civilization.
If there’s one assignment I hope you’ll actually do before midnight, with an alert mind and a real desire to “get it,” it’s this one. It gets to the “other heart,” the non-Confucian and sublimely nonconformist one, of Chinese culture.
As I told you, I took a little “pilgrimage” to the Orchid Pavilion last summer. It’s a quiet little park now that is still maintained and preserved to honor the little party there 17 centuries ago.* I can’t recommend it highly enough. It felt pre-industrial and more natural than nature itself.
But the most striking thing of all is how many people were there, young and old, and how proud they were of this piece of their history. A Chinese high school student stood next to me in front of a 12-foot-high stone slab with the "Preface" inscribed on it in Wang's calligraphic style, reading that ancient "time capsule to the future" softly to himself--and I was crazy envious of him. He sort of laughed at me for claiming to understand Wang, and he was kind of right (and kind of wrong). I hear Wang across that ocean of time, but only in translation. Meanwhile, that lucky little brat gets to receive the whole package.
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*Cooler still, the tomb of Yu looks down on it from a nearby mountain ridge. Yu is said to have died there on a hunting trip during the Xia Dynasty, which of course we cannot prove. But that touch still added—to risk a “historical hippie” pun—to the “trip.”
