Zen Baggage: A Pilgrimage to China by Pine Red

Author:Pine, Red [Pine, Red]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781582439785
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2009-03-01T03:00:00+00:00

Master K’uan-jung and Third Patriarch’s Stupa

After nearly an hour, she stopped. But she wasn’t done. She heated the air in four glass cups, then placed them lid-side down along my lower back. As they cooled, they created a vacuum that sucked my skin as it had never been sucked before. The idea was to draw the blood up from below the skin. It was painful, and it left four large blue moons on my back. What the hell, I thought. It was for a good cause. The treatment wasn’t cheap: 88RMB, or eleven bucks. But it was worth every RMB. I was able to walk erect again.

Since the day was drawing to a close, I decided to eat at the first restaurant I saw. Just past the acupressure clinic, I looked down a deserted side street and saw red lanterns hanging from some eaves, which was usually a good sign suggesting it might be the sort of place where people came on festive occasions, perhaps for a wedding banquet. The restaurant probably did cater to the occasional banquet, but certainly not one that was high-end, or even somewhere in the middle. It turned out to be a working-class restaurant. But it was clean, and that was all I ever asked. I had experienced hepatitis before, and once was one time too many.

I thought I would keep it simple and ordered a plate of fried rice with a bunch of vegetables mixed in. At least that was how I explained it to the proprietor. While I was waiting, half a dozen neighborhood kids came in and gathered around to watch me write in my journal. English looked just as strange to them as Chinese once did to me.

Every once in a while, I think back to the day I was filling out an application for graduate school. After the Army, I studied anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. As graduation approached, I saw no reason to get a job, not if I could go to grad school, and I decided to apply to Columbia, whose anthropology faculty included Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, among others. I checked all the boxes for money, including one for a fellowship that required the applicant to choose a language. Having just read Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen and feeling inspired, I wrote the word “Chinese.” I had never really looked at Chinese characters before. People say to be careful what you wish for. They should also say to be careful of what boxes you check. Six months later, I was overwhelmed.

The class was Intensive Chinese, which was required by the fellowship. And the teacher was the Dragon Lady, or so she was called by those who survived her as well as by those who didn’t. She started with twenty students, and within a month she was down to four. Then one day she asked me to stay after class and told me she only had time for three (two of whom she couldn’t get rid of because they had been sent there by the CIA), and I was not one of the three.

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