Taiwan / Week 9: Roadblock — Meeting the Dharma Master

People say I am courageous to go to Taiwan for six months. I don’t consider myself courageous to travel. Mostly, I love to discover new cultures, lands, people, ways of thinking. But where I can see my courage was in Chinese grammar class on Friday when I wanted to flee and stayed.

Every Friday we have a quiz. Teacher Fong hands out the quiz at exactly 9:10 when our class begins. When I arrived at 8:45 at the bus stop, no bus was waiting. No one informed us that the school bus was not running on Fridays because of the winter break. After waiting fifteen minutes, the other students decided to walk. The hill is very steep. I had three heavy books and I didn’t want to miss class, so I chose to hitchhike. Two young men in a broken down car picked me up. They asked in Chinese where I was going. I pointed in the direction of the mountain and kept saying, “Up, Up, that way.” They nodded and kept driving up the hill. “Zheli, here, ” I said. They stopped, left me off and then turned around and went down the hill. Such kindness on their part, but I didn’t take it in completely. I was feeling shaky that campus schedules change without notice and what could happen next.

I arrived at exactly 9:10. I’m usually there at 9:00. Teacher Fong was not giving a test. Instead, she was handing out plastic cards with one Chinese character on each card. She told me to go sit with Shah Tien (Lorenzo). We were to look in our book and write the number on the plastic card that corresponded to the shape of the character listed in the book. Shah Tien was quickly marking one after another. “Wait,” I said to him. “How did you figure that?” “Look,” he said. I couldn’t see the correspondence. His saying “Look!” didn’t help. I’ve noticed that his Italian gentleman ways don’t click in until he’s had his morning coffee. After asking him three times, and his mumbling incoherently, I began to feel panicky. I called out in English to the teacher, “I don’t understand.”

She came over and showed me that the plastic character Shah Tien was marking had the same amount of components as the character in the book, but I couldn’t see it. “I don’t see it,” I said. She said, “Mu Ing, go back to your desk and figure it out.” I walked to the other side of the classroom. That was the moment I wanted to leave the class. I love the characters, and I want to understand how they are assembled; but I couldn’t see what either she or Shah Tien could see. And I was not only being sent away — banished, so it felt — but I was being prevented from learning what I so wanted to learn. I wanted to cry. I wanted to leave. and then I thought, If I do the others will view me as a spoiled American. I hung on. That is the courage. Wanting so much to hide my humiliation and nevertheless rooting, refusing to allow myself to be defeated.

After a few minutes, Teacher Fong came over and said in her gentle voice, “Mu Ing, try. You can do it.” So I compared the characters and wrote down numbers on two of the plastic characters. The others had by now finished about twenty characters. Teacher Fong returned and said, “No, look.” And again, I could not see how they corresponded. Then she said, “OK, quiz.” She then passed out one page. In the first section, we were to place Chinese characters in the correct sentence order. In the second part we were to place sentences in the correct paragraph order to form a short story. I could not order one sentence. My mind was blocked. I thought of the many times I have sat at my grandson Abram’s piano lessons and watched him freeze in the same way. What the teacher was asking him wasn’t really difficult but some connection was cut for him. “Try,” I told myself and slowly I could make out a few words but there were too many characters that I couldn’t recognize so I couldn’t figure out the sentence pattern. Just then I heard a groan to my right. Pierre, the French intellectual, was shaking his head and quietly groaning. His face was clouded with misery. I whispered to him in French, “What’s wrong?” He whispered back, “I can’t think the way she does. Hers is so simple. My mind is complicated.” I would have laughed but I was deep in a funk. Then I noticed Ivan, from Belize, who sat behind Pierre. He too was shaking his head. He saw me turn and rolled his eyes. By now the three Japanese young men and Shah Tien had handed in their quizzes and were cheerfully chatting with the teacher. Pierre was groaning louder. I looked at my quiz again. I knew a few words but I just didn’t know enough. I wrote a zero on the top of the page and put the quiz on Teacher Fong’s desk. Ling. Zero. I could not answer one question. Brakes jammed.

During our ten minute rest period, Pierre, Ivan and I commiserated while the Japanese young men and Shah Tien chattered with Teacher Fong. Since our winter vacation, our class has a new dynamic. The three Japanese men who had been so quiet are talking all the time. We’ve passed the phonetic beh peh meh feh stage and are now reading and writing characters. They, and the linguist Shah Tien, are excelling. Pierre and Ivan discussed the quiz. I couldn’t remember anything on the quiz. All I could articulate to them was that the class had divided into those who were merrily moving along and those who were struggling, and it was the teacher’s responsibility to teach everyone. A primal feeling overcame me. Pierre and Ivan would continue on the boat. I would be left on the ice, thrown off the wagon. I was useless to the community, too much trouble. Memories arose of my parents telling me that if I didn’t behave, if I didn’t measure up, I’d be thrown out of the house with no place to live.

The class began again. A smoky cloud of disturbance was still wrapped around Pierre. My funk hadn’t left. We were both palpably sitting in dark clouds as the Teacher stood at the whiteboard and in her miraculous manner drew pictures on the whiteboard of everything she was talking about. I like her so much it was hard to remain miserable. I wanted to be comforted and reassured by her for not being able to do what the others could do and I was also glad she was just carrying on with the learning. She was explaining that in Chinese there are no prepositions: “Open refrigerator, take out water, give Mu Ing water.” She could clearly see the surrounding clouds and was doing her best to disperse them. I have such admiration for teachers, for parents, for the people in the world. How do people continue with all the pain that surrounds them? When does one stop to deal with the pain? When does one gently move on, knowing the pain must be dealt with individually? Teacher Fong laughs, draws, moves with grace, lets all the disturbances fall away. The young men are always laughing about how certain Chinese words have sexual innuendos. She laughs with them and keeps teaching.

I go home, look at the homework. I can’t read the directions. In class which lasts three hours and is all in Chinese from the context and the drawings I can mostly follow everything. I fall into a kind of altered space and enter the language. It’s similar to when you are deeply in love and at a certain moment you wake and realize that you are separate from the other. But when I can’t read one or two or three of the Chinese characters and there’s no soothing guiding voice, I’m lost. Part of the problem is that I can’t figure out how to learn. And part of the problem is that there is no problem. If I lived here long enough, I would learn. The roadblock is myself. My stubborness, my willfulness, my fears.

On Saturday, I took the train up to Taipei to meet Liu Chiung–yun (Evelyn). For five years, I’ve been seeking fellow travelers on the Journey to the West road of adventure. Evelyn wrote her Ph.D. thesis at Harvard on “Scriptures and Bodies: Jest and Meaning in the Religious Journeys in Xī Yóu Jì [西遊記].” Speaking with her at the Philo Café in Taipei, I felt such happiness to be with someone who knows all the chapters in the epic that I forgot to ask her my question. “What do you think Xī Yóu Jì means?” She had heard of Inanna at a conference in Hong Kong and was happy to have a copy. Still, she told me that, as I had intuited, in the earliest forms of Journey to the West, there was only Monkey, the priest and the horse, no Pigsy or Sandy. Also most of the earliest writings on Journey to the West were plays. And as for the poems in the epic, the author Wu Cheng’an used many traditional poems and then sometimes wrote his own poetry and commentaries, which accounts for the unevenness in the poetry. She brought some library books with illustrations of Xī Yóu Jì for both of us to look at. She gave me a printed copy of her thesis which will detail her understandings. But I had wanted to ask her in person what the story meant to her heart. She reminded me in her sincerity, intellect and beauty of my daughter Rachel.

An odd thing happens to me with some of the Taiwanese people I meet. I fall into a kind of reverie in their presence and just smile or laugh. It’s as if I knew them in a past life and we don’t need to communicate just to re–connect. Doesn’t have to do with words, more with the happiness of being together and being alive. Chiung–yun is struggling between earning money as an academic and just wanting to be free to tell stories. Because I’m always working at this and that, I forget what a blessing my life has been to have the opportunity to dwell in and offer stories to others.

I then went to the National Palace Museum to meet Yun–yun. She has no English name. She is thoroughly Chinese. We’ve been corresponding since I arrived in Taiwan as she was commissioned by her dharma teacher to look after me. What a blessing to know her. She is very awake. Very clear. Very direct and loves to laugh. She has a strong, vital energy. Take charge. Make the right decisions. No need for prepositions. We ate a vegetarian dinner at the museum restaurant which rivals the best of vegetarian restaurants and drank Emperor tea which is only available at that restaurant because they are the only ones with the recipe. Slightly bitter and healing.

After dinner Yun–yun, who works at the Museum and was once a tour guide there, gave me a tour of the painting gallery. She explained how artists within the same landscape paint different sections from different perspectives so that what we see becomes three dimensional. She explained how we are to put ourselves inside the painting and follow the traveler on the road. She indicated that the difference between the paintings of the older painters and ones of the younger painters is that the older painters painted from the heart. The others were replicating. Then she said, “I want to show you my favorite Gwan Yin.” We went downstairs to a gallery with many small gold Gwan Yin statues and walked through the room. I enjoy any Gwan Yin statue. But then we came to the last one and she said, “That’s the one.”

Indeed, that is the one. The statue is bronze, seven feet at least. Her hands are in a meditative position. Her eyes are slightly open. She is smiling. She is jolly, strong, full of understanding. Her chest is wide, open, powerful. In one being, she is jolly, powerful and compassionate. Walking one step to the left or to the right, she changes. From every direction, she continues to offer strength and reassurance. Only after I left did I realize I’d met my dharma master. On the way home to Kaohsiung, I fell asleep on the train. Yun–yun had taken seriously the instructions of her dharma master. She had led me to mine.

Image adapted from a photograph by Nesnad
(Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).