When I am confronted with bloody meats of all kinds; ducks hanging in unison from their twisted necks and the general stank of how “real” life can be in Hong Kong I sometimes force myself to look. Much of my first book relates to ritual and sacrifice; so it feels like this forced look at guts and blood is part of why I am here. The school where I teach is in a neighborhood called Sham Shui Po. Immigrants from mainland China and wherever else “land” here and end up …
Scales and Locks and Locks and Scales
July 2011. I am in India. This is probably (hopefully) the closest I will experience to exile. It has to do with taxes, and is not all that interesting in the end, but it is one of the reasons we’re here in J&K, (Jammu and Kashmir) India. It’s July seventh and we’re here in the hills, finally on our own. It is harder to achieve that in Asia. There is this thing about whiteness in parts of the world where it is not as much the norm. It gives one …
Shingo, India (Posted way after, but written there)
Today we walked about ten miles up and over a mountain pass called Ganda La; it’s at 16,000 feet. I haven’t been anywhere near that height since I was last in India. Everything is different now. We have a guide, Stanzing. She is twenty-two and a local Buddhist who has never been out of this region. The long walks give us time to figure out questions we want to ask her. Her name, for instance, was not given to her right away when she was born. Instead, months after her …
Indelible Blue: Or Why I Like High Altitudes
How to explain where I am… Every movie I have ever seen about Afghanistan could have been filmed in these hills, except that they irrigate and have bright green fields for farming somehow. It is the driest place I have ever been to the point that I am waking up thinking I have a soar throat but it is just incredibly dusted over. And the sky is that high-altitude sky that reminds me how huge life is. It is the blue you see in Colorado’s and Wyoming’s skies, but moreso. …
Ladakh, India
Ladakh is sandwiched between the Himalaya to the south and the Karakorom mountain range to the north. Its relatively low altitude (in such mountainous space) made it a key post on the silk road for thousands of year. When China closed Tibet’s Western border in the late 1940s it halted thousands of years of caravans and trade routes. Also in these parts is the highest theater of war in the world, on the Siachen glacier. The fight here between India and Pakistan can occur only during the summer months because …