Eric Mills

A good friends who is in China right now lost her blog a while back. I had some posts in my RSS reader, so I sent her the text from her older posts. A good reminder to keep a backup, and at the very least, subscribe to your own blog’s rss feed.

Here’s her new WordPress blog to replace the old Blogger blog.

Two springs have now passed since I sat at my desk in Central China, memorizing Song Meng Hao-ran Zhi Guang Sai, a poem to perform at a local elementary school’s first ever “English Teachers’ Day” celebration. On that day now two years gone, I was in the company of my normal routine : tea to loosen the pollution from my throat, pencils and paper to scribble notes, and my open window to speak the comings and goings of the neighboring buildings—which would entail any noise from soccer balls kicked on walls to a solo flute practicing a day’s lesson. Many of these occurrences have since been lost to my memory in the recess of other travels and other studies. On this very day, though, a most delightful event occurred and one which is embedded in my memory quite clearly. What I now know is a knife sharpener was then peddling his service; four stories below and through a few tree branches, I saw his gray, dusty, and sun-wrinkled appearance. It was not, however, his appearance that stains my memory; it is through his song I access this entire day.

To anyone familiar with commercial activity in populous areas of China and South East Asia, I need not describe the commotion, for you have already a mental likening. To those who aren’t so experienced, it is quite simple: imagine the busiest street of a metropolis, with your worst headache from noise. Next, overlap the filth of cracked and often unpaved roads trodden upon by bare feet, in a culture who finds it acceptable to throw garbage on the street and spit unwonted food on the ground. Finally, multiply this all by four to account for population difference. It would seem that nothing stands out from the mass hysteria of the crowded streets. Nevertheless, I carry the lonely knife sharpener’s song with me daily. Why is this? In a world whose motto seems to be: “the more stimuli the better,” what, indeed, in the vapid heap of information leftovers is remembered?

His song could be translated into English in a mere four words: “keep your knives sharper.” He sang it with such bellow and sustain that, despite a verse being only one line repeated, each repetition was up to a half-minute long. I carry his song with me today because it was melodiously chanted and bellowed. There are thousands of faces I’ve forgotten from my year in China, but his is stored in a different place; I hear the gray of his clothes in each word as I listen quietly. His forehead is an etched memory stick, notched with each passing season, a whittled smile, a pain in his foot, a wife buried; a map of life ironically masked from his own eyes. Jacques Derrida, the ubiquitous philosopher of written words, raises the eyes to a level of special importance. They are how we interact as humans; eyes are paradoxically and simultaneously full of the most profound insight and banal clichés. Derrida also privileges hands, for it is primarily through them that humans are able to know the world. The knife sharpener’s hands, like his eyes, were full of profundity and triteness—they held his cart with a serious detachedness characteristic of any longtime professional. Rolling smoothly and slowly, singing his song up to the scores of residents, he was a proud man whose life was on wheels. I ultimately attribute his wheeled existence as his origin of happiness. That unsedentary trade, his oral tradition, his song of life, the cool shade of a resting place from his mobile day.

Robert Pirsig, I believe, was the first traveler/thinker to introduce the American reading public to the delights of self-propelled wheeled travel and his weltanschauung, or worldview, was, avoid querulous difficulties by maintaining. Unfortunately for Pirsig upkeep, even in the 60s was and is more so now, on the diminutive. The world looks to the U.S. as not a serious leader, but instead as a very serious leading character on the Hollywood-infiltrated screen of world events. We—I almost referred to the U.S. as we, as if its policies were in line with my own—Americans no longer seem to emphasize the reusable condition of goods. This natural quality of the world around us is one of the primary myths upon which this country is founded. With the world reading up on the U.S. as if they are deciding which new flick to catch, it is too bad that Oprah doesn’t run for president, as Michael Moore proposes in his newest book. Nevertheless, Pirsig was indeed “on to something,” as they say, in his exploration of such landscapes as contain the Bear Tooth Pass in Montana, or other stretches of open land with few roads. However, he was wrong to conflate a motorized bike with freedom—riding a motorcycle one is still constrained to the idiosyncrasies of the engine and other non-human governed mechanical parts. True freedom resides much closer to the human hand, true freedom, under this definition, lies in our knife sharpener.

Contemporary Chinese understand that freedom lay in the wheel, but travel has been a topic of import for centuries. From contemporary films such as Beijing Bicycle where a school boy wants nothing more from his hardworking father than a bike, to much earlier times where the famous poet writes, gu fan yuan ying bi kong jin, or “the lonely sail is a distant shadow on the edge of a blue emptiness,” to be on the move is always a privileged position. Indeed, it would seem that travel of any sort, at any class, is an interesting phenomena in that it levels the strata of society. The wealthiest woman may fly, leer jet and all that, to visit the Great Wall of China, have a private entourage with this famous leader, lunch with that notable person, now shaking hands, now using a video camera to capture a famous tree. Then there is the mendicant who, in her travels, much slower to be sure, still has access to all the world’s treasures, because our pauper knows that one needn’t pay any entrance fee to visit the Great Wall. How does she know this? Has she read Peter Hessler’s interesting account of his two years in the Peace Corps River Town and does she remember his visit to the dwindling section of the Great Wall where it stands not above two feet? Perhaps. Or perhaps she’s learned first hand through wandering, or by word of mouth. And if stories were to be shared, whose would you prefer to hear? Shall we watch some video or shall we listen to a recounted tale from our experienced traveler? There is a German saying that runs something like this: “when someone goes on a trip, he has something to tell about.” While we should listen to both accounts of the Great Wall, the wealthy and the poor, and while we shouldn’t have any preconceived bias as to which will be more enjoyable an account, we might find that our traveler with less money is richer in her experiences.

Money, it would seem, is a strange tool. It is something that everyone wants; it will solve the world’s problems if fallen into the right hands. Interestingly, money disconnects individuals from society. First class, the privileged few. Money and the motorcycle, then, would seem to fall into the same category—for both are too mechanical of devices to enable proper freedom. I think it was Huxley who once said, “liberties are not given, they’re taken” and it costs not a penny to take some freedom. Of this, our singing, moving knife sharpener is fully aware. And, too, this freedom taking is a concept with which he has familiarity. That warm, sunny and hazy day, I realized it was my goal to get to know this man, this wandering, singing, wheeled man. But where was I to begin? Was I to take the advice given to Alice, by Humpty Dumpty, “begin at the beginning,” and then go all the way through to the end. What was my beginning? Did I dare?

It was time to purchase a bicycle. No, no motorized wheels for me, I had been to Cambodia and ridden all around with a little mini-motorbike. I recall the lady selling me the machine said, “if you are pulled over by a policeman, just keep going, don’t stop.” I didn’t stop for anything after that, not even to investigate a woman whose leg was slashed by a motorcycle riding too close to hers. I could see her bone through the gash in the flesh and that was quite too much for me. That day I rid myself of the motorized wheels and was back to my feet. A bicycle, then, was for my search for freedom in urban China.

I was able to procure a Chinese mountain bike for fifty yuan, or the rough equivalent of just over six U.S. dollars. Fifty yuan, I remember thinking, that’s fifty bowls of noodles. Everything, at this time of my life, was measured in the purchasing power of noodles. Breakfast in most Asian countries isn’t a separate and isolated meal from lunch and dinner, the way it is in the west. Breakfast is akin to lunch and dinner, the same family of spicy noodles or fried rice and warm soy milk. To that end, then, I suppose my noodle conversion would equate to measuring a western transaction by cups of coffee, or, as another expatriated American scribe put it, measuring our lives with coffee spoons.