Turning East

The wedding procession

The following interview with a friend of mine took place in May, 2012. Ruth kindly provided the photos.

Ruth’s story

An Australian journalist, Sarah Turnbull, wrote a fascinating book called Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris after she’d a married Frenchman and was navigating her way through the cultural minefield that is France. I could call myself “almost Japanese,” and recently I’ve become a housewife. It took nine years to get here.

When was younger I wanted to be a psychologist, and I had fantasies of living an exotic international lifestyle in Italy or England. But a year out of university I was working at a horrible job. Someone who’d taught English in Japan suggested that I should try that. I said, “I don’t know any Japanese people, I don’t speak Japanese, I don’t even like fish.” I was living in Brisbane, and a company with schools in Japan had an office there. I went to a couple of interviews and took some tests, and I was told, “In eight weeks we’re going to sort out your visa.” Then I found myself on a plane for a place I’d never heard of where I was to teach at a big Japanese conversation school.

Nowadays, I’m in Toyokawa, a regional city which the Japanese call “the country.” There’s no English menu at the restaurant. Nobody at the hospital can help you in English. You can’t speak to anyone in English on the bus or at the train or the shops. It’s not like being in Tokyo and working for a foreign employer, which is America with a Japanese backdrop. But that was how I lived for the first two and a half years. The job called for me to speak English all day. The staff spoke English, I lived in an apartment with other foreigners, and I only went out with people who could speak English. I didn’t need to know about taxation or medicines. Everything was taken care of for me.

But then the company was going bankrupt, and I’d gotten really bored anyway. They’d changed the textbooks so there was no creativity left in the lessons. It was all teaching by the book for eight hours a day to either little children or adults. I only felt I was using my brain when I went to aerobics. Living in this insular community was like having been sucked into a vacuum and not knowing how to get out.

I applied at a private school which contracted teachers out to different schools in the region, even though it was frightening to think of moving into an apartment by myself and traveling to so many places in one week: private cram schools, private junior high schools, smaller private classrooms. Children, adults, everybody. I really needed to speak Japanese. I might only speak to a native speaker of English once a week.

A friend of mine hooked me up with a professional teacher of Japanese. A lot of foreigners learn Japanese from volunteers, but this is probably the best investment I’ve ever made. There was another Australian at a junior high school where I taught, and he could speak Japanese fluently. When he talked with people I had no idea what they were saying. I felt inadequate, but I decided I was going to do this. Fortunately, I came a long way in a short time. It was in this “life’s getting interesting” phase that I started dating Shōichi. He could speak English, but I was trying to speak Japanese, and I started to feel that I really was in Japan.

In Japan foreigners are put in boxes as “a student,” “a person working here for a short time” or “a tourist.” You’re not actually a person. As much as I’ve been irritated by some things, I’ve always been okay with the fact that I will never be considered Japanese. Many of my friends and acquaintances try so hard—not just to fit in because fitting in is different—to be accepted as an equal in Japanese society. For women who’ve had children, dealing with the mothers of their children’s friends seems to be a constant struggle. However, just as I surrendered to the fact the language was going to be difficult, subconsciously I must have accepted the fact that I would not become Japanese.

Most foreign women don’t stay here. Unlike many of the men, those of us who’ve been here for a while don’t think we’re going home. It seems women can see Japan more clearly, and this has informed our decision to stay here. Looking out the train window, you see that the cities all look the same, really concrete and really ugly with patches of nature in-between. But there’s much more beauty inside, in the rhythm of life and in the creation of small things, in manners, in the language and the ways people relate to each other.

A nearby shrine, Toyokawa Inari

I’m a dancer. I started doing ballet as a child, and it’s really in my soul. In Australia the drum beats a really slow rhythm which is always the same. When I get off the plane I feel that life has shifted down three or four or ten gears. In Japan there’s a rhythm to everything, whether it’s the woman at the supermarket putting the stuff in the basket or the cars waiting at the stop light or the people walking their dogs or the announcements at the train station. The various rhythms which should be fighting against each other aren’t. They’re blending together. In Australia there’s nothing beautiful about a formal meeting. Here when visitors come into the workplace everyone snaps to customer routine, and there’s a dance that you do. There’s a bowing here and here and everyone knows their place. It’s all like the choreography of a musical.

My husband Shōichi teaches English at a junior high school in our town. He works sixty to ninety hours a week all year round. In Japan education is a much more honorable, respected and probably a better-paid position than in Australia. Before we were married we found an apartment together, but then I experienced one of the unpleasant things women face here, unwanted sexual attention from strangers. This was not the first time. Once before when I was walking home a man had grabbed me from behind and touched my chest and then unzipped his pants to show me his stuff. I’d just screamed at him and run home.

Being stalked was the most frightening experience of my life. With Shōichi leaving for work early in the morning and coming back late at night, it probably looked like I was living alone. I came home to find a letter addressed to me and sticky-taped to my bicycle. It was written in really bad English, and it said the sender was lonely and could we be friends and please return a letter taped to my bicycle. I threw it in the bin. The next day I got a letter in Japanese with pictures of a sexual nature drawn of me and this person. We went to the police, who took the letters and listened to my story. They didn’t really care. There’s so much of it. I got more letters, and the police came back to our house again and took photographs. I couldn’t sleep or eat, and I missed two days of work, which is something that I’d never allowed myself to do. Every day I was paralyzed with fear. We bought a surveillance camera to stick outside.

At the end of the week Shōichi said, “Ruth, I talked to my parents, and they said we should move in with them.” In twelve hours we packed up, and that night we went to his parents’ house in Toyokawa. We’d only been in the apartment for two months, and we couldn’t get out of the lease. One day our landlady saw the man taping a letter to my bicycle. She tried to call, but she couldn’t reach us. Anyway, in Shōichi’s parents’ house I was safe. I bought a car and got a driver’s license. It’s much safer in a car than in public transport, around train stations and in apartments, where there are lots of sexually repressed loners.

We lived with his parents for six months, and I got to see how to live in Japan. I loved it. I’d come home from work and not have to cook dinner. They really liked me, and I liked them. We moved out because Shōichi and his mother argued a lot—although not about me. When we got married, it was Christmas Day, but just another day in Japan. We did the city hall thing, just filling out documents and handing them in. The procedure was happier and more wonderful than the wedding. We had the biggest smiles on our faces, and everyone in the office was smiling. I count our marriage as starting from that day because it was just us—no family and no ceremony and no need to be nervous or have expectations.

Salt in a corner

Our wedding ceremony came eight months later. Nowadays Japanese brides have the big cream-puff ball gown and the pretend church. I wanted to get married in a Shinto shrine. Shōichi’s parents are pretty traditional, and they observe a lot more of the Japanese religious traditions than most people do. They practice a Japanese version of feng shui. When a change in life happens—changing a job or building our house or naming a child—we go to a place that looks like a Shinto-Buddhist garden and ask for advice. Even today we keep a little container of salt at the four corners of our house and in the four corners of our land.

His parents were really surprised that I wanted to have a Shinto wedding and wear kimono and a heavy wig. As you probably know, for death rituals the Japanese go to Buddhism, but for birth and marriage and stages in life they go to the Shinto traditions. We had the wedding in the shrine and the reception banquet in a building in the compound. It was hot, and I was sick with tonsillitis, and my period came during the kimono changes, but still it was the best thing I’ve ever done. I don’t look beautiful in the wedding photos because of how sick I was, but I did have the white makeup on my face. My mother and two friends came from Australia. Everything was amazing to them, the heavy clothes and walking in little steps, having a woman to hold my kimono and all those words they couldn’t understand. For the first half of the reception I stayed in the white kimono. I made a speech in Japanese. In Japan it’s unusual to reveal your emotions, but I wanted to say what I felt about my husband and our relationship. All the Japanese speakers cried. Then Shōichi gave a speech in English, and all the English speakers cried. The Japanese don’t often talk about being moved, but they were. An older woman told my mother, “I didn’t even cry at my son’s wedding.” I felt so proud. Even though I’d wanted this for myself, one of the rewards was having young and old relive a traditional wedding. Watching Shōichi’s school friends cry in our ceremony was really special.

I continued working for the English school. The money was good, and the hours were light enough so that I could start teaching ballet. Learning Japanese, having to be on my own at work, having a driver’s license and cooking Japanese food gave me the feeling that I was living in the real Japan. I joke that Shōichi has three household chores—taking out the garbage, picking his socks up off the floor and complimenting me at mealtime. The division of domestic labor is 100% a woman’s job. You need to get along with the neighbors, be part of the neighborhood association, pay the bills and learn how to take care of the house. In Australia we don’t worry about airing the mattress or bring the washing in on time or buying particular foods at particular times of the year. Until I quit my job, I always felt tremendous guilt. Once the next-door neighbor came over and said, “It’s going to rain. You need to pull your washing inside.” I felt like a failure as a woman with the people on our street checking whether I raked the leaves out of our front garden and whether I got my washing in before sundown.

Visiting Toyokawa Inari

A year after we were married we went to Italy for our honeymoon. Then we had our house built, and life began to change again. I took a job which because I was a woman I really had to fight for. In Japan if you’re a man people assume you’re responsible and hard-working, despite the stereotype of Westerners as fat, lazy and late for everything. I was hired by the board of education in another town. There were other foreigners with this job too, but I seemed to be doing better, whether because of my teaching experience or my Japanese language skills or because I’d learned how to behave Japanese.

I’d found it easy to copy my mother-in-law’s mannerisms, speech patterns and posture, which stood me in good stead. People said, “Oh, you have Japanese atmosphere.” While I was never accepted as Japanese, I was never treated like a guest either. In the staff room I answered the phone, and I stood up and sat down at the right times. I did all the things people don’t like to do that foreigners can get out of. I went to all the events outside of work and paid the money. This helped me fit in better even though it cost me personally. I found it difficult to do the housework, finish my Japanese homework, teach ballet, and teach English in elementary school and junior high with an hour-long daily commute in heavy traffic. That board of education really pushed English, requiring perhaps double what other Japanese kids receive. I didn’t just show up at school and hear, “We’re going to do this today. Ruth, please read this passage.” I was doing the lessons by myself and disciplining the children in Japanese.

This had great benefits because I learned how to speak to people above me and below me. Rank and level are very important, and they’re reflected in the way that you speak to people. My colleagues were forgiving of my mistakes. Every day I felt nervous, but I did well. I was the one picked—above the male foreigners—to be part of lectures to teachers renewing their license. My lessons were studied and videotaped and taken into other prefectures as models. So in this very small circle I had become a superstar, but I didn’t want people to think I’d been asked because I was a pretty girl with a nice smile who could be very entertaining. I was pleased to get praise from the people who hadn’t wanted to give me the job in the first place.

After three years, the government employees’ compulsory health check revealed that I had very high blood pressure. So now I’m a full-time housewife teaching ballet once a week and studying Japanese. I go to hospital every month for tests, but no one ever asks about stress. When I think of when I wanted to be a psychologist and I wanted to be in Europe, it’s almost as if I’ve let myself down. The funny thing is, only four days after I left the job, my boss drove out to collect my health insurance card, and he said, “Ruth, the woman that’s replaced you is pregnant. Do you think you can come back in November?” So I don’t think this is the end of the story.

Shōichi doesn’t expect me to be Japanese like the social rules do, or not-Japanese, like the people I meet on the street. The only time we argue is when I insist on knowing why something is like it is or why I have to wait. The Japanese accept what they’re told because people better than they are have decided this and it makes everything run smoother. When I have something which is really bothering me, like taxation or insurance documents, I talk to him about it, and he doesn’t seem to be irritated or defensive. I’m not sure whether that’s because we’re in love or because he’s broadminded or because he spent eighteen months in New Zealand.

He’s also a very handsome man, which is nice. I can’t believe I met someone who would fulfill all my requirements. Shōichi and I tell each other everything, perhaps because we would have misunderstandings otherwise. We can’t read each other the way an Australian couple can read moods or glances or body language. Everything has to be said because you can’t guess.

I don’t really have words to describe it, but gradually something inside has shifted. I’m proud to be an Australian, but when I go back I’m just visiting. This must be more evident than I think because my mother sends me books about Australia and goes out of her way to remind me of who I am and where I came from. But here, if somebody asks, “Ruth, when are you going home?” without thinking I’ll say, “Oh, at five o’clock.” Home isn’t over there. It’s in this great foreign land that is Japan. That happens quite a lot.

A reader who once lived in Japan writes:

A great read Carol.  Very interesting and very well written!  It brought me back to 1980.

Another reader writes:

I am grateful to have read this post. I, too, am about to get married and travel thousands of miles away to be (more or less) a housewife in a foreign country, with the hopes of being able to teach again. Ruth says, “We lived with his parents for six months, and I got to see how to live in Japan. I loved it. I’d come home from work and not have to cook dinner. They really liked me, and I liked them. We moved out because Shōichi and his mother argued a lot—although not about me. When we got married, it was Christmas Day, but just another day in Japan. We did the city hall thing, just filling out documents and handing them in. The procedure was happier and more wonderful than the wedding. We had the biggest smiles on our faces, and everyone in the office was smiling. I count our marriage as starting from that day because it was just us—no family and no ceremony and no need to be nervous or have expectations.” This
hit me personally. I’ve been whining and ranting like a brat over the past few days because I may have to get married in a city where everyone is a stranger and insisting that a girl’s wedding is probably the most important part of her life and it should be as she had envisioned it while growing up. Ruth’s take on it, spoken so simply yet eloquently, poked my brain and made me realize it’s all about how I look at it and the constraints can also make it beautiful. Thanks, Carol.

Women's residence hall and trees with mangoes wrapped in newspaper

After my application for the retreat was accepted, I started having doubts. Ten days without speaking to others I didn’t see as a problem for me. I like silence. We were also forbidden any reading or writing materials—I’d heard about this before with Zen practice. Also no cell phones, or food we brought in ourselves. No problem, I thought. But eleven hours of daily meditation? With my old back and sciatica-ridden right leg? I got on the internet and found a very helpful pamphlet which assured me that students could work independently much of the time, in their own quarters if they like, where they could stretch out on the bed for five minutes if necessary. [http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/v_retreat6.pdf]. This was clearly not the kind of situation where you had to be sitting in the meditation hall the whole time and a monk would come around and whack you with a stick if you weren’t sitting up straight. (When a Japanese monk did that to a friend of mine, she jumped up and yelled at him.)

For four and a half years I’d taken a weekly meditation class from Do Gong Sunim, aka John Barazzuol. [For Dogong’s posts here , see http://caroldussere.com/2012/04/14/a-meditation-teachers-last-talk and http://caroldussere.com/2010/12/10/the-man-behind-spiritpower-part-1 and http://caroldussere.com/2010/12/18/the-man-behind-spiritpower-part-2 .] I wrote to him about the retreat, and I got this response:

Throw away your apprehension and embrace and enjoy the 10-day Vipassana retreat! This is a wonderful, precious gift that you have given yourself. I will be your cheerleader. I’ll cheer for you to go. Do it. Go for it.

Now I must admit that I am very prejudiced in favor of the Vipassansa meditation, which comes from the Theravadan Buddhist tradition in which I received my first, high ordination as a Buddhist monk. Also, in various times in my life as a lay person, I have taken a few of the Vipassana retreats run by the teachers under Goenka. I love Goenka’s style and approach. He trains his teachers to run a very tight ship as far as discipline and rules and regulations go. Initially, it all sounds like a bit too much to put up with—but just accept and go with it and you will find yourself in a wonderful meditation environment. The Rules function to minimize distractions and help you maintain a focused mind. I also like Goenka’s meditation technique—”The Technique”—and have made good use of it in my life even though it is no longer my main meditation practice. Also I found the Goenka retreat environments very helpful in attaining an inner stillness. If after taking the course, you are not happy with the results or whatever happened, and you want to blame me for recommending it, then I would say with great delight, “Do it again!”

I close with this observation: after many meditation retreats, participants would often share all the suffering from the hell realms that they passed through; and they were not at all happy with me sounding like a bliss ninny. But I also experienced the same suffering as they.  I embrace the suffering and I enjoy the bliss. I embrace my darkness to get to my lightness. Now I am in no way suggesting you program yourself to go to this retreat expecting to suffer or to be blissed out. Just go and accept whatever the universe has to offer you.

I would be delighted to know how it all goes for you.

A few weeks later I was with the Vipassana group on a public bus for Sico Farm in Dasmariñas, Cavite, where Dhamma Phala is located. My head was full of images from approximately two decades before, when Dogong and Mujin and Chikwan Sunim—all monks and nuns from English-speaking countries—took our meditation class to Sudok Temple, a few hours from Seoul, for three or four weekends of meditation. We sat for eight hours a day in the meditation hall, mostly facing the walls, while the old clock creaked and banged its way through the hour. We also slept in the hall—men in the hall, women on the porch. I made us coffee in the morning, we gave each other backrubs, and between meals we pigged out on junk food. At the Vipassana retreat there would be no backrubs because we weren’t allowed to touch each other for the duration of the course.

Sudok Temple buildings

Images from Sudok Temple were with me the first couple of days at the center. Sudok-sa was a traditional Buddhist temple with buildings with curved tiled roofs and enormous Buddha statues, all financed by the same Chogye Order which paid my university salary. In contrast, the Vipassana Society is supported entirely by donations from former students—no religious affiliations, no corporate grants, no commercial exploitation of the method. Teaching, food and lodging are free to participants. The staff is unpaid. The rules include putting aside all religious objects and practices until the end of the course. At Dhamma Phala, the land is owned by a former student. The buildings are metal prefabricated constructions which can be taken apart and moved when the society buys its own land.

During the retreat, when the bell struck repeatedly at four in the morning and I had to struggle into my clothes, wash up a bit and head up the gentle rise from the women’s quarters to the meditation hall, in my head I was also hearing the temple bell and the wooden drum, loud enough to waken the dead, and the monk strolling around the courtyard, beating the wooden mokt’ak to summon everyone to the temple. Then I would slide the paper door to one side. It was hard to imagine anything more exotic—the hour, the silhouettes of the temple buildings in the dark courtyard. Inside the temple, the cosmic patterns painted everywhere, the shaven-headed monks in their robes, the rich light falling on the Buddhas and the paintings, the sound of the brass gong. While the cold wind blew through big cracks in the walls, our group stood behind the monks and participated in the bowing and chanting. Then we went back to the hall to begin meditation on the overheated floor.

It was strange not putting palms together and bowing when I entered the Vipassana center’s meditation hall, a plain white building with cushions in royal blue on the men’s side and powder blue on the women’s side, a seat for the teacher in front and recording equipment to play audio and videotapes. As soon as I sat down the first time, I felt I had come home.

The meditation all--men on the left, women on the right.

Meditation began when the teacher put on an audiotape of Goenka’s chanting in Pali, followed by Goenka’s instructions. For the first three days, we were to concentrate on the breath coming in and out of the nostrils, first on the inner wall and then on the bit of skin outside and below the nostrils. This was practice for sharpening the mind to our physical sensations. As he explained in the videotaped lectures, the idea is that by observing our physical sensations and reacting to them with equanimity, we can train the mind to avoid making immediate positive reactions, which lead to craving, or negative reactions, which lead to aversion.

This made sense to me. I know about hair-trigger reactions’ becoming a habit. I’ll also never forget sitting for three days at Sudok-sa trying to follow my breath but listening to my thoughts making one judgment after the other, mostly that something was bad. It was frustrating and humbling, and it taught me something about thinking always in dualities. I knew also from experience that examining a thought or feeling dispassionately without feeding it any emotional energy can take away its power. However, I’d just finished rereading Goldstein and Kornfield’s Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation, taken copious notes and loved it. I had Goldstein’s The Experience of Insight not yet finished. I was not at all sure I was willing to follow Goenka’s insistence that one use this technique only, forsaking all others. I also had Dogong Sunim in my head cheering me on.

My concentration was poor. I knew better than to be too hard on myself for this. Many times I’d heard Dogong laughing at his own lack of concentration in the early days. But I berated myself anyway. When my practice, such as it was, was only to follow the breath, if the mind wandered off to make a banana cream pie I could pull it back and begin again with an in-breath. But now, when using the mind to scan the body for physical sensations, I’d come back to what I was supposed to be doing and realize I didn’t know exactly where on the body I’d been when my mind wandered off. It was really frustrating to tell myself time after time, “Okay now, start over at the top of the head.” The teacher, who was there to answer students’ questions as well as to play the tapes, suggested that I combine concentration on the body with concentration on inhaling and exhaling. That helped.

I’m a writer. Much about this experience my mind wanted to mull over. Since I was unable to write anything down, it insisted on remembering by repeating again and again—even editing sentences or finding the right words. Sometime in the second or third day I realized I’d come up with a post for this website, a blog for another, and the contours of the first chapter of a novel—a misdeed of some sort in a setting of Noble Silence where the participants weren’t allowed to communicate with each other. The first chapter would end in the washroom with the protagonist secretly scrubbing dried blood from a black silk shirt. It was ridiculous.

Women's dining hall

I was also hungry most of the time. I hadn’t even thought about food as a problem. It had been at Sudok-sa, but only because we had to serve the monks at some of the meals. They would sit on cushions at low tables, and we would scurry in carrying the food. I had fears of dropping the soup and watching it spread out over the linseed-oil-papered floor. After we sat down, each meal was regulated by the sound of the mokt’ak. You untied your set of bowls, lifted out each one and set it on the placemat in the proper order, served or got served, gobbled up your food as rapidly as possible while wasting not one grain of rice, rinsed the bowls with water, scrubbed them with a pickle, poured the dregs in a bucket for the “hungry ghost,” ate the pickle, tied up your set again and stood in line to put the bowls back on the shelf. Here at this retreat there was no ritual, no need for speed. But there were only two meals a day, breakfast at 6:30, when I was famished, and lunch at 11:00, before I’d gotten hungry again. Between 11:30 and the following breakfast, there was a small piece of fruit and a cup of tea at 5:00. In the meditation hall I would sit on my cushion and think of cooking. I came up with recipes for peanut butter cheesecakes, chocolate-coconut cakes, peanut butter banana cakes. This was exactly the kind of craving the technique was meant to be working against.

Still, somehow it worked. The woman I sat behind wore a tee-shirt which said on the back “Ang galing mo!” or “Good for you.” It seemed she was also cheering me on. I was learning “the technique.” When Goenka introduced it to us with a guided meditation, I was amazed at how much physical sensation I could feel in my face. Sometimes I felt really good vibes on my body and told myself not to get attached to the feeling. When I felt a pain in my back or in my right leg, I warned myself against developing aversion—and when it got really bad I moved the leg a bit. My cushions were set against the wall, so I could lean back, and that helped. I seemed to be holding up as well as the other students, almost all of them half or a third of my age. Once during the group meditations, when we had to sit motionless for an hour, I felt the sweat running down into my ear, tickling unbearably inside my ear, and tried hard to maintain equanimity.

By the end of the seventh day, when Goenka informed us that we were now ready for surgery and that we should cut out those unwanted miseries we had brought with us, I thought, “How does he know?” I also felt he was right, and I did some work on the worry and resentment I’d brought with me, but not without remembering Goldstein and Kornfield’s saying, “You can learn a lot from anger.” Why should one take only one approach?

Our class in front of the meditation hall

Part of what sold me on this particular center was the people. True, we maintained silence and avoided even nonverbal communication, but it was clear that, except for the three who left early, everyone on the women’s side was following the rules, working on the meditation, maybe also feeling she was having a life-altering experience. I felt less isolated in this overwhelmingly Catholic country with these people who were doing Vipassana during Holy Week.

Windy overcomes 30-year fear of cats. (Click on photo to enlarge.)

On the last day we were allowed to talk with each other. I got my camera back and took some photos. Noble Silence was now followed by Noble Chatter. In a flood of pent-up thought and emotion we shared with each other what we’d been through for the past nine days. One woman said that after great agony she’d crawled over to the teacher, a native speaker of German. Referring to herself as ‘this humble person,’ she begged to be given her old seat where she could lean against the wall. In the laughter which followed, I said, “In German people haven’t used language like ‘this humble person’ for two hundred years.” Another woman was empowered to overcome her 30-year-old fear of cats by petting the scrawny adolescent male who would wander through the woman’s dining hall. I seemed to have finally gotten what I need to maintain a steady meditation practice, and I was glad to hear about the regular sittings where people who have finished their first 10-day course can practice together.

Women students

On the way home, one of the women told me she’d actually signed up for the retreat in order to lose weight, and later she sent a text that she’d lost ten pounds. I discovered I’d lost six and a half of the fifteen pounds I’ve been wanting to take off for years—and that’s without exercise. I’ve also discovered I don’t need as much food as my mind tells me I do. I’m sleeping better. I feel curiously empowered. My concentration while meditating has improved. I have the sense that my focus has sharpened, even though I’m not sure what that means.

Men students

So that’s it for me. I’ll close by offering links to other people’s reflections on their first 10-day course.

Goenka Vipassana Washes Whiter < http://www.hyam.net/blog/archives/1572>

How to survive a 10 day Goenka Vipassana course.  <http://www.evolver.net/user/vincenz0h/blog/how_survive_10_day_goenka_vipassana_course>

The Vipassana site can be found at http://www.dhamma.org/.

A reader writes:

Thank you for sharing your website. I can relate with your former meditation teacher. “There is no certain way—each of us must make his own way, and when he does that, that way will express the universal way.” I’ve been making my own way, too, and our 10-day Vipassana course was one of those ways. I went to the course with an unformed, “unworded” question in my heart. I didn’t ask the teacher, some part of me knowing that it will be answered in time. I waited and I listened to my heart, my guts, my bones (despite the unexpected pain that sprang from wherever I’ve unconsciously buried it). And on the last minute of the last hour of the last day, during metta [loving-kindness] meditation, I heard the answer. Like what a friend of mine told me, the answers to our questions are really simple and just under our noses. (It really does start and end with the breath.)

A reader writes:

Your Vipassana retreat sounds quite amazing. On the one hand, I admire and envy your… What? Tenacity? Commitment? On the other hand, it seems an extreme measure to shed a few pounds. Honestly, it must be great to be in that place where you are willing to make the sacrifice in order to achieve something more. Good for you. I, certainly, am nowhere near there.

A reader writes:

Very interesting.  Glad you did it even though it makes me feel guilty that I don’t put the effort into searching out activites that will improve me!  Maybe someday!

A reader writes:

Enjoyed your recent posts, Carol.  Great to know you’ve been sitting in the shade of the ‘big oak’ all this time. (Wasn’t that how you once described talking with Do-gong Sunim?)  Hope you can hear me cheering you on from the emerald isle.

A reader writes:

Thank you for sharing this beautiful post.  It is good to be reminded and walked through the technique all over again.  In no attempt to
overrate the experience, I would sum it up as “life changing.”  Coming from a quality-oriented environment where there are documented standards and procedures in order to operate, this has been such a liberating experience.  I realized there are no standards on how to live one’s life, but there are techniques we can work on to have inner peace.  Everyday I still try to meditate, though not as religiously as we would during the course.  I would still do it for 10 more days, given the chance.  I also like what I read regarding “embracing one’s darkness to get into lightness”.  Thank you for documenting this Carol and sharing your metta here.  Hope to see you again some time.



Lanterns hung at Lotus Lantern

Years ago, our meditation teacher left the Lotus Lantern Buddhist Center in order to return to Canada. He laughed when we gathered in the meditation room and saw seven tape recorders laid out on the floor in front of him. In Canada he removed his monk’s robes and wrote his own book on meditation, which he talked about in “The Man Behind Spiritpower.” When I asked him about his monk’s name, he said, “Do Gong means ‘empty way.’ My interpretation: a way that is empty includes all other ways. So I don’t have a personal path because my path/way is large enough to include all others. Lao Tzy says, ‘Everything comes from nothing.’ “

Dogong Sunim’s story

Buddha told a wandering monk, “I am the one who is fully awake.” Be involved in the process of waking up. What does it mean to wake up? So I started working with the unknowing mind, the mind that is before thinking. This is what Zen is about. So I volunteered to wake up the other monks. I could handle that. Don’t fall into the fog. Wake up.

“What am I going to do with my life, where is my life going, what is the direction of my life?” I thought about that and sat with that for many years.

“I think I need to release some energy.” I went up the mountain, and I yelled for three or four hours. And that night I couldn’t sleep because I had so much energy. An incredible amount of poison, toxin, defilements, negative energies had been released in my body. An enormous amount of junk that I had been holding onto had been released. I had filled the vacuum with a lot of this good, clean, fresh mountain energy. So that got me interested in the whole process of purification. For me, part of the process of waking up is the process of purification, letting go of the impurities that are lodged in the body and the mind. I spent a lot of time working on the five hindrances—desire, hatred, sloth and torpor, laziness, doubt. I spent a lot of time looking at the dark side of myself, looking at the dark side of human nature, of ourselves. I got in touch with stuff in myself that I wasn’t supposed to see, particularly as a monk thinking that I’m such a special person. Stuff like I had a very deep fear of being abandoned, which I think came from childhood. All kinds of restlessness. A lot of doubt and cynicism and skepticism, just all kinds of garbage came up and came out. I worked with this, and sometimes when I was at Lotus Lantern it took the form of talks.

I got interested in Carl Jung because he talked about “the shadow,” which is all these defilements that you can’t see because they’re buried inside you, the energies that are unacceptable to us. Whenever they come up, we push them down and reject them. I was particularly interested in these kinds of energies because these energies represent the real master. The master’s not out there, the master is the stuff in here that we don’t want to look at. That was the master I was looking at. When you look into this deeper side of your unconscious mind, you find a lot of stuff that’s not just negative, some of it is positive. I got in touch with a character deep inside myself that was pushing this waking up process. Deep inside of you are positive forces that will support what you want to do if you can contact them. It said, “As long as enlightenment is your goal, I’ll be around to help you. Whatever you do or don’t do, I will be working with you and through you. You cannot and you will not uproot me.”

Another vehicle that I’ve used is teaching. During the time I’ve been at Lotus Lantern, my focus has been on getting the teaching into my life. Before when I studied Buddhism, the Buddha’s teachings were in my head. I’d just taken them in my head. When I went back to the West with them in my head, I had nothing to offer, just a bunch of information. I realized I had to take this information in my head and put it in my gut and in my toes and in my bones and in my blood and in my life. That’s what I tried to do with the teaching here. So it wasn’t just, “This is what the Buddha said,” it was “OK, this is what the Buddha said, but what does this mean in your life, what does it mean inside your body, what does it mean right now.”  I started taking this approach because if the teaching is just dry, intellectual abstractions, they didn’t do anything for me. They didn’t seem to go anywhere. “Understood are the things to be understood, cultivated are the things to be cultivated, eradicated are the things to be eradicated.”

One of the cultivation things I did here was working with love and compassion. I was at Hwagye Temple wandering around in the mountains one day. I had a free day. I said to myself, “where is my practice going? It’s not clear anymore. What do I need to do the practice. What kind of a practice should I do?” Then I said, “Okay, I’m not going to stop walking until I find out what my practice is. I’m not going back to the temple.” I found myself walking down the mountain, which I didn’t like. I thought I was supposed to walk in the mountain. I went on the subway and went to Chongno-3-Ga and started walking up and down the street where they’ve got all these Buddhist stores and shaman places. I started walking up and down, and I walked into a store, and there was a big statue of Kwanseum Bosal [also called Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion]. I walked right into Kwanseum Bosal. Okay, I walked into another store. They’re playing a tape—Kwanseum Bosal. I walked into another store, there are all little wooden statues of Kwanseum Bosal. This went on for about five or six stores. Kwanseum Bosal, Kwanseum Bosal, Kwanseum Bosal, Kwanseum Bosal. And I think, “I think I got the message. I think I can go home now. I think I’d better do something with Kwanseum Bosal.”

So I went back in the subway, and sitting on the subway there was this older Korean lady, and she just had no energy. She was washed out and depressed, and her whole body sort of hung there on the subway. So I did one of my little tricks. I pretended to be asleep, and I sent my mind to her. I tried to radiate some compassion and some love to her. I thought, “Okay, come on. Get to work. Here we go.” I went back to the temple, and I thought, “Okay, this is what I’ve got to work with.” So one of the things I tried to develop is loving compassion. Not in any formal way.

As we go through this process of waking up, we have to each of us follow our own way. “There is no certain way—each of us must make his own way, and when he does that, that way will express the universal way.”  Zen Mind, moment to moment as we live our life. If you are on the way to waking up, I hope you find your own particular way and I hope you stay on this way for 10,000 years if necessary but at least until you can experience some kind of a full awakening. I hope that you can be the Buddha that you already are.

The metaphor of waking up has become real to me. I want something that’s workable and practical and pragmatic.

I think the most difficult was to stop the thinking mind and come to a mind that was naturally empty. There was one kilche [meditation retreat] I remember at Hwagye-sa, when my mind was thinking, thinking thinking. About halfway through I said, “Oh, please, please. Stop. Stop. Thinking, thinking thinking. Oh, please, stop. Stop. Stop.” I’m begging myself to stop thinking. And you know, it took me many, many years. When I first meditated, I sat down and went “duh-duh-duh-duh: these are are all the places I went to and all the places I saw and all the kinds of perfume I smelled and all the kinds of food I ate and how I can cook this and I can’t cook that.” Oh, it just didn’t stop!  It went on, and it went on, and it went on. One year, the next year, the next year until—I remember I was in Singapore at the time, I was doing the walking meditation and for four steps there was no thought. My mind is empty. And then the next day I went halfway around the room. Then one way around the room! Ooops, lost it. But it took a long time to reach silence because I’ve got all this thinking karma. This is why I’m straddled with teaching. My teacher once told me at the beginning, “Don’t read any books.”  And I thought, “Well, that’s fine, because I needed a holiday from books.” But he said, “When your direction becomes clear, you must read.” I’ve always had trouble getting beyond the thinking mind.

Okay, the koans. [For example, “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” These are intended to stop the mind from thinking.] A koan is a question that if you bring it up, whatever this question is—in my case it was related to thinking, too. I once asked myself, I was doing koans like “who are you?” “what is this?”and I’d go on for hours and hours. But one day I asked myself, “where does this thinking come from?” And I really looked. I was stunned. I had no idea where it came from. And so whenever I ask myself where my thinking comes from, it just turns right off, because I have no idea. I really don’t have the answer. So to me that’s the function of the koans. When you really get into a koan, then you’ve got your mind at the edge where you know that you don’t know. So your mind just goes, “Okay, I give up.” You’re bankrupt. You’re in a corner. But that’s one way. Then awareness is I think another way. Where you watch the thoughts coming and going.

The mechanics of the koan, as I understand it, is you’re given a little story or something, and your thinking mind thinks. And if you play the game, you think and think and think and think and think and think and think until one day you get the message that your mind is not going to come up with the answer. At that stage you genuinely don’t know. It’s not an attitude. You have no idea because you’ve been thinking about it for months and years. And you know that you don’t know. And that’s the beginning of knowing. But it takes a lot of thinking. For me it took a lot of thinking. So you can turn it off with koans. Mindfulness is good too.

No, the idea is that we each have a self-image. When energy pops up that’s not consistent with the self-image, we push it down. This is what the shadow is all about. Energies that are not acceptable to the conscious mind get pushed down into the unconscious mind where they take on a life of their own. And they work inside the unconscious mind, and then they take over. So you have an idea that you’re some particular kind of person, and then something happens that’s not consistent with that special kind of person you think you are, so you jam it back down again. You don’t recognize it because it’s not you. Or you project it onto someone else—“that dirty, filthy person. It’s not me. I’m pure. That animal.”

Anyway, I found that working with the shadow side is difficult. It’s very slow and it’s very difficult, and it takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of commitment because you have to take a look at parts of yourself that you don’t like and don’t want to see, and you have to be with parts of yourself that are not acceptable to you, and they have to be.

With negative energies, I found that what works best with me was just hanging out with them, living with them, treating them as friends. And if necessary staying up all night with them sometimes until they were ready to leave on their own. And that’s how it worked with me. One night I couldn’t sleep, and I stayed awake all night. And about six o’clock in the morning I just spontaneously started a dialogue between my heart and my mind. And I did a gestalt thing. My heart is over there, and my mind is here. And I went back and forth between the two places physically. And the heart said, “Please, listen to me. You’ve been a big bully, and you won’t listen to me. You just control everything. You override all my decisions.” And the mind said, “I’m sorry if I’ve been doing this.”  And they started a dialogue which ended up with their deciding to try to cooperate and work together. And then I went to sleep. But that kind of a transformation was—I let it work on an unconscious level. I didn’t even know what it was until it was ready to come into words. And then through the verbalizing it got released. I don’t know. It happens all kinds of different ways.

But all of this—anybody can do it. But you have to get a focus. You have to turn your energy in and zero in on it and be with it and concentrate and hang out with it and work with it. And so you have to make it sometimes a priority in your life. It doesn’t matter if there’s a business appointment. Tonight you’re going to stay up until this thing is settled—even though you don’t even have words for it. Or you’re not. You go to bed.

Why do you throw a fish in the water?  Why do you throw a bird in the air?  Why do you become a monk?  It was the same. It just happened. I found myself knocking on a monastery door and saying to this man who has become my teacher, “I want to meditate.”

And he said, “I’ve got all the bulldozers and the banging and the scraping and the painting. How could you meditate here?” And I looked at him like, “Are you crazy? I want to meditate.” And this came out of me. I’m looking at myself saying, “What are you telling this man?  You can’t meditate.” I’m going, “I want to meditate.” And I’m looking like “where’s this coming from?”  And then bang, I’m in robes.

You know, I feel that everyone’s life is like a flow. This is not Buddhism now, necessarily, but anytime my life has taken major turns, it isn’t really my thinking mind. My thinking mind can never really think out what I’m supposed to do. It just happens. I have no idea why. My thinking mind has no idea. None. Completely out to lunch. Not just me, but I think if you’re in the flow with your life, instead of resisting you just sort of go with it. I could never have imagined my life. If somebody had told me that I would have become a Buddhist monk, that I would live in different parts of the world and I would move around from one place to another, I’d say, “You’re crazy.” And if you’d said I would live in Seoul, I’d say, “you’re absolutely out of your mind. Korea?” I had absolutely no interest. But it all happened. I couldn’t have planned it if I’d wanted to. It’s like moment to moment the universe brings all this stuff to us. I’m constantly amazed, and I see it all as a mystery. I have absolutely no idea why all of this happened.

With meditation basically you’re just being yourself. You’re just with yourself, right?  Whether you call it Vipassana or Zen or whatever you call it, or whether you to the koan or concentrate on your breath, you’re sitting there. And if you sit long enough, this stuff comes up into your mind. It just comes up. The hells arise, and the heavens arise. My attitude is very Western and very pragmatic. Whatever works, use it. If it doesn’t work, abandon it. When the mind becomes naturally empty, there’s no Zen, there’s no Vipassana, there’s no technique. There’s no teaching, there are no words. It’s just empty.

When there was the silence here, it felt really nice. One of the things that I’ve also discovered in Korea, and I think it’s from the oriental tradition, the focus is on here in the tanjeon or the hara [abdomen]. In Vipassana, sometimes people concentrate up here [nostrils]. But for many years now I’ve had my energy in here, down in the tanjeon. And because of this I’ve finally gotten to reclaim what we call the gut center, the instinctual center. This is also the creative center. And so I feel in the last few years I’ve also gotten in touch with my creative energy, indirectly through the meditation. Just from keeping the mind in this area all the time. I discovered the whole creative energy. When the mind is silent, like we’ve got a silence in here, there’s that silence inside. This is also a way of getting in touch with your creative energy. If somehow you can still your mind—by Zen or Vipassana or being in the mountain or taking a hot bath—anything. Once the mind is quiet inside, then the creative energy can start surfacing.

Friends among the "urban poor"

A couple of weeks ago, I met a friend of mutual friends. He got to talking about what he was doing, and later in the evening I asked whether I could interview him. He refers to his going out with donations as “sorties” because he’s bombing with love. The photos come from his Facebook pages.

Homeless kids at James's dinner table

James’s story

It started when I was working for a call center. On my way home I saw people sleeping on the street, even in the rain. I wondered if they’d eaten dinner. So when I came across some money—I think it was a bonus from my company—I had an extra 1,500 pesos, roughly $40. Noodles were about 7 pesos a package. I bought about 200 pesos worth and cooked them up. That night I went around the community, waking up the homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks. At first they might have thought I was a policeman trying to get them off the streets. They were surprised when I gave them some noodles. It became a habit every time I had extra money or my children give me some from their salaries. I’d go cook some noodles, then bring my children with me. It’s quite addicting. You see faces lighting up because they see there’s food in front of them and there’s still a person who seems to care about them. I think it gives them hope.

Then it expanded to bringing goods to the flood-stricken area in Bulacan. Calumpit [northwest of Metro Manila on the Calumpit River] was under water after a typhoon. I brought some relief goods which my family and I had packed up at home. I went there with my youngest child, who’s eight years old. She enjoyed it. I find it fulfilling to be able to help, however small that help might be. It’s my principle that you don’t have to be rich to be able to help people because there will always be someone poorer than you, there will always be someone needing your help. It’s just a matter of having the willingness to give and to make sacrifices. To me it doesn’t matter if they’re people I don’t even know as long as I can alleviate their suffering. It gives me joy and fulfillment.

Cooking noodles

I talk about it on my Facebook pages, where I put some personal quotes and my personal philosophy. I really don’t want people to know I’m the one doing this, so I use another name. For the pages in English I use James Braddock, the character from the Chuck Norris Missing in Action films. He was my idol when I was younger.  On the Tagalog pages I use is Mang Urot. An urot is something annoying. On those pages I also put in some humor about family life, married life, situations at home, other things I think I have some understanding of—whatever comes to mind, if I find it amusing or think it might help somebody.

After I went to Calumpit to distribute relief goods, my friends on Facebook—people I had never met in person—were asking me why I didn’t post some pictures. I told them I wasn’t doing it for publicity, I was just happy to be able to share. But they said, “Come on, do it. Maybe others will be pursuaded to do the same.” So I did. At that point in time I had no pictures of myself or my family in my Facebook pages. They called me “Older Brother” or “Kuya.” [The use of family terms for people outside the family is common among Asian, family-based cultures.] I know they benefit from my philosophy, and sometimes I give them some counseling. They wrote, “Kuya, we’ll be sending some donations.” Some of this money came from Saudi Arabia and Cyprus, one from the U.S. There might have been some from Canada. After that first sortie into Calumpit, they sent me about 10,000 pesos [$230] in cash. A week after my first trip, I used the money to buy relief goods, and I went back to Calumpit.

Boiled tap water for drinking

After that they were asking about my next project. I said, “I’m not used to accepting money from people I really don’t know. Are you sure you trust me?”

“No problem, Kuya, we’ll be send money.”

The next time they sent money, it totaled 20,000 [$450]or more. They said I should decide how to use the money. Feeding the homeless in my area would only cost about one or two hundred pesos a day. I wondered how I could use 20,000. So what I did was I organized my friends and my family, and we went to 168 Mall in Divisoria [a wholesale-retail mall] and bought school supplies. So for me, my contribution was making the trip to a place where the goods would be cheaper instead of just going to an SM mall. My contribution was to lower the cost so we could provide for 120 or 150 students instead of only a hundred. I brought my childhood friends along, including some from “the urban poor,” which gave them the privilege of being able to help people. So we went to 168, and we carried out twenty to thirty kilos of writing pads, notebooks and slippers [flipflops]. Then I coordinated with the schools in downtown Manila to make the donation.

A trunkful

It was quite a good experience. For us, what’s 100 pesos [$2.36]? It’s one coffee at Starbucks. A hundred 100 pesos per kid is not much—probably it’s not the amount. Probably it’s the kids’ feeling that someone cares. I hadn’t finished posting the pictures when another fellow wrote and said he wanted to support my next project. That was about 35,000 pesos. We were able to go to a school in Quezon City and give more than we had previously. I hope it goes on like this forever. It’s not my habit to solicit money from people, and I really don’t want to do it. But I hope it continues and people can see the beauty in what I’m doing and the beauty in doing it themselves.

I’m encouraging them: “You don’t have to support me. You can do it yourself. Why not do it in your own community?”

They insist on helping me. “Well, I’m in Cyprus. I’m in Saudi Arabia. How can I do it? I cannot help people here because they’re wealthy.”

I look at it this way: if I refuse the help they are giving for my projects, then I would not be able to reach out to the needy in the Philippines.

His daughter and her nanny packing up food

I’m gaining some friends—and yes, some detractors who accuse me of making money out of this. But I just have to go on because I know what I’m doing is good, not only for them, but also for me. It renews my spirit.

About a week ago someone sent me 5,000 pesos [$116]. I still have it because I was planning on doing something for the squatters in Makati. For 400 families that’s a small amount. One woman wrote to say her employer was getting rid of old toys and clothes, and she’d be sending them to me by FedEx. I wrote back that it would be okay to send them some cheaper way, like by ship. Otherwise the cost of sending the items over would be more than they were worth. It would be better to just send the money and we could go buy food or clothes for the children.

This has become a personal crusade, and my family is into it. When my daughter [a flight attendant] has some extra money she gives it to me. My son [an engineer] doesn’t usually give me money, but the funny thing is once after payday I saw that his bag was full of packages of noodles. So I think he’s doing something on his own. It really makes me happy that what I’m doing is rubbing off on my children.

There’s another thing that I can’t forget. One day when we were going to Manila, on a corner near our house there were my friends—I call them friends now, a family that regularly sleeps outside a bank. We know each other like friends. I noticed that the father was limping and that he had a very ugly wound, like a burn. I was afraid it would get infected. So I told my son, “Go home, get some Betadine antiseptic and some gauze.”

In front of the bank

Without hesitation, my son got the stuff and came back. “Well, what should I do with this?”

“What should you do? Look at his wound.”

So he took care of the man by putting some antiseptic and gauze on the wound. How many children—or how many men—would go out of their way to do that? For some it’s disgusting to be with homeless people, and much more so if it involves treating an ugly wound. I’m proud and blessed to have a son who also reaches out to the poor.

There’s something wrong with many rich Filipino families. They don’t seem to want to mingle with poor people. They look down on poor people. [This is probably the only way they can justify to themselves the enormous gaps in living standards.] I have to tell you, when my older daughter and my son were about six or seven years old, we were rich. They had no any idea that when I was young I was mingling with squatters. I enjoyed mingling with “the less fortunate,” as they’re called. I noticed that my wife and my children seemed to have a double standard when it came to themselves and to poor people.

In front of the bank

So I said, “Pack up some things for two days.” They thought we were going on a vacation, but I brought them to my friends in a squatters’ area in Makati—which is still there—and I had them stay with the squatters’ family for three days and two nights so they would know what it was like to live in those conditions. That worked pretty well. They still love the poor, and up to now every time they go there they feel the acceptance given to them by the people in the squatters’ area. There’s no animosity. There’s no fear. My Facebook pictures are proof of that. We’re a family regardless of whether we’re poor or rich. We are a family.

I only can do so much. Doing this work doesn’t make me a better person than anyone else. But again, I took the advice of my friends that I should post the pictures because there’s a good chance that someone will follow suit or at least support what others are doing.

[I said I’d been told not to give money to children begging on the streets because they are run by syndicates, otherwise the children would be in school.]

Look at the smile on his face.

Well, I don’t give money to children on the streets. I believe most of them are handled by syndicates. But I doubt if they would be in school even if they weren’t. It’s quite a cycle. Their  parents weren’t able to go to school, and then they have children who aren’t able to go to school as well. The problem is deeply rooted, like only the privileged in the Philippines can go to school. Even if you provide free education, what about the school supplies? What about food, uniforms, shoes and miscellaneous expenses? What if these children have problems with their homework and their parents are uneducated as well? It would discourage the poor kids if they were unable to keep up with their classmates. There would be more discrimination because their classmates would have school supplies or good uniforms and shoes and they’d be wearing dirty clothes or torn shoes. That’s a very big problem. It has to be addressed not only by government but by every citizen who feels he or she is more blessed than those people. It would really take a very concerted effort from citizens, not only the government.

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Village grandma and grandson

In 1986 Alice taught English for a semester at Xiamen University and did research for a project she had brought with her from the States. At home she has served as a college affirmative action officer, as the director of college programs for displaced homemakers and in other aspects of the college’s women’s program.  Alice is an active, vigorous woman in her forties who is concerned with nutrition and physical fitness. She could frequently be seen running along the beach road, enjoying the view while keeping fit.

Alice’s story

The standard of living here seems comparable to what we saw in Venezuela, where there was both more poverty and more wealth. A developing country is a developing country. They bring in ten million dollars worth of equipment which there’s no one to operate, repair or maintain it. Modern computers but no toilets that flush.  But Chinese culture is not so blatantly sexist. The second year I understood what was being said to me on the street, and it was very offensive. Also, Venezuela doesn’t have a long history like China’s, and where we lived was not nearly as beautiful physically as it is here. I love living by the ocean. Probably the only thing I don’t like here is the difficulty of the language.

Conditions for women in China are much better. Most women in Venezuela don’t work outside the home, have little education, and are economically dependent on a man. Venezuela is a Catholic country, and the birthrate is high. You see what having a lot of children does for women with poor nutrition and no education and no job and poor health. Although here women have a tremendous burden of work, having a job makes a world of difference with self-respect.

When I interview a woman for my research I ask how her life is different from her mother’s and grandmother’s. I focus on family background, education, work outside the home. I go into salary, health benefits, and housing. I look at the size of living quarters and indoor or outdoor plumbing. I haven’t started tabulating any of the data yet, so I don’t have any statistics, just general impressions.

One young woman I interviewed felt sexual intercourse was common before marriage. “A lot of people do it, but nobody admits it, nobody talks about it.” She talked about what premarital sex does to women, especially if the relationship doesn’t work out. Not being a virgin is still a big problem. She asked when that was going to change.

“Well, maybe in about twenty years. I think it took about that long in the United States. When I was growing up, everybody did it, nobody talked about it, everyone felt guilty about it, and your life was over if the relationship didn’t work out.”

I asked the young, unmarried women, “How many children will you have?”

They all said, “One.” Some said, “I’m only allowed to have one.”

“Well, if you had a choice, how many would you have?”

Some said, “Well, I just want one, and that’s enough.”

“What happens if it’s a girl?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

I don’t know if they believe it or not, but they’re mouthing all the right words.

The majority of women say that in China it’s better to be a man than a woman, women carry more of the load in the family, and on the job men have more opportunities than women do. Of course some women say there’s no difference. People have told me that the men who do the hiring specify that they want men. In some fields they don’t think it’s fair. To them it’s clear that women can work in an office as well as men and that the work unit should not be able to request men, but there are some fields where women think discrimination is okay.

No one—male and female, educated and uneducated—disagreed with the idea that some work is inappropriate for women, like lifting heavy things. I thought about the fifty-year old peasant women who are watering those trees on campus with the shoulder poles and those huge buckets of water, the women who are carrying around children on their backs. I wondered if the poor working in the fields out in the countryside divided the labor so the women didn’t do the really heavy work.  On the other hand, the issue of non-traditional jobs for women is not the same as in the States where heavy physical labor has been well paid. In China heavy labor doesn’t earn you much more than other labor. So should women be breaking their backs?

Business travel is considered inappropriate for women: it’s not proper to go traveling if you’re a single woman, and if you’re married you should be raising your family. Domestic travel might be okay, but not going abroad and having dealings with foreigners. In fact it is considered an insult to a foreigner to have to deal with a woman.

A great many women believe that there’s equality in China. In some ways that fits the Chinese view of the progress they’ve made since Liberation. They’re pleased to have 35% or 40% women at the university. As an American feminist, I say, “It should be 50%.”

With encouragement and role models I think Chinese women students would change quickly, but of course the majority of the teachers are men, and so the system just perpetuates itself. I have about only 20% female students in my classes. In my second year classes I shouldn’t have that kind of distribution. They’re law, business, and history majors, the kind of majors where—at least in the United States—there are a lot of women.

When I ask my interviewees how their legal rights might be different from those their grandmothers and mothers had, they don’t understand. I also ask about political participation. They don’t know what I’m talking about. Legal rights and political participation as we understand them are concepts outside their culture. I ask whether their grandmothers and their mothers had arranged marriages, how many children each of them had, and how it was decided how many children they would have. Then I ask them whether it’s preferable to be a man or a woman in modern China and whether women on the whole work harder or men do.

There’s a lot of similarity in responses, especially among the women teaching in the university. Housing, salary, health benefits are standardized according to what job you have. The young teachers I interviewed getting around 70¥ [$23.33] a month, and they all have health benefits. The housing basically depends on whether they’re single, in which case they’re living with two or three others in a dormitory room, or whether they are married and have a family, in which case they probably have two rooms and a kitchen. Most of them have one child, some have two children. Sometimes they have a parent living with them. A couple of women don’t live with their husbands because the state has shipped their husbands off to jobs at another location.

When I asked how their lives were different from their mothers’ and grandmothers’ the university women talked mostly about education and employment. Typically, the grandmother was illiterate, the mother may have some education, and the daughter is highly educated. I’ve interviewed some of the women who were the cadre-peasant-worker types, and they came into the university through the Cultural Revolution. Even though they’re teaching in the university, they don’t have the formal educational background that the others do. I met two doctors with a middle-school education, but they must have gotten some training after school. One woman worked with her father, who may not have had any formal medical training.

Up at the retired workers’ activity center, I interviewed women who seemed to be in their sixties who were not university educated. They told me that the difference between life before and after Liberation was the difference between starvation and having enough. They’re strong supporters of the Communist Party. One woman burst into tears when she was talking about her mother, who starved to death when she was living up north with her mother-in-law. Even though the husband was sent down here on a job and the wife and daughter could have come with him, it was considered her duty to take care of her mother-in-law, who made her work like a slave. My interviewee talked about how much her mother had hated her mother-in-law.

Another woman was a strong advocate of the party because after her husband died the party found her a job.  She worked for years as a street sweeper. She didn’t make much money, and she had to work hard, but she had an income. She has a pension now, which she appreciates very much. At the time of the interview, she was fighting with her sons, so she’s happy she doesn’t have to live with them. The only criticism she had of the Communist Party [as moral educator] was that it should teach the children to be more respectful of their parents.

I also asked a question about domestic violence, but I think the results probably aren’t reliable, because the question is really hard to interpret. We have a hard time in the United States deciding when a parent is spanking a child and when a parent is beating a child. Making the distinction clear to someone of a different culture who speaks a different language is very difficult. A lot of people have told me that domestic violence exists here, but it’s not common. These people think it’s more likely to occur among the uneducated than the educated people, particularly if the woman isn’t working outside the home. For example, out in the countryside an abused woman might not have the option to leave. The women I interviewed said, “I have a job, I have an income, I have health benefits. If I could show that I was being abused, I think I could even get a divorce. I don’t have to put up with that.”

I have to laugh when what I think are simple questions get confusing and convoluted answers. I asked a woman how old she was. She’s really 36, but usually she says she’s 38 because you have more prestige if you’re older. The day she was born she was one year old [because Chinese often add a year for gestation]. The birthday is also linked to the calendar year in her province. Because she’s so close to the end of the year, the moment the new year hits she gains another year. So when she was two months old, she was two years old.

I interviewed one woman in an apartment with three rooms and a kitchen. It seemed  spacious until I realized nine people were living there. I have now done thirty-five interviews, and she was the only woman I talked to who was concerned about the repercussions of talking to me. “If there is another Cultural Revolution, what I say may come back to haunt me.”  In fact, many people did get into trouble for talking to Westerners during the Cultural Revolution, but her children, who weren’t old enough to remember, were not at all patient with their mother’s reticence. They were needling her for not saying more.

I said, “You know, she’s been through something that you haven’t been through. You have to respect that.”

One of her sons worked for the security police. When my interpreter translated the comments he was making to his mother, I turned to him and said, “You tell me how it was.”  He did give me some information, but nothing of much value. The daughter was more interesting. She had been sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, had married a peasant, and the two of them had managed to get back into the city. I haven’t met anyone else who has been able to do that.

There was an article in China Daily about the exploitation of the young girls in the factories that are starting up with the new free enterprise system. The journalist estimated that around 7% of the girls aged 7-12 are not attending school. They think there’s a lot of pressure to use these girls as labor in the factories. When I was up in Long Ai interviewing, we stumbled into a candy factory filled with young girls hand-wrapping individual pieces of candy. I’ve heard about this in the countryside, too. Now that the peasants can raise produce for the free market, people keep girls home from school so they can contribute to the income-producing venture.

The biggest limitation of my research is that it’s so centered in Xiamen. It has some diversity because some of the students are from other parts of the country, but getting a true cross-section of the population is certainly not possible while staying in one spot. Xiamen is unique in having the combination of a big university and a special economic zone. But I’ve accomplished what I wanted to accomplish, which is to learn a whole lot more about women in China, even if it’s one small segment of university women.

When I went to the women’s federations, I enjoyed talking to the staff because their work is similar to what I do in the States. At first I sat through the speeches they read to me, and I was only fed the official line. Later they came to my room, and I had a lot of questions for them—what do you do, what’s your biggest problem, how do you do that, how do you cope with this kind of situation. I asked all the really sticky ones.

They have basically the same objective as I do, trying to bring about equality for men and women by providing additional services for women. They talk to employers who’ve been reported to be engaging in discriminatory policies. They provide personal counseling and advice, they put on workshops and distribute information. They’re active in daycare. Right now legal rights is a hot item in Chinese life. So they might do a workshop to tell women what their rights are or set up a training class so that women can acquire additional skills or help a woman find daycare or get along with her husband. The women’s federations reflect the incredible bias in this country toward reconciling a married couple, and they make it clear that divorce is bad for everybody. The federations have lots of staff, and they work closely with the woman in charge of population control, which is seen as a women’s issue.

At the moment I’m waiting for a translation of the 1950 and 1980 marriage laws, which cover a lot more than just marriage. It’s a real hindrance not knowing the law. When was talking to the federation I said, “I’ve found that some say university departments will call up and request applications for employees saying, ‘We want someone, but we don’t want a woman.’  What do you do when something like that happens?”

They said, “Of course that is not supposed to happen, and we will immediately go down and work with the employer. If we do not get a satisfactory resolution, we report him to the labor department. The labor department has the authority to bring about sanctions.”

One of the federation women said that if a work unit is discriminating because some job is not appropriate for a woman, then you can suggest some reassignment. “Can you assign the heavy work to an existing male employee and give some other work to the new worker so that you can hire a woman?”

Usually, if I hammer away at them too long with questions about what I consider inconsistencies in their thinking, they will start to retreat to their memorized statement. I can always tell if I’ve gone too far when I get a statement like, “I’m sure with China’s future development these problems will be resolved.” But there are times when they agree with me, especially if I can give them an example of a problem I’m dealing with. Then their guard is down and it’s more of a sharing, and it’s not an I-point-my-finger-at-you thing.

Talking with the women from the federations made me realize how much I have missed my colleagues’ companionship and my work in the States. As much as I’ve enjoyed what I’m doing here, in the States I’m part of a network, I have people that I meet with on a regular basis to share my values, my goals and my work.

Response from a Filipino of Chinese extraction:

Thank you so much.  I found it interesting, and it made me ask myself who I would be today if my Dad hadn’t left China, where he was born. What if I’d been born there? What would my way of thinking be today? Hmmm….

The original buildings at Xiamen University

Brian’s and Alice’s stories

In 1986, when Brian, his wife Alice and I were teaching at Xiamen University, he told me about a special lecture he gave as a part of his contract with the university. Later Alice shared a story about getting gifts shipped back home. Both stories are good illustrations of the how bizarre everyday life in China can be. The Bo Xue classroom building was a few blocks from The Number 2 Guesthouse where most of the foreigners were living.

Brian:  I was giving a special lecture on Saturday afternoon, and I was told that it would be at Bo Xue, one of the classroom buildings on campus where I teach.

“Fine. What time do you want me to be there?”

“No no no no. We’ll send a car for you.”

“What do you mean send a car to get me?  I can bike over there in two minutes.”

“Well, we’ll send a car.”

So they sent a car. It was one of the old cars, not one of the Toyota Crowns, one of these old Chinese cars. We got in—my minder, that is, the Chinese faculty member who looks after me, and myself and the driver. We rode along, but then instead of turning left at the gate in order to go down to Bo Xue, the driver made a right turn and left the university. I thought, Well, he could go down to the post office and come in the other gate down there past the administration building. He went down and made a turn down at the post office and turned into where the School of Economics is. My minder hollered at him, “Where are you going?” There was a discussion in Chinese, so I gather the driver was told, “This is not where we’re going. We’re going to Bo Xue.”

The driver backed out of there and went down the road and made a left turn to come in the university gate down by the printing factory. Only the gate keepers wouldn’t open the gate for him. The driver sat there, and he hollered at the gate keepers, and they hollered back at him, and pretty soon my keeper was hollering too. They wouldn’t open the gate even though this was a university car. When the gatekeepers saw the driver getting out of the car, all of a sudden they decided to open the gate. My minder turned to me and said, “A big mistake.”

We finally got down to Bo Xue, only the driver didn’t stop. He started driving back up toward the main road again. My minder hollered at him to stop. He stopped, and we got out and walked back down the road. I don’t know what the problem with the driver was, whether he didn’t know the names of the buildings or he only spoke local dialect or what, but he sure had a terrible time.

I had a bunch of overhead transparencies I was going to use. When we got into the lecture room, they said they couldn’t find a screen, so they were going to show them on the wall. The wall had all kinds of posters on it, so you couldn’t see much of anything. About eight guys ended up picking up this huge combination lectern and desk from the front of the room and hauling it across the room to put closer to the wall. In the meantime somebody had put the outline of my lecture up on the board in Chinese. My minder had been coming to see me for about two weeks. He had a copy of the complete published article that was the basis for the lecture, and he was going over it and asking me about each word. He was going to translate it. He had talked about whether he was going to translate it sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph. We finally decided it would be better to do it paragraph by paragraph.

At the lecture, he introduced me to the audience, and he turned to me and said, “I sit down now.” He went and sat down. There I was with no translator. So I started talking, and I had just gotten a couple of sentences out when a couple of students showed up with a screen. They tried to figure out how to hook it up. The room had blackboards that slide up and down on vertical tracks. They hooked the screen on the top of one of the blackboards and shoved it up, and of course as soon as they got it up the blackboard and the screen came crashing down, and the screen fell on the floor. They hooked it on again and shoved it up, tried to get the blackboard to stay up, but it wouldn’t, it came loose and fell down again, and there was the screen on the floor. The third time they pushed it up they took an eraser and jammed it in the track to keep the blackboard up. That held. But now the screen covered up half of the blackboard where the lecture was outlined. Then I tried to put the overhead on the new screen, and you couldn’t see. I went back about five rows and couldn’t see a thing. This was an auditorium that must hold a hundred or a hundred and fifty people. I said, “Well, let’s forget about the projector. We can’t see it anyway.”

From there it was pretty uneventful. I used the outline in Chinese and I would point to the sections. It was a pretty detailed outline. So I think some of them were able to follow me as I was talking.

Alice:  But they were reading it while you were giving the speech in English. They were reading it in Chinese.

Brian:  They were reading it from the blackboard.

Alice:  So why were you even there?

Brian: I don’t know. But I haven’t finished my story. I finished my speech, and there was a bunch of professors from my department on the front row asleep. The ones that were asleep didn’t understand any English at all. They were just sitting there. I found out later that it was either come to my lecture or go to a political meeting. They decided they’d rather come to my lecture and sleep than go to a political meeting and sleep. My minder said, “OK, now we go to the banquet.”

Fine. We started walking out to the door, only none of the other accounting professors came along. He kept hollering at them, “Come on. Come on. Let’s go.”

I started walking down the road with a couple of people from the computer science department who had some questions about my lecture, and my minder ran back and talked to the professors about why they weren’t coming, and he came back and told me that they all had bicycles and were going to ride over. They brought me over in a car, but when the lecture was over, I had to walk back. It’s a five minute walk—big deal—but it was funny. We got back to the guesthouse, I went to the room to get Alice, we waited for the other professors to show up, and then we went into the guesthouse dining room. There was no table set up for a banquet—no nothing.

My minder went into the kitchen with some other faculty members, and he came out and said, “A big mistake. They’re not expecting us. They have no banquet.”

They sat us down in the middle of the dining room—as you’re well aware, it’s a fairly large room—and got four chairs, and they had Alice and me sit in two chairs, and two Chinese professors sat in the two chairs facing us, and they brought some cokes. We talked. Everybody else disappeared. We didn’t know where they’d gone.

Alice:  We had just found out that one of the professors, who was probably in his late sixties, spoke English and was educated in a Western-style university for very rich families.

Brian:  His parents were landowners. He had a very classical education. He can sing Peking Opera. He knows about a lot of different areas, he’s much better educated than people today.

Alice:  A Renaissance man. I think there are some young students who are very bright, very competent, especially some who spent a couple of years in the West. But boy, between them and the sixty-year-olds you’ve got a real vacuum.

Brian:  We must have been there twenty or thirty minutes. Pretty soon my minder came back and said, “OK, the banquet’s ready. Follow me.”

Fine. We got up and followed him. There’s a little restaurant out there behind the Chinese guesthouse. They’d gone in there and ordered the banquet. So we went there, and we sat down, and somebody threw a plastic sack of those sweet hot dog buns on the table, and somebody else threw out a plastic sack of hamburger buns, I guess. Somebody had some wine. They had coke and beer. Then the restaurant started bringing out dishes.

As it turned out, it was about one of the nicest banquets we’ve had here, because the accounting people were very relaxed and very informal, and they jabbered away and had a great time. There were only a couple of people that spoke English. They had the professor sitting beside us and then my minder. The food was pretty good. It was kind of fun. But the whole afternoon seemed to be a comedy of errors.

At the end of the term, the university was preparing for a visit by very big potatoes from the Ministry of Education. So for about three weeks, from early morning until late at night, residents of the guesthouse had painting, repair work on plumbing and electricity, installation of color television sets, maintenance work of all sorts—all of which seemed to require incessant pounding and hoards of chain-smoking workmen charging into rooms without knocking. The hasty, last-minute repair of the guesthouse was underway when the Carters arrived for lunch in my partially repaired apartment. It was their last day at the university. Since the Carters were on a short-term contract, they had to bear the expense of shipping any freight themselves.

Alice: I don’t understand why those people at the waiban [foreign affairs] have absolutely no experience in shipping. I just cannot believe they know so little about it. The part that went smoothly was getting the box made. That they understood. They got a carpenter, they got the stuff measured, and they got the box. But then how to get it from here to the United States was just a complete mystery to them. The only thing they could think of was to take it to the post office and have it shipped by air.

I said, “That’s not possible. We can’t afford to do that.”

They were at a loss. Then they found out that there was a shipping company downtown. So they took me downtown to the shipping company, where the clerk said, “Well, if we take that box, they’ll get lost or broken.”

I thought, Why should I pay them to ship it if they say it’ll get lost or broken? The interpreter couldn’t quite get it through his head that we needed to leave. He kept arguing with them. I said, “Let’s go. We really don’t want to use this company. If there’s no other shipping company, then the post office must be able to do it.”

“No, no. The post office will only take a box weighing one kilo.”

“We’re downtown, let’s go to the downtown post office and ask since we’re here.”

“No, let’s ask at the university post office.”

We asked at the university post office. One kilo.

“You’ll have to ship it from Hong Kong then.”

All along the waiban was trying to get us to take it on the boat with us to Hong Kong and ship it from there so they wouldn’t have to deal with it.

My standard argument was, “Look, in Hong Kong we don’t have an interpreter, we don’t know the name of a shipping company, we don’t know where customs is, we don’t know how to do anything. Also, we don’t want to have to haul it to Hong Kong. We don’t want to have to carry it. It weighs close to 40 pounds.”

“Let’s go back to the waiban office and call. There has got to be a way to send it through the post office.”

“No no no.”

“Please. I insist that you call the main post office. Here’s a list. We need to know everything on this list. How much will they charge, what are the limitations on the size and weight of the box, will they insure it?”

He called. “Well, that’s good. They can ship it.”

“That’s wonderful. How much will it cost?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“What about the weight and the size?”

“I don’t know. I’ll call back and ask them.”

He returned. “It’s 130¥ [$43 at the time] for twenty kilos.”

“Wonderful. What about the size of the box?  Can it be any size?”

“I don’t know.”

“How about insurance.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think they insure things.”

I said, “Well, we’ve got partial information. Let’s go with that.”  We had been at this now for three hours, and I was exhausted. “I understand that you can get customs to come here and inspect this.”

They started to yap. “Customs will not come here for a little box. They would only do that if you have a lot of articles. We must go there.”

“OK. We’ll go there.”

So that’s what we did today. Not knowing what would happen in the last few days, I had my schedule well planned out with every item on every hour carefully thought out. This morning at nine o’clock I had the car from the university, I had the driver, I had the interpreter, I had the box to go to customs.

The monitor from one of my classes came to my door and said, “Here, you must full out all these grade books.”

I didn’t know that was going to happen. He didn’t have all the grade books, but he had ninety percent of them. Then I had another student come to present me with a gift. He came with his camera and he wanted to take pictures. Then I had all these workmen who were coming in the door. Someone interpreted for the workmen and said, “Your heater’s going to be out for three days. Do you mind?”

I had all of my possessions laid out all over the bed and the box and the suitcases and everything organized according to what goes where. The workmen came in and said, “You have to move all this stuff because we’re going to do this work here, and we might break something.”

About that time I wanted to throw them all out because I couldn’t deal with it. So I told them we are moving out tomorrow and they could have the whole room then.

Actually, the customs office was not as bad as I had feared it would be. We were just the box and me and this official going through the stuff. I expected mobs of people and no place to get stuff out, and that didn’t happen. So that part was good. They looked at everything. They asked me for the value, and it was 400¥ [$133]. I didn’t know what was going on. I finally asked the interpreter what was happening.

“Because the value of the gifts is so high, I have to take this piece of paper to the university and get the university to verify that these are legitimate gifts.” At least that’s what I understand from him, though I don’t trust his English.

“Will there be any difficulty with this?”

“Well, he’s trusting me to mail him this form with the university seal on it.”

Maybe the box is sitting there waiting for someone to stamp the paper. I don’t know. We just nailed it shut. Then we went to a special shipping post office downtown by the docks. It’s not the main post office, it’s not the university post office, but a special shipping post office. Once we got there, then it was awful. Then it was the mobs of people and no place to work and many forms to fill out and all of that. Now it’s not clear to me whether the box will actually go or whether they’re going to wait for some special notification. I could not get that out of the interpreter. He assured me that I was all done, and they would take care of it—no problem.

On one of my trips to Japan I interviewed an American teaching English in a private university. He showed me the little Buddhist shrine in his apartment, but he talked mostly about the meditation as he had practiced it in and around San Francisco. In Japan he has gone  to the headquarters of the Sotoshu Zen sect, to connect with like-minded people and does some meditation with people in his area.

Links:

Tassajara Zen Mountain Center <http://www.stevenkharper.com/tassajara.html>

San Francisco Zen Center <http://www.sfzc.org>

Staying at Tassajara <http://www.sfzc.org/tassajara/display.asp?catid=4,19&pageid=2643>

Independent Meditation Center Guide <http://www.gosit.org/CenterDetails.asp?vCitySt=Los+Angeles~CA&CenterID=207>

Tracy’s story

My reason for coming to Japan was that I couldn’t grow professionally in the Bay Area.  You can’t get work in one institution full-time, which means you’re commuting between different schools, and that was a recipe for burnout.  I was very grateful to be able to come here. At that time my wife Umiko and I had started seeing each other, and she was going back to Japan, and there seemed to be a convergence happening in our lives, both of us moving in the same direction.

In the Bay Area there are so many traditions, so alive. In fact, Suzuki Rochi, who wrote Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, said, “I want to go to America because I like the attitude, I like the energy.” He was invited as the head of the Sotoshu Mission in San Francisco serving the Japanese-American community. After a couple of years, he was basically serving the role of your standard Buddhist priest, filling ceremonial functions. But more and more people were coming to the temple to sit zazen [Zen Buddhist meditation], and eventually the Japanese community said, “It looks as if they need you more than we do.” He said, “You’re right. This is where this practice is coming to life. It’s with these people because of their motivation and enthusiasm and willingness to try new things, and I like being around people like that, stumbling their way toward finding out what’s happening in the world.”

For me Buddhism is fresh. As it’s presented to us, it doesn’t have a rigid dogma that you have to accept before you can grow or be a part of the religion or the practice. It’s like religion without God. Westerners weren’t born into it, so it doesn’t carry all the baggage. The Buddha said, “Don’t believe anything I say. Just check it out for yourself.” It’s your own experience that verifies it. In the sutras there’s a lot about transcendence and cosmic psychedelia that’s very appealing, but what draws people is the suffering.

A lot of young people come to the Zen center because something in their hearts is calling them or because they find it philosophically appealing. There’s so much convergence with our understanding now of how the universe is constructed. There’s no separation between the observed and the observer and all. But certainly the people I’ve met in their thirties through their seventies all come to Buddhism because nothing else is working. I’ve been through it all, and I want to get to the root cause of suffering, which as I am finding out is also the cause of everyone else’s suffering.

Often there are elements of religion people liked as child: being in church, the smells, the bells, the chanting, the community. Then for whatever reason—getting fed up with the idea of original sin or the hypocrisy they saw around them—they grew out of it. But they still have a lot of affection for people coming together and as a group and expressing gratitude for things as they are.

I practiced meditation full-time for about six years, pretty intensely, and for eight years a little less so. I was actually at the monastery for two years and then working part-time and living in communities or in the city center and working in the communities, in the garden or the farm or in the kitchen.

The city center, the country center, the mountain center were all different. You could even say they were increasing in levels of intensity from the city to the country to the mountains. Some people would say that the mountains are the toughest because that’s where the practice is the most demanding and rigorous, getting up at 3:45 in the morning and having a couple of periods of zazen before breakfast. At the same time you’re doing stuff in the zendo [meditation hall]. It’s freezing cold outside although they’ve got heat in the center now, not like the good old days. Then more zazen all morning long, and then there’s a class and a few hours of work in the afternoon, and then you get to take a bath, and you have an hour and a half of free time. Then you’re back in the zendo and then there’s more of that and then you’re in bed by nine o’clock. You get up six and a half hours later. You’re physically exhausted, your body’s a wreak, you’re out of your element and you don’t have any of your comfort foods.

It’s often pretty grueling. Practice is great. Lunch is great. Whatever’s left over from lunch is all thrown together for the evening meal. Sometimes even the cold salad is thrown in with the sticky rice. It’s baked a couple of hours, and it comes out so that you have to scrape it off the spoon to your bowl. But then technically, there’s no meal at night. What you eat is like a warm stone in the stomach because it’s freezing cold in your cabin. The food keeps your energy up. Sometimes people would find the life very demanding, and certainly at the beginning it is.

There are seven periods of zazen. The meals and classes are in the zendo, and you sit in the same posture except that instead of facing the wall you’re facing outward. The meals are all ritualized, right up until the moment when you bow and get to start shoveling the food into your mouth. It’s all over quick. You agreed to be under their control, but very soon you’re going to be on the controlling side. That’s the beauty of the training: everybody slides through every position, even the abbots are cycled in and out. It’s a kindness machine.  You have to give up. If you fight it you’ll be really miserable. People’s hearts just open up.  They give up because they’re so exhausted. It’s classic brainwashing.

Why do it? Basically, the idea is that, if clinging to the ego is the essential cause of our suffering, if you remove all of your ordinary distractions you’re forced to face the operation of your own ego. You’ve made a commitment that for these next few months you’re really going to try. As Dogen said, “To study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be realized by all things.” Then compassion and wisdom are born. So if you’re forced to sit there, and you’ve made this commitment to yourself to sit there, you can’t see anything else but your mind basically screaming to get the hell out. Why the hell am I doing this? You start to see how your mind works when it’s faced with what’s unpleasant.  At the beginning nobody likes to get up at four o’clock in the morning.

Actually, after a while many people really start to dig it. When you start sitting long enough there’s a shift of consciousness going on, and you’re experiencing various bliss states. That in itself is very appealing and very addictive.  But for most of us it passes after a few days and you’re back in your suffering again.

So why would somebody do that?  As I was saying before, people are very often at a point where they’ve tried everything, and they know deep-down they are hurting, and the only way they’re going to get to the root of that is by facing that suffering. Then they see it’s not the pain that’s so horrible, it’s trying to avoid the pain that’s so horrible. That’s what’s causing the suffering. How you put the blame on everyone else, not taking responsibility for your own actions, not seeing the consequences of your own actions, not being aware of the karma that’s being produced. Also, how you’re living out your habits and you’re living out your parents’ history.

In my case, I had a history of depression—still do, but it’s largely diminished now. Certainly for me there’s a biological component, but there’s also a part that came out of shutting down at an early age to avoid the pain of the disconnect I felt from my parents. When I was doing zazen I could go into foggy-grey zones for days. I’d break out of it now and then.

For a lot of people, the only outlet they have is food, and even that’s regulated. You can go crazy over food because there’s nothing else to get worked up about. You could gripe about the schedule, but you agreed to that. So you complain that you’re not getting enough food or it’s not the right balance. Every fifth day you get sort of a day off.  You can have home-baked cookies if you want. People go berserk, and there’s a gorge fest to compensate for all the deprivation of the previous four days. I saw huge amounts of anger arising within me. We would get this great breakfast of fresh-roasted cashews and buttermilk and bananas. We could actually put the cashews and buttermilk and bananas in the bowl and mix them, which is verboten unless the cook invites you to do that. Sometimes the head cook would forget to invite people to mix. For me it was essential to have it all together. The only thing in your universe that you can control is adding the cashews in order to have a good taste for ten minutes. All the rest of the day you’re doing what somebody else is telling you to do. So I’d be raging inside that I couldn’t mix the food together, and I’d have a resentment, and I’d be forced to deceive everyone by putting  the cashews in my mouth and then putting the bananas and buttermilk in my mouth so I could chew them together.

Also, when the buttermilk and bananas was being served and the pot was coming around the zendo, I could tell from the sound of the metal ladle scraping the bottom that it was running out. So I’d be thinking, “Those idiots in the kitchen, can’t they plan anything correctly? Don’t they know that we’re all in here suffering and this is our only relief?” I’d have massive amounts of rage. Because of my history of repressing strong emotion, which gives rise to the depression, my energy would go into holding those emotions in.  But then I’d practice breathing in every bit of pain that’s in my knees during the rest of the day, breathing in and out that anger. It produced these breakthroughs, these flowerings. Sometimes I’d go into bliss states for days at a time, what they call “the reward body.” It’s kind of innocent, but it’s what happens when you get with the way things are.

You’re angry—don’t—it’s not your parents. Okay, it is your parents, but breathe that.  It’s not the cook. Okay, well, it is the cook.  Breathe that.  The bottom line is your reaction: okay, this is mine. People open up in ways that are incredible.

The abbot used to say, “You know, you guys are only here for a short time or maybe only a few years. When you leave, of course you’re sad. You know you won’t be able to sustain this sensitivity, this openness. It’s a physical impossibility. The heart opens, the heart closes. This is the way it is. In the city it’s going to be really loud, and your heart’s going to close down. I’ve been doing this for thirty years. You have been changed by this experience. You don’t know it necessarily, but deep down, at the cellular level maybe, you’ll remember. Whether you know it or not, our nature is Buddha-nature. You’re planting seeds in others even though you don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t even begin to fathom what you’re doing. It’s incomprehensible.”

That was just one center. The vast majority of people who consider themselves a part of the sangha [community] don’t live there. They have busy lives. They’ve got families and careers.  Or they’re really messed up, with addictions and other problems, but they know this is speaking truth to them, and they want it.

When I was in Tassajara in the mountains, guests would come, people who’d volunteered in the work period, and referring to all fifty of us students who lived there year-round, they’d say, “I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you’re here doing this practice.” Now that I’m out I understand. When people do this practice, it’s a touchstone. It’s a reminder. It’s hope. It’s also that people are healing. I’ve forgotten all the words that used to come easily when talking about these kinds of things. The monks are doing healing work for the planet and for everyone else. They’re the shamans, the medicine men and women whose cultivation of selflessness is having an effect on everything else, helping everything else be a little less attached and stressed out about what’s mine and what’s yours. So even for the people who have no idea what’s going on, who haven’t thought about things other than mowing the lawn or trying to pay bills, I think they’re being helped too. The people who are aware that this is what’s going on and who aren’t actively taking part, like me now, would volunteer during the work periods or come as guests during the guest season. They’d say, “Yes, you’re actually helping me because I know this to be true, what you’re doing. It reminds me of how I want to be in my life—but I’m in the city.”

Dogen, the founder of the Sotoshu Mission, used to say, “In the beginning, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. You go to the mountains, and you practice, and then mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers. You come down from the mountains after your years of practice and return to the city, and then mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers again.”

What he meant was every day in conventional reality we say that this is a table and that’s a plant. Then we practice in the mountains or in our rooms, and we get a sense or maybe even a taste of the rise and fall of everything, all the time and at the same time. That everything is interdependent and nothing is happening without everything else taking part in bringing that event to life. So in that ultimate sense there is no ego, there is no self, there isn’t even clinging. Everything’s flowing. That mountain’s a part of that cloud, and this feeling of anger toward whatever is a part of an event in my life twenty years ago, and then a part of a series of events in my parents’ lives thirty years before that. You can’t point to any one thing as saying this is that without getting an incomplete picture.

Most of us can’t live in ultimate reality all the time with it’s constant sense of awareness. In a conventional world, children have to learn when they put a finger on a hot stove it’s going to burn. There are immediate consequences from their actions and behavior.

The universe doesn’t give rise to my sticking my finger in the flame. I have to take responsibility and ownership for my own feelings. Some people would say that “mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers” is an illusion, it’s separating reality into constituents that ultimately don’t exist as separate constituents. There’s an interdependence of everything and a selflessness of everything. But you have to be able to connect that with the fact that we all live in an everyday world where there are very direct consequences for our behavior.

Hopefully, when we come down from the mountains we bring that sense of interdependence with us to our relationships, to everything. They say that city practice is the toughest practice. That’s where the world is. You see people being thoughtless and cruel and everybody’s wrecking the world and hurting each other. It’s tough. But if you’re privileged enough or lucky enough to be able to do get away to practice, they say you’ve taken on a responsibility. Not in the missionary sense or evangelical sense, but just by living in a way that’s consistent with and comes from the experience of interdependence.  So that others can benefit.  That’s the bodhisattva. That’s the Lotus Sutra.

In the spring of 1980, South Korea was in the hands of the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, who had staged a coup a couple of months after the assassination of the previous military dictator, Park Chung-hee. It was a time of great social and labor upheaval, with disturbances caused by workers in various areas, demonstrations among the coal miners, industrial strikes and student demonstrations against Chun’s illegal seizure of power. Riot police were sent to squash all unrest. Chun disposed of his political rivals, dismissed the National Assembly, closed the universities and declared martial law. Then in May a peaceful demonstration on the campus of Chonnam University was attacked, not by the usual riot police with tear gas and night sticks, but by the Special Forces, paratroopers who had been deprived of sleep and food for three days then fed alcohol. In their mad frenzy they attacked people on and off campus with bayonets and created a bloodbath. The citizens came out in support of the students. Eventually the military was forced to withdraw. The townspeople elected a council which appealed to the U.S. as head of the United Command, but their request to intervene went unanswered. In the meantime, the military had sealed off the town, and they returned with overwhelming force. In the end an estimated two thousand people were massacred, many hauled away and buried rather than returned to their families.

The news about the Kwangju Incident was suppressed or distorted by the press by government order. This was in the most repressive period of Chun Doo-hwan’s rule. Given the reputation that the people of the Cholla Provinces had for being untrustworthy leftists and artists, much of the Korean population accepted the official rumor that Kwangju had made it up. But about five years later a video was put together from pictures the German and Japanese media had taken right after the massacre, and copies of it began circulating. Eventually, the news did come out. (For a fuller account, see “A Priest’s View of Human Rights in Korea” http://caroldussere.com/2010/05/09/a-priests-view-of-human-rights-in-korea. Also, Henry Scott-Stokes and Lee Jae Eui’s Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press Account of Korea’s Tiananmen. (New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2000.)

Young-soo was in middle school when he heard about the event from his classmate. “When I heard about Kwangju, even though I didn’t know much about it, it was a very big thing for me. At first I couldn’t believe it.  Then another classmate said his brother was crippled. Then I knew. I rejected everything from school—every poem, every novel, every bit of history. I started over, and I saw the world with new eyes.”

Fast forward to 1996 when Young-soo was a university student deeply committed to social change. He was arrested after the riot police sealed off buildings on the Yonsei University campus where student organizations had assembled to discuss the reunification of the Korean peninsula and other issues. (For a description of the confrontation, see “5,715 Students Arrested After 9 Day Protest and Police Brutality” <http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/55a/204.html>

Young-soo’s story

Some people thought students protested against the government because they didn’t want to study. That wasn’t true in my case. I really wanted to study, but I was desperately trying to find a way to develop a social movement. There were lots of uncertainties and lots of confusion. I wanted to work for democracy and social welfare and human rights. But every day things were changing.

In 1996, the president of the country was Kim Young-sam. He was a civilian president following several years of military rule, which was symbolic, but he wasn’t exactly democratic. Many of his policies reflected those of the previous regimes, especially Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo. Kim had been an opposition leader, but he wanted to be president, so he joined Roh’s camp in a three-party merger. While many people regarded the government as a democracy, others were concerned about Kim’s so-called reform policies, especially regarding Korean reunification and education. There was also a scandal involving Roh Tae-woo’s huge, illegally obtained slush fund—hundreds of millions collected from Korean businesses—and whether a large amount of that money funded Kim’s election campaign.

In 1996 the students were criticizing the government on three main points: the corruption issue I mentioned, the education issue and the reunification issues. The education concerned a big increase in university tuition and a proposed change in university structure. The university was not open. A student couldn’t enroll in the university and then decide on a major. Acceptance came for a particular major within that department. Both academics and the student hierarchical structure were based on the departmental system. All of a sudden, without any preparation, the Ministry of Education wanted to change it. There were no advantages to be gained, and the professors weren’t prepared for the changes. The students saw it as an attempt to dismantle the student movement by destroying its structure and the close relationships among students of the same department. Then there was the reunification issue. At the beginning of his presidency, Kim Young-sam had allowed a prisoner to return to North Korea, and he took other progressive actions. But then after the death of Kim Il-sung he canceled the North-South summit talks. In 1994 he returned to the old, repressive policies.

In early 1996, the students were demanding an investigation into the corruption issue. Whenever they demonstrated for reunification, they were severely suppressed on the streets by the riot police, which hadn’t happened in 1995. There was a very confrontational atmosphere. In March, when the students at Yonsei University demonstrated, there was a suspicious death which the students attributed to the riot police clubbing someone to death. A series of events in April, May and June caused the confrontations to escalate.

August 15 was National Liberation Day, the anniversary of freedom from Japanese colonial rule. Traditionally, students, dissidents, anti-government groups and democratization movement groups celebrated and held rallies for reunification and other democratization issues. The Korean Federation of University Student Councils [Hanchongnyon, which the authorities considered an “enemy-benefitting organization”] announced the event for August 13 to 15, but the government declared it illegal. There was conflict. Finally, the government shut off all access to Yonsei University. Nevertheless, a total of about 4,000 students got in. The riot police attacked. [With massive use of combat-grade pepper gas and liquefied pepper gas, fire and beatings even after the students surrendered.] Over the following days, the severity of the crackdown did not lessen although many prominent people outside the campus asked the government to let the students go home. The electricity and water were shut off and the radio and the news channels. No food was allowed inside. We almost starved. Some women’s organization tried to donate menstrual pads to the female students, but the police wouldn’t let the pads in. Students had been injured in the struggle with the police, but medical supplies were also not allowed in. We resisted until maybe the twenty-first or the twenty-second, then decided to escape. I was arrested on the way out. About 3,000 or 4,000 students were arrested by the police. A hundred—I don’t know—students spent one or two years in prison. I only got information after I was released. There was a very small human rights investigation. [See above link.] Some of my friends who had already done their military service said they had heard military guns shooting, like inside the building at a barricade. They said it was like another Kwangju. I don’t know exactly how many students were injured.

Before I was moved to the prison I stayed in a jail cell at the police office. Every day for about three weeks I was taken to the Hongjae office of the organization that was once the notorious Korean Central Intelligence Agency. I couldn’t see outside when I brought there. At that time the facilities were similar to when Park Chong-chol was tortured to death there in 1987. [Park Chong-chol, the head of the linguistics department student council at Seoul National University, was detained during an investigation into student activities. Park refused to confess the whereabouts of one of his fellow activists. During the interrogation, authorities used waterboarding techniques which eventually led to his death. Later in 1987 Chun Doo-hwan was overthrown, largely because of student protests.]

A lot of my problem came from being a leader. [In Confucian cultures, those at the top of the hierarchy always bear far more responsibility than those in the middle or at the bottom.] The two interrogating officers tried to terrify me. They forced me to stand and look at the wall for hours. They said, “You know this room and what happened here?” It was a room with a small bed, a urinal, a desk and a chair. They told me all of the student leaders were put in this room and not let out until they told exactly what they did. I was interrogated until midnight or one o’clock in the morning. They wanted names. I’d worked with someone high in the national alliance of student organizations. They kept asking me where he was. Every day they pressured me to write down everything I was thinking, especially anything about North Korea. “What do you think about Kim Jong-il? What do you think about the north Korean system?” They were looking for evidence that I had violated the National Security Law. In that law, especially under article 7, any criticism of the South Korean government was praise for North Korea. For two weeks I was told to write about North Korea. They were never very much concerned about the demonstration at Yonsei or what we were doing there. They wanted to know, “Who picked you for your position in the student organization?” “Oh, I was elected.” “But who picked you to become a candidate?” “What kind of books do you read?” I told them. “Didn’t you read Marxist things?” [Under the National Security Law, this was anti-state material.] They didn’t know much about Marxism or North Korea, but they had been instructed to ask or make me write about it. Funny—one day after the interrogation at Hongjae, a lower ranking official, drove me to the Seodaemun police office for more questioning. He was really eager to be promoted to interrogator, so he thought by getting information out of me he could further his career.

I spent a total of 18 months in prison. For the first six months I was at Yongdungpo, in a very small room, smaller than a twin bed. It was like a coffin. I’m short, but even so when I was lying down I couldn’t stretch out my arms because of the walls on both sides. There was no heat, and there was only a wooden floor with big holes in it. Inmates slept on the floor. Inmates were given two blankets and were allowed to buy a sleeping bag for the winter, which most of the prisoners did—except for the very poor—because otherwise it was hard to bear the cold temperature and wind. I’ve heard that the floors of the new jail are heated some. Wearing a lot of clothes didn’t help, although I didn’t have enough warm clothes. While I was lying there I could feel the rats. I stayed there the whole first winter, with ice on my body, my toes and fingers and ears. There was swelling and lots of blood. The skin got red and cracked and bled. My circulation was bad. I had regrets with regard to my colleagues and the younger students and my family, and that made the physical conditions harder to bear.

The food was bad. It was cooked by the other prisoners with ingredients that weren’t too good, and there wasn’t enough of it. We had three meals a day—a bowl of rice mixed with barley, a soup and two side dishes. Meat was available only three times a week. My family could buy kimchi and sausages and gochujang [hot pepper sauce] for me at the prison, and that made it bearable. Actually, the political prisoners were treated relatively well. My cell was a little bit modernized because I had a squat toilet instead of just a hole. I had a water tap so I could wash my face. In the other rooms water was carried in early in the morning so prisoners could wash themselves and their cutlery in their rooms.

I had thirty minutes exercise from Monday through Friday. For the whole eighteen months I was in a single cell eating alone, sleeping alone, then exercising alone—walking or running. There was no exercise equipment and no grounds outside the building. There was just a very small yard, a kind of garden.

Of the six months in Yongdungpo, the first three were really hectic, since I was called to the prosecutor’s office for investigation and the trial. I was there all day. I was so tired I couldn’t think. When I adjusted, I did yoga with some meditation as a way of overcoming my claustrophobia in that very small space. I needed escape from the darkness. There was a dim light, but it was still dark with no sunshine. I needed to overcome my fear. I felt if I could meditate and do yoga to increase blood circulation, it would also help me mentally. Through the window in the door, the prison guard saw me. He was a very experienced in Tanhak, a kind of Korean style meditation, so from time to time he came to my room and taught me. He told me, “Please lessen your rage.” His point was that if you didn’t deal with your rage, it would damage you.

I was convicted of violating the NSL, the prohibition against assembly and demonstrations, and then violence, which was a kind of collective charge. There were a lot of clashes between the students and the riot police. They had no evidence that I threw rocks or reacted in a violent way. They just lumped all the students together. After my conviction I was moved a remote area. It was the policy of the Justice Department to imprison convicted students as far away as possible from their hometowns or their families.

My second cell was two and a half times the size of the previous one. It was a little bit larger because the prison authorities were careful of all political prisoners, who were known to object to the conditions of their imprisonment. It was a kind of a tradition. They knew the political prisoners wouldn’t hesitate to go on a hunger strike or something like that. I think during the first six months I was allowed to see my family once a week for ten minutes. Later it was once a month.

In prison I was felt really disappointed and I had a sense of loss. At first I was always thinking about how to escape. But after the final conviction I needed to do something. I couldn’t think of anything, so I read books and other things. Six months before my release I read an article in the  monthly magazine Mal, which was very progressive and very critical of the government and U.S. interference. While staying in the U.S., the reporter wrote about why the U.S. empire had not collapsed and why it continued to prosper. At the end he asked what our young generation should do to prepare for the future. One of the things was to improve their English in order to work with other progressive groups and other countries on other continents. At that time my language skills were poor. Sometimes the prison guard had asked me to translate something about prison procedure for an inmate, like the English teacher who wrecked a car when he was driving drunk. I couldn’t do it very well, even something like “tomorrow we have to get up and get on the bus at 9:00.” The guard’s English was actually better than mine. I’d also been undecided about whether to finish my degree in engineering. At that time an increasing number of people were associated with human rights groups, but they were humanitarian rather than part of a social movement. After reading the article, I decided I wanted to be a bridge across borders. I felt if I could resolve the language problem maybe I could make a contribution. So I had a very clear objective.

That period is still a part of my daily life. From time to time I have dreams of being caught and thrown into prison. I don’t know whether or not it was a necessary channel to become the person I am now.

http://www.hrsolidarity.net/mainfile.php/1997vol07no06/2088

The speaker is a lawyer, a twenty-year resident of Japan and a good friend of mine.  The interview took place in 2011.

Cathy’s story

I first came to Japan in 1982 to live with the family of my first husband, a Japanese photographer. We’d met in France when I was twenty-two years old. I’d wanted to get married because I couldn’t figure out what else to do with my life. So at twenty-three I came to Japan, as the foreign fiancée of the eldest son in a conventional Japanese family, and lived with his extended family for six months, got married and continued living with his entire extended family. At that time the family consisted of his “grandmother,” his grandmother’s sister, his two younger sisters and his father and stepmother Kayoko, who came on weekends. After several years, one of his sisters got married, and her husband moved in, and they had two kids, so it really was quite an extended family.

My life was divided into two completely separate and distinct worlds. My first job in Japan was teaching English in a chain of English-language schools. Like a lot of foreigners, I taught English at multiple locations throughout the Kansai area in Western Japan, usually in the afternoon and evenings, and studied Japanese at a YMCA in the mornings. I quite liked this school since the teachers came from all over the world. The school I worked for was somewhat unusual in that it didn’t hire only blond, blue-eyed Americans. There were a lot of Asian teachers as well, which is unusual. We’d go out drinking in and to discos all the time (this was in the 80s). I felt like a tourist.

After this, I’d go home, where I’d try to be a typical Japanese daughter-in-law, wearing a kimono at home, doing Japanese cooking, even doing family ancestor worship ceremonies. This particular ceremony involved putting some rice in what looks like a small china teacup on the family Buddhist altar. You also put out sake an there are certain flowers that you change every two or three days. There are certain things that you dust, and there are certain things that you don’t move.

For me this part of my life in Japan was like acting. I wanted to experience the culture, and frankly I thought the only way to be accepted by a Japanese family was to be exactly like them. In my first few months in Japan, I learned from personal experience the maxim that the “nail that sticks out will be pounded down.” Conformity is highly prized. Individuality and self-expression is suspect and can be punishable by ridicule and isolation. At twenty-three I had no idea who I was, so I imitated what I saw and allowed the culture to define me.

With this kind of schizophrenic lifestyle, I’m glad I had a sense of humor because I really needed it. I was pretty independent, and I remember such things as going to the supermarket and buying what looked like organic peanut butter, taking it home, spreading it on bread, putting it in my mouth and discovering that—oh my God—it was miso. I got into so much trouble with my family. I’d decide to clean the house when they were gone during the day as a kind gesture, and I’d go out and buy cleaning products based on the size of the bottle and the color, assuming they would be the same as in the U.S. So I ended up using toilet cleaner to wash the dishes.

Yoshi and I were married for five years. After a couple of years of this Japanese-type existence with his whole extended family, I decided that we should move out. I thought married couples should live by themselves instead of with a whole boatload of relatives. I wanted out of this small town in which we were then living where I was the only foreigner. I thought that living in the either Kyoto or Kobe would work, since both of us would be within commuting distance of our jobs. He said no, he couldn’t do that. At the time we were living in a fourteen-room house, which is huge in Japan, left to Yoshi by his grandmother. He said he couldn’t leave his sister living there on her own. Six weeks after she met me, his grandmother had died from a heart attack which I’m sure it was brought on by her grandson’s marrying a big-breasted foreigner. She’d told everyone he’d only marry me over her dead body, and that was what happened. Yoshi’s grandmother left him this fourteen-room house, which is huge in Japan, and he couldn’t leave his sister living there on her own. At the time his sister was twenty-four, and I thought why the hell not? Then she got married, and her husband moved in, and they had two kids. So for a while there were two couples living there with two kids. Our marriage turned platonic, and in a way it felt like being married to my brother.

Looking back, there are a lot of things I really liked about his family. When I first got there, his parents were still really young and fun. They lived in Osaka and came home to this house on weekends. We spent a lot of time visiting temples all over the country. My mother-in-law was a Japanese kimono teacher who also taught Japanese tea ceremony and that sort of thing. I learned a lot from her about Japanese culture.

A family tree

My first husband’s family was quite unusual from an American perspective, but perhaps not terribly unusual for Japan at that time. When I learned about the complicated relationship of Yoshi’s family, it seemed like something from a Japanese novel. Yoshi’s father came from a poor but honest, hard-working farming family. Yoshi’s adoptive grandfather had only one child, a daughter, and they needed a son to marry into the family in order to carry on the family name. (In fact, Yoshi’s mother herself was not the birth daughter of Yoshi’s “grandfather” and “grandmother,” but was herself adopted. She was the result of a liaison between Yoshi’s “grandfather’s brother and his geisha mistress). So they went out scouring the villages for an eligible man to marry their daughter. They found Yoshi’s birth father—we always called him “Frank”—who at the time was seventeen or eighteen. He moved from his natural birth parents’ home to Yoshi’s grandparents’ home and was legally adopted as their son. He lived with them for two years before marrying their daughter. So for a couple of years, on paper, Frank and Yoshi’s birth mother were brother and sister. They got married, and he then legally became the son by adoption and was registered as such on the family register. This type of adoption of a son is a very common practice in Japan in families without sons. Yoshi’s grandfather, who was a wealthy banker, put Frank through college. Frank and Sumi had three kids, Yoshi and his two sisters. So the people Yoshi called his grandmother and grandfather were actually by blood his great-uncle and great-aunt.

Sumi had had a troubled childhood as the offspring of a long-term liaison between the brother of the man Yoshi called grandfather and a geisha mistress from Kyoto. This long-term liaison produced five children. To me what was interesting was that every time the mistress got pregnant, she would always go to her lover’s wife’s house to give birth, which was quite common in the Japan of the 1920s or 1930s. According to Japanese law, the lawful wife had the right to keep the children or have them adopted out. Of the five children, one was kept as a male heir and the other four were given to relatives for adoption. Yoshi’s mother was one of a set of identical twins who were split at birth and adopted by different relatives. Some of the relatives called Sumi flighty, and others called her slutty. After she married Frank and had three kids, she started running around and disappearing for long periods of time. Finally, when Yoshi was fourteen she disappeared altogether.

Yoshi’s father married a wonderful woman named Kayoko, my first mother-in-law. It turned out that Frank and Kayoko had also been having a long-term affair as well. What was amazing to me was that, by the time I got there, there was a grandmother who wasn’t really the grandmother and a father who was still legally the son of the grandmother whose adopted daughter he had divorced. Frank and Kayoko came on weekends. When the grandmother was ill and dying, it was Kayoko who came to take care of the grandmother, do the laundry, the shopping, the cooking, and all kinds of things like that, even though she was no blood relation.

This told me a lot about how Japanese families were constructed. It’s a kind of social fiction in a sense. Once you’re in a role it doesn’t matter what the reality is. Your role gives you your function, and there’s no way out of it. That’s really Japanese. I would ask Yoshi, “Have you ever met your natural grandmother, the geisha?” “Yeah, once.” “Weren’t you curious? Didn’t want to know more about her?” “No, why?” He thought it would be disloyal to the grandmother who had raised him.

I think the unusual family history made Yoshi’s parents really open because they themselves had been screwed by Japanese society. For example, some of the relatives said that when the grandfather was out scouring local villages for an heir, he already knew that his daughter had problems, but he didn’t divulge this to Frank.

In November, 1983, when I arrived in Japan, Yoshi met me at the airport and drove home to his house. It was Saturday, eight o’clock at night. His grandmother was already asleep. She just didn’t want to meet me. But Kayoko was there and Yoshi’s sisters and the great-aunt, who was wonderful, a real character. Frank worked for an architectural firm, and he was still at the office, but he called, and said to me in English, “Cathy, welcome to Japan and our family. Everybody crazy!” He came the next day bearing all kinds of gifts, including Japanese language tapes. His children weren’t fond of him because he had been absent so much during their childhood, but I think he saw me as a way to fill a hole in his soul.

We all lived in that big house. Through my English teaching we collected a whole menagerie of foreigners who used to come over for parties. Frank really loved that. One wing of the house had a huge room the size of a ballroom, but it was Japanese-style with tatami mats on the floor. That’s where we had all the parties. We had a stereo there, and Frank was really into disco dancing with the foreigners. Everybody was young, and it was a fun time.

Since the town was so small, I got to know the neighbors pretty well. I was the only foreigner for miles around. People often asked me to help their kids with English homework or to practice English conversation. I was never paid for any of it, but it gave me the chance to visit a lot of Japanese homes and see different types of lifestyles. One thing that was really fascinating about the town was that it was still divided into communities of ten homes, which was a system set up by the Japanese secret police in the 1930s as a way of group control—group spying, that sort of thing. In the 1980s, if somebody in one of the ten families died, all of the women would go to the house and manage the funeral, which would be held at home and last five days, from the wake to the Buddhist interment. So I got to be a part of that bunch of women. It was really amazing. They taught me how to make tofu and grow rice. That sort of thing was what made living in Japan an adventure.

I liked many things about Japan but I didn’t like my living situation enough to stay. I was getting tired of what I saw as a purposeless existence. I wasn’t using my mind enough teaching English [which can involve a lot of rote repetition and mind-numbingly simple sentences]. I got tired of playing a role. I didn’t know where Japan started and I stopped. I didn’t know how to tell my husband that the marriage wasn’t working out for me. .

I told Yoshi, “I want to go to Boston for a year, and then I’ll come back to Japan.” I thought of it as a permanent separation, but I didn’t say that. He decided he was going to come too. I taught in an ESL program t a U.S. University for a year, and I really liked that. Yoshi was in an English program at Harvard. We went through his inheritance from his grandmother. We bought a car and did a lot of traveling.

By that time I wanted out of the marriage, but I didn’t know how to do it. I wanted to go to law school, but I knew that enhanced language skills would be a plus, so I returned to Japan and went into a full-time Japanese language program from 9a.m. to 2 p.m. every day. I also needed to save money for law school so—this was in Osaka—I would rush out of the Japanese language school at one-thirty and start teaching English at two. I taught from two to nine at night, Monday thru Friday and all day on Saturday. I studied until midnight. I would study on the trains. I’ve always been like that. Even starting from age fourteen, I always combined working multiple jobs with studying.

I applied to U.S. laws school from Japan. Basically I chose the University of Denver because my undergraduate roommate was from there, and I’d visited, and it seemed familiar. In my early thirties I noticed that, although many people thought I was adventurous because I’d lived overseas and I’d moved a lot, every time I moved or changed jobs I went where I already knew someone. So I went to Denver, and Yoshi came with me. He found a job working for a real estate agency that put out magazines with pictures of the housing. He didn’t like that kind of photography, but he did it, and he also worked as a chef in a Japanese restaurant. I worked in the library, and I was a hostess at a Japanese restaurant on weekends.

Halfway through my first year of law school, I had a crisis of confidence and indecisions and wasn’t sure whether I wanted to continue either in the marriage or at law school. So I took a year off from law school. I found a job doing ESL in Chinatown that first summer, and then I found a job working for a really cool American lawyer who had worked in Hawaii and who had a Japanese speculator-billionaire as a client interested in investing in wine country properties and wineries. The lawyer needed somebody with Japanese language skills.

After about nine months, Yoshi and I decided to get divorced in Japan for various reasons, and we did. Then I went back to the States as a transfer student to a different law school—the Denver school had felt like a commuter school. I thought, “Okay, now I’m really done with Japan this time. I’m divorced, and I’ve said my goodbyes to friends and family. I’m going to a new school, and this is a new life.” Then the first week at school I met the man who became my second Japanese husband, which changed the whole course of my life, although I didn’t know it at the time.

Donna Miscolta

I first met Donna Miscolta in July 2009, when we were both in Chris Abani’s workshop at the Centrum Writers Conference at Port Townsend, Washington. I was impressed with her submission, a short story called “The Last Canasta,” which was later revised and then appeared in the Spring, 2010 issue of The Connecticut Review. Through the Squaw Valley Community of Writers alumni group, I learned of the publication of her first novel, When the de la Cruz Family Danced, which deals with the immigration from the Philippines. I read the novel and immediately loved the style and the interaction of the characters.

Dance is the dominant metaphor, and great attention is paid to nonverbal and verbal communication as a part of that dance. The narrative shifts with ease from the Philippines to Southern California and from 1971 to 1990 and to flashbacks of World War II. The point-of-view is always third-person limited, that is, restricted to the perspective of one person, but it shifts from one person to another. All shifts in location, time and perspective are clearly marked. At the beginning of the novel, the reader sees the world through the eyes of the two main characters, Johnny and Winston. After the other family members have been properly introduced to the reader, we see Johnny and Winston through their eyes as well. This gives the characters and their actions a rounded, three-dimensional quality because they are observed from several different angles.

When the de la Cruz Family Danced was released on June 28, 2011 by Signal8Press. Donna and I talked in December, 2011.

Link: Donna Miscolta’s blog http://donnamiscolta.com/notes/includes a link to the video trailer, a synopsis and reviewers’ praise. The trailer is also available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sEOr2WaBbR0#!>

Hopefully, Filipino book dealers can be persuaded to carry this lovely novel, In the meantime a look inside the cover can be found at Amazon, which offers both the paperback and the Kindle versions. http://www.amazon.com/When-Family-Danced-Donna-Miscolta/dp/9881989590/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325239806&sr=8-1#reader_B0055X0CEQ.

Donna’s story

The genesis of When the de la Cruz Family Danced was a class assignment: write the first chapter of your novel. I hadn’t anticipated writing a novel. After all, we were beginning students.I think the assignment was meant to make us consider the differences between short stories and novels and think about which story ideas were big enough to become novels. I started the assignment while waiting for a flight from Seattle to San Diego for my father’s funeral. I thought about my father’s life, about how little I really knew about him. I wondered what kinds of dreams he’d had and whether he felt he had achieved them. I thought about what it was like for someone to leave his home country to start a new life. What things got lost along the way? What things were sacrificed? Though the book isn’t about my father, I got the idea for it by thinking about him and the circumstances that led him to leave the Philippines. From there, I created the character Johnny de la Cruz and imagined his life.

Johnny’s aloofness and his reticence to touch–a simple hand on the shoulder, a playful slap on the back, an impromptu hug–comes, I think, from his sense of loss, of leaving something behind or perhaps never having it in the first place. For instance, the relationship he has with his daughters suffers because he was absent, away at sea in the U.S. Navy, during the early years of their childhood. He doesn’t know how to relate to his daughters because he feels removed from their experiences and emotions. Then there’s also the cultural preference for sons. Johnny think she might have had more of a connection to a son, but the appearance of young Winston Piña in his life challenges that belief. Leaving the Philippines as a young man and coming to a new country, making the transition from one culture to another, causes a gap in Johnny’s psyche, his soul. That gap can be hard to close, particularly for someone as introverted as Johnny.

In the novel, dancing is how people connect to one another. Dancing is important in many cultures, including Filipino culture. But Johnny doesn’t dance–something I can relate to in my own life. I’ve taken some dance lessons, and I’m a passable partner, but I don’t really have the confidence to go beyond basic steps. I love to watch people dance, which is why I had so much fun making a book trailer. Dancing is such a beautiful way to connect with music and with one another, and when you’re not good at it, I think you do have a sense of missing out.

You noted, Carol, in our email exchange that Filipinos tend to be warm and demonstrative. That’s absolutely true. But it’s not universal. It wasn’t my experience growing up in my particular Filipino (and Mexican on my mother’s side) household. I don’t know whether my father’s personality just didn’t fit this cultural pattern or whether something in his experience affected how he behaved in his interpersonal relationships. The story I gleaned was that my father’s rebellious adolescence coincided with World War II and the Japanese occupation of the islands, during which my father engaged in some guerrilla activities. Post-war, my father’s rebellion hadn’t subsided and my grandfather dealt with that situation by helping to engineer my father’s exit from the islands. My understanding is that there was some manipulation of my father’s birth year on the enlistment papers for the U.S. Navy. So my father left his home in Las Piñas because my grandfather wanted his son to have some direction in his life, not to mention opportunities that could accrue from eventual U.S. citizenship. It seems that my father left the Philippines not necessarily of his own accord. And I don’t think he ever liked the Navy. I think he just made the best of the situation and put everything behind him—the Philippines, his language, his customs—and made a concerted effort to become an American and to adopt American behaviors.

In our Southern California neighborhood there were quite a few Filipino families. My father rarely spoke Tagalog, preferring to speak English with the neighbors. I think it was also important to him to sound like an American. You could barely detect his Tagalog accent. He wanted us to be an American family. We ate American food, though on occasion he did cook pancit for us. The friends I hung out within high school were from households where both parents were Filipino. They knew the language, the food and the culture. So I did experience this sense of not quite fitting in—of being more of an observer of Filipino-American culture. Quiet and shy, I spent a lot of time observing inside and outside my family, comparing how we interacted with how other families communicated, both verbally and non-verbally. I became practiced at the “unsaid,” which I think plays a big part in my writing.

My father never shared much information about himself. When I was growing up, it never occurred to me to ask my father about his past. He never volunteered information, so it was easy to believe there was nothing to tell. Of course, anyone who lived in the Philippines during the war had some experience it. In the novel, there’s a flashback to the war when the teenage Johnny encounters a Japanese soldier in the rice field. That scene was based on an event my father shared when asked by my husband about his role in the war. It was really a revelation to me–my father as a teenager in real peril. You don’t imagine your parents being in such situations. That bit of information my father shared made me realize that there was so much about him that I didn’t know—and that I’ll never know.

Writing this book might have been an attempt to connect in some way with the Philippines and with my father. My knowledge of the Philippines has come through books, movies, photographs, articles, and talking to people about their experiences there. I felt very relieved that the two Filipino-American writers who read my book and wrote blurbs for it seemed to think that my scenes set in the Philippines felt authentic.

I think you can say that my fiction is a way of connecting with my roots. I have a short story collection that I’m hoping to have published. Three of the stories have been published in literary journals– “Rosa in America” in New Millennium Writings, “Strong Girls” in Calyx, and “The Last Canasta” in Connecticut Review.  The collection has three sections. The first is about four women—one named Lupita—who emigrate from Mexico. The next two sections are about Lupita’s children and grandchildren.  For these stories, I mined my family for a lot of material—things I observed or heard. I sort of appropriated them and made them my own. Again, the themes center on how one goes about making a life in a new country, how things are lost, how belonging can be an elusive thing and how the hopes of immigrants are often invested in subsequent generations.

My grandparents and parents did not go to college, but my circumstances were different. I have an undergraduate degree in zoology, and I have master’s degrees in education and public administration. I didn’t have much of a background in literature or writing, but I’ve been a lifelong reader, which served me when I decided at the age of thirty-nine that I wanted to be a writer. I think I’d always wanted to be a writer. I just never allowed myself to believe I could be. Maybe it was from reading so many books by long-dead authors. When I was in junior high school, I read a lot of William Faulkner and in high school it was Thomas Hardy and Henry James. After college I had my D.H. Lawrence phase. But I also had my Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen phases. Eventually I came around to writers like Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Gish Jen, writers of color who made it easier for me to believe that I could become a writer.

I do think those writers I read early on influenced me in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways. In 1998, when I was at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers conference, I had a one-on-one consultation with DeWitt Henry. He remarked on the stream-of-consciousness quality in my story and asked me if I’d read much Virginia Woolf. I wondered if he was suggesting that I was imitating her. I wasn’t aware of consciously having a style. I think at some level, we’re influenced by everyone we read. Like Henry James with his long, long sentences and pages of description. I’m sure I was influenced by him to some extent.

When I first started writing, all I did was exposition. Writing exposition is easy for me. It took me a while to really figure out story. I’ve attended a lot of writer’s conferences, I’ve taken classes, I’ve read how-to books, but still it took a lot of practice to figure out how to write the story. I wrote a complete draft of this first novel and was fortunate enough to have had an editor look at it and give me feedback. She was encouraging, but in the end, I saw that the novel wasn’t really working, so I tossed out all but thirty pages and started over.

The first chapter was published in an online journal called Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. That led to the book being published by Signal 8 Press, a new press based in Hong Kong. The press released four books last year, most recently a short story collection by Xu Xi called Access. Also released was a story collection by Bay Area writer Philip Huang and a non-fiction book by Chris Tharp on his experiences living and traveling in South Korea.

With my story collection completed, I’m working on a new novel. I came relatively late to writing, not starting until I was nearly forty. I’m fifty-eight now, and I have a sense of urgency about getting work done and out into the world. That’s what we want to do when we write something. We want to share it.

Reader feedback:

Excellent!  I liked it very much; felt like I was right there, listening to her talk.