October 30, 2009

Letter 8: Goodbyes and Hellos

I knew from the start that this would be the trip of a lifetime, and for me that’s saying a lot.  I made my first trans-Atlantic flight at 6 years of age.  Actually, it was plural – you didn’t fly non-stop back in 1956, especially on military transport planes.  We stopped in Greenland and again in Shannon, Ireland to get from New Jersey to Frankfurt.  We also made those same stops when returning in 1958, when I experienced a day that never seemed to end because the plane was traveling with the sun the entire trip (the planes were slower then). 

 Times have changed.  Back then, all I knew about China was that the children there were starving, and the only way to save them was to finish every bite of my oatmeal.  I don’t think my mother meant it that way (‘Finish your breakfast, children are starving in China!’ was probably meant to be a positive statement about how fortunate I was to have a good hot breakfast to eat each morning).  Without knowing the reality for those children back in the ‘50s, my reality during my trip to China was that the Chinese believe in the healing power of food, and they tried very hard to keep me healthy.  I have gained 10 pounds, and I can remember most of the reasons.  Duck, fish, chicken, beef, lamb (who said the Chinese don’t eat a lot of meat?).  Dumplings of all kinds; steamed, fried and boiled – for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  In Fuzhou, I was greeted with an entire banquet of things that I didn’t even know existed, much less that they were caught and eaten. 

The only item that I just could not get excited about was duck feet.  They taste just like they sound; boiled duck’s feet, with sauce. An Asian version of snails (oops – escargot!). The Chinese really do believe that food heals, so why not eat the nutritious duck foot cartilage with sauce, rather than just dry them and grind them up and press them into pills?  Yet it’s silly to complain about one single dish out of hundreds of delicious, steaming (the Chinese don’t eat a lot of cold foods), fragrant delights.

If you think that I am going on too long about the food, it’s because at home I eat 1 meal and snack the rest of the time.  So having a sit-down banquet 3 times a day left me with the impression that all we did on this trip was eat.  Yet these were the best times, because there the table was always full of people.  Deans, professors, graduate and undergraduate students (often serving as translators, staff from the universities, and often the limousine driver who drove us around for several hours a day. Faculty members often invited their family, which David explained was a great compliment.

This was David’s 5th trip since 2001, and he was my fairy godfather the entire trip.  Besides putting out the invitation in the first place and allowing me to participate, he coached me for hours on presentation materials, words and phrasing that the Chinese would understand. Several times a day he would whisper hints about etiquette and manners, and thankfully would take the lead on proper guest behavior so that I could copy him and look really, really cool.

He had learned that the Chinese consider it a great honor to be invited to one’s home, even if this is not a practical invitation.  He would find just the right moment to invite our host and other prominent guests to come to Philadelphia, and teased in private about what would happen everyone took him up on his offer and he would have a house overflowing with guests!  Which would actually be lovely, and once or twice over the years he had entertained some distinguished scholars who were visiting the East Coast.  Yet it did feel odd to be inviting people to one’s home day after day after day!

From the start, this trip was different for him and Joan as well.  I had arrived a few days early, so that I could do some of the sightseeing stuff that they didn’t need to do (Great Wall, Forbidden City, etc.).  On the day they arrived, we were invited to a banquet by some dear friends who had lived in Philadelphia.  This will be a short version, because again words cannot describe the event.  We went to what had been the housing compound of a member of the royal family, which had been converted into a restaurant. Each bungalow was now a private banquet room, and waiters and waitresses brought dishes from the main kitchen through a series of intimate formal gardens lit with lanterns and featuring the sounds of fountains and ponds.  I’ve never experienced such a sense of opulence and sheer wealth.  David said, ‘It won’t be like this all the time’.  These words became a joke between the three of us, because it kept being that spectacular, that magnificent, and that remarkably different a trip than he and Joan had ever experienced.  So ‘it won’t be like this all the time’ will have to be words I remember for the next trip. 

This time, it may have felt like David’s ship had come in.  With the publication of The Undefended Self plus his two books (Conscious Capitalism and Conscious Globalism), his advocacy of Socially Responsible Business as a philosophy which was economically cost-effective and ecologically sound, plus exquisite attention to the names and personal details of his hosts, he had established himself as a friend. The Chinese revere friends, and they are intensely loyal and supportive of them.  I was witnessing the bounty of a decade of dedicated effort.  It was a privilege to be present and to be able to contribute.

The other contributor to this victory was Dr. Zhihe Wang, who has also put in a decade of effort to create not paths, but expressways to transport Cultural Ambassadors to his country.  In his book Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell uses the word Maven to describe a person who is responsible for creating connections between thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands of people. Zhihe is a Maven.  Everyone he knows becomes a resource for everyone else he knows, and he is incredibly good at weaving together interests, needs, goals and dreams so that information travels at fiber-optic speeds and connects productively.  Another of our jokes was that everyone in China knew Zhihe, or at very least he knew about them! 

Zhihe’s is a renaissance man: a Ph.D.,  scholar in Whitehead philosophy (which is huge in China), professor at Claremont University, author of several books and director of the non-profit institute which sponsored our trip through university contacts.  (While we paid air fares and a base management fee, the universities covered domestic transport within China plus all meals and lodging – and all the sightseeing we could squeeze in between presentations). His email is claremontwang@yahoo.com, and if you have expertise that the Chinese might find of interest he would love to talk to you about joining one of his Cultural Ambassador tours.

When I was an employee, I worked for my boss.  When I was the boss, I worked for my employees.  As a factory owner, I also worked for my customers and my suppliers.  As a Helper, I work for my clients and the world-wide spiritual community.  In China, I focused upon working for David and Zhihe, because their goals were so well integrated into China’s spiritual and temporal needs.  And China’s success will contribute to success for the entire planet. 

I’ve never had better bosses.

On October 30th, I left China.  It felt as if I had been there all of my life. Because it was so outrageously new and different from anything I had experienced (and I have lived in multiple locations on 3 different continents) perhaps I just went into freefall, and allowed myself to be completely immersed.  Doing partial melt-down to fit into new situations is a way of life for me. I learned to meld into the culture and climate of wherever I went, because as a military family we moved so often.  It was less painful if I felt that I belonged and fit in.  Yet like all defenses, I didn’t realize the downside – that in compensating for never having a permanent home (by making every new place my home), I never developed the ability to define what kind of home I wanted.  I eventually lost any sense of who I was, and awoke at 42 to find myself living other people’s ideas about what life should be like.  It took a few decades to find my own ground.  So it was extremely pleasurable to use old, well developed talents from a new place of maturity, to lose myself utterly and yet never feel lost.

I arrived in Japan late that afternoon, and practically went into shock.  There was yet another world to explore, another looking glass to go behind, another dimension of humanity that I had never experienced before.  I am falling behind in these letters, because I have already completed the 9 days and 3 workshops and a side trip to Kyoto and leave today for home.  So I will write again after jet-lag subsides about Japan.

Regards, Jan