Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China

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by Tony Brasunas




  Double Happiness

  Praise for Double Happiness

  “The rare adventure memoir with an intelligent and soulful heart. It grabbed me right away and never let me go.”

  —Brad Newsham, Author of All the Right Places

  “A poetic work that’s not just a travelogue or memoir, but also a bold statement on culture, politics, and the challenges facing an emerging generation in an uncertain world. Amid the scenic tapestry of a far-off land, Brasunas’s penetrating lens reveals the common threads of our shared humanity and the deep growing-up that faces us all… This is a brilliant new writer taking us on an unforgettable journey.”

  —Anodea Judith, Author of Waking the Global Heart

  “For armchair travelers and would-be explorers alike, this is a heartfelt and meticulously observed journey of discovery.”

  —Jason Elliot, Author of An Unexpected Light

  “This tale of innocence will touch all readers interested in setting forth, whether as young students or as armchair geographers. Brasunas's enthusiasm pulses through every chapter.”

  —Edie Meidav, Author of Lola, California

  To see this map in greater detail, visit

  www.DoubleHappy.be/china-map

  Double Happiness

  One Man’s Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder

  on the Long Roads of China

  Tony Brasunas

  Torchpost Creative

  DOUBLE HAPPINESS

  is a publication of

  TORCHPOST CREATIVE

  1612 Bay Street

  Alameda CA 94501

  First Torchpost Creative edition 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Tony Brasunas

  Trade paper: ISBN 978-0-9911662-4-4

  Casebound: ISBN 978-0-9911662-9-9

  E-book: ISBN 978-0-9911662-1-3

  www.Torchpost.com

  www.DoubleHappy.be

  The right of Tony Brasunas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Exception is made only in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Excerpts from NARCISSUS AND GOLDMUND by Hermann Hesse, Montagnola. Copyright © 1930, 1957 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpt from LITTLE GIDDING by T.S. Eliot. © 1922 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, LLC. Excerpts from LONELY PLANET reproduced with permission from China 7 © 2000 Lonely Planet. Excerpt from DANCING NANCIES, words and music by David J. Matthews. © 1994 Colden Grey, Ltd. (ASCAP). International Copyright Secured. Reprinted by permission of Cherry Lane Music Company. Excerpt from TAKE ME HOME, COUNTRY ROADS, words and music by John Denver, Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert. © 1971 (Renewed) BMG Ruby Songs, Anna Kate Deutschendorf, Zachary Deutschendorf, BMG Rights Management (Ireland) Ltd., and Jesse Belle Denver in the U.S. All Rights for BMG Ruby Songs, Anna Kate Deutschendorf, and Zachary Deutschendorf administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. All Rights for BMG Rights Management (Ireland) Ltd. administered by Chrysalis One Music. All Rights for Jesse Belle Denver administered by WB Music Corp. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation and Alfred Publishing. Excerpt from LEAVING ON A JET PLANE, words and music by John Denver. © 1967 (Renewed) BMG Rights Management (Ireland) Ltd. and Cherry Lane Music Company (ASCAP). All Rights for BMG Rights Management (Ireland) Ltd. administered by Chrysalis One Music (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation and Alfred Publishing. Excerpt from TEARS IN HEAVEN, words and music by Eric Clapton and Will Jennings. © 1992 by E.C. Music Ltd. and Blue Sky Rider Songs. All Rights for Blue Sky Rider Songs administered by Irving Music, Inc. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  BOOK DESIGN BY JOEL FRIEDLANDER

  EBOOK BY DAVID KUDLER, STILLPOINT DIGITAL PRESS

  Cover photos courtesy of Damian Spieckerman and Jordan May.

  To my mother, Lynne,

  for her optimism, her curiosity,

  and her dedication to growth throughout life.

  不上高山不顯平地

  If you do not climb the mountain,

  You will not see the plain.

  —Chinese Proverb

  Contents

  Prologue

  Heart of an Empire

  All the Myths Are True

  An Old Summer Palace

  Uplift the Nation

  One Chinese Home

  A Grand Total of Ten English Words

  The Glorious Return to the Motherland

  The Chinese Word for Carrot

  The Atom Bomb

  Celebrity Gwailo

  Barbarians at the Gate

  Playing Chicken and Losing

  A Child’s Drawing of the End of the Earth

  Six-String Lăoshī

  A Journey to Centuries Past

  The Scent of the Winter Plum Blossom

  Into the Belly

  The New Light Party

  The Faces of the Emperor’s Soldier

  Yī Lù Shūn Fēng

  A Victory in the Cradle of Civilization

  A Bottle that Pours Any Beverage You Imagine

  The Sun Is Redder in the West

  Friends in Poetry

  The Silk Road

  Walking to Heaven

  The Brief Tibetan Sunshine

  A Mandala’s Permanence

  Storms, Death, and Six Dollars

  The First Laughter

  The Waters of Jiuzhaigou

  White Rabbit, Black Rabbit

  Four Sides to Every Waterfall

  Tiger Leaping Gorge

  A Tiger and a Butterfly

  Homecomings

  South of the Clouds

  Epilogue

  A Glossary of Chinese Terms

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  “Do you want to tickle the dragon?” My father was calling up to me. I was curled near the ceiling in a carpeted cubby he had built as a loft space. Lying on my belly like a snake, I sorted golden rivets into piles: long, yellow brass ones; shorter, reddish copper ones; dull, gray steel ones. It was fun and important work, but I could never resist tickling the dragon.

  I climbed down the ladder and stepped onto the sooty concrete floor. The smell of coal hung in the air around my father’s brick forge. I grabbed hold of the wooden peg on the giant black wheel and pulled it down. The wheel began to turn. Because I wasn’t tall enough, I let the wheel spin the peg back up, and I caught it again as it came down, pulling again so the wheel began to turn faster. Heat radiated in intensifying waves from the hole in the center of the forge, and embers of hot orange and gold flew from the hole. The dragon was breathing!

  “That’s it,” said my father. “Good. He’s awake.” In iron tongs he clutched a long piece of black steel that maybe, finally, he would make into a sword instead of a horseshoe, triangle, or fancy gate.

  But I had to watch from above. He sent me back up to the loft, and I let my head hang over the edge so that I could watch as my father held the steel in the dragon’s breath. The fierce heat now exhaled constantly and turned the steel purple, red, orange, and finally a bright gold
en white. The flames held my gaze. Is there really a dragon down there, under the concrete floor? I wondered. Does it actually eat the coal we give it every morning?

  He pinched the white-hot steel with the tongs, set it on the anvil, and with a heavy iron hammer, he struck the glowing metal, once, twice, three times, and sparks flew: Long, hairy fragments of orange shot everywhere in an inverted waterfall of light.

  This was the end of the 1970s, on a commune in West Virginia. Twelve years earlier, before becoming a blacksmith, my father had been one of the first long-haired hippies at MIT in Boston. He swore he would never wear a tie, and he leapt into the civil rights and peace movements that were sweeping through the country like wildfire.

  Soon he changed course and elected a more personal path to fixing the world. With the woman who would become my mother, he traveled to England and lived for a year in a spiritual community west of Oxford. They learned meditation techniques from the community’s leader, John G. Bennett, a wise and well-traveled man. Bennett determined that the time had come to start a community in the United States, and an estate called Claymont, in West Virginia, with four hundred acres of hilly forests and fertile farmland, was chosen for the purpose. At Claymont, my father turned an old concrete storehouse into a forge while my mother worked in the bookstore and the vegetable gardens. I helped in the forge and attended the three-room school, studying math, French, and art in the mornings alongside the two dozen other children; in the afternoons, our teachers would take us into the loam-smelling woods or down to the gurgling waters of the fish farm.

  After a mere nine years, the commune faltered, rudderless. Bennett’s unexpected death had robbed the experiment of its visionary, and efforts to replace his leadership had largely proven fruitless. My parents had ushered my sister and brother into the world, and they consulted an astrologer for a new path. “Telecommunications” was divined in my father’s future, and he concocted a short resume, tied a tie to his neck, and landed a phone company job in a nearby town.

  I went a different way, breaking with my strange hippie parents and attending a faraway college, exploring a freshness I found in political and cultural conservatism. But the dragon's fire that I fanned as a young boy was something that I had also lit deep inside me, and an interest in travel, a love of languages, and a curiosity about China that my father, through his secondary role as the school’s occasional geography teacher, smoldered in me—and these coals did not die. Math, computer science, and, finally, Chinese drew and held my attention. After my college graduation, I left the United States for the first time. I flew alone to the other side of the planet, and at twenty-two arrived in China with but a few bags and a handful of wild expectations.

  The year was 1997, just before international travel became dominated by the omniscience of smart phones, ATMs, and email—before Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and the technologies that would replace them, before the ubiquity of blogs on every imaginable subject. In China, it was an exhilarating and confusing time. The nation’s political isolation was thawing rapidly but unevenly: Many towns and regions were open, but others remained verboten to foreigners, and the motives of Americans in particular were suspect. The excitement was palpable: Hong Kong was reverting to Chinese rule after 157 years of British colonialism, the economy was heating up like a blacksmith’s forge, a building boom featuring modern glass and steel was transforming cities small and large, and formidable international honor from things like the Olympics had become more than a gleam in the eye of well-placed officials. It was before 9-11, before the “War on Terror,” before American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; in many ways it was a simpler time for Americans to travel. In every other respect it was just like today.

  The steel glowed in the flames as if coated with honey-hued neon. My father pulled it out and flipped it over on the anvil.

  High-pitched notes rang off the walls as his hammer pounded, metal-on-metal. Sparks leapt through the air, danced across the floor, vanished. Slowly the steel cooled under the transformative blows.

  Could it be? I watched the steel flatten, lengthen, darken.

  He dipped the steel into a barrel of water beside the anvil, sending clouds of steam hissing into the air. He motioned that I could climb down.

  “Are you making a sword?” I asked.

  “What else are you going to be carrying—if you find a dragon that isn’t friendly?”

  I stepped towards the blade.

  “Let it cool,” he said, a hand on my shoulder. “It will be yours soon.”

  Chapter 1

  Heart of an Empire

  The way of the superior man is threefold,

  But I am not equal to it.

  Virtuous, he is free from anxiety;

  Wise, he is free from hesitation;

  Courageous, he is free from fear.

  —Confucius, Analects 14:28

  The first promise of dawn paints a watercolor on Tiananmen Square. An old man dressed in navy blue flows quietly through the circular movements of tai chi; a woman on a bicycle tows a young girl in a red wagon. The canvas of this painting is the broad square stones beneath my feet, stones that murmur nothing about parades or riots, joy or mania, blood, the toes of leaping feet, tears. The moment holds only peace. Long stone buildings form the painting’s frame: The Great Hall of the People stands to the west, the People’s Museum of the Revolution is on the east, the granite-gray Frontgate towers to the south, and Tiananmen Gate stands at the north, guarding the countless golden roofs of the Forbidden City. On every stone cornice, eave, and column, the air hangs silent and still, as if waiting between earthquake beats of time.

  Out of place amid all the stone is an electronic billboard in front of the Museum of the Revolution. “147,988 seconds,” announce its red digits, precisely measuring the earthquake beats of time that remain before the huíguī, the handover of Hong Kong, in a bit less than two days. The four dark squares to the left of the decrementing digits suggest that the billboard has been counting down for years, perhaps even for all thirteen years since Margaret Thatcher first pledged to return the colony to China. In any event, it’s June 29, 1997, and there’s little time left for the British to change their minds. Decorative flags hang everywhere, drooping patiently in the quiet air: Half are the familiar, scarlet Chinese banner; Half are the future flag of Hong Kong, which is also red but with a single white Bauhinia orchid succinctly replacing the British crown.

  Three young women clutch miniatures of the two flags in their fingers, and they skip the scoreboard and stroll up to me. “Be in a picture?” one asks boldly.

  I nod, and two of them stand beside me, tentatively touching me just at the moment the third snaps a camera. Then they’re gone, as always.

  My steps carry me further across the paved plane, past Mao Tse-tung’s enormous mausoleum, to a towering granite obelisk called the Monument to the People’s Heroes. As Hong Kong’s seconds tick away, I sit on the monument’s steps, my royal blue backpack beside me, and I feel the liquor of freedom and the terror of utter isolation mingle in my body. The sun’s early rays throw inky shadows from the monument and cast the rest of the world in a glistening stark light, as if this painting is but moments old and its painter has only just set down his brush.

  Hundreds of pigeons swoop and alight nearby. A small boy dashes at the pigeons, gleefully hurling handfuls of yellow bread. Green-uniformed schoolchildren rush over in a horde, bouncing their own fistfuls of dough among the heads of the hungry birds. Hungry myself, I reach into my backpack for a breakfast of leftovers: a red apple and some crumbling crackers. Sleep didn’t come well or easily during the thirty-four hour train ride up from Guangzhou, and my eyelids struggled to stay open as we rolled into China’s capital city at 5:15 am. The bus driver announced Tiananmen Square, and the place seemed to call to me, so I got off.

  Now I’m here and eager—despite inadequate sleep and food—to do what’s next: call Colt. He handed me a phone number months ago, before leaving Guangzhou,
telling me he’d be staying with the family of his mother’s San Francisco acupuncturist. But it is hardly proper to call a Chinese family I’ve never met at the crack of dawn.

  Thirty minutes pass, and the need to move unseats me. Energy pours through my veins from every direction, gathering in my chest, running to my limbs, tapering at my fingers. I enjoy the feeling as I move, letting it kick out the kinks in my knees and ankles from the two-day ride. I walk all the way to the south end of the square, Frontgate, the oldest edifice here; Frontgate was once the one and only portal among thick walls that immured royal palaces, back when entrance was forbidden to the public. Now, abandoned and denuded of its walls, vestigial Frontgate quietly gapes outward, southward, across a boulevard of speeding cars, to its motley young neighbors: McDonald’s and KFC.

  The patio outside McDonald’s is already crowded with locals at 7:45 am. To the overjoyed children, hip teens, and businesswomen in skirts, this restaurant, this endlessly replicated plastic diner is a symbol of modernity, a hot spot for social climbers, a place to see and be seen. To me, when I open the doors, the picture flips into its opposite, like a photographic negative, and a world that was strange turns suddenly familiar: the subzero air conditioning, the synthetic yellow and red décor, the plastic imitation wood tables, the particular stench of special sauce. Here I know the mores, I know the words, I can be the one who laughs. I order in English, and lickety-split, orange juice, eggs, and a hash brown puck land on a brown tray. I sit on a red-orange bench and consume morsels of a syrupy grease I haven’t tasted in these ten months. I look around me, return the stares for a moment, and smile comfortably to myself. The audible words, phrases, and conversations, however, still fly at me from this peculiar Mandarin universe that has callously lost and found me so many times through these many moons that I often feel deaf, dumb, and stupid. On the table, beside my plate of eggs, I thumb open my scarlet pocket Mandarin dictionary and build vocabulary the hard way, word by word. I learn that I mispronounced the term gètĭhù—individual street vendors. Gètĭhù, called China’s newest capitalists, typically xīulĭ shŏubiăo (fix watches), mài bàozhĭ (peddle newspapers), or sell hot roù chuān (meat kebabs).

 

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