Tuition Fee - a long course in progress

Last night I had such a vivid dream.  I was hiking in the mountains with my pack on my back.  The trail was so beautiful, passing under cherry blossoms through coniferous groves winding up onto a ridge.  Birds were singing in the high branches and golden shafts of sunlight slanted between the tree trunks.  The path started to open up so I could see the massive peaks ahead and above as I strode along.  A knife-like ridge climbed to the nearest viewpoint, and beyond white snowfields sloped up towards pure gleaming cornices and the final approach to the summit.  As I set out onto the ridge my heart resounded with joy.  Everything around me seemed to vibrate in harmony as if I and the mountain were one composite entity.  The rise to the summit felt inevitable.
Without any warning the ground fell away beneath my feet.  Light turned to dark.
They say that if you fall in a dream you never know when hit the ground or you will die.  I don't remember falling but there I was on my back staring at the sky, my body a sea of pain.  Far above me the summit shone golden in the last rays of the sun.  Then the clouds closed in, the rain began to fall and a chill wind blew hard through the trees.  My vision blurred, with darkness threatening around the edges.  Pain lanced through my skull.  My ribs ached with every breath.  But I was alive.  The rainfall increased, the temperature dropping rapidly, thunder rumbling across the high peaks.
Somehow I staggered down off the mountain that day.  The forest around me became a harsh, foreign place.  The trees and bushes inhabited a land in which I had no place. It turned out that the damage was limited to three broken ribs, a mild concussion, a sprained ankle and countless bruises. Slowly, slowly I started to heal.

When I awake the dream seared its images in brilliant colour across my memory.  Had it really happened?  What did it mean?  How is the world composed of two such sharply contrasting realities at one and the same time?  The dream was like the circular Tai Chi symbol: within the brightness of light a promise of darkness; within the deepest darkness a promise of light.  In the after images of the dream I felt a harrowing of my soul.  My thoughts returned again and again to the glimpses of paradise - lost in an instant.  In remembering the pain of loss, the loss of what I never really gained, I suffered.  The mind is a strange place.  The past is gone forever and the future an illusion, yet we suffer from the loss of the former and the fear of the latter. We cling to the happy memories, but hold nothing but cherished dust. What is that suffering, but  a substantial tuition fee that we pay unwillingly for our own development?

 Along the theme of "He who kisses the joy as it flies / lives in eternity's sunrise" I figured I should put more people in my blogs.  Jason, on the right, used to live in Burnaby, although he is a native born Taiwanese.  He's standing by the poster for his new dance studio which is currently looking for new students.  He teaches ballroom dancing much of which he learned at my old Alma Mater - UBC.  Taichung has all sorts of people operating a wide variety of individual enterprises.  I've never seen so many small businesses: restaurants, bookstores, Chinese medicine shops, tea shops, motor-cycle repair shops.  This venue (in the photo) was actually a busy used book sale with live bands, performances and many tables selling food and lots of other products and services.
      On the left is Jin Yao who teaches English at a beautiful private University near Taichung.. She studied at the University of Western Australia in Perth and is thinking of returning there to finish off her Phd.  Those flowers are in the huge glass conservatory that forms a part of the Taichung Museum of Science and Technology.
      Last night at a pizza restaurant a Taiwanese man pulled up on a bicycle and joined me at my table.  He has retired, lives nearby, has excellent  English as his business often took him to the states.  Oddly his mane is Simon and he is almost exactly the same age as me.  I need to get a photo of Simon on his bike.  He invited me to his 9th floor apartment and it is truly beautiful.  One huge room is set aside for Qi Gong.  The lay-out has generally a Japanese feel to it, but he also has Italian marble walls, hardwood floor, German designed kitchen features and so much open space,  We drank Pu'er tea, he played some music and it was all wonderfully relaxing.
    "Kiss the joy as it flies....."  I don't know exactly what Blake was thinking,  but every day is a treasure if you really look at it.I intend to make a practise of trying to feature individuals in my blog.  I hope they will agree to be photographed in action, so to speak.

I'll write this post first instead of starting from a photo, because today my phone said it could not connect to its camera.  OMG! Disaster. So no photos.  (Later a friend just suggested a re-boot, which of course worked fine.)
Anyway....A famous writer wrote a book around the concept that we need to remember, "Life is difficult.“  His point (in part) was that we should wake up and embrace the moment instead of whining about it so much whenever we encounter a problem.  Well, Chinese is surprisingly difficult. First there is new vocabulary with no free hints like we get in, say, Spanish.  Second, words do not always say the same things but can change according to word order and context.  Third, meaning is affected by tones which do not stick very well in aging Western brain cells.  OK, so now we have learned the words and we're ready to understand them right? Wrong, of course.  The teacher speaks at normal speed and I try to translate in my head resulting in my losing track constantly because I'm too slow.  The difference is shocking! I know that the word 'yifu' means 'clothes', but I will still get lost until the word itself contains the meaning in my mind without my having to think about the English word.  While I think, 'oh I know that one, it means clothes', several more words will have gone by.
But that is not all, said the cat in the hat.  Oh no, that is not all.  Everything is written in Chinese characters.  So what I see on the board is 衣服.  Got it?  Try copying it.  See how long it takes you.  Then have a go at re-producing it without looking.  I spent years learning Pinyin where the Chinese sounds are transliterated into alphabet symbols - 'yifu'.  You still have to know the tones but at least you have a fighting chance.  However, in Taiwan they teach writing first.  Western letters are absent.  If a character comes along that I don't know, which happens constantly. there is no easy way to discover what it is.
People DO learn Mandarin Chinese.  Children learn it.  Foreigners learn it.  Even 64 year old foreigners can learn it.  I just happen to be in a class with ten or so other students who can ALREADY read and write.  I know, I could have joined an easier class, but that would have been a beginner class.  Our teacher teaches in Chinese, but I actually do know almost all the vocabulary.  Its just that the other students have this enormous advantage over me - reading and writing.  The teacher (affectionately known as Zhang Laoshi - teacher Zhang) is very sympathetic and tries to help me out.  She uses adaptations for me and encourages me to stay in the class.  She reminds me to not compare myself to others - true, but not easy.  I soldier on.
It must be said - I AM learning.  Today I wrote a whole sentence on the board (mostly correct) and presented some pictures about seasons to the class.  It has only been 3 weeks so far out of a 3 month course.  After the 4th week there is a 4 day break and I'm going to Macau, so that's something fun to anticipate.  Meanwhile - life is difficult.  So what did you expect?
"Say not the struggle naught availeth"

testing

Yesterday the students were all nervous about the test in class.  For me it was not so hard as the teacher gave me a special copy written larger with all the characters transcribed into pinyin.  I have learned some of the characters, but its sooooo slow and the other students can all read and write in Chinese.
An added bonus hidden within my studying is that it requires intense concentration.  Anyone familiar with Vipassana meditation will see the value - its a prerequisite for mindfulness.  My other practice of riding a Ubike in heavy traffic also requires the same skill.

So, you might ask, what does that have to do with the photo above?  Blake wrote:
"Who holdeth to himself a joy doth the winged life destroy,
 but he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity's sunrise."
It is very easy to appreciate the beauty of each moment when one is fully present to that moment. But can that moment stay still? The photo of the lake captures a moment in time.  However, everything is always flowing past us like a river including external events, thoughts, feelings;  the river never pauses for even an instant.  If you have some difficulty grasping the concept, try riding a Ubike at night along busy Taiwan Boulevard in Taichung.

Neo university student

The photo on the right illustrates my rather serious attitude towards study.  This is out of character, but when you look on the right you can see that, without considerable effort, no progress will be made at all.
I don't know what it says; although when the words are spoken I do understand them, usually.  It was some questions about today, alcohol and speaking Chinese.
I'm hoping to maintain my attitude of present moment awareness now that my life has become more comfortable and routine.  The classes require complete focus for three hours (with breaks) because everything is in Chinese.  She does a lot of repetition so I can understand it, but only if I keep my concentration all the time.

We had the lantern festival.  In Taipei they put candles in paper balloons to carry your wishes up to heaven.  In Tainan they throw so many firecrackers around that some people look as if they are in the heart of the fire.  Here in Taichung all I saw was a parade,  a charming part of which you see on the left.
To continue with my bicycle theme:  This is what one of my fellow students is riding to class.  its designed specially to keep the back straight with the high handle bars.  It also has electrical assistance to the front wheel.  The battery is in the brown bag.  This isn't the only bizarre bicycle I've seen.  Taichung seems to be fertile ground for innovation and it remains, after all, probably the best place in the world to mass produce specialty bikes. See the video below.

What is beyond?

I know 30 or 40 characters and can write about 25 of them.  There are thousands.....

 The path continues, but its level is different - a journey of the mind.  For me the task of learning mandarin is indeed "The road less traveled" because I know very few people who have walked this path.  Never mind that Mandarin is spoken by more people than any other language on earth - the point is that people don't usually learn it at age 64.

In spite of the fact that every other student knows more Han zi characters than I do my teacher felt I ought to be able to handle this (basic) class.  There are about 12 of us, from many different backgrounds.  The photo above shows some of my first night's study as I attempted to learn the characters we will use the next day.  A young guy from Toronto, Nolan, is also staying in the guest house so we studied together.
While we were puzzling over the intricacies an elderly Taiwanese man came in and asked to join us.  What a treat!  He's a visiting professor lecturing on Business administration, but it turned out his real passion is calligraphy.  He proudly showed us long scrolls of his own work.  The poetry comes from a Prince in the Ming dynasty which he had lovingly painted in Han dynasty style characters.  Beautiful!  It led us into a lengthy discussion about Chinese history and the variety of places we collectively had visited.  One of the advantages to studying traditional characters is that you can sometimes grasp the pictographs out of which they arose.  Parts of complicated characters are replicated in other characters.  There are patterns; mysterious threads that Nolan seems to recognize more easily than I.
This morning I visited the bookstore above called Cave's.  It has a wide collection - in particular, many books created to help Chinese speakers to learn English.  Like all Taiwanese bookstores they have worked hard to create spaces where people can just sit and read a book without buying it.  This creates a bit of a social centre where people can meet and exchange ideas.  I met a woman whose husband is from Vancouver and another Taiwanese woman with a charming baby whose husband is French.  Apparently they communicated in English - the second language for both of them.