Doorway

If you walk down the quiet dusty narrow street you will find her house. The way is shadowed by grey painted brick walls like bookends that press back the light of the sky and underfoot it is uneven and crumbling.  Three well-worn stone steps lead you to the large red door upon which shreds of old propaganda posters cover layers of peeling paint.  The doorway is crowned by a header carved into delicate flowing branches of leaves; but it too is suffering from years of neglect.

Her father was given this courtyard house by someone in Mao’s inner circle. Perhaps it was Mao himself, but she is not sure.  As a young man her father was educated in Europe before returning to serve his country. During the Sino-Japanese War he led the Chinese forces against the Japanese in the southwest and accepted their surrender in Vietnam.  He knew Ho Chi Min well. He had been the head of munitions for Chiang Kai Shek before the Nationalists were defeated by the Communists and fled to Taiwan.  Her father was not a Communist though. But her uncle was.  He was the first communist mayor of Shanghai so she believes that may be one reason why her family got special treatment.  Even so, she says they lived in fear during the years of the Cultural Revolution that the Red Guard would break through the doorway of this house to the outer and inner courtyards and find something that would incriminate them.

These days someone she doesn’t know lives in the outer courtyard of their house. They just showed up one day and never left.

You pick your way past their dirty buckets, rags and hanging laundry to get to the second door, the entrance to the inner courtyard, the part of the house that is still her family’s.

The door to this is locked, but she has the key. With a rattle and a shake the large panels squeak open.  You step over the raised doorframe and stand under the red and green carved portico so you can survey the inner sanctum. Three facades of glass paned doors open onto a paved square patio.  The wood of these doors is rotting, the paint has faded and the traditional curved terra cotta roof above is cracked and crumbling.  In the open space of the courtyard carefully crafted but now dried out flower beds hint that a gardener once took great care here.  A rusted old bike leans against a broken screen, its seat covered in a dirty plastic bag.  Behind the glass paned doors are the interior rooms of the house. Each has its own access to the courtyard and is also adjoined to the next by inside doorways. In the summer months the outside space becomes as the main hallway of the house. In the bitter cold northern winters however you have to walk from one room to the next to get to where you are going.  Privacy has a different meaning here than what you are used to.

You are only blocks from the outer wall of the Forbidden City now and yet you feel as if you are in the country, far away from the politics, the tourists and the traffic of Beijing. The leaves on the trees inside the courtyard and the overhanging branches from outside the walls shade this tranquil scene and evoke images of a scholar’s life of quiet contemplation in the time of mandarins and concubines.  A time long lost.

When her father died after 101 years, her mother moved from here to the comfort of an apartment on the other side of the Imperial Palace. But the family treasures remain. It is only a matter of time she tells you before the child of a senior party member will claim this place for his own and convert it to a high priced restaurant or boutique hotel.

She leads you to the biggest room of the house which is filled with books, photographs, trinkets and old newspapers. She hands you a large volume bound in red leather embossed with gold Chinese characters which you cannot read.  Inside are the photographs and names of the all that were present at the first meeting of the communist leadership in 1949 when Mao declared the founding of the modern People’s Republic.  Her uncle and father were there.

You lightly touch the piles of photographs carelessly scattered on a large polished wood desk. It is as if someone had been interrupted as they were arranging them and never came back to finish.  In the faded black and white collage, you recognize faces from history books you have read about China’s leadership during that time.  All of them have come and gone.

Nothing is left now but dust and stories retold by people who were never there.

Yellow is the New Black

I was thirty six when I bought my first car. It was a bright yellow Audi S4 station wagon.  I chose the color because I didn’t want a grey or black car like everyone else had, and red seemed as if I was trying to prove something.  There was a nice blue option with grey seats, but I thought that might make me feel too much like an established, conservative older woman.  I wasn’t that person yet.

The car came with a black leather interior and a V6 engine. It could accelerate to 60 miles per hour in 5.8 seconds – just like a Porsche 911. When I test drove it, I felt as if I was in a sports car even though to everyone else I probably looked like someone’s mom going through a mid-life crisis.  Perhaps I was.

The open trunk was big enough to fit a bicycle and luggage when the back seats were down, and when they were up there was a trap door in the back seat bench through which one could slide a pair of skis. The polished chrome roof rails could handle a rack and a cargo box for a long road trip to any active outdoor adventure of my choosing.  I imagined using all these features as I drove around in my high heels and business suit, my well-worn brief case lying next to me on the passenger seat and my sons’ sticky car seats strapped in back.  I was a long way from pursuing outdoor adventures back then, but the yellow car enabled my dreaming.

Four years into ownership, when my sons were in grade school they gave my yellow car a name. Every first and third grade boy called it the “Banana Car” and wanted to ride in it.  But unlike the pervasive minivan my car could only fit three lucky passengers.  My boys’ friends waved at the car as it drove by as if it had a personality of its own.  Encased in my black leather interior, I often forgot how the exterior presented itself until one day a small child, too young for school, stopped playing in his front yard, pointed his pudgy finger at me and stared.  Then a grin spread across his face in recognition of what must have looked to him like a giant Hot Wheels.  When my yellow car made people smile I was reminded of what it felt like to be a kid again.  It was the bright and happy float in the parade of grey and black SUV’s that inched its way through our small downtown every morning.

Though the color seemed frivolous, the car itself was very practical. It could carry a weeks’ worth of groceries, a three dimensional science project and two full school bags all at the same time in is trunk. It had heated seats in winter and a sun roof for the summer. When my sons’ hockey games required me to drive across the greater Chicago area in the middle of snow storms, I was grateful for the all-wheel-driving and the halogen lights.  (Though it took a good five years until on-coming drivers realized these were standard head lights and stopped flashing me to turn off my high beams.)

People saw the yellow car long before I saw them. In a few instances I was grateful for that.  I almost killed a client once when I pulled up to the curb side to drop him off at the airport.  I missed a car in my blind spot that was accelerating out. Had he not seen the bright yellow flash in the corner of his eye I’m pretty sure he would have pinned my passenger side.  People waved at me from passing cars.  But without exception I had no idea who they were in their grey, black or white vehicles with tinted windshields.  Who knows how many friends I offended by not waving back. Then there was the time I waved back and smiled at a silver BMW only to realize that it wasn’t a wave but a third finger being held up for my benefit.

For the most part the response out there to my choice of color was positive. But after my husband borrowed it while his car was in the shop he returned it saying he would never drive it again.  He had more people honk and shout at him during that week than in all the other weeks of his life combined.  There must be something about a middle aged man driving a yellow station wagon that brings out the worst in his alpha counterparts.

I know I sacrificed a little privacy over the years by owning a yellow car. There were many times I’d get a phone call or a text message asking me what color nail polish I had chosen when my car was parked in front of the salon.  Or as I was working frantically for a deadline I’d be interrupted at the office when someone saw my yellow car parked in front of the building and knew I was there.  It was a beacon in the otherwise grey concrete landscape of my life during those years.  But its homing device quality served me well when upon returning from numerous overseas business trips, too exhausted and jet lagged to remember where I had parked my car I had only to look out the tram window as it pulled into the long term parking lot to spot my yellow wagon happily waiting to welcome me back.

When my boys grew old enough to drive themselves they grudgingly asked to borrow the yellow car. The Banana Car wasn’t cool anymore even if it did drive like a race car with its V6 engine.  I think its one attraction was that the girls thought it was cute.  As they took the keys from me I reminded them that the only car the police will pull over more than a red one on a highway is a yellow one with a teenage boy driving.  It was enough to keep them in line on the weekends.

When one of the boys’ coaches needed a ride to a hockey tournament on an icy February weekend he accepted a spot in the yellow wagon. Impressed with the car’s handling in the snow and its cheery color, he christened it “Old Yeller”. The new name stuck.

With the impending departure of my boys for college, I have adopted a new puppy. These days a large green plaid blanket covers the back seat of my car. It didn’t take long for Old Yeller to win over my furry companion who will sit for hours surveying the world of squirrels and canines from behind a nose print smudged pane of glass. I’ve also taken up bike racing and given my new bike a prominent position on the roof rack. Last winter I fit a set of cross country skis nicely into the trunk when I set off for an all-day adventure in the snow.

Given the miles it has carried me my yellow wagon is in surprisingly good shape. But every once in a while something big has to be repaired like the brakes, the heating system or the axle bearings.  Each time I call the garage I have only to describe the car and they know who I am without even checking their records.  I’m not sure they ever remember my name, but they certainly know Old Yeller.

I am now the age when I would certainly look better driving a blue sedan with a grey interior. But I continue to discourage suggestions that it might be time for a trade in.

Buying my yellow wagon was the best decision I ever made. Fourteen years and half a generation later I’m still dreaming and it’s still driving me around.

Golden

The Brahmaputra River is like a liquid opal winding its way through the faded sand colored landscape. It is the artery of life in this part of the world. To get to the Samye Monastery one must cross it on a flat bottom barge squeezed in next to claret colored robed monks wearing knock off ray bans and North Face jackets. Once on the other side there is the choice to either walk to the monastery along a rough and dusty road or take a bus that has neither shock absorbers nor enough seats.

There is no warning before you come upon the oldest monastery in Tibet. It just appears from the sandy bottom of a plateau surrounded by beige graveled mountains with snow caps.  It is so dry here that licking your lips does nothing but to make them more chapped.

The monastery is laid out like a giant Mandala, a metaphor for the Buddhist universe with a temple in the middle representing Mount Meru, its mythical center. It is to the top of that temple that I have been told to go.

Inside, the dark corridors are illuminated by rows of golden prayer wheels. They look like upright barrels atop wood fence posts. If you touch one, it will keep spinning long after you walk on, its embossed Sanskrit letters catching the dim light. The reflected Buddhist text reads: Om mani pad me hum.  It is the sacred mantra whose meaning I am still trying to grasp.  Translated in English as six words: generosity, ethics, patience, diligence, renunciation and wisdom but said together it means none of this and also much more.  The purpose of reciting it is to help purify the speaker of ego, jealousy, desire, prejudice, possessiveness and hatred and as one says it one should consider how to live out this wisdom while all the while becoming less fixated on oneself. I am not sure how to do that.

There is a second floor that wraps around an inner courtyard overlooking the temple. The walls are white washed up to bands of burnt umber that dye into golden eves of intricately carved overhanging roofs. Along the mezzanine that makes up the second floor are the monks’ rooms.  Their privacy provided by a cloth of blue and white draped across a doorway.  The walls of the corridors are painted in vibrant hues of yellow, blue, red and green.

Inside the temple the light is dim and the air is filled with the smell of yak butter candles, like rancid milk mixed with sweet wax. I pass the barrels of little lights, the prayer benches, the draped prayer flags, some fashioned into origami like cascades hanging from the ceiling. There is the golden Buddha and a row of bodhisattvas. Everything is covered in a thin film of dust.  The space around me is cloudy and oily.

I climb up through the temple then, one step at a time on ornately painted orange stairs. Inside the room on the third floor I am the only one except for a monk who quietly shuffles away when I arrive. Another Buddha sits here as if waiting for those who choose to make the journey from the opulence below to seek him out in this simple and quiet space.  He surveys the room and me with it.

I put my palms together and close my eyes. I make the sound, the first vibration.  I feel it deep within my abdomen where it rests upon my pelvis, then in my chest surrounding my heart, over my shoulders and down my arms and then onto my lips.

I wait.