I am back in HK, and the city has gifted me with a couple of the most surrealistically beautiful days I've seen here. The sky cerulean blue, the harbor merrily flickering sunlight, the day clear and endless with possibility. Days like these you think that you have just arrived here and the city is new to you and the world is still a street corner turn away. And even if I have been here three full years, the longest I've ever been anywhere besides my time in college and my childhood in Vietnam, I feel like a fresh arrival. It's that beautiful.
I am now officially done with my masters degree. The writing of analytical essays has been wonderful. I was lost in a Proustian sentence, I knocked about Paris with Flaubert, I swam with Wordsworth in the lakes of his childhood, I imagined the Mediterranean with Shakespeare. And now I want to solely focus on writing creatively, perhaps with my summers, but also to work on pieces during the year. I've been here long enough so that the teaching shouldn't overwhelm me anymore with busyness and activity, and I think I can create a space for myself to reflect and write about either my time here, or to craft novel, imaginative things on my mind that reflect only what I can dream. There's no excuse now, really, for not writing more. What's needed now might be a focus or topic, but I feel it's a matter of time and effort to get "it". This will be my new and sole goal for this year, to write myself back into frame, to focus, to find time to explore the interior world of thought and reflection what I find so lacking in seeing the exterior world, so mercantile and mercilessly forward gazing, so overly concerned with transitory, fleeting things like wealth and comfort. Stories, essays, plays, blog posts about travel, snippets of pieces, as long as I make time to build them, they'll be there for me, a ward for me against the life lived on the surface of things.
I realized recently how difficult it
is for me to write anything when I am pretty much happy. Oxford is, I think,
that place that makes me, pretty much happy. For the past five weeks there
hasn't been much responsibility other than to crank out a long paper every two
to three of those weeks, to soak in the town and the English countryside for
the remainder of them, or soak my body cells in briny pub life for others. And
what is paper writing but the reading of Wordsworth or Coleridge, and trying to
place yourself in the trails of ruminative lines, to retrace and walk again the trail
of thought of a thinker who went before you, or to take the walk and branch
off into new territories of your own? I
suppose that I've procrastinated writing about Oxford this long because it's
only now that I comprehend that I'm about to leave it.
Oxford is one of those places that
shouldn't be shown to academics or intellectuals like me because it would be
what we would conjure up if we had ample time and allowance. I had been out of
the student business for seven years, and now, coming back to it, I'd only
begun to realize how much I miss books, reading, and libraries and old
buildings, and women who wear glasses and seem intellectual or intelligent, who
at least pretend curiosity about the things I'm curious about. It is a
bibliophile's delight. Walking and turning a corner, you run into bookstores or
an extension of the Bodleian library; walking another block reveals a cafe with
leather couches and desks, a reading nook where you can hole up for a while, a
pub to drink in that was once frequented by literary luminaries. It's not
Oxford's history that appeals to me, but the oaken surfaces, the sense of
things ancient that seem to sound out the need to write and to think in
writing, because as palpable as the life that exists in the constructed concrete
world outside, just as real, as scintillating and lasting, is the life of books
and thoughts, of silent talks between shy people whose forms of turning to the
world is a growing inward and a retracing of the paths of thoughts that seems
dimmer in the dark world of noise and alarms.
So whenever I tried to write about my
four summers here, I've always come up empty. Perhaps I'll write about a moment
when I first remembered feeling a bit sad and homesick while I was here.The first and only time it happened.
It was my first summer in Oxford. I
had not returned to America for two years, and in all that time I never thought
much of missing it.On a free thursday
night, I decided to stop by the Sheldonian with a friend, John Whalen, who was
at the time teaching abroad in Brazil, to hear Dvorak's New World Symphony.
Dvorak's New World Symphony was always a favorite of mine and I had read
somewhere that it was inspired by Dvorak's research on negro spirituals and
folk songs of America. I had always wanted to hear this live and to see how the
piece is performed, and we sat on good, albeit uncomfortable seats in the
theater.During the second movement, I
saw the main flutist, an old gray haired woman in glasses, pick up the melody,
the one that's perhaps the sweetest and most lyrical, to my mind, and I watched
as the rest of the orchestra, like a wave, follow her, and the tune that was
about the best parts of America, its folk music and its romantic landscape that
perhaps no longer existed but in the mind of this Czech traveler and composer,
reverberated through the hall of an ancient orchestral hall in the middle of
England.It was as American as any music
I've heard.And I suppose there was
something strangely appropriate about hearing a song inspired by America,
composed by a Czech, played for me by an English orchestra, just as I was about
to depart for home after two years of being away.
After it ended, I talked to John for
a bit and we were startled by how much the piece affected us. He had been
abroad longer than I had been, and he said he doesn't miss home at all, but he
did miss his neighbors and family, and the drives he went on when he was
home.Then I went out and sat for a
while on the steps of the Bodleian by those weird statues and looked onto the mellow
pastel buildings of Broad Street at evening light, and as the night descended
upon Oxford and its old buildings, in my mind's eye all I could see were the
countryside of America, the foothills of the Adirondacks, the Ozarks, or what
you will, the coastline of Massachusetts, and I relived for a while the morning
drives I made in Pennsylvania through rolling hills and winter snows, and
listening, and I could recall with acute clarity my last long drive I made
right before I left it all to go abroad, that long passage through Virginia,
Tennessee, and the Appalachians to hand over my car to my father in Texas and
deliver my dog to my friend because I couldn't take her with me abroad, and how
she had her head out the window the entire drive, even when it rained in the
mountains of West Virginia.Sitting
there on Broad Street and remembering this, I suddenly felt a bone deep,
inexpressible longing for home.
It is possible that our memories of place and
geography, and even of home, can become a moveable feast, to be taken from
storage and fed on in times of scarcity or sadness, to make us whole again when
the world of our lives grow flat, narrow and more fragmented. It is also possible that the places we
hold the most nostalgia for never live up to our memory of them when we come back.
And then there are literary places in which the magic of reading it is more palpable than the place
itself.Walden Pond was one such place.
I had pictured a solitary lake in winter, with ice cracking and whooping its
loneliness, or in spring, a landscape bustling with animal life, devoid of
human company, but when I came, I found it busy with other travelers, some
there to drink from the same fount of nostalgia as me, none of us much wiser
for having visited, none looking at the place as is, only in comparison to what
we had dreamt up while reading.
Perhaps because I am an American, or perhaps
because we saw the place at its most stormy rainy time, visiting The Lake
District with friends did the opposite; it brought into sharp relief what I had
read and only half pictured in blurry detail. Craggy outposts, rolling hills,
landscapes that I have read from the Preludes and cottages that seemed to
shelter Coleridge's babe in Frost at Midnight came into focus and for the first
time I felt and thought I understood. Going to Vermont did not for me bring on
new understanding of Frost because the New England falls and winters I lived in
my childhood already contained all his magic; his poems were already enmeshed
in my memories. Visiting Grasmere and the countryside nearby made real what
Wordsworth felt, the heart of a god beating in the land, lake and sky, the
movement of a landscape that can be fearsome, austere, beautiful all at once. I
swam in Ulswater, the lake Wordsworth ice skated on... we drove through the
craggy crannies of the mountains near Grasmere, where mountain goats and sheep
dotted the mountain passes, lost in rain and fog. At one point, we had a
harrowing moment when our car was trapped sheer inches from a cliff during our
drive, and scraped out of there by the skin of our teeth through the magical
driving of Matt Kasper and told the story to ourselves to laugh and lessen the
dread.And that night, when we settled
in our hostel to drink wine and read from Wordsworth I shuddered at hearing the
Preludes, particularly the moment the child Wordsworth canoed on Ulswater, and
thought he felt an unspeakable force following him in the shadowed mountains,
and I recalled our smallness in the midst of all this fog and rain and craggy
land.
Proust wrote that 'the true
paradises are the paradises one has lost.'I probably have glossed over my time in Oxford and the Lake District,
and made them more ideal in my imagination, and left out the jostling tourists
or the discomfort or occasional mundanity of travel decisions - where should we
eat next, which town has the best potato skins, and so on.But I am all for selective memory, and when I
leave a place I prefer recalling the happiest times or most memorable times
rather than the boring bits.Yeats would
add that "Man loves, and loves what vanishes". So in a few days the Lake District,
the cows and horses in Port Meadow, the canal boats and dreaming spires of
Oxford, the fantastic friendships and conversations about literature and life
vanish for me, to be replaced by tall glass high rises, mountains and the
ocean, crowds and crowds of people. But Proust also gave a consolation for
those who grieve too much the loss of paradise. He said that: "...if
our life is vagabond our memory is sedentary and though we ourselves rush
ceaselessly forward our recollections, indissolubly bound to the sites which we
have left behind us, continue to lead a placid and sequestered existence among
them, like those friends whom a traveller makes for a brief while in some town
where he is staying..." It is a beautiful thought.And what if, years later, we return to our
memory of this spot of countryside, and relive the time of our having been
there. Would it be as if we had never left the place at all?
On the winding mountainside I see the traveler
coming down the hilltop, rain soaked and weary and eager for company. I show him to my stone cottage. He's from a city a world's length away, and
the mountains and endless rainstorms here frighten him, so easily cowed as he
is by the elements. He seems insubstantial, lost to civilization. My dog runs
ahead and chews grass; she looks back at us when she thinks we are looking,
waits, then jots off again. Inside the cottage it is warm and dry. Here is my
pantry, I say to the stranger, it is yours too. My setter that now settles on the rug beside
the fire is also yours. Here are cheeses, goulash warmed from the stove, water
from a stream nearby. Come and drink, so
says my memory to me. Eat, so that we
may be whole again.
you were in my dreams last night. we were
visiting museums and saw one that had no specific exhibition but instead responded
to the whims and desires of its visitors and because it was in a hidden street
corner of that old European city we were visiting at the time and because it
was night and getting late we thought we'd stop by and see what curiosities
were inside. There was a large hall where, displayed in full size and textured
with reality, were all the cities i've lived in and all the cities you've
visited and the places we were to come see in our future. we walked through
castles and doors of castles, embankments and moats, old houses and modern
flats overlooking rivers, we
stepped under glass towers and traversed towns lost in snow and places i
thought i recognized from my childhood but it had been so long since and their
features were so lost to time, that even the old stone bridge i had passed so
many times on my way to school as a kid seemed to drip into the river it
spanned, like paint, and when you asked me where we were i mumbled a name i
thought i heard once when i woke from a sleep years ago but had long since
misremembered and quickly forgot again after its mumbling. we sat on a bench in
a park near a river with trees sheltering a skyline of hazy city lights and i
said let's stay here for a while and you asked me why and I said don't you
remember this is the city in which i loved you and this is the spot where you
read to me that poem that made me fall for you and you said no this isn't it at
all, though i recognize certain features, all objects here are transplanted
from some otherwhere that has nothing to do with our life now, nothing here is
native or true, not the bench, tree, the oaken balcony, the dripping bridge,
the window seat with a cat nestled in a corner reading a newspaper or the
artist with the beret on the lawn there painting us sitting here, nor his
anachronistic painting of us, older and happy and settled, that you have
inserted insidiously into this landscape of our memory or the love that you
professed on a hypothetical night that you might have shared with some other
woman, or if you had professed it to me then neither i nor you
remembered the moment with clarity because both of us might have been drunk and
had been walking home in the dark trying to find shelter in a hidden street
corner of that old European city whose features were lost in fog and dusk and
rain and the winding maze of our collective memory, and so we moved on, to
other rooms and other spaces, until we were tired and found a final room cased
in dim light where a clown in black played a tabor that beat the rhythm of a
rain dripping steadily from the ceiling. In politeness we stood and waited for
him to finish, but he continued playing and so we watched and listened to him
until the museum closed. The doors were locked then, the lights flicked off and
the clown wore black and was faceless and played a drum that beat the rhythm of
rain falling from a ceiling whose dark outlines i couldn't see.
Back in Lincoln. My room's windows open out to battlements
and turrets from which I might rain down arrows and pour burning oil upon mine
enemies, namely Italian high schoolers. God I love it here.
Was just involved in a
drunken conversation about Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, pantoums, and sestinas. I
love Breadloaf.
Peter said Mons Venus in reference to that crazy phallic
passage in Milton's Paradise Lost today. We all thought and pictured it. But he
said it.
20 hours from now, the
literature nerds of Breadloaf will take on the science geeks of Oxford in an
ultimate frisbee death match that will rival all three Star Wars prequels. It
shall be an epic match of nerdiness, a Miltonic battle of the brainy and
uncoordinated. B-Loafers, go big or go home. We read real literature; they do
computations. You do the math.
Oh Tolstoy, why are you so
sexy? You make me want to work on a farm and gaze at stars and suffer
existentially.
Ran into my FOURTH student from
CIS in Oxford yesterday. I'm halfway across the world and still can't escape.
Today's official literary
lines taken out of context, from Henry James' Portrait of a Lady:
"...while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had
least pleased her..." (581)
They had a little love, now
they're back for more; 'cause tonight, is the night, when two become one.
Turgenev & Henry James togethah fo'evah... (in my paper).
Xoxohugsnkissesshitsngiggles.
A mellow evening in Oxford. All
the stone buildings, and all the painted homes, and all the paved roads reflect
the sun's waning glow and slowly turn into pages from a Henry James novel. Off
to Lincoln library to write on the Master.
Scored me tickets to Richard
III with K. Spacey as the hunchback king. Best day of my life at least until I
get hitched or my future wife gets preggers and delivers twins.
Just made a reference to The Hangover on my essay on
Midsummer Night's Dream.
If my life could consist of writing about Shakespeare and
then talking about it with Emma Smith, I'd be a happy man.
Caught up w/ a friend, then sat and read by myself in a French
restaurant in Mayfair while waiting to see Richard III.A French family straight from the pages of a
Flaubert novel is sitting next to me.
Sunlight lies soft and warm on the pavement, the café chairs
are wet after the rain. The family converses in the most charming French. I
could be in a Parisian postcard or in a line of Proust, but I am in Mayfair
waiting for an American to perform a hunchback English king and I am drunk.
Le petit garcon with the charming jacket and curls puts a
spoonful of soup to his mouth, tastes, and exclaims... superb!I am lost in this glass of Chardonay.What wine should I drink, what bread should I
eat, to what god should I pray for this day that swells my heart so?
I finished my third year of teaching in HK this past week. The days were a flurry of activity until the last day, and even as I type this, I think of returning to my office tomorrow to clean up the explosion of papers, books, and mess that is my desk.
With every school year that ends here at CIS I become more and more impressed with the students I teach. I am in particular taken by how thoughtful and generous they are and how thankful they are for a teacher's time and good teaching (or sometimes, not even that). My seniors invited me to dinner, my year 10 made me a card and crafted a tongue in cheek "2 minutes hate" that was modeled after 1984, and my homeroom made a hilarious tribute movie "trailer". I used to worry that their politeness and warmth came were actually insidious lobbying for higher grades, and I am sure there is always a degree of that, but I do feel now their genuine affection, appreciation and love. One girl I taught beamed and thanked me genuinely for the nice things I wrote to her on her report, and I find out only later that the grade I gave her was lower than her previous year's marks, though only slightly.
This year also marks a farewell to my good friend and colleague Matt, who arrived the same year with me and has welcomed me into his family, and now returns to midwest America. His has become a foster family of sorts for me, so I jumped at the chance to write a sendoff for him at the end of the year though I am incredibly sad he is leaving. If I ever felt lost within this city, or lonely, a sit down meal with his family, a cheerful conversation with his wife and him or a brief playtime period with his boy Finn quickly grounded me and returned to me my bearings.
It's a tradition that teachers who are leaving ask a friend to write a brief speech to send them off and to recall their accomplishments at the school. This is the speech below:
I'd like to begin by commenting on a few recent world trends. One, peak oil and climate change are upon us and we will adapt by learning to eat and vacation locally; we will choose to get to know our next door neighbors over lurkers on internet dating chat rooms. Two, Ohio, USA, will become a destination of choice, as its plentiful resources and local farms become the new emerging market. Three, these midwesterners's children, wholesome cornfed boys and girls of Ohio, will demand a less restrictive, less stifling education; they will collectively cry out for a creative but still grounded, internationally recognized I.B. and MYP certified English Lit teacher. Enter Matt Peterson.
Three years ago Matt courageously moved his family halfway across the world to Hong Kong and to teach at CIS. He has taught kids how to construct their first thesis statements, how to throw their first frisbees, how to fall in love with language in all its varied iterations. Matt is the rare combination of polymathic intelligence, organization, and whimsy that forces you to feel that learning can be hilarious, fun, life affirming. His students love to tell stories of hijinks in his class, saying how varied, challenging, and fantastic those 80 minutes are. I note with some concern that even though his name is listed next to mine, Matt clearly has a much better ranking on ratemyteacher.com, with such affirming nuggets of feedback as "Love mr. P. to bits, <3", and "he's hilariosauce", this latter being a clever combination of the word "hilarious" and, I believe, "sauce".
If education is the ultimate act of empowerment both for the educator and the student, then entering Matt's classroom will feel like walking into a hallway of superheroes. You hear students once cowed by their own shadow suddenly speaking up; you hear Matt doing a witch's voice, cackling maniacally, kids tossing bits into a box, reciting Shakespeare, and always, you hear uncontrollable laughter. His students always felt like they were a part of something grand, something magical. Most importantly, Matt led them to discover their voices, in writing, in discussion, in thinking. I can find no better example of this than in the methodical way he and Monte taught their son Finn sign language before he could speak, so that he could communicate his needs to them. Multiply this example 20 times and you have a fragment of Matt's effects on a class; multiply that six times and you see his footprints within a year, three times more and perhaps you see a glimmer of his influence over CIS. But how can one measure the changing of sentiments? How can one use numbers to track the trail of a unique, individual thought, the development of eloquence, the blooming of a sensibility? It is both a blessing and curse of we literature teachers that our legacy is unquantifiable. So we compromise; we judge our work in the poetry we hear from our students' voices.
Matt told one of his students that it's fine if you feel sad when you leave a place, because that means you've had a good, fulfilling experience there. Well, the sentiment works in reverse too, Matt. We, the English department, are devastated you're leaving because we've had such a lovely three years with you. You've made friendships here with the faculty and with the innumerable students you've taught. I will miss your wit and humor, singing songs before dinners with your family, jamming to Dylan raucously on our guitars, and I will miss seeing Finn grow up from a baby to the hilarious, precocious child he is now. We hope you'll keep in touch even if you're a half a world away.
One last prediction. Ten years from now, there will be a world financial collapse caused by the end of cheap oil, and from the puncturing of mystical financial innovations like derivatives and subprime lending. This humming mercantile world, these cloud capped towers, the gorgeous palaces will fade away like visions from a dream, and we will wake up to realize that what remains to sustain us, is family, friendships, and the truths that can still be found in the poems of Robert Frost or the prose of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. A CIS alum, ten years out, successful entrepreneur, disenchanted but protected from the wreck, will saunter to her bookshelf to recall these self evident truths. She picks up Emerson's "Self Reliance", reads the words that run across the page... "A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages...", and through Emerson's words she will remember the voices of her classmates and Mr. Peterson's voice, and her own distinct voice just finding its timbre in that class discussion she had years ago. For a moment, what she is reading makes the only sense in the world.
By Tuan on February 19, 2011 12:09 AM
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It has literally been forever since I've written on this blog. I suppose the reason for this absence is that I've been running on all cylinders here in HK, work has been a bit of a treadmill, without a moment of reflection or cessation to reflect on what is going on, or why I teach the way I teach.
I recently came to realize how little teachers do what they ask their students to do. When, for example, was the last time I wrote a timed essay by hand? Eons ago, in college, probably freshman year. And yet it's a skill that's asked of all I.B. English students and assessed regularly, and I plan on assigning it still to prepare my students for the exams to come in spring. How can I call myself an expert in the task if I haven't done it myself? Certainly there is a gap between what I purport to teach and the fact that I've not done the task myself.
And what is the point of all this assessment? I grow more and more disillusioned with the I.B. and MYP each day I teach them. I fear the flotsam and jetsam of rubrics lead to a regurgitation of concepts and materials, that this is all becoming a curriculum of increasingly cumbersome rules and guidelines. I miss the inventiveness and freedom of planning what I like to plan. I miss talking and discussing literature without the fear of upcoming assessments, the crunch of time. I miss big ideas. I talk more and more in my classes, and I listen less and less. I invent less. I look at numbers and rubrics more.
Last year was one of my most enjoyable years of teaching. There was a magic to it that I haven't felt since I began teaching. This year, however, has been helter skelter and rushed. When I think back to what made last year enjoyable, I realized that it really was about being able to play with a year 11 group after the assessments were over. We wrote credos, recited poetry, and had discussions, as is usually the case. We slowed down the syllabus and the "overall plan"; we revised and we heard each others' voices. That has not been the case this year. More often than not, I've heard the sound of my own voice droning over students'. So for the last part of this year my goal is to slow down the learning process, to trim assessments and work, to forget, if ever momentarily, the assessments, and to teach with mindfulness. Life is sweet when it is slow. So should education. Thoughts are only possible when slowed. Reflection, insights, and the deep ruminative, discursive mind comes from the magic of slow time, sleep, and rest, and stillness. This, I feel, was what has been missing this school year.
I've decided to take a little break from social networking, and am hoping to decrease my time online, and do a little writing. So I cancelled my facebook account and see if I can go without it for a month. Of course, an entire country's course is changed by protesters, aided with facebook and a man who works for a search engine company, in the little week I go off the social network. What an incredible, incredible time we live in, when entire countries' courses can be changed with a little chatter over the virtual world.
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