I spent the night before in Shanghai and the city was full in places. Walking from The People’s Square to The Bund took an hour-and-a-half on account of the crowd squeezing itself in between the two tall, young-but-old-looking edifices of Nanjing road. Everyone stopped for a photo in front of the Fairmont Peace Hotel. But it was cold after a while and so I watched the crowd melt into the bluish back streets of Shanghai and sauntered along beneath cable car lines.

On a ferry for the other side of Huangpu river, the bottom deck was filled end-to-end by delivery drivers on electric bikes, each in the distinct apparel of their employer: yellow, orange, green, and blue. Those in yellow, driving for the delivery service Meituan, sported plastic kangaroo ears on their helmets. It was full and it was silent. They all sat there in that ferry in Shanghai as they sit at red lights in Suzhou (and often as they sit while operating their vehicles), engrossed in the lights blaring from one of their two or three mobile phones. The 30 or so drivers sat on their bikes in the ferry’s metal hull in a hunched or bowing pose, the silhouette of temple worship. Though instead, there and then, it was an image of the kind of isolation which is the twin of convenience. They earn very little, a few Australian dollars per delivery, to shuttle food, groceries, cleaning supplies, etc to their customers. Reception of the delivery will be a phone call and your things left in a locker or on a bench. The whole process is full of people, you the orderer, the people who prepare the goods at the shop or restaurant, and the delivery driver; even so, the interaction is almost entirely without any human interaction. Ultimately, the freedom afforded by such as these ends up being very close, on the psychological continuum, to loneliness. Maybe this will come up later on in SZH. It was as quiet on the upper deck and the air still had the early spring’s night chill. A few other solo travellers stood scattered on the deck, in a pattern which could be more or less replicated by observing the end position of a handful of billiard balls scattered by a powerful drive. What separated us was that we did not know each other and had no reason to start.

Shanghai is a city with a bigger population than Australia. Therefore, to me, ‘crowded’ has acquired a meaning beyond “hard to find somewhere to set down,” namely, “how it feels to be a meaningless face in a thicket of people.” It’s a sad, floral, weak-cordial kind of feeling. Sonder, a neologism created to describe the peculiar sorrow of realising, maybe on the highway or walking through a shopping centre or something, that the lives of every person you pass are as dense and complex as yours. The sadness of sonder is that the complexity, the richness of the lives of strangers, is something which can only really be glimpsed at like a louse on the frayed end of an Anatolian rug. But what I felt wasn’t a bitter yearning for the chance to see the beauty of the tapestry. I felt sonder’s shadow. That is to say, this louse found it hard not to think, regardless of what it believes, that there is meaninglessness in numbers. That the lives behind all the faces did not belong to fellow subjects but were merely other objects of the street, because not in spite of their numerosity. Common as dirt. This is a human way of seeing things, taking rarity for value. I really do not believe that is the way things are but it’s how everything looked from inside the crowd looking in.

When I walked through the hallway at the end of baggage collection in Hong Kong airport I saw the first two faces I really knew in months. Mum cried a bit when she hugged me. She told me that she told my little sister that I would be used to crowds by now, so don’t expect him to be hanging back from everyone else when everyone comes down the hallway. Apparently I didn’t. We chatted mostly about little things. Like the tea they had just tried at the Hostel and how it had been deemed “the coffee of tea” by my little sister. Hong Kong is a lot less convenient than Mainland China. You need an Octopus card to pay for public transport. You need to buy a physical card with cash. You can only top up the Octopus card with cash. You can only top up the Octopus card in cash denominations of $50HKD or $100HKD. Certain Octopus cards can be refunded for the value of the card and anything on it, others can not. Some shops take Octopus cards as payment, others do not. You have to carry many denominations of cash. Some of the coins are weird as, by the way. We sat together on the train and looked out the window. Mum told me she and my little sister had been struck by how all the lights implied all the windows and all the windows implied all the people who had been packed in like that to all of those buildings while they rode the line the night before. She couldn’t imagine so many people. I told them about coffin homes. We rode the train for about 40 minutes and spoke mostly of little things. Sometimes I looked at them. Not the way of looking which is a part of communicating: reading emotions in faces and watching lips for comprehension, etc, but the way of looking that’s just receiving. It’s a cousin of watching, I guess. If you do it to (notice: to) someone long enough they’ll smile a little and say “…what?” Even in the middle of a thought. They looked at me like that too.

The doors of the MRT clattered open. A small crowd heaved itself on to the platform as an equal and opposite crowd heaved itself off. Sham shui po station. The air is immediately warmer and wetter and you regret wearing jeans. Dim lights and stained cement. So many different people. I was struck by the diversity of the crowd. Young and old, of various shades of every skin tone under the sun, in all sorts of clothes: burkas, turbans, rip-off apparel (notably a ‘Njke’ hat), barbie-pink plastic sunglasses and worn out thongs, all pattering together and babbling that precise babble of a handful of languages, beneath algae-green tiles and upon a lino floor. And none of them staring at you. Exit at Golden Computer Centre. Another crowd swelled in the square. The market at the end of the station seemed to carry the goods of every name-brand you can think of, spelt, as you imagine, an unimaginable number of ways. I walk towards the YHA and with every step feel the brutal swamp-like conditions in my jeans setting in. A middle-aged woman flapped washing out the window of a building enmeshed in bamboo scaffolding. My little sister wondered aloud about what would happen if a shirt fell down to the street below. Our accommodation, the historic Mei Ho house, constructed as emergency residence after the shek kip mei fire. A fire started christmas day 1953 when a bucket of molten rubber burnt a shanty town to the ground which had been populated exclusively by immigrants from the mainland, killing two and displacing 53 000. It is now as it was then.

Hong Kong is the city which bears in its bones the impression of East meets West. It’s a city of contradictions and many moods. It’s old and limping. It’s beautiful. I took it as a point of significance that they came to Hong Kong on their way to the UK. I joked like three times to two different people that Hong Kong is exactly half way between England and China. I was wrong about that and I knew it, but as the stan who wrote the preface to Tolstoy’s “What is Art?” in 1899 after admitting a contradiction in Tolstoy’s argument once said, “I venture to think that anyone of intelligence, and free from prejudice, reading this book (blog?) carefully, need not fail to reach the author’s intention.” Over the next few posts I am going to talk some more about Hong Kong as a place. This post has been seriously difficult to write. Every time I sat down to de-blank the page I’d end up profoundly frustrated by every attempt I made to try and make clear what I want to say about Hong Kong. Mum, on the phone, suggested that I break it into piece. So I will. And I guess in the spirit of not beating around the bush, I can say that Hong Kong is a place where I didn’t feel alone.

Mum said, at some point during the weekend, apropos of nothing outside of her head, “I was worried that as nice as this is it would make things harder for you when we leave.” It did. I asked her at a different point during the weekend, “Did I do the right thing by deciding to go straight through airport security as soon as possible when I left? Do you think I should’ve spent more time with you guys instead of ripping the band aid off?” She said she thought I made the right decision because waiting wouldn’t’ve made it easier to go. I didn’t cry when I left Australia, but I did leaving Hong Kong. Maybe it was because I knew better what I was leaving behind and what I was returning to. It was actually quite embarrassing. I was sat right at the back of the plane. The guy next to me was the kind of crazy you, for reasons unbeknownst to any of us, exist only on public transport. He wore a socceroos jersey so I knew where he was from. But the guy was a menace. He had a copy of War and Peace open to the first page. Fresh. Then, moments before take off, produced a glad-wrapped croissant from his pocket. Every bite went like this: he’d unwrap the squashed croissant, curl his lips back, teeth-pinch a patch of pastry, then wrap it back up. I watched him do this over and over again. But all the while fighting back the storm swelling behind my eyes. I’d scruntch my face and stare at different parts of the plane, hide my face in my heads, wipe tears as quickly as they came, making my eyes red and my cheeks hurt. We made a pretty weird pair there at the back of the plane.

P.s.,

This one is super fragmented. I spent like twice the normal amount of time writing it and ended up with about half the quality. Hopefully the next one will be better.

This May 4th will not only be the 47th anniversary of ‘Star Wars Day,’ it will also be the 107th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, the political moment in which modern China was conceived. In this log I will only discuss the linguistic consequences of 5/4, but hopefully there will be more opportunities to return to this thesis, later.

5/4 was sparked by a student protest against the Treaty of Versailles, and by extension the powers of the Triple Entente, for the provision which allowed Japan to retain possession of territories in modern 山东 which had been captured from Germany during WW1. The ancient dynastic cycle had ended only seven years prior and political appetites were hungry for upheaval. The movers and shakers in barely post-dynastic China (including 鲁迅) agreed that the language itself bore some responsibility for China’s weakness in global affairs. Even Chinese people think Chinese is hard! Usually the second or third thing a stranger will ask me in conversation is, “你觉得中文很难吗?” Chinese’ hardness, even today, is considered sufficiently atmospherically omnipresent to qualify for a topic of small talk. These movers and shakers, back then, thought that if Chinese were an easier language, China would be more literate. More literate, more advanced, ergo, more influential in the international sphere, read: taken seriously at mahogany peace tables in French palaces. I’d like to specify that the decision made in Versailles was not strictly a cause but more like a salience of wider, older feelings in China, namely, that they had fallen behind the West by a lot.

At this time the written Chinese and spoken Chinese had so diverged that mastery of the written form required a not insubstantial quantity of a lifetime’s worth of training. Think: writing Latin, speaking English. Contemporary to 1919, the written Chinese had been frozen for centuries, while the spoken had continued to live and evolve. This divergence between the written Chinese and spoken Chinese is a consequence of the language’s most defining feature: pictograms.仓颉 is the mythical figure credited for the invention of Chinese characters. As the legend goes, he was a ‘literally’ four-eyed historian commissioned by the Yellow Emperor to create a writing system. Frustrated by the task, he set himself down on a river bank, and looking up, noticed that constellations of stars represented stories. And looking down that the pattern of a bird’s footprints in the sand, implied the bird itself. He was then inspired by the idea that images could represent things (See: SZH#0, SZH#4) and created a set of pictographic characters for the language.

A pictogram is a simple visual representation of something else. 火 is a pictogram of a fire. 山 is a pictogram of a mountain. 木 is a pictogram of a tree. Pure pictograms like these only compose a very small percentage of characters, but they are the fundamental building blocks of the writing system. For example, you can modify pictograms to specify their meaning. Adding a stroke at the bottom of 木 gives you 本 which means ‘root.’ These modified-pictograms are called ideograms. Then, you can get crazy and start combining characters. So, 木 is tree, right? Well, guess what 林 means? How about 森? If you guessed, ‘two trees’ and ‘three trees’ respectively, buddy, I’ve got a STEM degree to sell you. No, they mean ‘forest’ and ‘full of trees.’ These kinds of characters are called ideogrammic compounds. The next kind of character is the most common: phono semantic compounds. This means that one part of the character tells you roughly what it means and the other part tells you roughly what it sounds like. For example, the word for ‘word’, 话 has the speech/language radical on the left (讠) that tells you its roughly about words and the character (舌) on the right that tells you its roughly pronounced like ‘she’. Phono semantic compounds make up the majority of the writing system in Chinese. There are two other types of characters which do not use pictograms at all, but they compose a very small minority of the writing system. Most Chinese characters represent what they indicate.

Phonetic writing systems, on the other hand, reflect the spoken language. ‘S’ doesn’t inherently mean anything. It’s just a symbol which represents a set of sounds in English. Sometimes these sounds can have associations which can be put to use in things like sibilance, assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc, but they are hardly encoded in the symbol itself. Sometimes particular symbols can have associations with things too, but they are so simple that these associations are usually very broad and nebulous. Playing with that stuff is pretty much exclusively the domain of graphic designers, some…poets…, and freaks who know how to wield ASCII. There’s no essential reason why we draw the letter ‘T’ like that, or like this ‘⊥’. The written system is arbitrary. But of course, arbitrary doesn’t mean random. It’s very important that everyone agrees that ‘T’ represents the same set of sounds in English or it would become a useless symbol. Actually, in that case it would become an instance of ‘private language’ something proven to be well and truly impossible by Wittgenstein.

What is beautiful about a phonetic writing system is that if you have learnt the handful of rules needed to decode the symbols, you can read anything it is possible to write in that language. You mightn’t understand what it means, but you can read it. If there is a word you don’t know, you can sound it out. And before spelling was standardised, if you could say a word, you could write it. Even today, most spelling mistakes are caused by colloquialisms, accents, and other ‘speaking mistakes.’ But how do you sound out a pictogram? Or an ideogram? Or an ideogrammic compound? Or even, know which pronunciation to use when you encounter a phono semantic compound? You don’t. You have to be taught by someone else. There is no ‘linked pronunciation’ to Chinese characters in the way that there is a ‘linked pronunciation’ in phonetic languages.

To illustrate this, as well as the ancient heft of this language, I’ll tell you a little about ‘The Book of Odes’. The subtitle for SZH#5 is a quote from Confucius. He said (loosely translated by me), “If you don’t study The Odes, what do you have to say?” The eponymous ‘Book of Odes,’ or ‘诗经’ in mandarin, is a collection of anonymous poems written for music, performed in public, adored by Confucius (folklore has it edited into a volume by him), and composed in or around the 11th-7th century BC. Today, these poems are perfectly readable by a modern audience with one important exception: They are so old they have lost their rhyme. Over time, the shifts in pronounciation have left old words with new sounds. Contemporary Chinese readers know what a poem says but they don’t know how it sounds. So, to what extent can they (modern Chinese speakers) actually read them (The Odes)? Discuss. In fact, contemporary Chinese linguists use the rhyming conventions of ‘The Odes’ as a massive logic puzzle to try and piece together how Ancient Chinese would’ve been spoken. If you don’t study the odes, what do you have to say?

So now, put yourself in the head of an ambitious reformer who has seen with their own eyes the death of the last dynasty, who has personal command of a language so divorced from it’s writing system that ‘The Odes’ stopped rhyming 1400 years ago, and has spent the past few decades facing the reality that The West is already over the horizon, and has been for some time. What would you be willing to do or believe to try and catch up? The government decided that the ancient Chinese characters were too heavy a burden for a modern society. Difficulty in learning to read and write these characters would be addressed in the short term by sweeping simplification to the characters, but in the long term, the plan was to completely abandon them altogether. The alternative was a phonetic writing system called, not kidding, Bopomofo. Batches of simplified Chinese characters were released from the 1930s, with the last release occurring in 1974. That final release wreaked havoc by the creation of a double-standard, oversimplification leading to confusion, and refusal by some to adopt the new characters. Then in 1976, just two years later, that last batch of simplified characters were removed and plans to adopt Bopomofo were permanently tabled. Incidentally, Bopomofo is still used today as a format for some Chinese character keyboards, most frequently in Taiwan. I also know, personally, of at least one person who thinks that learning mandarin using Bopomofo is more helpful than pinyin, he also lives in Taiwan. The picture below shows Bopomofo letters. That’s what the written Chinese language may have looked like if history had transpired even slightly differently.

What would have been lost if the last purely character-based language was condemned to the eternal and universal ash for the virtue of being too difficult? The obvious place to start is culture. Chinese characters are encoded with information about meaning, not just information about how to pronounce it. That means that the words have culture inside them. A character you see a lot of during CNY is 福. The components of this character mean: clothes, a roof over your head, mouths to feed, and a piece of land. That’s the Chinese word for prosperity. For you who are watching from home, feel free to play along and think for yourself about how this concept differs from the western concept of prosperity. Once you’ve done that, feel free to realise that you have just gained an insight into a different culture based on nothing more than how a word is written. But the obvious answer, culture, is really just passing the buck because it doesn’t explain why this culture should be protected. A lot of people seem to find it intuitive that culture is inherently valuable, therefore, worth protecting. But, that’s clearly not the case because many, many wicked human cultures have been uncontroversially (and worthily) dismantled and lost to time. I think there’s a deeper reason than the preservation of culture for what makes Chinese characters special.

17th century philosopher John Wilkins wished to create a universal language which ordered the entire universe, scientifically. His language functioned like the taxonomy system used in modern biology. It never caught on. In response, two hundred years later, Jorge Louis Borges quoted from a document supposedly found in Ancient China called the ‘Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge,’ in which all of the animals of the world had been categorised according to whether they: belonged to the Emperor, were embalmed, were trained, were suckling pigs, were mermaids, were from fables, were stray dogs, were included in this classification, trembled as though mad, were innumerable, were drawn with a fine camel’s hair brush, had just broken a vase, or looked like flies from a great distance. His point was that any man-made system for categorising the universe is arbitrary for the simple reason that we don’t know what the universe is. Unfortunately for Borges, I think he is wrong on both fronts. Because, although phonetic languages are pretty much totally arbitrary as a written and spoken system, Chinese isn’t.

The spoken word is binary. It either means something or it doesn’t. If I make a sound halfway between the sound which means ‘Man’ and the sound which means ‘Horse’ it doesn’t mean something halfway between ‘Man’ and ‘Horse,’ like ‘Centaur,’ no, it means absolutely nothing. The same is pretty much true for phonetic writing systems. Writing a word halfway between two other words doesn’t mean something halfway between those words. Words are a binary mode of communication. Humans also have continuous modes of communication, namely, anything on the sound or light spectrum. Sound frequencies only have to be audible to be capable of provoking a response in the listener. It’s not like only certain notes or certain colours carry meaning, they all do as long as they can be perceived. Excluding language, anything that can be considered ‘art’ is probably communicated in a continuous mode. But because the written Chinese is built on pictograms, it more or less violates this principle.

The written Chinese is exceptionally (and with exceptions) language in a continuous mode. Fascinatingly, I think it is due to the fact that the written Chinese is mostly continuous that its writing system is not arbitrary. It might be argued that pictograms contain a degree of arbitrariness, maybe 木 could have been written with three strokes instead of four. Sure, but it could never be written like 山. Chinese characters are not arbitrary in the way Borges suggests because they reflect a reality outside of the mind. These characters appeal directly to the world. Language is the point of contact between inside and outside our minds. It’s the tool we use to interface with reality. And Chinese is difficult because it is an interfacing tool that does not reference itself but the world outside of itself. Therefore, it belongs to the order of footprints in the sand and constellations in the sky.

Definitions and Pinyin

• 不学诗，为以言: bùxuéshī, wéiyǐyán: If you don’t study the odes, what will you have to say?

• 山东: shāndōng: A province in China (East Mountain).

• 鲁迅: lǔxùn: One of the earliest and best known modern Chinese writers (1881-1936).

• 你觉得中文很难吗?: nǐ juéde zhōngwén hěn nán ma?: Do you think Chinese is really hard?

• 仓颉: cāng jié: Mythical inventor of the Chinese writing system.

• 火: huó: fire.

• 山: shān: mountain.

• 木: mù: tree.

• 本: běn: root.

• 林: lín: forest.

• 森: sēn: full of trees.

• 话: huà: word.

• 舌: shé: tongue.

• 诗经: shījīng: The Book of Odes.

• 福: fù: prosperity.

Your correspondent has included some more chinese words in this log, so pronunciation guides and definitions for the new words will be available at the bottom of the page. This will be the convention from now on. And if he (your correspondent) may make a suggestion, consider looking at the chinese characters as words rather than skipping your eyes over them. At least one of the words in this log is a pictogram (a simple visual representation of the object it signifies), see if you can figure out which one it is.

This year 清明节 and easter fell on the same weekend. 清明节 is for venerating your ancestors by making offerings, cleaning their headstones and tombs, and then having a picnic on their graves. However, in the big city, and among those who do not worship their ancestors, it’s a good excuse to go travelling. So, I visited 西山岛 with some Aussie friends from the program.

西山 is an island in 太湖. 太湖 roughly translates to ‘Great lake.’ It’s the third biggest freshwater lake in China, with a perimeter about 400 km long and a surface area of about 2400 km^2. According to Geoscience Australia, that’s roughly the same surface surface area as Canberra. 西山岛 was about an hour and half by car from where I’m living in 苏州. It’s the largest island in 太湖 and has a population of 45 000. The island lives off tourism and tea. Surrounded by that large, still lake, it’s dense with vegetation and heritage. Ancient buddhist temples, pagodas, and pavilions sit among greenery, mottle-patched, like a grange’s garden gone wild. We arrived during a harvest. By day women roasted the leaves in large, black, wok-shaped metal bowls. Using their hands, they stirred piles of browning leaves around different parts of the bowl. As night fell, we passed signs hung on restaurant windows declaring 收绿叶; half the pane reflected-back the darkening dusk and the other glowed-out the white fluorescent light from inside, where restaurant owners and their friends sat over round tables silently picking through piles of leaves. Exploring the island, largely on foot, I was struck by the confluence of two, sort of, discordant themes. On the one hand there was the simple beauty of the island. Wind flowed through trees, waving branches with leaves and flowers on. The hushing sound of water against stone. And the second theme was this messy, slap-dash infrastructure of the town. It seemed like almost all of everything not ancient was held together by improvised-solutions-made-permanent. Roads in disrepair, ghost villages and empty streets. See below, a guy in a van filled with junk watching while a diesel pump ear splittingly throbbed water through a filter.

These two themes reached their crescendo in a cave we visited. The cave is known in the Taoists classics as one of the 10 heavenly palaces below heaven, the one we visited was the ninth. Formed by the same tectonic events which thrust the island out from the lake, it has been used in ancient ceremonies for longer than people have spoken any kind of English; and it was set up for modern, public consumption in a way that was totally at odds with everything Australia had taught me to expect from natural heritage sites (heritage, natural sites and/or natural, heritage sites??????). The insides of the cave were lined with bright LED lights. Laser shows projected across the stalactites, ribbed black pipes fed smoke machines by pools of water, fake plastic flowers and lily pads, UV lights, ambient music, etc. It honestly looked like the cave rave from The Matrix Reloaded, or actually, more like how the engineers at Disney theme parks would design a que for a Matrix-Reloaded-Cave-Rave-themed-child-friendly attraction (MRCRTCFA patent p-p-pending). I have linked a video at the end of this log with a walkthrough for those who are interested to see for themselves. The guy in the video went at a time when there was no one else there. When we went the entire standing space was occupied by a line which ran from cave mouth to cave-... What do you call the part of a cave opposite to its mouth again?

A little girl and her father were standing in front of me in the line to the end of the cave’s guts. I noticed this thing that happened about four or five times. Whenever our part of the line shuffled over to an interesting looking pool or crevice, the father would retrieve his phone out from his jacket pocket and take a photo. Then, the little girl, upon occupying the same space in the cave-que proximal to the site of interest, would then also take her phone out and capture the exact same photo. This struck me as cute. Later in the day before, we had visited a scenic location known for being the best place on the island to watch the sunset over 太湖. We arrived about a half hour before sunset. The path to the lookout was lined with street food and knick knack vendors and the lookout itself already hosted a hundred people or more. It was not a clear day, the sunset was not visible. But all of us there had still gone there anyway to take what would have been, essentially, the exact same photograph. I was reminded of that last night’s revelation probably the third time the little girl took the same photo as her dad. Then something broke through. I realised that this little girl’s dad had also, this entire time, been taking the exact same photos as the stranger standing in front of him. And that stranger as the one in front of him. And that stranger as the one in front of…her. My eyes swam in my face like a hillbilly learning to read as my mind played an image of the whole digestive-tract line of us taking identical photos of the ninth heaven under the sky.

On the fourth of January 2026, in preparation for my trip to China, I purchased a Fujifilm X100 FinePix camera. Released to the market in February 2011, the camera features a 12.3 megapixel digital sensor, a hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder, and a classic button-and-dial style interface. That may sound powerful for those without a frame of reference, but my camera has about the same quantity of megapixels as 2017’s iPhone 10. In every way it is a fifteen year-old camera. However, on the day of acquisition, I made myself three promises: I would not take photos of the camera, I would not take photos of myself, I would not take photos about the camera. I made these promises because the X100 is a beautiful machine. Almost every time I wear it in public, slung around my neck in its original leather case and strap, members of the public feel compelled to tell me what they think about it. They usually say some variation of, “That’s a good camera.” What’s funny is they almost definitely have a more powerful camera in their pocket. I take this complement to really mean, “That’s a good-looking camera.” Which perhaps, in the world of images, suffices for goodness itself in the eyes of the public.

I purchased the camera from Facebook marketplace. By the way, every single person selling a camera on Facebook marketplace in the Sydney region at the time of my purchase was either an asian male or a caucasian female. I don’t know what to do with this information. If you do, feel free to tell me! Or don’t! It really is up to you. Soon after the purchase I joined photography-centric internet spaces on websites like Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit. I wanted to learn how to take a photo, to learn what a photo was, and maybe even, what a good photo was. I wanted the best photos I took to go on my weblog, Suzhou-Hua. I knew they would be important for a reason I’ll talk about in greater detail, later. Every photo you can see on Suzhou-Hua so far, with the exception of one, was taken by me with the X100.

So, standing there in the line to the cave’s end, on the biggest island in the third biggest lake in the third biggest country by landmass and second by population, I asked myself for the first time: what, if anything, was the point of me taking this photo? Why was I there taking the exact same cloud-and-fog-thwarted photo as everyone else? Why did that little girl take the same photo as her dad every chance she got? If I take photos to show people things, well, aren’t there already countless photos of the same stuff? What is one more picture of one more sunset? Why does it need to be my exact photo? If it’s to remember things, why do I need a camera? The old, very outdated quality of our family homevideos recall memories perfectly well. Wouldn’t, then, any do?

Revisiting the promises I made to myself when I bought the X100, I confess that the first two were broken within the month…but the last promise I kept. I kept it because of a sickness I saw in the online photography-orientated internet spaces. One of the two most common types of post in these photography-centered internet spaces were images of new cameras still in the box, with the caption, ‘Look at my new camera.’ The second type were photographs captioned with some variation of, ‘Look, my camera takes the good photos.’ With the second variety, you can see that the photographer was not interested in the subject of the photo as much as they were interested in how the subject justified the photograph. Therefore, how the photograph justified the camera. You can see it by the quantity of photo per photo (p/pp p-p-patent p-p-pending). A camera continues to sell itself to you after you have bought it, if you make it. Every beautiful photo a coin in the ‘Didn’t waste my money’ jar.

Photographers love their gear almost as much as they hate receiving the comment, ‘Your camera takes the good photos.’ That comment implies that their beautiful photos are not a product of their skill but of the camera’s technical sophistication. The very same technical sophistication photographers themselves pass great swathes of their lives discussing, meticulously analysing, min/maxing with budget, and bragging about to other photographers on the internet. Complaints about the phrase ‘Your camera takes the good photos,’ are, incredibly, the third most common post in these photography-centric internet places. Seemingly, without irony. That’s why I promised myself that I wouldn’t take pictures about my camera. I didn’t want to dishonour this beautiful machine by making it justify itself to me. I wanted to use it as a tool to take pictures of other things, or even as an instrument. A camera shouldn’t be pointed at itself, especially if it’s beautiful.

In this log I have discussed images and infrastructure. They’re both handholds, things people use to simplify interfacing with the world around them. Roads simplify travelling, houses simplify weather, streetlights simplify the dark, etc. Images, in the same way, simplify the experience of the photographer into something transmissible. Images are meaning containers, like words. A lot more on that, later. I think one of the reasons that images are powerful is that they can contain some kinds of meaning that words can not. Qualia, for example. Qualia is a term used by philosophers which describes the non-physical experience of living. Non-physical means not recordable/measurable/tangible/etc. Basically, something invisible to the scientific process. Qualia isn’t something that you can give away. It can only be received. Some people don’t believe in qualia, but I do, and I think images live off it. A good photograph will ring true when it when it recalls a real, incommunicable feeling you know. A skilled photographer won’t, therefore, just record a moment, they’ll express it. Articulate it. And if they take care to articulate that moment with honesty, and a high regard for truth (See: SZH#0), their photos will be good.

However, man-made images, like man-made infrastructure, are fallen (I agonised over pluralisation and verb conjugation in this sentence, unfortunately every option was wrong). Like the photographs I discussed earlier, the MRCRTCFA was infrastructure about itself. That cave’s glacial transversal of time was not honoured by what they did to it. By what we did to it. ‘We’ being the every one one of all of us made culpable by mere virtue of witnessing the MRCRTCFA and doing nothing about it other than taking another, indistinguishable-from-every-one-of-all-the-other-images, image home with us on a small hard drive inside our respective digital devices. Images shouldn’t be about themselves and infrastructure shouldn’t be about itself. Ever since after The Beginning people have exchanged worship of The Subject for worship of images. But our images won’t last. One day that cave will be empty and the island will be quiet and all the images in the world will be returned to their rightful place.

Pronunciation guide:

清明节: qīng míng jiē - Tomb sweeping festival.

• ‘q’ makes a ‘ch’ sound like in ‘chip’ mixed with a light/front-of-the-mouth ‘ts’ sound like in ‘let’s

• ‘j’ makes a soft, front-of-the-mouth ‘j’ sound.

• ‘e’ makes a ‘eh’ sound like in ‘epic’.

西山岛: xī shān dǎo - Western Mountain Island.

• ‘x’ makes a light ‘sh’ sound, also at the front of your mouth, mixed with an ‘s’ sound.

太糊: tài hú - Great Lake/Lake Tai

• ‘u’ in this word makes an ‘oo’ sound like in ‘school’.

收绿叶: shōu lü(\) yè - Harvest green leaves.

• ‘ou’ makes a ‘ow’ sound like in ‘stow’

• ‘ü’ is a vowel in chinese which doesn’t exist in english. One way to make that sound is by going ‘treeeeeeeeė’ and then bringing your lips together to a tight ‘o’ shape while still making the sound.

Linwu Cave Walkthrough:

The sky was the colour of old concrete and the rains fell until tomorrow. I had been awake for 27 hours and badly wanted to erase every impression the journey had made on my body.

My breath was stale and tasted like the average of the handfuls of plane-food I had milled to paste in my mouth. Closing my eyes I rolled my head towards my left shoulder and scraped my right hand down my face from hairline to jawbone, actually feeling the grease collect under my fingernails. I sat in the back of the shuttle bus that was taking the arriving international students from Pudong Airport to our accommodation and rested my head against the cold window. Countless percussive impacts of bus on road were transmitted into my bones and registered in my ears as humming white noise, and in my face as jiggling of the fleshy bits of my face. I had been awake for 32 hours. Out the window silhouettes of vast cement structures marched by one after the other. Corners, harsh white LED lights, and polished-slate-coloured glass all composed atavistic shapes which loomed out from dense cloud and thick rain like nightmares from memory. Rows upon rows of aisles upon aisles of identical, grey monoliths. Eventually, the interaction of outside’s late-winter rain and inside’s fifty or so bodies expirating hot breath fogged the windows so that droplets ran down both sides of the pane. The air began to stink like an afternoon school bus after a humid day. I closed my eyes and felt each of the animal sensations of being an unwashed body in motion.

In some deep place they remained closed for most of that day. I hated it here. Every building looked the same, every street corner like every other street corner. We arrived at the student accomodation. Two of seven identical crescent-shaped buildings, each 25 floors tall or more. Painted a once-vibrant yellow, they were now appeared the colour of wet sand through cloud-filtered daylight and sleety rain. We still had hours to go. The bureaucratic procedures required of every foreigner living in China are strange and long. For four hours I gazed at the sleet face of The State and felt its cold breath on mine. Inside every room the same goosebump-patterned black plastic chairs, catching the blunt-instrument-like white light of fluorescent poles in the same as way as in all the others. I looked out the window at the neighbouring buildings, their exterior metal fixings: bars across windows, laundry poles, air conditioning units, etc, all decaying and rust-running ochre and clay coloured streaks down the face of the wall beneath them. I had been awake for 38 hours and felt very far away.

That night I wrapped up in all the warm clothes I bought from home and went out for a walk in the rain. There was one stall set up on the street outside my building. I walked towards the red light cast by it’s sign. It’s light splashed out onto the rain-slick road surface, reflecting as tiny red dots on each and every rock protruding from the tar black. As I approached I saw a small old woman hugging herself under the awning of the cart. Thick drops of water falling, unpatterned, from it’s back and sides. She wore a beanie on her head and thick scarf around her neck, the end of which she flicked over her back as I made my approach. Her rain jacket was camouflage-green and old with many visible holes. By way of the holes I saw that it was thin, too. She smiled at me. Her smile was big and created great movement of the tanned skin of her face, in some places it folded together into deep crevices, in others it was taught and shiny; the deepest parts of her face were along the forehead and in the corners of her mouth. She was missing a few teeth. I smiled back.

On one side resting of the chopping board built into the cart was a lump of dough, a jar of chili sauce, and a pile of chopped spring onions. The other side was a raised, smooth aluminium coloured disc. In the centre of the disc was a raised hole, imagine an extremely flat volcano, it looked like that. The woman used the aluminum plate, heated invisibly-to-me by some kind of gas burner, to fry the dough into circular crusts. She spread those crusts with chili sauce and sprinkled them with the chopped spring onions. I bought two because she didn’t have any change and that was what the smallest denomination of cash I had was worth. As she fried the dough I watched breaths of steam roll from the cart out into the rain. Catching the colour of rain and night lights. Her wet face shone with it, reflected street lights and headlights that cast puddles of light in the dark irises of her eyes.

I turned around to look at the building at my back. It’s faces were glossy and black and it’s sides were lined with LED lights programmed to display a shimmering pattern of deep reds and bluetooth blues. Those lights bled angular shapes into the rain. I watched it for a while. Each drop in the light. I ate my food under the awning. The old lady rubbed her arms. On an ordinary night there would be 20 or more vendors on this street, selling food to the young workers and university students who live in my precinct. But that night it was just her. I suppose that rain and cold did not suffice for a good enough reason for her not to go out and sell her food. Two full ‘fried flat breads’ cost $4 AUD. I ate it hot and burned my mouth beneath the awning in the night that was still young and raining with late-winter rain.

Last weekend your correspondent visited Disneyland Shanghai with his friend Nick. Some of you reading this (or having it read to you in dulcet tones) will know her. There’s a lot to say about this experience. Too much for me to handle, frankly. So, instead, I’m gonna talk about mementos. Hopefully my discussion of mementos, like mementos themselves, will suffice as representation for the whole thing.

The first kind of memento is this thing, a brain-sucker (see above). I think what I find really wonderful about the brain-suckers is that they are terrible to behold from any angle. From the back (pictured above), the stuffed T-posing figure dangles limp upon the wearer’s neck. It’s arms, legs and, in most cases, tail sway to and fro with the rhythm of pedestrian locomotion, as if in some modern recontextualised image of a proud hunter bearing slain game on his shoulder. From the front, the brain-sucker’s head is now seen to only exist above the upper jaw. Oh! What a poor, bedevilled creature! To forever bite and never chew! Surely it’s sorrow is as great as the dust-ruminating snake, for it’s head is so many times larger than it’s atrophied body!1 Far more horrifying, though, is the creature viewed in profile.

People wear things inside Disneyland which they would never wear outside, never dare to. I imagine almost all of the brainsuckers I saw will soon enter a closet from which they will not return. But that doesn’t matter while you’re there. Everything in Disneyland adds up to a culture which makes people participate. The ambient music is tracks from the movies rearranged to sound both grand and nostalgic, and fitting with whichever themed area you occupy at that time. The buildings with their minute details and faux-cobble stones, and the characters in costume, and the guests in costume, the themed food and themed waiting lines. On some level, conscious or sub-, guests in Disneyland always participate. For some the participation is active and intentional, like dressing up as their favourite character. For others, participation may simply be not slack-jaw staring at every single person dressed as Daffy Duck, and not realising that they’re not staring, either.

The last time I went to Disneyland I was 15. Mum and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa put money together so that when my family went on a road-trip through the USA we could do Disney World. I think this was around the time I had developed an outwardly jocular though inwardly hot frustration with my Mum’s desire to take family photos everywhere, all the time. Like most teenagers I found my picture hard to look at, unlike most teenagers I developed a ridiculous reason to insulate myself from feeling that way. Mum said her favourite pictures were candid photos. Candid means that you’re taking a picture of someone genuinely in the moment, not posing or pulling a face in recognition of the camera pointed at them.

So, with those two principles I developed the practice of staring blank-facedly directly at any camera I saw in my mother’s hands. This was because, "The only authentically candid way to respond to a camera once you are aware of it is to acknowledge that anything you do after becoming aware of the camera is performance (therefore not candid), and so you must stare directly at it.” And also, “I thought you liked candid photos?”

And so at that age, being that teenager, I went to Disneyland. After our first day in the park Mum had taken us to the most advantageous vantage spot to watch the fireworks. Every night, twice a night, the theme park closes with a light, music, and firework show. The show has an arc. Usually it will start with some characters singing about how they want to explore the world, find their true self, be a well rounded considerate human being, etc. Then there will be songs about the beauty and wonder of the world, followed by villian themes and fire balls and high distortion guitar riffs on the melody of ‘poor unfortunate souls,’ etc. And then in the end there will be the cathartic reassertion that even though it was scary and hard to venture into the real world, look at all these different Disney characters who all came out better and stronger at the end, etc.

It is hard to describe the effect of this show. On one hand the message is so simple it’s hard to believe that the show is about anything other than communicating Truth about the world. On the other hand it is so so obvious how every detail of the show is about integration, brand identity, messaging, advertising, that you are made to feel like an ant at the still-standing statue of Ozymandias the Market Titan. When I was 15 I felt both of these things, loudly. I felt scornful about the oblique marketing. But I also felt something real, something blazing with meaning and purpose and hope and I felt like life really would be a great adventure, and that I really could set out on those journeys, etc. And the instant that those feelings peeked from the watery surface of my unconscious, I felt shame. Embarrassed that it worked on me. And as I was tasting my shame and rationalising it away, I heard my little brother who that whole time had been standing right there beside me, my little brother who was about seven or eight and who had seen everything I had seen but without the hot shame of an adolescent who felt something, tug at mums arm, quietly turn to her and whisper…

Well, I didn’t get permission to share what he actually said. But you can decide for yourself what you think he would’ve said. The memory I spent the past four paragraphs trying to sketch was the immediate first thing to smash my brain after I saw a little girl dressed as a princess sitting on her father’s shoulders crack a grin like a bolt of lighting when she saw Judy Hopps round the corner to our leg of the parade and I thought to myself, It would be magical to bring your kids here. The second thought was of a memory, nearly forgotten. When my mum went to Disneyland with her parents (aforementioned Grandma and Grandpa) she purchased a glass statue of the rose from Beauty and the Beast. The statue depicted the rose standing, still strong but wilting, under a glass cover where at the base lay glass petals. When you pressed a button on the base of the statue the platform spun and a gentle, stripped back orchestration of the main theme ‘Beauty and the Beast’ would play.

Mum cherished this statue. She took it home from the States on her lap the whole flight to ensure it wouldn’t break in her bag. She cared for it and kept it safe as she moved house after house. Eventually it ended up on the top shelf in my room. I was about seven or eight years old, the same age as my youngest brother at the fireworks. I wanted to look at the statue so I climbed the shelves. With one adam-like gesture I reached up to grab it, my clammy little frog hand stuck to the class, and my fingers gripped it white. Then I lost my footing and fell backwards, bringing that delicate glass statue with me, and shattering it on the ground. It was the first time something Mum cherished had been broken by someone else. It might’ve made her cry, to see that cherished artefact of her own memories and childhood laying strewn thusly on the floor.

I shared these two anecdotes with you because they were my figurative brain-sucker when I visited Disneyland. The crashing waves of realisation and dimly remembered snatches of conversations, the sudden awareness of the fact that my mum taking her family to Disneyland when I was 15 was directly related to how her family took her to Disneyland when she was 16, and what it meant that I hated smiling in every photo she tried to take on that trip, and what it meant when I smashed her statue, and the real profundity of what my little brother whispered into her ear that night while the last fireworks shimmered away beneath the stars and I burned inwardly with shame for thinking the exact same thing; and all of it triggered by a little girl sitting on her dad’s shoulders grinning so hard it might’ve hurt in the morning. That was my participation.

Wearing that brain-sucker I experienced the allure of neverland. When the sun began to set I started telling Nick about how much I was going to miss this once it was over and how I was going to feel so nostalgic about this one day in the future. I listened to the playlist ‘Disney Hits’ by Disney the whole two hour journey home. I allowed my mind to soak in the memories each song surfaced in my mind. By the next day it was mostly out of my system (although I did eat the second half of the donut that was larger than my head for breakfast). But that yearning I felt, even before the day was over, was the power neverland. The power of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is one of the most dominant themes in our cultural expression. Marketers use language like “re-live,” “re-tell,” and “re-experience” both ex- and implicitly in the messages they communicate to us. Nostalgia is undoubtedly a part of that puzzle which I tried to address in SZH#1. One of the points I was aiming for is that nostalgia obsession is really a sign of identity insecurity. If people really believe that all they are is the sum of their experiences, then their childhood is more like mythology than memory. The younger they were, the older the experience, the more important to who they are as a person. But the problem is if you believe you are the sum of your experiences, then you will only ever be the sum of your experiences.

The wholeness of yourself will boil down to what you’ve done and what’s been done to you. Then, the reality that human lives are mostly boring will be oblivion. Every moment spent waiting in lines, terminals, or on hold, at the supermarket, in traffic, at bus stops, train stations, waiting for an email or a phone call or a text message, for webpages to load, for food to cook or be reheated or delivered, waiting to arrive, waiting to leave, for a conversation to end, for something to begin, every single moment of all of it will be the in-breaking of death. Every moment you’ve already forgotten is a moment you never lived, not one of them precious, none of them holy. Now the value of your life is the memorability of its performance. And that’s to say nothing of the other side of the equation: what’s been done to you. In light of this, it’s easy to see why social media has such a ravenously addictive quality to our young. It not only validates that you were here, beyond the touch of always degenerating organic memory, but also, that your life’s content was entertaining.

I think we give two different feelings the name nostalgia. The first is for when you suddenly encounter something which was known to you but has since been forgotten: I didn’t keep this. You feel that kind of nostalgia when you smell something which brings you back, or re-discover that book you love, etc. The second nostalgia is the opposite feeling: I’ve kept this with me the whole time. That’s your favourite childhood movie or dish, something you engage with for comfort. I think it’s fitting that they are both called nostalgia. In this log I tried to demonstrate the power of both of these feelings. The sublime joy of encountering something you didn’t keep (or in my case, consciously abandoned). But also the terrible slavery of believing you are only what you keep. Maybe that’s what Hayao Miyazaki meant when he said of, ‘My neighbour Totoro,’ that he wanted people to watch the movie only twice: once as a child and once again as an adult. Or Clive James when he said in the coda to his ‘Postcards from Sydney’ episode: “…when they ask you why you left you can only give one answer: if I hadn’t gone how could I come back?”

P.s., It has been two weeks since my last post. I won’t post more frequently than once a week, and never less frequently than once every two weeks. I’ve decided that I will wait until I know what I should write about before I sit down at the blank screen. Various themes and avenues for discussion did surface, but I think it’ll be better to address them later. Including, I think, re-attempting the topic of my last post. SZH#1 definetly left some money on the table. By that, I mean I assumed the answer to a few too many too-interesting to ignore questions. More on that later…

I met a domestic student at a tour demonstrating to us international students the best way to take the metro from our dorms to campus. His name is Blaine.

The plan was to catch the number 6 line from the metro stop nearest our apartment until we reached the transfer to the number 8 line. From there we would ride the metro to 仁爱路 (rén ài zhàn (benevolence street(?(incidentally a great band name)))). Unfortunately for me and three other international students and Blaine who each of us lacked the requisite huge guts necessary for stampedishly trampling our way onto the train, we missed it. Those left on the platform after the train had heaved itself away from the LED-lit station and it’s transparent glass doors regathered. Yuna and Soul from South Korea. Kamilla from Russia. Blaine from China. Ethan from Australia. Later, Blaine told us over lunch the providence of his unusual English name.

The main character of a mobile game he liked was called Barry. When it comes to translating names from alphabet languages into Chinese there are two main approaches, the first is to transliterate the sounds, i.e. the Chinese name for Australia is 澳大利亚, pronounced Aòdàlìyà. The second approach is to translate the meaning. Some skilled translators may attempt both at the same time. For example, the first part of the Chinese name for ‘Starbucks’ is 星 (xīng) which means ‘star’ and the second part 巴克 (bākè) sounds like ‘buck’. Consonants without vowels are quite uncommon in Chinese, so the letter ‘s’ at the end of ‘Starbucks’ is omitted. That is also why many native Chinese speakers who are still learning English tend to add extra vowels to the end of words.

Regarding Barry, the Chinese translation in this game sounded something like “beh ahh li” (I neglected to ask for greater detail about which specific characters were used in the moment on account of trying to figure out what exactly my lunch was). So, when it came time for him to choose an English name the translator app he used turned the Chinese transliteration of the stupendously English name ‘Barry’ into the far more gaelic-sounding ‘Blaine’; a name from whose owner one would not be surprised to hear the phrase: My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner’s bog. It was Blaine who recommended that we visit the Humble Administrator’s Garden (拙政园 (zhuō zhèng yuán)).

The Humble Administrator’s Garden is located within an ancient town. I’m not sure whether that is the correct nomenclature for every one of these, but I think it is a fitting term. Despite what their name might suggest, however, ancient towns are usually not very old. Although they do occupy the same space (relative to Earth) as the ancient towns they imitate, modern ancient towns rarely have a continuous history with their namesakes. Most ancient towns have been constructed or reconstructed in the past handful of decades. These buildings are designed to look the way they would’ve looked some hundred or hundreds of years ago, without leaving the convenience of modern life (read: Starbucks) too far behind. Ancient towns like these are popular destinations for the gargantuan Chinese domestic tourism industry. Some estimates put the value of this domestic industry as high as 800bn USD; a value surpassed by the GDP of only the top 21 countries in the world. These towns serve an important purpose. They are an image of authentic China. They are an image of authentic China made for and consumed, almost exclusively, by Chinese people.

The images I have attached to SZH#1 are from the Garden, the Humble Administrator’s Garden. One of the most popular activities in ancient towns (particularly with couples) is to rent opulent ancient-looking gowns and photography equipment and sometime even a photographer and have photos taken among the scenery of the ancient town. For emphasis, these are modern metropolitan people in the costume of their ancestors in a modern metropolitan town in a costume of its ancestor. What I really want to do is avoid making fun of this. I would be easy to call it LARP (Live Action Role Play) or some other more academic-sounding thing (read: On Exactitude in Science) but I think that this is far less foreign then it appears.

I think this is an expression of the whiplash of a quickly changing world. Hundreds of years ago, in the time the ancient towns evoke, your identity was straight forward. I can’t imagine someone, let alone anyone, having a modern-style identity crisis if they had lived in the same place as all of their fathers, worked the same land for the same crop as their fathers, sold it at the same market with the people whose own fathers bartered with theirs, etc. Now, you can be born, live, and die anywhere, having done anything from everything to nothing. To those who seek their identity in the world, there are no easy answers. Especially in a world which has gotten so far away from itself. A world where your history will tell you about as much about who you should be as the costume your girlfriend insisted on renting, and of which you now must take about 18 identical-to-you photos from the same angle, most of which end up being unsatisfactory.

These questions of history and identity and change are being viscerally worked out across the whole world’s stage. In Australia, they arc through the flash points of immigration policy, national pride/shame, housing policy, and whether or not the next generation of teenagers will be able to resist the siren-like temptation of convincing themselves that mullets are cool. At least in China you take the costume off when you’re done with it. If you’ve had a mullet even once you will unfortunately be a person who once had a mullet for the entire rest of your life. At the end of the day, I think all of this basically boils down to, “How do I live in a world which no-one has lived in before?” To you who seek your identity in this world, there are no easy answers. No good ones either.

This will be the only time I talk about my writing or myself, directly. As a general principle, writing about itself tends to be gauche. But I feel that it is necessary for me to be plain about what these logs are for.

‘Suzhou-Hua’ will bear the record of my happenings and doings in the way that long, straight country roads and men’s public toilets both bear the same record of their past user. That is to say, I don’t want these logs to read like a diary. I prefer talking about the people and things I love, in the hope that that suffices for the kind of honesty/vulnerability required for a real human connection. My goal for the content of ‘Suzhou-Hua,’ then, is for it to contain me without being about me. I expect it to be about a multitudinous collection of things. Which, perhaps, when seen at once in big-view, render a True Image of my life and time in China. And maybe more. I hope that when I return and will be asked “How was China?” as often as I have been asked “How do you feel about leaving?” that ‘Suzhou-Hua’ will suffice for the most total answer I can give. That is my current goal for the content of ‘Suzhou-Hua’ which will, no doubt, grow and change over the course of the year. But I’m going to spend the rest of this log discussing the beliefs and revelations which lead to me really wanting to start this weblog.

I believe that you will only ever be motivated by what you really want. I know it sounds obvious and tautological but the implications of this belief have some iron-sharp teeth. For example, you (the reader) may think you want to be the kind of person who frequently jogs, or budgets well, or takes time to meditate on The Truth, etc, but unless you profoundly, seriously want to do these things, costs and all, you simply won’t do them. In the end you’ll always do what you want to do (whether you enjoy it or not (whether it is good for you or not, etc…)). If you want to know what you really want, look at what you do. The trick to change isn’t usually starting with behaviour, in my experience behaviour is the last thing to change. The trick is starting with wants. Recently I have decided that I want to be a good writer. My desire is to write something good, and interesting, and worth your time, and containing as much of the capital-T Truth as I can.

But there is a catch which has, sort of, lingered around my writing like a dog at dinner. It’s best described as an antinomy, a paradox arrived at by reasonable conclusions. I’ll lay out what I believed in premise form:

(1). I want to consider myself a good writer.

(2). I am not a good writer.

So,

(3). When I write I become aware of the fact that I can not consider myself a good writer.

And,

(4). The only way to become a better writer is to write more.

Any time I got to (4), (3) kicked me in the butt hard enough to make me nauseated at the thought of de-blanking a page. I’ve now realised that was because I thought the solution was to change (2). But (2) was actually the behaviour. What I really needed to do was start with my wants, i.e., (1).

The problem is similar to my ‘sincerity conundrum’. When I receive a gift or encouragement I try really hard to express my sincere gratitude. I don’t know whether it’s the particularity of the frozen-wax like impression of my smile or the overly melodious pitch in my voice, but unfortunately, the harder I try to express my real gratitude the more insincere and ungrateful I appear. I think this has something to do with a wider humanity-level communication problem (read: the fall) which I expect to come up later. But the connection to my writing is that the harder I aspired to write things that were True the more I realised how insincere my writing really was. I thought I wanted to be a good writer but what I really wanted was to be seen as a good writer. The problem wasn’t my skill, it was my heart. I was writing to prove to myself and to the people around me that I was clever. No matter how much my ambition demanded it of me, I could not love the Truth. Writing was like drawing blood from a stone on account of the herculean effort it took for me to ignore the wave of contradictions I was surfing.

So but now, having recently received these realisations, I have begun the process of changing my wants. I want to be a good writer. Really good. Good in the largest, most expansive meaning of the word. Good in a spiritually nourished way. Good in a thoughtful and thought-provoking way. Good in a technical way. Good in a non-hypocritical lover of Truth way. That’s why I’m writing ‘Suzhou-Hua.’ To start actually trying to be a good writer. Figuring all of this stuff out as I go. It’s a dangerous business going out your door. ‘Suzhou-Hua’ will be where I share my most condensed, transmissible lessons and stories from my time abroad. But I reckon almost exactly 1/3 of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ happens in The Shire because where you’re from is at least as important as why you’re going.

p.s.

In Pinyin, the contemporary system for anglicising mandarin:

• ‘u’ makes an ‘oo’ sound like in ‘pool’

• ‘zh’ makes a ‘j’ sound like in ‘jug’

• ‘ou’ makes a ‘ow’ sound like in ‘stow’

• ‘ua’ makes a ‘wa’ sound like in ‘mwa’ (ha ha!)

So, Suzhou-Hua is pronounced…

In chinese characters the title is, 苏州画 (more on that later, too).