We read the story of Cook Ding in elementary school. He is an expert at cutting up oxen. He sees crevices between an ox’s bones and joints and inserts the blade of his cleaver lightly. Hu-la, the meat falls apart like a lump of earth. Joy fills him as he cleans his cleaver, which still cuts like new after nineteen years of use. He follows the Dao, and what he does is wei wuwei, do without doing—effortless like non-doing.
In my youth, I was skeptical of Cook Ding’s joy. I couldn’t quite picture butchering without hearing the predawn shrieks from the slaughterhouse not far enough from our apartment. It was a bloody, messy business, a far cry from Cook Ding’s breezy effortlessness. People strove. I strove. Every school day seemed to be lived for the college entrance exam. Even the morning qigong practice with my parents was meant to help me concentrate better for higher scores.
I studied English in college, a useful major in the economically reforming China. After graduating, I moved to Shenzhen, the special economic zone, and wrote and translated for the English Page, which was inserted in the municipal newspaper and was known as the “necktie of the metropolis” (if Shenzhen was a western suit). It was the mid-90s, and the city was deluged with all things West: midnight bars, rave parties, Big Macs, Guinness, Nirvana, marijuana. I strove to be worldly.
A few years of my restless working, consuming life, I felt a longing for elsewhere. I imagined a kind of disappearance, maybe in a remote town where I would be alone and finally meet myself. I would do nothing—just write and wander and learn what life was all about.
The thought translated into graduate study abroad, a more logical, and predictable, next step for ascendance. It was a plausible, even applaudable way of disappearing, a more complete one as well. In the last year of the last millennium, I found myself in a classroom in the heartland of America, wondering how the language I’d learned…
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