yjourney http://www.yjourney.com/ yjourney--a travel and image log for the worlds you inhabit. Copyright 2011 Sat, 10 Nov 2007 16:41:24 -0800 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.16 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss View from my deck  ]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000605.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000605.html USA Sat, 10 Nov 2007 16:41:24 -0800 First snow ]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000604.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000604.html USA Sat, 28 Oct 2006 16:36:25 -0800 Kidal on my mind

]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000595.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000595.html Africa Fri, 01 Sep 2006 15:07:40 -0800 Pacific under cloud ]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000593.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000593.html USA Sat, 29 Oct 2005 21:36:21 -0800 Big Sur at sunset ]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000594.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000594.html USA Sun, 23 Oct 2005 21:47:32 -0800 The different faces of Sahara   ]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000592.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000592.html Africa Wed, 19 Oct 2005 21:08:24 -0800 Ice lake--collage ]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000591.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000591.html Asia Thu, 13 Oct 2005 19:39:56 -0800 Composition ]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000590.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000590.html Photography Tue, 11 Oct 2005 19:36:00 -0800 Laos

»  Click here to see more images of Laos, early 2005.  «]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000589.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000589.html Asia Mon, 10 Oct 2005 13:18:41 -0800 Tree at sunset ]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000574.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000574.html Photography Sat, 08 Oct 2005 20:44:55 -0800 Two sunsets

]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000576.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000576.html Photography Fri, 07 Oct 2005 22:06:07 -0800 Flickr

Images for the trek last November are located on: Flicker.com/photos/yingzhao. I'm not sold on Flickr, finding myself not all that social a photographer or viewer. However no need to duplicate the images here.

Leaving China in less than two weeks to return to the Bay Area... Turning of another chapter.]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000531.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000531.html China Fri, 13 May 2005 01:07:00 -0800 The Things They Carried

At the tiny port in Gao, Mali, where the Niger river comes right up to the back of the market stalls, the bigger boats are still some ways off. Men in long boubous load onto their heads huge grain bags as tall as and thicker than a man, and slowly walk into the water, waist deep, loading them onto the boats. Boys trudge into the same river downstream in Mopti, for the boats ferrying sand to the city. Stretching out a piece of fabric holding two corners each, two boys per team carry the sand to shore in countless trips. On the shore the sand is sifted shovel by shovel, made into bricks dried by the sub-Saharan sun. In Djenn�, where the streets are narrow and overflowing with mud, these bricks are then carried two per head to where they need to go. Whenever I travel to a developing country, I'm awed by the volumes of the world moved by head, limb, and torso. The women of Africa, of course, are famous the world over for what they can carry and how they carry it off, physical definitions of grace under pressure. Bundles of sticks for stoking a fire, halves of calabash, or tubs of enamel with towering piles of produce or laundry barely moves, while she climbs up steep escarpments with not a glance downward, pulls up one side of her billowy boubou to cover a glistening shoulder, and chats with her sisters. There's almost always a babe at the small of her back, two little feet sticking to each side of her waist, content to be swayed everywhere.

In the developed world such physicality, a kinetic sympathy of the weight of the world, is removed from daily life. Container ships, cranes, semis, cars, forklifts, and astronomical volumes are moved on paper and through fiber-optic cables (containers frequently slide off into the sea and it means nothing, I'm told). I suspect that in the world as a whole, flesh and bone move amounts many, many times over than that of steel and conveyer belts. Compared to the weight a grown man or woman often bears in Africa, or the percentage of his weight a child carries, my 30-kilo backpack is really nothing. Yet everything carried this way halfway around the world involves great calculation and weighing in my head. Especially the "non-essential" things: a few silk handkerchiefs and bracelets, tokens of appreciation for women I encounter and won't share a language with; one book, for which I chose Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, as thick as its namesake and an astonishing treatise on the surface and depth of daily life in an African jungle; one picture: that of me on my graduation day from University of California with Peter, who taught me ECON 1A and 1B, Principles of Macro and Microeconomics at the community college a few years earlier. Peter taught that economics is about human motivations, taught me to see past the language of charts and graphs of our mind-bogglingly complex systems to the human stories and urges underneath. Thus an idealist like me can live in this world, remaining in touch.

If people often seem happier in the developing world, it's perhaps because they understand better what they value, and the value of the things around them. When everything must be carried on heads and backs, one is more certain of its use, how it fits in to the greater scheme of things. That includes rice and couscous, hand-fashioned tools, as well as second-hand tape players, brightly colored plastic buckets. Their use is as evident as their weight, in an environment where nothing is superfluous.

Traveling affirms this: in slow journeys, a westerner can temporarily move past the expectations of efficiency, utility, and return on investment, beyond the classifications of capitalism or socialism; Christian, Muslim, or animist; local, indigenous, or foreigner; and see the sunlight and sand and the well and buckets, the men, women, and children doing work and living life: the environment and the human beings forever making peace with it. Poverty underlines this connection as development means complexity means abstraction, while in much of the world it's shoulders to field, hand to mouth, literally. Poverty is not to be romanticized, not pitied nor worshipped; it's just reality, and we look to understand it, to work within it. No matter how we value our educated thought processes, we can only hold so many levels of abstraction in our head without losing them, forgetting the original connections. Thus it's always the details that communicate and serve for memory, not the speech of politicians, economists, business and religious powers-that-be with the lofty and abstract ideals. In America we collectively suffer from a distance from the real, amnesia of the past real, protection from the future real, no burdens to bear leading to an unbearable lightness. We need doses of reality, of nature's poverty and richness, of work done that brings a very tangible reward, of one person's place in a community and in the environment... a sustenance as important as food.

The weight of a thing makes it real. The distance it was carried connects it to everything else. The weight of what I carry also makes me real, and connects me to everything else. In Mopti a young girl, couldn't have been more than 13, took a liking to me and when I shook her hand I was surprised that it felt like a grown man's, thick and callused. By the riverbank of Mopti, I buy tiny bags of peanuts from an old woman and her granddaughter each day, just to exchange smiles with them. The grandma would lay out all the change coins on her palm, so that I could count the unfamiliar currency. I always marveled at her gentleness and her fragile, age-spotted hand as I remove the coins one by one, leaving a few as a kind gesture. I should have left more for her each time. When I touch someone's hand, I become aware of the weight she's accustomed to carry. I do not hold each hand lightly, for I will be carrying the weight of their existence with me too.

]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000530.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000530.html Writing Tue, 01 Feb 2005 23:54:32 -0800 Early morning on the trek ]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000528.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000528.html China Thu, 16 Dec 2004 23:20:06 -0800 Marco Polos Invisible Cities, to Kublai Khan. What might the places in our trek look like to him?...

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There was the river, of a crystalline aqua-marine, that provided refuge and playground to a group of weary travelers. I remember its name, do you, my students and fellow travelers? One of us, curly-haired, sang by its rushing intensity for a long time like a water spirit. It saw the group sit by the fire, give thanks to the full moon for the beauty it adds to a sentimental holiday, with many other thanks large and small, and heard the idea of "family" interpreted in multiple ways.

There was the village, nestled in a deep valley, offering up its apples thru the raised arms of women. Its doorways are painted in multi colors, ancient water ways channel clear snow mountain water down to each house and shed. Unlike the villages with the insistent old women with the big hats, and the villages with the ridiculously tall ruins of towers watching over them, this one you can only walk to. Can you picture it? Picture then walkers going up the endless switchbacks up the deep valley, two young men at the end, one offering encouragement as well as distraction to the other, both learning about having faith in each step.

There was the sky, here, there, and everywhere, with amazing stars adorning its velvety depths. In one place the night sky heard some young women cough thru the night, and one of them, sleeping outside the tents, break down and cry. Indeed the sky heard at least one of us cry each day, probably. The stars shone more brightly thru the tears.

There was the valley that discovered a bit of gold in the river that runs thru it, and saw a dusty road come in, but not leading to a way out of its vast depth. The people have rough lives here like the pockmarked faces of its mountains--a father got drunk and fell off its sheer drop of hundreds of meters, leaving a wife and two young children behind. The girl quit school to work and raise the boy while the mother left for a town two-days away to make money, and the little bit of donation left by the travelers may help this family a great deal.

There was the mountain pass, barren for its relentless wind, relentless in its test of the travelers. Those who stop to rest only find it harder to continue. It saw these young people pass, one on horseback, all very tired, their will waning. A view of a sacred mountain at the beginning of the pass can only keep one psyched for so long. At this height one can almost see the curvature of the earth; all the tall mountains they saw on the fourth day, the seventh day, and all the other days, were beneath them. Yet neither of these facts may be consolation enough for the fatigue of the body, one only continues because there's no choice. On the descend, finally, they see the three sacred mountains at once and sigh with relief for their protection and blessing. But the mountain knows: you do what you need to do, and you will be able to do it.

---

Do you remember now, these places? But those are only a few visions of a myriad mountains and valleys we've passed, and what have you seen, my dear young one, my blue-eyed child? Memory is selective, stories even more so. In the evening breezes where you are, to your khans and klans, what kind of fantastical places are you shaping western China out to be?]]> http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000526.html http://www.yjourney.com/archives/000526.html China Fri, 10 Dec 2004 22:59:28 -0800