57. Like a rolling stone

Yes, there’s a major financial crisis in the US, and with the domino effect, it will soon have world repercussions.

Decades ago, I did work for a stock market, and before that I was even involved in derivatives as an assistant-trader. One can always say, after studying and passing exams to become a broker, that he or she understands financial markets. But that’s a lie.

In the years I spent in the business and financial world, the most remarkable thing I learned was how ignorant many of its tenants and actors were. Uninteresting, shallow people. Masters at deception. Selfish. Mainly filled with ambition.

I have met them. They were colleagues, bosses, acquaintances. An entire universe believing cash comes to those who deserve it, convinced bank accounts are a measure of one’s intelligence.

I have seen them trip each other, destroy opponents. I have heard them twist the truth about their own actions, shed away ethical values to advance themselves. I have witnessed lots of stupidity, treachery, deceit, cruelty. And you know what? This world has a strange way of functioning. The worst candidate for a position, as an example, usually gets it. Respectable individuals, those who analyze, have a broad mind, a generosity as a major motor component, are rarely picked to lead the way.

Executives do not necessarily choose the best, they often prefer to surround themselves with bootlickers.

One thing is sure: Eagerness to reach the top has nothing to do with one’s potential. It is a mind-set, a personality. Not a barometer indicating skills, knowledge or capability. Idiots can be very zealous and pushy, and are frequently cursed with a self-admiring temperament. They can also possess the ability to gather large troops composed of other idiots.

I say this based on decades of work in the business world. And it might explain why I've never tried to make my way upward, simply glad to pay food and bills at the end of the month. An allergic reaction to the mentality that surrounded me. People quick to judge. Reaching decisions on hunches. Not much different than (bad) gamblers. Unable to have a global view of a situation, their perspective ending at the tip of their nose. Loud mouths. Not truly talking, just bragging or repeating nonsense.

Maybe you’ll think I wasn’t lucky. That I fell in the wrong places. No. It’ everywhere. I spent much of my adult life having to endure foolishness reified as business conduct.

Or maybe you’ll say that it was my lack of flexibility, a fundamental negativity clouding my perceptions that were responsible for my unhappiness. A misfit among wolves. No. I’m pretty slow. I observe a long time before making up my mind. I wait. I leave a wide margin of maneuver to my opinions so to allow them to change course if need be. I’m extremely cautious work-wise, and spontaneously tend not to want to bite the hand that feeds me. Because I enjoy being loyal. A good soldier. But I'm unforgiving when I reach the certainty high-command behaves dishonorably.

So, for this financial crisis, I feel no pity for bankers and financiers. Not the slightest speck of sympathy. We are looking at robbers. Looters. Profiteers. Let’s call a cat a cat, hey. The fear these deciders are nourishing the public with benefits whom?

The bottom line questions should always be: On which side are the advantages? Who gains from a specific situation?

Most of the things I’ve learned in my young days about the economy are false. The reality of markets is far away from the principles taught in colleges and universities. But we keep on repeating the theory as if we were mentally handicapped and couldn’t notice it doesn’t work that way. The same goes for the principles of administration business students learn in management programs. I’ve never met a manager applying them. It all sounds reasonable on paper, but once in place, business leaders seem to use totally different parameters to arrive at decisions. And those are mostly subjective, aimed at self-protection.

And to finish, the media are delusional. They view their role as that of critical thinkers when they are, instead, taking sides that are pre-determined within the system. They even have difficulty using background material, quickly forgetting what they have themselves written in the past, not following up on lines of thoughts. They view a nation’s economy in terms of narrow political choices represented by the parties in place. It rarely goes further than that.

Oh well.

Dylan already sang it all:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
You thought they were all kiddin' you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin' out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.


Laolao

56. Queendom

Where have the mothers been?

Since I was able to delineate myself - to delineate in the sense of indicating a position, the “where-I-am-at-a-specific-time” - only when the hormones of motherhood kicked in (Where was I? Next to my child), it was the care I could provide that put a name on who I was.

I had become maman. A denomination that made sense and to which wholesomely I could answer to. Where on Earth I stood.

The beauty of that name, its merit, rests with its definition: An organization from which younger ones derive, as in ‘our mother house.’ To differentiate from 'our mother’s house,’ a possessive, the place where the children live, are tolerated, but still someone else’s home.

Also, an organization, not so much a person. A composite of functions, a plurality of roles, heterogeneity. The self divided to better accomplish a multitude of activities, latticework, a wide matrix of tiny seconds filled with enterprising ventures and risks.

Child care, thus, was the phenomenon by which I grew, in need of archetypical dialogue. Biological motherhood, an authenticated starting-point for nursery rhymes and versified poetry chronicling attachment, but without its disorders. Emphatic relationships responding to sensitivity across a lifespan. Nourishment. In departure from personal mythic traditions. The mammal part of me ready for its first private appearance. A tale and a pantomime to enrapture all offspring. Socio-emotional development thriving at the sound of whispered jingles, bedtime stories offering guidance and much needed metaphors. Experience stemming more from the fairy tale genre than from actual life skills. The biological system underlying emotional availability interacting with the infant’s gestures as windows of opportunities for the transit of miscellaneous information due to see surmises confirmed.

I was maman, which is unfortunately also a word for reproductive technologies, with prime connotations and a generic figure. A word often flavored with labor-intensive testimonials, outright manipulations and unresolved evolutionary conflicts. Internal chronology to support diapering ideology. Recounting the cycles of pedagogy, operationalization of pseudoscientific parenting. Inherently hostile educational views spewing the endless list of unrealistic obligations borne by the child.

So I was a maman, and to introduce myself, I had to shed the arrogance of knowledge. Converting into a mother without empirical support. Switching from punitive consequences to natural ones, relying on ditties, not policy statements, to secure attachment. Just-in-time production and a presence, no co-sponsor, as a way to avoid coercion. Nurturing for the sake of children, never to achieve one’s potential. Somehow incapable of solving riddles, but not ignoring the questions. An innovative approach to an epistemology capable of engendering both epic and archaic vocabulary. Amending mistakes not to become a continuity error. In the water of the fountain, some of the links in the chain of disasters rust and break.

Maman, letters swarming to form an old word with an untried meaning. Polymorphism beyond genetic traits. No valid measures to label parental models. Only inadvertent unconscious sins plotting an arc that shifts directions, finally moving toward the absence of self-prophetic abilities. Outwitting doctrines. Gifted with instinctive and unembellished references.

But where have the mothers been?

In a world of kinship, where all blood relationships are shown with subtitles, a person’s maternity gets challenged because it misconstrues role-playing games, a spoof after some hesitation renaming itself, and a landmark for immersion and perpetual gestation. A shadowy figure devoid of boundaries and woven from a compilation of hypnotized legal relations. Demonstrations of fine and experienced motherhood, profusion of melodramas nominated for awards, while despair is premiered underground.

Ploughed fields are seriously wounded. No restored queendoms.

Mothers have often been nowhere to be seen.

Laolao

55. Well-lit aria

A quick word to say I’ll be at your place in a little more than 24 hours. I have the plane ticket, preparing my bag this evening. So much work to do tomorrow, I might not have time and could forget some of the stuff I promised you.

I’ll be arriving in central China early in the afternoon, just in time to fetch you at the kindergarten with your mother. Truly sorry I’ll miss the show though. I love to hear you sing folk songs in Mandarin. Even Chinese versions of Walt Disney themes.

I must admit I’m particularly sensitive to your voices. I can reproduce them in my mind almost as if you were next to me. Of course, I recall your faces with precision, and easily remember how you move, the way you walk or sit, drink from a glass, or smile. But vocal timber has a special hold over me. Much more eloquent than a mnemonic picture. Reading/hearing voices. Not so much what they say, but what the pitch, volume, tone often unknowingly manage to disclose. That's what gets me first, not the words, but how they penetrate the ear and contort the realm of inner frequencies. A slight quiver. How breathing occurs in the midst of syllables, then echoes against the tympanic membrane, oscillations for moods and secrets like notes on a staff. How sound gets articulated. Its extent, how far it carries itself, and then rests, a time signature revealing how many beats per measure of understanding there needs to be.

Do people blurt out their story as if shamefully caught red-handed, or do they publicize themselves, blaring, tonic prominence put on self-serving vowels? Perhaps hiding under the pretense of shyness, sentences barely whispered, caught by the magnet of stillness. Other times, munching words like sticky candies activating the jaws, a biodegradable speech meant to be swallowed, not offered to the world.

Voices I like never seem to come from the larynx. They have an abdominal quality. Originating in the warm fullness of the body. No need to raise the volume to be heard, even from far away. Perspicuous waves, not so much clarity, but the lucid behavior of phonemes a noisy crowd wouldn’t bury. I don’t mean a deep, low voice either. Certainly not a loud one. More the property of transparency, a cleanness of the sound, a traveling strength, direct, honorable, and sovereign.

When I hear your voices, with all my subjectivity and bias, this is what I perceive. Every time surprised that children can possess that musical quality, like a perfect pitch, an instrument that can solo, distinguishable from its background, voices so tiny and yet, autonomous in their expressivity. Cutting through urban clamor without a shout, the stress of effort, unmindful of effects.

Is it because you have been exposed since birth to the guttural French ‘r’? The fast forward teamwork of teeth and tongue needed for the English ‘th…”? And the frolic four tones of Putonghua? Allophone plurality flexing parlance. Your throats undulating without attachment, indifferent to linguistic fixity, capable of independence, with an audible self-assurance surpassing the juvenile limits of your vocabulary. For this is what I always hear, attentive to your baby talk. A wide assertiveness as the foundation of your voice. A rare type of vibration oblivious to distances, penetrating with natural ease the thickness of clatter.

Do you see me at times shutting my eyes to better appreciate your voices? Taking them in, recording a melodic memory of our encounters. Never tired of listening to your vocalizations. Profoundly impressed by their caliber and range. Yes, I’ll say it again. I love your voices. Manifest circles gliding on water, unbounded.

At night, before I fall asleep, I recall the clarity of your giggles. Onomatopoeic splashes. The neat undulation of your babbling speech. In the darkness of my bedroom, I listen. How crisp and straightforward you sound. And I feel all is well. In good order. You'll grow into fine adults. It’s already inscribed in the neat way you pronounce. Hearable headlights brightening with a tuneful impression the long twisted path we follow on our way to sometimes saying something.

Laolao

54. Rain dance

There was a time when I danced. African and Hispanic bars because I would find there great partners to guide me across the wooden floors. Feet who knew what they were doing, accomplished, an absence of shyness when making decisions. Dancers with the ability to take the lead, understanding what my body could do on music, working with the intelligence movements always require, prepared to sense what a tempo can become for two people accompanying each other.

I would arrive alone in the middle of the night, entering places ideal for the irrelevance of names, and where beauty had to do with weightlessness, the kind of motion capable of transcending the body’s proportions. That’s when you could forget what you were made of, opting for osmosis with sound and cadenza. Your members, your organs no longer in the way, these parts that never seem to find the place where they’re supposed to fit. As if you were always too long, fierce, too tall for yourself. Overflowing your own shape. Ultra-visible, every cell too prominent. Your entire being so obvious, imprisoned in an anatomy of self-evidence.

Dancing to invalidate one’s form. Retaining only series of movements, those of a powerful microscopic atom at the heart of matter. Honed by rhythm. And electricity. Hidden by flawless steps and gestures, the only notions surviving under blinking spotlights, worth staging in the shadowless nightclubs and ballrooms where souls finally reveal their acetate-like dispositions.

Even forgetting about dancing itself, just the blend of mind and instincts, one’s identity transformed into an euphonic reflex, the physical having surrendered its heap to the blurred boundaries of resonance and pulse.

In those late hours, I was well. Not a person anymore. Just the perfect, self-abandoned dancer, never fearing that very instant at the mercy of the Other when control must be unconditionally forsaken. Accepting non-existence to be part of the experience. Such a deep faith. An unreserved course, trusting the ground, and the arms of men.

I danced and danced. Nights and nights. My dancing shoes a miracle. Whirling at the level where words recognize the superfluity of their nature. No conversation can be like a dance. Where eyes too are no longer needed, vision overtaken by insight, dimensions and coordinates included in melodies and their beat. Personalities going missing the time of a song.

Disremembering ideas about myself, that was when I could feel. Believe. Way over the naming of my being.

Above and beyond self-awareness, there was indeed a girl dancing and a drum. The notes and keys for a life. With everything a unique possibility. Accurately contemporary to oneself. Neither dwelling in the past, nor caring for a future. The immaculate feeling of a presence. Not an iota missing from that perception. Dancing with the men who captured that quality, modeling it with duplicity, artfulness. Who made somebody, an unquestioning body, out of me, unguarded, free. Given to them, an animated offering, for the sake of a passage into an immense resounding reality.

I did that for decades. Going out alone. Often lying, pretending to meet friends or relatives. A movie or a dinner. Instead, I would rush inside deepness, finding concealed dance floors housing staunch human fibers and their sweat, to dance pain away. To share a language I could finally air with fluency, a man there to respond and extend the message. To read intentions and reply with substance. All of us seeking significance in the circulation of dancers all around, the flux, together moving in a vein as if its warm red blood. Creating time and rain to render our steps anonymous. The scope of hope. Magnitudes for our movements. All the patterns of our heart’s weather. Unfailing lightning and thunder. And cyclonic winds pivoting on our heels.

So I danced.

Laolao

53. Sino-grime with a rhyme

The traffic is back, the pollution is back. A thick, heavy Sunday, grayness covering the eyesight like a dirty cloth choking the face, distress, a plight and a null-space. Aerial foam, froth. Pulling curtains over my home to hide its secrets and cement, to erase the trace. Oxygen’s ferment. The spectral images of the streets at noon parodying crepuscular ambiguity, doubting their neon twilight, when all kites had to flee. The mind a radar plowing a smoky, gloomy territory. Unwashable air draping all bodies, no longer aware, stagnant muddy ponds for sly skies and beyond these. Depth of nothingness. Nebulosity to harness a perspective we may not outlive.

The land of the amorphous. The building lost in formlessness. The indefinite as an address. This is where I kneel, slumbering in the vapors of grit, Morpheus.

Blind as we are, sleepily walking through an imprecise urbanity, we stretch a hand to caress again the spongy velvety fabric of the atmosphere. A large smear for a physique. Holding between our fingers the monochrome flow of people’s breath. Ghosts cycling in uttermost smog, land of the concrete exhaling its fumes. Not a fog, but a syndrome. As ethereal weight resumes. And I look for myself as I would look for escape, a retreat, the mortar and the gravel in a dull trance, all citizens merging into adulterated monotonies, not a chance, as unrecoverable from the landscape as they are from memories.

I look for myself, my shape consigned to oblivion in the mass of visible gas, a heartbeat heard in this accretion of floating sediments, the world as an impasse, drifting pigments, a sound which I cannot retrieve, dissolving itself in the depth of blankness. The eye showing incomprehension. Dust’s invasion. Each step I take suspended in the scary tenderness of a brownish haze. A specter as lover, devilish captor, embracing all of one’s pores. Unfazed. Concealing one’s isolation even more. A time to evanesce. A veil of dense molecules to disorientate. Scents of fuel. The semi-solid featurelessness of the air as a self-portrait, the eyelid covering the globe. So to enrobe the mess and the crime of grime. Or a simple sad eye for a silent sigh, the city's wimple as a key ornament, comrade.

Laolao

52. Money, sex, religion

About money again, because it was our poison. Loving it, clinging to it with compulsive enthusiasm. Or getting rid of it as if it was unsanitary. Two opposite stances: Defining one’s distinctiveness by the glitters of the dollar sign, or identifying one’s demise by the scurry of bank notes. On one side, petitioning the Almighty to win at the lottery. On the other, imploring Homo Sapiens to disregard the concept of payments.

Money was either the flawless solution to all ills, or their irrefutable root. It was here salvation, there damnation. There was no middle ground.

For my virtuous mother, money was wholly orgasmic. For my sullied father, it was an anti-climax destroying all the fun. A godly aphrodisiac. Or an unholy frustration device.

Indeed, from our family’s female perspective, cash was the wing allowing purity, righteousness to rise above the dirt Man carried into the house. And for the man of the house, it was the slime at the bottom of the foul tunnel through which he escaped.

I think, deep down, for my mother having lots of money meant she wouldn’t need to have sex. Whereas for my father it automatically lead to unrestrained carnal depravity.

You could clearly hear how the two positions got intermingled in the loud gruesome confrontations between my parents. Jumping lice and bounced checks finding their way into the same sentence. Arraignments targeting both how venereal diseases get transmitted and how fast bad credit spreads. All the time, monetary affairs merged with hanky-panky ones.

Practicalities forming an unusual bond, consensus reached, when my mother would announce with hysterical tones that not only would we go without food for a while, but also were forbidden to use the toilets at home on account of pubic crabs. No eating, no shitting. That seemed to make sense.

I have always made just enough money to see us through, barely finding what we thought we needed until the end of the month, necessities, whims, luxuries. Never accumulating at the bank. No savings. No discourse on the matter. Ignoring the long-term. Simply considering the day, what was best for you now. Laboring to meet those needs, whatever they were. Living like I had funds, resources, forever although they had to be invented day-to-day. No back-up plans. Nothing permanent. A compromise between my mother’s obsession with amassing security, and my father’s delinquent and inexcusable pecuniary conduct.

So I won’t be transferring to you any objects of value. No jewels, no insurance money, no inheritance. Just souvenirs of things we did together, of my love for you, heartfelt gestures, moments and words. Our concerns for each other. Efforts. And numerous victories, the only things at my credit. As I battled my way out of absurdity to make sure you’d be free from its repercussions. Often failing, true, but trying again.

That is the compromise I had to make to slowly build a functional sanity for all of us. Saying my farewells to all those who chose to stay behind, in the mind-numbing world where sex, religion and money end up jointly in the unilateral impetus for self-absorption.

For you I chose no material blissfulness, but no Inferno either.

I'm not that interested in learning if I was right or wrong to do so. It's not a debate. Just a fact now. The rest is up to you.

Laolao

51. Trump card

Younger, my interest for money was mainly carried by the amazement I felt when I considered what happened to a dollar bill as it passed through many hands, multiplying its effects. The money I had in my pocket had been in the wallet of another person before me. It had been earned, an employer somewhere had had it, that employer obtaining it from a customer maybe, who had in turn gotten it in exchange for doing a job or from a bank robbery, who knows.

That dollar in my pocket, I would soon spend it, throwing it back into the economy. The shop owner I would give it to would probably use it to buy products from someone, who in turn would pay another who might go shopping too, always that same dollar bill moving, floating around, traveling so often and far.

I would draw a tiny ‘x’ on my dollar bill to recognize it in case it would come back my way. I tried to imagine all the handbags, wallets, pockets it would encounter, all the things it would represent for each person touching it. How it would get transformed into something else, a different object, purpose, or need. There would be young and old women, tall men and shorter ones, rich and poor, healthy, sick, busy, bored, happy people, not so happy ones, all sorts of individuals handling that dollar bill, each one of them in a unique precise context. Keeping it for a long time, or an hour, perhaps just a minute before letting it go.

When I would pay at the store, I had a strong sense of involvement, perceiving my gesture as one belonging to a thread. Feeling it, the mystery of the journey, my hand only a transit station, a relay, all of us one by one being the energy money needs to continue its trip as we open our palm to either receive it or send it elsewhere. I would have loved to follow that dollar bill, look at those who would one day fold it away, curious about who they were, what they thought, what they looked like. I would try to picture their life, their conversations, their homes. Even the shape of the fingers eventually in contact with that piece of paper.

Whenever I received money, I saw first a secret, an invisible history. I thought such a dimension was important, the essence of money.

I was raised in a family where money was more than a concern, it was a cause. As such, it was alive, it had a decisive plan, destructive always. It triggered catastrophes. The unique reason behind adversity. Described as the origin of all tragedies. It was a sword with a will of its own, striking its victims out of pure malice and cruelty. Wrecking lives as a hobby. The disfigurement of all family relationships brought about not so much by its presence or absence, but by the slightest allusion to its existence. That’s how powerful money was for us. It didn’t even need to show up to elicit internal devastation. Its very idea was more than sufficient.

We moved to a rich part of town when I was about 12. A big old house facing a park where some of the oldest trees in the region could be found. Enormous trees, designing intricate shadows on the grass. Our neighbors were successful professionals, politicians, TV personalities, artists. A judge here. A top journalist there. Lots of doctors. A play writer. A deputy. Quite an elegant area. Kids my age reading books, articulating views on the world, well-traveled, their heads full of projects.

I quickly became aware of our status of nouveau riche. We were surrounded by old money. People who were used to having lots of it, parents, grandparents, grand-grand-parents, never a thought about money. At least, never speaking about it. People who moved around, in fact, as if money didn’t exist.

So, we had the house. But my father was regularly nowhere to be found. And when he was around, he lied. About bills.

The house seemed to me like a gigantic empty shell. It looked impressive from the street, but inside it was quite a different matter. Those damned bills.

I still see my mother calling companies to fill our furnace in the middle of the winter, all of them refusing to deliver because of outstanding, unpaid bills. No oil for us. My mother, on her way to the supermarket, stopping at the bank to withdraw money from the account she shared with my father, the one where she deposited her salary, only to find a negative balance. Nothing to eat, the fridge empty. No heating. The phone not yet disconnected (that would be the day after) ringing and ringing, a car dealer calling to inquire if my mother was satisfied with the new car her husband had just bought her. My mother answering – no, yelling – that she didn’t even have a driver’s permit.

That was hard on the soul, baby.

Three unfed freezing kids. My mother losing her mind. Between fits of moaning desperation, checking with the Tarot cards to see how my father would very soon, of course, be punished: The Fool, the Hanged Man, Death, the Tower, The Devil, all of them conspiring to represent my father on the kitchen table, the designs organizing his downfall, mystic sanctions for his selfish monetary policies.

My mother calling me to witness the verdict of the arcana. Making me repeat their meaning for additional confirmation: Chaos, crash, a dreadful transformation, the abyss, the ending of terrible cycles, or the inescapable.

The occult always on the side of the oppressed. Cartomancy fit for my kind of insight, trained at reading the flexible symbolism of the cards, my spiritual syndromes a guarantee divination would not fail to support my mother. Would not abandon her in these great times of needs. And times of great needs. Reading the future, clockwise, mystic traditions befalling me. Ready to amalgamate elements of alchemy with thoughts from the Kabbalah, divination at midnight, by the empty fridge, my mother insane with pain, uttering astrological threats, pleading with me, the Oracle, to remain as the magical instrument of revenge. Interpreting the wheel, an eye for an eye. Payback time as I unfolded the tactics the gods had concocted so to teach my father a terrible lesson.

To tell you the truth, I didn’t mind. It was a sort of literature, those medieval figures articulating murderous allegories. They soothed my mother. Divinatory meanings like motifs depicting one’s hope for an existence. The colors of an exit. The transport of fundamental messages from the Beyond, illustrations to underline the spoken promises of Justice herself. A book with changing pages, transiting knots, plots, shots at a world capable of understanding my mother’s grief. And her necessary drunkenness, imbibing to survive the uncharitable tide of debts drowning her dreams. No food, but never running out of gin and vodka. Figures, scenes, numbers, all with a story. Me, the editor. Opening the traveler’s tale, creating the fables, telltale anecdotes from the ghosts, divulging what’s ahead, a friend of fate, reassuring my mother: Her undeniable right to call on deities to settle scores and exact harsh retribution, to demand from spirits proper compensation for the unbearable vicissitudes constantly after her.

The cards from the Tarot de Marseille with a shape reminding me of the dollar bill. Exceptional moments when my mother almost sounded as if she cared about me. Pledging my father would be struck by lightning, or be the casualty of some other appalling mishap. How she appeared to love me then, the ally, the girl ranking her mother above all creatures before the matriarch would collapse, blotto. No more money to connect me to the world. Darkly silent as nothing would happen to save us during those long evenings. All supernatural trump cards having been played with sad but resolute adeptness, winning a few hours of cryptic communion with my mother. The money gone, not coming back. The ‘x’ for nothing. And the Tarot, inconsequential.

There would never be any help coming to exorcise the economy, or οἰκονομία, Greek for household management. No money, a word from the Latin referring to the goddess Juno, ironically for my mother the patroness of marriage, who, probably horrified, stood guard over the finances of the Roman empire throughout its decline.

Laolao

50. To walk the talk

A friend called yesterday, from the other side of the planet. So nice to hear his voice. Calling to remind me to write a text for a magazine of analysis and debate. Haven’t done that for a long time. And it must be in French. Do you think I can still handle verb tenses in a Latin language, well enough for publishers? And what about the accents on the vowels? I don’t have the keyboard for that.

Or am I making excuses?

There’s the topic too. Not sure I have something to say about it: The fear of China. I mean personally, I’m not scared. And I cannot really see from here how people elsewhere feel. I’ve been in China a long time, it’s home. You were born in Beijing. You’re among the first Chinese with blond hair and blue eyes. You attend school here. You’re native language is Mandarin. And you don’t like western food that much.

This lack of distance from the topic I've just summoned, is it another cop-out?

Analysis and debate, that’s altogether an issue. Can I still do it, be political, simultaneously theoretical and formidable? Honestly, I don’t think I can. Not that I ever did, though. Most of the time back then my writing so idiosyncratic, it even eluded me, and was praised for that virtue. But you would have been proud of your Laolao 30 years ago. Right in the heart of Paris, name them: The best actors, painters, photographers. I was with them, invited everywhere. My table at Café de Flore or chez Lipp. Published by the top post-modernists. Well-known philosophers as mentors and lovers. The great-Greats in literature taking me under their wings. Bada-boom. From my far away province straight to Les Champs Elysees at Fouquet's with the iconoclasts and fashion designers lending me outrageous fringues, not that much pret-a-porter, mind you. Evenings at La Coupole, porto and little gray schrimps to talk revolution. The young promising discovery. The female version of Georges Bataille. Living very Rive Gauche. Mistress of the most articulate and handsome ultra left-wing leaders, French, Italians. Yes, I was a pretty, sexy writer, sweethearts. They loved me, opened the doors, kept them gaping, introduced me, the propitious small-town nymphette. They also read me, quoted me. Saw me betray them. Excited about it. Showed me their own manuscripts. Drinking only champagne at La Closerie des Lilas. Cocktails at embassies with disabused prestigious foreign intellectuals. Known. Recognized. Talked to. And talked about. So many pirouetes. Gyrating. Conjecturing. Being told the in-depth stories of every stone, chair and table in Saint-Germain. All of us nothing less than a chef-d'oeuvre, the young and the old. So much above the vulgarity of money.

I had it all. Everything I wanted. I was exactly where, pedantically, I thought my place should be.

And I walked away. And stopped the writing altogether, except for a few sporadic texts for friends. Because they were friends. But never truly believing in what I was doing.

Three decades later, I still can’t account for my decision. Maybe because it wasn’t one. If you’re patient with me, I’ll discuss it later. But not now.

It’s only today, as I write to you, that I re-establish a form of link to the written word. Over time I’ve learned. Mostly about the cost linked to the work I had in mind in my early twenties. Also the implications it would have had for you, my children and grandchildren. There’s the question, too, about responsibility towards one’s work. I don’t think I was ready for that. In short, I may have had some form of talent, but certainly not the personality to go with it. And realized I definitely couldn't afford brilliance, real or dreamt. No difference.

So, this text I should write by the end of the year, what should I do?

Weak, I said yes, but extirpated a compromise, cowardice on my part. It was a yes under the condition I would do something light, possibly treating the topic with derision, provocative because that’s easy to do and it works all the time.

But then, why do it, right?

Can I try? Has enough time gone by? Can I inject a dash of meaning in a text without putting myself at risk? Unfortunately for me, I tend to think these are inseparable. That hasn’t changed.

One of the most important skills I’ve acquired in the past 30 years is to walk away. I sound here, but I’m not. I’ve perfected the art of the sentence so to make a decent living out of it, never exposing myself, safely withdrawn, like a technician watching the machine. Standing nearby, casually glancing his eye around. Intervening through the distance provided by good quality tools and easy-to-remember commands. It’s comfortable. Quiet. It’s an imitation of expertise in an environment where there’s no real competition. And it pays. I’ve fed and raised you with it.

Do not think it was pleasant, effortless, all that undoing I cleverly performed. One needs to be smart to discard articles of faith and a fine convoluted posture. Guilt, regrets, doubt, anger, they were constantly hanging over my head, troubling more than half my life basically busy at unlearning ideals.

And now that I know I’ve succeeded from a professional standpoint, having reached the trivial, at last the tranquil and decent nest of stereotypy, hackneyed ideas, the soft sheltering of linear syntax to render mental pictures that hardly need to be formed, will I walk away again? And to go where?

A pensive Laolao