"I traveled east
but I kept turning back
took a few steps
and then looked west again
would Chengdu be in
ruins now
after the uprising?
was my thatched
cottage still intact
beside the Flower-Washing Streams?"
- an excerpt from
"Song of My Friendship With Vice
Prefect Yan by Du Fu from "Du Fu - A Life in Poetry"
(Knopf) translated by David Young
I Came To The
Ruins - Alan Lau
We are standing in
the shell of a crumbling house, our whole family posed behind a solitary
fragment of a tall chair. Here in Southern China where the greenery and
heat reminds a friend of Hawai'i. I think of our fascination with ruins
as we stand on a foundation my father and his brother grew up in, a place
we never expected to find. All over China from Beijing to Shanghai to
Chengdu we had one cousin along with us who was still fluent in our native
dialect of Hakka. For some reason when he spoke to other Hakka in cities,
they had trouble understanding him. It wasn't till our van bumped along
the back roads of rural Canton province did the villagers begin to
understand him, pointing this way and that until we just stumbled upon
this shell of our ancestor's house.
What is it about
ruins that hold such sway over our imagination? Whether we make
pilgrimages to Macchu Picchu or Angkor Wat or just end up building our new
edifices over the previous dweller's ruins until they become newer ruins.
What can we hope to find? Is it something as basic as shelter or
confirmation that civilization had preceded us before on this journey?
I think of the
ancient Phoenix Hall of Byodo-in in Kyoto built in 1053. Fire, war,
neglect had taken its' toll on this grand structure near the Uji Bridge.
Perhaps drifters and the homeless had built small fires within its' dark
walls to stay warm from the bitter cold drifting past a field overgrown
with weeds? How the "Hall of Equality" survived over a thousand years of
neglect to become a resurrected architectural relic of Kyoto's glorious
eleventh century now drawing thousands of visitors today is a wonder.
As we stand in
ruins of our own making, have we completed the circle or are we destined
to continue the journey with no guarantee of ever returning home. From
time to time I think of that photo of a family posed in front of a
crumbling house staring off into the distance and wonder who they are and
where they are going.
"Who would dare to
say that what we have
destroyed was worth a hundred times more than
what we had dreamt and ceaselessly transfigured in
murmuring to the ruins? - Rene Char
from "The Brittle Age
And Returning Upland" (New Directions) as
translated by Gustaf Sobin
