Blogging today from the lounge on the fourth floor of the YWCA Hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia. I recommend the Y to travellers visiting this city. It combines postindustrial standards of hypercleanliness, bed-and-breakfast standards of gemuetlichheit, Japanese standards of efficient use of space, and (just for those who need to feel as though they’re being semi-deprived of something) hot water flow reminiscent of the seedier parts of a rundown European city. And I just learned that the lights dim momentarily when the AC kicks in.
So far, Vancouver is proving to be a fascinating city. Notable among its fascinations is Chinatown, which is most suitably entered through the imposing Millenium Gate. I didn’t know it when I rambled onto it, and through it, yesterday, but the gate is actually of fairly recent construction, commemorating the event it’s named after. Depending on who you listen to, Vancouver’s Chinatown is either the second or third largest Chinatown in North America, and ranks very high in population among all the Chinatowns in the world outside of East Asia. Walking through it, one has the sense that one is entering an outpost of a great civilization — a sense that I’ve never gotten in San Francisco’s Chinatown, perhaps because it doesn’t, too my knowledge, have a single spot that so clearly marks the crossing of a cultural frontier.
A short stroll from the gate brings one to the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. The Garden’s official website includes an online virtual tour of the Garden. It looks fascinating, and I may have more to say about it after I’ve browsed gone through it more thoroughly. It’s a very photogenic spot, frequently used as a location for films, and there are many pictures of it to be found on the internet. Embarrassingly, even though I visited it yesterday, I find myself disoriented when I try to reproduce my tour online. Apparently there are two distinct topoi adjacent to one another: the Scholar’s Garden and the adjoining Park, and I’ll have to sort them out in the real world before being able to do so in memory.
This is one of the street entrances; I believe this is where I first stumbled upon the place. Entering between the guardian liondogs, one finds oneself in a serene stone-and-stucco courtyard, the dominating feature of which is this statue of Dr. Sun. It struck me as a monument not only to Sun himself, but to the current in the Chinese tradition that combines the ideals of the sage, the scholar, and the ruler who has the mandate of Heaven. I was there yesterday in the late afternoon, and when I walked through the circular gate behind the statue of Dr. Sun (I believe thereby going from the Park into the Garden proper), the security guard gently informed me that the garden was closing.) The guard, a fat-cheeked kid in his early 20s at the most, then resumed a jovial banter with the other occupants of the Garden at the time: a small group of people with the characteristic dress and accoutrements of the homeless. My momentary impression was that there was no animosity between the guard and the transients, but that they had long since worked out a mutually acceptable modus vivendi.
After leaving, I strolled around a few more blocks of Chinatown, then decided I was straying a little too far from the familiar path for a mapless stranger. So I began heading back in more or less the direction from which I had come (not too difficult in a Chinatown; I suspect that one of the reasons for the Sinitic hegemony in East Asia is due to the imposition of right-angle street grids in all cities in the Chinese pattern.) So engaged, my attention was caught by the sounds of distress. A Hispanic girl, perhaps 15, was upset about something, and was letting the world know. There were a couple of busses in the street near where she was, and I had the impression that perhaps she had just gotten off of one, or perhaps someone had just departed on a bus and left here there alone. And she WAS alone, and expressing all the rage and fear and frustration and pain that a human being can feel at being abandoned. I don’t think she was verbalizing any, except for the one word “NO!” — which she screamed, over and over again, wailing, panting, roaring, running back and forth in the street, oblivious to the possibility of traffic (fortunately, there was none), fists flailing the air, at the point at which the two meanings of the word “mad”, insane and enraged, become one. Passersby were not interfering, but there was an alertness born of caution in the air, as people played with the possibilities of interfering themselves, of seeking the help of authorities, and balanced these things against the real danger that could arise if the girl’s rage should happen to be directed against others.
Suddenly, her frenzy acquired a sense of direction, as if she had come to some decision, and she dashed across the street to the sidewalk where I was. Given her state of mind, a spark of fear for her own safety crossed my mind, and I turned to see where she was dashing to. It was at this point I realized where I was: absorbed in this street drama, I had not noticed that I was back in front of the Sun Yat-Sen Garden again, and in fact it was into its gate that the distraught young woman had rushed.
I home she found some stillness and peace of soul there.
(This is posted hurriedly, and in need of editing. In a few minutes I’m off the the Vipassana Center of British Columbia for 10 days, where the vow of Noble Silence covers internet communications as well.)
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