Traffic days and Thursdays get me down

Our ticket-to-ride was going to be a laidback 36-hour rail travel on a soft seat (the lower berth of two double-decked bunks in a private compartment) between Canton (to oldies)/Guangzhou (to newbies) and Shenyang, crossing the Pearl, Yangtze, and the Yellow rivers as I hurried back to the Shenyang Aerospace University campus to vacate my university housing at the Friendship Villa of SAU’s International Education Center. Across China, the rule of foreign teachers to be under 65 is being implemented. We are three rivers past the chronological bend!

I am now learning to ride the friendly and ferocious dragon as a mode of existence. But first, for the literalist among us, there is no such animal as a dragon as depicted in the Shēngxiào, misnamed in English as Chinese zodiac, which has no constellations related at all. Rather, it is a scheme, a systematic plan of future actions that relates each year to an animal and its reputed attributes, following a 12-year cycle. The 11 of the 12 signs are earthly and tangible creatures but the imagined dragon is just as real.

I started pedagogy at SAU in 2011, the Year of the Rabbit, represented by that little thingy in the field that hurries with speed and much gusto, cuddly as a pet, a prolific multiplier, and reportedly fun to raise. We are conversant of developmental economics at the rural village level, and the SAU’s economics department got me to teach mostly Third World students micro and macroeconomics, with all the econometric equations to show Adam Smith’s law of supply and demand. After perusing the textbooks, it became obvious that econometrics written by book rabbits with algebraic bents are useless tools played only in the academé, so we disengaged from the discipline on irrelevance.

2012 brought us the Year of the Dragon, the “long” that sounds like the word for “river,” thus Heilongjiang, the name for Manchuria’s northernmost province, also the river Amur that borders China to the Russian Far East. The vitality of the southern twin rivers of Chiang Jiang (Yangtze) and the Huanghe (Yellow) and the fertility of the land in between is the cradle of Chinese civilization, home to the Han, the ethnic group that constitutes 9 out of 10 Chinese. The traditional dragon dance in Chinese celebrations depicts the appeasing and taming of the shrew, the balancing and harmonizing taiji (yin-yang) preoccupation.

2013 moved us to the Year of the Snake, the smart animal (represented as the sly devil in Western myths). After three years of opening up the portals of the English world so it can find home and acceptance through ease of use in the dragon’s lair (EnlisCHe, as spelled by the Dutch, is my English with Chinese characteristics in our term), we finally developed the skill to make the discipline and art a science. However, CCP “smarts” sharpened to implement age rules this year, so we are left to hustle with not much room for despair. The Pinoy is world-wise and street-smart in my book.  I shall stay true to form.

Jan. 31, 2014, ushers the Year of the Horse in the Lunar New Year. I visited eastern Inner Mongolia around Hulun Baier and Manzhoulli last year, allowing a couple of days in the open grassland and I saw why the Mongolian stallion (short but not a pony) is a revered majestic animal of elegant breeding since Genghis Khan.

We’ve been babbling on the traffic of the mind through the Chinese calendar symbols, clearly rooted on earth, utilizing animals to embody that earthiness not only on the year one is born in but also on the month (inner), the day (true), and the hour (secretively). Thus one can be a dragon by birth year, but also a snake internally by the month, truly an ox by the day, and a sheep by the hour. In all, however, the quality of being human is symbiotically derived from relating to other living creatures on Planet Earth and not from the placement of fire in the constellations as reflected in the Western zodiac.

Created by the Masr-Graeco-Roman staring up the skies, life in heaven is a Western goal, literally and metaphorically. We commented in our previous articles on Madiba and how African dance differs from, say, Zorba the Greek, with the latter’s arms and hand opened to the rhythm of the spheres, while the hop and stomp of the southern African hoedown is rooted on planet Earth.

Snowy Sunday in Dong Bei got us off the ground to hazy Hong Kong. HK tarmac traffic Thursday gets us back to icy Shenyang, and what a ground ride it was to the terminal! My taxi driver to the airport, evidently among an all-female staff ’cause the traffic in her walkie-talkie were all female voices, cut and crisscrossed multi-lane traffic while holding a lively chat with the girls, blaring her horn liberally through traffic, a trait I normally associate with misplaced dragon machismos among semi and six-wheel truck drivers in U.S. highways. The lady taxi driver got me sitting on the edge of my seat. She was one friendly and ferocious dragon, possibly a snake to boot.

2014 can only bring a wild horse to ride! Tally-ho!