In the Middle Kingdom, Part 1: Wuwei

What lazier way is there to title a book than the “Tao of…” (other, of course than “Zen of…,” with apologies to Mr. Pirsig, he did do it first and best). It’s an easy way to flog a book on some particular or quotidian thing, just bard it with a bit of Eastern mysticism, and an often shockingly superficial understanding of Asian religion, but it’s OK, because most of your reading public will be familiar with these concepts in name only. So off you go, and the “Tao of Fly Fishing” it is. 

(Note to self: check if that’s a real thing lol omg of course it totally is, and maybe the author is a true sage, but let’s just say my suspicions are not assuaged)

So, without going to Wikipedia, what could most of us say about Taoism? 

To be fair to my fellow damaged occidentals, it’s a devilishly difficult system to put your finger on, especially given its longstanding historical associations with esoteric and mystical beliefs despite the lack of mystical language in the Tao Te Ching, especially given the ways in which it has, like all Asian faiths, lent itself to syncretism, and the sheer openness of interpretation of the texts themselves, even by the woo-woo standards of religious literature. It is written in these dense, hermetic little aphorisms, which along with the allegories of the Zhuangzi as well as countless astrological guides, herbals, and alchemical manuals, form the corpus of Taoist holy text.

If I have to compare the whole thing to anything, it would be Robert Burton’s maddening, lengthy The Anatomy of Melancholy, an equally hermetic 1000-page Baroque treatise on the nature of the melancholic, rooted in the theory of the four humors, largely consisting of peculiar cures and musings on ancient Greek thinkers and legends. 

In that openness, I naturally found an appeal. Rather than religion, the Tao seemed more like a poetic, gestalt approach to the world. Even the first line of the Tao Te Ching is a fuck-you. The way which can be walked is not the eternal way. Sorry, next. Instead, we can only hope to listen closely to the music of the spheres, and try not to be idiots or assholes. Let that move me rather than being bogged down trying to make a rational decision in the infinite choices that flaunt themselves like streetwalkers in the grim stage of history in which I find myself. I can only try to move through as gracefully as possible, hoping to take effortless action, or what they call wuwei.

Knowing that there was no “knowledge” there, per se, no ultimate faith, I decided to take a cue from William James, and embrace the will to believe. I didn’t even know what I was believing in, but that was beside the point. I made a conscious decision, and chose to see where it leads me. 

So the wuwei led me to China.

Everyone has a take. The nation of the future. The number one enemy of human freedom. The inscrutable empire. The spearhead of communism. The spearhead of capitalism. The world’s oldest and noblest human civilization. A country irrevocably destroyed. A pillar of strength. A Potemkin village, a whole Temu-ass nation. 

Eh to all of that.

I’d rather smile at the aunties sitting next to me by the West Lake in Hangzhou. They laugh and gossip and enjoy their bags of medlars and their bayberries and their boiled peanuts, and their husbands smoke Chunghwa cigarettes, once a privilege of the Politburo, through stained teeth. They all loudly cackle and hack up phlegm and sip their tea. 

Robert Burton used to watch the boatmen of Oxford screech and swear and spit between writing the Anatomy.

They were men and women of an age where they may well have been sent down to the country. So let there be a blessing upon the sunny terrace and their medlars and cigarettes. They say that there are ten scenes of West Lake, depending on the seasons – the spring dawn on the Su Causeway, the lingering dawn, the autumn moon. This spring afternoon felt more than enough. 

Karl would have loved it. So would Rosa. But that Jiang Qing was a real ass, wasn’t she? Those were quite a few dead sparrows.

Nonetheless, the water still flows under the climbing vines on the old stone bridges of Zhouzhuang. Nonetheless, the stoic warriors still stand in silent formation, holding watch for their emperor beneath the mercury-fouled silt. 

And I can sit in a Shanghainese restaurant dating to the late Qing Dynasty, where the eels are slightly charcoal-grilled before being braised in spices and rock sugar, the chafing dish adding a second layer of char. The pork knuckle is cold and stodgy and dense under aspic, and a sip of hot Pu Erh tea turns it into an incomparably rich soup. A private joke among the last generation of mandarins. Men who would set their teacups on lilypads as they dreamed about butterflies.

“This is a way of showing the small in the large: in an unused corner plant some bamboo, which will quickly grow tall, then plant some luxuriant plum trees in front to screen it. 

This is a way to show the large in the small: the wall of a small garden should be winding and covered with green vines, and large stones decorated with inscriptions can be sent into it. Then one will be able to open a window and, while looking at a stone wall, feel as if one were gazing out across endless precipices.

Here is a way to show the real amidst an illusion: arrange the garden so that when a guest feels he has seen everything he can suddenly take a turn in the path and have a broad new vista open up before him, or open a simple door in a pavilion only to find it leads to an entirely new garden.” – Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life 

I take a taxi through the hutongs midway through demolition in the northern suburbs of Beijing, a little Ethel Cain playing on my headset, to the base of the Back Hill in the Garden of Harmonious Pleasures, on the north edge of the Summer Palace. It’s a steep climb, straight up amid old brick pavilions. These were once full of splendors, but when the Second Opium War and the Boxer Rebellion came, loutish British soldiers marauding through, sacking and stealing, smashing screens, pocketing jewels, grabbing curios which would go on to decorate the bourgeois living rooms of West London.

Because a trip to China is a trip through the horrors of human history. Here, the plaque says, is where caves in the Northwestern loess collapsed en masse in the great earthquake of 1556, burying thousands in their dugout homes. Here, the next plaque says, is where the Song Dynasty intellectuals committed suicide rather than submit to the Yuan. And over here is where the emperor’s mistress was tossed into a well alive. The stone lid they put on it that day is still there. 

In Nanjing, where the crayfish are beautifully sweet, the self-titled rulers of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom slaughtered the Manchu men first, and the Manchu women second, and then 30 million of their own Han Chinese were killed in the fracas, and 70 years later, the debonair and handsome Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, uncle of the Taisho Emperor sanctioned the industrialized mass murder of 200,000 civilian residents of the same city – and given his royal status, he was granted immunity. He died in 1981, a pious Catholic and wealthy golf course developer, living on my beloved Izu Peninsula coast west of Tokyo.

On the Back Hill, I am exhausted, the midday sun shining bright, amid the scars of old wars. 

But then I reach the pine-crested top, and the trees part and reveal Xanadu.

 

The mandarins are long gone, and us commoners get to traipse the plaisance along the Kunming Lake below. The girls get to do their hair into elaborate updos and dress up like empresses and concubines and water-sleeved fairies and interwar Shanghai femmes fatales. Along with the occasional anime schoolgirl. 

Not that it’s all lovely – a pox upon the gaggle of fat old ladies in jewel tones who nearly pushed me into the ponds in the Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou while they took a group photo, hideous knockoff sunglasses perched on their porcine faces. Chinese tourists have a reputation for being monstrous abroad, but it turns out that even domestically, all it takes is a selfie stick to turn a kindly aunt into hellspawn. And as I traveled, I had more than a few deeply unpleasant encounters.

Lacking the time to climb the sacred mountain of Huashan, I made my way to the Huaqing Pool, where the love of Emperor Xuanzong and his consort Yang Guifei was not to be, as told in the saga The Song of Everlasting Regret. Where, as the only Westerner, I was surrounded by more gawking locals who didn’t even have the courtesy ask if they could take a picture with me. More jewel tones. More knockoff sunglasses. 

The structures are largely hideous contemporary recreations, complete with plastic lotuses in the pond and mist machines.

 

“Other people are joyous, like on the feast of the ox,

Like on the way up to the terrace in the spring.

I alone am inert, giving no sign,

Like a newborn baby who has not learned to smile.

I am wearied, as if I lacked a home to go to.”

- Ch. 20, Tao Te Ching

 

“All my joys besides are folly,

None so sweet as melancholy.”

- Robert Burton in his overture to the Anatomy

 

But then I saw the path lead up the mountain of Lishan. Surely, this must be the way. 

And I climb to the top, to the little Taoist temple where the monks and nuns smiled and greeted me, merrily attempting to speak to me in Chinese, clucking through missing teeth. I simply smiled back and shrugged. They offered melon and steamed buns. And looking at the statues of the deities, I learned who my Taoist protector god was.

General Zhang Geng was an official of the decadent late Ming Dynasty who defended his family against unjust persecution, who defended the common folk against tyranny and oppression, who devoted his life to what he believed to be the honorable and honest way of doing things. This went as well as it normally does – of course the emperor offed him. And now, so they say, he keeps watch over all those born when the year of the tiger occurs in conjunction with the elemental sign of fire. 

I bought a cinnabar amulet there. I keep it in my messenger bag still.

And as I stared out at the turmeric-colored river, down towards the spot where the Qin Emperor’s mysterious necropolis supposedly lays undisturbed, I knew that I should be there, amid the lilacs and the cedars. 

In the distance lurked concrete towers.

As to those, I’ll see you in part 2.

The Summer Vibes Never Die

 On Sunday, 15 June 2025, I do what we all do. I wake up and check in on the world.

Then I see this beauty, shot at a Beirut rooftop club:

 

“Missiles in the sky, but the summer vibes never die.” Sun emoji.

Click the link for the funky beats and Baker Street-level sax solo: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DK5Z41RMRkz/ 

Netanyahu, of course, is hiding out in Greece right now. The Israeli Air Force One is apparently called “Wing of Zion.” Maybe he wanted summer vibes too.

The water is for the coffee is taking too long to boil. 

Meanwhile, back in my country, one Minnesota Democratic lawmaker has been killed, another injured. The presumed killer was the head of a security company called “Praetorian Guard,” but was apparently debased to living with a roommate, an old buddy. His CV said he’d worked for “the world’s largest convenience store chain” as a flex, meaning he had managed a 7-Eleven. Said roommate seemed to be a Papa John’s employee, and now the image everyone is going to remember of that poor bastard is him crying and reading text messages to the news cameras as he sweats through the Papa John’s polo stretched over his gut.

The suspect was experiencing “mental health challenges” per the local sheriff’s office. “Challenges.” 

I got baked last night and made post-midnight eggs au gratin with hella hot sauce. Probably a bad idea.

There’s probably still shit going on in Los Angeles, but Trump had a birthday rally in DC so all eyes were there, with troops failing to march in time to generic rawk and roll music that sounds suspiciously AI-generated. Sponsored by Coinbase, Palantir, UFC (natch), and Scott’s Miracle Gro. 

Miracle Gro.

Who’s been sending me messages? Seoul, Paris, Kyoto, and New York all send their regards, or at least their memes. I send back a picture of the pool outside (there are summer vibes, we must remember, even if it’s the bleak and rainy monsoon season here) and I have to ask myself whether to use the sunglasses emoji, or to playfully allude to the fact that I want to use the sunglasses emoji. 

The signs at the other rallies read “No Kings!” and I genuinely can’t figure out what this means. General dissensus, I suppose. I don’t see much in the way of concrete policy goals, mostly just one big frowny-face emoji.

Meanwhile, marines are detaining US citizens in Los Angeles after storming elementary schools, cops firing, point blank and with intent, at an Australian journalist reporting on the scene, Latino cops roughing up Latino protesters, LAPD and LASD shooting rubber bullets at each other, and Brian Wilson is dead.

 

But I repeat, “summer vibes never die.” Brian Wilson, at least you were given the dignity of being called profoundly mentally ill, not challenged. 

I really shouldn’t have had those late-night eggs.

The coffee is almost ready, though. 

What they tell you, five things you can see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste. Zero things you can vibe on, summer or otherwise.

I don’t know that that necessarily works. 

But I hadn’t even noticed my foot was bleeding.

I Miss Duolingo

Only one joke got an audible laugh from me in the Barbie movie. When America Ferrera and her daughter disappear into the Barbieverse, daughter asks about what her dad is going to do, and Betty who was never ugly says “he’ll be fine.”

Cut to the feckless white dude on the couch. 

(Happy chime sound, owl flips wings in joy)

Because that’s the degree to which Duolingo has become part of the zeitgeist. You know the person who’s “brushing up on their Spanish” or “dusting off their French.” Or you know someone who, just for the fuck of it, decided that Romanian or Norwegian was the way to go. 

And into that context, a little over a decade ago, I too decided to dust off my French.

It was another era, back then in the second Obama term, when I learned about Duolingo from some article or forum post back at a time when Cracked and Gawker seemed to be the wave of the future. Widespread pessimism had not yet transmogrified into widespread nihilism, and the question was what to do on the internet that wasn’t just a waste of time. So Duolingo was the answer, back when it was just a plucky little startup without a premium option (as I recall), and as was the standard at that time, the path to monetization was vague. 

Which says something about how optimistic the technological environment of the time was. People –including, tentatively, myself, as ashamed as I am to admit it – fully believed that Twitter had brought down Hosni Mubarak. I never fully embraced technical solutions to political problems, but the mere fact that I was not a full-throated enthusiast made me an outsider. And when I discovered professional buzzkills like Evgeny Morozov and Nicholas Carr, it felt like I wasn’t the only one who disagreed with the Obama-era consensus but also wasn’t some conservative mouthbreather.

It was a time when many technologies indeed seemed like “tools for conviviality,” as Ivan Illich put it. Who needs long-distance phone calls? We got Skype now! And WhatsApp for sending each other dumb memes. And even a skeptical fuck like me thought that maybe, just maybe, things might get better. 

And re: Duolingo, I was Duo-brained. To the max.

Well, Duolingo did, actually, show us the way – it all turns to shit.

As for when and how the decline started, different users have different opinions. Real heads would point to the increasingly heavy hand of investors during Series E and Series F funding in 2015 and 2017, and the consequent decline in the expansion of quality course material, but most would peg it around the time the “tree” model of language learning – modules one after another, but with some flexibility as to how that is approached -- was abandoned in favor of the “worm” model – do this, one after the other, with the option to just press skip if so desired -- in 2022. While this may seem trivial, it actually is pretty important. The former is a structure designed to guide language learners through a series of steps, with some options for individual patterns, but a focus on building the basics. The latter is a pure gamification. At the same time, forums were discontinued, meaning that users could no longer comment on the quality of the lessons or interact with one another, but were forced to simply play the game.

And this is perhaps the crux of the issue, something we never noticed, but should have. If you gamify learning, the goal ceases to be to learn. The goal becomes to win the game. I’m not the first to observe this. Nassim Taleb coined the term “ludic fallacy” to describe the misapplication of game-theoretic concepts nearly 20 years ago.

But the thing is, as I’ve learned as Duolingo has enshittified, I don’t give a fuck about the game itself, or the dumb challenges and different types of points and health bars and shit. I just want to improve my French and Spanish. I really, really don’t care whether or not I’m beating Slytherin1990 in the Diamond Tournament or whatever.

Despite this, things continue to be getting progressively worse. Consider the memo by CEO Luis Von Ahn several weeks ago in which he announced his intention to replace as many human workers with AI as possible, and the following dragging in the media, which he seems to be walking back in a panic, given how quickly the exuberance over AI is fading, although I doubt that that any reconsideration will amount to anything more than rhetoric.

“One of the most important things leaders can do is provide clarity. When I released my AI memo a few weeks ago, I didn’t do that well.”

 The pod-person phrasing doesn’t assuage my skepticism.

But this is hardly the first time that shitty AI has reared its ugly head. I’ve noticed more and more illogical translations, some of them laughable (“y” in a French sentence, meaning, for instance, “there,” pronounced as “i grec,” the French word for the letter Y). And with the option for Duolingo “Max” users (anything max is bound to be maximally crap) to have conversations with the cast of Duolingo cartoons (whom I also once found hentai of, SAD!) as AIs almost certainly being worse – not like I’d ever pay them a dime to test that hypothesis. Or, even more sinisterly, mistakes made while learning now prevent learners from moving forward, unless they pay for a premium subscription, functionally preventing anyone without a preexisting knowledge base of the language being learned from making any kind of progress. 

As with all products being undergoing this Ludovico technique, the self-consciously quirky humor (Duo died lol OMG Youtube-face) makes the ugliness all the more jarring. Please don’t show me Duolingo as a wrinkled old man or a fatass unicorn again.

But this is what happens when you take a good product, and let the private-equity goons have their way with it. This is what happens when you have an economic system that financially rewards the pillaging of the temple and disincentivizes building anything long-term which might negatively affect the profit margin this Q2. Those innovators and trailblazers – the ones who get treated with hagiographic praise at every keynote speech, state of the union address, and graduation commencement – either become con men, or reveal themselves to have been con men at their core, or are quietly marginalized by the professional con men. 

At least Tesla had the fortune to die before he could see what products his name was being slapped onto.

Aufhebung at Nottoway

When the Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, Louisiana, the American South’s largest remaining plantation home, burned last week, what was interesting was the degree to which the response was gleeful. Obviously, the media is going to focus on this response, but this was borne out by a quick foray into the social media space – something that would have been difficult to imagine 20 or perhaps even 10 years ago. And the reply from the reactionary right has been tepid, at least publicly, although I imagine what’s being said in upper middle class parlors throughout the South is somewhat less so. And this is something worth inquiring into.

 

I mean the reason people are celebrating is obvious. It’s a goddamn plantation. It’s a place built using the forced labor of slaves, and unlike, say, Monticello or Mount Vernon, the owners of Nottoway deliberately avoided using the buzzkill language of slavery – “antebellum home,” not plantation. The history section of their website says a lot about their lovingly named oak trees, and nothing about the people who were tortured and worked to death there. The picture of the couple celebrating their wedding on the property is decidedly racially ambiguous. It was, according to the owners, restored to its “days of glory.”

So before you read any further and willfully jump to any conclusions about my affiliations, I do want to underline the fact that antebellum nostalgists can fucking suck it.

But while I can empathize, I can’t celebrate. Because the fact remains that this is a historically important property, one of the sort that I think worth preserving because of course it is, especially if one wants to understand the role that industrialized slavery had in my nation’s history. The Grecian columns reflect a particularly pernicious belief among the ruling classes of their own natural aristocracy, a view of themselves as modern-day Solons. Architecture is perhaps the most potent of object lessons.

And it is/was just very pretty. In the same way a delicate moonflower blossom dripping with neurotoxins is.

So, as usual, the liberal consensus gets in my craw. I have to wonder how many of the choir of voices knew anything about the Nottoway Plantation beforehand (I certainly didn’t), and how many just checked their social media feeds for right-think, and responded accordingly. How much critical thinking about the whitewashing of history is going on here? And how much is just the kind of binary thinking that, at the end of the day, is little more than John Calvin hitting the pulpit and contrasting the total depravity of the world with the perseverance of the saints?

Because if we’re being honest with ourselves – what isn’t a product of horror? What cultural capital isn’t contingent upon suffering? Who do you think built those elegant Georgian townhomes that line the streets of London, and how many of those lords’ names are also found in remarkable number among black people in the West Indies? And who do you think owns those Georgian townhomes today, and how much unspeakable suffering do they continue to perpetrate throughout the tropical resource belt in the name of capital accumulation?

Who do you think built Rockefeller Center, and what do you think Standard Oil was up to? Is that what we think of when we see Jimmy Fallon yuk it up with background banter from The Roots?

But I don’t wish to moralize. Instead, I turn to the Marxian concept of aufhebung – a difficult term to pin down, but, more or less, holding the past condition of man and the ugly truth of material conditions, placing them in contrast, and arriving at a more humane synthesis.

History proceeds not through winners and losers, but through a more complex process. And so perhaps it’s best to admire the graceful line of an ancient oak, at the same time as one sees it nourished by human blood and sugarcane stubble. And after observing this contrast, it is perhaps helpful to admit that there perhaps really is a specter haunting the world.

Or maybe I’m just good at pissing all sides off. Worth a game attempt at honesty all the same.

The Obliterated Island

They ordered the tunnels to be built underneath a hill, towards the south end of the island, across the river from the little city that had once served as the capital a hundred years before, back when this was an independent kingdom. The admiral noted the quality of the sandstone – fine-grained, easy to quarry, but also remarkably resilient. The locals had a special name for it, in their dialect. They hid in caves hollowed out of the same stone.

It wasn’t much, but it would do in a pinch. The navy, once the terror of the sea, had been pushed back, forced into increasingly desperate action in a bid to keep the enemy away from the homeland. An invasion of the island itself seemed imminent, and they needed someplace safe, in the hope against hope that they might make it through. These men had been told they were going to unite a continent. Now they struggled under the tropical sun, quarrying out sandstone.

When the bombing raids began, the admiral and his men were trapped down there. He sat in the heart of his labyrinth, a simple bed, a simple desk, some radio equipment. Not much. He was did his best to try to convince the men that it was going to be alright, that reinforcements were on their way.

And yet the situation grew worse and worse. Thousands were down here, stranded. As the bombing raids increased, they couldn’t go outside. They slept huddled together, standing up, in the little alcoves in the soft sandstone. They shat in the corners where they could, the reek inescapable. And they waited, even as bomber after bomber flew above, shaking little bits of sandstone gravel from the roofs.

Until the admiral realized it wouldn’t happen. The enemy had already taken the northern half of the island, leaving the few infantry remaining stranded on the hills to the south. He had to make his decision. He pulled out his pistol, unable to salute the rising sun from deep within his underground maze.

Some finally sallied forth, a suicidal charge to the bright light outside, carrying out a dictum under two martial codes – one modern, brought back by the intrepid young men of the previous century who had carried the most contemporary ideas and philosophies of France and Germany and England back to their little nation, one far more ancient, derived from a time when a handful of feudal lords fought over what little arable land they had between their rocky, forested mountains and the endless sea.

And other men stayed in the tunnels. Weeping, desperate, they pulled the pins from their grenades, bodies still crammed in, device after device exploding, as young men who just a few years before had been tending to their fields and delivering letters and teaching in rural schools chose death over capture.

The few survivors out of the thousands who were down there came up to an obliterated island, fields destroyed, towns leveled, nearly every tree felled, many of the residents evacuated some months earlier, but a full 25 percent of the island’s civilians dead – either killed by the enemy, or goaded into suicide by commandants who could not bear the thought of their people living without the guidance of the imperial standard.

I stare out of the tunnel, into the light and emerge onto that high hill above the city, a light rain falling, halfway between Tokyo and Manila.

I knew the American military had been there for years, on the island of hacksaws and jawbones, hell, I’d known guys who had been stationed there in the USMC, but I didn’t know that we had administered the island as late as 1972. We left American-style plugs (two blades, unlike the two rounds used elsewhere), an affection for Spam and “taco rice” (made from the taco meat of scrounged MREs, and as disgusting as it sounds), and an inferior public transportation system.

“Keystone of the Pacific” read the old American license plates still hung up in bars and restaurants around the island.

Now blurred by the scratching processes of history. That mediocre Mel Gibson movie where Andrew Garfield played a real simple feller who just wants to love him some Jesus and save some folks. That’s what about the limit of what most Americans know. That and it’s where Mr. Miyagi is from.

And I had remembered, from news stories in my childhood, the 1995 incident in which three American servicemen, having been put off by the high prices of local hookers, had instead gang-raped and murdered a local girl. And indeed, I remember seeing the press conference where the then-head of the Pacific Command, America’s top military officer in the entire Indo-Pacific region, responded as follows:

“I think it was absolutely stupid… for the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl.” – Adm. Richard C. Macke

Then I stand under the two bishop wood trees, Bischofia javanica, that had survived the bombardment of the Shuri Castle, on a hill that had been thick with them.

But all of that history – 1945, 1972, 1995 – was remote from me. I was there, but I was not there. I was on the same hill, but in the here and now, the battlefields now covered in little houses and sun-bleached apartment complexes with rusted fences that would be just as familiar in Honolulu or Los Angeles, palm fronds and guava leaves fluttering in the Pacific breeze.

The tourist gazes on history. He, in turn, takes his photos and is gazed upon. And thus we form our place in the world. 

And then when I came back to my adopted city, and gave out my gifts – sweet potato candy and sea grapes, pickled scallions and preserved pork belly and dried beef tongue and spirits made from jasmine blossoms and the local shikuwasa citrus – that I sat at my local jazz venue and saw a woman in white, her eyes closed and hairline sharp like a Shinto shrine maiden, playing hypnotic, soft guitar, her voice a precise, almost impossibly mellifluous soprano.

She says to me in broken, slow, deliberate English, “I can tell. You were listening to. My music. Seriously.” Aww, that’s probably what you tell all the girls.

She smiles. “Your hometown. Is where you are.” She had said earlier in the evening.

And I look down at the page of my notebook where I had written about the tunnels. I look back at her. “My hometown is Okinawa,” she says.