Location: Guilin, a famed locale of misty riverside, bizarrely shaped limestone mountains layered one after another, home of the monster mosquitoes (this part I add with particular poignancy as I furiously slap my embattled calves).

Local Time: 11:25PM

I travel because it sharpens the focus and broadens the scope of the lens through which you view your life. 

I read because it allows you to wear someone else's--one that is more brilliant and vivid and deep than yours--brain and see the world through his eyes, and speak the world through his voice.

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Both are extraordinary and irreplaceable in the life I want to live, and am living.

Heat-Induced Memories

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.
-Kin Hubbard

So...this is the first 80+ degree weather I've experienced in about two years. Around this time last year, I was 8,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies and it still fell to the 40s during the night.  Coyotes howled, and midafternoon hailstorms were de rigeur.  Now it seems almost unbelievable that I was ever there, and even more unbelievable that I loved it. 

I sobbed as I navigated the pothole-filled dirtroad out of the grounds of Shambhala Mountain Center last August; in my heart of hearts I knew this was one aberration in my life I would not repeat, and that there was very little chance of my return to this odd little place in the world.  All the friends I had made there would also be gone, and it would never be the same, as nothing would be.  It was one of those moments in life that bisects your existence into a before and an after.

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The east coast heat has a texture that is altogether foreign to a Southern California native.  It, however, feels altogether familiar to a South Korea native.  In retrospect, I had the kind of wildly romantic childhood that is rarely found in my generation.  Two hours south of Seoul, my father inherited a large patch of hilly land from his father and raised cows until I was six years old.  He built the house we lived in himself with help from the local farmers, and we lived without hot water, toilet, or neighbors.  Ours was the lone house sitting on top of a hill, accessible from the next village over only by a rowboat across the Han River and a steep hike uphill.

My memories from these years are always of the summer.  I have no recollection of snowstorms and freezing temperatures in this place, although pictures tell me that I had plenty of wintry experiences, too.  I remember, at 3 years old, being cradled in my grandfather's lap, pointing at the fiery fuschia of the azalea blossoms in the mountains surrounding our little hill, and learning my first metaphor as he described the flowers as having "set fire on the mountains."  I remember swinging my bare, suntanned legs over the open porch in front of our house, eating a ripe peach and looking at a rainbow over the river.  I remember the mini-excursions my parents and I used to take to the creek behind the house: clear water would run, and my father would place a wooden plank over the stream so that my mom and I could sit and dip our feet in the water.  Then we'd always have cold seaweed-and-cucumber soup and mash hot potatoes with honey.  We would walk our cows to the river down the hill for a bath, and watch as some water-loving cows splashed about while some water-phobic cows stayed ruefully on the side, blinking their big bovine eyes at us.  In the evenings, mom played old nursery rhymes on the piano and read me stories from the books that grandma had sent for me.  

It wasn't an easy life for my parents.  Dad spent hours each day cleaning up after the liberally pooping cows, mom had to hand-wash my diapers and boil buckets of water just to have a bath and pick wild edible plants for dinner.  But for me, it was a small slice of heaven nestled between the oblivion of babyhood and the shock of a grey, grimy city we soon moved into for the sake of my education.  As a five-year old tyke, I'd go outside alone in the middle of the night for a "bathroom" break, and felt so happy listening to the chorus of frogs in the rice fields.

I went back to this house five years ago.  What used to be an unpaved riverside road and a stretch of lush plantlife had transformed into a swanky strip of resort-style hotels and eateries.  At the very entrance of our ranch, through which we used to lead the cows for their river-outing, sat a uber-trendy Vietnamese restaurant named Green Papaya.  With hesitation I glanced up the hill, afraid that there would sit a fancy hotel or, god forbid, a golf course.  I breathed a sigh of relief to find the gate locked, the land beyond it dark, and dogs barking to fend off strange scents approaching.  

I just pray that whoever owns the land now just holds off for a few years longer from "developing" the place, because, you see, I want to buy it back and see the mountains set ablaze by azalea blossoms once again.