Mom

(in "literature" for the 1st time :-). highly recommended and praised by his teacher. the little one also said that he was experimenting to write with no rhymes. his auntie was inspired to translate it. beautifully. and i am just, just happy).

Her smile makes the sun light up,
The lamp shines in her glowing eyes.
Her hair's a flowing waterful,
The picture on her sewing
slowly comes together.

She concentrates on her cloth,
and rainbow of colorful string.
Over, under, over, under
I hear the string running
throughout the cloth

I watch
as she sews a world
silent as a library
patient like a snail.

--------


小姨的翻译:



她的微笑点燃阳光

灯火在她眼中闪耀

发丝如瀑般倾泻

织绘的图画

渐渐明了



她沉浸在织绘中

还有那溪流折射的彩虹

一针,一线

上上,下下

我听到的声音

是溪水在其间奔流



我注视着

在她织绘着整个世界的时候

沉静地

象一个图书馆

耐心地

象一只蜗牛

the incurable pain

what is a life without sorrow -
an existence of no shadow?

Detour (a fictional story)

"Send!" I tapped on the key and there went the last email for the day. I glanced at the clock on the screen. 7:30 PM. Tired but satisfied, I walked out of my office.

It was quiet as usual at this hour. But something was disturbing the deserted air tonight. I followed the sound. A low sob became sharper. Then I saw her. Through the half-shut door. I hesitated. Then walked over, "Nancy, you okay?"

She turned around. Fresh tears washed down her face, "Oh, I'm fine. Fine. Really. Just... just a little allergy." She turned away. Buried her face in her hands, now crying relentlessly. Her cuddling body shaking. In her elegant blue suit.

Must be him. My heart sank... "It's quite late now. You should go home to rest."

"How can I go home? Like this?!" She cried harder. Desperately.

That's true. "Want to go have a drink?" I felt obliged.
--------

One

"Welcome!" Nancy poked her head at my cubicle. With a warm smile. "I am so happy you joined us. Highly recommended for your hiring. Now, I have a chinese countryman for a neighbor!" She switched to Chinese for the last declaration.

"Oh, thanks!" I was instantly at ease.

"Still can't believe you're head of Finance," I recalled my interview with her. "You looked so young. You are."

"Really?!" she laughed, pleased but dismissing the comment with a gesture. I noticed she wore a pink Kitty Cat watch. With a matching pink Kitty Cat purse. "Not that young anymore, really. My husband has been talking about baby for years."

"By the way, Dan also started today. Transferred from the Europe office. Jim was excited. He told us you two will make a great team. To turn the business around. You know, things aren't going well here. By the way," she lowered her voice with a grin, "he is so tall and handsome!" "Come on. I will introduce you to everyone around." Immediately, Nancy became my best friend.

But things certainly weren't going well here; and Dan and I were far from "a great team". Sales had been falling for three consecutive years. Moe, the sales director, was sent one leg out of the door. Dan and I reported to the vacant marketing director, who reported to Jim, when he was last seen.


Two

"Cheers!" Moe raised his mug, "This darn Legal Seafood! I have spent more hours here with you than with my wife in the whole month." "Well, I'm just sick of the popcorn shrimps. Wouldn't complain if they ran a Sichuan Gourmet at the airport. " All these years in America. Yet my stomach is more Chinese than ever. I even converted Moe to spicy food. I turned my thought away from food,"At least, we are close to close the deal. I hope this is the final trip to the 'Middle of Nowhere'." Deep in my heart, I actually love Iowa. Endless cornfields. Infinitely inviting highways. The "New Continent". Dwelled by Dvorak.

"Sure, except" Moe said, "Dan will get the credit again - he is touring the Europe office with Jim. You know that, don't you?" "Not really. I was in the field earlier this week. Visited local physicians. Old contacts. What's the Europe trip for?"

"What for?! Creating "synergy" between offices. Last I heard. Man, you better know that stuff. I mean, if you even want a shot at the director position!" "Dan hasn't done a single thing worthwhile. As far as I can tell." My mood darkened, "and I heard he was kicked out of Europe - who would have left kids and wife to the other side of Atlantic?"

"So what? Jim seems to be very happy with him. And sales are turning the corner: 'Hmm, must be Dan.' By the way, Nancy went with them, too." "How do you know everything? You are away as much as I am."

"'Course I know. I have Olga briefing me everyday. Matter-of-factly, how could you not know? She works for the three of us, if you happen to forget.""Don't need her. I use Expedia. Much quicker and cheaper. No delays. No mistakes."

"Old man! how could you be a boss? If, if not bossing around?" Moe paused to enjoy his play of words.

"Well, why did Nancy go?" I became curious about this new development.

"That, I don't know. Except this is the 2nd time they've travelled together."

"With Jim?!"

"With Dan." I suddenly realized that I haven't seen her drop by for a while. Well, hard to picture her in business. With her Kitty cats and all.


Three

"Nancy, do you have a minute?" I caught up with her in the hallway after the meeting, "why did you say the US office needs improvement? This is the first quarter we have turned around sales - after four years!"

"But we did not reach our stretch goal. You know that. And sales in Europe are crispy."

"But you can't compare like this. Europe is always strong - thanks to the leadership of Alex, if you ask me." I felt an urge to antagonizing.

"Not just him. Jim and Dan have done a lot of work, too. Anyway we can learn more from them... Actually, I've got to run. To Paris - we are holding our next year's budget meeting there." She impatiently raised her hand, showing a glittering Swiss watch.


"What a scandal," Moe snickered on my encounter with Nancy, "You and I have worked our asses off. And they have vacationed in every city of Europe!" He turned to the wine list, "Know anything about wine? Let's pick a good one. We deserve better."

"Don't care much about wine, either. Just get the most expensive bottle." I answered absent-mindedly, "Talking about them, now the whole office is talking."

"Except Jim. Still signing off all those "synergy" trips."

"You think he doesn't know? He can't see? I don't get it. I could never figure out what Jim thinks. "

"Nobody could. Only Dan knows how to kiss up. I have never met a guy this useless. Yet our boss loves him. And Nancy loves him. What a scandal. What a shame. I can't work here anymore. I am looking. You should do the same."


Four

"The management has decided that you are ready to take charge of the whole marketing department. Great job, Xiaosong. " Jim extended his hand.

"Thanks, Jim! I will do my best." So good work didn't go un-noticed, after all. I felt a sense of vindication. a relief. and... a question. It was somewhat unexpected, "How about ... Dan?"

"Oh, that's the other thing I wanted to let you know. Dan was just diagnosed with liver cancer. Late stage. He is moving back to Europe. For chemotherapy. To be with his family."

That was eight months ago.


Five

"Remember? you were the one who brought me here. When I first started." I looked around, remembering a time less than two years ago. Or ages ago.

"Yeah. Thought we would have come more often. Then... things just happened!" She tried to smile, but broke down again, hollering. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry! For being like this. He wouldn't approve. He kept saying I need be strong. Strong."

I ordered orange juice for her and a Cronona for myself. Just like the only other time.

"How's the treatment going?" I asked, expecting the worst. Nancy was not able to answer for a while. I watched her in silence. She looked sad and old. Oblivious of me. She kept wiping off the tears with the soaked napkin.

Finally, she said, "No more treatment. Xiaosong, he is dying tonight." She suddenly choked... gasped for air... And between broken breathes, I heard, "He is dying tonight... but I can't be with him!"

So it had all come to this. Two failed chemotherapies in Europe. One failed experimental trial back in States... And tonight, the life support was to be removed. Here in town. With his family....

Dying but not yet died. I froze with shock and felt tears welled up in my eyes. All my lingering resentments and confusion, towards him, towards her, evaporated. Slowly I reached across the table and patted her lightly on the arm, "Don't be so sad, Nancy. Things will be alright." She halted in her grief and looked up, "How strange, that's exactly the same last words Dan said to me."

---------------

Days later, we held a memorial service for Dan. We met Dan's family for the first time. His wife was stunningly beautiful. After the service, we went to the same Bar for a drink. Everyone told of fond stories about Dan. Jim recounted his heroic combat with cancer. Just one week ago, he had insisted on, because the doc didn't want to, scheduling the next bi-weekly appointment... I took the same seat but Nancy was not there.

---------

"Quick, Xiaosong! Come to the conference room." Nancy called outside my office, "Take a break. My department is having a little party. For the closing of a great year! Hurry up!" Nancy was smiling brightly. For a moment, I had a flashback of the day when I first started. But she also looked different. I don't know. She has to be.

How strange. Life is. In this "New Continent". Dwelled by Dvorak. Or by me. By Nancy.

Buckley Athwart History - from WSJ

(I am very much stirred by how he thinks and realizes his ideas; this is someone i can identify. actually, admire.)

I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.

-- "God and Man at Yale," 1951

It seems altogether possible that did National Review not exist, no one would have invented it. . . . For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D.s in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town.

-- "Statement," National Review, 1955

The attempted assassination of Sukarno last week had all the earmarks of a CIA operation. Everyone in the room was killed except Sukarno.

-- Editorial, National Review, 1957

We deem it the central revelation of Western experience that man cannot ineradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep. . . . Khrushchev cannot take permanent advantage of our temporary disadvantage, for it is the West he is fighting. And in the West there lie, however encysted, the ultimate resources, which are moral in nature. . . . Even out the depths of despair, we take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope. In the end, we will bury him.

-- Address in New York, after Khrushchev was invited to speak at the U.N., 1960

The glorious development of this year was the nomination of a man whose views have given the waiting community a choice. . . . Now is precisely the moment to labor incessantly to educate our fellow citizens. The point is to win recruits whose attention we might never have attracted but for Barry Goldwater: to win them not only for Nov. 3 but for future Novembers: to infuse the conservative spirit in enough people to entitle us to look about, on Nov. 4, not at the ashes of defeat but at the well-planted seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future.

-- Address to Young
Americans for Freedom,
September 1964

At a press conference during his campaign for mayor of New York City: Do you have any chance of winning?

Buckley: No.

Q: Do you really want to be mayor?

Buckley: I've never considered it.

Q: Well, conservatively speaking, how many votes do you expect to get?

Buckley: One.

Q: And who would cast that vote?

Buckley: My secretary.

-- 1965 (When later asked what he would do if elected, he replied, "Demand a

recount.")

A good debater is not necessarily an effective vote-getter: you can find a hole in your opponent's argument through which you could drive a coach and four ringing jingle bells all the way, and thrill at the crystallization of a truth wrung out from a bloody dialogue -- which, however, may warm only you and your muse, while the smiling paralogist has in the meantime made votes by the tens of thousands.

-- "The Unmaking of a Mayor," 1966

I first met [Whittaker] Chambers in 1954. An almost total silence had closed in on him. Two years earlier he had published "Witness." . . . The bitterness of the Hiss trial had not by any means subsided. For some of the reviewers, Hiss's innocence had once been a fixed rational conviction, then blind faith; now it was rank superstition, and they bent under the force of an overwhelming book. . . .

The tokens of hope and truth were not, he seemed to be saying, to be preserved by a journal of opinion, not by writers and thinkers, but only by activists, and I was to know that he considered a publication -- the right kind of publication -- not a word, but a deed. Though Chambers was a passionate literary man, always the intellectual, insatiably and relentlessly curious, in the last analysis it was action, not belletrism, that moved him most deeply.

-- "Odyssey of a Friend," 1969

Henry Gibson: Mr. Buckley, I have noticed that whenever you appear on television, you're always seated. Is that because you can't think on your feet?

Buckley: It's very hard to stand up carrying the weight of what I know.

-- Appearance on "Laugh-In," 1970

I am lapidary but not eristic when I use big words.

-- Column, 1986

How gifted do you need to be to publish Whittaker Chambers and Russell Kirk, James Burnham and Keith Mano? . . . If an editorial note is reserved for me in the encyclopedias, it will appear under the heading "Alchemy." . . . And, yes, we did as much as anybody with the exception of -- Himself -- to shepherd into the White House the man I am confident will emerge as the principal political figure of the second half of the 20th century . . . He said, at a critical moment in history, that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was an evil empire. . . . We were missing only the galvanizing summation; and we got it from President Reagan: and I think that the countdown for Communism began then.

-- Address at National Review's 35th anniversary banquet, upon his retirement as editor, 1990

Above all, conservatives tend to intuit that materialist terminology is insufficient to express the depth of American attachments to their ideals. It remains, for some reason, arresting that one speaks of the "sanctity" of life, of our "devotion" to our ideals, of the "holy" causes in which we engage. American conservatives never exclude those who discountenance transcendent perspectives, but we tend to live by them.

-- "To Preserve What We Have," essay in The Wall Street Journal, 2002

Ah, but the sea always has something lying in wait for you. . . . You are moving at racing speed, parting the buttery sea as with a scalpel, and the waters roar by, themselves exuberantly subdued by your powers to command your way through them. Triumphalism -- and the stars also seem to be singing together for joy.

-- "Thoughts on a Final Passage," essay, 2004

Despair is inappropriate for a culture as buoyant as our own.