So here is New year’s Eve; I suppose I should look back at the year that’s closing, and forward to the year that’s coming.

I’ll be brief, since no-one likes a whiner! In short, I can’t wait for the next few hours to pass: 2009 was a horrible, horrible year. I’ll look back on it as ‘The Year of the Zombie’, since I spent most of it so exhausted I couldn’t think straight. A number of things that have been going on for a few years now got worse and worse, and well… Let’s just say that it felt like nothing was working out. I lost sight of the person I want to be; most of my friends moved on from Beijing; my martial arts and meditation practice seemed to be going backwards fast, and professionally I felt over-qualified, under-paid, and under-valued. By late August, I was ready to quit Beijing and head back to Singapore. Frankly, I was planning to renew my meditation and grounding in the Dharma with the aim of stepping into freedom… Then I got knocked off my bike, and things got worse…

There were good points. In particular, I’ve made contact with a number of you guys, readers of this blog, who have turned out to be great people. Thanks for reading, guys, and for all the other interaction we’ve had online or IRL. It’s meant a lot. My friends in Singapore have turned out to be real stars as well. The yiquan has kept me going, even if I didn’t improve much. There was the connection I made with the village in Hebei, and the dragons… It turns out I really like Mongolian music…

As for next year… Well, it’s odd. Something changed in the stars in early December. I started to get some real insights into the yiquan, and my practice suddenly improved a lot. I’ve also found new friends in the other foreigners who are now coming regularly. I’m meditating and working with the Yi Jing again. I’ve met a new crowd of people on the same wavelength as me at the Beijing Improv workshops. I’ve been motivated to start bagua again, and found a place I can practice. Professionally, I find that my value has been acknowledged, and I’ve been made an offer that’s better than anything else I could hope to find, either in China or Singapore.

In short, I’ll be going into 2010 with a fair wind behind me. The balance has swung back to staying in Beijing. There are new opportunities to grow, in almost every aspect of my life, and I find that I couldn’t justify leaving. That doesn’t mean I’m breaking my bonds with Singapore – far from it, and I’ll be working on that in other ways.

There’s also S. – but ahh, what to say there. We’re not a couple, and I don’t know if we ever will be. Still, she drives me to become a better person; like Dante with Beatrice, Petrarch with Laura, perhaps I can only sing her praises as my unattainable muse, a reason for poetry and living… She’s made such a difference to my life…

So there we are; interesting times. As the old toast goes, may the best of the old year be the worst of the new – happy new year!

Just got back from meeting Kong Cheng. We trained for an hour, and then he had to leave, after which I did some more work on tang ni bu, finishing up with some zhan zhuang.

My baguazhang has gone. There’s no other way to put it. It’s over a year since I did any training, and from today’s experience, I was probably doing a lot wrong anyway. All of my physical misalignments reappeared… it was awful! I couldn’t even do tang ni bu properly any more! Aaagh!

Still… a lot should come back, with practice. Plus, for the first time ever, I now have a bagua teacher who speaks English. That’s going to make a huge difference. I’m looking forward to this….

What’s also extremely important: it turns out that, with the new subway line, Zhong Shan Park is very easy to get to from my apartment. I’d never been there before, and it turns out that it’s really quiet and peaceful. It was fantastic to be standing in zhan zhuang, with very little noise to disturb me, facing the early morning sun as its rays lit up the yellow tiles on the roof of the Gate of Celestial Harmony… WOW! It was one of those “I can’t believe this is really happening” moments…

Finally, I’ve found somewhere to train without crowds of gawpers! I hope to go there a lot in the new year.

It was cold, though… Very, very cold….

Whether you’re celebrating the solstice or the birth of Jesus: Mithras or Elah-Gabal, Yule or Hanukkah, Yalda or Saturnalia – at this moment of ancestral memory of those long, cold winter nights when the food and logs begin to run low and we look with hope to the coming of spring:

Merry Christmas!

I caught up with Kong Cheng last night. We met near the Drum Tower for a couple of hours and chatted about his trip to Europe, and about mutual acquaintances. We also chatted about various books about baguazhang; it turns out that he’s got plans to write a book in English for more advanced practitioners. I was urging him to start blogging, so maybe he will…

I’m going to start training with him next week. It will only be for a few classes, as he’ll be away in January, and I’ll probably be in Singapore for a lot of February. That reminds me, I ought to say something about my plans for next year; never mind, that’s for another post. Anyway, as for the bagua classes, it’s more than a year since I trained in bagua, and I’ve had a lot of insights through my yiquan training, so I want to start again at the very beginning, with tang ni bu, and then build up again.

We discussed various locations for the training, and settled on Zhongshan Park, on the western side of the Forbidden City. That’s thematically appropriate, since it’s named after Sun Yat-Sen, who I was just talking about in my last post! Apparently it’s one of the most central locations of Beijing, so there’s a certain appeal to ‘circling the city’s axis’, as it were…

I went to see “Bodyguards and Assassins” last night at the Oriental Plaza cinema in Wangfujing. Something felt wrong… until I realized that this was the first time I’d visited the cinema since coming to China, and it’s warm inside! (In Singapore, the cinemas always turn their aircon so low, you can practically see your breath!)

The movie was in Mandarin (duh!) and had no English subtitles. S. could understand it perfectly, of course; for the talky first part I treated it as an improv exercise, imagining an alternative dialogue. In the second part… well… you didn’t really need to know what anyone was saying!

If you don’t know what the film is about, it deals with a 1905 visit to Hong Kong by Chinese revolutionary (and future president of the Chinese Republic), Sun Yat-Sen. Ostensibly, he was there to visit his mother; in reality, he was there to meet fellow revolutionaries. The Dowager Empress and the Qing court, sensing opportunity, dispatch a company of assassins… In Hong Kong, a disparate band of warriors and workers agree to act as bodyguards for Sun…

OK, let’s cut to the chase: spoilers ahead.

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Still here? OK. Pretty much everyone dies, except Sun. It’s a great film. There’s one scene in which a few of Sun’s supporters are hiding out in Sun’s house, while outside one of the bodyguards (a Daoist monk turned beggar) battles overwhelming numbers of Qing assassins. Sun’s aged mother silently holds the hand of one young man who knows he’s going to be killed if the assassins get through, and tries valiantly to conceal his terror. I found it very moving…

There’s a spectacular scene of parkour, as one each of the bodyguards and assassins fight a running battle through a bustling Hong Kong street – demonstrating exactly why I think I should learn parkour! Maybe next year…

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though I had no idea what anybody was saying. S. tells me that it’s based on historical fact, though I can’t Google anything up to support that. It make you laugh, it makes you sad, it keeps you on the edge of your seat plenty…

Recommended.

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