“So,” I say, “didn’t go so well…”

Carrol just nods. She’s back from a year of University in the US, and that means I’m back teaching the day shift at Berlitz Taiwan, on special loan, so to say, for this one class. For the past few months she’d been emailing me faint-voiced letters from her dormitory room as she struggled through her first creative writing class - an intro to poetry - and her instructor’s sweeping pen notes in the margins that called for her to “try and engage the reader” and “clarify, clarify, clarify!” My own academic career in creative writing hadn’t gone well, either, I pointed out several times in my responses. Afterall, when I’d first taught her in Taipei a year back, when she was a highschooler who didn’t go to highschool, I was still a writer who seldom wrote. Undergraduate study had nearly killed the spark in me to write, something only the the energy and optimism present everywhere in I’d been in Asia, and Taipei especially, rekindled. She should be very suspect of my advice, I’d said.

I can tell now, though, she’s itching for another go at poetry, smarting at the failures (perceived or real) in the US, feels the need to go one more round. Clearly she believes I can help. I decide to believe, too, at least while I’m in class.

“Well, you’re in my class again, and if I’m going to teach you poetry,” I stop and wait for her frantic nodding, “you have to understand this first: we’re not here to write poetry, we’re here to make a poet.” Here again I pause. I didn’t have a plan for the lesson. A magazine article deadline loomed, and I was up all night before dealing with new arrivals to Taiwan who were crashing at my place while they sorted out their vacations and lives. I’d brought two of my favorite poems to class - a Lee Young-li and a Seamus Heaney - but that’s all. To anyone who hasn’t taught an ESL class for as long as I have this sounds irresponsible, but the best lessons always come running off your cuffs in the thick of the storm, as effortlessly as rain water. Faced with her silence, I’d made up the the objective of the course right there on the spot.

Now I have to get to the next point, which I also don’t yet know. “What’s the difference?”

She’s still wearing her hair in the same choppy, graceless style common here for girls would don’t want to be ‘girls’ in the narrow Asian sense. A year past I’d agonized over how to tell her that in America, it would look slightly ridiculous. She looks around the room for inspiration - to the whiteboard where I’d dashed MAKE A POET quickly, then to the crackling miniature tropical tree, dying, in the corner, then back to me. It was an unfair question.

I take another run at it. I say “Like gongfu.”

“Gongfu?” For a second she doesn’t realize I’m speaking Chinese, and tries to figure out the word in English.

“Gongfu, like TaiChi or BaGua, you know, Chinese fighting.” She doesn’t get it, and so just sits and waits for an explanation. I give her a question instead. “What makes a fighter good?”

“Practice.”

“What does that mean - give me a full sentence, a complete idea. Explain it to me.”

“They practice a lot, and so they can do it very well.”

“Do you think a fighter thinks about every punch they throw, I mean, after they’ve thrown it?”

No response. Strange question. “What I mean is, when they practice, do they worry about each little punch?”

“Yes.” Wrong direction. Still, though, she is right. The moment of tension, then focus, and release. Indeed they did worry about every punch. They thought of nothing else, in fact.

Stymied.

“So, when they’re finished, I mean, they’ve got their tea and their sitting on the meditation rock or whatever, are they thinking about the punch they threw ten minutes ago?”

“No.”

“Then why are you thinking about those poems you wrote a month ago?”

She doesn’t have an answer for me, but that’s because this runs pretty close to the bone. I understand. It’s the same reason I still think about that thesis that put me on the outs with the whole department, or when I was a sophomore why I’d kept a handful of short pieces for months on my desk, leaving them to go oily on the spit as I turned them around and around in my head.

When she’d sent me her poems to look at, I’d seen in her myself, the young poet. Fresh in school, so possessed of a desire to write good poetry that the tepid responses I’d received from my instructor, a poetry fellow on his second term, bewildered me. When asked for suggestions, just weeks before, to help her raise the grade of her final submission, I’d found myself suddenly in that fellow’s shoes. Page after page of poems, and each one good, but not worth revising. Carrol is anxious now across the table. It’s infectious.

So I cut the bullshit. I tell Carrol what no teacher ever told me. That no one poem matters. That her professor, like all of mine that came after that first fellow, had reacted as they had to, as a teacher should. They were saying: Great. Well-done. Now do it again a thousand times. Just like gongfu.

I lean in. “Poets are made of tiny, tiny bricks, thousands of them. What difference does it make if any one brick is that much shinier than the rest?” Here I was again, in the place teachers so often find themselves - suddenly understanding things better, more clearly, and totally spontaneously. Knowing something myself only as each word falls from my mouth.

“The young writer sees only the finished work of great writers, the poems that capture something extraordinary. They think this, then, is what we should aspire to, and try to find this in every poem they write - make every poem a masterpiece.We must remember, though, that those great writers had first to write a thousand other poems, poems that never quite made it, poems that had to be left behind.”

I ask if she understands my meaning. My heart’s pumping. She nods. Then she asks:

“When do I know if I’m done, and this poem’s good? Not just gongfu?”

The high wears off. “I have no idea. I haven’t gotten that far yet. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. Maybe it’s always gongfu. Let’s take a look at Seamus Heaney; he’s smarter than me, maybe there’s an answer in there.” And that’s when the course started.

“Deference unmediated by observing 禮 is lethargy; caution unmediated by observing 禮 is timidity; boldness unmediated by observing 禮 is rowdiness; candor unmediated by observing 禮 is rudeness.” - 8.2 The Analects

On the train from Daejon to Gyeongju, I wrote the following in my pocket notebook:

Fields and fields of algea-green rice shoots. Grid-like, planned green. The air-tight quality of trains makes the outside seem soundless: blue mountains far off and close-up, immaculate, deserted black roads. Far from Seoul. Reading Confucius now is like drinking at a still table. Again and again I see this word. What is 禮 (li) and why does he consider it the iron-wrought key to almost everything?

Then the door between the cars opened, and a pretty young attendant entered. She closed the door behind her with stiff purpose, moving her hand by twisting her hips in a contrived and clearly practiced motion. She turned to face the car, bowed, then walked quickly down the aisle, never stopping, before exiting and beginning again the same routine in the next car, and I imagined the car after that, and the one after that.

An oft-quoted truism is that Korea’s stiff formality comes from Confucian doctrine. Korea is the most Confucian culture on Earth, a truth born out by the Confucian colleges, detailed ceremonies, and the fact that only in Korea has the school of thought affected the trappings of a religion. I knew all this going in, which is why I brought The Analects along as my road book; I hoped to see first-hand what that reputation actually meant.

The other oft-quoted Korean truism is that Koreans don’t like Westerners, particularly Americans. The reasons are many and obvious - the shockingly misunderstood (by most Americans) Korean War for a start. Regardless, throughout my trip I was presented with a medley of dirty looks from strangers outside Seoul (the EXACT opposite of life in Taipei), and inside the cosmopolitan bubble, concerted disregard from almost everyone. The fact remains that Korea is not an easy place to travel in - Barret, a man who has trekked across at least three dozen countries, said of the difficulties getting train tickets, and traveling in general, that it was worse than in India. People weren’t rude - they just made no accommodation. At every turn, we had been expected to simply, and automatically, understand.

The pretty attendant made her way through the car again, stopping to shush the three of us, yet again debating in a great, free-for-all scramble. We were loud, but no louder than we thought was polite. Again, we seemed to miss the mark.

A major compounding factor of the real (but still wholly exaggerated) anti-Western bias is the foreigner’s total ignorance of the roles that govern all courtesies and even simple manners. Time after time, in paying for the check, asking for a light, being lost, or just talking to each other, we ended up pissing someone off. Anyone who hasn’t traveled extensively might be surprised to learn that manners aren’t universal. We were experienced travelers, though, and even to us it felt like the odds in Korea were stacked impossibly out of our favor. We all looked at the attendant with shock, and she graciously pulled herself back up, without another word leaving the car with the same wooden bow and exact motions.

禮 (li), the cornerstone of civilization for Confucius, gets translated in my version as ritual propriety. I, for one, have no clearer idea what that means than the Chinese 禮 or its romanization. Only when considering the way it is mentioned, again and again, as the necessary component to one’s social interactions, as a mysterious x-factor that balances all the columns, did I begin to realize that while to my American ear, ritual sounded arcane, we actually live detailed rituals everyday. Shaking hands, blowing out birthday candles, or blessing someone after a sneeze are all rituals, and those, not hours-long Sunday masses or tea ceremonies, makes the difference between a boorish person and a refined one.

So is the breaking of bread, the marriage proposal, the playing of taps, and even saying grace before a meal. It’s obvious how important these things are - even I, an atheist, take a moment before eating to be grateful for the food. I believe I’m a better person for it than I would be otherwise, too.

I doubt that any culture anywhere would expect a stranger to lock in step with their religious or formal rituals. The problem is oftentimes the tiny rituals, like how we should shake hands or conduct ourselves in a debate (rituals we don’t even recognize) are just as important - and totally taken for granted.

Whenever we are obliged to put on a public face or deal with strangers, we rely on a default mode - an intricate sequence of tiny rituals meant to put everyone in their proper place and see that business gets done. Which questions you ask, which you don’t, the words you use, your tone of voice, your posture - we deal with public affairs in an almost scripted way. I like to think of li as the way we greet a cab driver, deal with the stranger in the elevator, even make it through a first date. And all of us in these situations, we must admit, expect a equally scripted response.

In Korea, however, they did their best in the 1300’s to define all interactions in Neo-Confucian terms (Neo-Confucianism being the one man’s handful of theories being extrapolated to fill every corner of life), and what that means is that while in the West someone who doesn’t conform to social graces is at best eccentric and at worst a jerk, in Korea it’s a failure of the social contract. This is a serious thing: one false step and you come across as unlearned, discourteous, a disaster. I’ve felt first hand the anti-Western sentiment in Korea, and it’s not that bad. I can tell (in the way I have after more than three years of gauging the nuances of near-communication) that just one or two sentences of well-spoken Korean would banish the foul taste in the mouths of people I met as surely as any minor misunderstanding. It’s harsh, but without having made any attempt to assimilate or blend in, what can we expect?

Regardless, foreigners without knowledge of Korean culture and language will invariably come - and I’ll never learn Korean. Another page from my notebook:

I can go anywhere in Asia and be treated with sunny favoritism. The steadiness of Korea - the tepid, green regularity of the rice paddies - has its perks. I’m one step closer to understanding Confucius, for one thing, and at least I can tell the folks back in Taiwan that I’ve seen this all for myself.

The fish bangs its head against the wooden banister on the fishing boat’s starboard side before gracelessly tumbling back-first into the motor’s churning wake. Like the dozens of others, he falls with the pathetic clumsiness only living things can manage. I can’t help but wince as it slaps the white surf.

At my side are rows and rows of large plastic tanks, and in them writhe dozens of live fish. I’m one of six people, each with their own section of the fishing boat, pulling bucketfuls of fish to pitch back into the sea off the coast of Northern Taiwan. Next to me, another foreigner dumps her bucket of fish overboard and mutters, “I dedicate all merit from his to the Master, so that he can live long and healthy and continue to teach the dharma.” I was told that I must say this, but that if I wanted to add anything personal for the fish’s coming life, words of encouragement, that was fine, too.

The two-hour ceremony on the cliffs, now faint and grey behind the other fishing boats that follow in our train, had rewritten the fish’s karma, balanced the heavy weight that had kept them in a low-level of existence - the life of animals, which is all fear and hunger. I plunge the bucket and scoop up two big fish - muttering through clenched teeth, arms exhausted from dozens of loads, I struggle to raise the bucket. What wisdom have I for brethren souls still locked in darkness? “I dedicate all merit from this to the Ma-aster, so that he can live lo-ong and healthy and continue to teach the d-dharma. In your next life, be considerate lovers. Don’t be selfishhhh…” and the bucket pitched as the fish began their decent into the light.

The practice, which could be translated as Saving Souls if you had a Christian bent, is best rendered as Releasing Life. Buddhist cultures all over the world engage in this custom, buying up animals from restaurants where they are soon to be slaughtered and served to release into the wild, sanctified, ready for the next life, when they too will study Buddhism and release the lives of lesser beings, gifting upon their unwitting animal heads the truth they can only begin to understand somewhere in their myriad lives to come. For now, though, they are dumb, dead weight, currency for the merit economy.

The ceremony that brought them here, to the deck of a boat, had been impressive: four massive and specially equipped tanker trucks teeming with the living cargo, a dozen tour buses, a stage and even a pair of portable toilets were all neatly arraigned on the gravel cliffs, wide and flat enough to host such a party. If this sounds expensive, it is. Some fish were donated by restaurants happy to trade the stock of one day for a does of merit (what we call ‘good karma’) but most had to be purchased. Then there were the truck, boat, and bus rentals - not to mention all the equipment. This was all paid for by donations from thousands of true believers all across the island - a larger collection of same group that funded Master Wang’s Tea House meditation center, as well as his life and work. For every dollar spent, of course, came matching merit, like carbon credits for your coming lives.

For an hour we’d milled around the hot cliffs as the sailors stood smoking with their fishing boats moored in a small harbor below. There were twenty or so selected foreigners from the Sunday night practice, each having been specially picked by the Master, who’d joined a larger group of Taiwanese adherents to pile into a tour bus and make the trip along Taiwan’s beautiful northern coast. Those outside the inner circle, who hadn’t been invited personally by Master Wang, had been notified in sudden phone calls, or confidential sideline conversations, that only a few people could come, and so as not to damage the other foreigner’s fragile feelings, we couldn’t tell them.

When the tour bus would drop us all off near the tea house after the long drive back from the coast, we would stand around again with our hands in our pockets as one at a time we made our way to the Tea House. Going in as a large group, we would be told, raises suspicions. This was normal, however, as exclusive messages for one were constantly passing through the tearoom on dashing, socked feet, creeping whispers you were always only mostly unaware of. Ironically, the operations of an enlightenment-seeking organization seemed to hinge on winking ignorance into the eyes of curious near-believers, always for their own good.

Further out behind my boat, a disorganized group of other fishing boats maintain a respectful distance - when all of our tanks have been emptied, and we’ve turned back towards the rocky cliffs, they will overtake us to fish the waters we just seeded. My arms are heavy and tired, slick with the scum the teeming fish have whipped their tanks of water into. I struggle to balance my bucket on the banister. “I dedicate this merit to the Mas-” I begin but the boat tosses, and the bucket pitches its own contents shoddily into the sea. I look down to watch a fish glance of the side of the boat before hitting the water. Do I lose merit if I kill one?

Cargo spent, we turn and the real fishermen overtake us, casting out their nets. Most of the fish we freed will be caught and eaten within a week. The sooner they die though, I’m told, the better. The sooner they give up this pointless life, the sooner they can be reborn to seek the dharma, and that was the real point - not some momentary kindness to mindless fish.

I think about the return to Taipei, and the Tea House qigong workshop tonight. When I see the others, I know I’ll feel bad about having had the chance to go, and about having to keep it secret. It feels strange to have to lie. After all, we’re all good people.