Vast Chinese Walls Series: Calling Me

Clarion calling me since a mere boy

At bottom of deep hole I dug with joy

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Excerpts from the Introduction to my memoir, China Sings To Me (2018):

“There is nothing Asian in my known history. Yet from before I can remember I have been fixated with China and all things Chinese. I grew up on Cape Cod, a sandy flexed arm of American soil jutting into the North Atlantic. Cape Cod is on the other side of the planet from the Middle Kingdom….

I am often asked, “Why China?” I could say it is because mom and dad planted a seed when they told a little me that if I dig deep enough in our backyard sandbox, I would reach China. I could say it is because my mother also has a fascination with the East (which I did not know then). The joke at home is that I must have been Chinese in an earlier life. This last possibility may be closest to the mark.

We visited my grandparents’ cottage on Sebago Lake in Maine for Labor Day weekend before school started each summer. I was drawn to a small Chinese curio sitting on a shelf in the cozy living room near the sofa. It was an ornate ivory bridge, about five inches long, spanning a stream. A little, bent-over man made of wood pulled a cart with delicate wheels. There might have been animals too. Two decades later, my dad told me that when I left for college, his mother told him that she always knew China would be a part of my life because I gave her that Chinese curio when I was a young boy.”

The above images are from 1986-1987 at and near Badaling Great Wall north of Beijing.