It seems that just in a few days these wild plants (Kudzu) have grown to cover both sides of the trail along the river and creeping up on the bodies of tall trees.
Sculpture garden
Safe Haven
At the height of summer, I woke up on a Sunday morning to realize that the probability of being caught by bears is actually much lower than being killed by another human. After all, being eaten by a fluffy animal would simply be a natural return to nature and surely would feel better than a cold metal bullet. It was a liberating revelation; thus I overcame my bear-phobia and immediately went hiking in Shenandoah. Sunspots felt warm on the rocky paths. The air was breezy. I had almost forgotten how refreshing summer is here. It is a bit tempting to think we might still be able to find a safe haven in these mountains at the side of the waterfalls…
Summer is here
These days I take my daily walk in the evening. When it becomes darker, the bushes on the trail side would be sparkling as if stars had descended near. Then, I know summer has arrived. Yesterday I went out a bit early, and it was still light. While I was just thinking of it, it came, flying around me; landed on my palm. I was surprised, and touched for a whole night.
Reread Eileen Chang
Recently I picked Eileen Chang from my bookshelf again and casually flipped through some pages. I found myself still astonished by her talent. If one doesn’t have rich life experiences and can write so many characters whose every inch is alive, what is it if it is not talent? She did not dream A Talent’s Dream (an essay she published at eighteen years old that made her name); she was talented.
Read full textIt came to me all of a sudden that those sad men and women in Hong Kong’s movies and pop songs all seem to have walked out from her books. Her Eighteen Springs (also known as Half a Lifelong Romance), for example, is not a long novel, but has been a source of abundant inspiration.
Let’s put the book’s protagonists aside today. Cuizhi and Shihui are two secondary characters who really liked each other, but the differences in their family backgrounds would not allow them to be together. Many years later when they met again, Cuizhi already got married, and Shihui, though still being single, had more than one women in his life and each was like a shadow of Cuizhi and only richer than Cuizhi. The book ends with a scene that the two of them sat across each other at a dinner table. Watching a thick yellowish curtain blown by the evening wind as if a woman’s full skirt lingering at the window that could step in or take leave anytime but didn’t, both felt a deep loss in their lives and a sense of futility.
So, we see in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love and 2046, his leading man would forever look for a Su Lizhen he had once fallen in love under a special circumstance. They understood and felt for each other, but nothing had really happened in the end because of the circumstance. We hear Lin Xi’s Not Coming Not Going; the title of the song is almost a copy of Chang’s words.
It seems that not just me – Hong Kong must have also fallen too deeply for Eileen Chang.
Love at first sight
A few days ago I walked past this necklace at the National Gallery of Art and felt instantly I had to have it and took my first selfie. 🙂
Seven years ago
On July 4th in 2012 I went to see Lake Michigan one more time and closed a chapter of my life and my education in Michigan. It was the best part of my life and an exhilarating experience. In the small town Ann Arbor, I was able to sink in and began to learn about myself and make sense of my life. At the University of Michigan my mind underwent a transformation through interactions with many great people. Time has its own logic; it takes what it needs to get here. Even if the few ideas I got are the only achievement I have made in the past seven years, I am happy with my achievement. Got to continue trying.
Uncle Lee
Today I listened to Jonathan Lee, accidentally. Lee is a Taiwanese musician and an influential figure in the world of Mandarin popular music. He has been greatly respected by musicians who would call him their big brother at the peak of his career in the 1980s and 1990s. Lee turned 60 this year; time does not bias against anybody (even a celebrity), leaving obvious marks on his physical appearance. From 2012 to 2015 Lee embarked on a world tour Now That I Cannot Keep Youth, Let Me Be an Uncle, which turned out to be a huge success. Thus, the big brother has transformed himself to an uncle, successfully.
Read full textUncle Lee is actually better than brother Lee. Watching him sing with a light heart those old songs he wrote about his emotional youth, I know he has lived past his past. Only after one “has climbed over several hills,” could he have the kind of humility to say “a song writer may not be smarter than somebody who sells steamed buns on the street. ” And he may “finally be bold enough to meet the difficulty of living with a grinning face and smiling eyes, realizing that the world is only a stage on which we are not leading characters, nor can we determine our ups and downs, but we can decide when to enter and exit.” Climbing over hills, one may also “become more patient and learn how to be out and then fully engage in and how to be a king in his own world, dancing with winds, as a sorcerer practicing his art of magic.”
I used to like old stuff. Today I begin to see that the popular and the classic may not be that different. In his novel Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro tells us that life is a sad business, and most of us devote ourselves to a few courses we may not even fully understand as those boys and girls who are created to be organ donors. Some of them may donate once, some twice, and at most three or four times, and then they are done with. Is this much different from Lee singing, “we are already old when we haven’t grown up and still don’t understand it?” To Kazuo Ishiguro, even love is a fictional account that cannot help or save us. The Nobel writer’s insight is indeed deep but chill to the bone. Lee seems to be a little more at ease; he continues to sing, “Time, please do not rush me. All those coming I will not push away, all those gone I won’t chase. I will return what I own and give when I should.” At least he has a solution: even if we don’t have anything, or nothing is reliable, we can still be a sorcerer in our own kingdom concentrated on practicing our own magic.
Remembering Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Laureate in physics who discovered the particle quarks, passed away in Santa Fe on May 24th 2019. So, another giant in complexity science is gone, after we had lost John Holland in 2015.
I had met with the father of quarks three times. The first time it was at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). I was still a PhD student, and it was near the end of my PhD study at the University of Michigan. I attended a meeting at SFI on stability of economic systems, fortunately with professor John Holland, the father of Genetic Algorithm . It was my first visit to SFI, the epicenter of complexity study, and as a student of complexity, I approached Santa Fe much like a pilgrim.
During this visit I also got to meet some other legends in Mitchell Waldrop’s popular book Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. I read Waldrop’s book again and realized that Murray Gell-Mann had a vision on sustainability even back then. In his vision a sustainable human society is adaptable, robust, and resilient to lesser disasters, can learn from mistakes and allows for growth in the quality of human life instead of just the quantity of it. He said the transformation to a sustainable society requires understanding economic, social, and political forces that are deeply intertwined. That was exactly what I was trying to do with my dissertation. He had helped set up the World Resource Institute. From Waldrop’s book I also rediscovered Brian Arthur’s insightful remarks on policy which would become part of a new course Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and Policy I taught later at George Mason University.
About my pilgrimage to SFI, I will say no more today but attach a piece I wrote in 2010 immediately following my visit.
A pilgrimage to SFI
So, I have made my pilgrimage to SFI
A bright place on a bright hill, from where
The bright ideas of some bright people
Have brightened my mind
As a Buddhist to Bodh Gaya
A Muslim to Mecca
A Christian to Jerusalem
Sitting between the fathers of CAS, in a conference room
I become lost in some kind of aura
While the father of Quarks quickly relates my Chinese name to Japanese
“It’s a square plus a cross,” he says
The father of Genetic Algorithm jokes (as he always does)
“She is a peasant.” (Tian means agricultural field)
But the father of Q says I am a good-looking peasant (which makes me laugh)
It seemed as if just yesterday
Those legends in Waldrop’s Complexity world gathered here
Launching a scientific journey on CAS
But when I watch Don Farmer (one of the legends) on the podium
Who is talking about regulation and stability of the economy
I have to believe
Twenty five years have passed
In twenty five years, people do age, and things change
But the spirit remains
The father of GA still has the highest volume of voice in the room
His remarks are sharp (just as his eyes)
The father of Q still has beautiful dense curly hair (despite it is gray)
His head is up and face alive when it comes across names
Like Faraday, Maxwell, Albert
Not just them though
The Yale economist, the Stanford demographer, the UCLA neurologist
The Harvard biologist, the UM archeologist…
The staff members, even the waitress in a restaurant
And those businessmen from Intel, Lockheed, Citicorp…
All are enthusiastic (and interesting too) –
Enthusiastic about CAS
So twenty five years have passed, how much progress have we made? I ask
It’s very little, the father of Q says
We need LOTS LOTS of people to work on it, he continues
And we need theorists besides data mining, the father of GA adds
Let us get on and carry on what the legends have begun
Let us march on, as we must
No matter how hard it is
P.S.
Retracing footprints of the legends
I drive up the mesa from Santa Fe to Los Alamos
Stopping at the Valley of the Rio Grande, I watch
Sangre de Cristo Mountains above and far
As the legends did
The father of GA tells me
Sangre means blood and Rio is river
Rereading Waldrop’s Complexity
I realize
Twenty five years ago, the father of Q
Who helped set up World Resources Institute
already had a vision on sustainability
which is exactly what my dissertation is about
I must study hard to get my “union card”
Luckily sitting next to Cormac McCarthy at breakfast
I get to have a small conversation with the Pulitzer winner writer
who said it is more important to be good
than it is to be smart
which I can’t agree more
And he looks genuine and surprisingly gentle
Thus my pilgrimage to SFI goes beyond satisfaction
When I visited SFI the second time to attend a workshop on Gateways to Emergent Behavior in Science and Society, I already got my “union card” and became an assistant professor with the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason. I co-chaired a session Toward a Habitable Planet. My mind at that time was very much occupied by the mystery of the brain and had an aha moment on a walk. At lunch, I asked Murray Gell-Mann what he thought about the brain and the mind. He spoke to me candidly that he had not thought deeply into this matter.
My last encounter with the father of Quarks was in Singapore at a meeting More is Different organized by the Complexity Institute at Nanyang Technological University. At the reception he recognized me sitting at a table while walking out on the corridor and stopped to say hello. As usual his dense, gray curly hair seemed to contain wisdom and whimsy, but I noticed his health was deteriorating and felt sad. I didn’t want to burden him with long, serious conversations.
Just a few days ago, at the National Portrait Gallery I saw a small photo of him in an exhibition titled In Mid-Sentence among a collection of photos of politicians, artists, and entertainment stars and wondered how he was doing. I thought the gallery should put on better photos of him. Much has been said and I don’t need to add on anything about how great he was as a physicist, or what a broad and fine intellect he had. He had come across my mind always as charming and cool.
In fact many scientists are charming and cool in some way, but this side of scientists is unseen to the public. The Portrait Gallery had another exhibition American Cool several years ago. It included images of politicians, artists, and entertainment stars but not a single scientist. Maybe I should propose to the Portrait Gallery to set up an exhibition Scientist Cool.
May Day
Sunlight on the Atlantic is warm in May, but I don’t know how to capture warmth with a camera. Under my feet waves surge one after another making clear marks on the beach that overlap each other without a regular pattern, interlacing with my small footprints. At the far end of the ocean it is uniformly thick and deep; I cannot make out anything there even with binoculars. A couple of fish got strangled on the beach. Their bodies struggle to make a move to no avail, and their hard shell proves to be useless on the sand. I pick them up and put them back to the water. I am not sure if they will be able to get back to the deep ocean, though. It is kind of assuring to see strangers still smile at each other in this small place called Bethany. I smile back at everybody I run into.
