(8-96) I often wonder if Western culture centers on the young and the Eastern culture centers on the old.

I remember I was in a huge used book sale in Chicago twenty years ago. I picked up a high school text book and read a story. It was about a young girl feeling attracted to a young boy in the neighborhood. I almost cried. I still remembered the warm afternoon sun scattered around me.

I couldn't believe this kind of story could be in a school text book. I grew up reading some ancient literary giants writing about The Original Tao (way or principle), or discussing the proper way of being a teacher, a son, or a citizen. There would be some personal essays that we as Chinese categorized as emotional narratives; they were essays about the writer's feelings and emotions. However, a typical example in this category would be a middle aged man mourning the death of his sister, or 30 year old son's feelings towards his aging father. Nothing that a 15 year old girl could relate to.

I was 25 years old when I first read the high school text book in Chicago. I mourned for the years lost not being able to read a simple love story, and talk about issues involved in the open. Love to many of us was still a secretive and unattainable thing. A few years later, I went back school to get my second bachelor's degree in English literature. I was intoxicated with writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Auden, Melville, Conrad, Foster, and so on. I had my first and only formal education in Western literature in those three years, and those were the happiest years of my life. Each and every emotion was touched and addressed. I felt fulfilled and satisfied like an octopus sinking into the deep blue sea. Little did I know I would surface again with all my tentacles out searching for food.

I cannot explain why I am hungry again. I only know that the poetry and essays I read in high school seem to ring a different kind of bell for me now. "Slowly waking up in a deep spring sleep, hearing birds chirping and singing all around. How many flowers were fallen, by the sound of the midnight wind and rain?" I thought it was a silly poem when I was young. Now I can fully appreciate the emotion beyond the words. Maybe age 40 is a time when one wonders what has been lost in the rain and wind. Like Chinese paintings, the language composed in Chinese poetry invites you to contemplate what's unsaid. Not only that, the tone of voice is almost always that of acceptance. You feel, you mourn, and then you accept. "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light" will never find its way into traditional Chinese poems. The acceptance and awareness together struck such a chord in me that I can't help but go back to Chinese literature to find a resting place for my soul.