Der goldene Drache - The Golden Dragon
How can we exist beyond our personal grief and subjective defensiveness?
“This program “Wo-Men” means “Us”, or “We, together” in Mandarin Chinese. It celebrates our diversity and common humanity.
I’d like to start with two short stories.
In March, 2020, right after COVID was announced a worldwide pandemic, my little brother walks into his school and the children all point at him and run away yelling “Chinese virus!”
In February, 2023, just last week, I walk into a busy cafe in Vienna. The owner gives me one quick look, and immediately shoves me towards a dirty table in the middle of traffic. I ask politely if I can sit more inside, pointing at the empty tables by the window, and he snaps “no, we’re full,” then glares at me with such an intense contempt that can make a person feel at once both invisible and an eyesore. Unwelcome, unwanted, a nuisance, an outsider labeled as Japan? China? Tourist. Other.
’Get out of my space,’ those eyes, those body gestures, those details all scream.
These are just two stories. There are countless more.
Racism can be found in the smallest gestures and felt deeply. When this happens again and again, it’s extremely disheartening and painful.
And this brings me to my message in sharing music from around the world:
Before we look, let’s LISTEN.
We need to not just see each other, but hear each other first.
Don’t assume we know someone’s story just by looking at them. Listen, and hear. Hear without judgement and assumptions.
To listen without prejudice is a challenge, but a challenge we can all embrace with more attention, awareness, noticing.
To not only listen, but also HEAR without assuming we know anything about an individual in the context of a larger, often skewed ‘history’, of stereotypes, labels, preconceptions, of our own limited, lived experiences. That’s the practice of humility and kindness.
Listen with care and attention.
Listen and notice and allow yourself to be surprised and challenged.
Let’s listen with our ears, not our eyes. Listen with an open heart.”
Immaculate timing. For me to re-experience trials and challenges to remember why I do what I do, why I need to say what I say, and how I can find new ways to facilitate communication and the experience of art to enlighten awe and joy and wonder and profound spiritual connection with our shared humanity, with “Us, being together, a collective consciousness”.
This is what I scribbled in my journal during and after a series of experiences in Vienna.
Der Goldene Drache
A tooth. A whole. Hole. Family sized hole
that won’ stop bleeding
that won’t fill
lost and not found
can’t be findSeeking home, drifting across icy seas until we are bones and algae
Lost.What do we give away once we share our names.
Who owns shared memory? Who protects or takes care or abuses it?
Why?“T, o, n, g. It’s a Chinese name.”
I miss home, I said. Why did I share that to a stranger.Again, placed in the corner,
middle of traffic, front of traffic
because we are both invisible and an eyesore
shoved somewhere
out of the way
like we were never thereNo name.
Daring to be alone.
Stand ground.
Just be here.Warm and cozy
Who sees you.They don’t have names either.
Just “the Chinese boy”.
Do we avert our eyes. Do we sigh or gasp or consume the horror?
A cricket. Dance, dance for us. Anything to survive.“She’s not an animal.”
__
Who are ‘our people’?
All this wandering. Blown from place to place by some real or perceived unwantedness? Where do we finally feel at home? Like we ‘belong’? Totoro. Manga. Figurines. Spirited Away…Don’t you much rather be here than a fancy European cafe? Did you realize how hungry you are?Everyone is using chopsticks.
The moment, walking into an Asian grocery store, and feeling a familiarity through the smells, the sounds. This is why we group together. Power of cultural nostalgia.
Where do we allow ourselves to be? Where do others turn us away? Why are you here alone?
English, please.
What does a Chinese restaurant represent? What does it mean. To feel again like a daughter. To taste a mother’s care.
Thank you to all Chinese moms, all around the world. For feeding us. We love you. I left the Philharmonia for a Chinese buffet.
“Eat well. Eat slowly, eat lots”.
Finding a space we’re allowed to exist is a huge blessing.
2.14.23
How do we know. Decide: who are ‘our people’?
Why do we gravitate towards them?
Some kind of perceived kinship? Familiarity? Warmth? Openness? Understanding? “From the same clay”. But it doesn’t have to be colour or age or gender. What is it.The most touching part of the day was, what? The last few moments in conversation with the mother.
Mother.
The most powerful and softly heroic unfathomable mystical role, character, spirit to exist.Again, what is a Chinese restaurant?
All this variety of food, flavours, textures, nostalgic tastes, the traditional ‘tacky’ outdated decor. The ‘cheapness’. In that ‘cheapness’, all the warmth and comfort and endearment of what? Home, house, building a house, a life, a survival.To feed people.
With a grin. Eyes squinting. Rushing back and forth.The empty spaces. The quiet mandarin pop songs. Group of young girls, 4 friends. Chatting and giggling. Couple of big buff college boys, going round after round. Family of Eastern Europeans speaking Russian, their two toddlers laughing and playing. And then the single travellers who wander in seeking refuge.
Welcomed. Respected. Really, anyone can come. Come in. Welcome. Who are they? Polite middle aged lady who ate a few bites gracefully, slowly, without taking her coat off. And quickly pays, thanks Mother, and leaves. Black man in business attire speaking elegant English coming in near closing time, asking for coke, no- coke zero, and going straight for a bowl of fried rice and noodles.
It’s a kind of safe haven. That you’ve created.
Theres a sublime, beautiful honour in that. A kind of quiet, understated, undervalued heroism of mothers, of immigrants, of warriors. People on the margins. We protect and feed each other.
All day after wandering around, passing through so many worlds, social classes, communities, judging gazes, I find myself here. Finally. A most peaceful choice. Finally feeling ‘right’.
Testing the atmosphere, my interaction or diffusion into the various atmospheres, and trying to feel and understand why, how these spaces receive a solo Asian female traveller. And me, a chameleon, young, small, polite, English speaking, I can adapt and transform. I can cross my legs and lean back on the bar stool and pay for my overpriced Mezcal Old Fashioned cocktail in the Ritz without looking at the bill. I can check in my coat for almost half the price of the standing room ticket at the Vienna Phil. I can nerdily take photos of Studio Ghibli figurines and German manga at a ramenn bar.
But most naturally, sitting at that Chinese buffet, mom rushing back and forth ‘eat lots, eat slowly’ ah, 就怕你不够吃！There’s icecream too!
Like coming home.
Like new years feast.Some bizarre absurd horrific musical comedy happening behind the kitchen door. I wouldn’t be surprised if I found a bloody tooth in my soup. And I would still smile.
Interweaving stories. Lost families trying to reunite. Worn troubled travellers. A bloody tooth, rotting. Plate after plate of all the time spent away, spent trying to navigate different worlds where we have to fight so hard and act so sensibly to try to belong.
What are the rules?
How do you play when you don’t know the rules.I love challenges, I love games.
But it becomes so tiring after so long.Would you like to be not invisible?
Visible but in what way? Not an ‘outsider’?
But you are.
“China. Japan?”
China.
Canada, actually.
And you, where are you from?
Really?
Actually, earth. Clay.Bamboo.
Because the contrast between my experiences in Vienna and Budapest was so sharp and jarring, I was extra aware of and deeply touched by the warmth, generosity, and sincerity of my Hungarian host family. From the very first moment of picking me up from the station and driving me around everywhere to taste Hungarian food, experience Hungarian culture, to welcoming me into their home with the most humble lovingkindness, I could feel in the core of my spirit that inexplicable kinship, that mystical wondrous connection, whatever we call that strange yet awing spiritual understanding, a collective consciousness, a shared memory, past, present, future.
These are, were, will be my people.
We could feel it in all the big and small moments and each tiny gift of time in between. Of course, it goes without saying, but must be said - there is the musical magic, communications without words, each time playing together discovering some new awe and wonder and dialogue and inspiration and spark from the familiar. And then, the magic of daily life, living together - morning coffees that lead to deep heart to heart conversations or long discussions about pancakes, baking and sharing a chocolate tart, driving into the city for a delicious meal or running errands, sipping palinka at night and talking for endless hours about everything from punk rock and sci-fi to music and life and politics.
When we find these rare friendships, it’s truly a special blessing. Sometimes with people we connect immediately, sometimes we need time to earn each other’s trust and share our vulnerability. But again and again, it’s about people. It’s about opening hearts. With patience, with humility, with endless values, principles, practices to learn, re-learn, re-remember.
It’s been a most curious time in Eastern Europe, and as always, infinitely grateful for this time to experience each experience, to cross paths with the most curious strangers - whether for a second or a week, whether hostile, prejudiced, closed or warm, embracing, and open. Each one of our human family has been a necessary part of our continuous journey to notice new insights to how we might build better relationship, listening, awareness - through ourselves, each other, our art, our practices.
So to leave as usual, some more scribbles by Tong, Tong-ing.
With love,
Skye.pianist, or today, The Red Pianist
“I give warmth. I give light. I sparkle and dance and crack and am the same but infinitely different, repeating, morphing orange red yellow flame.
The red pianist.
I know it.
I go up on stage and I can move people.
I can.
I will.
I will keep doing it in my way. With limitations as my blessings and all. Remember this you.
The red pianist”
Vehicles of time travel are curious places.
Infinite stories. Characters. Briefly, timelines crossing.
How blessed it is to be reminded to practice.
Awareness of gratitude.
For time and space.
To become better at easing the rush.Patient listening. Attention during the moments in between. Says care.
You are important.
I am here with you.
I am listening. I remember, I am remembering. I will remember.Here, feed on my smile and joy.
Infectious.Tiny moments of living embedded everywhere if we allow the time and space.
What is necessary for survival.
The natural order, predator and prey. How do we survive? How does the natural world ‘judge’ what is ethical? Is nature ethical? Moral?
Dreams come to us triggered by the most unlikely collisions of images and memories and desires and unconscious of this world. Another time, another cast. memories are never forgotten. The heart remembers.
Our inexplicable unknowable appetite for the strangest paradoxes.
Tears are carried back into this world from other selves in other universes. The heart, some curious satisfaction, exhaustion, depletion from a deep hollowing, carving, mining for extremity of emotion, gutting organs.
People all laugh together after some announcement on the train.
What is happening?
“I do not look to poetry to gather easy hope. I look to poetry to deepen courage, resolve, and commitment to the language that might save us by changing us.”
Objects can ground us.
They’re also tokens of memory, reminders, talismans containing some personalized DNA of where we’ve been, who we are. And what’s wrong with that? Why attempt to be completely detached from all material physical things, for some higher state of nonexistence and thus ‘freedom’ or eternity? We’re human. In moderation and balance and acceptance we can live a truthful human life. We care about our belongings, our tiny selves collecting treasures along the writing of our story, crafting and piecing together our sense of meaning and identity.
Arriving at a new place, and just setting up on a blank white table the same pattern: Monet’s coloured pencils. Bam. Colours, drawings, calm. Layout gel pens - a reminder tot write. The leaf archive book, the agenda, the scribble notes. Quick reviews of myself. Totoro, lotions, matcha. Hair tie, hair brush. Lavender sachet.
I am a person.
Vienna
Night wanderings are curious. No destination. Just feeding the body air and movement. But how fascinating, the snippets of stories we catch.
Finely dressed Asian woman - black fur coat, tightly pulled back hair, shiny high hills clicking on the cobblestones, leather purse, leather gloves - why are you hurrying out of a street side McDonalds holding a brown paper bag, digging anxiously inside and cussing under your breath as you stumble and trip across the bridge?
Who else stands at the counter chowing down their tiny soggy flat burger?
Who makes eye contact and smiles as wee cross?
Brightly lit, soft warm orange glowing top floor penthouse, curtains all drawn open. That could be my CDA home. Now I’m on the street, gazing inn from the outside.
A kaffeehaus.
Everyone going about their business. Together.
“Coziness.” Cute.
All a symphony.
Suddenly colours make me cry.
“There’s no eternity like the immediate present”
Under the stars.
Green. Light, leading somewhere.
Leading somewhere?
Exactly there.
Your own utopia. Wherever.
It’s wherever you want it to be.
Albertina
“The coloured shadow”
“Wanting to build a house”Light and colour.
Where did we all come from?“delight and fright”
contradictions
a love of contradictions and paradoxes
the cruelty of fairytales
…cuteness! ambivalence, tendernessand:
the absurd, humorous, eerieWe, childlike monsters.
Why are you in tears
What moves you so strongly to try to tell your story that you can barely articulate.
Listen, stay, be there. Don’t be distracted by your own plans.
Live in our shared humanity.
“That’s it.”
What is ‘new’, really? But all that we re-appreciate with awe wonder curiosity”
Surprise, free from preconceptions. Prejudice.
Memory?
Can we forget, to remember anew again?The powerful momentary interactions with strangers. Hot dog stand pals, teaching me to pronounce German. Wide tooth grin. Laughter. “See you soon!” McDonalds girl waving me off, “we’re closed. Closed. DONE.” Other McDonalds girl smiling shyly to hand me a McFlurry. “Oreo, right?”
Oreo. Aero. Coffe crisp.
“Free but alone.”
Freedom, is this a privilege?
Your posture as you walk through the Ritz. How do we carry ourselves on the way. Confident? Apologetic? Shy? Nervous?
What are the different spaces we can attempt to belong to? A bookstore coffeeshop, ramen bar, cocktail bar, concert hall. Do we all need company? A drink. Alcohol company.What do you need to repeat when you find yourself ‘slipping’.
Re-remember.
The spotlight. The impatience. The energy that accumulates from the beginning of the day.
What do you need to reclaim?
What moved you today?
How do we speak to ourselves.
A ‘safari’ through a poem. A thought.
Friendship can burn. We fondle these burning things, and keep coming back to them. But, the most difficult friendships can often ask a long time.
The misunderstanding, neglect, un-understandable
between people who love each other, and who are connected.
So, a promise. A remembrance.
Friendships that have had long periods of misunderstanding. “At the beginning there could be some intensity, and then something comes in between. But there are certain spells, certain embers, with time will recollect their earliest fire”. -poetry Unbound
“Sometimes you meet somebody, and it’s as if million of years ago, before the silence of nature broke, their clay and your clay lay side by side”
all of it matters.
allow this feeling to inspire you to show up again.
“Fondling fire”
We are attracted, intoxicated, entranced
bewitched by things
that burn
Luminous destruction
Death and light
Mesmerizing dance, warm, heat crackling chuckling pain joy eternity
Notice how nice that feels.
Not worrying about what’s coming nextLet, let yourself be tired.
Budapest
Remember that.
I am Tong because that is what I am.
Share that.
The art of listening.
How to listen?
Just because you’re a ‘trained’ musician, do you listen well? Better? It’s an ‘art’ because there’s an intention, a practice, a noticing, an emotion, right?
What do you want to say?
How do you decide how to communicate your sincerity and facilitate that art of listening. One comment, one gesture, one pause can change everything.
The different tempi of lifestyles.
No hurry to practice, to rehearse, just a settled calm pacing of enjoying the fulfilment of life. The pace of eating, drinking, reading, sharing stories, the underlying confidence from years of skill and experience.
Why is it that when we (‘girls’) play like that with fire, authority, raw grit and passion, we are labelled “aggressive”, angry, while when these handsome boys with Liszt-like profile and long golden locks can ‘charmingly’ rip away at their instruments like they can walk in anywhere and demand to take up space?
What is that like? To not apologize for taking up space.
Music as universal language. Why?
Because of this power to call upon collective memory, collective nostalgia, a deeply spiritual and mystical connection with our shared universe. One. But also infinite multiplicities. Suddenly feeling like we’re one energy. “Millions of years or undeterminable millenniums or mere seconds ago, we were made of one clay.”
“One Drum. One Song.” Whatever the metaphor is.
Close your eyes and be transported to your own utopia. Wherever home is for you. It’s all in the music.
So what is honesty?
How can you judge someone else’s sincerity or honesty and label it if and when and how ‘art’ becomes ‘show’ or ‘branding’ or commodity?
How do we place value on art?
How do we perceive or express our own honesty and truth and vulnerability? And then when that art is birthed, how do we surrender control of its original intentions? What if a most sincere and authentic and emotional expression of your open heart is judged as fake, commercial, and turned completely upside down?
Greener on the other side?
Actually, I love my side.Remember your clarity. Remember your truth. Trust. Rhythm. Practice. Always repeat. But not blindly, not mindlessly. Relearn your honest values with curiosity and the capacity to be constantly surprised, challenged, awed. Learn from these stories you are witnessing. Feel the honour and privilege. Yes, be messie but not lost.
Principles, remember?
Respect, but do not betray your values. Open, but do not be mindlessly swayed. You can listen but you don’t have to affirm views that misalign with your own. Core principles.
Observing these different worlds, being part of them, experiencing who you want or not want to be, who you want to be with. These are invaluable lessons. All that you have to be grateful for. They inform more clearly and confidently the path you need to take. The world you must build yourselves.
I can.
I so can.
I know it.
I will.
You don’t have to dare me.Now again I start to understand and re re re believe, my ‘value’. It’s my heart. My energy. It shines. It reaches and connects. I can practice a healthy sustainable way of sharing that light, of burning. Let me burn bright but let in the oxygen. So I can burn a long long time.
I give warmth. I give light. I sparkle and dance and crack and am the same but infinitely differently repeating morphing orange red yellow flame.
The red pianist.
I know it.
I go up on stage and I can move people.
I can.
I will.I will keep doing it in my way. With limitations as my blessings and all. Remember this you. Time and success and failure and people and politics and ego and bitterness and cynicism will all be distractions along the way. But remember how free and true you are now even in face of ‘greater’ presence. You are Tong. You can grow but that does not mean you are broken or incomplete or lacking. You don’t need anything else. You have everything already. To say, feel, be in your heart. Activate. Notice and activate the sparks, the magic.
I love you.
Inhale. Sacred Breath.
Exhale. Sacred Breath.
Stay true.
Stay honest.
Trust.
