More bricks

Tim the Lego Panda has decided to chronicle this visit of the Australian nephews to California in Lego as he did the one two years ago. Today we decided this warranted getting some new pieces and did some eBay bidding (and scored)! Hope the 650 new pieces arrive before the nephews head back to Victoria... Here's what Tim's assembled so far:

Scorched earth

This time global warming sure feels like warming - though coastal California seems the most temperate part of the country. I didn't even know there was a pink on weather.com's temperature maps.

Uncle Marco's Flying Fleamarket

One of the pleasures of parenthood, I gather, is recouping your own childhood, which is to say reconnecting with your five-year-old, your six-year-old, your eight-year-old self. (Parents are rediscovered, too.) My intense annual bouts of uncling only give a taste of this, but it is a taste. My older nephew is almost 10, which is close enough for a rediscovery of a book I devoured when I was 11. Übersetzungswürdig!

Oh, and look what I found inside it! A reminder of an earlier, nearly forgotten, prepubescent me. Our Japanese friend Y introduced me not only to origami but to making paper dolls with washi paper. She supplied me with many lovely papers, and I made dolls, not just flat, like this
one, but 3D, too. Was I into fashion even before I got into religion?!

Trackwork

Went with my sister and nephews to the Model Train Museum at Balboa Park again. A pleasure to observe the work of many decades in many gages - the once sketchy environs of San Diego's own Santa Fe terminal, an A-frame church in progress (complete with preacher), a model train within a model train, ongoing work on a model of the Tehachapi Loop.

Old friend

It's been years, but I'm about to start keeping company with Leibniz again. Not one but two gigs in the Fall will bring me back to the community of Leibniz scholars of which I was briefly a member through my dissertation work: a conference on the effective history of the Theodicy in Lisbon in October (my slightly crazy topic: "Leibniz' Theodicy as a metaphysics for 'lived religion'"), and a panel on the reception of Leibniz at AAR in November (on Lessing's "Leibniz und die ewigen Strafen"). When my visiting Australian relatives head home, I'll head to the UCSD library to reconnect with the German Universalgenie. This reunion is unexpected - I didn't seek it out - but certainly not unwelcome. And there's something nice about its coming soon after my visit to China, a land from which he felt the West could learn much. (Indeed my only real publication on Leibniz is an extended review of a book on Leibniz and China.)

Setting your sights high

One of my favorite cacti in Del Mar has been steadily climbing one of the Torrey Pines in our neighborhood. I gather it can get out of hand...!

Surf's up!

Back from China 2

I mentioned that Kunming had disarmed the scruples I'd brought with me, but that isn't quite right. I brought much more than scruples, and Kunming was aided by the helpful perspective of C, an old schoolmate in Hong Kong. As the trip to China approached I found myself remembering trips behind the Iron Curtain in Europe, going into a police state as a citizen of an enemy nation. I was thinking this because, it became clear, our trusty New York Times has taught me there is a cold war, economic as well as political, between the US and China, as if I were going to North Korea. It is a one-party state, it's true, and they wouldn't have let us near the more restive Tibetans. And yet, as C - a man who grew up in Guangzhou and ended up in Hong Kong as a child, and has studied and worked in the US - reminded me, "America and China have never been enemies."There was other baggage I brought with me, too, this more positive. China may be Christianity's future, and one of our Queer Christianities panelists thinks China will nurture a less sex-negative Christianity. And I was to be in Hong Kong in time for a meeting of gay Asian Christians!

So I went to China expecting vertiginous experiences. It was more than a relief to find that I could roam freely through Kunming and to get my bearings. The freshly builtness of Shangrila gave me a kind of vertigo, too. And then there was the world's tallest TV tower in Guangzhou (=Canton) with its view across the Pearl River to the city's new "CBD."

Its LEDs ripple rainbows come evening, though I was to hear that my colleague's assessment of Chinese gay-friendliness was at least visionary, if not fanciful. (Still, I wonder if the one-child policy might not have laid the groundwork for a post-patriarchal post-reproductionist society.)
Some other scenes from my one-day tour of Guangzhou: the (19th century, rebuilt post- Cultural Revolution) ancestral house of the Chen family, where we witnessed a massive downpour, a street restaurant which had not had a foreign customer before; wedding portraits

in an old western-style building in Shamian, Cantonese opera in a historic tourist district, one of many bronze statues sprinkled around the city, a roast pigeon which interrupted a near-aquatarian dinner, and American mommies and new family members at the Garden Hotel.
The trip to Guangzhou was the idea of C, so I would see more of the Chinese miracle. I had already planned a quick trip to Shenzhen - the poster child of Deng Xiaoping's "capitalism with Chinese characteristics" - but I'm glad he added Guangzhou. The 14 million-strong megacity

which came from nowhere in 30 years is demographically anomalous (all migrant, all young - for now); the key question may be what continuities with the past survive or are reconstructed as the Chinese economy and cities explode, and for that Guangzhou was good to have seen first.
What is there to see in Shenzhen? I suppose I could have gone to the sparkling new highrises, the famous community of oil painting reproducers, or the Apple factory. I wanted to see one of the "villages," surviving land with agricultural status which have become little ghettos.

In the end, beyond the subway and the buildings from train and taxi windows, I saw little of the city. I settled for two destinations: OCT LOFT, a design district designed to have the character of the converted warehouses of western cities, and the theme park "Splendid China."
I admit I was expecting to scoff, but I found myself taken in by both. The winner at OCT LOFT was the Old Heaven bookshop-café, which I found an utterly charming and convincing mix of old and new, Ostalgie and global hipsterishness. Whether it inspires creative design I can't say.

As for Splendid China, our indignation at the prominent position of the Potala and snickers at the anachronistic Three Gorges gave way to real enjoyment of the cultural wealth of China; the three giant Buddhist mountain carvings - I entered mini-Dunhuang - blew me away.

One could, I'm sure, do a devastating cultural critique of the theme park (and we didn't even go to the minority ethnic village activities), but I wasn't in the mood. However crass and commercial its intent, however contrived its premodern Chinese Liliput, Splendid China complements in a strange way the landscapes of new building running roughshod over actual historical districts in most places, creating new historic districts in a few others. Are contemporary Chinese condemned to live with no more than a theme park past, whether in Lijiang or Shenzhen? Does that make them modern, even hypermodern, postmodernity with Chinese characteristics? Or is its ancient tradition, a tradition which includes more than its share of wholesale destruction and rebuilding, stored up even in these kitschy forms, waiting for a new day to unfold in new-old forms? Zombie, immortal, Disney, arhat, queered Christianity, the Way?
I don't know the answer but after my first trip to China I find I care.