Dear friends,
Climate change is shifting the distribution of tornadoes, and sure enough, an EF1 blew through town last week, damaging buildings and downing trees but miraculously leaving no injured humans in its path. My partner and I compared notes with friends later that morning: did the citywide sirens wake you? where did you shelter? is your power back? (yes; a stairwell because we don’t have a basement; not yet). Those in the know had listened for the sound of a freight train. As clueless Californians who live in an Ann Arbor townhouse next to actual freight train tracks, we hadn’t known what to listen for. Though there had been a peculiar roar as we cowered in the stairwell at 1:45am.
🚂
Waiting for something that might or might not materialize felt like living in a plotless movie. My stairwell feeling returned over the weekend at a performance of the complete piano etudes by Philip Glass. That I immediately felt suspended in an atmospheric film is a testament to the minimalist composer’s ineluctable influence in cinema.
The stage was set as you would expect for a solo piano performance—a Steinway, an artist bench—except for the semicircle of nine additional benches behind the concert grand. Seating enough for ten different pianists to play two etudes each. Glass composed the twenty pieces between 1991 and 2012 to improve his own technique. Had he ever imagined 3,500 people in 2026 listening to a decade of classical and jazz and experimental musicians interpreting this score in a single evening? I’m glad someone imagined it. Onstage, a mix of ages and genders and outfits; in the program notes, a smorgasbord of origins (America, Canada, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Mexico).
Three hours is a long time to listen, especially when the etudes rival Buddhist sutras in their repetitiveness. I cycled through rapture, boredom, amusement, confusion, excitement, calm. I picked a favorite: Aaron Diehl’s rendition of Etude No. 16 (at the 02:17:30 mark in this video, available through April 28) with its paradoxical blend of restraint and richness. I thought of Glass’s contemporary—also a Buddhism-influenced experimental artist—and the event scores she wrote. Like Cut Piece, which Yoko Ono first performed in Kyoto in 1964:
First version for single performer:
Performer sits on stage with a pair of scissors in front of him.
It is announced that members of the audience may come on stage – one at a time – to cut a small piece of the performer’s clothing to take with them.
Performer remains motionless throughout the piece.
Piece ends at the performer’s option.
Second version for audience:
It is announced that members of the audience may cut each other’s clothing.
The audience may cut as long as they wish.
I always feel a sense of turmoil when contemplating Cut Piece. It’s disquieting to imagine myself as the one getting cut. But it’s even more unsettling to consider that I don’t know how I would act when the option of wielding the scissors passes to me. Violence, like beauty, can induce frenzied imitation. Is the performer of Cut Piece like Vessantara, a giver who knows no limits? Or are they Mara, tempting the takers to further greed, hate, and delusion?
🌪️
It’s possible to refuse to perpetuate violence even if you’ve been steeped in it all your life, as Gish Jen’s latest book, Bad Bad Girl, movingly (and humorously) attests. This genre-bending tome tells the story of Jen’s “troubled relationship” (xiii) with her mother, who was born in Shanghai in 1924 and died in New York in 2020.
A few chapters in, “troubled” already seems far too mild a descriptor. The mother in question is a tornado to her eldest daughter—devastation ready to touch down at any minute—yet more like a soothing tropical breeze toward her other four children. I wonder how Bad Bad Girl will deliver on Jen’s promise in the author’s note:
I would write a book that sought to understand her—that portrayed her honestly but compassionately, and that ultimately forgave her. (xii)
Spoiler alert: on the last page, a sutra appears. Not what I was expecting in a book about a volatile Catholic mother.
There is a Chinese saying: “Every family has a sutra that’s hard to read” (324).
家家有本難唸的經 jiājiā yǒuběn nánniàn de jīng. Less poetically: every family has its difficulties. À la Tolstoy: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Or, as AI renders it, “Housekeeping is Hard” (?!), in reference to Singaporean superstar singer Poon Sow Keng’s surprisingly upbeat rendition of the 1958 song with the same title. One of the YouTube video comments: 没有ai的日子❤❤❤ [an age without AI <3 <3 <3]
🎹
In the non–AI generated words of Gish Jen’s daughter, Paloma:
The effects of trauma can’t be washed away in a generation. It takes many generations, with every echo growing fainter. (322)
What inheritances echo down the generations? How can we make the samsaric ones grow fainter, the liberatory ones louder?
Bad Bad Girl offers one blueprint. Emily Kwong’s Inheriting podcast—especially the episodes on Bảo & the Vietnam War and Victoria & the Cambodian Genocide—offers another. The youth group at Chùa Tường Vân (where I spent the weekend before last) offers a third. Generalities run through all three—curiosity, questions, stories, listening, care, co-creation, the recognition that some difficulties are better recited than buried—though the path is in the particulars: Gish’s dandan noodles for her mother, Bảo’s father-transmitted nostalgia, playful team competitions at the temple (altar-building, cooking, Vietnamese capture the flag).
After the Philip Glass concert, I found a copy of Etude No. 16. Four pages, eight (!) repeat signs. It was an easy enough sightread, but my version lacked the layers and subtleties that had emanated from Aaron Diehl’s fingertips less than an hour before.
Glass invited Diehl to perform the etude in 2014. A dozen years of interpreting this deceptively simple piece.
I suddenly thought of chapter 20 of the Lotus Sutra, on Bodhisattva Never Disparaging. From Burton Watson’s popular translation:
This monk did not devote his time to reading or reciting the scriptures, but simply went about bowing to people.
Bowing and saying to each of them,
“I would never disparage you,for you are practicing the wayand all of you will become Buddhas!”
...which did not endear him to others.
When the people heard this,they gibed at him, cursed and reviled him,but the bodhisattva Never Disparagingbore all this with patience.
Whenever I think about Bodhisattva Never Disparaging, a part of me always wonders: Is this guy a saint or a sucker?
Another part of me thinks: Cruel incantations are not worth passing down, but some difficult sutras are worth chanting again and again.
Til the next quarter moon,
~Chenxing
