Jaunt Through Asia Archives

It is nearly one o’clock in the morning. According to traditional Korean Buddhist temple etiquette, the crack of the moktak—a fish-shaped wooden percussion instrument played by Korean monks to signal the beginning of their day—will awaken practitioners in exactly two hours for the morning meditation. Nodding off, I jerk my eyes back to the kong-an—a Korean Buddhist word play meant to facilitate contemplation—written on the tearoom whiteboard that has been the focus of my meditation for the past six hours.

I’ve been visiting Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul for well over a decade, experiencing vicariously its measured return from the verge of extinction. As a fresh faced American soldier in Korea in 1993, I recall one of my first ventures outside our gated compound was to the National Museum, at the time located on the Gyeongbok Palace grounds. Housed in an austere, rectangular building of white granite, the museum seemed out of place among the traditional wooden Korean structures. As I wandered through the museum’s stone halls and up its grand central staircase, I did not realize I was roaming through the building that was formerly the Colonial Headquarters of the Japanese. Erected in the 1920s with deliberate affront, the Japanese could not have chosen a better location to make a statement of political dominance.

Returning to Beijing after a long absence, there is always the pleasure of discovering the next big thing to eat. In early 2006, it was tujia bing, a sauceless minipizza sprinkled with meat and taken to go in a brown paper bag. In the fall of 2007, it was Sichuan roasted fish, the dish that drives the Zhu-yufang franchise and is making inroads into the hotpot empire on Ghost Street. Meanwhile, artists flush with cash from the Chinese art boom are starting their own restaurants, and high-end vegetarian cuisine has made the leap from monasteries to the A-list. For people obsessed with food, Beijing has endless offerings to excite the senses.

Tracking pandas in the wild is not easy. As my legs, soaked from a fall into an icy river, grow colder in the January wind, my two guides confer over our next move. We have followed a panda’s tracks along a stream, but the trail has run out. Suddenly a snap of bamboo echoes from a thicket above. The guides motion silently up the hill and quietly we move toward the sound, hoping to catch a glimpse of the elusive animal.

Ko Thet and Ko Aung Zaw were joyriding around Bagan on a motorbike when they passed my friend and me, who were pedaling one speeds in the thick midday heat. "Hello, mother!" one of them shouted as they sped by, seizing a chance to practice his English. When they slowed to find out why my travel companion and I were laughing over our handlebars, we struck up a friendship.

City dwellers across China have learned to dread the appearance of the "chai?character on the walls of their historical neighborhoods; the eight-stroke red daub means the buildings are slated for demolition. But at buildings of grander antiquity another mark is increasingly commonplace, and the results of its appearance are almost as dramatic. The arrival of a plaque with the UNESCO World Heritage symbol may not lead to complete destruction, but it all too often indicates the imminent replacement of reality with replica.

On a balmy Saturday morning in Tianjin, Happy Rat, a corn-rowed college student from Xinjiang, took the field with his rookie team of ethnic minority Muslims, Air Kazak. On the other side of the overgrown grass field at Da Dang Stadium, Tianjin Speed, made up of students from Tianjin Sports University, waited at their end zone for Air Kazak to pull the disk. Sporting a lucky tiger claw necklace, Happy Rat let fly.

This spring at Moganshan Lu, Shanghai's main art district, Beijing Art Now Shanghai christened their gallery opening with a rather unconventional exhibition, "Shanghai Now." Viewers entered the cavernous warehouse and stared blankly at canvases sheathed in money. Gallery founders Huang Liaoyuan and Zhang Haoming had wrapped each painting in shiny wrapping paper printed with faces of various different currencies.

With a deep sigh conveying authentic Weltschmerz plus a bit of whiskey-fueled dramatics, former Senator Kraisak Choonhavan leans back in his office recliner. Ever since the Sept. 19, 2006 military coup, he explains, Thai contemporary culture has been under siege, the victim of shrinking budgets and expanding censorship: "The conservative Thai state sees contemporary art as a threat to traditional identity of being Thai.

A road sign offers hope. "Yutopia," it reads, pointing toward nearby Yufuin, a hot-springs (onsen) town on the southwestern Japanese island of Kyushu. Was this just another example of Japanese wordplay–yu means hot water–or might this be the Promised Land of onsen? Lake Kinrinko in the center of Yufuin offers a cool break from hot springs.