I was having trouble in the head one day. I walked along Jianshe Road trying to shake the mess out. As I approached a little coffee bar with people chatting at the tables outside, I saw two giant rabbits leaping onto the pavement from a grassy area nearby. They were enormous rabbits, bigger and whiter than any I’d ever seen. It occurred to me that they belonged to a young kid who appeared to be chasing after them, but his father, who was walking ahead, suddenly called for him, and the kid ran off, leaving the rabbits. These giant white rabbits were strays, didn’t appear to belong to anyone but themselves. This was the sort of thing you got used to seeing in China. These two giant white rabbits scuffling about by themselves on a busy street in the middle of the city: it made perfect Chinese sense.
One of the rabbits suddenly darted across the road, leaving the other rabbit to toddle off in a different direction. This frustrated me. I’d made the decision just then to follow the rabbits as a fanciful literary upbringing had convinced me that if I ever saw a white rabbit I should follow it because a sequence of wonderful events would surely commence. But their parting of ways had now put me in the agonizing position of having to choose which one to follow. One rabbit may have led me to the wonders, but the other may have led me to tedium. Dodgson never gave Alice those options. He never gave himself those options. He may never have found Wonderland if he had. I gave up on the rabbits, and went into the coffee bar to forget the mess in my head.
*
The coffee bar was snug and mostly quiet, save for a turntable rigged to a Nad amp and a pair of JBL’s, issuing some pretty decent soft acoustic rock sung in Mandarin, noticeably different from the usual canto-pop on offer. The walls of the establishment were garlanded with pages from China Daily, the national English language newspaper, the pages covering well-known stories of recent years, the Lhasa riots, the Olympic games, and featuring headlines such as ‘Does the nation see itself as a superpower?’ Scattered across the newspaper pages were random photos of people travelling –staff maybe, or simply friends of the coffee bar. In a European bar, these photos would perhaps have contained the expanse of the world, youths photographed from Alaska to Zimbabwe, but here the photos didn’t stretch beyond China - yet the images covered a whole world of visuals, from desert to tundra to grassland to metropolis. One image could have been Greenland, another could have been Egypt. One image even reminded me of Carlingford Bay, quite close to where I grew up.
After the second coffee, a conversation pertaining to comparative philosophy arose. I can’t recall exactly how the conversation began. The other individual involved was a balding Chinese man wearing a check shirt and blue jeans. He’d said Hello to me and the next thing
‘In China, we enjoy a lighter, more intricate understanding of life. We like to make the journey from A to B and take in the uniqueness of the journey every time. In the west, your journey becomes more and more tiresome for you as you progress, so the uniqueness of getting from A to B is frequently forgotten. You get bored too quickly. Your philosophy’s too mechanistic these days. The sciences have put such a stranglehold on western philosophy that a great majority of it is about nothing.’
‘How can you say that? Are you saying that the sciences deal with nothing? I’ve a friend back home, he's a chemotherapist and he’d box your ears for you for saying that.’
‘I’m not talking about functional science here. I’m talking about philosophy.’
‘Yes, but isn’t philosophy supposed to be about nothing? Well, I mean, everything and nothing? Doesn’t eastern philosophy also deal with nothing?’
‘Certainly, but there’s a difference between that nothing and the western nothing. The western nothing is mostly tied up with physics and quantum mechanics and all those things. The eastern nothing is concerned with issues of personal being and relation.’
‘What about western religious philosophy, Aquinas and all that? Is that not the nothing you’re talking about?’
‘Yes, that’s something akin to it. All forms of life have this kind of nothing, whether it be within the religious man’s reflection, or the atheist’s rejection. But the philosophy of religion is really just an arm of western philosophy, a specific branch, often at odds with all the other branches, whether that be epistemology, metaphysics, even some ethical systems. Eastern philosophy is bound to this nothing, and will never detach from it. Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism – though they may be distinguished from one another are joined in their shared language of the nothing. Eastern philosophy is infused with the wonder of things. These days, western philosophy views that as naïve. But if you look closely at it, regardless of the eastern nothing we just talked about, eastern philosophy has always been considered by the west something primarily concerned with some mystical spiritual nothing, even though its chief concerns have always been grounded, rather than elevated, located expressly in the social, ethical, and political worlds.’
‘I’m losing you. My head’s a mess. What then is the key difference between these philosophies in your opinion?’
‘Poetry, my friend.’
The conversation ended around then, and I found myself suddenly alone in the bar. The mess in my head was less thick, but more swirly. I changed from coffee to beer. As the waitress brought the beer, she offered me a cigarette. She’d noticed I was smoking the same brand as her. Zhong Nan Hai, a Beijing cigarette, not as popular in the south as in the north. Here, in Hubei, you only ever saw a few girls or foreigners smoking them. Usually quite light compared to other brands and markedly cheaper. Zhong Nan Hai cigarettes were named after the government buildings in Beijing. In fact, they were Mao’s cigarettes, manufactured especially for him. Whether he actually liked them or not, I’m not sure.
My beer finished, I decided to leave. I said goodbye and thanks to the waitress and her husband who’d been sitting behind his laptop the whole time I’d been there, barely raising his head. He managed to lift his head to acknowledge my farewell. I gathered they ran the place together.
*
The mess in my head continued to swirl as I walked to the bus stop.
The wheels of cars swirled insistently.
The outdoor fans and air conditioners swirled mechanically.
The neon swirled in all able perceptions.
The world around me swirled with people and activity.
In the headlights of these kinetics, I caught the rabbits again - choosing to ignore them this time, I watched as they ran once more headlong into something I could only surmise was nothing.
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