Farewell HuaFeng Xu
One of my colleagues in the lab is leaving and I am sad. Huafeng Xu (HFX) a.k.a. Chinese Blade a.k.a. Eye of the Blade a.k.a. the Jewish-Asian magician David McKowski has decided to bid farewell to academic science on the West Coast for the pulsating glories of commerical research on the East Coast.
Oh, and his future-wife-to-be is also waiting for him there as well.
HFX, I am afraid to say, is a die-hard romantic. This was not evident at first, but he left clues. I stumbled on the first clue in, of all places, his PhD thesis. Normally, a thesis is a grindingly boring piece of prose that budding scientists are required to do. It is no joy to write. The only real emotion in a thesis is normally found in the preface/acknowledgements - I vented a few of my frustations in a page long diatribe. Not HFX. His preface was a five-page effusive outpouring of scientific romance,
"...my mental image of a theoretical chemist was a solitary figure walking down the Long Island Beach with his advisor. They would exchange a few words now and then, or squat to write some esoteric mathematical equations on the sand with their fingers. Theoretical chemistry seemed too romantic to be for me..."
Reminds me of the story about the Christian walking along the beach. Looking back, he sees that for most of the journey, there are two sets of footprints faintly impressed upon the sand - his and the Lord's. But then the Christian notices that occasionally there was only one set of prints. "Why," he asked the Lord, "did you abandon me?" "No, my son," replied the Lord, "when there was only one set of footprints, it was I who was carrying you." Think of that story as an allegory for the many conversations that I had with HFX in our journey to the truth. Sometimes only one of us would be right, then there would only be one set of footprints in the sand, as one of us would carry the weight of the error of the other. Man, does HFX like to talk. We talked about everything, the meaning of life, love under communism, the future of business in a melt-down world, chinese poetry, ethical dilemnas involving members of one's own family, the meaning of the second order pertubation expansion in the Schrodinger equation, the symbolic order behind a glass of wine in Sideways. But his is always a generous and expansive conversation, and more-often-than-not, funny as hell.
HFX has the face of an innocent child but the heart of a prankster. One of our favourite activites would be to draw cartoons in the middle of a seminar with a visiting professor and try to make the other crack up. We would write pseudo officious pronoucements that would be irresistibly funny to us but (apparently) not to anyone else. But over the last year, I saw HFX flex his writing muscles, transmorgifying his writing into something substantial. HFX reinvented himself as the blogger chineseblade, a trenchant social critic and a witty commentator of the world around him.
Talk about flexing muscles, I cannot fail to mention the time that a bunch of us, staying late at night on a Friday, decided to do a fashion parade down the catwalk of our work cubicles. One by one, we would play a song on Banu's laptop, and slither down our imaginary catwalk, strutting our stuff. When it was HFX's turn, he disappeared for a good 5 minutes before appearing in King's oversized leather jacket. He glided down the catwalk like a panther, and when he reached the end, with a well-practised motion, he whipped off the jacket to reveal his naked torso.
Many a dull afternoon at work was enlivened by an impromptu card trick from HFX. The tricks got better and better such that one night, we organized a private show. Of course, a magician cannot use his everyday persona, he must draw something from the world of fanatasy, and so the persona of David McKowski, a chinese-jew was born - son of a hasidic master of magic, refugee from Nazi Germany, who forms an illicit relationship with a simple chinese peasant girl. Growing up, Mckowski discovers his mystical roots, and learns to manipulate cards, eventually fulfiling his destiny as a Magician.
And so, I end this post, my farewell gift to you, HFX. Adieu.
2 comments:
An Australian trapped in the USA, a poet trapped in the body of a physicist (Or are they really a unison?). You wrote too flattery a piece of the humble Chinese Blade. Your mention of David McKowski, a character of our mutual creation, brought back fond memories of this brilliant article that you composed, reproduced here without your permission.
The History of David McKowski
The origin of David McKowski is murky. What traces that exist are fragmentary. It is known, for instance, that the grandfather of McKowski, Elie Kowski was a young jew from somewhere in northern Germany. There are hints to conclude that Elie was a Rabbi student at a Yeshiva in the Jewish sector of Berlin. It was probably there that Eli learnt the unspeakable names of Jehovah, imbibed the holy Kabalah, and attained Holy powers. Stories from people who lived at the time suggested that Elie Kowski was a gifted student. His powers were prodigious at a young age. Stories of his mysterious hands, larger than normal and super-dexterous are legion. He healed diseased children, converted prostitutes to virgins, filled the stomachs of the hungry with magic. He had been earmarked to become one of the Holders of the Living Torah.
But not even the Kabballah can resist the tides of history. As Hitler burnt the Reichstag, those who could leave Berlin, left. The records of that time are particularly murky but in 1941, Elie Kowski found himself on a ship heading out for Japan. Why Japan? Escape? Look at the facts – a young promising Rabbinical student, most probably schooled in the Magic Arts of the Kaballah - would not have gone to Japan for safety. No, most likely, he was on a secret mystical mission, to find the ley-lines, or maybe to petition the Secret Masters of the World who dwell in those lofty peaks of the Himalayas. However, such speculations are futile, for the ship did not reach it’s destination. In the dark of night a Japanese convoy attacked and sunk the ship. The only known survivor was our Elie Kolowski, who washed up on the shore near Canton.
Near the delta of the Zhujiang river, lies a tiny village, Jing-Jang. Villagers had lived there for centuries, nurturing their existence from a particular species of fish, a kind of flat-head fish with a greasy textured flesh and a rainbox-fluted tail that was a delicacy in the region. Learned Confucian scholars in silken brown robes in previous times were known to have made the arduous journey from Canton to Jing-Jang to taste this delicious fish. And it was in the fishing nets for this fish that the almost-drowned body of Elie Wiesel washed-up. His curly-locks bedraggled, his head was bare, as his kipot had long washed out to the open sea. Yet even in this near comatose state, his whitened knuckles still gripped a tiny Torah, which had somehow survived.
The person who found the near-dead Rabbinal student on the shores of a rural Chinese fishing-vllage, was none other than David McKowski’s paternal grandmother, Xu-Xu. A tiny demure fishing-girl, wrapped in the weavy-fishy patterns of the village dress, the exotic sight of a pasty-faced, hair-covered, proboscally-endowed European would have been a shock. But it was a shock that would shake loose the bonds of love. His face was puffed up from the days floating at sea that made him look like one of the local fish. She found him, claimed her and brought him back to her house.
In the months afterwards, Xu-Xu slowly nursed Elie back to health, feeding him tiny morsels of that delicious fish, morsels from the cheek, the tenderest part of the fish. At first, it was difficult for Elie to eat, but each bite of the fish was like a kiss from Xu-Xu. As his strength improved, the portion of fish increased until he was able to eat a whole fish in one seating, eating in the traditional way such that the skeleton was picked clean yet remained integral. It was fortunate for Elie that fish was kosher.
The war passed the village by. Elie recovered, fathered a child, feared for what was happening in Europe and left. He was never heard of again, and may have been killed in a concentration camp.
Meanwhile, the son that Xu-Xu bore, Bing-bing, the father of David McKowski, grew up as a Communist. He was given a good Chinese name and studied hard to master the thoughts of the Great Leader. He was treated differently by the other villagers, as is the classic Chinese fear of strangers. Occasionally beaten, frequently slurred, this half-Jew half-Chinese boy was a natural fisherman. The other villagers would sometimes swear that he knew the secret name of fish, and by a guttural incantation, he could call the fish straight into the net.
The Communist government looked after the village, and for the first time in living memory, children of the villagers got an education. Bing-bing naturally gravitated to the healing arts and became a doctor, and later a surgeon. Bing-Bing was a practical man, not prone to introspection. Maybe a few times in his life, he had wondered about his father and that funny little book of Hebrew that he had left behind. He vaguely knew that his father was Jewish, but that meant little to his orthodox Communist mind. Yet his hands were magical. His hands, his university teachers would say. They were marvelous surgeon’s hands - dexterous and steady, long and pointed, they were almost feminine. Bing-Bing hands were feather-sensitive and he would be able to detect tumors and cancers with a slight brush of his hands, liver problems, gall blow-ups, all could be found by the amazing senses in his hands. And naturally, patients responded to his ministrations better than anyone else. As with all successful professionals, Bing-Bing moved to the capital.
And thus, David McKowski was born in Beijing, a quarter Jew, son of a surgeon, with the blood of the Holy Torah and the spirit of fish running through his veins. David McKowski was not the name he was given. He had his father’s and his grandfather’s hands, the mystical inclinations of his grandfather not his father’s practically. He discovered the little book of Torah at the age of five. It fascinated and grew into an object of obsession. At age fifteen, he ran away from home to America, to discover the meaning of the book. He knew that New York was the true center of Judaism. It was there that he tracked down people who had known his grandfather, and learnt the name of Kowski. There he changed his name to McKowski, son of McKowski, in honor of his grandfather. He wanted to be like his grandfather and labored to learn the secret arts. By the time McKowski tracked down the great Kabbalah masters, they had all gone into show-business, and so they initiated him into the Performing Arts of the Kaballah. Through years of self-denial and self-discipline, he has today mastered the Arts of the Cards, and I present him to you, ladies and gentlemen, the Chada, the Hierophat, the Grand Kippur, Dr David McKowski.
BTW, your quote of my thesis is probably the first and only citation that it will ever get.
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