And meet Lu Min, one of my favorite Chinese, and unfortunately not one of the ones that speaks the most English. Good thing I am fluent in Mandarin. (Also the guy you probably speak with if you call my office phone and I'm not there, and now you can picture the guy that tells you "Emily is not kere, she travel to Kong Kong.")
So yeah, I went to the Great Wall...it was awesome...and I'm copping out on writing about it. But it all reminded me of a great poem, which I shall oh-so-conveniently post for you here to take you back to fall schooldays and autumn leaves. If I were in high school I would most certainly explicate this poem with my Great Wall experience as a backdrop, but alas, I grew up, and I have to work. Maybe one of these days while something processes I will research, write, and post here my 5-paragraph thesis with funneling introduction that does just that. For now, Robert Frost (a slightly better writer anyway):
"Mending Wall"
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."
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