Really, all I wanted yesterday was to glimpse some color on an extraordinarily dreary, damp day. Off I went to visit Lan Su Chinese garden since the red New Years lanterns all around old town/Chinatown reminded me that the Year of the Rat is upon us and the garden celebrates the occasion. I’d surely find some color there – as I did indeed. Red, pink, white, green against the dark grey of the stone and the light grey of the drizzling rain – it was perfect.

And then the chain of associations kicked in: Rats reminded me of disease vectors, disease of course of the new, deadly Wuhan Corona virus, a relative of the dreaded SARS virus. It is communicable between humans, and now emerging wherever infected people travel, including the first case that has appeared in Washington State. Our dear leader, of course deems it totally under control. We really wouldn’t know, would we, given the deregulation and cutting of funding for research and disease control (here is a fascinating interactive chart by the Brookings Institute of ALL the deregulatory actions committed by this administrations of January 2020.)

And the WHO seems to think otherwise:

The World Health Organization is convening an expert panel today to discuss whether the Wuhan virus should be designated “public health emergency of international concern,” a rare step aimed at getting more money and resources from global donors to fight an outbreak. The emergency designation has been used just five times: against polio, the swine flu, the Zika virus and two recent Ebola virus outbreaks in Africa.

The Chinese Government, despite attempts at secrecy and minimization of the expected danger – the virus is making people intensely ill with a high proportion of deaths, with no known immunization or effective counteragents – does take it seriously. As of yesterday, the 11 million people of Wuhan and surrounds (8.9 million in the city proper) are prohibited to travel and leave the region, despite the Chinese New Year which customarily sees people travel all across the country to be with their families.

That is like telling the entire city of London that it is quarantined. You don’t make that decision lightly. Travel warnings and advisories are also given to those coming into China, with dire consequences for tourism – dependent industries, particularly around the New Year which usually draws hundreds of thousands of people in addition to the millions traveling within China.

*

Clearly a life and death battle against an invisible enemy is anticipated and the forces are closing the hatches. Or the airports, as the case may be. Battle reminded me of another, more positive association with recent things Chinese: the first ever translation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War into English by a woman, Berkeley’s Professor of early Chinese History, Michael Nylan (yes, that’s her first name. And why do people focus on the gender? Valerie Niquet already translated the same book into French in 1988, and some of the best war novels ever written were by women – Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy and Silence of the Girls, Christa Wolf’s Cassandra.) Art of War has been glued to the pockets of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedonga, served as a manual for military men and Steve Bannons of the world, many trying to understand how to vanquish one’s enemies, not necessarily just on the battle field. The translation has received positive reviews, all of which mention that the translator sent out the manuscript to a huge variety of scholars, military people and politicians to receive input.

I found most interesting what she herself had to say both about the art of translation and the lessons she drew from the text itself: that the book is in essence a manual about how to avoid war. (Her essay is really a fascinating read, found in LitHub of all places.) And how can you not be curious about a woman whose research interests include belief. (Research interests: Early China: Seven centuries of Warring States through Eastern Han (475 BC–AD 220), with an emphasis on sociopolitical context; aesthetic theories and material culture; and belief.)

 “It is not only that The Art of War might as well be named The Art of Life, since it famously advises readers (originally all powerful men at court) to avoid war, by any means, if possible, on the two cogent grounds that it is far too costly a substitute for diplomacy and long-term strategies, and that the outcome is never assured, given all the variables at play. Equally importantly, the Art of War, like Thucydides, conjures the entire spectrum of human motivations that lead the already ultra-powerful to seek more power through violence. Then, too, The Art of War is interested in what I call the “politics of the common good” essentially, inquiring what sort of leadership can create a stable society in which domestic disruptions and painful divisions are at a minimum. In conversation with the so-called “Confucian” Classics, The Art of War imagines a three-pronged approach, wherein the vast majority can be brought to identify with good leaders, without imposing much conformity, as those leaders have shown themselves to be humane and deliberate when serving the people’s needs, desires, and interests.”

Politics of the Common Good – take that, Steve Bannon! And for all those women who adhere to the Chinese New Years taboo that a woman may not leave her house all day (!) otherwise she will be plagued with bad luck for the entire coming year – think of all those ancient Chinese generals who were female! They did not exactly stay home.

新年快乐 / 新年快樂 (xīn nián kuài lè) “Happy New Year!”

步步高升 / 步步高陞 (Bùbù gāoshēng)  “A steady rise to high places!” / “on the up and up” – yup, that’s not happening in your kitchen!

Music today is also a climb – for our ears and brains used to more traditional fare.

Campy, whimsical and evocatively comical,

Rated R wildly re-imagines the myths of the Chinese Zodiac Animals to encompass zany comedy and to dramatize serious social issues. In a post-apocalyptic world, the Zodiac gods suffer a crisis as their human underlings lose interest in reproducing. The Lark, a chirpy court entertainer who dreams of becoming the first Goddess, descends to the Earth to solve the mystery. Through the journey, she discovers her real passion and therefore, revives the world.

* *   *       *         *               *                           *

A CHAMBER OPERA IN THREE SCENES WITHOUT INTERMISSION

Music and Libretto by Wang Jie.

Instrumentation: Singers, Fl, Cl, Bsn, Hn, Tpt, Trbn, Tba, 3 Perc, Keyboard soloist: Hpsd (amplified)/Cel/Pno, Strings.

The Lark (Coloratura/High Lyric Soprano), Peasant woman (Mezzo-Sop.), The Rooster (Actor or Tenor), The Rat (Basso Profundo/Bass-Baritone)

The remaining ten Zodiac Gods, humans on Earth (SATB chorus of minimum 16 voices)

Rated R for Rat was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra through the Underwood Commission Prize, American Opera Projects through an OPERA America Female Composers Commissioning Grant, and received its first workshop with assistance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Opera Program.

I often wonder how so many women out there manage to face health decisions and catastrophes with courage, independently of how varied their circumstances. Making life and death decisions around illness or reproductive choices in itself is hard enough – if you add to that a hostile environment, economic factors like lack of employment or risk to employment, no health insurance, family needs etc., it can become an overwhelming task.

I was reminded of that by two pieces I read this weekend, marveling at the courage around us. One was an article by a young Health Care reporter at Politico, Alexandra Glorioso, whose last name is an apt description for her candor in speaking about her breast cancer diagnosis at age 31. The candor is glorious. We live in a time when the enforced silence that even only two generations earlier had to endure, is no longer an issue. If anything, there is such a flood of testimonials about going through cancer (of all kinds) and living with disease, that interest has been saturated. Or in any case devoted to hearing the success stories, not the fact that 42.200 women each year in this country still die from breast cancer.

Among this deluge, Glorioso stands out for her willingness to admit to all of the factors driving her choices about treatment and how to deal with the effects of treatment, less heroic ones like vanity included. And how can you not feel for a 30-year old dealing with issues of threats to fertility and artificially induced menopause (potentially reversible) so that the cancer can be fought without estrogen feeding it. Yet this young woman also has a support structure that is phenomenally helpful – beginning with a scientist father who knows all the right experts, to a fresh boyfriend who soon becomes a fiancee, to a health insurance that covers, if not all, then seemingly a lot of the procedures and medications. She thrives on the solidarity between strangers on the web-wide “cancer club,” who add succor and practical help with their electronic interactions.

I was moved, but it was nothing in comparison to the other piece on my desk, a book review of poet Anne Boyer’s new book The Undying. The very first paragraph had me jump up and call a book order in at my local bookstore:

The pink ribbon, that ubiquitous emblem of breast cancer awareness, has long been an object of controversy and derision, but the poet and essayist Anne Boyer doesn’t just pull it loose, unfastening its dainty loop; she feeds it through a shredder and lights it on fire, incinerating its remains. “The world is blood pink with respectability politics,” she writes, “as if anyone who dies from breast cancer has died of a bad attitude or eating a sausage or not trusting the word of a junior oncologist.”

Boyer, a single mom in precarious employment circumstances as a teacher, also still young when diagnosed at age 41, has an unusually lethal type of breast cancer that now, 5 years and many extraordinary debilitating treatments later, seems to be absent. From what I gather from the reviews (and here is another one by Sarah Resnick that is intellectually richer and putting the memoir within a larger framework of society’s interaction with cancer,) the book is only partially about the author’s experience on the medical front. Instead it deals with how the world reacts if you disclose the anguish, the fear, the exhaustion, the pain and the losses not within a narrative of heroic survival, sticking to your on personal war story. As Resnick notes:

To linger in the grammar of pain or anger or sorrow, in the bleak syntax of one’s illness, risks summoning “a chorus of people, many of whom have never had cancer, accusing her of ingratitude, saying she is lucky, warning her that her bad attitude might kill her, reminding her she could be dead.” These impositions, Boyer explains, arrive as diktats from a new boss: “the boss that is everyone.” “Self-manage,” they cry from their open-plan workspace. Avoid speaking of death, practice meditation, do yoga. Take care of others. Summon your inner warrior. Smile. Fight! This new boss is doing the bidding of our unjust and unhinged economic system (“white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”): If the onus of responsibility—for recovery, for health, for well-being—falls on the person who is sick, the rest of the world gets a pass, is not accountable for whether a person lives or dies, and if she lives, in what state…..Breast cancer, Boyer insists, cannot be understood as an ahistorical sameness, an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells. It is, rather, a socially and historically constructed nebula, and the women who have it do not suffer from the illness alone. They suffer from the world.

A world, we might add, that faces ever increasing attacks on our ability to stay healthy and avoid carcinogenic exposure: this week we learned about new EPA restrictions on using science to draft and monitor health regulations. Let’s breathe poisonous air, drink poisonous water, have the kids be exposed to lead – as long as industrial profits are not endangered….

*

Why was I so much more receptive to the issues raised within the book review than the Politico essay? Partly from admiration for the harder fate of the poet, facing much more radical treatment, who might leave an orphan behind if things didn’t work out, who had to do all this without the network of supporters. More likely, though, because I always thrive on reading about the larger picture – not purely the human interest story, no matter how much I can relate to it, but the anchoring within the system, the world that surrounds us, whose parameters affect us all. Again, the red thread of this week, receptivity to information is so much defined by what is already there. Which leaves me wondering, what kind of information is not getting through to me when it should, caught in the net of preconceived notions or habits.

As William Congreve once said: music can tame the savage breast. It can also tame the sorrow over the absent breast. This is particularly true for music written by someone unwell himself, in this case Beethoven who suffered severely from Inflammatory Bowel Disease and after a bout wrote a string quartet (Opus 132) in 1825 with one movement titled: “Song of thanksgiving to God for recovery from an illness, in the Lydian mode.” It washes over you with anguish and joy, echoing the everlasting longing for recovery.

Photographs today ignore pink ribbons and instead offer multitudes of silvery slivers of hope.