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walk mountain—pay respects to the dead

waw; wei—interjections like “wow”

wu wei—non-doing

Contentment and well-being at once become possible the moment you cease to act with them in view, and if you practice non-doing (wu wei), you will have both happiness and well-being.

—THOMAS MERTON

Xizang—Tibet

zaijian—au revoir, auf Wiedersehen

Notes

Many thanks to the authors of the following sources, which are excerpted or referred to in the text:

Irving Berlin, “Sittin’ in the Sun (Countin’ My Money).”

Dalai Lama, How to Expand Love: Widening the Circle of Loving Relationships, translated by Jeffrey Hopkins, Atria Books, 2006.

Gilgamesh, translated by David Ferry, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992.

Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald, 1858.

Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, New Directions, 1965.

John Mulligan, Shopping Cart Soldiers, Curbstone Press, 1997.

Rumi, “Songs of the Reed,” The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, Castle Books, 1997.

Maghiel van Crevel, Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem, and Money, Brill Academic Publishers, 2008.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Sherman and Co., Philadelphia, 1900.

Yang Lian, “Poets and Poems in Exile: On Yang Lian, Wang Jiaxin, and Bei Dao,” translated by Maghiel van Crevel.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maxine Hong Kingston, the author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, The Fifth Book of Peace, and other works, has earned numerous awards, among them the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal, and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. For many years a Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at U.C. Berkeley, she lives in California.

ALSO BY MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

China Men

Hawai‘i One Summer

Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

To Be the Poet

The Fifth Book of Peace

As Editor:

The Literature of California: Native American Beginnings to 1945

Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace