A Gary Snyder tribute: Wang Ping

Academic acknowledges her poet friend

RECENTLY we were delighted to carry an item in our ‘Beat Meetings’ series in which Chinese-American professor of English Wang Ping spoke of her meeting and subsequent friendship with the great and enduring poet Gary Snyder, an important figure in the shaping of the Beat Generation in its key mid-1950s gestation.

We promised a longer account of their association of more than 40 years and the account by Wang Ping, an important academic, poet and artist in her own right, we carry below is a special distillation of many aspects of their fertile connection.

Her essay is a heartfelt tribute to a writer who brought such important influences – the ideals of Zen Buddhism and eco-consciousness among them – to that emerging Beat community of novelists and poets. And, of course, Snyder was immortalised in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums as Japhy Ryder.

‘Kitkitdizze & Gary Snyder’s 赤子之心 – Heart of Child’

By Wang Ping

I know how much the world loves Gary. Still, I’m surprised by the shares and loves people showered on my post about his well-being on social media. It made me wonder why, among so many great poets in the world, Gary takes such a big space in people’s hearts.

We met at MoMA, 1988. I was the translator for Allen Ginsberg, who organized the first American Chinese poetry Festival. It opened with a reading at MoMA. The readers included Gary Snyder, John Ashbery, Bob Creeley, Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Yang Lian, Shu Ting and many others. The first reader was Gary. I was so nervous that I could only sputter ‘My Name Is Wang Ping’ repeatedly. I started sweating and trembling. The whole crowd must be laughing at my stupidity.

I heard Gary laugh. Somehow it calmed me down, and I was able to speak, as a translator.

After the reading, there was a party. I found Gary in the crowd. He was surrounded. I stood outside the ring, watching him talk to each person with joy. He looked familiar, as if we’d known each other for a lifetime, even though this was our first time meeting, even though I had only heard of his name a day earlier, and had a chance to glance at his Cold Mountain and his other poems an hour before the reading. I fell in love with his poetry at the first glance.

I felt an immense closeness with him, despite my blunder. I could tell him anything; he’d listen, laugh, and everything would be ok.

Gary saw me. He extended his hands and the crowd opened. I stepped in. He grabbed my hand and pulled them towards his heart. I felt his pulses, beating with such power and kindness. Tears filled my eyes. I wanted to apologize for my folly, but he stopped me with ‘You’re a wonderful translator, Penny, and I thank you!’

His words and smile wiped out the shame and doubt that had been chewing me during the event. I was tongue-tied, as Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, and other poetry giants smiled and watched.

I knew, at that moment, that I had stepped into the big river of poetry. Although I was a nobody, had just started writing in English, I would not get lost.

Eleven years later, I became a poetry professor. I began to fulfil my dream to bring Gary Snyder to my college. It took me 15 years to get hold of him. I was shy going after stars. So I started with those I knew well: Lyn Hejinian, Bei Dao, Mo Yan, Yusef Komunyakaa, Tyehimba Jess, Patricia Smith, Karen Yamashita, Kimiko Hanh, Robert Hershon, Lewis Warsh, Layli Long Soldier, Sherman Alexie, Paul Hoover, and many others. As time flew by, I knew I’d better go find Gary. He was already in his late 80s. I heard he was getting frail, and no longer traveled to give readings. I couldn’t wait any more. So when I was invited to serve on a committee that bridged arts and science, I suggested Gary, founder of the deep ecology movement in USA. It got a unanimous approval. Then I asked my poetry godfather James Lenfestey for help.

Jim immediately hooked me up with Gary via email, including his phone number.

The emails were painfully slow. Gary has to go down the mountain to get good  connections in a library, and he does that once a week. When we finally got connected, he said he no longer traveled, due to his age and health, but he’d give my invitation some thought. After a month, my colleague, a physicist professor who’s also a Snyder fan, kept asking if Gary had said yes yet. So I gathered my courage, and called Gary.

He answered after the sixth ring. Hello, hello, hello, he said. For no reason, my heart pulsed with emotions, as if my ancestors were calling me home. I told him who I was, and he remembered me as if we’d just met yesterday.

‘You’re not going back to China, right? You know you’re on the blacklist?’ he said.

Wow, how did he know? But of course, he knew! ‘Would you please consider coming to St. Paul and give a reading? I know you love rivers. I’ll show you the mighty Mississippi. You can bring a family or friend to help you move around.’

He laughed. ‘Oh, I can move around just fine. But my son has been traveling with me in the past few years, as my assistant. If that’s ok with you, I think I can visit in early fall.’

I ‘screamed’ the good news to my committee right away. Everyone was excited. They were professors of environment studies, physics, chemistry, biology, geology. They all loved Gary, all knew what he had contributed to our planet, through his poetry and life style. They were super excited to meet him in person, and hoped he could visit their classes.

I expressed their wishes to Gary, and he got excited too, and suggested he could stay for a week. I thought he just wanted to take it easy. But he wanted events everyday: public reading, class visits, lectures…I kept asking him if he could take on so many duties, but the more I asked, the more work he requested. So I just fulfilled everyone’s dreams: the faculty dinner, three class visits (poetry, ES, environmental history),  environmental lunch talk, tea ceremony and meditation, poetry lunch talk, individual meetings with poetry and science majors, and one poetry reading open to the public, as a finale.

The whole Midwest got excited. People planned to fly or drive from Ohio, Chicago, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota to the campus in St. Paul.

I made a banquet to welcome Gary and his son Gen. My colleague offered to pick them up at the airport, drive them to the college guesthouse, then bring them over to my home for dinner. I waited and waited. Finally they arrived. My colleague told me that the guesthouse was locked. He tried to call, knock, shout, but nobody was there to open the door. It was strange, because I knew that college guest house staffs 24/7 student workers. But food was getting cold, so we started eating: salmon, curry chicken, dumplings, vegetables, rice…we drank, ate, laughed.

Gen asked me why I scheduled so many things for Gary. Didn’t I know how old he was? I apologized and told him Gary insisted taking on more work. Gary laughed and said he’d be just fine, he was excited. I promised Gen that I’d make sure to give many breaks for Gary during the day, including time to take a nap at the guesthouse.

The next day, I got a letter reprimanding me for my incompetence, for the failed coordination with the guesthouse about Gary’s arrival. It came from the president’s office. I forwarded the letter to the committee, since it was the committee’s task to book the hotel, and my job was to plan the events and make sure Gary was safe and well. Everyone was puzzled by the severity of the letter and why it was sent to me. I knew why. Something much bigger was brewing. But I had Gary for a whole week, and I wanted to celebrate every minute of his visit. Besides, if a tsunami was coming, I could do nothing to prevent it.

The week flew by in a bliss. Every event was a success, at least I thought, especially the public reading. The ballroom was packed with people. The tea ceremony became a spontaneous chanting of the Heart Sutra. The science professors on the committees were delighted, said it was the best event they had ever hosted. They even let go of their classes and went for a walk along the Mississippi with Gary, breathing in the fall air and wind. As the physicist professor stood next to Gary, looking up at the sky and woods and river, I saw something shifted in his heart. Gary felt it too, and he smiled kindly at him. Later, the professor became an avid water protector for MN 360 movement.

At our last meal, Gary said to me: ‘Ping, come and spend a week at Kitkitdizze. You’ll need it to withstand what’s coming.’

I was dumbfounded. Kitkitdizze is Gary’s homestead at the Sierra foothills, near Nevada City, a place abused and forgotten by mining industry, but restored little by little by Gary, his family, and his community. I’ve read so much about this mecca of deep ecology. Now I’m invited to spend a week with the guru?

Of course I accepted this blessing, without knowing what’s coming. As soon as he left, I felt it.

Complaints streamed in: why did I bring Gary to the campus? He appropriated Zen Buddhism, Japanese culture, Chinese culture, and worse, Native American culture; he was a sexist; he was a supporter of Japanese internment; he was so old he couldn’t even cross his legs while chanting Heart Sutra, and that was so traumatic that they lost sleep three nights in a row…

I was dumfounded. I didn’t see this coming. Not at all. I have super antennas for things like this all my life. But how did I miss this one? I thought everyone loved Gary. He had a packed house and classroom for every event. I got so many thank-you notes from students and science colleagues. I looked at the complaints. They came from my poetry class. What! Gary spent most of his time with those complainers, talking to them and commenting on their work. He told me how much he liked their work, and how much work I’d done with them, and how luck they were to have me as a professor...

‘They love you, truly,’ he said. ‘Never ever forget that, Ping.’

So what went wrong?

I lost my temper, for the first time in my 35 years of teaching, no, 45 years, if I counted my first teaching gig at 15. I had students cut my palm with a pocket knife,  call me stupid cow, bitch, fuckarue, put their militant boot on my desk, lie on the floor to block the classroom door, file Title 9 against me because they got B+…I never got mad. Instead, I took them out for long walks, cooked them meals, brought them lunches, opened my office for their night study, whatever it took to melt their hearts so that they could produce their best poems and stories. And they did, always!

But this time, I lost it!

‘What’s wrong with you!’ I said, looking them in the eyes. ‘Where were you when he gave up his Berkeley scholarship and spent 9 years studying Zen in a Kyoto temple? Where were you when he brought Zen back to America, inspiring the Beat Generation and many other cultural movements? Where were you when he chopped woods in the Sierra Mountains, living without electricity or running water, as a role model for his belief in “Deep Ecology?” Where were you when he celebrated the Native culture when it was a crime to drum, dance and chant? Where were you when he fought shoulder to shoulder with his Japanese wife, her whole family victimized by the Internment Act?  You may think you’re woke, pointing fingers, canceling this and that. You think it’s incredibly brave, but what about building something like Gary did?’

Nobody said a word. They didn’t know how to react. They were used to my soft voice, smiles, laughter, my tea, food, books and other gifts. They had never heard me roar.

‘Now you sit here calling him names,’ I continued. ‘You complain he traumatized you with his old, injured leg. How many of you can cross your legs? And how old are you? 20? How old is Gary? Almost 90. Where’s your decency? If we get stuck or lost in the mountains for ten days, guess who’ll be the last person still standing, and walk out alive? I bet you a million bucks it won’t be you but Gary, the old man who can’t cross his legs!’

Someone laughed. ‘You’re right, Ping. It’d be Gary still standing in the end. We’d all have perished, most likely. Some of us have never worked to make a penny, you know. Some of us are just spoiled brats.’

I laughed, and the whole class laughed. I remembered what Gary said: ‘They love you, truly.’

‘Let’s workshop your poems, which Gary praised highly,’ I said. I wanted to tell them that he didn’t need to visit our class or meet with them individually. With his status, all he had to do was a public reading and a faculty dinner, yet he was so generous with us.

I kept quiet. I had said enough.

But a question kept bubbling up from the deep: why such aggression, such arrogance? This was so unlike my students. I’d never had a bad class, in my entire teaching career. All my students learned kindness, respect and love, through poetry and life.

I did a little research on the attackers. When I saw who were advising them, my heart sank. I recalled the reprimanding letter from the admins. Were they part of the tsunami Gary had felt? Was it why he invited me to his mountain, to prepare me for the coming tsunami?

And soon it came, wave after wave, pulling me under. I was drowning in the daily attacks from all fronts. The final blow came when I was banned from the campus, just because a white girl I’d never met complained I made her feel ‘unsafe’. I was also ordered to finish my teaching till the semester was over. How was I supposed to achieve that? Fortunately, all my three classes took place in a language building, away from the center. I was able to sneak into the classrooms through the back door. My classes were spread through Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I didn’t want to be seen going in and out of the building and to be accused of violating the ban. So I spent my Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in the building, holding my office hours with students in empty classrooms, and resting on the floor between classes, during lunch hours. It was the coldest winter and spring I had ever had. But Gary’s faith in me as a poet, teacher and person kept me warm and safe on the rigid floor.

After the semester was over, I scaled Kilimanjaro, installed prayer flags at the peak, then at the source of the Nile at Lake Victoria, then flew to California, to spend a week with Gary, then attend the ASLE conference at UC Davis. We’d present together for ‘7 Minutes to Make a Better World’ panel, then Gary would be celebrated as the founder of this international ecology organization.

Gary picked me up at the airport. He walked with a stick. His leg was swollen.

‘What happened?’

‘I tripped over the tablecloth after a presentation at Berkeley. My shin hit something hard.’

‘X-ray?’ I knelt down to examine his leg.

‘Nope! It’s getting better. The swelling was much, much worse.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Over a month.’

I found the spot where he hit his shin, and pressed it gently. He didn’t flinch, and he had been walking. So it’s unlikely he had broken his shin bone. He might have bruised it, though. That’s why it’s taking so long to heal, and still swelling. I told Gary to get an X-ray, just to make sure. He nodded, but I could tell he likes to tough things out, as he’s done all his life. And I respect that. My doctor friends told me the more frequently people see their doctors, the earlier and faster they’ll die. Every pill has side-effects. During my three-year internship at the TCM clinic, I treated many patients desperate to get off their damn pills.

I massaged his leg, gently, then vigorously, until the dark redness reduced by half.

I gave him my hand to stand up from the baggage conveyor. He waved, laughing. ‘I can stand. Wow, my leg feels much lighter already. You have magic hands!’

This was how I spent a week with Gary on the mountain: laugh, chat, cook, eat, read, write and walk around his homestead, surrounded by ponderosa pines, books, history, and the aura from a magnificent poet of two centuries, two continents, many cultures, infinite wisdom...He translated Cold Mountain and brought Asia to America through poetry and Zen, the way Ezra Pound changed European and American poetry through his translation of Cathay. He brought Zen practice to America, inspired Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, became ‘Thoreau of the Beat Generation’, founded Deep Ecology, brought Native American culture out of the underground…

In his guest room, on a tatami, I read and wrote, and meditated under the pines and blue sky. I often pinched myself, to remind myself I wasn’t just daydreaming.

What have I done to deserve such luck, such blessing!

I had endless dreams on the tatami. One of them was a tiger howling and trying to break through the screen door to get in. When I woke up, a cat, as big as a tiger cub with gray stripes, sat on my chest. I showed her to Gary. We lured her out with milk. Gary told me to shut all the doors and windows. But the cat found her way in mysteriously, the way she entered my dream. We did it a few times, till Gary sighed and showed me where the cat food was.

‘It’s too soon,’ he said, sorrow in his eyes. ‘My cat, her death was only…I still miss her.’

His eyes were a bit wet. I couldn’t tell if he missed the cat or his late wife Carol.

I gave his leg another massage. After that, he was able to walk without his cane.

On my last day, I offered to cook a dinner for him and his two sons. Kai was driving from Oregon to take us to UC Davis.

Gary took me to the local organic grocery. It was small, but had almost everything I needed. As I turned the corner, I saw Gary talking to an Asian woman.

‘Ping, this is Masa,’ Gary introduced me as if I knew her.

I did know her, years ago, from Gary’s poem ‘The Bath’. The poem took my breath away the first time I read it, with its rituals, love, openness, transformation, and humans’ entanglement with nature. It has never failed its inspiration every time I read and taught it, at New School, Baruch, York College, Pratt, Loft, Stillwater Corrections, Shakopee Women’s Correction, and other liberal art colleges in Midwest, until now, after some students accused me of promoting pornography, child abuse and sexism. So I had to take that poem off my teaching list, including also Ezra Pound, Sherman Alexie...

Teaching in America is becoming a dangerous profession.

I stared in awe. Though they’re no longer married, they’re still entangled with love, respect and poetry. Masa lives nearby, close to their son Gen. She’s very active in the community, Gary told me on our way to his Zendo through the ponderosa forest. Built by the community, the Zendo has attracted meditators from all over the world.

Masa grabbed my hand, and placed it against her chest. ‘We must have a photo together,’ she said. Her warmth pulled me into the energy field of ‘The Bath’, and it felt good.  

‘Wait,’ she said, stopping the camera girl, a stranger in the store. ‘Gary, let me fix your hair.’

Gary stood still and let her smooth his hair. I could tell she had done this countless times in their life time. They were divorced, but the baths they had shared still kept them together.

I suddenly remembered the gesture, the hands that pull me to the chest, Gary’s hands, his Holiness Dalai Lama’s hands, now Masa’s…it’s the same gesture: grab, hold it against the heart.

Is this a universal gesture of love, a universal blessing?

I made sliced beef, sweet and sour with Teriyaki, and bokchoy with shitake mushrooms. Everyone loved it, Gary especially.

Early next morning, he handed me a piece of paper. ‘You’ll need this, Ping. It’ll be a hard battle, but your innocence will keep you strong. Remember: knowing when to retreat is the best strategy. Chinese know this well: as long as the mountain stands, there’ll be trees, always.’

I looked at the paper. It was a petition on my behalf, with his signature. Blood drained from my face. I’d managed to forget all the troubles back home on the Sierras. Then my heart burst with gratitude. Gary just opened the door and let me see the mountains. 留得青山在，不怕没柴烧: as long as the mountains stand, there’ll always be firewood. This is the proverb every Chinese knows, but I loved Gary’s version better:

‘As long as the mountain stands, there’ll be trees.’

I followed Gary’s advice. I retreated into the green mountain of peace, to preserve my trees.

During the pandemic, I started writing an essay about Fu Lei. I came upon the phrase: 赤子之心, used to portray the famous Chinese translator. I checked the dictionary. Something hit me hard.

赤子之心chi zi zhi xin – heart of a red child, a person with integrity, purity and faith who can’t be destroyed by politics, rumor or dust of this world.

That is Gary Snyder, his joy flowering like a lotus, out of the muck. He’s that red child, the new-born, arriving with nothing but love, innocence and faith.

No wonder he can laugh like a child, under any circumstances. No wonder he knows everything. No wonder his poetry flows like rivers and mountains. No wonder so many people love him, in response to his unconditional love for life.

Is that what he sees and hears in me, the Laughing Ping? Is that why he lets me flower on his mountain, whistling among his ponderosa pines, at his homestead Kitkitdizze, an ancient plant the Natives have been using as medicine for small pox, cold and flu.

And who’d have known that China cultivated this 野蔷薇 into voluptuous roses 5,000 years ago, the way Gary brought Cold Mountain from China to America.

Poetry is an entangled world of everything.

I’m blessed.

See also: ‘Beat Meetings #11: Wang Ping & Gary Snyder’, August 18th, 2023