Hi, hope you are well. It is raining here in Vienna, finally. It has been a very dry year. The radio is full of 9/11, 25 years. I was in Beijing, Jackie and I were in Beijing. Jackie was going to get pregnant, Maia was born on Sept. 4, 2002. Jackie worked at the Austrian embassy, military section. Yeah, they have one, even though Austria is rather small and our military is supposed to be neutral, that was a prerequisite to get Allied troops leaving in 1955. It is basically for emergencies such as floods. Although they had some troops at the borders to Hungary and Slovenia when and after many refugees came in 2015. There is a draft for males, but you can do voluntary service in hospitals etc. instead. I taught German to Bosnian refugees instead of military service. That was in 1993.
Jackie and I saw the news on 9/11, 2001 in Beijing somewhere in between on some sreens, I don’t remember exactly. Did I see it first, did I call her? Maybe.
Liam called a few days after or so. He said everything is going to change. Not the relationship between USA and China, probably not, I said. They remember the bombs on the Belgrade Chinese embassy in 1999. It was a stupid thing to say. But I was in China. I had seen some poetry online already, I think. Very sympathetic. But yeah, people remembered 1989 back then.
I was in Vermont about one month in 2014, October. I was there as a translator for a Chinese poet. Yi Sha and I had met for the first time in December 2013 in Xi’an. We became good friends. He translated my poetry, too.
In September 2011 I wrote a song, to the tune of Der Mond ist aufgegangen by Matthias Claudius. It starts in English, but there is some German in between. I wrote it for Moon Festival, 中秋 was on Sept. 12 that year. That is pretty early. Don’t even know know when it is this year. We have a Chinese calendar hanging in our apartment, I am going to look. Better than online.
You can read my song through this link
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2011/09/13/hope-you-had-a-happy-moon/
The tune is probably easy to find.
Leo speaks much more now, in German, English and even some Chinese. And he does Duolingo for French. We are going to France again soon, and maybe even to Guadeloupe this year. We have friends there. Anne-Laure was our neighbor in Beijing, up on the roofs. Jackie had met her in 1994 already, I think. We went to her wedding in a village near Bordeaux in 2016, or was it 2017? They have a bee farm with bed and breakfast on Guadeloupe, they have been there some years now.
A Chinese friend of us is in Berlin now. We met him in 2003 in Beijing, through his 姐姐. We knew her from Romania in 1997/1998. Maybe he can come visit. Another friend stayed with us ten days ago or so.
My reading at Vermont Studio Center on October 5, 2014 had this 9/11 Moon song, among other stuff. I had five poems, Yi Sha also had five, I think. He shared his reading with me, that was his idea. My 9/11 Moon song was well received. People came up to me afterwards and told me they liked it. I don’t know if they understood the German parts. Maybe some. It was the first time they had someone from Austria there. Vermont has many people with Austrian roots. Yi Sha and I got lost in the woods one day, and when we got to a main road, we hitchhiked back. A student took us, there is a college close to the Center in Johnson. In the car on the way he asked us where we were from. He was surprised I was from Austria. His family came from there, he said. But it was the first time in his life meeting someone directly from Austria. I didn’t ask if his folks fled from the Nazis.
The guy next to me on the picture comes from Tibet. He was also invited to stay there, two months or so in his case, as far as I remember. He made his own instrument and sang almost every day in his room next to mine in the writer’s building. People didn’t complain, although some complained when Yi Sha and I discussed poetry in our rooms. Our voices carry. We had a friend from Chicago there, JoAnne. We had very good times.
You can see and read what we recited back then through this link:
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2014/10/09/martin-winter-reading-on-sunday-0ct-5th-2014-at-vermont-studio-center/
Yi Sha and I are not friends anymore. He thought he had to support Russia after they invaded Ukraine in 2022. Now he says that war doesn’t have anything to do with China. Back then everyone immediately thought about Taiwan. So if he says now the war between Russia and Ukraine has nothing to do with China, all the better, I guess.
Back then in 2014 they became friends for the time we were there, the poets from Tibet and China. They exchanged some poetry. What was his name, our friend from Tibet? I saw him on Facebook sometimes. One of the songs he sang in Tibetan with his homemade guitar-like instrument was a song that Yi Sha knew from his childhood. With Maoist lyrics.
I should do some translation now, Chinese to German.
Take care, write when you can, please.
See you all again, hopefully soon.
Martin