This walk was a spiritual experience. I went with a friend who is staying with me, and we shared a pair of headphones for the tour. Having one headphone in and one out made for a surreal experience, for as we walked down to the row of funeral homes there was brass playing on the headphones and brass playing in the street. The line between what we were seeing and what we were hearing blurred. We stopped for a while and watched the procession. We saw the park where “old men wait to die.” As we walked to the corner and looked at the jail and the courthouse, a woman walked in front of the hearse, flipped it off and said, “Fuck the Chinese! Some of us have to go to court today!” Though racist and hurtful, the soundwalk at least gave some sort of context to the outburst. As we continued on we thought about death. My friend’s mom passed away two weeks ago, one of the reasons for the visit. We awkwardly stood in the center for seniors watching the old ladies slowly move across the room, wondering if they were the same as the men in the park. We listened about the gang wars between the Chinese, and before that the Irish and the Italians.
And then we came to the temple. We took our fortunes and we walked up to the giant golden Buddha. We listened as the narrator talked about how we are all connected, all reincarnated. We breathed our conscious breathes taking away the shadows and emitting light. Though there is great suffering, there is great joy. We stayed in the temple meditating on this thought, listening to the chanting, watching an old man pray along. There will always be death, but life is precious. Life must go on. In Chinatown, in the world.