could the anti-christ be china?

“could the anti-christ be china?”

This is a search question that was used to reach my blog today. I think that it deserves an answer.

First of all, I know a Chinaman. He serves me a plate of pan-fried noodles every Friday evening at Woo’s. I don’t know whether he speaks English or not. All I’ve heard him say is “You likee?” He wears a short-sleeved white shirt and black trousers. Could he be the Anti-Christ? Perhaps. I can’t just come out and ask him, because the Anti-Christ is apt to lie. Let’s keep this guy in the back of our minds for now.

There are one billion Chinese in China. That’s 1,000 million. We can deal with them million by million and then we’ll only have to do it 1,000 times. Half are female, so we can eliminate them. Or, wait. Has it ever been proven for sure that Christ was a guy? Maybe we better not rule out the females just yet. And anyway, with all the transgender, sex-changing activity going on (End of Days!), it’s a moving target anyway.

So, first of all, the Anti-Christ will come all friendly like. The checkout woman over at Pay And Go did not get the memo. Very crabby. Maybe she’s Japanese. I read an article where a whole crowd of folks, white, brown, yellow, and black, were given a test: they were all shown pictures of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. Nobody could tell the difference. So that checkout woman, if the Anti-Christ is Chinese, is not Chinese. She failed the friendly test. That’s how we know that the Japanese are not the Anti-Christ. Pearl Harbor.

What about all those different Chinese languages? You could get 20 Chinese in a room and none might know what any of the others are talking about. Is the Anti-Christ that tricky? What about Taiwan? Is everybody on the island just pretending to dislike the mainland?

If the Chinese are the Anti-Christ, they sure fooled Pearl Buck. And they’ve wasted a humongous amount of time, incense, and gongs on Buddist ceremonies.

Wait a minute! Lucy Liu. I love Lucy Liu. No way she’s the Anti-Christ. But she’s seductive, so seductive. Could she come to me sometime, like a thief in the night? No, that’s Jesus who will do that. It’ll be spooky when he does, too.

My time as a monk

When I was in my 20s, I renounced the materialism of the Western world. I got a job on a freighter after obtaining my seaman’s ticket, and worked on the high seas until taking my accumulated pay and debarking for good at the port of Chittagong. I could have lived like a king for a year in Bangladesh but instead I secreted my money on my person and made my way north on foot, depending upon the kindness of strangers for my biryani and llish.

In time, I passed through the hills of Meghalaya (the Scotland of India) and crossed into Assam. I endured rain, sat and watched the one-horned Indian rhinoceros, and eventually progressed into Bhutan. Here, in the deep valleys, as I approached the mighty Himalayas, I began sitting with the Vajrayana monks whom I encountered. Finally, in the company of these monks, I began the long, long tramp to Cona in Tibet, at 14,000 feet, and eventually, as the seasons passed,  to Gonggar. I was tempted to apply for membership in the Sakyapa school of Tibetan Buddhism at the Gonggar Dzong or the Gonggar Choede Monastery, but I craved to leave the valleys and trek up into the wild and rocky Himalaya hinterlands, which I did, feet wrapped in burlap. I could feel myself leaving the world behind and approaching true understanding on the edge of the great voids of thin air that fill the spaces between the mountain peaks up there.

I arrived finally in a small and nameless village on the stoney gray flank of a gigantic mountain. A woman, Chomo-Lung-Ma (Godess Mother of the Universe), took me in. There were no monks in the village but she explained by gesture that this was a good thing – that I could best advance my own personal monkhood in solitary fashion.

It developed that she had six children. She kept me busy with chores, which seemed good for a newbie monk. I never figured out where the village’s food came from. The goats would wander off over the flinty slopes; they must have found something to eat somewhere back there because they came back sated. Chomo-Lung-Ma gave me sustenance sufficient to keep me alive and able to work, no more.

When Spring arrived, she gathered the family’s meager belongings and the kids and prodded me out onto the track through the village. It seemed as if we walked for months after that. Walked and walked. In fact, we did walk for months. We walked until we arrived on the ocean shore at the harbor of Beihai in Guangxi province. Chomo-Lung-Ma took my money stash, which had remained intact since my final day on the freighter, and she and I and her children crossed the Pacific and were smuggled ashore south of L.A. We caught a succession of buses north to a furnished bungalow in Canoga Park. Five bedrooms, three baths, red-tile roof, full landscaping. We took up residence as a happy, middle-class married couple. She worked with a gang smuggling Far Eastern drugs; I was in charge of the kids, the pets we acquired, and the Escalade. Two housemaids came in on Tuesdays and Fridays.

I would have done some yard work, but a Mexican crew showed up every Thursday to take care of that.