| Qin: Dear Juan Juan Ramirez’s educated middle-class parents, his father a high school teacher, his mother a librarian, gave him the best they could afford: college, a year in the United States to polish his English. But Juan had an unscratched itch. The cleverest, funniest people in the cafes of Ciudad Mexico didn’t touch it. Sex, strangely, only made the itch worse. The sharp ideas of the best books didn’t touch it. Now and then, a few measures of music, a frozen gesture in a painting would brush against it, only making the itch itch more. A week in the mountains, with Indians and mushrooms, provided lovely hallucinations, like hours and hours of television the way television might be in the year 3000, but when he returned home the itch was still there. Settled in his job as web site designer, Juan fell in love with a programmer in the next cubicle. They were married, and for a time the itch seemed to lessen, especially when their children came. Nurturing, Juan discovered, almost scratched the itch. The children grew up, went to college, started their own lives, and Juan found the itch returning, unchanged, not stronger, not weaker, just there. By now a vice president of his company, Juan went on a management junket to Hong Kong. In a suite at the Peninsula Hotel, he dreamed one night of an old man, an old Chinese man, on a mountain. In the dream, the itch stopped. Next day, Juan told his colleagues he wanted to travel in China for a while. He traveled alone, having the same dream every night. Some nights the dream was weaker, less clear. Other nights it was stronger. Juan figured out the dream was acting as a compass, showing him his nearness to or distance from the mountain. Four weeks of wandering finally brought up to the path leading to the old man’s porch. The old man was as usual tending his garden. He didn’t look up as Juan approached. "No end to weeds," he said. Juan, always polite, said, "May I help you?" "Sure." Juan knelt in the dirt and started pulling weeds. While they’re weeding, the old man says, "This old boy goes for his draftboard physical, and when he pulls his pants down, the doctor is astonished when he spies a tiny, tiny penis, and he calls another doctor over to have a look. The recruit is embarrassed and says, 'What's the matter? Y'all never seen a erection before?'" No reaction from Juan. "I got a million of 'em." the old man said. Juan sat back on his heels and looked at the mountains, the valley, the trees, the clouds. "It’s like the best sex, but better." The old man started to cry. He put his hand on Juan’s shoulder. "OK. You want sage, I’ll give you sage. Look not for desire but for the soil in which desires grows," he said, and disappeared. Back to Qin
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