Dear St. Gheorghe, you the Russian monk, don’t forget China is China
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Old Sung came back from Russia last week, and we had a lunch at the old restaurant nearby Mike’s apartment. He gave me a Russian Bible, and told us he had received baptism. Old Sung is an Orthodox now.
“How did you get ‘washed’?” I asked him,” Head-wash or body-wash?”
“Body-wash.”
“Were you naked?” Professor Guo asked.
Old Sung was given a new name, George. So we began calling him St. Gheorghe.
He is teaching Chinese culture at a university in Moscow, meanwhile, as Gheorghe, he is a student of a theological seminary.
I’ve known Old Sung nearly a decade and we once worked together for several years. He is always an amazing man, like a restless cloud, floating from one city to another, unceasingly, changing his jobs, houses, and wives.
He was a pressman, a writer, then a businessman and a professor. But before all of that, St. Gheorghe was a soldier of the People's Liberation Army, lived alone for years in the mountains nearby China-Soviet border to monitor the enemy's radio broadcasts. Now he is studying ancient Slavic, maybe to be Father Gheorghe of a Chinese Orthodox church in the future.
It’s really funny. But why?
You will find a feeling of happiness, St. Gheorghe told us.
Aren’t we happy yet, living in a country which become richer and richer, and in a great new era that singers pay tributes to on TV everyday? Look around all of us on the table, does everyone have new house and new car? Dear St. Gheorghe, you the Russian monk, don’t forget China is China, and Chinese are Chinese, we always know who we are.
But you, you are washed.
“How did you get ‘washed’?” I asked him,” Head-wash or body-wash?”
“Body-wash.”
“Were you naked?” Professor Guo asked.
Old Sung was given a new name, George. So we began calling him St. Gheorghe.
He is teaching Chinese culture at a university in Moscow, meanwhile, as Gheorghe, he is a student of a theological seminary.
I’ve known Old Sung nearly a decade and we once worked together for several years. He is always an amazing man, like a restless cloud, floating from one city to another, unceasingly, changing his jobs, houses, and wives.
He was a pressman, a writer, then a businessman and a professor. But before all of that, St. Gheorghe was a soldier of the People's Liberation Army, lived alone for years in the mountains nearby China-Soviet border to monitor the enemy's radio broadcasts. Now he is studying ancient Slavic, maybe to be Father Gheorghe of a Chinese Orthodox church in the future.
It’s really funny. But why?
You will find a feeling of happiness, St. Gheorghe told us.
Aren’t we happy yet, living in a country which become richer and richer, and in a great new era that singers pay tributes to on TV everyday? Look around all of us on the table, does everyone have new house and new car? Dear St. Gheorghe, you the Russian monk, don’t forget China is China, and Chinese are Chinese, we always know who we are.
But you, you are washed.
