貝魯特的太極練習課

Tai chi is no joke. Earlier this week, when I was having coffee with a friend at an outdoor cafe in Beirut, we saw a middle-aged Lebanese man beating up a young Syrian refugee on the curb. Everyone was too busy sipping their coffee to care or interfere. After leaping instinctively from my seat, all it took was one tai chi move to make the man stop, and give the traumatized refugee time to flee…

“Why are you hitting my child?” I said in Arabic, prompting the man to smile at the absurdity of my claim. There was no obvious connection between me and the tiny shoe-shiner covered in shoe grease–like a character out of Dickens. What the man didn’t know, though, was that the young boy and I have been making art together on the streets of Beirut for months–and recently his mother, still stuck in Syria, asked me to look out for him in her place. Though she and I have never met in person, our hearts are connected through our love and concern for that small boy–a member of Syria’s lost generation–who wants nothing more than to stop shining shoes, and get back to school…