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Pictured above: T.P. Wilkinson with his new book, “Temples of the Heart”.

Sixteen years on the streets, living and working with the people of China, Jeff

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Intro

Great to have another fascinating discussion with Dr. T.P. Wilkinson, who has graced these pages many times. You can find our previous interviews and many of his articles here,

https://radiosinoland.com/search/?q=wilkinson

Thomas’ books can be bought here,

Or on Amazon,

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Dr-Santang-Wei/author/B0D66YRPG6

https://www.amazon.com/Fruit-Vine-Vol-Intelligent-Family/dp/B0CSJJTLVW/

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Dr.-T-P-Wilkinson/author/B0D66V73RW

https://www.amazon.com/Church-Clothes-Land-Mission-Apartheid/dp/B0D65Z2L39/
Interview summary

Santang’s Writing Journey and Friendship

Jeff and Santang discussed their long-standing friendship and shared experiences. Santang revealed his passion for writing, which started at a young age, and shared his journey of writing a 250-page flasher novel, which eventually turned into an 800-page story. He explained the challenges he faced with publishing the book due to a typing error in his name, which led to the need for a second edition. Santang also mentioned his plans to continue writing the story and hinted at a trilogy. Jeff expressed admiration for Santang’s work and mentioned his intention to create a library of their collaborative efforts.

Santang’s Journey Into Chinese Culture

Santang discussed his passion for Chinese culture and his journey of turning his interest into a variety of media, including a book on the Chinese solar terms and a novel set in China before the Revolution. He detailed his research process, including a trip to Anqing to gather more information. Santang expressed his gratitude for the help he received from a museum curator in Hefei, who provided valuable resources for his book.

Santang’s Creative Poetry Book Project

Santang shared his creative process of writing poems and creating a handmade book for his friend, Ann Singh. He experimented with Chinese calligraphy and used a cursive generator to produce a cursive version of his poems. The book, titled “Lighthouses of Ansing and Porto, Temples of the Heart,” contains his poems, drawings, and calligraphy in Chinese, Mandarin, and English. Santang also mentioned that this book is the second in a series he calls “Culture and Context” and that he is working on other books in the same vein.

Santang’s Book Production and Career

Santang discussed his approach to learning about China through book production and writing. He mentioned that his books are available on Amazon, but there’s an issue with the search results. Jeff expressed his admiration for Santang’s work and encouraged others to read it. Santang also shared his career history, stating that he has had an irregular career due to his independent nature. He mentioned that he started writing in 2022 and aims to finish his projects by the end of the year, as he cannot retire until he’s 66.

Sharing Knowledge and Poetry’s Significance

Santang discussed the importance of sharing knowledge and experiences, likening it to an act of love. He also shared his thoughts on poetry, stating that it is a form of pre-explanatory knowledge and a way to organize experiences without clear explanations. Santang emphasized that poetry was once the main form of literature, but it has since become elite literature. He also noted that there is no difference between fiction and non-fiction, as both are man-made organizations of selected data.

Santang’s Writing Process and Projects

Santang discussed his writing process and experiences over the past 4 years. He emphasized the importance of organizing thoughts and using hands while writing to achieve action and seek truth. Santang shared his attempts to involve others in his work, crediting those who have contributed to his projects. He mentioned planning more books, including one on politics in North Africa, and another about an Erhu player he admires.

Santang’s Art and AI Concerns

Jeff and Santang discussed Santang’s artistic endeavors, including his calligraphy and painting. Santang shared that he had been receiving positive feedback on his work, particularly a lantern festival painting, and was considering publishing a book of his drawings and calligraphy. Santang also expressed concern about the potential loss of human intelligence due to the reliance on artificial intelligence and data crunching, emphasizing the importance of human involvement in the creative process. Jeff agreed to promote Santang’s work and mentioned adding Santang’s art to the interview page.

Transcript

Jeff: Good evening, everybody. This is Jeff J. Brown, Radio Sinoland in Taiwan, China. And I am with one of my favorite people in the whole universe, Dr. TP Wilkinson. How are you doing?

Thomas: I think I’m fine. Given the condition that the world is in, I’m relatively immune from most of the disasters. So, that what is it? Thank God for small favors!

Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. No kidding. TP’s pen name is Wei Santang, and he and I go back many, many years. And, in fact, I’ve decided after this show I’m going to create a library of all of his stuff that we’ve done together because it’s quite substantial, including shows. And I published all of his Corona papers back during the bad days of… and they’re still going. The ongoing, his Corona papers. And anyway, he has really, and we’ve met each other. I went to Porto, where he lives in Portugal, and so we’re good friends and he’s a respected colleague of mine who I admire very much. He has been on a book-writing tear for the last year and a half, maybe, and I want to share with you all tonight his latest book: Towers of the Heart.

Thomas: Temples of the Heart.

Jeff: I’m sorry, Temples of the Heart. And he can kind of… so I do have his Solar Terms book, and I do have his book, the first book of his trilogy, I think it’s going to be Fruit of the Vine, Volume 1, and then he’s going to talk about his other book that goes with that series, and his newest one, Temples of the Heart. So just take it away, TP. We’re excited to hear about it.

Thomas: Well, maybe for those who don’t know about the first book, what started this whole thing is I’ve been writing since I was three years old maybe. Then I was only painting walls with marking pens, but later I started, you know, as soon as I knew how to write, I was writing everything. I still have some things from my elementary school days that I wrote. So I can prove it if somebody thinks I’m making it up, but that’s probably the only thing that has kept me consistent, that has been consistent in my life.

And one of the things is that I like to write, and I like to draw with my pen. So what happened was in 2022, in the middle of the first phase of this ongoing war against the health of humanity and our sanity, I was talking to a friend of mine in Maine who had been making slowly up to $50,000 a year publishing slasher novels in about 200-page format, that she was writing, like you know, other people bake bread, right? And I said, well, I don’t write like that.

But she said, well, I publish it directly through Amazon KDP, and she explained it and said, well, of course, I didn’t start out that way, but it basically it’s worked its way up to where I get a fair amount of money from selling these books, and I don’t have any real costs because there’s no stock people, it’s print on demand. Anyway, so she sent me one or two autographed copies of her stuff, not my taste, although it’s sort of cute because we went to high school together.

And I wouldn’t have imagined her writing stuff like that in any case. It proves that you can sell a lot of strange stuff in the United States if you know how to write fast in any case. To make a long story short, I was sitting in my… it was Christmas Day 2022… in utter penury, a condition that’s not infrequent in my life, but this is about the longest stretch that I’ve been in. Well, I’ve got to do something.

So I thought, well, if she could write 250 pages in syllables, I can do that, I think. I’d never done it before, but I thought, okay, I’ll try. So I sat down with the aim to write really 250 pages on something in fiction and so on. So came up with this idea of a spy story. I’m not into splashers. In fact, I really don’t like violence in that sense; I’m more into intrigue but not violence. So I sat down and I wrote. And four months later, I had written 800 pages.

Jeff: Wow.

Thomas: So I couldn’t really fit into the 250 format. And I realized the story wasn’t finished, so I was going to have to keep writing it, but I had to stop for this book because I couldn’t imagine I didn’t want to write a 2000-page book, right? So I just stopped and it was like 800, and I had to figure out, how do I stop it? Where do I stop? And then where do I continue? Okay, well, that was Fruit of the Vine. So that book is not so easy to find when you search on Amazon because my friend helping me put the thing online made a typing error and hit my name, and it was impossible to remove.

Jeff: Oh my gosh.

Thomas: So I had to do a second edition and add my name as a second author to the first edition so that it would have a possibility of showing up in the search engine. So that didn’t happen with the second book, but it’s a little bit confusing. What I wanted to get at was that I just started writing and I had to keep going because I hadn’t finished my story. At the same time, I had been preparing for a job in 2020 to teach at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, and because of the COVID, I couldn’t go, but I had been studying China, and I came across. So a friend of mine in Hefei, she sent me the link to Seasons of China, which is a beautiful series on the…

Jeff: CGTN. Or is it China Daily?

Thomas: I think, was China Central Television.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s right. CCTV, yeah.

Thomas: In any case, it was narrated by an English guy, and it was 24 episodes, one for each of the Chinese solar terms. So I’d watched all of this like two or three times, and then I thought my friend, the mayor, was making wonderful nature photography, and so I thought I’d make a book on the solar terms, which you’ve seen; you have a copy of it.

Jeff: Well, I read it. We had a show on it.

Thomas: Yeah. So I ended up deciding that I was going to turn my growing passion for Chinese culture into a variety of media, or media print media, but I mean a variety of types of books, and after I finished that, I decided I would go on to tell the story of the father of the hero in the first volume of my novel, as someone who’s serving in the Yangtze patrol in China before the revolution, so 1927, to be exact.

And I started doing a lot of research to make sure I got the dates right because, you make up a story, you’ve never been to a certain place, you want to at least try to get some of the facts right, because I don’t write fantasy. There are some people who make up worlds; I like to make sure that things more or less start. So it’s about a guy in the Navy and it’s about a woman from a village who learns out who becomes an opera singer. And this story went to another 800 pages.

But before I could finish it, I had a certain block. I was thinking, it takes place in Ansing, and around that area, and I’d never been there, and I really couldn’t find out enough about the place, especially in that period. I found one book, which was a report by the Episcopal mission in Anqing at the time, which was very interesting because it gave me an idea about infrastructure and time and things like that, but I still needed to see that.

So I managed to get somebody to help me pay for a trip to China with the idea that I have to go see Ansing. Well, in order to justify this trip in other ways and try to get some support, I added some academic work. And of course, I wanted to go to Hefei to meet Fey, and what happened was I went to Anqing and there spent two or three days, and I saw some stuff, but I really hadn’t gotten everything I needed. And somebody said, well, you should go to the city museum.

So I went to the city museum, and that was actually a miracle! I hate museums generally, but this city museum had all the stuff, all the images, it had a panorama of the city around the 1920s, all the things I needed to know to sort of fill in the gaps in my book. So I was really thrilled. This was like two and a half hours that I spent in the museum taking pictures, and I had a nice guide, one of the curators there. And I said, wow, this is really amazing.

So, when I got back, fast forward to Porto at the end of the… I decided to… Well, I finished my book, that was the first thing, so I felt confident that I could finish the book. The other thing that I did was I started corresponding with this woman who had helped me so much in the museum, because I needed some map material. I couldn’t find the current maps or the maps I needed for that period, and she managed to find these things in the museum archive, and then I started writing her a poem.

So, I guess that’s one way I express myself to people when I find a certain degree of friendliness or affection, but we won’t go into that detail right now. The important reason for that story is that she basically created for me a discussion, an internal monologue, you might say, about answering beyond the story that I told. So, I had been starting to try to teach myself calligraphy, and when experimenting with Chinese calligraphy and copying, basically, which is again something I have always done, is copied other people’s handwriting and stuff like that.

It was not a new activity, but it was a new script. So I started writing poems for her and then translating them with it, more or less, with this Google stuff to get a calligrapher to get the Chinese version of my verse. Sometimes they’re good translations, sometimes they’re not, but it wasn’t so important that what I wanted was a picture. So I had these standard pictures, the regular Chinese characters. And then I found a cursive generator.

So I copied the standard text from the machine translation into the cursive generator, and it will produce a cursive version of these Chinese standard characters, which I then proceeded to copy. Now, a friend of mine gave me a book like one of these things that you used to have, well, girls used to have her diaries, with a little clasp on it and everything, looks basically empty pages inside. Well, this had something that was embossed on the cover pose, and so he gave it to me. He said, “You write poems. Here, maybe you want to fill this book.”

So I started to film this book apology with my poems for my friend in Ansing, and to draw pictures and calligraphy. So I had basically everything I could do with a pen was between these two covers. Now, the funny thing was it turned out that this book had some letters like written in the beginning, one in Dutch and the other in Portuguese, dated 1923. So the book was about as old as the story I had been telling.

So I thought, here’s this hundred-page-old book which I’ve been writing and it’s all sort of connected to the fact that I’m writing a story about China in the 1920s. So I sent this to the woman in Anqing for Christmas because one of the things she mentioned to me when she was taking me around the museum was that she’s Christian. So Christmas was something I could legitimately use to excuse sending her this handmade book.

But before I did that, I copied and scanned everything in there, in case it got lost, and then I thought, well, let’s see, people that said, oh, the drawings look nice. So I decided to make a book out of it. Well, I didn’t know… I didn’t have a topic, and then one of the things that occurred to me, and this is how this long story gets us to the title, I was the sort of landmark or the thing that makes that stand out in Anqing in all of the photos, in all of the old paintings and pictures, is the tower at the Buddhist temple.

So I extra went there because I wanted to see that and what happened was that I then made a drawing of it from a photograph, and then I also told her about Porto, a drawing of the Clerigos Tower. And then I looked at those, and I did some reading for background and figured out they’re almost exactly the same size. They’re both parts of religious buildings. One is Buddhist, the other is Christian. The other thing is that they were both used as lighthouses for the river traffic.

So I started with that and decided to write a little bit about these two buildings, which is why they’re important in Ansing. They’re both temples, and Temples of the Heart is an allusion to the Neo-Confucian idea of the heart-mind, and then I started reading a little bit about I had been reading about Anqing and Porto, and in fact there are some other historic parallels between the two cities. For instance, Anqing was one of the last bastions of the Taiping Revolution, right? It had a long battle before it was more or less defeated in that area.

Well, in Porto, about the same time, or in the north of Portugal, there was the Maria de phantom revolt, which is a Catholic women’s revolt against British liberalism, which was dominant in the Portuguese capital at the time, and it was a very democratic kind of a revolt led by women to protect their land ownership. Because in the north of Portugal, land ownership is actually very decentralized. There’s no Latifundia like in the south. So lots of families and the women were the main title holders of these because the men were often at sea or somewhere.

So they didn’t want to have a liberal land regime that would undermine their property rights. So I thought, wow, you’ve got these two cities which have no obvious connection to each other, and by accident, I make a connection to them. So the book is called Lighthouses of Ansing and Porto, Temples of the Heart. But it’s a reflection in prose, poetry, in calligraphy, and in drawings (pen drawings), and it’s in Chinese, and in Mandarin, and in English. So from the front you read it in English and from the back you read it in Mandarin.

So that was the way this Fey product arose, and it sort of started, it’s basically the second in a series now. So I have like the novel is not yet a trilogy, but it’s heading towards a trilogy, and this is the second in a series I call Culture and Context, and right now I have two or three other books that I’m working on in the same area where I sort of either I take something specific concerning Chinese culture, or I take something which I consider to be comparable between Portuguese and Chinese.

And these are books of about 100 pages, 150 pages long, with where I do almost everything, except you know drawing, painting, or the photographs in the case of fade. There’s one more book coming out with face photographs. And my idea, I guess, is that I’m really… Well, let’s put it this way. I think you learn by doing things, and so all of this book production or writing production is a way for me to learn about China. Every time I make something, I have to ask questions and answer new questions, and to do that I have to produce something. So that’s essentially it’s what I have to do until I die kind of thing.

Jeff: Long may you live.

Thomas: Please don’t wish me anything so horrible, right? Immortality is not my desire.

Jeff: Well, at least on Earth. So are these books available on Amazon?

Thomas: Yeah, they’re on Amazon. Unfortunately, there’s no way to fix the mistake with Fruit of the Vine, but for instance, if you put on, enter like Dr. Wei Santang, you will get the second volume of the novel, In Solar Terms, and Temples of the Heart. They all appear on one page. You have to enter something else weird to get the Fruit of the Vine link.

Jeff: Well, send me all the links and I’ll include it on the interview web page, and I encourage everybody to read TP’s work. He’s a brilliant writer, and I really enjoy what he does. When we met each other in 2021, right? Yeah, in 2021, March of 2021, I guess it was or February, you were still trying to figure out what you wanted to do. And when you decided to do it, you have been going on a riding tear. So I’m really impressed with your Promethean production in the last couple of years.

Thomas: The thing was, Jeff, I’ve had an irregular career in the sense that I’ve never spent more than the longest time in one fixed employment relationship was two years, and this is not because I wanted to move around a lot; it’s just because I’m very apparent, I would say, too independent for most organizations, so that there was never a problem about the quality of my work was a question of whether I belonged or not. So, I didn’t have anything in the classical sense of somebody who was a permanent employee somewhere to show for all of this stuff.

Who cares about my degrees, right? I mean, they’re just licenses to kill or be killed. And when I started in this in 2022, I thought, well, technically, in 2024, I would have been retired under the old regime. So I said I’m going to write as much as I can until my formal retirement, and then I could say, well, whatever I produce by the time I’m 65 is the product of what I’ve been doing for the previous 50 years or whatever. So, okay, I actually can’t retire until I’m 66. So that means I have to finish the rest of the things by the end of this year. Who knows?

But I could say maybe something else that I think is important about all of this stuff is that we can’t change the whole world, but we always change some of it when we do something. And in the scale of things, I wrote something, I wrote a new Chinese colleague with whom I intend to write a book in the next year, a first political scientist that I’ve ever met that I really liked, besides, yeah, and I wrote something which I think is maybe not a bad thing to pass on. And it says that sharing is how we grow, and it’s how we grow stronger.

When I share with the younger, it’s part of how I conserve the universe, and it’s also an act of love. So that’s sort of the basis of this, you know, poetry, somebody told me or my mentor used to say is badly written prose. And he was being a little bit sarcastic, but he was trying to get at something else. And I think that something else is important if I may make a slight digression before we end this for today.

Well, when I was growing up, we had to sort of, and I think it probably was the same with you when you went to school, there were some standard poems one had to learn. We didn’t really memorize anything, but it was not something anybody took seriously, or very few people took seriously, and when you went to university, if you studied literature, the people who studied literature took poetry entirely too seriously. So it was insufferable to listen to people go on and on about the significance of somebody’s poetry, whether it be 400 years ago, only 40 years ago.

In any case, Morse Peckham, who is an author, I recommend anybody read that who is interested in cultural history. He said that poetry essentially is pre-explanatory. So we only have language, that’s the only way we get around in the world, but when people write poetry, they’re writing, they’re trying to organize knowledge or their experience without having a clear explanation for it, and that’s the cognitive distinction between prose and poetry: prose is over-determined and poetry is underdetermined.

So it’s not really something people will think about, oh, I’m going to go out and buy a book of poetry, but what we forget in this part of the world at least, is that until the end of the 19th century, poetry was the main literature, the main mass literature. It was only in the 20th century that poetry became elite literature because poetry, and this is what I say in Solar Terms: Poetry was the closest thing to vocality, to common speech, that literature had.

For an illiterate or an illiterate majority, poetry was something people bought books, there was one person who could read, they read it aloud, people learned it by heart, recited it to each other. Everyone knew the famous poets in the 19th century. Nobody knows any poetry now. So the idea of the novel as the only serious literature, it’s a recent phenomenon. And to go back and to write. And because poetry is trivialized in school, or made into something, there’s no theory of literature in school.

People go through school, they’re glad usually to be done with all of the literature courses, and to do something serious with their lives, but they never learn exactly what’s going on in these things, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what’s going on when people write. And I realized that there’s no difference between fiction and nonfiction; there’s no cognitive, they’re both fictive, right?

They’re both man-made organizations, selected data, they leave out things, they include things, and that’s what authors do, they choose what’s important and leave out the things they don’t think are important. And literary critics go off and go into a book and say, well, what should he have written, and what didn’t he write about? Or what does he mean by what he did write? Or she, as the case may be.

So these last four years, three years nearly, that I’ve been writing almost constantly and then pushing them into this machine for direct publication has also been an attempt to test the practical consequences that anything you write may have proof value or not. That’s not really the important thing. The important thing is that in order to write, you have to organize yourself. You have to think to write, and this thinking is not done just in your head.

If you want to have action from thought, if you want to seek truth through facts, you have to do things, and writing is one way of doing things. You have to use your hands, not just your eyes, and so trying to produce things that they read, write, read, write is a way of trying to mobilize. I know the telephone is the way to anesthetize, and I think writing is a way to mobilize, and that’s sort of what I’m trying to accomplish. It’s about the only thing I really know how to do well, and it’s something that apparently is, you know, not very well understood.

So at the same time, I try to understand what I’m doing and not just do it. If you listen to a lot of writers, and I’ve met a lot of, I used to know or I, or this way. In my University days, we had a lot of famous writers come to our school, and I met different people, and I thought, where you could say, well, they may write well, but they haven’t got a clue what they’re doing. And if you ask them about it, they’ve got the platitudes that you find in the New York Times or in the London Review of Books.

They’re just publicists, and for me, this is laboratory work too, you know, and I should say one last thing about it: Face errors and hanging didn’t come to me and say, make me an author. They didn’t say, in fact, they didn’t really, they were very reluctant to be in any active role. And I said to them, look, you know, you do something, you’ve made an intellectual photographic or whatever contribution, and your name has to be there because it’s part of the work, and without you, I wouldn’t have written these things.

So I don’t believe in these, I don’t have much respect for these people who don’t give credit for the world that helps them, for the people that help them, and even if it’s only the person who makes them coffee every day or whatever. You know, nobody writes or does anything completely alone, but lots of people like to pretend they’re all alone, and they own everything by themselves.

And so I made a very conscious effort that all of my projects, with the exception of the essays in On Becoming American and my scientific book, all the other books I do essentially attempt to get to implicate other people in my work. And the series Culture and Context is intended to implicate all of my Chinese friends by making them part of what I do and naming them for doing it. So I’ve got in the program another book with Fey.

I want to write a political theory book, which may be a history of politics in North Africa with someone from the Institute for African Studies in Tinhoi, and I really want to do a book about the Erhu player because I have met and corresponded with the most beautiful Erhu player in the world, if you can imagine it. They’re not brighter than that because I don’t want to think, I’m just making up stories about her, but the fact is, I don’t think I’ve seen a more beautiful woman in my life, and a musical genius. So I need to write a book about her. So that’s the way I do these things.

Jeff: Absolutely. Well, TP, I will do everything I can to promote your work. It’s valuable and you have, like I said, when we met in 2021, you were kind of, well, I don’t know what I want to do, and you made a decision. Man, you are going for it, and it’s not just quantitative, but you’re really writing super well. So, congratulations.

Thomas: Well, you know, what I have one more thing. Another book that may come out even earlier is I started doing these drawings, and I started doing this calligraphy, and people were saying wow, that’s really amazing! Where did you learn to do that? And I say, I didn’t learn to do it; I just started doing it and practicing, and it’s just what I do with my pens. So I’ve got like, I don’t know, maybe twenty pictures, right?

Jeff: Did you bring any that you can show us, a couple?

Thomas: Well, I showed them to you in the last thing. I don’t have any right now, but I can send you some pictures of them.

Jeff: All right. I’ll add that to the interview page.

Thomas: But I’m going to do a book with these things, but a friend of mine said to me yesterday in the bookstore that also is the publishing house for my other books. He said, “Look, I think I can sell these.” And I thought, you must be crazy as a yeah, you know. And then I asked people, I was in the coffee shop to copy and have them scanned in for this book, and they said, “Those are really good.”

And I said, but I’m not an artist. I’m not a painter. And, making these things and one in particular, and it was for me just a funny story because people don’t often say, “Where am I from?” And I say, I’m German. “You don’t sound German. Wilkinson’s not a German name.” And I said, well, I am German. I was born in the United States, but I’m German. So, and you live in Portugal. Yeah, I live in Portugal.

So they’re like, where’s your home? I said, well, I guess my home’s Portugal. So I sent one of these pictures, which I also sent to you, that I painted for Lantern Festival. And I sent it to one of the scholars at the institute who doesn’t know me personally, but only knows me from WeChat and not very well, and I sent her the picture, and she said, “Are you Chinese?” And I thought, well, if people have to ask that question, then maybe it’s not too bad.

Jeff: What you’ve just gotten, it has gotten quite good here in the last few months compared to when you first started out.

Thomas: Well, I wasn’t painting first. I was just doing calligraphy. This particular picture has no calligraphy, or almost no calligraphy. She was talking about the picture itself. And there’s another guy from China, I’m not saying this to brag, I’m just saying that I was really surprised. The guy in Hong Kong, purple culture is the business he runs. He supplied me with books and things that I can’t get here.

In fact, you ordered some stuff for me through him, or you paid for it through him, and I sent him this Lantern festival picture too, and he said, “Wow, that’s amazing! You have so captured the sense of that day in your painting.” And I’m thinking, I never went to a festival. I don’t know what the sense of it is; I just wanted to make a picture for my friends and I put some lanterns in it, and I thought that’s how I imagine a lantern festival. But everybody thought it was an amazing piece of work, and I thought, gee, you don’t know what you’re doing, often you just do it.

It’s other people who have to just tell you what you’re doing. You don’t necessarily know yourself. So I don’t know how I do it or what it is that makes it so gives it that quality because I don’t speak Chinese. I’ve only spent a total of three weeks in my entire life in China. So I can’t say that I have any natural or acquired background for this. So, apparently, I’m making things that I don’t yet know about how I’m making them, but you only discover it when you actually start making things. And this is what we are in danger of losing.

This was my last sort of my moral end of the story, you know the news has been full of Open AI and Deep Seek. And people don’t seem to understand that that’s not intelligence. Artificial intelligence is not intelligence. Artificial intelligence is enormous data crunching. It’s the organization of the organization data at the highest conceivable volume and with the highest conceivable speed, but it’s nothing else but organizing data. It’s not intelligence. There’s no artificial art.

Knowledge comes from people and it comes from them doing things themselves, and if they followed the trick that a machine can think for them, they will lose the capacity to think, and that’s the point of this technology: You make the machine smart by making the user stupid, not the other way around. We won’t get smart artificially; we have to use our own hands, and we have to use our own voices and own eyes, and we have to use our own bodies. Otherwise, the knowledge that we claim to have isn’t worth anything. That’s what these books are about.

Jeff: Good. Well, on that hopeful note, I want to thank you so much for getting back on the show after I blew the first recording. This one’s going to work. And then hopefully we are going to go back to France probably in August and September. So hopefully, I was hoping maybe to come visit you.

Thomas: Well, if the universe is willing, I will be in China then.

Jeff: Okay, well, anyway.

Thomas: We’ll see, but I’m not there yet.

Jeff: Well, then you can come visit us here.

Thomas: Yeah, well, I certainly hope that that will work. There was something else I wanted to say before we quit here. Oh, yes. Someone else made a suggestion to me, which I think I’m going to break down and actually do, and we may talk a little bit about how to organize that. I’ve managed to get my Chinese teacher who’s M.A. thesis.

I’m supporting to agree to help me start a series of podcasts on cultural history. And I want to do it with her partly because I need someone to work the camera and stuff like that. But also because I hope in that way to combine a Chinese aspect with my own perspective and to run this and periodically from Porto or wherever, but to start out from Porto, and that might be something that we’ll have to share and you’ll have to come and talk to us on in that context.

Jeff: Well, I’ll be happy to put it on Seek Truth from Facts, China Writers Group, and I’ll blast it all over the world.

Thomas: Well, the thing is, it might be something that we make a little round table with you on as part of this, and then it’ll come out as an episode in this cultural historical podcast series.

Jeff: Well, I would love to participate, and tomorrow is the China Writers Group Roundtable, so I hope you’ll join.

Thomas: Yeah, I saw that. I don’t know where I’ve got some things to get ready for France. And I hope that that will go off without any problems tomorrow.

Jeff: I think it’s like three in the afternoon tomorrow for you?

Thomas: Our time or your time?

Jeff: Yeah, my time is 10 P.M. Your time would be 3 P.M. No, no, 2 P.M. because Portugal is an hour earlier, so yours would be 2 P.M. tomorrow. Hope you can get on. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Thomas: Well, I’ll see if I can’t figure out some way to get into that. Do I have a Zoom link for that already, or can you send me again?

Jeff: I’ll send it to you again.

Thomas: Okay. Well, I’ll see if I can’t do that. Depends on where I am, whether I can get my computer like I have right now launched, and because I can’t do it from home, unfortunately. Okay, Jeff, give Evelyn my regards.

Jeff: A Buddhist vow from Taiwan, China, and to Porto. Dr. T.P. Wilkinson, one of my dear friends and dear colleagues.

Thomas: And after I saw a little short video about the different ways to say “thank you” through the dynasties of China, I remember that something like that in the Tang dynasty, it was a bow with the hands in front of you, sort of, and put down. Like this?

Jeff: The right fist and the left hand. Yeah, there you go.

Thomas: Yeah, because the name Santang is also related to the Tang Dynasty, which is the verse style I use in Solar Terms. So I give you a warm thank you in the Tang style.

Jeff: Talk to you later, Thomas. Bye-bye.

Summary of first interview that failed to record

Quick recap
Jeff and Santang discussed their upcoming trip to France and their long-standing friendship, with Santang sharing his passion for writing and Chinese culture. They explored Santang’s various creative projects, including books, poetry, and artwork, as well as his plans for future endeavors and a potential extended stay in China. The conversation also touched on Jeff’s recent activities in journalism and self-care, and both expressed interest in collaborating on future projects and promoting each other’s work.

Paris Trip and Financial Arrangements
Jeff and Santang discussed the latter’s upcoming trip to Paris and La Havre. Santang mentioned that his bus and hotel were paid for, but he had no cash for food. He hoped to receive some money in advance to cover his expenses. Jeff also mentioned that Chara would not be able to join them due to her busy weekend schedule. Santang emphasized the importance of acknowledging connections with others, even if they can’t meet for a drink or coffee. Jeff then started the main discussion, but the transcript ended before the content of the discussion was revealed.

Santang’s Writing Journey and Friendship
Jeff and Santang discussed their long-standing friendship and shared experiences. Santang revealed his passion for writing, which started at a young age, and shared his journey of writing a 250-page flasher novel, which eventually turned into an 800-page story. He explained the challenges he faced with publishing the book due to a typing error in his name, which led to the need for a second edition. Santang also mentioned his plans to continue writing the story and hinted at a trilogy. Jeff expressed admiration for Santang’s work and mentioned his intention to create a library of their collaborative efforts.

Santang’s Journey Into Chinese Culture
Santang discussed his passion for Chinese culture and his journey of turning his interest into a variety of media, including a book on the Chinese solar terms and a novel set in China before the Revolution. He detailed his research process, including a trip to Anzing to gather more information. Santang expressed his gratitude for the help he received from a museum curator in Hefei, who provided valuable resources for his book.

Santang’s Creative Poetry Book Project
Santang shared his creative process of writing poems and creating a handmade book for his friend, Ann Singh. He experimented with Chinese calligraphy and used a cursive generator to produce a cursive version of his poems. The book, titled “Lighthouses of Ansing and Porto, Temples of the Heart,” contains his poems, drawings, and calligraphy in Chinese, Mandarin, and English. Santang also mentioned that this book is the second in a series he calls “Culture and Context” and that he is working on other books in the same vein.

Santang’s Book Production and Career
Santang discussed his approach to learning about China through book production and writing. He mentioned that his books are available on Amazon, but there’s an issue with the search results. Jeff expressed his admiration for Santang’s work and encouraged others to read it. Santang also shared his career history, stating that he has had an irregular career due to his independent nature. He mentioned that he started writing in 2022 and aims to finish his projects by the end of the year, as he cannot retire until he’s 66.

Sharing Knowledge and Poetry’s Significance
Santang discussed the importance of sharing knowledge and experiences, likening it to an act of love. He also shared his thoughts on poetry, stating that it is a form of pre-explanatory knowledge and a way to organize experiences without clear explanations. Santang emphasized that poetry was once the main form of literature, but it has since become elite literature. He also noted that there is no difference between fiction and non-fiction, as both are man-made organizations of selected data.

Santang’s Writing Process and Projects
Santang discussed his writing process and experiences over the past 4 years. He emphasized the importance of organizing thoughts and using hands while writing to achieve action and seek truth. Santang shared his attempts to involve others in his work, crediting those who have contributed to his projects. He mentioned planning more books, including one on politics in North Africa, and another about an Erhu player he admires.

Santang’s Art and AI Concerns
Jeff and Santang discussed Santang’s artistic endeavors, including his calligraphy and painting. Santang shared that he had been receiving positive feedback on his work, particularly a lantern festival painting, and was considering publishing a book of his drawings and calligraphy. Santang also expressed concern about the potential loss of human intelligence due to the reliance on artificial intelligence and data crunching, emphasizing the importance of human involvement in the creative process. Jeff agreed to promote Santang’s work and mentioned adding Santang’s art to the interview page.

Upcoming Trip and Podcast Series
Jeff and Santang discussed their upcoming trip to France, with Jeff planning to visit Santang. They also discussed a podcast series Santang is organizing on Chinese cultural history. Jeff expressed interest in participating in the podcast and encouraged Santang to join the China Writers Group roundtable. Santang mentioned having had a conversation with Dr. Quan Lee, Peter Man, and others, but no specific decisions or next steps were discussed.

Jeff’s Activities and Self-Hypnosis Practice
Jeff and Santang discussed their various activities and interests. Jeff shared that he’s been busy with journalism, including creating libraries on Judaism and the Apollo Moon Hoax, and conducting interviews with notable figures like Amir Khan and Rainer Shea. He also mentioned his exercise routine, which includes swimming and self-hypnosis, and his plans to continue calligraphy classes. Jeff also revealed that he’s been taking care of his physical and mental health, feeling younger and better than when he was 50. Santang expressed interest in Jeff’s self-hypnosis practice, which Jeff explained as a form of deep meditation for relaxation and mental well-being.

Santang’s China Visit and Extension Plans
Jeff and Santang discussed Santang’s plans to visit China for an extended period. Santang had applied for a mobility grant that would cover his travel expenses for two months or more. Jeff advised Santang to go to the embassy with his invitation letters and ask for an extension of his stay for a second month. They also discussed the possibility of Santang staying in China until the end of the year to work, learn Mandarin, and teach at a university. Jeff suggested that if Santang’s extension request was denied, he could take a train to Hong Kong, get his passport stamped, and return to China.

###

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