Slowly, words began to form inside me… a question that felt daring, even forbidden: “What if my body—this body—is the path to liberation? What if being fully in this body is how I’ll get free?”
As these thoughts quietly surfaced, I slowed my breath and sank my hips deeper into the cushion. Could the very thing I’d fought against my entire life—the thing I blamed for all my suffering—actually be the way through it?
Eating disorder behaviors first appeared in my body before I was ten years old. For decades, I restricted and purged to escape the emotional suffering I experienced while inhabiting a body that never seemed to fit in anywhere. I was too masculine for a girl, and I was attracted to girls in ways that made the adults around me uncomfortable. I was too Asian to blend in, yet too American to be Asian. For me, “belonging” was a foreign concept. Years of relentless bullying in grade school and junior high took a toll on my mind. My body wasn’t a place I wanted to be. I was terrified of the shame surrounding its queerness, its trans-ness, its Asian-ness. During those years, my eating disorder felt like a welcome break from that pain. It helped me escape.
“Recovery is a long and winding road—a committed and vulnerable practice of care.”
An eating disorder is rarely just about food. More often, it stems from a disconnection of mind and body—inner turmoil. Disordered eating is the second deadliest mental illness after opioid use disorder, and it can change the brain in ways similar to alcohol and narcotics abuse. Like recovering from substance addiction, healing from an eating disorder requires deep compassion, nonjudgmental community, and a willingness to embrace the physical form.
I grew up in an evangelical Christian household where I was taught that the body is sinful and that denying it is the only way to become more like God. In my early twenties, I began the journey of reclaiming Buddhism as a second-generation Taiwanese American. Disengaging from the colonial Protestant mindset that has drawn so many of my relatives and ancestors away from their indigenous and Buddhist practices wasn’t easy.
In the Buddhist spaces I found myself in, I often heard similar language about how attachment to desire is the root of suffering—that to be free, one must detach from desire. At the time, I understood this to mean that any attachment to the phenomenal world, including my body, would only exacerbate my suffering. Over and over, it felt like I was hearing the same message: The body is the problem.
Like all addiction and self-harm behaviors, there comes a point when continuing becomes unsustainable. I believed that recovery from an eating disorder would be quick and easy—I just needed to choose it. I thought that once I decided to walk in that direction, life would become simple.
I had a similar expectation the first time I read the Heart Sutra. “This is such a short and sweet text,” I thought. “It’ll be easy to understand.” I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Recovery is a long and winding road—a committed and vulnerable practice of care. And the more I sat with the Heart Sutra—reading, chanting, and savoring its words and phrases on my hungry tongue—an unending string of wisdom pearls unfurled within me.
The sutra teaches, “This body itself is emptiness, and emptiness itself is this body. This body is not other than emptiness, and emptiness is not other than this body.”
My body has no permanent, independent existence, I realized. It is only made of non-body elements. Recognizing my body as both being and non-being—form and not form—led me to an experiential understanding of emptiness. Form is not form, therefore form is form.
I began to consider that perhaps the body itself was not the problem; rather, it was my distorted attachments to it. What emerged for me was a profound new relationship with compassion, both for and within my body. It became clear that it’s through this body that I can experience compassion and wisdom. My body has become a site of practice where I encounter the dharma in every moment, every day.
The more I sat with the Heart Sutra, my body’s capacity to hold more tenderness grew. Neutral and nonjudgmental, this tenderness gave my body space to breathe. A deep softening emerged as my recovery intertwined with my study of the Heart Sutra.
I was opening up to something truly unexpected. Within the Heart Sutra, I hear both a promise and an invitation: embodiment can be a wisdom practice. Now, I hold my body with the same sacred care that I bring to bowing to the dharma.
Every day, I choose to walk the path of recovery, one that continues to surprise me and invites me to face my deepest fears and longings. My recovery teaches me to believe in possibilities that once seemed impossible, reminding me that my body—the very one I used to fight against—could be a path to liberation. Once my arch-nemesis, this body has become an ally. A spiritual friend.
My recovery invites me to experience belonging within an impermanent embodiment. Both recovery and the Heart Sutra teach me how to sit compassionately with others. Once again, I return to my breath. “What if my body—this body—is the path to liberation? What if being fully in this body is how I’ll get free?”
We visited the iconic restaurant before it closed its doors last weekend.
by Nathalie Graham
China Harbor has sat on the western edge of Lake Union for 30 years—a hulking black box surrounded by docked yachts and boat rental companies.
But until last week, I’d never been inside the massive Chinese restaurant. Every time I drove past, the big red letters in the stereotypical typeface literally called “wonton font” shouted “CHINA HARBOR,” drawing my attention to the building and the steps leading up through the round entryway. I would try to glimpse what and who was in there until the curves in the road pulled my eyes away.
For the three decades it’s occupied the former Elks Lodge building along Westlake Avenue, China Harbor has been mired in conspiracy. It’s been a mythmaker, an object of fascination. Anyone I asked about the restaurant spoke about it conspiratorially. “It’s a front, you know,” they’d say. “It’s always empty there. The Chinese mafia owns it.” They spoke of bad food, of poor health ratings, and rampant rat infestations. They’d toss around theories about prostitution, drugs, and basement gambling. None of them—friends, coworkers, strangers on the internet—had ever been. The mystery grew. Then, less than a month ago, the restaurant’s team posted on Facebook that China Harbor would be closing. Finally, during its last week in operation, I ate at China Harbor.
I arrived with two friends at 6:30 pm and waited in a long, unmoving line to just talk to the hostess. Inside the banquet hall, which I could only glimpse from my spot in the empty lobby, people dined. Behind me, the line kept growing as more and more people showed up to pay their respects, or whet the appetites of their curiosities before it was too late. Many seemed surprised to find a line, to have to wait. They’d probably bought into the “mafia front” rumors, too, and had expected an empty ballroom.
In the large dining room, a wall of windows snaked around the perimeter, framing the view of South Lake Union and the Seattle skyline with ornate red lattice. The room’s light glowed through painted ceiling tiles in between wood-carved beams. Tables and tables filled with people filled a dining space as big as a football field.
The hostess sat my group at a table next to the window that looked out at the lake as dusk fell on Seattle. A frazzled waiter, his disposable mask slipping beneath his nose, took our order, advising us to order all at once because “it would take a long time.” We could barely hear him above the din of diners and only ordered appetizers.
The crab rangoons came first and were gone in a matter of seconds and a matter of bites. My stomach growled gratefully when the moo shu pork came out. I wasted no time slopping hoisin sauce onto a pancake as I piled pork in the middle. I moaned as I took a bite. Yum. We heaped steamed garlic green beans onto our plates and consulted the menu for our main dishes.
In the frenzy of closing-time festivities, we couldn’t flag down a waiter. When a busboy came to clear our dirty appetizer dishes, we begged him for a drink menu.
“Oh, I don’t know what we have,” he said. “I’ll go get someone. Today’s my first day.” The restaurant’s planned closure was in three days.
Soon, a waitress came. She took our orders. When we asked for beef chow mein, she said, “No. Get chung fu. It’s better.” We trusted her. When we ordered dim sum, she shook her head. “None left.”
We gorged on almond chicken and slurped beef chung fu. By the time the beef and broccoli came out, we determined it would make a good lunch tomorrow and split it into to-go boxes. All of us left China Harbor sated and impressed.
Above all, it seemed like a normal Chinese restaurant. Where did all the hullabaloo come from?
After eating there, I wanted to dive into the mystery surrounding the building. And, boy, would you believe it? That mystery that’s tailed the business for decades? It’s actually just run-of-the-mill racism.
If you want to know anything about what White Seattle thought about China Harbor through the decades, look no further than the Naked Loon, an early-aughts satire blog that now reads like The Needling’s conservative, unfunny uncle. A farcical story from the Naked Loon called “China Harbor Probably Not Just A Restaurant” involves, what I assume, is a made up story of the Loon staking out the building:
Most people agree that the 34 thousand square foot facility is in fact a front for a massive drug smuggling operation. The establishment’s waterfront location and immense storage space make this pretty much a foregone conclusion. In an attempt to confirm this, our investigators called the restaurant, and attempted to make a reservation for “Cocaine, party of 2 kilos” in a fake Chinese accent. The outburst of mixed Chinese and English profanity that resulted from this query was considered to be proof enough of the assertion, and we felt that it had been worth the trouble making the previous thirty calls in which the person answering had merely hung up on us without responding.
Although China Harbor does technically meet the qualifications for being considered a restaurant—in that they serve things purporting to be food—the food that is served is unnaturally shiny and, according to a lab we sent it to, may in fact be plastic.
The Loon piece goes on, but it hits on a few key China Harbor myths: The restaurant cannot possibly afford all of that space by just being a restaurant, illegal things must be funding this desirable piece of real-estate, and the food is dirty.
Maybe The Loon is an artifact from a bygone era where punching down with stereotypical racist jokes could win you a Comedy Central special, but 2008 wasn’t that long ago, and this racism still exists, evidenced by all the still-persistent China Harbor rumors.
It doesn’t take a genius to piece together that all of these incredibly racist things are common in anti-Asian rhetoric, but I’ll lay it out for you.
According to a PBS story published in the wake of the pandemic during the height of anti-Asian hate, “persistent false narratives… that Chinese American neighborhoods or Chinatowns are dens of vice send the message that Asian people are less civilized.” Suggesting that China Harbor houses a brothel upstairs or a gambling den in the basement isn’t only racist, it’s unoriginal! Theories that Asian businesses aren’t legitimate businesses, but fronts for illegal activity are commonplace nationally. And so is the whole dirty food thing.
Assuming Asian food is “dirty or disease-laden” is a trope we can trace back to the 1850s when white people spread the false rumor that Chinese immigrants ate rat and dog meat. In reality, those lies—which should sound very familiar to us right now—were how white people expressed their fear of the new, the unknown. For white workers in the 1850s, this sneering at Chinese immigrants was white workers using them “as a scapegoat for their economic woes,” Ellen Wu, a history professor at Indiana University told PBS. This has another name: xenophobia.
Think about monosodium glutamate, or MSG. The chemical compound, founded in the early 1900s as a way to enhance the umami flavor in food, was maligned starting in the late 1960s when a doctor blamed the seasoning for the bad feeling he got after eating Chinese food. This spawned an entire ailment known literally as Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. Despite there being no actual proof that MSG was harmful, the stuff all but disappeared in Chinese food in the US.
“That MSG causes health problems may have thrived on racially charged biases from the outset,” an article in Five Thirty Eight explained. This “fear of MSG in Chinese food” was just another example of “the U.S.’s long history of viewing the ‘exotic’ cuisine of Asia as dangerous or dirty.”
In reality, chances are the China Harbor was making ends meet not by trafficking drugs from one side of Lake Union to the other or whatever people assume, but by being a unique, multi-use space in this otherwise commercial part of town. Their event space was hugely popular in Seattle’s Asian community. In their closing announcement, they wrote that, on their busiest days, they “served over 500 guests.” On weekends, the restaurant’s event space gets booked out for salsa nights and other multicultural dance spaces. There’s a massage business and a basement swimming pool where people take swim lessons. It’s a hub for non-white Seattle. Does any place that doesn’t cater specifically to white Seattleites always inspire this kind of fear or suspicion?
I regret not having given China Harbor a chance before it closed its doors due to staffing woes, high rents, and construction fees. While the China Harbor rumors always seemed far-fetched to me, I felt guilty for even entertaining them without ever having gone inside the building; For entering the restaurant and looking for any sign mob activity. I wonder if anyone else who packed that dining room to get a glimpse of a Seattle mystery realized the conspiracy part of the popular conspiracy theories as they cleaned China Harbor out of dim sum. I wish I got to eat some dim sum. The next time that craving comes I’ll go to the restaurant’s new venture, Vivienne’s Bistro.
A person driving a car has a far greater negative impact on society than a person living on the streets.
by Charles Mudede
On August 30, Sound Transit added, between Northgate and Lynnwood, 8.5 miles and four (soon to be five) stations to its 1 Line. This amounts to 33 track miles. The time it takes to move from one end of the present line to the other is just over an hour. This is the real deal. A big section of the region has been liberated from I-5, and time spent searching for parking.
Two weeks after the extension opened, however, it was hit by electrical issues. An army of self-bloated commenters wasted no time denouncing light rail on news posts that covered the incident. This one in the Seattle Timeswas typical: "That section of rail is only 2 weeks old, at huge cost of billions of dollars. You would think that something so new and supposedly built to be in service for decades would not have a failure like this. What the heck throw another million a minute to this total waste of money."
The gold believed to be in this reasoning is transformed into worthless straw by the daily existence of traffic jams.
Yes, the Link had service disruptions on that day, September 17, but how is that any different than the constant car clogs on I-5? Both are system failures, but one, I-5 and its connection of roads, occurs on a scale that dwarfs and wastes far more money than the other. Not much thinking is required to appreciate the truth of this assertion. Being in a traffic jam only means that the freeway or street is not working. It's broken. And it breaks almost every day of the week.
The power of car ideology in our society is such that many drivers cannot even see a traffic jam for what it actually is. Sitting for hours in a car is certainly much worse than waiting for a delayed train. One commentator on Seattle Times's post "Link train service restored after electrical issue had caused delays" wrote, "With all of the issues on ST choo choo trains and associated infrastructure, it seems reasonable to require 'Ride at Your Own Risk' signs throughout their facilities." Such a sign would make more sense if it were posted on an I-5 on-ramp for several glaring reasons: Frequent eruptions of road rage, car accidents that are often deadly, and the considerable mental wear-and-tear caused by the time-oppression of long jams.
Car ideology (and an ideology only works its wonders when it doesn't recognize itself as an ideology) unexpectedly came out in the open during an Amtrak bus trip I recently took between Vancouver, BC and Seattle. The bus driver, who evidently saw himself as something of a personality, blamed the traffic jam that reduced our exit from Vancouver to a snail's pace on the city's lack of freeways. "Yeah, folks, we got the ‘60s to thank for this," he snarkily said on the bus's PA system. "This is why were in this mess. We never built freeways." But a few hours later, the very same driver had nothing to say about the traffic jam we hit not long after passing Everett. Movement was so slow on the I-5 that it took nearly two hours to reach the University District. The jam was worse than anything we experienced in freeway-less Vancouver, BC. As we crawled along, I saw a Link train that had left Mountlake Terrace Station fly toward Shoreline North/185th Station on an elevated track.
Been thinking lately about how entitled pedestrians and cyclists are, and how we can't find any money for public transit.
Not long after the expansion to Lynnwood opened, a lot of noise was made about the exploding cost of the proposed Link expansion to West Seattle. KING 5: "Estimated cost of West Seattle light rail extension increases by $2 billion." But of course, this concern goes up in smoke when it’s exposed to the light of reasoning that's free of an ideology that's daily, hourly compounded by ads that never show traffic jams but fantastic automobiles racing up hills or crossing some remote nowhere. There is simply no way that the price tag attached to the construction and maintenance of roads and the storage of cars in the form of massively subsidized parking can be compared to those related to public transportation.
And here we reach the highest point of reasoning on this transportation matter. We can only conclude that those who complain about the rising costs of Link's expansion are in that sorry state Ajax found himself in when he thought, while in a battle, he was slaying the enemy but, in fact, was just butchering sheep. They are in a state comparable to madness. Driving a car provides nothing in the way of what economists, following the ideas of Arthur Cecil Pigou, call a social good. Zero. In fact, it makes society worse: pollution, deadly accidents, and debts that most incomes struggle to clear. But using the train or bus does provide a genuine public service, a social good, which is why Link and Metro should be free. It can even be said, in the most rational sense, that drivers should pay people to use public transportation.
The present carbon tax, which may become history in November, is nowhere near enough. We need a tax that is not transferred to the public purse but directly to those who use Link and other forms of transportation that do not burn fossil fuels. If this happened, if drivers were forced to pay all of the social costs of car ownership, then we would live in the kingdom of reason. Just think about it. Really put your mind to it, and you will see that a person driving a car has a far greater negative impact on society than a homeless person in a tent. This fact is just there. Another fact is you can reach, for close to nothing, the delights and surprises of the suburbs by Link.
A flock of starlings is called a murmuration, an apt word because the flocks move like a rumor pulsing through a crowded room. This is a particularly beautiful murmuration observed in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
[This is a vintage post originally from Jan 2015.]
Log in
