Soft-copy version of an original text written during and after my year in Central China. Freedom in contemporary China can be found thriving only in the shadows and hidden nooks and crannies of the Great Wall, and in truth, the shadow of the Great Wall stretches in all directions and casts everything in a strange, surreal twilight between light and dark, fact and lie, and joy and suffering. In hindsight, I have tended to put into verse those experiences for which the emotions stood strongly in the way of more cogent and coherent expression, but this has been alright, as perhaps the voice of verse versus prose is the better voice of intuition, of the perception of feelings, and of about what may be otherwise hidden or only implicit in our world and of ourselves within it. Do I believe in ghosts and spirits? I think only they are fun to imagine at least, but also that writing such verse in a political world cannot but become a frame of mind edged both ways with ideological pointedness, and ghosts seem somewhat on average apolitical creatures. It seems also a way of dealing squarely and relatively painlessly with an unfair world: of dealing fairly, anesthetically, antiseptically with a painful world, and therefore also it is foremost a way of bridging inimical political and social realities otherwise unbridgeable.