I opened an English school in Beijing in 2002.  It grew strong, and I sold it in 2016.  I came to Galway and built a house for my wife and my son. I had designed my life so that I could spend the years remaining to me in study and writing.

I wrote a book about a Time Machine, but none of the friends I sent it to thought much of it, so I gave up on it. I began work on an e-learning presentation of the Kwakiutl Cannibal Ritual, but tied myself in knots. I attended Kevin Higgins’ poetry workshop, and produced poems with which I was happy, but it was not enough.  Covid came, and the workshops were over.  During lockdown I designed a Dungeons and Dragons world for my son, but we grew out of it.  The only thing I stuck to was the daily diary.

My body had been diminishing and I was visiting specialists trying to find out why I always felt so wrong.  I began work on A Man without Talent on January 3rd, 2021.  On February 12, 2021, I was diagnosed with MS.

I had no title for the book yet.  It was meant to tell simply, journalistically, the story of my schools in Beijing.  I saw a catalogue of violence unfolding in front of me.  I saw that I was an amoral person, for whom the world was nothing more than a barren struggle of tooth and claw. I was ashamed of myself, but I pushed on.

As I continued the story of Aihua, a counter narrative began to unravel, which traced the path leading to the establishment of the school, and provided a backdrop for my lack of moral register. 

When I considered A Man without Talent finished, I felt it wasn’t enough.  It needed something more.  If I finished writing now, I would have to face the MS eye to eye. I struggled to find some way to finish the book.

Lin’s sister was dying in China, and Lin had begun to look into Buddhism.  I joined her in this.  One day as we walked in Dangan, and spoke about the Buddha mind, she told me a parable about a man who fell on bad fortune, and became a beggar.  When his brother saw him, he reached into the beggar’s robe and took out the pearl he had sewn in it years ago.  He said 乞丐怀珠 枉受贫穷 “Brother why are you poor?  It was here all along.”  

I felt as though directed to use the diary to complete A Man without Talent.  It was the 5th of November 2022, and that was the final entry in the diary.  I had two million words of diary, and I worked on editing this down until June 1st, 2023, when I considered the work to be finished.  Lin and I studied the Sutras and meditated while I did the work.  I bore in mind that learning is the result of daily accumulation, while wisdom is the result of daily diminishment, as I cut down words relentlessly, hoping to leave only truth, barren and Zen.  

The book begins with the recount of a meditation in a hotel room in Beijing on the 20th of June, 2023, after work on the book had been completed, and my interest in Buddhism had grown into faith. Though it is uninviting to the reader, I felt compelled to begin the book in this way, to see the whole voyage wrap around on itself, and allow the meditation on the nature of time to extend more deeply into the heart of the book.