Baha’i Blogcast with Rainn Wilson – Episode 18: Khalil Fong 方大同

Fang Da Tong, it’s been wonderful to be introduced to you via this blogcast and to learn of your highly popular musical-culture-spanning, clean-living career, in total harmony with Bahá’í principles. I feel somehow akin to you and your mix of rational and artistic temperament…and also taken by your practical health advice to your younger self in response to your host’s astute inquiry – advice I’m still giving myself, especially with regard to controlling my sleep hygiene in response to the at times crazy-busy, scramble & slog demands of a job as a first year “senior intern” bilingual HS English teacher – albeit at one of the most copacetic high schools in Hungary, praise the Lord! Anyway, they tell me it will be a lot easier next year. As a good neighbor of mine was wont to say, “We live in hope.”

Rainn, this interview resonates with me very strongly, as I served as an isolated Bahá’í university English teacher for two years in two different cities in PR China near the start of my long and tangled TEFL career. During an unscheduled visit to a hilltop monastery in China my second year there, I had a remarkable encounter with a Buddhist monk who pantomimed for me a personal message of my need for emotional detachment. Shortly after that, the “fire of self” overcame me, and enduring what in hindsight seems to have been a slow-healing nervous breakdown, I high-tailed it home to friends and family, professional development and personal therapy in the States, simultaneously stepping away from the Faith for some of the same reasons you did, Rainn – only to reboot my spiritual search and surface in the warm embrace of the Bahá’í community in Abu Dhabi three decades later.

Close to twenty years back, with my SE Asian Chinese wife (an instinctively generous, free-thinking, well-grounded & practical helpmate to me in my peripatetic life, for whom I give heaps of gratitude on a daily basis), I revisited visited Beijing & vicinity and saw some major changes even then. And more recently, Chinese students here in Hungary have shared with me how very much China has grown, materially and spiritually, since then. When I visited Chengdu back in the early 80s, the highlight for me was eating at the original Mapo Dofu restaurant, which I would imagine is probably still in the same location and looking much the same. Back then, except for the standard government-built concrete block apartments, Chengdu didn’t look all that different from how it had looked for centuries, to my mind. But your description of the futuristic eco towers of Chengdu now, Da Tong, is startling. That’s something I’ve gotta see with my own eyes, one day.

Rainn, as one deeply flawed yet worthwhile human being to another, hats off to you for putting this life-affirming material “out there”. And thanks, as always, Naysan & crew, for your behind-the-scenes work in helping make the magic happen!