I started going to Columbus Park every Sunday.

Recalling the anxiety of my first day at Columbus Park feels like a prolonged jet lag. That dizzy, doubting moment has certainly turned into one of the most treasured points of return in my diasporic life.

Memories vaguely flooded back each time I dribbled or took a shot: the sticky afternoons in Wuhan, our little ‘gang,’ grandma’s noodles, the fierce desire to win…

Things that had been absent for the past decade started to re-emerge, bit by bit.

My body, too. I used to be harsh on it, now I let it guide me. It’s as if a code has been deciphered. I can feel the basketball sets it free, and it remembers everything from the past. Things I thought had been disconnected for so long turned out to have always been with me.

They just exist in a form of absence.

Like a blank space in a Shan Shui painting.

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You see, basketball, in its purest form, can feel like a living landscape—a dance of motion, energy, and flow that resembles the timeless principles of Shan Shui (山水).

山水（Shān shuǐ), literally meaning mountain and water, refers to Chinese landscape painting and the philosophical, aesthetic idea of depicting natural landscapes. In the view of the ancients, “mountains and waters” are not merely static entities, but idealized spiritual worlds that reflect the harmony and vitality of the universe.

山，宣也。宣气散，生万物（《说文》）

Mountains (山) signify ‘xuān’—to disperse and radiate energy, spreading vitality that gives rise to all living things. (Shuowen Jiezi)

Mountains are the source of the earth’s vital rhythm, where the energy of the land (地气) is channeled and released. Only through the presence of towering mountains can the earth’s energy be emitted, spreading in all directions to foster and nourish all life. Water on another hand, just as 上善若水 (The highest good is water) described, marks the source of harmony, balance, and potentiality.

Rooted in Daoist philosophy, at the heart of Shan Shui (山水) painting lies Xie He’s concept of 气韵生动[1] (qì yùn shēng dòng), often translated as “rhythmic vitality”. 气 (qì) stems from the mountain and permeates all things. It is the invisible current that animates the mountains, rivers, trees, and clouds depicted in a Shan Shui painting. 韵 (yùn), on the other hand, summons harmony like water, bringing equilibrium between mountains and rivers, fullness and emptiness, yin and yang. Without capturing the qì yùn, a painting would feel lifeless, no matter how technically skilled the artist.

If we think of playing basketball in the world of Shan Shui, you can feel that 气 (qì) flows through every dribble, pass, and shot, animating the game with vitality. 韵 (yùn)—the rhythm and balance—emerges in the seamless coordination of players, the timing of movements, and the grace of the ball’s trajectory. The pauses and silences, like the blank spaces in a Shan Shui painting, subtly create a dynamic cadence of motion and stillness.

In A Thousand Plateaus, precisely the sixth plateau, it came to my surprise the way Deleuze and Guattari wrote about such vitality and Taoism, especially the connections to Body without Organs (BwO). They wrote so passionately that the whole chapter reads like a live game. The ‘body without organs’, they propose, is not a fixed entity but an ongoing process and something you continuously ‘make’. It embodies a state of openness and potentiality, just like Taoism, which allows new existences to be configured. And true vitality, is like love, lies in active experimentation, breaking free from rigid ‘organisms’ and allowing desires to flow in ways that challenge conventional structures.

Shan Shui Basketball is much like this. It’s a site of experimentation where players move beyond the rigid categorizations. Here, one doesn’t simply ‘execute plays’ but steps into a state where movements arise intuitively, constantly responding to each other’s impulses and desires. A fleeting transition, a glance, an unspoken connection… No one is a fixed ‘self’ anymore but relational and, yes, desiring beings.

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That’s why to me, Shan Shui is never some transcendent or mystical existence, but always a grounded way of living. Situated and embodied.

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Once, Lu and Yulin said to me after a scrimmage, “Chi, you are such a competitive player. Aggressive too! Haha.”

Ah. Is that so? HAHA!
I laughed like a five-year-old again.

Maybe it’s all that ‘hot’ energy running through my blood since day one. The hot-tempered nine-headed bird, the dry spicy food, the unbearable heat on the playground. They used to flow side by side along the Yangtze River. Now, I feel that fiery Qi coursing back through my life again.

Maybe this is my kind of ‘competitiveness.’ It isn’t about becoming the strongest by meeting established standards. Even if I’m the one who least fits those so-called ‘standards’—short, small, amateur Asian woman—I still play. I play no matter what. This type of competitiveness isn’t about proving to anyone that I fit the mold, but about refusing to be limited by it.

As long as I’m playing, I can feel that each of us is so much more.

Much, much more.

I see us in vibrant landscapes, where the absence has always been in confluence with the current moment. Our desires move freely, not as a lack to be filled (as those psychoanalysts love to claim) but as an affirmative force, as the Qi dispersing from the mountain. And those ruptures, cliché blockages and broken moments in life, are meant to be part of it. They are the blankness that holds its weight through the passings of space and time, the thresholds waiting to be transformed into the Rhythmic Vitality once again.

In my years living in the US, I’ve always felt like I was on an errantry between worlds. Alone. Displaced. Longing for an anchor that grounds me in this country. But in these Shan Shui moments, I feel the urge again, a sense of lightened freedom, to pull up the anchor and cast it away.

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One recent afternoon, after a string of meetings, I found myself in Chinatown. I wandered back to Columbus Park and sat by the side court again. Arcs of shots rose and fell. Some elders shuffled by. For a moment, I thought of my grandmother, the velvet on her balcony, clichés, some faces I can no longer return to. I also thought of faces I just saw last Sunday and those I will see the next.

Then, an indescribable feeling struck me—absence and presence merged in front of me like a scroll of painting unrolling. The riverbanks of Wuhan and the concrete courts of New York, flowed as one.

And for now, that is enough.