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Updated: Aug 30, 2018
dear fellow humans...
I haven't spoken to Jay for many years but he has always been in my mind at moments from the day I met him. I googled his name yesterday, July 16, 2020, to get in touch with him again but it was too late, and I was weeping.
I'm still stunned. I cannot picture Jay being not alive.
I can easily picture myself not here, because I'm weak, and have only a moderate zest for life. Jay seemed like he'd be around forever, like a force of nature.
I met Jay in 1981 or 1982 at Dartmouth College and we were friends through college and afterwards, when he crashed on my floor in NYC or L.A. fro…
Wonderful to read the comments and stories here...to remember. Posting a short poem in his honor today.
Yesterday morning I swam the Connecticut river
past a flotilla of lily pads. Jay was still alive, in an
induced coma in the ICU while they ran tests
to find out why he collapsed in anaphylactic shock.
This afternoon, rain beginning to pebble the water,
I swam back and forth again. This time the soft rain
had sprung two lily pad blooms from their buds.
White cups with a yellow pistil towers rising
from their centers. One was decorated by a bee,
whose weight bent the golden honeyed ziggurat,
the other was empty. And Jay never came back.
Thank you Lyn, for reaching out and letting us know of this very significant event - and loss - in our lives. We have been thinking of Jay, my wife Kathy also got to know him during graduate school, ever since I recently wrote to old friend Rehile Dawuti in Urumchi to continue our collegial and friendly relationship that had started when I stayed with her and Cindy Huang in Urumqi in 2005. I was shocked to learn that she had 'disappeared" in December 2017, and I was put in touch with the network of Xinjiang and Uyghur related people, among whom Jay was to my mind the sharpest. I first met Jay when Gerry Berreman and I taught Anthro.…
Jay was funny, wry, with a hint of the enigmatic - a Daoist, not the Deep South, kind of trickster. In the 1990s, Cathy Clayton introduced me to Lyn. In the 2000s, Lyn introduced me to Jay. We had the easy friendship of old China hands.
Jay and I bonded at the EPIC conference in Tokyo, 2010. I was feeling alone. There was Jay, a kindred spirit, breaker of rules, and definitely someone who’d wander for a bowl of ramen. Since then, we’d periodically meet, usually for lunch. Except for that astoundingly tasty Sichuanese dinner he cooked for Lyn, Ben, and I (and our kids who also got to peek into a real teenager’s bedroom that night). The last ti…
Hi all—this is Marcia Yonemoto, an old friend of Jay’s from graduate school. From here—dry, unseasonably warm Boulder, Colorado—it’s hard to believe that we were all gathered just yesterday in Matteo’s beautiful garden, with a view of the sea, remembering Jay. It was so kind of Lyn and Jay’s family to include me in the memorial—thank you, so much—and so wonderful to see the many of you I knew already, and to meet those of you whom I had heard a lot about but hadn’t ever met.
I have been out of communication with Jay for some time, which I regret. Jay once said something to the effect of: call me anytime, if you ever need anything, and I w…