“Now I Dream Of The Plum Rains”

 

The East Asian rainy season (Chinese: 梅雨 méiyǔ; Japanese: 梅雨, tsuyu, baiu; literally plum rain; Korean: 장마, jangma) is the frontal precipitation caused by a front, a persistent east-west zone of disturbed weather during spring which is quasi-stationary and stretches from the east China coast, across Taiwan, and eastward into the southern peninsula of South Korea and Japan. The rainy season usually lasts from June to July (approximately 50 days) in Japan and Korea and from July to August in Eastern China (especially the Chang Jiang and Huai He regions) and in Taiwan.

The weather front forms when the moist air over the Pacific meets the cooler continental air mass. The front and the formation of frontal depressions along it brings precipitation to Japan, Korea, eastern China, and Taiwan. As the front moves back and forth depending on the strength of cool and warm air masses, there is often prolonged precipitation and sometimes flooding in eastern China. However, in the years that it does not rain as much as usual, a drought might result. The rainy season ends when the warm air mass associated with the subtropical ridge is strong enough to push the front north and away.

East Asian rainy season at Wikipedia

“Now I dream of the plum rains,” Chloe said.
“They were so long ago it is as if
they never happened, or it was a dream.
They won’t come for so long it is as if
they can’t happen, like things we just wish for.
When I’m working on a drawing, the world
isn’t the same world I was living in
before I started drawing that image.
Then when I’ve finished drawing an image
I cover the drawing with a tissue
and put the drawing on a shelf and then
the world around me is another world.”

Chloe touched a photograph. A woman
is in the rain under an umbrella.

“When that woman gets inside,” Chloe said,
“and closes her umbrella that doesn’t
make the rains go away it just closes
her umbrella. It doesn’t change the world.”

“By drawing, just by drawing,” Chloe said,
“I’ve made the old worlds go away, lost them,
and now I dream of them like the plum rains.
I wish drawing was like an umbrella.
I wish drawing didn’t make a new world.
This must be why people stop diaries.
Every entry they write makes a lost world.”

“Now I dream of the plum rains,” Chloe said.
“I dream of drawing that isn’t drawing.
Like this photograph. A world that will stay.
This must be why people stop diaries.
Every entry they write makes a lost world.”

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plum rains 梅雨 at aShanghaiBlog


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