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Contemplating Going “Home”

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I was quickly stopped by a policeman. “Have you been drinking? Have you been smoking pot? Your eyes are all red! Then he made me stand, in high heels, on one foot and count to forty. Then follow his finger moving back and forth with my eyes. Then he let me, shaken, go.

Last time I got off the plane in Portland from almost a year in Asia, I found myself jet-lagged and completely disoriented…driving on the “wrong” side of the road.

Found this blog by a Chinese-American on Bootsnall. He is probably much younger but his experience is none-the-less very similar to mine.

Coming Home: Sharks Also Need Constant Motion
By: Jeffrey Lee

“Coming home meant coming down. It was easier to stay up. I’d return home to piles of bills and an empty refrigerator. Buying groceries, I’d get lost – too many aisles, too many choices; cool mist blowing over fresh fruit; paper or plastic; cash back in return? I’d wanted emotion but couldn’t find it here, so I settled for motion.

Out at night, weaving through traffic, looking for trouble, I’d lose myself in crowds. Gaggles of girls with fruit-colored drinks talked about face products and film production. I’d see their lips move, look at their snapshot smiles and highlighted hair. I didn’t know what to say.
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Watching The Chinese

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A local newspaper in Borneo reported another logging agreement. China had just placed a rush order for 800,000 cubic meters of wood to be used in the construction of its sports facilities for the 2008 Olympic Games. Authorities are planning on cutting as much as four to five million acres of trees in the future.

In other news, China needs the Sudan’s oil and gas so it is blocking the UN from sending peacekeepers to help stop the genocide. On top of that China is forgiving the Sudan it’s debt and lending, interest free, money to the President of Sudan to build a personal palace…among other sickening things.

The Looming Tower

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Have recently finished the acclaimed “The Looming Tower” by Lawrence Wright which is a history of Islamic radical fundamentalism beginning in the 1930’s and 40’s and ending with the bombing of the World Trade Center. Including the ridiculous and ultimately tragic machinations of the CIA and FBI, it reads like an unbelievable novel…and it left me drained and feeling hopeless.

The Christian Science Monitor reported today that Al-Qaida said in its monthly magazine posted on an Islamic web site that “cutting oil supplies to the United States, or at least curtailing it, would contribute to the ending of the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.” The group said it was making the statements as part of Osama bin Laden’s declared policy. It was not possible to verify independently that the posting was from the terror faction, said the Monitor.

Al-Qaida claimed responsibility for last year’s attacks on oil installations in Saudi Arabia and Yemen after bin Laden called on militants to stop the flow of oil to the West. The group also was behind the 2002 attack on a French oil tanker that killed one person in the Gulf of Aden, according to the paper.

Also reported today was that Egypt has arrested nearly 80 members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

What really frightened me recently was the sight of a young artist, on his knees in front of Santo Domingo, working on a gigantic poster of Bin Laden. It was never put up because the next day the PFP routed and burned the planton in the Santo Domingo Plaza.

What Now For Oaxaca?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Local analysts argue about whether the causes of the popular social movement here in Oaxaca are utter corruption and the history of political bossism by the PRI party, the effects of transnational/neoliberal policies created by NAFTA, the lack of economic development by federal and state authorities…or just plain infighting between any and all political and social groups.

In Oaxaca State, the main employer has been the government.

Outside of Oaxaca City the lost jobs are mainly in agriculture and that results in a huge migration to the US and Canada. The Isthmus is in an uproar over the wind farms. They were “rented” by intermediaries who gave the local owners next to nothing (100 pesos annually per hectare) and then turned around and rented the land to the transnationals at hefty prices. They are making grand profits while the local people are left behind.

This last weekend the APPO met, while other APPO activists are in Mexico City or the USA or Europe or somewhere, trying to get support. The biggest decision now has to do with how to approach the elections.
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I Could Be In India

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I was reading through some of my blog entries about India the other day and then I came upon this Slate.com article about India and laughed so hard I nearly cried. It’s really good to laugh.

Trying Really Hard To Like India

from: Seth Stevenson
Posted Friday, Oct. 1, 2004, at 2:27 PM ET

“In the mid-1970s, famed author V.S. Naipaul (of Indian descent but raised in Trinidad) came to India to survey the land and record his impressions. The result is a hilariously grouchy book titled India: A Wounded Civilization. Really, he should have just titled it India: Allow Me To Bitch at You for 161 Pages. I hear you, V.S. This place has its problems. As you point out, many of them result from the ravages of colonialism � and some are just India’s own damn fault. Still, I’ve found a lot to love about this place. For instance:

1) I love cricket. The passion for cricket is infectious. When I first got here, the sport was an utter mystery to me, but now I’ve hopped on the cricket bandwagon, big time. I’ve got the rules down, I’ve become a discerning spectator, and I’ve settled on a favorite player (spin bowler Harbhajan Singh, known as “The Turbanator”�because he wears a turban). I’ve even eaten twice at Tendulkar’s, a Mumbai restaurant owned by legendary cricketer Sachin Tendulkar. Fun fact: Sachin Tendulkar’s nicknames include “The Master Blaster” (honoring his prowess as a batsman), “The Maestro of Mumbai” (he’s a native), and “The Little Champion” (he’s wicked short). His restaurant here looks exactly like a reverse-engineered Michael Jordan’s Steak House. Instead of a glass case with autographed Air Jordans, there is a glass case with an autographed cricket bat. And in what could turn out to be a dangerous habit, I’ve begun going to Mumbai sports bars to watch all-day cricket matches. These last like seven hours. That is a frightening amount of beer and chicken wings.

2) I love the Indian head waggle. It’s a fantastic bit of body language, and I’m trying to add it to my repertoire. The head waggle says, in a uniquely unenthusiastic way, “OK, that’s fine.” In terms of Western gestures, its meaning is somewhere between the nod (though less affirmative) and the shrug (though not quite as neutral).

To perform the head waggle, keep your shoulders perfectly still, hold your face completely expressionless, and tilt your head side-to-side, metronome style. Make it smooth�like you’re a bobble-head doll. It’s not easy. Believe me, I’ve been practicing.

3) I love how Indians are unflappable. Nothing, I mean nothing, seems to faze them in the least. If you live here, I suppose you’ve seen your fair share of crazy/horrid/miraculous/incomprehensible/mind-blowing stuff, and it’s impractical to get too worked up over anything, good or bad.

(This is a trait I admire in the Dutch, as well. They don’t blink when some college kid tripping on mushrooms decides to leap naked into an Amsterdam canal. Likewise, were there a dead, limbless child in the canal� an Indian person might not blink. Though he might offer a head waggle.)

4) I love how they dote on children here. (I’m not talking about dead, limbless children anymore, I’m being serious now.) At our beach resort in Goa, there were all these bourgeois Indian folks down from Mumbai on vacation. These parents spoiled their children rotten in a manner that was quite charming to see. In no other country have I seen kids so obviously cherished, indulged, and loved. It’s fantastic. Perhaps my favorite thing on television (other than cricket matches) has been a quiz show called India’s Smartest Child, because I can tell the entire country derives great joy from putting these terrifyingly erudite children on display.

5) I love that this is a billion-person democracy. That is insane. Somehow the Tibetan Buddhists of Ladakh, the IT workers of Bangalore, the downtrodden poor of Bihar, and the Bollywood stars of Mumbai all fit together under this single, ramshackle umbrella. It’s astonishing and commendable that anyone would even attempt to pull this off.

6) I love the chaos (when I don’t hate it). Mumbai is a city of 18 million people�all of whom appear to be on the same block of sidewalk as you. If you enjoy the stimulation overload of a Manhattan or a Tokyo but prefer much less wealth and infrastructure. this is your spot. (Our friend Rishi, who we’ve been traveling with, has a related but slightly different take: “It’s like New York, if everyone in New York was Indian! How great is that!”) And whatever else you may feel, Mumbai will force you to consider your tiny place within humanity and the universe. That’s healthy.

There’s more good stuff I’m forgetting, but enough love for now. Let’s not go overboard. As they say in really lame travel writing: India is a land of contradictions. A lot of things to like and a lot of things (perhaps two to three times as many things) to hate.

It’s the spinach of travel destinations, you may not always (or ever) enjoy it, but it’s probably good for you. In the final reckoning, am I glad that I came here? Oh, absolutely. It’s been humbling. It’s been edifying. It’s been, on several occasions, quite wondrous. It’s even been fun, when it hasn’t been miserable.

That said, am I ready to leave. Sweet mercy, yes.”

A Field Guide To Getting Lost

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My son, Josh, the little weasel, asked me what it felt like to be living alone in Oaxaca. It got me to thinking. Then I picked up a book at Sharon’s apartment entitled “A field Guide To Getting Lost,” a book written by a woman in San Francisco. It reminded me of a blog entry I wrote one thoughtful day in Bangkok. Here it is for those of you who missed it.

June 12 2005

Perfect Memories
“What A Perfect Day…It’s Such A Perfect Day…And Then We Go Home.”

Have been re-reading a book that I have been dragging around with me for the last year. Pico Iyer can set my imagination afire like no other travel writer. One of his pieces reminds me of the fall of 2003 when I was traveling alone down the coast of Viet Nam. Imagine all the people sharing all the world: I was riding behind Mr. Binh, my kind motorcycle taxi driver, and after three days on the bike my rear-end was numb. He takes me to a small food stall by the side of the road leading out of a little town on the South China Sea, where we wave down a local kamazake minibus that will careen down Highway 1 to Hue. The bus is crammed full of Vietnamese one on top of the other so I sit on some rice sacks until someone gets off and I, the older one, am graciously allowed to have the emptied seat. A couple of giggling girls offer to share a small sweet tangerine with me.

The driver had very long hair-possibly in his 50’s-with a pocked and scarred face…signs of a life lived on the edge. This guy is feeling powerful and narrowly misses oncoming overloaded trucks leaning at odd angles. He is having a great time and I am breathless waiting for my life to end. Suddenly when he throws a dirty towel to the back of the van and it lands in my face he looks back with a grin to see if I am alright. Gasping, I return his thumbs up with a laugh.

“Travel the World and the Seven Seas…Everybody’s Looking For Something. Some of them want to use you�some of them want to abuse you.” For Pico, the best kind of traveling is when you are searching for something you never find. “The physical aspect of travel is for me,” he says “the least interesting…what really draws me is the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don’t know and may never will. We travel, some of us, to slip through the curtain of the ordinary, and into the presence of whatever lies just outside our apprehension…” he goes on to say. “I fall through the gratings of the conscious mind and into a place that observes a different kind of logic.” Transcendence… and pure Pico.

“Nobody told me there would be days like these! Strange Days Indeed.”

“Letters From Thailand”

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“Letters From Thailand” is a lovely novel wrtten in 1969 by “Botan”, a pseudonym of the Chinese-born Thai female writer, Supa Sirisingh, and recently translated into English by Susan Fulop Kepner, an academic on Southeast Asian studies from UCLA.

The book is written in the form of self-revealing letters to the beloved mother of a young man who leaves rural China to make his fortune in Thailand at the close of World War II. In Tan Suang U’s starkly honest account of his daily life in Bangkok’s bustling Chinatown, deeper themes emerge: his determination to succeed at business before all else; his hopes for his children in this strange new culture that sickens him by what he sees as it’s drunkeness, laziness, gambling and sexual depravity and his resentment at how easily his children embrace urban Thai culture that is becoming increasingly Westernized at the expense of their Chinese heritage that he holds dear.

Westerners will recognize the cross-cultural themes that emerge… the desire to hold on to cultural heritage in the midst of an alien land, the stereotypes that keep groups separated one from another and the struggle of oppressed women to transcend their own culture and live life on their own terms.

“Not to eat another man’s rice but to hate him” is something to be ashamed of, Suang U learns. “I was of the opinion that a good heart was not money in the bank,” Suang U says toward the end of the book. But he learns that “two baht worth of rice with love at the supper table is a feast.” Finally, a lonely old man, after he has passed his business on to the ungrateful son that he himself mentored, he discovers that “to be alone is terrible, but it is not so terrible as to be a guest in a son’s house.”

The strongest survival instinct is self deception. After a long sorrowful road to self-discovery he is astounded to learn two things: one is that money is not the most important thing in life; the other is that what we believe does not necessarily reflect what and who we are.

“Letters From Thailand”
1969 by Supa Sirisingh
Susan F. Kepner English Translation 2002
Silkworm Books Chiang Mai
http://www.silkwormbooks.info

The World A Playground?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

A friend recently emailed me asking what it is like to have all the world as my “playground.” This was my very brief answer:

Well, the best thing about traveling in developing countries like SE Asia, Africa and China is the smiles that fill the heart. Europeans generally ignore the people…very aloof…Americans are busy looking at buildings and statues and for something to buy. But if you make a cultural mistake and you smile and point to your head in Thailand and say “ting tong” (crazy in Thai) the people giggle and laugh and they love you for it because they are not used to Westerners being humble. Then the massages are wonderful $5-$8 for an hour. The food is incredible everywhere…a feast on the street…a big bowl of delicious noodle soup with pork for 50 cents that would cost $6 in the States. And if you stay in the cheap guesthouses instead of western style hotels that are exhorbitant by local economic standards, you meet wonderful travelers from all around the world. That is the fun part.

Then there is the work part. You get to practice patience and develop flexibility in dealing with inefficiency…and rules and regs that make no sense to a Westerner. You get used to the garbage and broken sidewalks with live electric wires hanging down everywhere…and the hacking and spitting Chinese. Pedestrians have no rights whatsoever so you have to watch you don’t get killed…the biggest vehicle on the road is king. You learn to be tolerant of other cultures…eg. it is considered rude in Thailand to be confrontatory and demanding. You learn that not everyone in the world wants to be American and that they love their own countries. People value their families over material things…and it rubs off.

And then you begin to notice other things. The police are not paid enough so they are always on the take and not to be trusted. Corrupt governments keep people impoverished. In fact, Prime Minister Thaksin in Thailand is being forced out of office as we speak…thousands demonstrating in the streets this week in Bangkok. I won’t even start on Robert Mugabe who is starving his own people in Zimbabwe and ought to be shot by somebody. And because of the government-controlled press, foreigners know more about China than the Chinese people themselves. I learn we don’t have it so bad in America.

So when I am in America I miss the warm-hearted people and the colorful streets and want to be here and when I am here I miss the humor, music, good roads, the efficiency and customer service (non-existent outside the U.S.) and general good governance with the exception of our foreign policy.

So briefly, that is what it is like to have the world as my playground. Actually travel is a very serious business. Besides being married and raising children, it is the most brutal spiritual work there is…needling selfish boundaries…culturing the heart. I think meditation is much less difficult!

Pico Iyer, author of “The Global Soul,” gives me great comfort. An Indian by birth, Pico was raised in England. Moved to California. Now lives with his significant other in Japan. If he can do it I can do it.

Chiang Mai Thailand

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Flew from Koh Samui on Bangkok Air (the only airline off the island because Bangkok Air built the airport) and then on to Chiang Mai on budget Air Asia.

I guess Bob is in Bangkok, but I am in the Galare Guesthouse in a cozy Thai-style building on the Ping River that runs through the city. A broadband internet cable is plugged into my laptop. I am drinking real drip coffee made in my little Starbucks coffee maker on this blessedly cool morning and listening to Leonard Cohen on my tiny speakers.

I am mid-way through “All That Matters,” a lovely book by Wayson Chow about Chinese immigrants in the 1930’s in Vancouver B.C. Most of the Chinese those days were from the Pearl River Delta of Canton China who came as merchants to Chinatown in Vancouver or as workers on the railroad.

I catch up on the news in the U.S. on BBC TV…much better coverage than we get from US media. I am following the political crisis in Thailand in the English-language Bangkok Post in the downstairs open-air restaurant at breakfast each morning. In the streets of Bangkok thousands of people have been demonstrating for constitutional reform and an end of corruption…calling for Prime Minister Thaksin to step down. And that is really something for a culture that generally disdains confrontation. Locals are hoping there will not be a repeat of the military coup in the late 90’s that left scores of students dead in the streets.

I am walking distance to the Night Market (actually a street market) that bustles with open-street cafes until midnight. I usually don’t take the Tuk Tuks in Thailand because I am tall and the ceilings of these things slant downwards making it difficult to see ahead but they are the best way to get around in this city because they can dodge through the smooth-paved alleyways avoiding all the one-way streets. I like this city. Much quieter…even the Tuk Tuks don’t sound like weed-eaters…and the traffic isn’t as nuts as it is in Bangkok and on the islands.

More farangs (White westerners) in this town than I’ve seen anywhere in Thailand (even the islands because most tourists there just stay within hotel compounds) so Chiang Mai seems to be quite the tourist destination. Tour companies offer trips to places like the national parks, elephant training camps and to the Golden Triangle where Thailand meets the Lao, Chinese and Burmese borders that is famous for the opium trade of years past. I am thinking I will take one of these trips…maybe to the Golden Triangle…and to Chiang Rai through colorful Akha, Karen, Lisu and Palong hill tribe villages.

How long can I stay in my room, I ask the smiling girl at the reception desk. Until way next month, she says laughing. Maybe I will.

More On Mao

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We are grounded by the subway strike so have been reading more of the biography of Mao by authors Jung Chang, the author of the wonderful three-generation epic “Wild Swans,” and her British husband Jon Halliday.

What is especially interesting so far, is that this biography reveals much heretofor unknown information about Mao Tse Tung and the Cultural Revolution in China. Mao, for decades, held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population and was responsible for “well over 60 million deaths in peacetime,” more than any other twentieth-century leader. He used terrorism to try to establish China as a world-wide military nuclear power and to seat himself as it’s leader. To do this he wanted to draw draw Russia and America into a world war. Russia, hoping to appease Mao, allowed him to start the Korean War…Korea’s Kim even taking his orders from Mao. Mao sent thousands and thousands of troops into Korea thinking the Americans would never know the difference between Chinese and Koreans…and he was ready to sacrifice untold millions of people. He knew the Americans wouldn’t tolerate the body bags. Stalin (“The Master”) held the line, but when Stalin died, Khrushchev pulled the plug.

The detail illustrates Mao’s premeditated cruelty unprecidented in modern history. The authors had access to the Russian archives, interviewed hundreds of key people that are still alive…Russians, Chinese, Americans and anyone else who had a role during this time.

Values in China are carried forward by the culture…not by any ethical or civic standard. I could feel reverberations of China’s past during our several months in the country.