At the Edge of the Middle Kingdom

What would you expect from a city that sprang from a small town back in 1982? Thirty-four years ago there was a sprawl of military structures on the border. Today Shenzhen is rumored to be the richest city in China; “If you want to feel poor, go to Shenzhen” is the ending or a modern day proverb. It stretches for over 700 square miles and is divided into ten districts, four of them recently added.

There are two central business districts, one which has supplanted the original. There are beaches (one of them four miles of white sand) and mountains and what claims to be the world’s largest bookstore. Although geographically in Cantonese territory, Shenzhen is a Mandarin-speaking city with a trilingual subway system. Citibank ATMs are found in 7-Eleven and Starbucks isn’t hard to find.

Two of its beaches are a little over 800 feet from one of my favorite Hong Kong islands, Peng Chau. A subway whisks travelers from the airport to the border in an hour, which is about what it takes to go from JFK to Manhattan. Trains leave every twenty minutes to Guangzhou and the journey takes an hour--no reservations necessary.

Zara provides clothes for well-padded Western women, just like in Bangkok, but Cantonese food is harder to find than the cuisine from other parts of China. Food streets are common.

The Shenzhen Library has a black granite waterfall wall that can be seen from the second floor and a collection of books in English on the third. Western magazines are easily bought, except for The Economist and those of that ilk, and there is an English language newspaper that costs one yuan, which is I think somewhere around fifteen cents.

I began to write down places I wanted to go and how to get there in a notebook and had to stop after an hour. This city is going to be as surprising to me as Bangkok ever was, and probably every bit as frustrating. It even has illegal taxi drivers for that ultimate blood pressure elevator.

I can’t wait.

One Man, One Act at a Time

Yesterday I went to Chinatown and as I walked through it, I saw a small Asian woman carrying a black garbage bag across Jackson, with no regard for traffic lights. A huge collection of bags and a heavily laden large wheeled suitcase waited for her at the curb and she was rather small. After I went to the bank, she had brought everything to the opposite corner of the street and was carrying it, a bag or two at a time, down to the bus stop at Bartell Drugs.

That was my next destination and as I followed in the woman’s wake, I saw a tall familiar figure walk toward me, pulling a very large, very deep black wagon. “Marcus, how are you? And shouldn’t your wagon be red? Tis the season after all.”

“I bought it for her,” Marcus replied, stopping near me and the mountain of bags. He upended the wagon and drained the rainwater that had dampened it on his walk. “She carries those bags around every day so I went down to Home Depot and picked one up.”

“You’re a good man,” I said and he answered, “Making up for past transgressions.” The small woman had returned for more belongings and Marcus said, “Here. Put them in this.” She swept past him without slackening her pace and walked back with another burden of bags.

“This is for you,” I said, “he bought it for you.” I reached out to touch her arm and she spat “No!,” like an angry cat. As she walked away, I said “I can’t speak Chinese,” and Marcus said “She speaks English.”

“I should leave you alone. She knows you and maybe she’ll listen,” I said and Marcus’s response was “No. Don’t go.”

He is a tall man in his midyears and although his smile is contagious and his voice is gentle, he takes up a fair amount of space and he is black. “Maybe she’s frightened,” I told myself, “Maybe having a woman with him will make her more at ease.” I stayed.

After minutes of quiet persuasion, finally she stopped, turned in Marcus’s direction and responded to him. “I can’t get that thing on the bus.”

“Yes, you can,” I argued, “it’s like a wheelchair. You can put it on the ramp.”

Marcus held out a new red rucksack that Santa might well envy. “This too,” and he dropped it in the wagon. “And here. I just found this on the street. It’s not mine. Take it,” and he held out a folded, obviously new, bill, its denomination carefully hidden.

“Please take the wagon. You’re a little woman and this is all so heavy,” I said as softly as I could. She glanced at me and then back at Marcus. “He is a good man,” I told her and she nodded almost imperceptibly.

Her eyes assessed him and were met by that glorious smile. “Take it,” he repeated in a tone you would use with a frightened child. He put the money in her fingers and she didn’t drop it. When Marcus picked up some of her bags and put them in the wagon, she didn’t object.

I left them and went on to finish my errands. When I walked out of the drug store some minutes later, there was a red wagon, filled with bags, a red rucksack still empty, and a large wheeled suitcase, all belonging to one of the figures that leaned on a metal bar that served as bus stop seating.

One man, one woman, a cold street, and possessions that once had obviously known a place to hold  them--I walk past this almost every day and do not help. Marcus didn’t only help; he looked, found a solution, and didn’t step on that woman’s dignity. And although I may not find his grace within me to conduct  that same sort of action, I know I have to try.

I hate the term angel when applied to humans, and saint is not in my lexicon either, but I know goodness when I see it and from the first minute I saw him, Marcus has radiated nothing but good. He was sitting on the landing of the International Apartments when I first moved into the building and introduced himself with that radiant, sweet smile. We found that we share a passion for travel and had chats in the hallway based on that.

He invited a friend who had recently gone off drugs and needed a home to stay in his apartment while he was on a journey. The man took everything Marcus owned and broke a window before he left with the last of the loot. “He even took my leather jacket,” Marcus told me, “I had just bought it. It cost me 400 dollars. I hope I don’t see him because I want to kill him.”

I had just returned from Asia with an editing payment and it was Christmas. I put 100 dollars in a card, wrote a little note, and left it with the building manager to give to Marcus when he saw him. He returned it with thanks.

And after that, several times, a bouquet waited for me outside my apartment door, from Marcus.

Still my neighbor, in a neighborhood that is still mine, this quiet, kind, compassionate man is a signpost without noise, goodness without stint.

Apocalypse Day After Tomorrow?

At the end of this coming week, I will turn 68. Whether I celebrate this occasion or not depends on what happens in three more days.

My birthday has always come four days after an election but I have never felt as though that would blot out my happiness at entering a new year. This year is different. This year threatens to darken many of the ones that follow it and I have been sickened by this for months.

For me my 67th year has been one of mixed blessings. There have been too many deaths, but on the other hand I received the friendship of three girls, two small and one almost grown, who make me feel hopeful about the state of the world to come. For more than a quarter of 2016  I went through my days without smiling, but during that time I was sustained by my children, my friends, and a cousin whom I hadn't laid eyes on for half a century. Later that same cousin and I ate ice cream and rode a carousel together in Manhattan, the city where we both were born months apart. Her renewed presence in my life has been a gift and an unexpected one, which is always the best kind of present.

I discovered the excitement of traveling in my own country this year and that was another joyful surprise. New York and Los Angeles are as much fun to explore as Bangkok and Beijing. We have not yet become a homogeneous country and for that we can thank immigrants. Please give us more. They, like my grandparents and great-grandparents in the past century, bring texture and vibrancy to a country that has always been sustained by its new waves of population. Current threats of wall-building nauseate me to the point that I feel waves of vertigo. This is not what the United States does. From an economic standpoint alone, this is madness. And from a cultural standpoint, all anyone needs to do is go to Jackson Heights in Queens or Boyle Heights in Los Angeles and feel buoyed up by the energy and life that comes with new arrivals to our country.

Facebook's annoying little yearly memories were particularly poignant today. Four years ago, I posted exultant cheers at President Obama's swift victory, one that had been by no means assured. On Tuesday night, what will be said? The terror of what might happen is tarnishing the afternoon sun and the glint of light on leaves that are still green and shimmering through the window that I face right now.

By no means will this election be the end of the horror that has come home in the past year. No matter who wins, the repercussions will be difficult. Victory will not be a band-aid no matter who achieves it. We are too divided a country to lapse into any sort of peaceful complacency.

I won't be in the United States for the inaugural ceremonies but I won't stay in the country where I will spend the beginning of next year. One of the other gifts that I received this year is the understanding that I do have roots, and they are found in the eastern corner of the U.S. It's an odd thing to learn as I approach the last quarter of my life (if I'm lucky). But when I make shoofly pie, a dish invented by my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors who have lived in the Lehigh Valley for three hundred years, when I laugh with a woman whose blood and humor and joy of life are all things that we share in spite of fifty years of distance, when I think of the energy that I get only on the Eastern seaboard, I know this is a true fact of my life.

This is my country and that is my corner of it. And that is a present that may well change my life, once again. Whatever happens on Tuesday may blight my birthday celebrations but it won't send me to Mexico or Cambodia. It may make me and many other people like me bitterly unhappy but it won't make us quit. We are all better than the stereotype and it is time to prove that, win, lose, or draw.

Back to Life as I Know and Love It

Almost two months ago my dental debacle was completed. Suddenly I had my complete face back again, smile, grimaces, and all. My world enlarged to its normal size once again, no longer truncated by missing teeth and I reclaimed my usual enthusiasm for life and all it has to offer.

It was a source of complete exhilaration to talk and laugh without covering my mouth, speaking to strangers and going outside of what had become my comfort zone. Within a month I was on a plane to New York to reacquaint myself with one of the people who had been a mainstay of kindness during the past months, a cousin whom I hadn't seen in fifty years.

I'm still warmed by our visit,  by the friendship that we're claiming, and by the ties with family that were never a part of my life when I was growing up. It's a gift that I never expected and am overjoyed to have received.

Along with this came a rekindled love of the city that I was born in, in a section I'd never explored before. Although Manhattan has become bland, Queens is more vibrant than any other part of America that I have yet seen. I wandered through the Chinese city of Flushing, the invigorating diversity of Jackson Heights, and the windblown shore of Far Rockaway, and began planning my next visit long before I checked in for my flight back to Seattle.

Los Angeles is my next destination where I'll be staying in the still-Mexican community of Boyle Heights, exploring that as well as many other parts of that far-flung and exciting city. Although summer is almost gone in Seattle, I'm extending it through these journeys, chasing the heat and light that I incompletely enjoyed from April to August.

But my withdrawal from the world and my rediscovery of it has pointed out a very jolting truth. I have lived in my new home and have explored my new neighborhood since the beginning of this year. I've enjoyed both the house and the area around it but the novelty is wearing off. It's been replaced by a feeling of familiarity and comfort; I've found "my" corner of the living room, "my" favorite walks and places to eat. I'm beginning to recognize people in the neighborhood and we greet each other as we pass by. And as this began to happen, I began checking up on different cities on Craigslist.

"Philadelphia!" I began announcing to friends. "I can afford it and it's only an hour or two from New York."

Last night I lay awake, juggling finances in my head, trying to figure out the most economical way to move me and the cat across country. Then this morning something slapped me hard. Every time I begin to feel at home somewhere, I look for ways to move away from it.

I have no idea why this is so deep-rooted but I've felt this way ever since I can remember. It's not just a flaw. It's an illness. And it really has to stop.

Traveling doesn't mean a prelude to uprooting--or it shouldn't. I've called myself a geographic trollop but that's too gentle a description. In truth this is more akin to geographic nymphomania and it isn't cooling with age.

But it is time to let myself learn that comfort is not a prison sentence and that a trip has a beginning and an end, both of which are equally satisfying. As I approach 68, this is my goal--to go somewhere, enjoy it, and come home without saying "I want to live there."

Shaking on the Inside

I feel sick to my stomach and it would take very little to make me begin to cry. When I look at my hands, they are steady but inside I'm trembling. I should be hopeful but there have been too many glitches in the past four and a half months to keep me from feeling that way. Instead I'm scared, perhaps not to death, but closer to that than I would like to feel.

My two bottom front teeth were pulled in early April and it is only now, in early August, that they may be replaced. This has been a time of inertia. I finally even stopped writing because all that came to the page was my missing teeth. There are places I haven't gone, people I haven't seen, and things I haven't done because I have felt disfigured.

It doesn't matter that friends have said they haven't noticed the gap in my mouth. The most difficult thing I have done perhaps ever was to leave the house and speak to people without clapping my hand over my mouth. And yes, people have noticed, in the same way that I in the past have noticed other people's missing teeth, with a mixture of pity and revulsion.

At first I castigated myself for being vain but that isn't really fair. This has been like walking through the world with any sort of visible disfigurement; it's not like leaving the house without wearing eye makeup. The best that could be said was that this was temporary; the worst is that it was not temporary enough.

Other people have said they have friends and family who have gone through the same thing, with a gap in their mouths for months. It seems to be normal dentistry. But if that's true, this is a profession that needs serious revamping.

There is a temporary disposable denture for these situations. I've read about it in Dentistry Today. Apparently my dentist has not, since she insists that any denture used in the beginning will then become the permanent one. I've stopped discussing it with her, but if I ever see a dentist again, that will be at the very top of my agenda before submitting to care.

I have gone to this office before, eager to have a permanent crown or this same damned denture put in my mouth, only to learn that something else went wrong and there will be another delay. This is why I'm shaking now. If I go tomorrow and learn once again that this isn't ready, I am truly afraid that I will hurt someone.

Wish me luck, please. If all goes well, I'll be smiling, if I can only remember how.

Sentient? Hell Yes...and Divine

“Loving is a habit and takes practice, like any other,” Martha Gellhorn said when she rescued a small cat on a West Indian island. She bought it a little basket and carried it with her as she hopped about by boat in the Atlantic during WWII. Before flying back to the States, she realized the absurdity of what she had done and gave the cat to an Air Force base while realizing it had been much happier in its original forest home.

A judge recently decided that a dog was a sentient being, not a lesser creature, which is a fine thing to recognize, and high time too. But still that dog is subjugated to the whims of its owner. What and when to eat, where to sleep, even the elimination of its body waste is on somebody else’s schedule--and then there’s the true crusher. Dogs and other animals aren’t admitted to into heaven. Even Buddhism allows that to happen only after a human incarnation, although dogs, far more than many people, exemplify the Buddha nature like nobody’s business.

Cats of course go way beyond sentience into omniscience and divinity, a state that no doubt existed long before humans could record their speech in writing. Among modern deities, Shiva is the one they are most closely related to, but cats would rather destroy worlds that others have created than to take that energy to create one themselves. That is what humans are for, and lurking in the dispassionate gaze of any cat is the sad truth that we are doing a piss-poor job in that ongoing act of creation.  Still we are the best that they’ve got for the task and they continue with their silent directions which we ineptly follow.

People who dislike cats are the ones who are most closely attuned to the power that felines wield, although they fail to articulate that vague knowledge. “Dogs love their owners; cats tolerate them,” is usually as close as they get to voicing their unexamined knowledge that cats rule the universe. And what’s more, cats are certainly not going to let us into whatever heaven they may have constructed.

Like Martha Gellhorn, my life feels incomplete unless it includes a cat for me to love. Still I have never really believed that my love is reciprocated in the same way that I bestow it upon any of the felines that have shared my bed and board. When I do their bidding, they emit approval that at times I can almost convince myself is affection. Even the small black feral kitten that I adopted in Bangkok never gave me the same regard that he had for his counterpart, another small black kitten who found him and became his partner in crime. I was always the warm lap, the pair of opposable thumbs, the imperfect instrument who made sure that he had what he wanted.

In The Summer Book, Tove Jansson just about sums it up when she describes the hopeless passion that a little girl feels for an impervious tomcat. For a long time I thought this was the perfect depiction of the flawed nature of human love, but now I know I was wrong. It’s a recognition of the despair that we feel when we realize that our divinities are impervious to human demands and desires, especially the feline variety.

Desperately Seeking Fried Rice

Some days all you want to eat is simple food and you don’t want to cook it for yourself. Whether you call it diner food, bistro food, or street food, it’s all based on comfort. Why else would a grilled cheese sandwich prevail as a popular menu choice well into the 21^st Century? Why is macaroni and cheese making a sudden resurgence in chicken and waffle joints across Seattle, if not the country?

When I lived in Thailand, an American friend and I would play a sad and masochistic little game called What Will You Eat First When You Go Back Home. Surrounded as we were by one of the world’s greatest cuisines that waited for us right outside any hour of any day, we had humble yearnings for our introductory meal. “Chicken fried steak,” was my friend’s usual answer while mine was “A meat loaf sandwich.”

Simple food can’t be confused with food that’s indifferently prepared. Nothing is more disgusting than a burnt grilled cheese sandwich or mac and cheese that’s soggy, except perhaps a meat loaf sandwich that’s been made with overly fat ground beef. Simple dishes are perhaps the most demanding of all food choices, because they rely on only a few ingredients without a lot of culinary flourishes.

Like most foreigners in Thailand, I found the gateway drugs to what became my lifelong street food addiction were dishes that were comforting, easy to find and to pronounce, and somehow familiar: wok-fried rice and noodles with chicken and soy sauce. Gradually my choices became more adventurous but these street food staples remained as two of my favorites. The stinging miasma of garlic and chile sizzling in a hot wok would lead me to the places that would give me what I wanted, where I knew I’d find my Bangkok version of simple, satisfying comfort.

It had been a long cold post-holiday season here in the Pacific Northwest and as we neared the end of January, I needed Thai fried rice. In Seattle, this isn’t an easy dish to find. The almost toxic cloud of garlic and chile frying at high heat would cause an entire restaurant to flee the premises and wok cookery isn’t just an art—it’s hard, hot, and painful work. Many other things are much easier to prepare than fried rice, and that’s what most people make: curries, grilled meat, and braised Sino-Thai dishes. I couldn’t blame them but nonetheless, in the same perverse and nostalgic spirit that prompted me to occasionally search in Bangkok for a hamburger that wasn’t a Big Mac, I wanted khao pat that would taste as though it had been made on a sidewalk in deepest Thonburi.

To find that, I needed to find a place with woks, and Thai Tom in the University district of Seattle came instantly to mind. The owner had found an old diner and kept it intact. Cooks worked behind the counter in full view of the customers who were seated nearby on stools. Woks were at center stage and when the place first opened, people crowded to the place, eager to watch the spectacle of open flames shooting menacingly above the guy who was making their food.

Now there’s more than one wok behind the counter and each one is smaller than the original that I remembered from twenty years ago. The joint is still hopping. I showed up well after the lunch rush and two cooks were still in motion, which was a good sign. I ordered my rice and watched and waited.

“How hot do you want it?” the waitress asked me and I said, “Normal. Just please bring me some fish sauce with chili and I’ll fix it myself.” She ladled what I’d asked for from a container behind the counter and handed me a little bowl. The chili was so finely diced that it looked almost like powder and the fish sauce smelled old. I braced myself.

The cook tossed a handful of sliced pork into the wok and let it sizzle, then added an egg and tossed it about for a while. Then he scooped out enough rice to feed several starving orphans and dumped it into the wok. There was a spurt of obligatory flame and then he turned his attention to someone speaking to him from the kitchen. Then he returned to a short burst of moving the rice around the wok and then it all went on a plate—my plate.

It wasn’t the worst fried rice I’ve ever had. That honor goes to Phnom Penh Noodle House, which once brought me a plate of it that had been scorched. It was however a plate of rice that had been heated, not fried. There were hunks of warm chicken, a slice or two of onion, and some basil leaves. I could, and have, done better myself at home, and I left most of it uneaten.

It took a while before I had the strength to resume my quest but at last a day dawned that was bright and sunny, daffodils and crocus decided to bloom, and my optimism returned. On a whim I stopped at Song Phang Kong on Jackson Street, the one place in Seattle that is so much like a Thai noodle shop that I always expect to see motorcycle taxis waiting outside it when I leave.

I’ve had good food here, sausage both Thai- and Lao-style, papaya salad with a generous dash of fermented fish, and chicken that had been grilled over charcoal. I knew that the lady who had presided over the kitchen had died but her husband was still in place. Although fried rice wasn’t on his menu, fried noodles were, so I asked if he could make me what I was longing for. “Yes,” he said.

Before disappearing into the kitchen, he made me a Thai iced tea that was almost sinful, tart with lemon and tamarind and topped off with a thick layer of half-and-half. Traditional? No. Delicious? Absobloodylutely. My hopes soared a little higher and were nourished by the view of one of his arms, visible through the kitchen doorway, moving in the St. Vitus dance of a seasoned wok user. My only reservation was the rice he had taken into the kitchen, scooped out from deep within a rice cooker. Perhaps, I told myself, it was rice that had been cooked the day before.

He brought me a plate that was heaped high with rice, chunks of chicken, sliced onion in profusion, and a generous helping of broccoli and carrots. That was fair. Although the green vegetable usually used in fried rice was sold right across the street at Viet Wah, he had no reason to have pak kana in his kitchen. I’d ordered off the menu, after all, and he’d obliged. When he showed up again to ask me how my food tasted, I told him it was delicious.

I lied. The rice was clumped together as if it had been meant for sushi. It was soggy and mushy and I couldn’t finish it. I ate enough to be polite and asked that the rest be put in a box, although I never intended to touch it again. But it was my fault, not his. I’d asked for fried rice and he had cooked fresh rice for the day to accompany the dishes he had on his menu. I told him I’d be back soon for his sausage and I certainly will be—but fried rice will never be my request again.

I was still hungry. Slowly and sadly I made my way up to the end of Broadway on Capitol Hill, where Rom Mai has been for decades. Full disclosure: I’ve known the owner for over twenty years; we became friends long before he opened his own restaurant. So when the waitress asked me what I wanted, I told her I wanted to ask her boss a question.

“Can you make me fried rice with pork? Not with broccoli but with pak kana, like Bangkok? The kind where the rice isn’t soggy?” I was almost in tears and his answer was swift and reassuring. “My wife takes the rice from the top of the cooker and she works out all of the lumps. And we give people whatever vegetables they want to eat. She’ll make you Bangkok khao pat moo.”

When the rice was put in front of me, it was spread out on the plate in almost individual grains. Each bite had the flavor of the garlic, onion, and pork with which the rice had been fried. It was succulent, without a trace of sogginess, accompanied by pak kana cut on the diagonal and pork that was thinly sliced but still flavorful. In a restaurant that is almost formal in its decoration, where dining is the word that comes to mind rather than diner, I had khao pat moo that was as good as any that I’ve eaten on a sidewalk from a pink plastic plate on a table that bears a holder filled with a roll of toilet paper. And for me there is no higher praise than that.

Rom Mai offers fried rice with crab as one of its specials. I’ll be back. Soon. 

Alaska: Beyond the Palins and the NRA

Although every household in the small Alaskan community that I grew up in was equipped with a rifle, it was a tool of last resort, used to bring in food when supplies ran low. Although people traveled on foot and by dog sled, a rifle wasn’t usually what was carried on a pack-board. Between wild beast and mankind existed a form of peaceful coexistence, unless the animals were in rut, or with offspring, or needed on family dinner plates. Then all bets were off.

Scotty, a quiet, gentle family friend whom I adored, ran an eleven-mile trap line in the woods near his cabin outside of what was with some exaggeration called “town.” He was on the trail when a bull moose came out of nowhere and charged his team of four dogs. The dogs, three-year-old litter-mates and no pushovers, went for the moose, fangs bared, while Scotty, who carried only a hunting knife with him, grabbed a chain that he used in the traps and joined the dogs in their battle. The moose backed off and then came back in a second charge, kicking viciously at the dogs and leaving deep head gashes on two of them.

At this point the story takes on Paul Bunyanesque proportions. Scotty made a noose in the chain, managed to throw it over the moose’s head, pulled the makeshift lasso tight, and tied it to a tree. He drove his dogs a safe distance from the attack scene and went back to release his captive. He couldn’t reach the chain to untie it because the moose was in full panic mode, thrashing about in unsuccessful escape attempts.

With two of his dogs badly hurt, Scotty had to walk back to his nearest neighbors for assistance and four men returned with him to unchain the moose. A rifle wasn’t deemed necessary. One of the group lassoed a hind leg with an easily removed half-hitch knot while the others freed the moose from the tree and eased the chain over its neck. Once liberated, the moose charged the group again; they fought it off with the chain until it gave up and disappeared into the woods at last.

Scotty and his friends estimated the moose was around 900 pounds, full grown and uncharacteristically aggressive. It was “on the prod” because of the hard crust of ice that had formed on the snow and turned dagger-sharp when weight broke through it. With bleeding cuts from that crust, the moose was in a bad mood and Scotty and his dogs were the nearest target that it could find.

The dogs recovered from their wounds and Scotty decided perhaps carrying a rifle on the trail might be a good idea from now on. “You know,” he told a big city reporter from the Anchorage Times, “’that moose could have been a big bull.”

An Aching in My Belly, a Craving in My Head

For the first time in three weeks, my room is filled with the scent of coffee and with my first bitter sip my mind stretches, yawns, and agrees to wake up. It is my drug. Tea is too subtle for me; espresso is too fast. I need to swallow freshly ground beans bathed in boiling water to feel alive in the world and for all of my synapses to fire properly. After over half a century of drinking coffee, the grooves it has worn in my nervous system are too deep to sod over and reseed into a refined green tea landscape. I’m addicted as my mother was before me. I’m sure that coffee ran in my veins before I was born.

Dad thrust a cup of hot sweet milky coffee into my fifteen-year-old hands when I came home from a long, wet, chilly horseback ride to pick up mail and library books. I drank it as a sacramental rite of passage but my next cup was black, and so were all of the others after that. I drank it all night as a teenager and was delighted to find that by morning I had lost five pounds—legal speed.

In New York I was always amazed to find that in that city I didn’t need it. The rush of a Manhattan street woke me into life without caffeine, which was fortunate because the coffee in NYC was vile anywhere above 14^th Street. Still I drank that battery acid from the depths of hell that was sold in diners because that was what fueled the city that had given me birth.

My father was the one who bought me my first cup of espresso, down on Mulberry Street, when children still played on the sidewalks with grandmothers in shapeless dresses sitting on stoops to guard them. I drank it with a shot of anisette in a neighborhood joint where nobody questioned my age. As I sipped and felt a tinge of sophistication long before my time, a car pulled up and a man got out wearing a black homburg and an expensive-looking black overcoat. He walked in with an aura of regality and everyone in the place paid him homage with their attention. “Good morning, Large Joseph,” the bartender greeted him as he took his place at the counter and even I, who had barely ever heard of the Mafia, was in awe. Ever since then I’ve associated the taste of espresso with power.

The machine that made that first espresso for me was large and made of gleaming copper; it looked as though it could fuel a small battleship. It took skill to operate, I learned, when I went to a place in Seattle that used a similar system to very bad effect. Before Starbucks, when espresso was still Italian and barista wasn’t a word applied to teenagers who pulled shots after school, what emerged from a well-operated machine could raise a heartbeat from death to hyperspeed in three minutes flat.

And that of course is where the danger lies. I love my little espresso pot with its ceremonial undertones and its chaste little white cups and saucers, but what it makes is not really my friend. Espresso isn’t meant to be sipped; it cools too quickly in those sweet little cups and I could down three of them in the space of writing a paragraph. I need my coffee in a mug that retains the heat, the way I learned to drink it in Alaska.

My parents and their friends drank coffee the way winos clutch bottles of cheap wine, killing a pot at a sitting, their maintenance doses. It was a socially sanctioned time to down tools and talk in long conversations that ranged from the price of chainsaw fuel to the state of the world. In another time and place I use it to fuel conversations with myself and it sparks thought in a way that never comes with the gentler infusion of caffeine in green tea.

This morning I was awake before six, knowing what was waiting for me in the kitchen, and that I know is the thrill of addiction. I’m sure my blood pressure is above sanctioned levels at this moment and I do not give a jolly damn. I have had my drug, and I will have it again tomorrow, and the world is a much less torpid place for me.

And without thinking very much about it, I’ve gone past my first page this morning and am more than happy to write more. The sun is up and so are both of the guys I live with and I am in my caffeine bubble, oblivious.

Thank heaven I never tried heroin.

Been a Long Time Since I Rock-and-Rolled

Watching All Things Must Pass last night before I went to bed has Tower on my mind this morning, close and familiar. Faces I knew and others who were always invoked but never seen, the toad-like face of Stan Gomen, bizarrely normal Bud Martin, squishy-featured Michael Solomon, the anointed one who failed his father, and of course Uncle Ross, a mixture of Kris Kringle and Mephistopheles, drinking Scotch in front of a great wall of books, not records, videos, or cds. Rudy Danziger, who was so proud of having a signing with Beverly Garland by the pool at a Sacramento Holiday Inn, not Norm whose last name I can’t remember but whom I spoke to over the phone every week, who told me “We’re going to get you to Sacramento, why should Seattle have you?” and had me shuddering with disgust, and Heidi Keller, who let Rudy go during the agonizing dismantling of an empire by saying, “Rudy, I want a divorce.” Later she knew the guillotine awaited her when Russ called and asked her to lunch, because in all the years she’d worked for him, he’d never done that before.

The shocker was photos of Heidi when she was young—the woman I knew as a harridan with cold eyes was shiny and really beautiful. “They told me to wear miniskirts to work and then they all looked up my skirt,” which was borne out by an earlier story told to me by one of the old reps. “I walked into Watt Avenue and there was a pair of long legs wearing a miniskirt on top of a ladder, pulling stock.” “Leopard skin underpants and a mini skirt,” the old Heidi vouchsafes in the movie, for all posterity to remember.

“They taught me to swear, to drink, and do drugs. I was one of the guys,” she said, and I winced. That was me, except for the drugs. I too learned to be as tough as any man I worked with but not as much as the redoubtable Ms. Keller, who said, “I went into labor twice at the register.” She didn’t say when, but I would bet it was during Christmas or the 30% off sale.

If she was like me, labor wouldn’t have kept her from either of those events. There was something weirdly exhilarating about facing a line of customers that extended the length of the store and getting them all out the door in minutes flat. There was no attention given at those times, just sheer crazed efficiency.

Two little girls used to come to Mercer and I would always ask them if they wanted their own little bags. They showed up in my line during the 30% off sale and stared at me with reproach at the end of the transaction. “We want our own little bags,” the biggest one said and I quickly apologized, bagged each book, and they let the line continue.

Open to Midnight, 365 Days a Year, was the boast but a customer wrote to us in outrage
once because he came to the store at 11:55 on December 31^st and the doors were locked. That occasioned more outrage from upper management than the two times that we were robbed, once at gunpoint.

We made nothing, but our employee benefits were immense. There were Tower Building Blocks that we could cash in when we finally left the company if we stayed for a specified amount of time that I can no longer remember. I think I cashed mine for about 200 bucks after five years. We had employee charge accounts that we could put rep comps on for credit, we had sick leave of sorts and a decent number of vacation days. We had medical, dental, and vision insurance that was better than any employer-based policy that I’ve had since, and the annual parties were bacchanalian. Employee meetings were always at a restaurant that served booze; so were many of the sales calls. The tab from any of those meetings was equal to what any of us made in a month.

When The Satanic Verses earned Rushdie a death sentence, we kept the book front and center on the new release table, sold every copy we had, and then took special orders, which we put proudly and visibly on a shelf behind the counter. The only caveat we received was that we shouldn’t have the customer’s name also visible, on slips of paper tucked into each book that was waiting for pick-up.

“It wasn’t a job, “one former employee kept saying throughout the movie, “It was a way of life.” Tower Culture, I called it, and it absorbed almost all of us who had ever worked there. We worked and ate and drank together at Mercer, just one big dysfunctional family. Even after leaving by choice, I still dream about the store that is now a bank, vivid dreams where I walk in and try to make it the place it used to be.

There were people who made real money there, all of them in Sacramento. Everybody wanted to be a manager but not for the money, which was laughable even at that level. We wanted our own stores, and it was Russ Solomon’s peculiar genius that made us feel that the store we would manage would be ours.

I was given a 250 dollar bonus once for launching a reading program in several Seattle elementary schools. I could well have used the money but I was outraged. “They can’t give us raises but they hand me this for something that I couldn’t do without the support of this store?” I spent the money on an expensive Krupps coffee maker and a grinder for the beans which had a place of honor in the backroom until some idiot burned out the element.

The best part of the movie was in the outtakes, when Gomen told the story about an elephant they dyed pink and brought into the Watt Avenue store for a Big Pink promotion. He claimed the elephant peed on the floor and drenched the carpet. Russ’s version was when they put the elephant back in the truck to leave, it let loose and he watched a river of urine rush down the street toward the store. “That’s not what Stan said,” someone remarked off-camera, and Russ wheeled upon Gomen. “Well that’s what so-and-so told me had happened,” was his defense and Russ roared “You weren’t even there.” And then two old men were laughing their asses off on a street corner where a beginning of an empire once stood and reigned and went to hell.

Bangkok Is Not Thailand

This is Mukdahan, on its walkway by the Mekong. When I first went there, the walkway was empty; the last time I was on it, it was crowded with vendors. The view is still exhilarating and two years ago, I could still buy coffee from this truck and watch the river as I drank it.

Across the river is Savannakhet, another favorite spot, where Laos people are separated from their Thai relatives only by the border formed by the Mekong. The language, the food, the friendliness is the same as it is across the Friendship Bridge that takes me over the river into another country.

Along the river, a short van ride away is Nakhon Phanom, I still miss that lovely, peaceful place.

And there's Korat, where I always stop and spend a day or two before going on to the Mekong cities.

Then there are the people and places I see from a bus window as I travel through Isaan. They haunt me as much as the places I've spent time in.

I think of the small towns that the buses pull into at dusk, where I think briefly of getting off, finding a room, and staying for a while. Someday I will.

But for now, I'm grateful for the knowledge that Bangkok is only a pale reflection of the rest of the country. All that is being erased there is still thriving and vital in smaller cities, tiny towns. Next time I'll skip the capital and go to Thailand.

Cemetery of Splendor, Graveyard of Hope

“Developing country” is a description that is almost completely owned by Thailand. The development is raw: tall buildings of striking design tower over tin shacks that house construction workers, their families, and their dogs; ramshackle buses stand still, paralyzed by traffic under the elevated tracks of the Skytrain; children wearing the uniforms of prestigious private schools have after- school snacks in shopping malls of regal splendor while their less fortunate counterparts sell flowers on the streets outside. It’s become a photo gallery of traveler’s clichés: barefooted monks strolling past Tiffany’s, a Mercedes pulling up to buy food from a street vendor’s cart, the homeowners selling their recyclable papers and cans for what amounts to pennies to a man in tattered clothing who drives from house to house on a motor-scooter with a wooden platform tacked onto the back where he places his gleanings.

Development is less stark but always present in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film about his home country, Cemetery of Splendor. He has set it in Khon Kaen, the major city in Thailand’s Northeast and one of the country’s largest, but the movie’s setting is rural. An improvised hospital that has been put in an abandoned school building sits beside a lake, surrounded by trees and near a small temple. Across the water, the shadows of modern buildings break the dome of open sky that features heavily in the film; in a setting this placidly bucolic, days are given drama only from the storms that might break from the puffy-cotton clouds.

The silence is broken by the daily noise of construction equipment that excavate a large piece of ground near the hospital. Nobody knows why, nobody seems to care. It’s a government secret, one person speculates, so secret that there’s no need to hide what’s being done. In the hospital are beds filled with soldiers, spellbound men who spend most of their time in sleep that resembles a coma. Body functions take place without interrupting their slumber; catheters drain urine, and erections caused by dreams are noted with amusement by the hospital staff. The men awaken long enough to eat something and often collapse facedown into their plates midmeal.

Like all of Apichatpong’s movies, this is one is surreal and demands more than one viewing to appreciate. The film’s pace mirrors the lassitude of a Thai afternoon, its unending hours punctuated by meals and snacks and random snatches of chatter. The conversations, though brief, are telling ones. Beautiful ghosts, figures venerated in a local shrine, come to one of the hospital volunteers to tell her that the hospital is built upon the burial ground of past kings who are sapping the energy of the sleeping soldiers to fight ghostly battles; the men will never awaken fully. A young psychic has been summoned to their bedsides to penetrate their dreams and offers to lead the volunteer into the sleeping world of the soldier she has informally adopted as her son. It is a palatial vision, more glorious than anything the volunteer has dreamed of herself, and as the psychic reveals the soldier’s dream world, the volunteer traces her own memories on the grounds of what was once her schoolyard.

Both journeys are equally spectral; a former bomb shelter for children who were threatened by the war in nearby Laos still stands in place near broken statues that filled the grounds of the ancient kings who once ruled this place. These remnants of history, these provinces of memory, are all fragile and doomed, threatened by the buildings that are making their slow progression across the city and the escalators within them that carry mute and passive shoppers, the mysterious backhoes that scoop sacred ground from a royal cemetery.

On one lazy afternoon, the hospital volunteer shares a meal with her adopted soldier-son, who quotes the famous maxim of the revered historical monarch, King Ramkhamhaeng, “There is fish In the river, rice in the fields.” “Rice in the fields and then there is nothing,” is her response, which would be a criminal act of lese majeste in Thailand.

At the end of the movie, she and the soldier exchange dreams. Whatever she is given remains a secret but it has stripped the beauty from her aging face. The close of the story shows her sitting near the excavation site, her eyes staring fixedly at some terrible vision that only she can see.

Apichatpong’s subtleties are rooted in the culture that shaped him and are obvious enough to Thai citizens that his films are unavailable in the Kingdom. He has said that the current political repression means that he can no longer work in his birthplace, that Cemetery of Splendor will be the last movie that he makes in Thailand. As for the audiences who are puzzled by his work, the hospital volunteer has words for them, in English. “You’re a foreigner,” she tells her American husband, “You just don’t get it, honey.”

Stepping on Seattle's Dreams

Yesterday I read about an Ethiopian spice grocer who will be displaced by Vulcan’s purchase of Promenade 23, along with some other small businesses and the only supermarket to serve that part of Jackson Street, the Red Apple. Since I haven’t been to that neighborhood since I moved, even though it’s much closer to me now, I decided to explore in that direction.

This is an old neighborhood, and a graceful one. The Langston Hughes Community Center is a cultural anchor and the Sojourner Truth Library combines Carnegie elegance with a downstairs addition that is flooded with light from skylights and offers seating on modern red sofas. The streets are quiet and it’s difficult to remember that it’s a quick walk from them to downtown Seattle.

Jackson Street is peppered with entrepreneurial success stories that stand out among the Walgreens and Starbucks that have sprouted there. Craft beer from Standard Brewery is showing up in restaurants; it soon will offer food as well as fresh-brewed beer in an expanded setting. Nearby in a dusty shopfront, an Ethiopian lady sells what people have told me is the best fried chicken in the city, and I came away yesterday with almost an entire chicken for less than eight dollars. She sells the Ethiopian version of samosas too, sambusas, and little coconut handpies that are made locally, are consumed in two bites, and could prove to be addictive. A bit further down the street is Two Big Blondes, a consignment shop that sells designer wear; 14 is the smallest size in the place.

The Starbucks is one of the few I’ve seen in Seattle with patio seating and it always seems to have people in it who are savoring their coffee, not gulping it on the run. Across the street the Red Apple sells food for families—ice cream in tubs, racks of ribs ready for barbecue grills, reasonably priced produce, and catfish sandwiches for instant picnics. When I lived in Chinatown, I often walked here in the summer, uphill most of the way, to escape the high prices and Japanese junk food of Uwajimaya.

Then there is the ill-fated shopping center, which the Seattle Times in their usual burst of inaccuracy said contained “beauty salons, barbers, and nonprofits.” They weren’t completely wrong, but except for the nonprofits, the other enumerated businesses are singular, not plural. They failed to mention the one clothing store, whose window announces that they offer in-house teeshirt and hat printing and bears a phone number for those who are in the market for custom gold teeth. There is a Seattle Neighborhood Service Center and a place that takes donations of used children’s clothing—and then there is East African Imports and Restaurant.

The minute I walked in, my nose never wanted to leave. The smells came in a barrage and they prickled my nostrils with scents I recognized and those that were completely new to me. Bags of powders and flour and unroasted coffee beans crowded the shelves, along with stovetop grills for injera, kettles and coffee pots in graceful shapes and delicate cup and saucer sets and pans to roast the coffee beans. Colorful baskets of different sizes were heaped in a container at the front of the shop, with much larger ones filling the shelves. Clothing, most of it beautifully embroidered, hung on the few patches of wall that were not covered with shelving.

This was a store for serious cooks and I was dazzled by the world they knew how to negotiate with skill and confidence. When the man behind the counter asked if I had questions, I told him I had too many to answer in one visit, and then assailed him with the most insistent ones.

There is a restaurant partitioned off from the spice shop, with cozy booths and small tables and a menu that gave descriptions of the 22 dishes that can be eaten there. The coffee is hand-roasted and freshly brewed and can be had for breakfast, since this spot opens every day at 9:30.

This shop and restaurant aren’t just a community resource. It ought to be a city treasure. Instead it has at best eleven more months, less if Vulcan is allowed to proceed with their plans apace. It will be replaced by 570 apartments with underground parking and as a sop to the existing local community, a plaza.

In an area where lovely old houses with yards are the predominant feature, a plaza doesn’t seem as though it is what the residents are going to yearn for—especially when it replaces a very well-stocked supermarket and a very good restaurant and a spice shop that is unique in the area.

Arguably even more alarming is the idea of at least 570 new residents and probably more, depending on the size of those apartments, each with a car to keep safe in that underground parking area. Jackson Street is a major thoroughfare that is filled with several well-used bus routes and now the streetcar. Anyone who has seen what happens in the area from South Lake Union to lower Queen Anne in the late afternoon can only shudder at the thought of almost 600 hundred new drivers taking to Jackson Street every day. Even if there were no other neighborhood impact, this is enough to make Vulcan’s vision for this neighborhood one that needs severe alteration.

It also makes me wonder what exactly is being planned for the new and improved Yesler Terrace project. The silence that surrounds this has been broken, to my knowledge at any rate, by an announcement that the development will be similar to that of South Lake Union. To someone who has lived off Jackson for over a decade and who loves it, this is news to chill my blood. Perhaps yours too?

Paul Allen’s vision for Seattle is not mine. This billionaire is stepping on the dreams of those less fortunate than he—and that is almost everybody who lives in this city.

                  

Granted Wishes at Dong Thap

Ask and ye shall be given--Dong Thap was given to me yesterday after my plea for pho with flavor and I see no reason to ever eat this dish anyplace else in Seattle. Pho in this place bears no resemblance to any I've ever eaten.

First of all there are those fresh made in house noodles. Second is their shape--flat, not round--"This is the shape we use in Vietnam,"said the Saigon-born owner, "Most places here use dried noodles and they are usually rounded." Third is the broth, rich with slow-cooked bones and aromatic with spices which are used with subtlety but are present on the tongue while eating. Then there is the meat--the brisket and meatballs that I chose from the twenty selections on the menu were perfect, not stringy, not dry, completely delicious.

"Never give up on pho. It is wonderful,"the beautiful lady behind the counter said before I left. Yes, it is--if you eat it at Dong Thap.

Desperately Seeking Pho, Long-term Relationship Desired

Yesterday I felt depleted and lackluster and in need of a meal, so I went to Lemongrass for soup. It is a downmarket place when compared to Eric Banh’s joints that are quite nearby, and I figured the only reason for its survival would be its food. A month earlier I’d eaten fried fish with tamarind sauce that had tasted very good to me so it seemed a plausible spot for a hot and restorative meal when necessary—and right now seemed very necessary. The wind was raw and I had prudently worn my rain coat which wasn’t warm enough. I walked in and ordered my food, feeling happy that I was given a seat near the streetside window. When the waitress offered to pull down the shade to spare me from the tanning quality of sunlight, I felt hopeful. If she believed darkness was a positive asset, then maybe the cook would believe in serving the true food of Vietnam.

I know nothing at all about how Vietnamese food should taste, only that the ingredients need to be very fresh and that fish sauce is as much of a staple in that country as it is in Thailand. I come to it as most people approach Thai food in America. If it pleases my palate, then I call it good.

I’d always avoided pho after my first few bowls of it, deciding it was far too subtle for me, and ate bun bo hue instead, which is hearty and flavorful and packs a punch of heat. The first bowl of it that I ever ate had a jolt of fish paste, which I really liked and have never encountered again. Still it pleased me more than pho, which tasted like nothing at all but the herbs that accompanied it. “Too refined for me,” I decided.

Then my friend Kim came to town and we went to eat Eric Banh’s acclaimed pho at Ba Bar. After several spoonsful she told me politely, “This is good soup, but it isn’t good pho. There’s no spice in this broth.”

I was surprised because I had never realized that pho’s broth should taste like anything other than slightly salted stock. When Kim told me it should have notes of things like cinnamon as its anchor, I felt cheated and when I saw that Lemongrass had a five-spice chicken soup, I ordered it.

It wasn’t pho and the broth was a vegetable one, but it did say five-spice and I felt optimistic. I sipped my tamarind soda and looked at the other patrons. Few of them were white and that made me even happier. I smiled at the plate of mint, basil, jalapeno pepper, and bean sprouts, with its generous slice of lime and remembered the Vietnamese restaurant in Hong Kong that had told me they had no lime when I had requested it for my meal. This place had already passed that hurdle successfully.

My soup arrived in a bowl that resembled a small basin and I covered it with the herbs, sniffing happily as they released their scents. I stirred it all with my chopsticks and found three large chunks of roasted chicken with its once-crisp skin still attached. It detached from the bone easily, dark meat that hadn’t become hard and dry. It all tasted quite comforting, but where were the five-spice flavors?

They weren’t there, or if they were, they were far too delicate for me to detect. What I had in my bowl was typically Seattle pho, a light broth with a clump of rice noodles that clung together in chummy fashion at the bottom of my bowl. The difference was the roasted chicken.

It tasted good, although toward the end I wished I had chili sauce on my table to jazz up broth that had become tepid. But I ate it all and assured the boy who came to clear away the dishes that he had probably saved my life.

I left a sizable tip and went away feeling fed. Whether I was well fed or not, I have no way of knowing. I only know I was given a meal in a bowl that tasted good and made me feel much better than I had before I ate it.

And isn’t this the best that we can ask of a restaurant, especially an unpretentious neighborhood joint with low prices? In some ways I would say yes. In other ways I feel cheated. I would bet that every cook in a Seattle Vietnamese restaurant goes home and puts spices in their pho, ones that I found in a cookbook on my bookshelf. Pho contains a cinnamon stick, coriander and fennel seeds, anise and cardamom pods, and whole cloves, tied up in cheesecloth and simmered for an hour in the broth. They can be bought in a little package at a local Vietnamese grocery. I know that’s true because I bought them myself at Viet Wah recently to put in a Thai dish that I made at home.

Even when Vietnamese restaurants first appeared on US shores, these spices were available, but I’ve never detected any of those familiar flavors in a bowl of pho. They are all well known to American palates. Why aren’t they used? Is it because US eaters associate those spices with pies and recoiled from them in soup?

But then if eaters don’t know they should be there, does it matter if they are missing? As someone who has never cared for pho, I say yes. If I enjoyed the taste of salted water that is augmented with a handful of fresh herbs and the meat that floats in the broth, I’d say who cares?

And this is the question for me: is it wrong to criticize Americanized Asian dishes? They serve a purpose and make people happy. What’s not to love? But I do think it’s unfair that I now have to search for pho that has retained its traditional flavors in a city with acres of places that serve a watered down version of the real thing.