It's already the day before Christmas in Bangkok and in Hong Kong. In Seattle daylight is just beginning to brighten at a little past ten am on the 23rd. At this time of day, the sky outside my window belongs to the birds--sometimes seagulls the size of small puppies soar rather menacingly past my view. They're big enough to smash through the glass if they wanted to. Fortunately they seem to be bird brains.
This time of year for me is a festival of light and love. I wish I lived somewhere that would allow me to build a bonfire. Instead I light candles and jam clear lights, along with glittering, multi-colored balls, into a jar. I bake things that make my small apartment smell of ginger, cinnamon, and dark molasses. I wrap gifts for people I love with a lot of enthusiasm and very little artfulness. All of this is what Christmas means to me.
In Bangkok, New Year's is the time that all of this happens and that for me that makes complete sense. One year a friend invited me to her house on New Year's Eve. Her entire extended family was there, including a baby; we ate to the point of coma-risk and I was home well before midnight. It was the perfect way to end a year.
Somewhere not too far from my quiet little neighborhood, credit cards are flashing brightly and cash terminals are blazing hot. This holiday has become a retail frenzy, something I'm grateful not to be part of. I'm content to watch the light and be as quiet as possible as the year ends.
Calendars create artificial divisions to time. What does it mean that 2012 is over and 2013 begins? What counts is the fading of light and its slow rebuilding of strength. We fill our shortest days with attempts to grant each other's wishes, while our real wish at this time is that the sun will come back.
In Thailand, during an eclipse, people make offerings to Rahu, the god of darkness. Black food is put with candles and incense to appease his ravenous appetite so he won't devour the sun (or the moon, as the case may be.) In this part of the world, we send out light and love and as much joy as we can muster. Without those offerings, who knows if the sun would ever return?
My array of food on the 25th won't include a black chicken but I hope it will still pass muster. In my window, candles will gleam into the darkness, asking for a longer, larger light for the whole world.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Monday, December 17, 2012
Fixing What is Broken
In a weekend filled with grief and horror, questions arose. When did weapons made for warfare become a consumer item? As someone who grew up in a "gun culture," where a 30.06 meant food on the table and I learned to handle a 22 by the time I was ten, I have a respect for rifles and people who know how to use them properly. That respect doesn't extend to hand guns and automatic and semi-automatic weapons; the only reason why they have become part of our social fabric is money, big money. These firearms don't come cheap--somebody is profiting heavily from their sales, and the almost 95,000 people who have been shot by guns this year are paying the price.
It isn't yet 10 am PST as I write this and 144 people have already been shot by guns today. By the time I finish writing this post, that figure will have increased. It is found at http://www.bradycampaign.org/ and it's a figure that should be reported over the radio and television news just the same way as the Dow Industrial Average is. It is an indicator of who we are and what we are letting ourselves become.
In my mediocre local paper was another horrible statistic. 45 million Americans use Medicare, and the costs of that program are sinking the national budget, even before the full wave of Baby Boomers have hit the system. The reason? Escalating health care costs, especially the cost of prescription drugs, in what has become a medical industry..
I have no health insurance. I haven't for over twenty years. The last time I went for a physical examination, it took almost two hours, what with the Pap smear and the litany of questions about my personal life that the doctor was required by law to ask ("Are you in danger of physical abuse in your home?"). Fortunately I'm rarely ill.
The last time I was truly sick, I lived in Bangkok. A virus had settled in my chest and my temperature refused to go back to normal. I lurched down to a neighborhood clinic where I was given a shot of an antibiotic, more antibiotics in pills, and something to help me sleep. Total cost? Right around twelve dollars for everything--and the doctor provided the pills--I had no need to totter on to a pharmacy. Done.
This is the medical care of my childhood. It is no longer what we receive in the U.S. Our healthcare involves high priced drugs that pharmaceutical companies persuade physicians to prescribe and high-tech machines that may or may not be useful. (See my earlier post about the baby who contradicted the fetal monitoring equipment.) Once again, big money, high profits, and we're the ones to get a kick in the teeth.
Pharmaceutical companies battle against generic drugs, and cheaper pricing for third-world countries. Doctors charge over $100 for an office visit. This is madness.
Six-year-old children were cut down in a school by semi-automatic gunfire; the killer was someone who needed psychiatric care and didn't receive it. This is madness.
And the insanity is related by profits. No matter what the NRA and the AMA assert, it's time for regulation, price controls, and a full measure of sanity. Let's work on this.
(And by the way, that figure of how many people have been shot today? It's now at 151. It's 10:30 am in Seattle.)
It isn't yet 10 am PST as I write this and 144 people have already been shot by guns today. By the time I finish writing this post, that figure will have increased. It is found at http://www.bradycampaign.org/ and it's a figure that should be reported over the radio and television news just the same way as the Dow Industrial Average is. It is an indicator of who we are and what we are letting ourselves become.
In my mediocre local paper was another horrible statistic. 45 million Americans use Medicare, and the costs of that program are sinking the national budget, even before the full wave of Baby Boomers have hit the system. The reason? Escalating health care costs, especially the cost of prescription drugs, in what has become a medical industry..
I have no health insurance. I haven't for over twenty years. The last time I went for a physical examination, it took almost two hours, what with the Pap smear and the litany of questions about my personal life that the doctor was required by law to ask ("Are you in danger of physical abuse in your home?"). Fortunately I'm rarely ill.
The last time I was truly sick, I lived in Bangkok. A virus had settled in my chest and my temperature refused to go back to normal. I lurched down to a neighborhood clinic where I was given a shot of an antibiotic, more antibiotics in pills, and something to help me sleep. Total cost? Right around twelve dollars for everything--and the doctor provided the pills--I had no need to totter on to a pharmacy. Done.
This is the medical care of my childhood. It is no longer what we receive in the U.S. Our healthcare involves high priced drugs that pharmaceutical companies persuade physicians to prescribe and high-tech machines that may or may not be useful. (See my earlier post about the baby who contradicted the fetal monitoring equipment.) Once again, big money, high profits, and we're the ones to get a kick in the teeth.
Pharmaceutical companies battle against generic drugs, and cheaper pricing for third-world countries. Doctors charge over $100 for an office visit. This is madness.
Six-year-old children were cut down in a school by semi-automatic gunfire; the killer was someone who needed psychiatric care and didn't receive it. This is madness.
And the insanity is related by profits. No matter what the NRA and the AMA assert, it's time for regulation, price controls, and a full measure of sanity. Let's work on this.
(And by the way, that figure of how many people have been shot today? It's now at 151. It's 10:30 am in Seattle.)
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Power
When I was much younger, I spent a fair amount of time observing people at Book Expo America, the annual gathering of people in the book business. Publishers took center stage at this event and women were prominent among them. What intrigued me was that the pretty women were almost all on their way up--or hoped they were; the women who had real clout had moved far beyond the issue of how they looked. The ultimate sign of power seemed to be how much physical weight a woman carried while still wielding clout. Their words and actions were significant enough that they needed no other attractions. They fascinated me.
At about the same time, I read a resonant sentence written by Nora Ephron that said something along the lines of now that she was in middle-age, she noticed her pretty friends complained about losing their looks while she on the contrary was finding hers. I interpreted that as an encouraging message: that bone structure and eyes and enthusiasm and engagement with life would outlive more conventional forms of good looks. The truth was sadder than that; both Nora and I still were preoccupied with how we looked, far beyond being neat, clean, and well-groomed. I was pulled in by any department store cosmetic counter that caught my eye,and Ms. Ephron?
In an essay about beauty and cosmetic treatments in the current issue of Marie Claire, a woman who was a "family friend," divulges that "Ephron had often shown up at a dinner or party looking younger than the last time I'd seen her." At this stage of her life, Nora Ephron's every word was assured its publication, she had written, directed, and produced a number of wildly popular movies, she was a force to be reckoned with on both coasts of her native land. If any woman (other than Hillary Clinton) had the power and privilege to age naturally, Nora was that woman. The author of the essay salutes "her refusal to let her appearance slip and fall short of her youthful curiosity." Me? I tend to agree more with Isabelle Rosellini, quoted in the same essay as saying, "Is this the new feet binding? Is this a new way to tell women, You are ugly deep down, you should be this and this, and give a lot of other standards that are impossible to reach because the main problem is misogyny?"
The irony is not lost on me that I came across this provocative bit of examination in a fashion and beauty magazine that I bought to cheer myself up on a grey winter afternoon.
Perhaps it's easier to age for women who have never been pretty to begin with; we have had to develop other ways of being attractive, features that don't require Botox or a surgeon's knife to maintain. In fact, attempting to hang on to youthful charms is not just a waste of time and money--it's a source of incredible dissatisfaction. As every woman knows, those youthful charms were based upon being new, shiny, and relatively untouched; it's the irresistible attraction of a field of freshly fallen snow that holds no footprints.
Experience. Humor. Intelligence. Love. Talent. Generosity. Enjoyment. If I had a daughter, this is what I would teach her to carry into age. Clothes? Makeup? Of course--but for fun, for amusement, not because, as the essay in Marie Claire concluded, because those things will make us "the generation that simply will not be put out to pasture." Power doesn't come from an unwrinkled face--just ask Georgia O'Keefe.
At about the same time, I read a resonant sentence written by Nora Ephron that said something along the lines of now that she was in middle-age, she noticed her pretty friends complained about losing their looks while she on the contrary was finding hers. I interpreted that as an encouraging message: that bone structure and eyes and enthusiasm and engagement with life would outlive more conventional forms of good looks. The truth was sadder than that; both Nora and I still were preoccupied with how we looked, far beyond being neat, clean, and well-groomed. I was pulled in by any department store cosmetic counter that caught my eye,and Ms. Ephron?
In an essay about beauty and cosmetic treatments in the current issue of Marie Claire, a woman who was a "family friend," divulges that "Ephron had often shown up at a dinner or party looking younger than the last time I'd seen her." At this stage of her life, Nora Ephron's every word was assured its publication, she had written, directed, and produced a number of wildly popular movies, she was a force to be reckoned with on both coasts of her native land. If any woman (other than Hillary Clinton) had the power and privilege to age naturally, Nora was that woman. The author of the essay salutes "her refusal to let her appearance slip and fall short of her youthful curiosity." Me? I tend to agree more with Isabelle Rosellini, quoted in the same essay as saying, "Is this the new feet binding? Is this a new way to tell women, You are ugly deep down, you should be this and this, and give a lot of other standards that are impossible to reach because the main problem is misogyny?"
The irony is not lost on me that I came across this provocative bit of examination in a fashion and beauty magazine that I bought to cheer myself up on a grey winter afternoon.
Perhaps it's easier to age for women who have never been pretty to begin with; we have had to develop other ways of being attractive, features that don't require Botox or a surgeon's knife to maintain. In fact, attempting to hang on to youthful charms is not just a waste of time and money--it's a source of incredible dissatisfaction. As every woman knows, those youthful charms were based upon being new, shiny, and relatively untouched; it's the irresistible attraction of a field of freshly fallen snow that holds no footprints.
Experience. Humor. Intelligence. Love. Talent. Generosity. Enjoyment. If I had a daughter, this is what I would teach her to carry into age. Clothes? Makeup? Of course--but for fun, for amusement, not because, as the essay in Marie Claire concluded, because those things will make us "the generation that simply will not be put out to pasture." Power doesn't come from an unwrinkled face--just ask Georgia O'Keefe.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
What a Drag It Is Getting Old (but does it have to be?)
My mother-in-law was a woman I loved and admired and still do, years after she died. We didn't always agree on many things--"His imagination could use some stunting," she told me once, when I said that TV would stunt my little boy's imagination and my candy-free Easter baskets (filled with many other delights that weren't edible) were rendered useless when she showed up with baskets for each of my children overflowing with sugar and green slime in a toy garbage can. She followed this up by immediately showing them disgusting things they could do with the slime. They loved it and I continued to love her.
My mother-in-law slowly lost her memory. Her husband had to face the death of their oldest son alone. "You'd think all those flowers would tell her something," he grumbled in frustration and heartbreak. She rarely spoke but she laughed often. Even locked in Alzheimer's, Wanda Brown loved life.
I think of her often as I grow older. When she was middle-aged, her equanimity and humor and joy made me know at twenty-five that forty-five didn't have to mean becoming Whistler's Mother. And I hope I can savor life as jubilantly as she did up until the end.
Wanda Brown went from being a beautiful girl to a chubby little snowball but when I tried to keep up with her once in an aerobics class when she was in her fifties and I in my early thirties, I was crippled for a week. She was just fine. We both loved to sing but she had the guts to sing in public behind a microphone. She divorced her handsome husband with the wandering eyes and remarried him a decade or so later after he had learned his lesson. She made lemon cookies and bootleg Kahlua and one Christmas sewed gaucho pants for all of her daughters. I got a pair too. "I'd rather gain one than lose one," she said about her children's choice of spouses. With eight children, some of whom married more than once, she gained quite a few extras.
She loved to read. She loved to dance. She loved the Easter Egg Hunt in the snow that she put on every year for her grandchildren. Her legacy is one of generous, unconditional, motherly love, given by a woman whose own mother died young.
She stood beside me when I was in labor with my first baby right up until I went into the delivery room. My second came unexpectedly; the fetal monitoring machine refused to acknowledge his imminent arrival and Wanda left me to go back to work, I asked her to call her son to come to the hospital right away and she did. "I should have known the baby was coming when you told me to call Jimmy," she said later.
We are very different and I can never hope to be the woman Wanda was. But I can damn well try to follow her example as much as I can. Maybe I should start with baking lemon cookies...
My mother-in-law slowly lost her memory. Her husband had to face the death of their oldest son alone. "You'd think all those flowers would tell her something," he grumbled in frustration and heartbreak. She rarely spoke but she laughed often. Even locked in Alzheimer's, Wanda Brown loved life.
I think of her often as I grow older. When she was middle-aged, her equanimity and humor and joy made me know at twenty-five that forty-five didn't have to mean becoming Whistler's Mother. And I hope I can savor life as jubilantly as she did up until the end.
Wanda Brown went from being a beautiful girl to a chubby little snowball but when I tried to keep up with her once in an aerobics class when she was in her fifties and I in my early thirties, I was crippled for a week. She was just fine. We both loved to sing but she had the guts to sing in public behind a microphone. She divorced her handsome husband with the wandering eyes and remarried him a decade or so later after he had learned his lesson. She made lemon cookies and bootleg Kahlua and one Christmas sewed gaucho pants for all of her daughters. I got a pair too. "I'd rather gain one than lose one," she said about her children's choice of spouses. With eight children, some of whom married more than once, she gained quite a few extras.
She loved to read. She loved to dance. She loved the Easter Egg Hunt in the snow that she put on every year for her grandchildren. Her legacy is one of generous, unconditional, motherly love, given by a woman whose own mother died young.
She stood beside me when I was in labor with my first baby right up until I went into the delivery room. My second came unexpectedly; the fetal monitoring machine refused to acknowledge his imminent arrival and Wanda left me to go back to work, I asked her to call her son to come to the hospital right away and she did. "I should have known the baby was coming when you told me to call Jimmy," she said later.
We are very different and I can never hope to be the woman Wanda was. But I can damn well try to follow her example as much as I can. Maybe I should start with baking lemon cookies...
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Unabashedly Sentimental
Yesterday I was rushing to the post office when I tripped on an uneven bit of sidewalk and fell on one knee, my weight twisting the booted ankle of my other leg. My slacks were torn, I was embarrassed, and passersby walked around me, not seeming to notice but actually sparing me further humiliation--after all, I was clearly unhurt.
As I walked on, I was relieved to find that my ankle hadn't become sprained or strained and the graze on my knee wasn't very deep. It wasn't until I completed my errand and began to return home that I reached in my pocket for my apartment keys. They were gone--apparently my balance wasn't the only thing I'd lost a few minutes earlier.
I hurried back to the scene of my spill which had taken place near the large glass window of a residential hotel. Elderly ladies frequently sat in the lobby and watched the world whirl by. Perhaps one of them had seen my keys rocket away and had picked them up--but she would have shouted the news to me as I hobbled away. I began to scan the sidewalk with little hope, telling myself silently precisely how idiotic I had been not to zip the keys into my handbag.
They were gone. There was nothing metallic gleaming on the cement where I'd fallen. I raised my head, feeling a little sick, when a man working nearby, small, smiling, Southeast Asian, asked "Did you lose your keys?"
"Yes," I admitted and he said "I found them. I've been waiting for you to come back so I would be sure that the right person got them." He pointed to a sign tacked to a tree at the side of the street; hanging from one of the tacks was a set of keys that belonged to me. He handed them to me. "When you lose your keys, you're in big trouble," he said and I thanked him with every particle of gratitude that I possessed.
I took a few steps away, then turned back with five dollars in my hand. As I approached him, he backed away. "No," he told me. "You are so kind," I said again, and an old man walking past smiled and said "Vietnam people are good." We all three smiled at each other and once again I felt a deep sense of joy for being lucky enough to live in my neighborhood.
Merry Christmas to all. May we all care for each other as much as the man on the street did for me yesterday.
As I walked on, I was relieved to find that my ankle hadn't become sprained or strained and the graze on my knee wasn't very deep. It wasn't until I completed my errand and began to return home that I reached in my pocket for my apartment keys. They were gone--apparently my balance wasn't the only thing I'd lost a few minutes earlier.
I hurried back to the scene of my spill which had taken place near the large glass window of a residential hotel. Elderly ladies frequently sat in the lobby and watched the world whirl by. Perhaps one of them had seen my keys rocket away and had picked them up--but she would have shouted the news to me as I hobbled away. I began to scan the sidewalk with little hope, telling myself silently precisely how idiotic I had been not to zip the keys into my handbag.
They were gone. There was nothing metallic gleaming on the cement where I'd fallen. I raised my head, feeling a little sick, when a man working nearby, small, smiling, Southeast Asian, asked "Did you lose your keys?"
"Yes," I admitted and he said "I found them. I've been waiting for you to come back so I would be sure that the right person got them." He pointed to a sign tacked to a tree at the side of the street; hanging from one of the tacks was a set of keys that belonged to me. He handed them to me. "When you lose your keys, you're in big trouble," he said and I thanked him with every particle of gratitude that I possessed.
I took a few steps away, then turned back with five dollars in my hand. As I approached him, he backed away. "No," he told me. "You are so kind," I said again, and an old man walking past smiled and said "Vietnam people are good." We all three smiled at each other and once again I felt a deep sense of joy for being lucky enough to live in my neighborhood.
Merry Christmas to all. May we all care for each other as much as the man on the street did for me yesterday.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Switching Universes
Today is Thursday but it doesn't feel like it. I'm still stuck in Sunday and I'm on Bangkok time. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday have been one long, unending, hallucinatory day and I'm ready for it to be over any time now.
On Sunday morning, unable to eat and fighting tears, I left Bangkok. I can't count how many times I've done that but it's still never easy. Even though I know I'll be back, it's always difficult to get in that taxi and drive away from my neighborhood.
And I always return to that neighborhood. It isn't really mine, but I belong to it. People there are used to seeing me pop up and then go away again. They know why I do and they all approve my decision to live near my family. Anything else to them is pure insanity.
The guy who makes the best chicken rice in the world is assisted in his shop by his adult daughter. The woman who sells more fruit than magazines than she used to frequently is given a day off by her son and daughter. The ladies who make morning noodles and fresh orange juice every day have their granddaughter with them as they work. (She used to be in a playpen, then she began to walk around and assess the sociability of the customers, these days she drops in when she's not in school--she's a young coed of three and a half.) My dearly beloved newspaper lady, now in her seventies, is occasionally replaced by her middle-aged son so that she can go upstairs to the shophouse behind her sidewalk table and take a nap. If he doesn't show up, she naps at the table, and laughs about it later.
Family is integral to Thai culture. People who leave home to make a living elsewhere return when they can. A woman I know who is in her late thirties will soon move to the US to be with her American husband; she's worried about living so far from the mother with whom she has conducted shrieking battles for decades. One of the most modern families I know in Bangkok still come together frequently in the apartment building that they own. When I lived among Thai people without my children--or at least a husband--I was an inexplicable anomaly. Living in that country made me understand why a cloudy, chilly corner of the US has become my real home.
And yet when I go to Bangkok, it always provides a strange feeling. Within two weeks, I was ready to come home. At the end of four, "home" was becoming a kind of dream state. I slowly enter the looking glass when I am in Bangkok. I enter another life, a different kind of time that shimmers and bounces like jello, an alternate behavior system in which I move more slowly and speak with deliberation, whether in English or (bad) Thai. My life at home, although I frequently and passionately miss it, becomes shadowy; my daily routines there seem almost fictional.
This doesn't happen in Hong Kong. That city has a Western pace and overlay that makes it less of a jolting change to come there from the States--plus I speak no Cantonese at all. "When you learn another language, you become another person," Haruki Murakami said. And it's true that in my highly imperfect Thai, and in the English I speak in Bangkok, I am a different facet of the person I am--more polite, more thoughtful, more accepting. It's a change that is surprising and profound, no matter how often it happens.
Home now, I'm still living through the unending day that jetlag provides, awake and hungry by 3 am, still feeling that ghostly vertigo that comes with motion sickness, amazed and delighted by things that were taken for granted six weeks ago. I wish I knew why I have to leave so thoroughly to be able to appreciate what I have--but I did and I do. And I probably will do it again.
On Sunday morning, unable to eat and fighting tears, I left Bangkok. I can't count how many times I've done that but it's still never easy. Even though I know I'll be back, it's always difficult to get in that taxi and drive away from my neighborhood.
And I always return to that neighborhood. It isn't really mine, but I belong to it. People there are used to seeing me pop up and then go away again. They know why I do and they all approve my decision to live near my family. Anything else to them is pure insanity.
The guy who makes the best chicken rice in the world is assisted in his shop by his adult daughter. The woman who sells more fruit than magazines than she used to frequently is given a day off by her son and daughter. The ladies who make morning noodles and fresh orange juice every day have their granddaughter with them as they work. (She used to be in a playpen, then she began to walk around and assess the sociability of the customers, these days she drops in when she's not in school--she's a young coed of three and a half.) My dearly beloved newspaper lady, now in her seventies, is occasionally replaced by her middle-aged son so that she can go upstairs to the shophouse behind her sidewalk table and take a nap. If he doesn't show up, she naps at the table, and laughs about it later.
Family is integral to Thai culture. People who leave home to make a living elsewhere return when they can. A woman I know who is in her late thirties will soon move to the US to be with her American husband; she's worried about living so far from the mother with whom she has conducted shrieking battles for decades. One of the most modern families I know in Bangkok still come together frequently in the apartment building that they own. When I lived among Thai people without my children--or at least a husband--I was an inexplicable anomaly. Living in that country made me understand why a cloudy, chilly corner of the US has become my real home.
And yet when I go to Bangkok, it always provides a strange feeling. Within two weeks, I was ready to come home. At the end of four, "home" was becoming a kind of dream state. I slowly enter the looking glass when I am in Bangkok. I enter another life, a different kind of time that shimmers and bounces like jello, an alternate behavior system in which I move more slowly and speak with deliberation, whether in English or (bad) Thai. My life at home, although I frequently and passionately miss it, becomes shadowy; my daily routines there seem almost fictional.
This doesn't happen in Hong Kong. That city has a Western pace and overlay that makes it less of a jolting change to come there from the States--plus I speak no Cantonese at all. "When you learn another language, you become another person," Haruki Murakami said. And it's true that in my highly imperfect Thai, and in the English I speak in Bangkok, I am a different facet of the person I am--more polite, more thoughtful, more accepting. It's a change that is surprising and profound, no matter how often it happens.
Home now, I'm still living through the unending day that jetlag provides, awake and hungry by 3 am, still feeling that ghostly vertigo that comes with motion sickness, amazed and delighted by things that were taken for granted six weeks ago. I wish I knew why I have to leave so thoroughly to be able to appreciate what I have--but I did and I do. And I probably will do it again.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Seventeen Years Later
Almost twenty years ago, I fell in love with a city. Bangkok in 2012 is wildly different from the way it was in 1985--but under its newly sophisticated gloss, some things remain the same. It's true that its small children no longer scream at the sight of a foreign face, and coffee is more in the mode of Starbucks than the caffeine-in-a-baggie that I used to carry around by its rubber-band handle, but there are still things that persist that I've always loved and still do.
1) Motorcycle taxi drivers-- Those intrepid entrepreneurs who have never let me down--they know where to go and how to get there. When in doubt, I look for the guys in the vests--and sometimes when I need a lift to my spirits rather than a lift to a destination, I turn to them. There's little that can't be cured by a motorcycle ride down a busy highway.
2) River boat whistles--A language of its own--stop, back up, go--imagine a jet plane where the co-pilot communicates with the pilot though a little tin whistle. On dry land, whistles are disappearing--no longer does every security guard use one at the sight of a vehicle. On the river, that piercing call is still a common language.
3) Little buses that resemble tin cans and think they are motorcycles--When I first came to Bangkok, the only thing my boss told me NOT to do was ride the little green buses. When I finally did, I was usually the only foreigner on board. Now they're orange.
4) Fruit sellers in pickup trucks with megaphones--The first time I heard this weird, disembodied call on a quiet soi, it woke me from a sound sleep and I was sure it meant a revolution was at hand. They still wake me but at least now I can understand the names they call.
5) The sting of chili and garlic fried in a wok--It isn't as pervasive as it used to be. It's hot, hard work--my favorite wok chef retired to run a business where she sits at a desk under airconditoning with her Alaskan husky by her side. I can't blame her but I wish that the art she practiced wasn't so hard to find in 21st century Bangkok.
6) Cute, cheap shoes--Everybody told me Thai shoes would be too small for me and that was sad because they were everywhere and they were fantastic. They still are--and somewhere along the line I courted instant humiliation, asked to try on a pair and to my great joy, they fit! They teach the nature of impermanence, since they last for fifteen minutes, but it's easy to practice non-attachment when replacements are so easy--and so much fun--to find.
7) Wet markets--Food and flowers and frivolity all in one place--I've furnished entire households from these sprawling collections of fresh fish and crockery and polyester sheets and alarm clocks and Buddha amulets. Hot and crowded and completely irresistible, despite Tesco Lotus and Carrefour, the markets prevail.
8) Fresh fruit carts--The best invention the world has ever known--pineapple, green mango, papaya, cantaloupe, watermelon, sliced and handed over in a plastic bag with a skewer and some chili powder and sugar as a garnish. I can't eat fruit anywhere else--nothing tastes like Thai fruit anywhere.
9) Isaan food--Instant picnic no matter where it's eaten. And no. You can't get it in the states--not even a ghost of the grilled chicken and catfish laab and green papaya salad or grilled fish with mango that is on every streetcorner in Bangkok.
10) 7/11--Where else can you buy minutes on your mobile phone, a bottle of Stoli or Johnny Walker, a jar of instant coffee, and a bucket of essentials to take to a monastery as an offering?
In October, there will be a whole new cluster of places to explore in Bangkok that have sprouted up over the past year, but this list is a large reason why I'm going back. My love affair with Bangkok is anchored by these things.
1) Motorcycle taxi drivers-- Those intrepid entrepreneurs who have never let me down--they know where to go and how to get there. When in doubt, I look for the guys in the vests--and sometimes when I need a lift to my spirits rather than a lift to a destination, I turn to them. There's little that can't be cured by a motorcycle ride down a busy highway.
2) River boat whistles--A language of its own--stop, back up, go--imagine a jet plane where the co-pilot communicates with the pilot though a little tin whistle. On dry land, whistles are disappearing--no longer does every security guard use one at the sight of a vehicle. On the river, that piercing call is still a common language.
3) Little buses that resemble tin cans and think they are motorcycles--When I first came to Bangkok, the only thing my boss told me NOT to do was ride the little green buses. When I finally did, I was usually the only foreigner on board. Now they're orange.
4) Fruit sellers in pickup trucks with megaphones--The first time I heard this weird, disembodied call on a quiet soi, it woke me from a sound sleep and I was sure it meant a revolution was at hand. They still wake me but at least now I can understand the names they call.
5) The sting of chili and garlic fried in a wok--It isn't as pervasive as it used to be. It's hot, hard work--my favorite wok chef retired to run a business where she sits at a desk under airconditoning with her Alaskan husky by her side. I can't blame her but I wish that the art she practiced wasn't so hard to find in 21st century Bangkok.
6) Cute, cheap shoes--Everybody told me Thai shoes would be too small for me and that was sad because they were everywhere and they were fantastic. They still are--and somewhere along the line I courted instant humiliation, asked to try on a pair and to my great joy, they fit! They teach the nature of impermanence, since they last for fifteen minutes, but it's easy to practice non-attachment when replacements are so easy--and so much fun--to find.
7) Wet markets--Food and flowers and frivolity all in one place--I've furnished entire households from these sprawling collections of fresh fish and crockery and polyester sheets and alarm clocks and Buddha amulets. Hot and crowded and completely irresistible, despite Tesco Lotus and Carrefour, the markets prevail.
8) Fresh fruit carts--The best invention the world has ever known--pineapple, green mango, papaya, cantaloupe, watermelon, sliced and handed over in a plastic bag with a skewer and some chili powder and sugar as a garnish. I can't eat fruit anywhere else--nothing tastes like Thai fruit anywhere.
9) Isaan food--Instant picnic no matter where it's eaten. And no. You can't get it in the states--not even a ghost of the grilled chicken and catfish laab and green papaya salad or grilled fish with mango that is on every streetcorner in Bangkok.
10) 7/11--Where else can you buy minutes on your mobile phone, a bottle of Stoli or Johnny Walker, a jar of instant coffee, and a bucket of essentials to take to a monastery as an offering?
In October, there will be a whole new cluster of places to explore in Bangkok that have sprouted up over the past year, but this list is a large reason why I'm going back. My love affair with Bangkok is anchored by these things.
Leaving
Packing is very different for me than it was at this time four years ago. Then it involved winnowing possessions to fit in two suitcases; now it's a matter of choice that is temporary. Somehow that's much more difficult for me to do. I've practiced the art of leaving so often but the art of a journey that brings me back to my starting place is one I've not yer perfected.
I don't even know the word for what I'm doing in a week, It's not really a vacation because my work is in the computer I'm carrying with me and I'll keep slogging away at the rewrite that is my job. It's not really a work trip because I'm going to spend the bulk of my time with friends and reacquainting myself with Kowloon and Bangkok. It's a sojourn, but who uses that word anymore? It's a reunion, more than anything else, and that's strange to me because I usually avoid that sort of thing. The closest I've ever come to that was at family weddings in the small town where I grew up, and that was sheer hell. Huge gulps of my past in a massive wave--this will be more like sips of cold water on a very hot day.
I've made lists of things to take, things to do, and people I'll see, only for the pleasure of thinking about all of this. Except for the itinerary given by air tickets, I have no set schedule and with a few exceptions, I don't know what I'm going to do--the joy of traveling alone is that I can be completely spontaneous. I love to be able to turn on a dime.
Yesterday I read Vaddey Ratner's stunning novel In the Shadow of the Banyan, which brought Cambodia so close that I could feel its red dust on my skin. And then I was lost in memories of Savannakhet and I knew the first thing I need to do in Hong Kong is have more pages put in my passport--just in case.
Water dominates the places I'm going to spend time in--Hong Kong's harbor, Bangkok's river, a beach that no tourists go to, unless they're invited--and then that area that is shaped by the memory of water--the dry ocean floor and the marine sky of northeastern Thailand that stretches into Cambodia and Laos, Isaan country, a waterless inland sea. I have snapshots of this place but to remember it, I have to let myself feel it in my skin--salted with sweat from climbing up Preah Vihear, scalded by sun so hot I could feel it hit the ground and bounce back into my skin, hit by the wind that comes to the pillion seat of a motorcycle.
Yes, this part of the world has gotten under my skin and I'm going to put more of it there. That's why I'm going and I don't know one word for that--but there are many of them and I hope to find a few to bring back with me.
I don't even know the word for what I'm doing in a week, It's not really a vacation because my work is in the computer I'm carrying with me and I'll keep slogging away at the rewrite that is my job. It's not really a work trip because I'm going to spend the bulk of my time with friends and reacquainting myself with Kowloon and Bangkok. It's a sojourn, but who uses that word anymore? It's a reunion, more than anything else, and that's strange to me because I usually avoid that sort of thing. The closest I've ever come to that was at family weddings in the small town where I grew up, and that was sheer hell. Huge gulps of my past in a massive wave--this will be more like sips of cold water on a very hot day.
I've made lists of things to take, things to do, and people I'll see, only for the pleasure of thinking about all of this. Except for the itinerary given by air tickets, I have no set schedule and with a few exceptions, I don't know what I'm going to do--the joy of traveling alone is that I can be completely spontaneous. I love to be able to turn on a dime.
Yesterday I read Vaddey Ratner's stunning novel In the Shadow of the Banyan, which brought Cambodia so close that I could feel its red dust on my skin. And then I was lost in memories of Savannakhet and I knew the first thing I need to do in Hong Kong is have more pages put in my passport--just in case.
Water dominates the places I'm going to spend time in--Hong Kong's harbor, Bangkok's river, a beach that no tourists go to, unless they're invited--and then that area that is shaped by the memory of water--the dry ocean floor and the marine sky of northeastern Thailand that stretches into Cambodia and Laos, Isaan country, a waterless inland sea. I have snapshots of this place but to remember it, I have to let myself feel it in my skin--salted with sweat from climbing up Preah Vihear, scalded by sun so hot I could feel it hit the ground and bounce back into my skin, hit by the wind that comes to the pillion seat of a motorcycle.
Yes, this part of the world has gotten under my skin and I'm going to put more of it there. That's why I'm going and I don't know one word for that--but there are many of them and I hope to find a few to bring back with me.
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Stuck in the Middle, Moving On
I'm twenty-something years older than my sons and twenty-something years younger than my mother. Like most women of my generation, I haven't ever found my mother a helpful trailblazer. I never wanted her life and I spent a lot of time inventing my own, a process that is becoming more difficult with time.
I still enjoy, in theory, what my sons like to do. I love hearing live music, the louder the better. I'm comfortable anywhere that will serve me a cold beer on tap. I like baseball, although I don't cheer the hometeam since they used up Ichiro Suzuki, and I'm fond of a good action movie. In practice? I go to bed earlier than I ever dreamed of doing ten years ago, I hate shivering on a bleacher in a stadium, and beer makes me fatter than I think is healthy. And movies? I hate paying a small fortune to see something I know I've seen before, often.
It's hard for me to admit that I'm getting old but every day of my life reminds me that I'm wearing out. Not my heart or my eyes or (thank goodness) my liver but things I never expected would dwindle--my nerve endings.
I first noticed it in New York, five years ago. That's a city that always caught me up in its energy and buoyed me through its streets. It exhilarated me so that I barely needed coffee--but not this last time. I didn't soar through Manhattan; I slogged along its streets and wondered why it had changed. Slowly I realized the alteration was in me.
Once I was tuned so tightly that I could pick up and run with any sensory impression that passed me by--sunlight on water, wind sweeping through high grass, a fluster of snowflakes. Beauty charged me with energy; the excitement of the world was more than I could hold.
It's much too easy to contain myself now. The messages that I receive are from my muscles; my nerves have become blunt. Without those sharpened messengers rushing excitement to every one of my cells, now the ache of my back, the heaviness of my legs, and worst of all, the feeling that I've seen it all before dominates the way I look at the world.
I do my best to fight this. I travel when I can. I write. I take every opportunity given to me to see friends. I read a lot.
But the fact is when I talk to my mother, I see where I'm going. I am going to lose more and more of my physical being over the next twenty years. I think of Marguerite Duras with her wrinkles and her short skirt and her smile, of Martha Gellhorn with her cigarette and her scotch and her salon full of "boys," of Dorothy Parker in a hotel room, always poor with uncashed checks stuffed in a drawer--and I realize what kept those women going, in their own ways, was work. And I cling to that, hoping it will stay with me, even as everything else succumbs to deterioration
I still enjoy, in theory, what my sons like to do. I love hearing live music, the louder the better. I'm comfortable anywhere that will serve me a cold beer on tap. I like baseball, although I don't cheer the hometeam since they used up Ichiro Suzuki, and I'm fond of a good action movie. In practice? I go to bed earlier than I ever dreamed of doing ten years ago, I hate shivering on a bleacher in a stadium, and beer makes me fatter than I think is healthy. And movies? I hate paying a small fortune to see something I know I've seen before, often.
It's hard for me to admit that I'm getting old but every day of my life reminds me that I'm wearing out. Not my heart or my eyes or (thank goodness) my liver but things I never expected would dwindle--my nerve endings.
I first noticed it in New York, five years ago. That's a city that always caught me up in its energy and buoyed me through its streets. It exhilarated me so that I barely needed coffee--but not this last time. I didn't soar through Manhattan; I slogged along its streets and wondered why it had changed. Slowly I realized the alteration was in me.
Once I was tuned so tightly that I could pick up and run with any sensory impression that passed me by--sunlight on water, wind sweeping through high grass, a fluster of snowflakes. Beauty charged me with energy; the excitement of the world was more than I could hold.
It's much too easy to contain myself now. The messages that I receive are from my muscles; my nerves have become blunt. Without those sharpened messengers rushing excitement to every one of my cells, now the ache of my back, the heaviness of my legs, and worst of all, the feeling that I've seen it all before dominates the way I look at the world.
I do my best to fight this. I travel when I can. I write. I take every opportunity given to me to see friends. I read a lot.
But the fact is when I talk to my mother, I see where I'm going. I am going to lose more and more of my physical being over the next twenty years. I think of Marguerite Duras with her wrinkles and her short skirt and her smile, of Martha Gellhorn with her cigarette and her scotch and her salon full of "boys," of Dorothy Parker in a hotel room, always poor with uncashed checks stuffed in a drawer--and I realize what kept those women going, in their own ways, was work. And I cling to that, hoping it will stay with me, even as everything else succumbs to deterioration
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Bare Ruined Choirs--Not Yet
"This time of year thou mayst in me behold
Bare ruined choirs where once the sweet birds sang."
Not yet...this time of year the tree outside my window casts hard shadows on the brick wall of my building and the leaves are a deep, warm, translucent green in the late summer sun. I love watching this just before the light falls away, which happens earlier now.
When I come back from Thailand in late October, then there will be those bare, ruined choirs--at least until the branches are softened by snow. But I'm too happy with today's light to think about that now.
Earlier today I was drawn out of my apartment by firecrackers, drums, and gongs. There were lions and dragons parading down the street and people waved plastic Taiwan flags. When I came back toward my place after a quick grocery grab, I was stopped by some of the best lion dancers I've seen in this country--and a dragon dance that was mesmerizing in a very small space. I don't know where this troupe was from--their shirts weren't in English and when they were finished, they packed everything into two tour buses.
"Where are you going?" I asked one of the dancers who replied in strongly accented English, "San Francisco." "Don't go away," I pleaded and he smiled. Of course there is nothing online explaining anything about this, although it was performed for many prosperous-looking gentlemen in suits--and the amount of firecrackers that heralded and concluded this event wouldn't have disgraced a war zone.
But that's, as Jack Nicholson taught us all to say, Chinatown. In this city, there's no other spot where I want to live, with its sun-warmed brick and its private celebrations.
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