The World Is Too Much With Us

Anne Truitt writes in Daybook about the sounds of her childhood and those that her children had always heard. She had no Muzak, no droning voices coming from a TV set.

In the time when she became aware of the world, magazines were text-laden, not image-driven. Pictures to her were paintings, not photographs. Her life wasn't tranquil, there were cataclysmic wars and the Depression, but it was quiet.

Now silence is a luxury; people travel to experience it. Although I live alone and work at home, noise is a constant presence. The sound of jets, buses, street construction, passersby, the apartment-dweller above me who comes back home after the bars close--I never play music anymore and only turn on my television at night for baseball or a movie. Still I live with the constant presence of sound. I wear earplugs to bed and frequently turn on my bathroom fan to create a barrier of white noise.

Mornings have the closest approximation of silence and if I'm careful, my mind is still unrippled then. That's when words come most easily and the work that is truly mine takes place--but only if I ignore the icons on my computer screen. If I let myself click once, the world is with me and the morning becomes sociable. Because I live alone, that one click is perilously seductive.

My computer isn''t just my workspace. It's supplanted letters, the telephone, the daily newspaper, a set of encyclopedia. It's how I stay in touch (on a superficial level) with friends on other continents. It's immediate gratification, an instant cocktail party. It's becoming my memory in a way that frightens me--can't remember? Google it.

I could stop going to the grocery store if I chose to, forgo DVDs for "streaming," have conversations through a social medium. Why not? Already so much of what I used to enjoy comes through this screen. Sometimes I think the only part of my life that can't come through a computer is travel. It's why I yearn for the discomfort of being wedged into an airline seat for hours on end; it's one of the few inevitably raw acts in my life.

I wish someone would bring back the word processor, a glorified typewriter with no accompanying distractions. Without that, I have to learn not to squander the best time of my day by clicking an icon. It will all be there, the photos, the links, the badinage, the Scrabble game, the abbreviated letters, waiting for my tapping finger to bring it into being. But the work won't wait. It fades away with sociability, dissolves into a weird sludge of the mind and spirit if it isn't given voice. 

Carrie Fisher once said "The trouble with instant gratification is it takes too long." She said that in the early '90s; today it's as quaint as any sentiment embroidered on a Victorian piece of needlework. Now the trouble with instant gratification is it can strain the muscles in your index fingers.

Not Everything Fits in a Capsule

Many thoughts occupy my mind but few of them fit comfortably in a blog post. It's not a matter of length, but of tone. Who wants to read about the feelings that come crashing in along with the arrival of a Medicare card? Or  the realization that one is the oldest in an extended family but isn't ready to be a matriarch? Or what to do about back pain which seems to have ambitions of settling in for the long haul? Or about that fine line between solitude and loneliness?

Does anyone really want to know the "if a tree falls in the forest" feeling that comes after a book comes out into the world? Didn't think so,,,

What about the restlessness that erupts after being in the same place for two years? Yes, I'm yawning too.

The happiness that comes when the shape of a book is in place and it's ready for revision, which could be my favorite part of being a writer? The pure and wholehearted joy that descends after finishing all three books written by Jesmyn Ward and discovering that they fit into an intriguing whole piece of literature that stands up to frequent reading and re-reading? Close but no cigarillo. (Which brings up the strong urge I've had to start smoking again, if I could only afford that stupidity...)

The realization that economic class is as defining a factor in our country as race and the unexamined truth that huge amounts of money are spent by the powerful to conceal that fact? And the sadness that we have a president who would be listened to if he brought this up for public discussion, and yet he chooses to be silent?

Is the queasiness and waves of chill that I've felt for the past few days caused by swallowing unvoiced thoughts or is it the flu? "Horseman, ride by."

In My Little Town

I've always been a city person, loving the rush and color and excitement of urban streets. Now if I want that adrenaline surge, I go to another country. It doesn't have to be on another continent--Vancouver B.C. works just fine.

In my city, the streets are hazardous. I used to love walking downtown. Now I'm always on the lookout so I don't step in human excrement. How did this come to pass?

When I borrow books from the library, I bring them home and pop them into my little freezer compartment for three days. When they come back out, they go in a ziplock bag when I'm not reading them. Below-freezing temperatures kill bedbugs after three days, a librarian at the University of Washington was quoted as saying. The eggs live on until a second freezing period takes place--that's why I use a ziplock bag.

We have a world-famous library downtown. I rarely go there anymore. It's a hangout for people who have nowhere else to go; they fill computer stations and tables and reading areas on every floor. While I'm glad they have a place to go, they make me sad and when I'm browsing the stacks on upper levels, they make me uneasy. I go to my little neighborhood library instead, requesting that books from other branches be transferred there. If you think I'm exaggerating, do a google search for the illuminating article about the Rem Koolhas-designed public library that was published in the Atlantic shortly after I returned to Seattle almost two years ago. Things haven't changed a bit since 2011; in fact they are worse.

A bus ride on the King County Metro system is something few people experience unless they have to. I've never owned a car or even a driver's licence, but after being on the same bus as a naked man wrapped only in a blanket, or with a man who vomited in front of the driver instead of presenting his fare, or having a man profusely bleeding from the face argue vociferously for his right to embark, or sitting beside countless pitbulls, I'm beginning to wish I could afford a chauffeur.

My neighborhood has its share of indigent people with personality disorders, and the sidewalks are cracked and uneven. Even so the concrete is clean and all kinds of people walk on it--it's a pedestrian's area. Few people panhandle or sit on the sidewalks with their bags and their dogs and their cardboard signs. I rarely leave the boundaries of Chinatown--unless I go to another country.

Seattle is supposed to be one of America's most livable cities--if you live in a buffered version of it. Otherwise find a neighborhood you love and stay there.

Non-Developing Country

This is Bangkok, the capital city of a developing country. In this snapshot are at least six forms of public transportation, the (stairs of) the Skytrain that lead to the subway system, buses, passenger vans, taxis, and motorcycle taxis. Oh--and many, many private automobiles.

I now live in Seattle, a burgeoning city of a developed country. Outside my window blares the construction noise that will eventually become a streetcar that will extend for not much more than a mile through the city. It is in proximity to a lightrail system that runs from the airport to downtown, with stops along the way. For years there has been construction that will become a lightrail spur that will extend the line by another three miles at best. The city at present depends on a bus system which faces extreme cutbacks due to budgetary shortfalls. This is not a matter of concern to many of the city's residents--they have private automobiles.

Bangkok has a love affair with private automobiles that arguably exceeds that held by Seattle. A middle-class family in Bangkok frequently has a car for each member old enough to drive, and a car and driver for those who can't yet reach the steering wheel. In spite of the notorious traffic jams that bring the city to a standstill, people cling to the comfort and privacy of a car. Even so, Bangkok has spent years and a lot of money on public transit.

At first the passengers on the Skytrain were mostly tourists. Bangkok residents who used public transit stuck to the buses, which carried passengers at a fraction of the Skytrain's cost. The subway, except for commuter rush hours, was almost empty. But not any more--and the people who crowd into these conveyances are local, covering a wide gamut of income brackets. 

The cliche "If you build it, they will come," proved true in a city that at first was lukewarm toward high-speed mass transit. In the U.S. only Los Angeles seems truly committed to providing an alternative to the automobile--imagine, the city with the most highly developed car culture is working full-tilt on a regional subway system.

Meanwhile in Seattle, I spend hours every week waiting for a bus. Often I discover that the bus I'm waiting for now longer exists. The ones that are still in the system hold no allegiance to any sort of schedule. As I used to in Bangkok years ago, I now figure two hours to go anywhere by bus in Seattle. If I'm early, good--I'll relax over coffee and a paper. However, I always am accompanied by a strong sense of irony, realizing that as Thailand becomes more of a developing country, the United States is achieving the status of a non-developing one.

Paradise:Gross

The opening scene of Paradise: Love is one that shows a number of developmentally disabled young adults driving bumper cars at an amusement park. The camera lingers on them for quite a while, as they gleefully scoot around the floor, unaware of the power that the cars give them, just having one hell of a good time. Before this degenerates into crashes and bullying and bad feelings, a caregiver calls a halt to the outing and everyone gets up and leaves.

This sort of happy ending eludes the caregiver herself, when she embarks upon her own private amusement park, a beach resort in Kenya complete with rent boys. At first she’s titillated and amused, with a dash of delighted horror, when a fellow Eurohag tells her of the special extracurricular activities that lie in wait for her. This hausfrau is initially enchanted by monkeys on her balcony, the sight of beach and sea, the pleasures of cigarettes and cocktails beneath palm trees and the open sky. There’s a sweetness to her pleasure upon arrival; her broad and simple smile, her wide, blue stare, the unashamed bulges of her exposed flesh. She’s a woman without artifice, not particularly bright, who’s thrilled to be on holiday.

But she’s being singled out as an unattached source of ready money. Whisked off by an enterprising charmer, she ends up fending off his unsophisticated advances in a stark little room. Later she asks her compatriots, all women of a certain age, all well aware of the fleshly delights that surround them, “Don’t you just wish someone would look into your eyes?”

The lady wants romance, she wants to be desired, she wants her middle-aged fantasies to come true. The man of her dreams rescues her from a crowd of importunate beach vendors, assures her that she is special, beautiful, alluring. And for a brief moment she is. Her pink, floppy flesh takes on true loveliness as she lies naked in a post-coital nap. Her smile is radiant. She wanders hand in hand through a beach village with a truly gorgeous man who has chosen her, who has absorbed her lessons in the art of tender seduction, who looks into her eyes. Then he begins the long litany of family disasters that require money—her money and lots of it. When his “sister” turns out to be his wife, paradise begins to curdle around the edges.

Deprived of romance, the hausfrau becomes a harpy. A series of harrowing scenes showing how thoroughly power corrupts become increasingly difficult to watch. Finally the woman who had happily shared a soapy shower with a bedmate, gleefully cleaning and being cleaned, ends up barking orders at the man of the minute, telling him to bathe thoroughly as she waits, sprawled on a bed, drunken and sweaty in her stained and crumpled dress.

Sex tourism has been insufficiently examined, and rarely from the female point of view. The parameters of the sex trade have been defined by men, and, like it or not, they have made a fairly straightforward business of it. Money changes hands, love is not required, romance is unnecessary. The male flesh is willing and the female flesh is able to pretend.

As shown in Paradise: Love, the same is not the case when women are the purchasers, and the perennial question of what do women really want comes around one more time. By the end of the movie, what I wanted was a nice, tough, mercenary madam to saunter onto that beach and start setting prices, collecting bar fines, kicking ass, and taking names. As it is now, according to this director and this screenplay, none of these strangers in paradise is having a good time.

Another Face, Another Time

This is the face of the woman who went to Bangkok almost twenty years ago. She was 46, clutching her very first passport, leaving a house, family, friends, a good job, to go to a place she could barely imagine. It took her three months to find her footing and then another year to find her home. She learned to live alone, travel alone, and discovered that was the way she wanted her life to be forever. She fell in love with a man who was 24 years younger and has never found anyone who could supplant him in her heart and mind. She fascinates me in a way that has nothing to do with narcissism; I'm no longer that eager, that untried and I marvel that she still was at 46.

"To me, you're like a little girl," the man she loved told her, and when I look at her picture, I agree with him. The woman in that picture had yet to grow up. Perhaps she never did--she just grew old.

Taste the Apple, Divide Your Heart

My morning began with a question on Facebook from a woman who has become my friend. "Why are you in Seattle? I ask this because I believe, strongly, that life is short, and you need to be in the place that makes your heart sing. It doesn't seem to be here."

The old saw that you can't go home again immediately came to mind as I woke up to her very good question. When you leave a place for a generous extent of time, after you finally return, you come back to a whole new arena. And you face it with the point of view that comes from living in, and loving, another part of the world. This friend knows that; she lived in Europe for a long time. She knows what happens when you bite into the apple, when you leave home and make your new home in another place, and then return to your spot of origin.

The difference is she moved there--and came back--with her children. They share those memories of learning another language, a different form of motion, a new way of looking at the world. 

Relationships are built upon shared experiences and a common context. When I chose my other home, I began to create a context that my children didn't understand and their lives became ones I couldn't touch. The same thing happened with my friends, my sisters, my mother--but I could live with that. My children? Not so much.

When I returned to Seattle, my life within this city was profoundly different from the one I had lived before I last left. People whom I worked with and liked and counted as my friends I see much less often than I did when we shared a workplace. My own workplace is my apartment; there are days when my social contacts fall within a five-block area. I spend two months of the year outside of this country. My roots in Seattle aren't ones that I reclaimed; they're tendrils, new and fragile and struggling to take hold.

Except for one part of my life here, which is not only unchanged, but stronger than ever--that's the life I share with my children. The ability to say "Let's have dinner tonight" or "Can you come over?" is invaluable to me. It's worth this long haul of reestablishing a home in a place that has become strange to me. 

I look forward every year to leaving this city for a while, and at the end of my time away, I look forward to coming back. It's a weird way to live, perhaps, but this is my life. And I think of this Raymond Carver poem, which is me, without the cigarettes:

Tomorrow

Cigarette smoke hanging on
in the living room. The ship's lights
out on the water, dimming. The stars
burning holes in the sky. Becoming ash, yes.
But it's all right, they're supposed to do that.
Those lights we call stars.
Burn for a time and then die.
Me hell-bent. Wishing
it were tomorrow already.
I remember my mother, God love her,
saying, Don't wish for tomorrow.
You're wishing your life away.
Nevertheless, I wish
for tomorrow. In all its finery.
I want sleep to come and go, smoothly. 
Like passing out of the door of one car
into another. And then to wake up!
Find tomorrow in my bedroom. 
I'm more tired now than I can say.
My bowl is empty. But it's my bowl, you see,
and I love it.--Raymond Carver

Eating "Chinese" in Seattle

Gene Balk of the Seattle Times has observed that Seattle's “patronage of Chinese restaurants is surprisingly low.” Perhaps the sad truth that Seattle still thinks in terms of “Chinese restaurants” has something to do with the city’s lack of enthusiasm for “Chinese food” That “Seattle foodie circles” are excited about the opening of a Taiwanese food chain that specializes in Shanghai soup dumplings points out exactly how unsophisticated these foodies are about food from China.

In a city that prides itself on its Northwest cuisine, as opposed to Southern or East Coast or Tex-Mex or Cajun, it seems bizarre that “Chinese food” is still a category. Sichuan, Hunan, Beijing, Uighur, Yunnan, are only a few of the regional cuisines found in China. None of them are to be found in Seattle, a city where dim sum, barbecued pork and poultry, chow fun, potstickers, and hotpot--oh and rice too, lots and lots of rice-- are what people eat when they eat “Chinese.”

I live in Seattle’s Chinatown and I like to eat out, but I stopped going to Chinese restaurants in my neighborhood years ago, There’s a limit to the amount of chow fun I can choke down with any enthusiasm at all; as for dim sum, if I want to eat it, I’ll wait until I’m in Hong Kong—or perhaps San Francisco.

Restaurants who claim to serve Sichuan food ignore the key ingredient, Sichuan pepper, in favor of drowning the dishes in chili oil. Hunan food? Well, people tell me, there was a place out on Aurora, but it’s not there anymore. Restaurants that try to give Seattle something different from the usual “Chinese” menu usually suffer the same fate as that Hunan place on Aurora. The China Club Bistro across from Kinokuniya Books on Weller Street served a nice little Shanghai soup dumpling, aka xiao long bao, as a bar snack. The past three times I’ve gone there, the place has been closed; “on vacation” the sign said. My guess is it was just a little too “Chinese” for Seattle, certainly every time I went there, it was usually quite underpopulated.

There’s a spot up on 10^th and Jackson called Uway Malatang that cooks with Sichuan pepper, but if you aren’t Chinese, you have to be sure to let them know that you want it. It’s a condiment that makes your tongue tingle, moving on to your lips—it’s not pepper in any sense that you might already think you know. It’s the happiest spice I’ve ever eaten, and if you want to try it, you’d better hurry before Uway Malatang also goes “on vacation.”

Today I passed half a dozen “Chinese” bakeries that all sell the same things—Cantonese buns, egg tarts, and slices of cake with elaborate fillings (durian anyone?)—and as I walked, I wanted nothing more than a Beijing bakery. Delicate little cookies like shortbread, but not too sweet; round, flaky pastries filled with something savory, others containing a sweetened date paste; flatbread and circular bagel-like rolls—these were exactly what I wanted and can’t get in this city. But then if one opened here, it would be hard to convince people that it was truly “Chinese.”

Seattle is thrilled that they are getting a Taiwanese soup dumpling chain; meanwhile, across the border in Vancouver, a dingy looking diner on Seymour Street has a handwritten sign pasted on its window saying Xiao Long Bao. Cities get what they want.

Me? If I want to eat soup dumplings, I’ll put my money on a dive in Vancouver rather than a chain in a shopping mall. And if I want to eat food from China, you won’t find me in a “Chinese” restaurant; in fact I’ll probably be eating somewhere in China. But then in Beijing, “American” food is found in a Kenny Rogers Roaster, or at a pastry counter in a Starbucks. Yes, imperialist running dogs, that’s what your cuisine is to the people in China. Funny, isn’t it? How unsophisticated--don't "they" know better than that?

Seattle Blue

A man I loved very much used to like to catch a bird in flight in his photographs. Now that he's dead, when I find a flying bird in one of mine, I always think of him.

He never saw the different shades of Seattle Blue that I love so much. Like so much of the beauty I see in the world now, I try to see it for him too. That flying bird brings him close to me for a minute, each time I see one in a photograph.

Where I live now is superbly beautiful when it chooses to be, but it's a moody city. Today the clouds have closed in again and the air has a nip to it, for someone who's happiest at 90+ degrees with high humidity. But it always has a surprise or two that leap out at odd moments. Today I woke up to Vietnamese pop music broadcast through a loudspeaker, then anthems.

Down the street from my apartment, a small parade has gathered with floats, dragon dancers, and small lions. Last year they came up my street and I saw it all. This year, construction has driven them over one block; they are all facing the opposite direction from me. But I caught a glimpse of it all from my window, and enjoyed the music.

Last year I had no idea of what the parade was for--only that it was Vietnamese. Later that day I walked to the Vietnamese temple up the hill from where I live, where a typed sign on the gate said it was the Buddha's birthday. Happy Birthday, Guatama!

May Is Such a Lovely Word

This month began with lovely promises and I've been living at a high level of anticipation even before the first day arrived. Hints of what's to come--a peek at my new apartment, a copy of my new book, and sunlight that's taken out of my shell and into the world--are making every day feel like Christmas Eve.

In the coming week I'll be able to take a closer look at my new living space to figure out what will go where--the only jigsaw puzzle I ever enjoy doing. The idea of taking a bath and coming out relaxed to sit under a ceiling fan--or of closing my bedroom door and making my bed after I have coffee--bliss. My favorite part of staying in a hotel is taking multiple baths--soon I can live in my tub, if I want to.

Almost Home--once again that title defines the mood of my life. A friend told me it was too commonly used and I should change it. He's right, but it is so much part and parcel of how I live that I couldn't give it up. Soon it will be out in the world at large; it already is in Bangkok, on the shelf at Dasa Books, among friends.

And then there's that sunlight--almost a week of it, leaving me browner than I was in April and very happy. I know it's only a preview of coming attractions but it reminds me of why I stay in this city. When the sun is out, the water and sky blend together in a blaze of blue, and I'm on a ferry in the middle of it all, there are few places in the world that I would rather be.

Come and visit--you can have my bedroom!