- No dancing on the roof.
- Everyone brushes their teeth and gets dressed before ten in the morning. This includes wearing socks and underwear.
- Stay in the house.
- If you go outside, be sure to wear appropriate winter clothing. This includes socks and underwear.
- Keep the thermostat set at 68. If it gets too hot, turn it off. If it gets too cold, put on a damn sweater.
- No cooking on the stove or with the oven.
- No cheese in the toaster.
- Unless he's dressing, the thirteen-year-old's door stays open.
- Two cookies or one small slice of cake before lunch. Two cookies or one small slice of cake after lunch.
- Anyone who reads to the seven-year-old will get an extra cookie. The seven-year-old will also get an extra cookie.
- Rule #10 only applies once to each child.
- Unnecessary tooting will lead to the loss of a cookie, either today or in the future. Use the toilet like a real human being.
- No feeding the mice under the cupboard.
- Everyone gets one hour of screen time. BEFORE screen time:
- The older kids need to practice piano
- The younger kid needs to draw, read, or build
- Call us if anything goes wrong or seems strange
- Dad's cell: 817-XXXX
- Mom's cell: 817-XXXX
- If there's a real emergency, call Pat and Ellen from around the corner. Their number is 464-XXXX.
- If there's blood involved, call 911, but understand that if they see these rules, they'll probably take you away from us.
White Boy From Wisconsin
because sometimes Virginia is weirder than China . . .
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Rules for a Snow Day When the Thirteen-Year-Old is in Charge
Friday, June 28, 2013
Sin City, Cambodia
“The difference between a good
haircut and a bad one is a week.”
--my Aunt Marcy
Day 1:
You arrive Sihanoukville, in the
south of Cambodia, at 7:45 PM. You’ve
been on the road since 7:30 that morning, bouncing over barely paved roads and dodging
in and out of motorcycles carrying whole families, minivans crammed with thirty
people.
You’re tired. You’re two-and-a-half-weeks into your trip
and you’re not sleeping enough, not exercising, and eating way too much rice.
You hate this. Not Cambodia, but arriving in town this way,
in the dark, tired. Bad enough trying to
establish a mental map, locate a good grocer, figure out the logistics of
getting breakfast, work through the kinks of your hotel room’s cooling
system. But to arrive late at night,
exhausted and hungry with a second round of Pol Pot’s revenge on the
horizon. The worst.
It probably doesn’t help that Dam,
your guide, has warned you and the rest of your group that Sihanoukville can be
a dangerous town. “There are pickpockets
there,” he says, his baritone unusually earnest. “And bag snatchers. Don’t leave anything alone on the beach.”
And it probably doesn’t help that
Sihanoukville has a reputation as a sort of hippy enclave, a place where people
who can’t stay sober even long enough to maintain a job at McDonalds go to hang
out on the beach and smoke weed until they pass out, waking at dawn with their
legs red from sand flea bites. You did your
stint in Colorado twenty years back and have only minimal tolerance for people
like this, folks who have no loyalty to anything or anybody other than their
own high. After seventeen days wallowing
in the company of Cambodians whose kindness and humor is unparalleled even by the
Thai, you’re not in the mood to spend time with dread-locked pot heads who
haven’t bathed in weeks.
At the Holy Cow for dinner, you
barely sip your pumpkin soup, your stomach grumbling. Everyone else is thrilled with their food,
but when they start talking dessert, you put your spoon down and excuse
yourself, catching a tuk tuk back to the hotel.
You spend the next twenty minutes on the toilet, head in your hands.
Day 2:
Breakfast sucks. The dining room is hot and crowded, the
tables are littered with crumbs and used napkins. The buffet, featuring everything from boiled
eggs to lo mein to batter-fried squash, has been picked over. Sihanoukville, a masseuse in Siem Reap told
you, is a favorite vacation spot for Cambodians. This sets it aside from many of the beaches
in Asia, where the only natives you see are the ones cleaning your room.
But even so, it means you have to
stand there quietly, watching the dark-haired lady in front of you take the
last six slices of mango.
At lunch that day, you and your
colleagues watch as a handsome young man with Irish skin and black hair throws
a leg over the seat of a moped. Moments
earlier, you watched as this same young man came down the hall toward you,
weaving slightly, eyes half-closed, lips parted as though he’s just thrown up,
or is just about to.
It’s barely noon.
Now he’s joined by a companion, a
lanky boy with sun-bleached hair, expensive dark glasses, and a full bottle of
San Miguel in one hand. The two of them
settle themselves on the moped and dark hair starts the engine, twisting the
throttle. As they lurch off, blonde hair
sways back, spine arched, nearly tumbling head over heals onto the sandy
courtyard.
He doesn’t though, doesn’t spill a
drop of his beer as they zoom off the curb and into the road, veering to miss a
gray-haired man on a bicycle.
It’s afternoon now, and you’re at
Wat Kraom, high in the hills on the other side of town. You
might as well be in another country, it’s that different from the open-air bars
and restaurants that line the beach area, all sporting red and white Angkor
beer signs.
The wat itself is a typical temple
in Cambodia: boxy and rectangular on the
outside, with glaring whitewashed walls and a tiled roof with gold trim that
rises in ornate flames toward the sky.
Inside, the high walls and ceiling are covered with primary-colored
paintings of the life of the Buddha, beginning with his birth beneath a banyan
tree and proceeding to—well, it’s hard to tell exactly where they proceed to,
since they don’t appear to be in any particular order. They swim over and around you, grabbing your
eye at every turn, and then grabbing your eye again with the next image, and the
next: the Buddha as a child taking his
first steps, the Buddha on a journey across India, confronting some sort of
deer-like creature that looks a little . . . angry? A huge golden Buddha statue rests on a
platform at one end of the tiled floor, surrounded by four white pillars. By the door at the other end of a room, a
fortune teller is dolling out handfuls of rice onto a square mat. A slender woman in a white shirt kneels
beside him, watching silently, her face anxious.
You’re here with Liesl, who’s
writing an article on death practices in Cambodia. There’s a school in the compound as well, and
she’s come to interview one of the teachers.
Outside the temple, young monks in saffron robes—it’s a cliché, and you
know it, but that’s what color they are—sweep the brick courtyard with fronds
of grass tied into short brooms. Their
heads and eyebrows shaved, they have a slightly startled look. Mostly, though, they look bored. Not surprising, perhaps: they’re teenage boys and as often or not they
became monks because in a country where 48% of the country lives below the
ninety-cents-a-day poverty line, joining a monastery is the best way for their
families to ensure they are fed and educated.
One of them, a tallish boy with unusually round eyes, has draped a towel
over his head, swinging his broom across the dry leaves with a practiced, easy wave
that ensures he remains cool and sweat-free.
There’s a cemetery here, filled
with ornate stupas, circular burial structures that spiral toward the sky,
sometimes eighteen feet high, sometimes higher.
Some are painted red, some are white, some are yellow, but all of them
are topped by the same flame-like waves you see on the temple. The flames are meant to purify, someone told
you, to lift evil away. Some of the
older stupas contain bodies, but most hold only ashes. One of the things Liesl will discover is that
in Cambodia, only the very rich can indulge in grief. The poorest just cremate the body and go back
to work.
In one corner of the compound
stands a small temple. You slip off your
shoes, go inside, the tile gritty and reassuring beneath your feet. The news from home has not been good, so you
light three joss sticks, bow the same number of times. It can’t hurt. A man comes over, his face broad, his shirt
faded and baggy from so many washings.
He gestures toward the front of the temple, beneath a low ceiling where
a dark-faced carved figures rests cross legged, staring over your head. You follow him and he places you in front of
the figure, hands you more joss sticks.
You bow your head and he reaches in front of you grabs some sort of long
brush, like a butler’s broom. Chanting,
he dips it in a bowl and splashes droplets of water over you, again and again,
his voice low and earnest.
God, you love the Cambodians.
Whizzing back down the hill in the
tuk tuk, you start to feel a little better.
But that night, on the way back
from dinner, you pass clusters of Anglo kids, college age and a little older,
resting on concrete medians, their heads in their hands. Others drift along the crumbling streets, more
like zombies than you thought possible of people who are not partially
eaten. A couple passes you, the woman
lithe in shorts and a bikini top.
“I got fired from my job today.”
“Yes?” says the man. She barely reaches to his shoulder.
“I told off my boss’s wife.”
“What was your job?” he asks. He sounds German, but may be Swiss.
“I was a receptionist.”
They are holding hands.
Day 3:
You’ve been avoiding the
beaches. Partly this is due to your
guide’s warning about bag snatchers, but partly this is because some of the
people you’re with have come back with reports of wild bars, lunar parties,
body painting. You’ve been to Hoi An and
you’ve seen pictures of Phuket, and you know what beaches in Asia can be like
when they’re not lined with bars featuring fireworks and fire twirling every
night. Ever seen The Beach, starring Leonardo DeCaprio? Like that, only: a) real; and b) without a film crew.
It doesn’t help that when you
Googled “Sihanoukville,” before coming, you found a half-dozen blogs
complaining about the kids peddling bracelets and hair bands on the
beaches. You like kids, but you know
that in Cambodia parents often pull their children out of school, forcing them
to sell to tourists, knowing that only the stoniest of hearts can resist a
brown-eye, dark-skinned twelve-year-old who looks no older than six. The problem got so bad that the police in Siem
Reap took to rounding up the kids in early morning raids and driving them out
into the country where they dumped them, unceremoniously, as far from the
hordes of annoyed tourists as possible, forcing them to find their way back on
their own—or not. Indeed, the problem
got so bad that now there’s an NGO—Child Safe—that papers hotel lobbies and
elevators with flyers begging tourists not to buy from children, insisting that
poor returns on this practice might lead to parents keeping their kids in
school.
Child Safe, it appears, hasn’t had
much of an impact in Sihanoukville.
Children roam the beaches in packs, peddling their wares. When tourists decline, it’s not uncommon for
these brown-eyes, mocha-skinned twelve-year-olds to unleash a string of the foulest
words in the English language—learned, undoubtedly, the packs of tourists who
used those same words to shoo away the kids.
And they really are
pickpockets. Clusters of children will
approach an adult, half of them poking them or stroking their skin—“You have
pretty skin, lady!”—while their peers dip into your pockets. This sounds Dickensian, you know, but sure
enough, when some of your colleagues come back from the beach, they tell
stories of being accosted.
“What did you do?” you ask.
“I freaked out,” says one of
them. “I told them ‘Get away! I don’t like being touched.’ Then this little girl says, “You no like
being touched? But I bet you like it
when boy f**k you, right?’”
So you’ve been avoiding the
beaches. This morning, though, a friend
mentions going to a nearby national park (one thumbs up, one down), mentioning
in passing, “If I weren’t doing that, though, I’d probably go to Otres Beach.”
Then later that morning you’re
stepping out of the grocery store and a tuk tuk driver says, “Need ride?”
“No,” you reply. “My hotel’s just over there.”
He nods. It’s still early, and the mild panic that will
kick in later when the day is growing short and still he hasn’t received a fare
hasn’t yet arrived. “Maybe later,” he
says, “you find me, I take you to Otres beach?”
You take this as a sign. So later that day, you do indeed find him, and
he takes you and some friends to Otres beach.
It is pretty near perfect. There are restaurants and bars, yes, but in
this slow season—May is when the rains will start to come—and with a twenty
minute tuk tuk ride from Sihanoukville, the stoners and drunks can’t be
bothered. The sand is white, the waves
are strong enough to be interesting and steady enough to be soothing. Buy a mojito—for a mere three dollars—and
you’re allowed to sit all day on a chaise lounge beneath a thatched
umbrella. There are venders, but only
occasionally, and they seem half-hearted.
When a middle-aged mother comes along and offers a massage, you decline,
figuring it, too, will be half-hearted, not to mention sandy. But then she goes down the beach and a
Chinese woman flags her down, and you watch as the masseuse spends an hour
spreading oil over this woman’s body, working every muscle, front and
back.
Fishing boats putter near the
horizon, passing between small islands.
The horizon—no, the sky, the entire sky:
there is no sky anywhere in the world like the sky in Cambodia. It’s blue, for one. Rains come once a day, in the late afternoon,
and twenty minutes after the first drops, the sky is that perfect shade
of—again, with the clichés—azure, like a cartoon movie you watched when you
were a kid. And the clouds. They climb, bundling up one over another
until they seem to reach miles into the sky.
When the sun strikes them you can see every curve, every indentation and
pillar and every bend in every bale. You feel like a dork, looking at these
clouds, trying to find ways to describe them.
You feel like a poet, a bad poet, struggling against cliches.
You sip your mojito, feeling more
than a little silly, watching these clouds, trying to find words.
Day 4:
Your friend has booked a
three-island tour. You’ve seen men on
the beach selling these, flashing cracked plastic binders full of photographs
at anyone who will listen to their patter.
You assumed, like with the massage, that it was a scam of some sort,
which is funny in a twisted sort of way.
This is Cambodia after all, not China, not Vietnam. The people here are genuinely very
forthright, only sly when they’re teasing you or making a joke. This just goes to show, you think to
yourself, how much Sihanoukville seems to carry an air that doesn’t feel like
“real” Cambodia: real Cambodia is
genuine and brown-skinned and always polite.
Sihanoukville—or so you were led to believe, or have led yourself to
believe, is fake and pale-faced and obnoxiously drunk.
But anyhow, so your friend has
booked a three-island tour, an all-day excursion beginning at 8:30 and including
lunch and stops for swimming and snorkeling and lazing about on the beach. You’re not really that interested, but you
haven’t seen your friend for a while and you’re not sure what else you’re going
to do, so you pay your $15 and tag along.
A van arrives to pick you up and
you climb aboard. They make one more
stop, along the same strip of sand-blasted road you wandered the other night looking
for a restaurant. At a small guesthouse
behind a bar, the van stops to pick up three British students lugging their
backpacks. They seemed dazed. When the bus stops next at the pier, one of
the students climbs out and stands there, swaying as though blown by a
breeze. When the group makes its way
down to the dock, she drags her backpack behind her, letting it bounce along
the pavement. She’s wearing the shortest
of short shorts, and you’re pretty sure you’ve never seen quite so much butt
cheek on a person who’s technically clothed.
Once on the boat, the trio of Brits
collapses on a platform on the rear deck, their forearms over their eyes, their
hands on their stomachs to counter the rise and fall of the deck. You go fore, and the boat quickly fills with
tourists from all over: Cambodians and
French, Germans and Russians. The boat
casts off, and one of the Brits—the boy, wearing Harry Potter glasses—leans
over the rail and vomits.
The first stop is a coral reef, or
what remains of it. Most of Cambodia’s
coral was killed off by dynamite fishing years ago. Nonetheless, the snorkeling is pleasant,
black and blue striped fish swimming beneath you. Lunch is served and it’s good, pan-fried fish
with fried rice. Afterwards, the boat
reaches the second island, Bamboo island, and everyone gets off, lugging their
gear. The hungover Brits march across
the sand to a pair of sun-bleached huts on wooden stilts and you watch,
wondering if they’ve loaded their packs with tequila or if they’ve come here to
dry out for a while. You find, finally,
that you don’t really care.
The beach is nice, the sand warm
and clean. Fishing boats bob maybe
fifty-yards out, and the whole thing has a made-for-face-book feel to it, and
you mean that in a good way.
Nevertheless, eventually you get
bored and make your way through the saw-grass to a trail that leads to the
other side of the island. You follow a path
of moist earth beneath foliage rattling with tree frogs.
You don’t quite get it at
first. When you reach the other side of
the island, it just looks like another beach. Sure, there’s the ocean, unobstructed by more
islands, no fishing boats or tankers on the horizon. Sure, the sand stretches for a half-mile on
either side of you, not the white sand that you’ve been told is so precious,
but ordinary tannish-brownish sand, regular sand like what you grew up with in
your sandbox as a child. Only here it’s
flawless: no tidal debris, no seaweed,
not so much as a gum wrapper. Brightly
colored huts stand back on the edge of the forest, and here or there a cluster
of tourists—mostly white, but some brown—stretch out in the sand, talking
quietly.
You wander both ways up and down
the beach, more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. This makes you hot, though, so you leave your
backpack and t-shirt in a pile on the sand—fears of bag-snatchers seem to have faded—and
wade into the low, steady waves. The
water is warm, but when you dive under and squint into the clear green water,
you can feel a layer of sweat being wiped from your skin. You come up, take a breath, then dive back
under, not so much swimming as coasting along the sandy bottom, feeling your
way with your hands. Coming up, a wave
slides by, knocking you back on your heels.
You press the salt from your eyelashes, squint toward the shore. Your bag is still there, so you dive under
again, and then again. When you come up,
your toes dig into the sand and you realize you’ve never felt sand like this
before, that it’s rubbery and fine, almost elastic beneath your feet.
Later you’ll wade back to shore and
flop in the shade of a tree along the edge of the sand. You’ll lay back, eyes shut, the sun playing
through the piney branches above you, warming your skin.
Day 5:
What does it, though, what makes
sure you will remember this place for the rest of your life, happens the next
day as you’re preparing to leave.
Your bags are packed and you’re
standing in the lobby, waiting for the rest of your group. It’s hot outside, and you’re glad to be in
the shade watching the world through a plate glass window. Then, across the parking lot, you see a monk
strolling beneath an umbrella, carrying an alms bowl. He’s in his saffron robe, of course, and
holds a fold of it above his knee so that he doesn’t trip as his sandals scrape
over the melting asphalt.
You’ve seen monks collecting alms
before. In Phnom Penh, you could sit in
your hotel over breakfast and watch as a stream of monks curved up the road,
each one stopping, slightly stooped beneath his umbrella, at the same
house. Every time this happened, a
motherly looking woman in a flowered blouse would emerge, a few riel in hand, bowing deeply before the
monk as she hands him the money.
You watch now as this particular
monk pads across the steaming concrete in Sihanoukville. He must be taking a shortcut, you think to
yourself—surely monks don’t stop at hotels?
Surely a place of business doesn’t offer alms, too driven by profit, you
think, too . . . soulless, maybe, is that the right word? It’s corporate, after all, made up of a
series of individual employees with their own lives, their own homes, their own
alms to offer to the monks who come to their own doors. Why would a business give money or food or
gifts of any sort to soliciting monks, particularly when these monks trod the
same path every day, making the same stops every day?
So you expect to see this monk cut
across the parking lot, bypassing the wide, covered entrance of the hotel.
But no. He stops just beyond the line where the front
porch of the hotel would offer shade.
Standing there beneath his umbrella, his hands crossed along the rim of
the coffer in which he makes his collections, he looks neither left nor
right. He just waits.
And so do you.
Nothing happens at first. Two women stand behind the huge carved desk
at the far side of the lobby, laughing at some joke the hotel manager just
made. A porter in a red and gold suit
swishes by, rolling someone’s bag.
Still the monk stands there.
You consider, wondering who’s
missing, who he might be pausing for. A
janitor, maybe, or the boy who hands out towels by the pool?
Then, finally, the door that leads
to the dining room swings open and the concierge emerges. He’s a big man, the concierge, especially for
a Cambodian, his shoulders filling his dark uniform. He has a face that seems to play at
seriousness, as though he wants you to think he’s the epitome of
professionalism when really you suspect he has a sly side, isn’t beyond making
jokes in Khmer about the clientele, perhaps even when they’re standing right
there, uncomprehending.
In his hands he carries two
sandwiches wrapped in plastic. His heels
click as he strolls across the lobby and then out onto the tiles beneath the
veranda. Approaching the monk, he stops,
bending at the waist until his head is low, the food offered in front of
him.
The monk puts one hand out,
hovering over the thick hair of the concierge.
He begins a blessing, his voice low, melancholy, melodious in a subdued
kind of way. The concierge stays remains
bent, his head at the waist of the monk.
The monk murmurs, words pouring over each other like stones in an ocean,
solid and smooth and tossed by waves. You listen.
You watch.
Then the prayer ends, the silence
suddenly full again. The monk accepts
the food. Placing the sandwiches in his bowl,
he nods once and moves off into the heat, his umbrella bobbing above him,
bleached by the sun. The concierge
remains bowed for half a moment or more, then rises, touching his coiffed hair lightly
before straightening the lapels of his uniform.
Labels:
cambodia,
Sihanoukville,
travel in Asia,
travel writing
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
A Brief Introduction to Lexington, Virginia--some of which is actually true . . .
Back in 2000 when Ellen and I
found out she was pregnant, we had a conversation about what we were going to
do. At the time, we were living
approximately 105 miles apart, with Ellen in Charlottesville and me in Roanoke. It was a very short discussion:
“Do you want to give up your
job?”
“No. Do you?”
“No.”
The only option, then, was to
choose a spot halfway between the two locations and begin a double
commute. The only question was,
where?
Again the conversation was
short:
“Do you want to live in the country?”
“No. Do you?”
That option gone, the only
reasonable location was Lexington, Virginia, an historic town more-or-less
equidistance from Charlottesville and Roanoke. Once or twice when we were living apart, we’d make a date on
a week night and meet in Lexington for dinner, trying out different
restaurants, getting a feel for the town.
We weren’t impressed. The
place was small. Very small. Like, drive through end to end in six
minutes small. Like, notice a car
from out of town because it stands out small. And the restaurants weren’t that good: there was the fancy place in town,
where the waiters stood in their white shirts, hands behind their backs over
white linen table clothes. Only
the food was just . . . okay. Then
there was the diner on the edge of town.
Even the salad was bad. And
I don’t mean kind of bad; I mean, we can’t eat this, we need to leave and go to
Hardee’s bad.
But it was either Lexington or
someplace where your rental home came with a John Deere tractor and a gun rack
in the dining room, at least one of which I refuse to live with (hint: JD tractors are made in Iowa, home of
my undergraduate alma mater and one of my favorite states ever). So Lexington it was.
It didn’t help that Ellen is a
big city person. Prior to living
in Charlottesville, which was a necessity given her job, she’d spent several
years in New York City, on the busy west side, taking the subway to work, doing
carry out Chinese every third night, clubbing with Boy George and the former
members of Oasis, waking up at noon in the dingy alley way behind a meat
cutter, head full of cotton and a tattoo reading “Jesus was my meth dealer”
bleeding on her forearm.
Okay, not really, but you get
the point: whereas I’d grown up in
a small town in Wisconsin visiting my grandparents in an even smaller town
(think, drive from end to end in sixty seconds) that I absolutely loved, Ellen
moved from one large metropolitan area to another, including Portland Oregon,
L.A., Oxford, England, Minneapolis, and New York City. Lexington for me was a step up. Lexington for Ellen was a . . . well,
nightmare is a strong word, so let’s just say that it wasn’t her idea of
paradise.
But such was life. She was pregnant, neither of us was
quitting our jobs, and both of us were afraid of cows. So Lexington it was.
We weren’t willing to commit
completely, of course, so we kept our house in Roanoke, renting it to a good
friend with a cleanliness fetish, at the same time that we shopped for a nice
apartment in Lexington. We
eventually found one on the edge of town and moved in the August before Will
was born. As is usually the case
in situations where none of the persons moving actually wants to move and one
of the persons moving is five months pregnant, the move was stressful and tiring. Finally, though, we got the house more
or less in order, took the dog out to go to the bathroom, locked all the doors,
and crawled into bed.
In order to make sense of this
next bit, it helps to know that we have a king size bed. And when I say “a bed” what I actually
mean is “a yacht that two people sleep on”—it’s just that big. These days, all five of us can crawl
into that thing and drift into la-la land without touching each other. Back then, when it was just Ellen and I,
we could go for days in that bed without even knowing there was someone else on
the other side.
This is important for you to
know, because not long after we turned out the lights that night, exhausted and
a little depressed from the day’s move, I felt the bed begin to shake. Not mightily mind you—no earthquake or
anything like that—but a shaking nonetheless, just the light flutter of a body
trembling on the other side of our runway-sized mattress.
“Hey,” I said into the
darkness. I considered sending up
a flare, but decided against it—no point in losing our deposit on the first
night.
The quavering continued.
“Hey,” I said again. I reached a hand into the darkness,
groping until I found Ellen’s shoulder.
It was shaking. Fiercely. Poor thing I thought, and scooted
across the sheets. Must be the
hormones, I thought, the move, all this change, everything.
“Hey,” I said, again, holding Ellen
close in my arms. Her shoulders
rattled against me. “Shh . . .” I
said. “It’ll be okay. Seriously.”
The shaking deepened and then
she burst out laughing. “I swear—“
she gasped, “I swear—.” She had to
take a deep breath. I pulled back
a little, trying to figure out what was going on.
“I swear,” she said, laughing so
hard she could hardly breathe. “I
swear I just heard a cow moo.”
That was in 2000. Now, twelve years later, we still live
in Lexington. A couple times while
we were in Hong Kong this or that administrator would probe gently, trying to
see if we were interested in making our stay there more of a long-term thing
(this isn’t that surprising: the
universities there are growing rapidly and desperate for faculty), but we never
took the bait. And since we’ve
been back, we’ve talked a lot:
what sort of job offer or location or opportunity would lead us to pack up
and move away forever? What
would cause us to leave Lexington?
The answer: very little. Excepting an offer from the Sorbonne (not bleedin’ likely),
or someplace renowned for its food—say, Tuscany or Toledo—chances are we’ll die
in Lexington and get buried in our backyard, which sounds kind of creepy until
you know that our land abuts a cemetery—and likely sounds creepy even then.
So what is this magical place
that snares would be transients?
What is this Shangri-la that turns us all into lotus eaters—and worse,
that causes us literary types to mix their metaphors?
Sit back, and I’ll tell you:
Lexington, Virginia, population
7,000, more or less, is the county seat of Rockbridge County, population
36,000, more or less. The county
goes back approximately 200 years, and though wikipedia will tell you it was
founded to shorten travel distances to the nearest courthouse, the truth is the
county was created after a group of pissed off white settlers killed an Indian
chief they believed was stealing their cattle and then selling it back to
them. Afraid that the people in
distant Richmond would look upon this sort of wholesale slaughter of the
natives as a criminal act of murder—probably because it was—the Rockbridge area
residents very quickly established their own county, built their own courthouse,
held their own trial and—surprise!—found themselves innocent of all
charges.
Which is a metaphor for
something, I’m sure, likely involving genital herpes.
Lexington itself was first
settled in 1778 and named after Lexington, Mass. following the revolutionary war battle. The town finally became incorporated in
1841 and grew steadily, feeding off of the timber industry, the advent of the
railroad, and its proximity to the Great Wagon Road, which ran the length of the
Shenandoah Valley, in which Lexington is located.
Several things make Lexington
distinctive: first and foremost,
it’s home to two nationally recognized colleges, Washington and Lee University
and the Virginia Military Institute.
For better or for worse, these two schools shape the city: go downtown on any weekend night and
you’re bound to run into VMI cadets in their dress whites; forget to make a
reservation for your favorite restaurant in early November and you’re liable to
discover that every seating has been taken up by students being wined and dined
on parents weekend. Student
rentals dot most neighborhoods, and real estate prices are inflated by the
influx of faculty and artificially low mortgage rates sponsored by colleges
desperate to keep Harvard-educated professors in a town the size of a
moderately cramped parking garage.
Not that I’m bitter or
anything.
The other thing that’s
distinctive about LexVegas is that it’s purrty. I’m not saying it this to make fun of southern accents—some of
my best friends are southerners, and so are my kids—but because it’s just the
appropriate way to say it:
Lexington isn’t pretty, it’s purrty, warm and soft and shockingly green,
just like, um . . . your, uh . . . green cat.
Anyway.
But damn, it is: pretty that is, or purrty, or
whatever. Unlike Salem, fifty
miles down the road and named after another Massachusetts town albeit one known
less for a courageous battle than for burning human beings alive, Lexington has
managed to keep much of its olde towne charme. Most of the downtown sidewalks are glazed brick and a lot of
the buildings have been standing since the late nineteenth century. Away from downtown you’ll find
tree-lined streets full of antiquated wood-framed houses, hardly a brick ranch
or McMansion in sight. It’s the
kind of town where kids walk to school with their friends, where on the 4th
of July they have a bicycle parade down Main St. full of boys and girls on
streamer-covered bikes, the sort of place where Sons of the Confederacy march
proudly any damn day they want, waving that symbol of lost history, the stars
and bars of the confederate battle flag . . .
Uh . . .
Forget I mentioned that . . .
Actually, that’s not true: as of last October, the SoC—just one
letter away from . . . again, forget I mentioned it—the SoC is no longer
allowed to fly their flags from the town’s poles to commemorate the South’s
efforts in “War of Northern Aggression,” a phrase that is not used ironically
(by some—indeed, by many) down here.
Which relates, I suppose, to two
rather more complicated components of life in the Lex: first, it is very much a place that is
steeped in confederate history. It
is, after all, Washington and Lee
University, and no matter how you slice it, that last bit isn’t named after someone
by the first name of Peggy.
Indeed, good old Bobby Lee is actually buried in Lexington, on the
W&L campus, in the Lee Chapel.
Which is a chapel. You
know. A sort of religious
building? Where you worship
God? Or gods, as it turns out. And if you think I’m kidding, then feel
free to glance in and see what they have where the alter should be.
Hint: it looks an awful lot like a confederate general carved in
marble . . .
In addition, Thomas Jonathan
Jackson—he of Stonewall fame—is also buried in Lexington, or at least most of
him is as I’m not sure what they did with the arm that his—ahem—own men shot off. Old Stonewall is actually buried in my
backyard—or in the cemetery next to my property at least. Indeed, I can almost see his
statue—which portrays him with both arms standing tall and facing to the (surprise!)
south—from my desk as I write these very words. Stroll by his monument on any given day and you’ll notice a
half-dozen lemons strewed about the grass: among TJ’s many quirks was his belief that sucking lemons
made a man stronger. Pity it
didn’t make him glow in the dark, because maybe then he wouldn’t have gotten
shot. By his own men, have I mentioned that?
Indeed, the southern history here
runs deep enough that when they were considering shutting down the confederate museum
in Richmond, Lexington was mentioned as a possible alternative site. That the museum wasn’t actually moved
here perhaps points to the second complicating factor that needs to be
mentioned when we discuss Lexington:
namely, that the town itself isn’t really representative of the deep
south—or even the moderately shallow south.
Allow me to explain by telling
yet another one of my short but stupid stories: a little over a year ago I was invited to a party where I
didn’t know a lot of people.
Generally in situations like this I drink too much and make a pass at my
hostess, leaving only when the police show up and chase me through the
woods. This particular evening,
though, I was well behaved (my hostess was a former karate instructor) and more
or less sober. At one point
I was introduced to a guy in his late forties with long, graying hair,
workman’s hands, a loud laugh that was infectious. When he asked me what I did, I told him I was a professor
but that I was currently on sabbatical writing a book. He gave that laugh of his and said,
“Rockbridge County: where half the
people have written a book and the other half have never read one.”
It was a harsh comment—funny as
hell, but harsh. And like most
funny as hell but harsh jokes, it had more than a bit of truth in it. In this case, I think, it made an
exaggerated claim that pointed to a real fact: half the county—mainly, the people who live in Lexington, are
over-educated geeks like yours truly; the other half (who
actually read plenty of books) are . . . well: not.
On some levels this is a
political thing: every other year,
our congressional district regularly elects a carpet-bagging mind/soul vacuum,
largely because the Republican county wipes out the Democratic city.
And as is the case generally in
the US these days, the political is social: not only do the town and county vote in very different ways,
they live very different lives—or at least generally. The county embraces rural life, is not afraid of guns, and
tends to engage in the life of the mind without getting obsessed about it. The city folk generally pride
themselves on being cosmopolitan (e.g., being able to distinguish good Thai
food from bad, good single malt scotch from cheap), tend to keep even water
guns away from their kids, and argue strongly that there’s nothing wrong with
being intellectual, that, indeed, the country would be a much better place if
people would start to pay attention to what they’re thinking and why they’re
thinking it and whether or not what they’re thinking is actually true.
But again, I need to say
this: generally. Because the
fact of the matter is that: a) the
minute I make generalizations like this, I start to think of exceptions; and b)
I generally like to be honest about the complexities of these things,
particularly when: a) it’s a small town and I’m easy to find; and b) the people
I might offend likely have guns.
But more, I think, I really
don’t have any interest in arguing that a town full of wealthy folks,
academics, and wealthy academics is necessarily better than folks who know how
to fix a tractor—or the other way around.
Rather, the point I’m trying to make, finally—FINALLY!—is that
Lexington, Virginia doesn’t fit the stereotypes—accurate and inaccurate—of
south central Virginia. It’s its
own place, its own weird place, full of anomalies.
And that’s why we like it.
And that’s why I’m going to
write about it from now on.
And that, at least, is the
truth.
Friday, August 10, 2012
My Own Private Kitchen
A little travel/food piece I wrote for Roads and Kingdoms, all about the best private kitchen in Hong Kong.
Feel free to read about it here!
Feel free to read about it here!
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
What Remains
In less than a
week, it’ll be almost two years since we returned to the States. A lot has happened in that time: lost teeth, piano lessons, graduations from
preschool and fifth grade, karate, piano recitals, some pretty major home
renovations. At times it’s easy to
forget that there ever was a Hong Kong year, we’re so buried in the
heres-and-nows of Virginia.
Which means at times it’s easy to think that none of it mattered, that
we shouldn’t even have bothered.
But still . . .
Here’s a short
list of what, two years on, remains from that year:
1) There
are, of course, the objects: the
Hong Kong flags hanging in the kids’ rooms, the tin wind-up toys Jamie got for
his birthday when we were in Vietnam.
There’s the red salad bowl made of finely-grained wood, the fancy
brushed steel flashdrive I received as a party favor at one of the conferences
I attended. I still have my nice
suit from the tailor down in Central, and Ellen has two or three skirts and a
few shirts from Hoi An. Over our
mantel is a fancy porcelain carving of gold fish swimming around a lotus plant,
and opposite it hang a pair of paintings from Hanoi and Xi’an,
respectively. We also have a neatly
embroidered baby carrier over one bookshelf, not too far from a trio of fantastical
paintings from Bali showing brightly colored dancing beasts and magical
women.
I’m pleased to
note that my beautiful, six-million dollar hand sewn rug from Beijing is still
beautiful, and worth every damn penny, thank you very much. This bears mention, because just after
I bought it I was one of the guys on the trip—a Canadian whose family had just
joined for the day—was teasing me about spending so much money.
“What you should
do,” he said, “is buy a stop watch.
Then when you get home you can time yourself whenever you stop and look
at the rug. That way you’ll know
how much all of this cost you per minute.”
Jerk.
For what it’s
worth, not a day goes by—okay, not a week
goes by . . . okay, not a month goes
by where I don’t pause, look at that rug, and say, “Dang. That’s purty.”
As all of this
probably makes clear, we bought a lot of souvenirs when we were in Asia. Enough to decorate the entire house,
actually, so that, stepping into our living room before actually meeting us,
you’d assume “Hanstedt” was some sort of weird name from an obscure ethnic
group in China.
Seriously, we’ve
pretty much decided we can never live abroad again simply because we don’t have
any rooms left to decorate. That,
or we’ll just have to buy a second house next time we return to the
States.
That said, the
objects we actually notice—the ones that make us pause for just a millisecond,
our hearts suddenly warmer than they were before—aren’t necessarily the
expensive ones, or even the big ones:
there’s the silk embroidery of a lotus flower on the wall by the front
door, for instance, almost an afterthought when we were in a small shop in
Vietnam, but now something that I’ll pause and . . . just look at for maybe half a minute every other day or so. Or the small wooden plates next to the
cookbooks, thrown in with the aforementioned salad bowl and a half-dozen other
things we got in a shop near our hotel. They’re beautiful—one green, one red, one natural wood
color, the grain showing in all of them—and they catch my eye almost every day
when I walk into the kitchen.
Or when Lucy
comes down in the morning for breakfast, and she’s wearing her blue and white
sport uniform from the international school. Mornings where that happens, both Ellen and I will pause,
watching her make her way to the table.
Sometimes we’ll look at each other and grin, sometimes we won’t, just
watching her, both of us smiling, the little red Norwegian flag flashing on her
shorts—and we’ll know it was all real.
2) Then there are the
memories.
Some of them are
prompted: the first Christmas we
were home, for instance, we made photo albums for each of the kids. For Will and Lucy, this meant culling
their nearly 5,000 pictures (each) down to 400 or so that we put in separate
albums, customizing each one to reflect the experiences of the child, what they
valued, what they’d want to remember.
For Jamie this meant picking at random from Ellen’s thousands of pics,
trying to choose images that would somehow capture key moments for a little guy
who was barely half-way through his third year when we returned.
We gave the
albums to them on Christmas eve, halfway through the present opening. For twenty minutes everything
stopped. All three heads were
bowed, all three pairs of hands were flipping the pages, flipping, flipping,
scanning from side to side, taking it all in.
“Look! Will! Remember?” and then Lucy would point to picture of the bird
market and tell a story.
“Hey, look! Remember?” and then Will would hold the
book up so we could all see a picture of the kitten we found in a park in
Shanghai.
“Look! Remember?” Jamie would then holler, and
hold up a picture of a—what was that?
A cat turd? A dead bird? Hard to tell. Not really even sure that he knows . . .
But a lot of the
memories are unprompted. We’ll be
sitting at the table eating dinner, and out of the blue Lucy will say, “Remember
the time Jamie shook his fist at a monk?”
And we’ll burst out laughing.
Then Will will say, “Remember when he ate his dinner so fast that he
threw up?” And we’ll laugh
again. Then Ellen or I will say,
“Remember how Eldon use to love playing with Jamie, how he would come over and
shake his fists at him and Jamie would shake his back and the two of them would
keep doing it until they burst out laughing?” And we’ll laugh again, even louder. And it will go on like that for ten
minutes maybe twenty, sometimes half an hour: “Remember?’
“Remember?” “Remember?”
3) And then there’s something else,
something that’s harder to explain:
I see it when
Will and Lucy come home from school, and I find them in Will’s bedroom, their
heads together, lost in some game they’ve made up, involving marbles, beads, or
three kinds of glue and miniature Leggos.
And I see it
sometimes on Saturday mornings, when Jamie is fussing about some thing or
another and later I’ll notice that he’s turned quiet, and discover him in his
room, being read to by his older brother.
And I see it on
nights when Ellen is gone or out with her friends, and instead of cuddling with
all of the kids separately, I’ll stretch out on the big bed in our room and the
four of us will lay there, telling stories about the day, about school, about
burping and farting, and our friend Lilianna who talks in funny voices.
And I’ll see it
sometimes when we go on a trip, a short trip to Charlottesville, maybe, and
I’ll give them a heads-up when it’s five minutes until departure, then we’ll
all climb in the car, no fussing, no complaining, just a sense of, “This is who
we are. This is what we do.”
I’m not sure how
to describe it, really. But it’s
very real. It’s like a river
that’s cleared, all the dirt and debris settling to the bottom, firming down into
sediment that will be solid for years to come, leaving everything above clean
and pure. It’s as though we’re
utterly content with ourselves, with who we are as a family. And with our place in the world.
That’s what it’s
like. That’s what remains.
Labels:
family travel.,
hong kong,
Hong Konged,
souvenirs,
Travel with children
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
On Korea, Fear, and Harry Chapin
It’s easy to forget that
traveling is kind of scary. When
we’re sitting at home, booking those tickets, we’re thinking about the dazzling
quality of the sun in those foreign places, the exotic foods, the colorful
markets, the peculiar interactions with locals that we’ll collect and bring
home to narrate over the dinner table at parties so we can make our friends
jealous.
What’s absent from these visions
is what it’s like to finally get through immigration, to gather your bags, and
to step out into the airport concourse of a country we’ve never been to before,
where we barely know the language, where the customs may be nearly impossible
to comprehend, and where even the very air has not just a different smell but a
different quality to it—to get through all of this, experience all of this, and
then think “Now what?”
Part of the reason I like
traveling with Ellen is that she’s very good at those first moments, very good
at relishing the strangeness and moving us forward. When I’m on my own though, particularly after I’ve had a
long flight—and let’s face it:
from the States, everything is a long flight—I generally feel mildly
nauseous and slightly feverish, with a weird granular taste in my mouth.
Case in point: I flew into Korea the other day (and
boy are my arms—oh, never mind), never having been there before. This sounds stupid, I know, but I was
surprised by how different it was.
I anticipated a Hong Kong kind of place—basically clean, basically
modern, only with more open spaces and more fermented cabbage. After all, Korea is Asia’s “success
story,” the little country that could, with a solid economy, an educated work
force, and all the modern amenities.
And all my friends had told me what a great place it was: “It’s like Toledo,” one of the other
Fulbrighters said, “only with more Asians. And, you know: fermented
cabbage.”
What I saw, though, on the
bus-ride in from the airport looked more like Vietnam than post-industrial Hong
Kong: a dusty gray sky,
semi-dilapidated houses, stooped-over women working in rice paddies.
It was late when I arrived, so that
first evening I ventured only a stone’s throw from hotel, strolling down a
brightly lit alley to one of those little restaurants where you grill your meat
at the table under an industrial-strength ventilator hose, then wrap it in a
lettuce leaf with some coleslaw type stuff and fermented cabbage, eating it
sideways like a sloppy but tasty Korean taco. Which sounds great.
And it was, except for the fact that this was clearly meant to be a
social activity. Not only was my
table round and large enough to seat a small baseball team, it was surrounded
by other tables, all of them filled with laughing families and gangs of
friends. Needless to say, I was
tired and dirty and a little depressed and feeling sorry for myself, so I
compensated by eating my way through half of a cabbage-stuffed cow and the hind
quarters of a barbequed pig.
I had the next day free. Instead of racing out the door though,
a la Ellen, I slept in late, ate breakfast, and found myself lingering in my
hotel room. I checked my e-mail,
tried to negotiate some end-of-year financial complications with the Roanoke Review, posted something meaningless
on Face Book, browsed the pages of a few friends. I looked up a couple key phrases in Korean—hello, thank you,
how much?, and please get your fermented cabbage out of my air space—then
checked my e-mail again, just in case someone had written me something from the
United States in the middle of the night in the last three minutes. Nothing. I packed my backpack, counted my cash, checked my
e-mail. Sighed. Looked around the room, trying to find
something else that needed to be done.
When nothing presented itself, I checked my e-mail, went to the
bathroom, checked my e-mail and dragged myself out the door, heading toward the
nearest subway line.
It didn’t help that the train
smelled vaguely farty (this happens, I’m sure, in a country that prides itself
on fermented cabbage). I sighed,
pushed some kid out of a seat, and settled in the next few stops. Emerging into the station, I was confronted with twelve
different options for possible exits.
I glanced at my map. I
wanted the Namara--something
market. That’s not the
actual name of the market, of course.
It has more letters and no dashes at the end, but the fact of the matter
is every time I looked down at the map, then glanced up at the directions
board, I promptly forgot the second two-thirds of the word. Korean is weird, I decided, more like
German or Russian, with all those letters and vowels: I mean, Kamsamnida?
What kind of language requires half a sentence just to say thank you? I longed for Hong Kong and Cantonese,
and those two character-, two-syllable phrases: Cho san! Ngoi
Sai!
I gave up. Even with all the letters, I
couldn’t find Namara—something market anywhere. Sighing, I trudged up to street level and spent fifteen
minutes poking attractive women with my finger, trying to get them to take pity
on me and point me in the direction of the market, or at the very least to take
me home and feed me fermented cabbage.
When that didn’t work, I stopped
a grubby old man selling what looked like frozen turkeys out of the trunk of
his car, who immediately pointed me in the right direction. “Walk that way,” he said, nodding toward
a tall building with a seven-story portrait of Marilyn Monroe on the side. “Behind that.”
I walked. It was hot, and it was noisy, and it
was dusty. And I wasn’t even sure
why I was going to the market. I’d
been to Asian markets before, of course, plenty of them, and it wasn’t like
this one was going to be any different.
Shouldn’t I be doing
something more meaningful, like going to a museum, or visiting a Unesco site,
or eating fermented cabbage?
Certainly, that’s what Ellen would have done, especially if she only had
one day in a foreign country. Of
course, Ellen also would have researched the country before she flew there,
buying a book or two and a map, and spending at least an evening on the
internet trying to get a feel for things.
Me? I’d spent every evening
the week before stuffing my face at various Hong Kong restaurants and drinking
beers with Joe. Now that’s what I
call traveling.
Once in the market, I felt a
little better. It was Asia in all
its glorious chaos: stalls filled
with soccer jerseys and nonsensical t-shirts—Korea Legend Start Here! 2010—tables covered with brass trinkets
and nylon socks. At one point I
saw a woman in a long dress trying on underwear—pulling them up under her
skirt, then peeling them back down again before trying on another pair. There was a vendor frying something
doughy looking in a vat of sputtering oil—fermented cabbage donuts?—and a quiet
looking lady selling long braids of bread dusted with sugar. Those were good, and I would know,
because I had six.
When sugared bread lady finally
shooed me off, I went in search of gifts for the kids. Noah, the son of a friend, had been
adopted from Korea several years ago and his mother had asked me to get him
some souvenirs. I picked up a
little baby opium pipe and a set of nail-spiked numchucks, plus a couple of
T-shirts: “Number One Hot Korea
Bad-Ass”; “You My Lady; Me Your Pimple,” that sort of thing. Eventually I wandered down into a lower
level and discovered an entire bazaar of sorts, booth after booth of homemade
jewelry, K-pop CDs, foam padded bras, glasses, camping equipment, freeze-dried
noodle pots. I picked up a few
more trinkets, wandered a bit more, then made my way back up to street level.
Drifting a long, I found a small
diner, maybe seven feet wide and twenty feet deep, glass fronted. On the door was small
advertisement: Noodle
Mussels! Spicy or Mild! The place looked clean enough and the
owner was a nice looking guy in glasses, so I stepped in and was escorted to a
table at the back.
“You look?” he said, gesturing
toward some pictures on the wall.
“Just mussels.”
“Enh?”
I pointed at the table beside
mine, where two girls were piling shells on a plate. “Mussels.”
He nodded and went off. I sat down, took a deep breath. An older woman with curly hair brought
me a pitcher of water and a cup, then returned with a fork. I waved it away, drawing metal
chopsticks from the container on the table. She nodded, smiled, pretending to be impressed. I drank, and a few minutes later she
returned with a small plate of kim chi—fermented cabbage. It was good. I drank some more and ate some more, and started to feel
more at ease.
Well, almost. Suddenly, I felt a prickle of
unease: the sign outside had said mussels
with noodles either spicy or mild.
I definitely wanted spicy.
I stood up and looked at the bowls of the young women at the next table. Their broth was clear. Could that mean . . . ? I glanced at the pictures on the
wall: on the left were mussels spicy. The liquid was red. Further along, on the right, were
mussels mild. Clear.
Damn.
I glanced at the pictures again,
then sat down. I rubbed my face
once, took a drink of water, shook my head. It didn’t matter.
Mussels were mussels.
Besides, who knew how hot the spicy ones were? No one wants to get sick on their first trip to Korea.
I took another sip of water,
then looked around. It was a small
place, just six table. The walls
were tiled and the tables laminated, the kind of restaurant you could hose down
at the end of the day and then let drip dry overnight. Even the pictures on the wall were
covered in plastic.
I caught the eye of a heavyset
woman sitting at a table at the bottom of the stairs. She was looking at me, frowning. Then she looked at the pictures on the wall, looked at me
again, and twisted in her chair, saying something in Korean. The waitress, the one with the curly
hair, glanced my way, then came over to the table.
“Yes?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s okay.”
She smiled again, indulgently,
then padded back to the kitchen or whatever it was by the door. I blushed, then glanced at the woman
who’d called her over. She met my gaze.
I smiled a little, and nodded.
She also smiled, just a little, and nodded back.
After that, the day was
gravy. The mussels were good, I
picked out another spot I wanted to visit—a neighborhood with old, interesting
architecture and a palace with a hidden garden—paid my bill and went out the
door. I found the subway right away,
got on the right train, and got out at the right stop. Ten minutes later I was wandering down
glaze cobbled lanes so narrow I could spread my arms and touch the walls on
each side. I got lost a little,
but it was a pleasant kind of lost, and when I came out on the other side I
could see the palace just up the street.
Admission cost $8 US, and I
spent much of the afternoon just wandering from building to building, taking
pictures of the intricate artwork on the ceilings and trim and trying to avoid
the heat. I’d paid to get into the
hidden garden, and was a little annoyed when I arrived at the gate and learned
that you were only allowed admission as part of a tour. I like to wander. I’m good at getting lost, and good at
finding food, and good at finding quiet little gardens in cool shady
places—like, say, for instance, gardens, particularly hidden gardens—in which to take naps. This is how I experience countries.
That said, the tour wasn’t that
bad, and would have probably been even better had it been in English. I left the garden and palace, wandering
east, thinking I’d just explore some neighborhoods, see what Seoul was really
like, maybe do a little home shopping for when Ellen and I moved here (because Korea
was quickly becoming one of my favorite places in the world). At one point I ducked down into a
subway to get under a busy street and discovered a German bakery and coffee
shop. Two lattes and an onion-cheese
bread later, I emerged into the late afternoon sun, dazed and happy and in need
of larger pants. I found a
pedestrian mall populated by art shops and soap makers and jewelry and picked
up seven or eight more souvenirs.
Then I headed back to the hotel and took a shower.
Dinner that night was at the
same restaurant, only this time the other US speaker from the conference was
there and we spent the evening talking about family and travels and careers and
how mediocre Korean beer was but how we’d have another bottle nonetheless,
thank you very much. I collapsed
into bed that night feeling stuffed and content.
The next day the anxiety was
back. It was conference time, and
suddenly I was aware of the fact that:
a) I had to give a serious 40-minute talk for which I’d been paid a nice
bit of money plus expenses; b) I didn’t know my hosts; c) I didn’t know anything much about
Korean general education; d) I didn’t know anything much about Korea (other
than the fermented cabbage thing); and e) I was an idiot.
Here again, it’s one of those
imagination versus reality things.
When you get the e-mail inviting you to speak, all that you can think
is, “Cool: Korea!” If you give it any more thought than
that, it’s probably something vague on the lines of, “Well, I’ve been to Asia
before; how hard can it be?” This
ignores the fact, of course, that, though both are in Asia, Hong Kong and Korea
are radically different places with radically different cultures. Not to mention languages. For while I can more or less get by in
Hong Kong with a little bit of Cantonese and a whole lot of English, these only
work with people who: a) speak Cantonese; or b) speak
English. Which, go figure, doesn’t
cover Korea.
Actually, that’s not entirely
true. Plenty of people speak
English in Korea. Just not as many
as in Hong Kong and not quite as well.
And because the only words I knew in Korean were, “Hello,” “How much
does this cost?” and “Does it always smell like that?” my ability to grease the
social wheels was limited.
Which means that, in reality, I
found myself feeling awkward and nervous and amateurish when we met our hosts
and drove to the campus where the conference was being held. Every one was being perfectly nice, of
course, but when there’s limited opportunity for small talk and you’re kind of
tired and nervous, the awkward seconds feel like awkward minutes and the mild
blank glances of strangers feels like glare of disapproval.
But then the conference began
and the talks began, and it became clear that my hosts had a wonderfully
organic understanding of the complexities of general education and a real
intellectual and emotional investment in its success. In the afternoon, I gave my talk and nobody booed except for
this one little old granny who said I sucked and should be sent back to
Yugoslavia, me and my band of baby ducks.
Not surprisingly, the moment I was done I felt a lot better. Then my new friend from America spoke
and the two of us started fielding questions. Within a matter of minutes the whole room was caught up in
an intense conversation about the differences between integration and
interdisciplinarity (don’t get me started—I can talk on this for days), about the necessity—or not—for a
year of foundational content prior to synthesis and application, about all
sorts of things that would really try the patience of those of you who have
made it this far in what is already a really long blog post, even on this blog,
which is known for really long blog posts.
It was a great
conversation. It was complex, it
was thoughtful, and it was funny.
I loved being teased by the audience, loved it when they pointed out
contradictions between what Natalie had said and I had said. I loved it when there were follow-up
questions and debates between audience members. It was fun. It
was great. It was extraordinary.
The conference was followed by a
small banquet for the organizers, speakers, and various VIPs. Again, a little moment of anxiety as I
was led to a table and seated as the sole white guy amongst a group of Asians. But beer was poured and toasts were
given and the food was good.
Someone told a story about how the government had offered dignitaries a
choice of tickets to various concerts, and everyone had chosen K-Pop—fluffy Korean
boy-and-girl band music. We all laughed, and drank more beer and ate more
food. There was more talk about
general education and more beer and one lady who’d been slightly critical at
the conference sat next to me and made sure the waitress took care of me.
When that was over, I waddled
back up to my room, packed my bags, scheduled a wake up call, and dropped
instantly into sleep. I awoke at dawn the next morning, took a
shower, grabbed my bags, and headed down to the lobby where they flagged a
cab. Climbing in and buckling up,
I thought about Harry Chapin. He
was killed in a car accident while riding in a cab, after all, and for some
reason every time I take a taxi to the airport, I think about him. Which makes absolutely no sense, of
course—he was on his way to a concert, not to the airport—but I always wanted
to be a rock star when I was little (e.g., 43), and I suppose I like to think
of myself that way whenever I can.
So I climbed into the cab, and
buckled up, and sipped my water and munched on my meal bar, and thought about
what would happen if I died right then.
Which is morbid, I know, but I hadn’t had much sleep and I’m kind of a
melancholy dude, so this is what happens sometimes. And what I thought was that if I died, Ellen would be
probably kind of sad for a while but would then maybe hook up with that carpenter
guy she has the hots for and be pretty much a lot happier for the rest of her
life. And then I thought that if I
died on the way to the airport, having just flown to this new country, having
spoken at this conference, having been part of this important conversation,
having met these people, having eaten all of this amazing food, Ellen would
probably tell people that I’d died happy, that I’d died doing the things I most
loved doing.
And she would be right.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
This is just to say . . .
that excerpts from our "White Boy" adventures in Hong Kong will be appearing in book form soon. HONG KONGED will be published in July 2012 by Adams' Media. Stay tuned for more details. And thanks, all, for your support. I'll be back soon with more tales of life in Virginia. I know you're all just dying to hear details about our trips to CVS and Kroger . . .
Labels:
Adams' Media,
Blog to book,
books,
Hong Konged,
White Boy From Wisconsin
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)