returnal e-turn
I woke up this morning in my mother's house on the outskirts of suburbia, on the spare bed in the study. Nestled between two highways and several shopping centers, in a few streets of houses by the same builder, it insulates itself from the rest of the world with its small lawn and few sparse trees inside high fences. My room, the study, has a window that faces one of the fences, with a roman shade that usually precisely covers it, top to bottom, side to side. Most of the windows in the house are like this; even the two slit windows on either side of the front door have curtains that fit exactly into the cut-out space of the window recess. But most of the windows, you wouldn't want to open anyway, since the seventy-five degree dry air circulating in the house is more comfortable than the outside heat and noise. Or at least that's what the builder must have assumed, since there are no cross-ventilating windows at all.
I woke up this morning and needed to get out. I did what any sane high school student would do (what i did, then), just got in my car and drove, trading house for highway, highway for coffee shop, in the hopes that open air and kindly chemicals would do for my mood what no amount of family feeling and rich Russian bread and cheese could. Now i'm in a cafe with the after-church crowd (or so i assume... i'm in Texas, after all). Maybe it's just that there's more space here, but people seem more distant and unhappy than the people i'd be sitting with on a Sunday in Taipei. I miss the crowded streets and the noisy air, all of which crowded into my bedroom there. Inside and outside weren't so clearly divided as they are here, and the space between people wasn't so clearly marked off, table by table, or room by room. I need a city, or at least a town with a center where people pack themselves together just because that's where everything happens. Instead, i'll probably console myself with another cup of coffee and later, shopping, with money i don't have to spend.
lost cities
I just booked my return ticket to the US.... I'll be leaving Taipei June 16th and stopping for a day in Tokyo (because it seemed like a good idea at the time), and then arriving in Dallas earlier the same day.
Unless i get that fellowship i applied for, i'm not planning on spending much money in Tokyo. I have the same image of Tokyo that i did of Hong Kong before i went. I imagine i will emerge from the quiet envelope of the airport directly into the noise of the city, and will be enveloped in throngs of people, lit during the day by the sunlight that filters down between the tall building, lit by night from above by the copious neon of millions of noodle houses and bars. This should mean i can wander around aimlessly, spending the night in different shops, drinking tea or reading, trying to get the know the city, and waiting for the dawn.
But Hong Kong was much different than i thought. Central was deserted by 8 PM -- the department stores and the office buildings all closed up -- and my curious friends and i were forced to seek refuge and dinner in a Hardee's. Kowloon was more populated, but the only people making themselves visible on the streets were the ones yelling hostel information at all passing buses. (And if there's one thing i've learned in Asia, it's not to trust anyone who's trying to sell you something (though i count Taipei as the exception to this).) I should probably know better than to think i'll stumble across the odd 24-hour bookstore that will let me nap (with all my luggage) in their aisles, or the 24-hour dim sum place where i can sit and drink tea till 4 am, when the urge to fall asleep has finally passed. I should probably have learned from my first night in Hong Kong that, no, Scarlet, the likelihood of your finding a place to stay at 1 am is limited by the places within a quarter-mile stumbling distance of where you are when you're ready to drop. And this may mean that you end up trying not to wince visibly as the very courteous man behind the counter runs your credit card through the hotel's platinum-plated credit card reader, and curse yourself because no amount of complimentary Paul Mitchell shampoo can make you feel better about that wad of money you just blew.
No, a city is never what i want it to be. It's never as vital or as indefatigable as it should be, never the New York of my dreams, where life is about the same at three in the morning as at three in the afternoon.
My few late nights in Taipei, i've walked home through the dim dawn, past the aged and the merely strange in the park for their morning constitutional. I've gotten breakfast at 5 am when the city finally opens it doors. But night is always disappointing. The neon turns off at about 10 pm, and there are no throngs of people outside in the wee hours. Everyone's tucked away safely inside, into beds under sheets, or gathered into those centers of light and heat called clubs. What's the likelihood that i would pass someone else on the street, similarly sleepless, who just wants to watch another few hours unfold? Who's also glad that she could find the
Hound of the Baskervilles or a pound of smoked salmon at three ay em if she really needed it, but who's not looking for those things, just out looking for the spirit of the city.
Will i go to Tokyo a wiser person? Will i have arranged a place to leave my suitcase and lay my head for the night, or will i be out wandering the streets, looking for the city that isn't there?
One night in Bangkok -- not much between despair and ecstasy
I'm in Bangkok! Wow! So number one! This is my last day here, and i'm ready to go home; that i'm reflecting on my experiences rather than having new ones is probably a good indication of this. I met my dad here in Bangkok last Friday, and the next day we took off for three nights in Cambodia, in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. We are tourists. We don't speak the languages. We don't know how much things are worth. Tomorrow morning i'm leaving for a place where i can have more meaningful interactions with people. But first, here are some disconnected thoughts on Cambodia, Thailand, being a tourist, and my relationship with my father.
Cambodia. Cambodia! Wow. Even in Thailand, my eyes are wide, and it's all i can do just to take all this information in. What can i write?
We stayed two nights in a town (Siem Reap) near Cambodia's most famous tourist attraction.. the ruined temples of Angkor Wat and others. The town survives almost totally on tourist trade, apparently. It seems to be difficult for those who don't speak foreign languages to make a living there, since prices are inflated because of hotels and restaurants buying all the food. But the people who can speak English are doing better than elsewhere in the country.. we paid our guide to the temples $20 for eight hours.
The temples and palace complexes around Angkor Wat are really.. something. The earliest ones were built in the ninth century. Wow.. That's really old. Most of the temples were originally built using Hindu symbolism (a moat around two surrounding walls and four towers in a square, with a fifth, tallest, in the middle, representing the approach to paradise and its highest peak, where Shiva lives) and for worshipping Hindu deities. The country has since become Buddhist, and a lot of the figures of the Hindu gods have been moved and replaced with representations of the Buddha. Because of this compromise, tho, many of the buildings were preserved, and were still used when they were 'discovered' in the jungle by the French in eighteen-something.
The best and brightest art there is an amazing temple with many four-faced towers, the eyes looking in all directions. The faces have the sort of quiet look to the eyes and the near-smile that changes expression every time you look away. Fucking. incredible.
In Phnom Penh, the woman who saw me hailing a cab and stopped to watch.. she was carrying a basket toward the market and was wearing a stack of ten hats with floppy brims, all of different colors.. i couldn't take my eyes off her.. we stared and smiled; Other people carrying things to market on brimless baskets three feet wide, balanced easily on their head.. no hands!; The market itself.. a huge yellow art deco structure whose color has been mellowed by the red dust of the city.. the building in the shape of a cross with arms pointing to the north-east, north-west, and the alleys between the arms made of the roofs of innumerable vendors.. open to the air inside, with geometric wind-holes cut in the walls all the way up to the stories-high roof; The Mekong and the impossible clear heat of February; Banana leaves cut into circles and used on a plate under the food, or under a bowl, like a charger. (I wonder if Williams Sonoma sells giant cookie cutters for this purpose?); The colonial legacy in the form of French bread and charming yellow-and-white villas.
Cambodia does in fact print its own currency, but if you're a tourist, you might not ever discover this. Visa fees *must* be paid in US (no matter what country you're from), and aside from the small packet of laundry soap i bought, all prices are quoted in US.
Cambodia is a strange place to be. I've said this before, but being a tourist is wierd. How can i possibly relate to the people asking for money, who've lost limbs to mines? I can't speak to them, and even my concern seems prurient to me. How can i justify to myself sitting in a French cafe eating amazing chocolate pastries while the people in town who can't speak English or French are having a hard time getting enough to eat? Is tourism in countries outside the first world unavoidably unethical?
An interesting phenomenon: when we were in Cambodia, people usually called me 'Madame' when i was walking around with my father. He doesn't look seventy, but then, to the Asians i've asked, i apparently look about twenty-two. Wouldn't i be better dressed if i had married for money? Anyhow, the counterpart of this phenomenon is that in Bangkok, i'm almost always called 'Sir'. At first i thought people were talking to my father, but they'd look right at me and say it. Happened again when i was alone in the cab this AM with a driver whose English was pretty good. It doesn't bother me, but i wish i knew what they were picking up on so i could cultivate it.
In a lot of ways, Bangkok seems like Taipei. It's sticky-hot. Stray-ish dogs press themselves flat against the cool concrete. There are motorscooters and bicycles everywhere. Stores spill out onto the sidewalks and street vendors take up most of the rest of the available space. The streets are full of people. I love it.
Compared with Taiwan, there are a lot more of the sort of couples that are one older white man and one younger Asian woman. I'm trying not to look askance at it because i figure they both must be getting something out of the relationship, but it still seems strange and attracts my attention.
Bangkok smells like sticky rice, and cilantro and lime and other green things.
The taxi drivers in Bangkok are bastards. Getting in a cab here is like making a deal with the devil -- you can be pretty sure you're not going to come out ahead. DO NOT get in a cab without first haggling over the fare.. you should be paying a third of the rate they quote you. Also, be very careful about what money you give the drivers.. DO NOT accidently give them 100 Chinese Ren Min Bi when you meant to give them 100 Thai Baht (exchange rate ~8:1) because they'll deny you did. And if you want to give them 500 Baht, first say, 'Can you make change for 500 Baht?' otherwise they'll give you 60 Baht in change instead of 460. I think next time, i'll vacation in a country where i can haggle in the language.
Flowers are everywhere here. Vendors sell loops of jasmine and yellow chrysanthemum to hang on the shrines to Buddha or the beautiful four-headed elephant, or to hang on the rear-view mirror of trucks, and bunches of orange or purple or yellow orchids to attach to the front grilles of cars.
People walk around with drinks in plastic bags. NO, not drinks in bottles in plastic bags, drinks IN little tiny bags with two handles, and a straw sticking out between. There's a lot of that Thai iced coffee.. who knew? I thought they called it that just to attract tourists.
On Friday we went to Pattaya Beach by bus.. two hours from Bangkok. I sat and stared at the sea. I sat and sipped Singha beer and sang the Pogues song. Vendors walked up and down the beach with ice cream, or steaming pots of seafood , or there was the one who called, 'some fruit, many fruit.'
People here seem to swim in full dress. Long pants and shirts.
The architecture in Bangkok is actually really interesting. A lot of new buildings mimic the style of the old temples and palaces. They are stepped like pagodas, many layers, with the smallest near the top.
More things about Bangkok i'll remember fondly:
Tiny green eggplant streaked with white, about the size of small eggs, cut up in green curry; Kaffir lime trees with their warty hard fruit, growing in parks; Jackfruit trees along the streets, the fruit huge and heavy and spiked like a mace, dangling over everyone's heads; Mango trees, fruit just large and still green; Durian toffee; Iced coffee; Fresh papaya at breakfast; Sweet sticky (and slightly salty) rice with mango; Seas of hot lemongrass soup (one of the two things i can pronounce in Thai (The other is the name of a stop on the El: Rat.Cha.Tii.Wii.); Street vendors selling green mango with a sauce that looked like nothing but red chili and sugar (which my digestive system was too timid to try.. street food, right out!); Iced coffee; Our ridiculous hotel, with speakers for the television in the bathroom; And maybe best, going home to my own bed, my old habits, my music, my swimming pool, and a language i can speak.
My father. What do you want to know about him? He's almost seventy and retired recently, but he decided to go back to school to become a physician's assistant. This is connected to his rediscovering his latent Christianity (Tho i don't generally have warm feelings about Christianity because i think it displaces a more genuine (this-worldly) search for meaning i think it might do him some good. What he lacks is the ability to think well of people and to sympathize. Jesus has his work cut out for him.) I admire this charitable impulse on his part, maybe partly because i ofen accuse my chosen profession of being without humanitarian results.
On the other hand, i wonder. His lack of sympathy and inability to listen to what people are saying will make him the sort of medical professional that to me seems typical. I've been sick (with the flu or something) and recovering on this trip, and i've always had to deal with fatigue. And despite my having voiced concerns about these things, he declared my tiredness was due to drinking too much cold water. ??? I worry that he'll assume that he can separate the important symptoms from the unimportant without listening to what a patient says.
In trying to relate to him, i've discovered (or maybe re-discovered) something about intimacy. It's not about getting a person to describe himself and his motivations and hopes and dreams. This might be knowledge, but it's not more than that. I haven't been able to spontaneously talk about myself with my dad because he's so critical of other people, and so negative generally. No matter how much i know about him, we're not going to be close until he learns how to seem interested in what i'm doing and ask me questions about my life.
He's also a horrible bigot. Probably our first day back from Cambodia, we were waiting on the platform of the El, and on a building opposite stood a person wearing full head covering, with only the eyes showing out, and a garment that hung down to the floor, like a Muslim woman in a conservative culture. He said, "There's a terrorist." !!! No kidding. That's exactly what he said. When i tried to point out to him what a horrible bigot he was (tho not in those terms!), he said that if he saw a group of people dressed like that, he'd report them. Holy shit! That was almost enough to make me go back that day.
I don't think i'm strong enough to remonstrate with him. I don't even think that's what i should do. When i can get him to hear what i'm saying (His hearing is getting worse, and it was never that good.), he seldom listens. And when he does, any back-and-forth has the tone of an argument. So i've just stopped trying to have meaningful exchanges with him. We talk about what we plan to do, and sometimes about what we see, tho we see very differently, even looking at the same thing. It's not that i don't listen to what he says. It's enlightening to hear what he thinks about the world, and he's not always wrong. But i've stopped trying to respond. I must seem either very simple or very absent.
Despite this interpersonal strangeness, it hasn't been a bad trip. There's a lot to take in, and more details than my poor brain can catalogue. I wish i were here with friends -- that would be far better than my poor vague descriptions.
Beijing, Taiwan, modernization and orientalism
I drank a lot of whiskey in China. Scotch, too, when i could find it, since it was nearly as cheap, if more scarce. Who wants cocktails in that kind of weather? And hot toddies were out—the one time i tried to have one made, i got a pretty good approximation, except that it was over ice. Now, i turn to whiskey to warm my heart.. wild turkey, two shots, neat.
The cold and wind would have been brutal even if i had remembered to bring gloves, and most of what i remember of the city are grey pavement of temples and the plaza of Tiananmen Square the forbidden city, seen from under the brim of a hat pulled low. Because of the cold, i spent most of my waking hours indoors, talking over coffee or booze or hotpot about Chinese philosophy, Wittgenstein, orientalism, and the fate of the world.
The bars my friend took me to were mostly on smaller side streets, the old alleys of the city, in one-story buildings doomed to be destroyed to make way for the Olympic hordes. Christmas Eve, my first night there, was spent in a red and gold bar mostly frequented by Chinese. We got there around nine and managed to get a table, but since this was the last night this place was going to be open, spaces filled up quickly. We didn’t stay too long; the cold had made all of us tired, and my fatigue made everything hazy, and i could only stare sidelong at the great gold Buddha emerging from the mirror.
The bars we went to are really very much like places in the US, candles on the tables and low ceilings, except for the endearingly mediocre Chinese pop acts on stage and the mostly Chinese clientele. This bar reminded me a little of Boltini in better days, done in warmer colors than silver and black.
I’ve been asked whether i think Taipei is westernized, whether Beijing is. I’m still not sure how to answer this. Yes, Beijing is changing its face, putting up new buildings. I don’t know whether to say that this in itself is a mark of Westernization, but i tend to think calling it modernization is more accurate. Whether Beijing is losing its Chinese character? As sure as it has to tear down its history to make room for taller buildings, it is. How is a building built in 2004 in Beijing different from one in Chicago? In Taipei the same replacement is going on, but the process is less deliberate—there is less of tearing down and more of letting the weather beat the curved tiles on the roofs of old Japanese-style houses to dust.
In terms of mundane buildings as opposed to architecture, there’s not a modern Asian style, and the demands of skyscrapers don’t allow for that much variation. There’s Taipei 101 (see http://www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=100765 and http://www.tfc101.com.tw/english/taipei/taipei101.htm ), but the convention hall in Hong Kong (http://webserv1.discoverhongkong.com/eng/touring/hkiidistricts/ta_dist_wanc3.jhtml) resembles nothing so much as the one in Sydney.
But for even a modern Asian style—it would be a pity to tear down the old buildings to put it up. A more vexed question is about the demands of the residents… should someone be charged with preserving old dwellings when the people who live in them would rather move to a less drafty and insect-permeable place?
What else? The subway in Beijing is great. Convenient to all the tourist spots :P
My friend noted that Christmas in Beijing is Christmas devoid of any religious significance, that the crass commercialism that people criticize the holiday for having in the States is simply what it is in China. Double Santas (It’s lucky!) staring out at you from the doors of shops, Christmas garlands and shiny red balls hung from any available ceiling or overhang. The same is mostly true in Taiwan… the Christmas spirit expressed in the gaudy excess of red and gold. Even now, now that twelfth night has passed, the Christmas pointsettias are still set out (which makes me wonder, in the States, where do they disappear to the day after?), and the lights on the Christmas tree in my subway station are still blinking. In Taiwan, these decorations seem to be left up all year, fading in the hot sun of the summer.
After coming home from Beijing and recovering from the weather and the cold i picked up there, the world seems shiny and new. I finished that thirty-page paper that was aching to be finished, and i only have seven hours of class a week this semester. The world is my oyster. Here’s to my friend The Pilgrim in Beijing, and to friends in the US who are temporarily physically distant!
