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Commentary

Dispatch from the 4th International Conference on Gross National Happiness

Learning from Bhutan.


When U.S. President-elect Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination, he explained that “we Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country.” And that is what the Bhutanese have been working on since the 1970s, when their last king realized that the country’s gross national happiness was more important than its gross national product.

It’s my first time in Bhutan, but after two days here, I am captivated by the country’s beauty and the civility of the people. And as I open a second bottle of Red Panda beer and gaze over the lights of Thimphu, I feel very privileged to be here. Just a few years ago, it would have been pretty unlikely for someone like me from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to have even thought of attending a conference like this. But over the past few years, the idea of developing alternative measures of progress has become close to the OECD’s heart. It is work that has been the focus of the OECD-hosted Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies for the past three years.

 

 

For 60 years, gross domestic product (GDP) has been the dominant way in which the world has measured and understood progress. This approach has failed to explain several factors that have the most significant impact on people’s lives. During the last decade, a large amount of work has been carried out to understand and measure the world’s progress. The Global Project is the first systematic global effort to “go beyond GDP” by enabling and promoting new ways to measure societal progress, one high-profile example of which is French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Commission on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress. The commission comprises some of the world’s great thinkers and includes five Nobel laureates.

The Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies aims to foster the development of sets of key economic, social, and environmental indicators to provide a comprehensive picture of how the well-being of a society is evolving, and seeks to encourage each society to consider in an informed way the crucial question: Is life getting better?

The Global Project is an international network of organizations from all sectors of society. The main partners in the Global Project are the OECD, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, and the European Commission. Research institutes, development banks, nongovernmental organizations, and statistical offices from both developing and developed countries are also working with us.

The project has three main goals:

  • What to measure? In order to measure progress, we must know what it looks like, and so we are encouraging debate about what progress means in different societies. The project is developing methods and guidelines to carry out these debates effectively.
  • How to measure progress? The project is developing best practices in how to measure progress and its component parts, some of which are not yet measured well using existing statistical indicators.
  •  Ensuring that those measures are used. New information and communication technology (ICT) tools offer huge potential to turn information into knowledge among a much broader swathe of citizens than those who currently access such information. The project is developing new tools for public use.

At the heart of the Global Project is the development of Wiki-Progress, a global collaborative online platform that will serve as a hub and focal point of the many existing and nascent initiatives to measure societal progress at national and local levels.

The OECD is among those that believe that grassroots conversations around measuring progress — and the outcomes a society wants to achieve — can change the political debate: They can shift discussion from arguments over the political means to agreement on the societal ends. This also echoes U.S. President-elect Obama’s Democratic nomination acceptance speech: “We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country. … Passions fly on immigration, but I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers. This, too, is part of America’s promise, the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.”

There is mounting evidence that discussions on indicators of progress can foster a sense of what the U.S. president-elect described as “our sense of common purpose, our sense of higher purpose.” The OECD is working to promote this approach. And there is much we can learn from the Bhutanese.

Jon Hall is project coordinator of the Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies. He presented the paper “A global movement for a global challenge” at the 4th International Conference on Gross National Happiness held in November in Thimphu, Bhutan.

Additional reading:

Measuring the Progress of Societies
A global movement for a global challenge
Papers from the 4th International Conference on Gross National Happiness in Bhutan
A teacher’s view on the Gross National Happiness conference

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Photo Essays

101 billionaires

The other side of Russian capitalism.


Under Vladimir Putin’s rule, Russia has reclaimed its position among the superpowers of the world. In the past eight years, the economic recession of the tumultuous 90s is seemingly all but forgotten. Thanks to the country’s abundance of raw materials, such as oil and natural gas, the Russian economy is flourishing as never before. After a mere 18 years of capitalism, the January 2008 issue of Finans Magazine reported that there are currently 101 billionaires in Russia.

It is difficult to detect much prosperity in the book 101 Billionaires, which portrays an entirely different segment of the Russian population.  In this excerpt, Hornstra depicts the impoverished Russians: victims of the ”tough-as-nails” capitalism with which Russia made its name immediately after the fall of communism."  Hornstra’s new book, 101 Billionaires, is available through his website, www.borotov.com.

[ Click here to view the visual essay ]

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News

Propaganda’s children

Life among Ho Chi Minh’s heirs.


 

Where to begin? Any street here in Ho Chi Minh City hits you with so much in one minute.

You cower from the onslaught: braying horn honks shattering nerves, motorbike engines sputtering and growling, and any number of the 10 million Saigonese moving, squatting, smoking, spitting, buying, selling. 

A swarm of kids tumble out of school, mindless of the ceaseless maelstrom of traffic in the street. The red neckerchief of state obeisance, dutifully knotted around their necks hours earlier, is now used to play-whip a friend. 

And, most difficult of all for an Englander like myself, nowhere is there no people and no noise. There is only the millions of people; the bike fumes; the money passing hands; the beggars, with tireless hope, thrusting out empty paws; and the burgeoning vehicle hierarchy: a drip-drip influx of sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and Mercedes Benzes beeping the bike-riding lower classes out of their way, only to ultimately be rejoined by them at the lights. For with four million motorbikes in this city alone, we are too many, and the archaic road system here cannot cope with our luxurious metal excesses. Communism’s nouveaux riches are as vulgar and cocooned from reality as ever. 

Here, in the city formerly known as Saigon, lives are lived on top of one another. Hard-won possessions and houses are guarded by ever-watchful owners, utilizing a variety of padlocks, barbed wire, iron spikes, or walls lined with broken glass. It’s a mindset that dates back to April 30, 1975 — the day of the city’s fall or liberation, depending on your perspective. And that perspective depends, at least in part, on your roots.

 

The Red thread

The communist nature of daily life here is something you could easily miss when passing through as a tourist on the group tours, with the state-owned tour companies and hoteliers pointing out all the glorious deeds of once-dear leader Uncle Ho. Yes, you’d see red flags, yellow stars, and the lime-green uniforms of army-cum-police on every street. You might even see some of the old Tannoy speakers on street corners in Hanoi, and experience the misery of being woken by the blare of propaganda at 6:30 a.m.

But it takes time to see how communism and a closed society has imprinted itself into the habits and thought patterns of the people through education, controlled media, and fear. Who would dare discuss politics when the man beside you in the coffee shop could be a plain-clothes policeman?  People still disappear to be “re-educated” after visiting the wrong websites, such as Vietnamese pro-democracy groups in the United States, for example.

Four years of teaching and writing in Vietnam has put me in proximity with this much-exalted “youth.” From 2004 to 2008, I taught students from across the entire age spectrum; that’s preschool (kindergarten) through to adults taking night school classes after work. But the majority of my time was spent in private language institutions, teaching high school kids aged 12 to 18. They are a unique demographic, brought up on brainwashing, educated in a doctrinaire manner to revere Uncle Ho and to never question the status quo.

The adolescents I taught are still very much a product of their closed society. From my tentative discussions with them in class, I learned that they are rarely exposed to the choices and responsibilities of their Western counterparts that engender maturity. Their parents generally seek to protect them from “social evils” — drugs, prostitution, sex — sometimes forbidding them to date boys or girls until they’ve graduated from university. One of my female students — an 18-year-old named Vinh — once told me that, over the weekend, her mother had listened in on her private phone call and locked her in her room when she heard her discussing boys.

But despite the iron-rod parenting and societal frowns, Vietnamese teens are still having sex, and doing so in ignorance of safe-sex practices. The country has one of the world’s highest abortion rates, at 1.4 million annually. Due to the lack of privacy in Vietnamese society — children tend to live with their parents until they marry — couples often head at night to ca phe oms (literally, coffee shop hugs), which have lightless rooms out back for making out.

Yet the closed society is open to bizarre paradoxes. Slushy romantic notions of love are idealized, and every teenager knows the lyrics to the Titanic theme tune, “My Heart Will Go On.” Students in their mid-20s will giggle at words such as “hot” or “sexy.” Trying to have a debate on gender, race, or sexual politics is fraught with difficulties, and a discussion of politics in general is simply not possible.

The doctrinaire education system has created a population that lacks a vital vocabulary for critical thinking. It’s staggering, the lack of responsibility and social awareness the youth here has. I could cite several examples from my time teaching high school graduates English: the 18-year-old girl, Na, who told me that the first time she had raised her hand to ask a question in class was in mine; one student’s reaction to my circuitous questioning regarding ideas about freedom of the press:

“Who controls the media in Vietnam?” I asked her.

“The government,” she replied.

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“It’s a good thing.”

“Really. Why?”

“Because our government wouldn’t lie to us.”

Where would one begin? For if the children are receiving English lessons in a private school, it often means their parents are paid-up members of the Party.

This education system, serving only those in power, is starting to take its toll on foreign investors, who are experiencing firsthand the problems that inculcation and rote learning have in the workplace. Vietnam has experienced phenomenal gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the past decade, making it the second fastest growing economy in the Southeast Asia region. There is a growing gap, however, between skilled jobs and a skilled workforce able to make decisions, take responsibility, and lead.

Human resources headaches for foreign investors

Vietnam is at a crossroads. The country became a full-fledged member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on January 11, 2007, and is opening up to a market economy. However, WTO commitments restrict the hiring of foreign workers in some areas, notably the service sector. Therefore, the inability of the current generation of graduates to solve problems and make decisions through critical thinking is now surfacing as a headache for foreign investors in the human resources sector. At the Vietnam Business Forum in Hanoi last December, the Australian Chamber of Commerce (AusCham) bemoaned the fact that few graduates had the necessary skills to enter the workplace without additional training. AusCham cited a lack of focus on analytical skills as one of the major shortcomings of Vietnam’s higher education system.

In March this year, according to the European Chamber of Commerce (EuroCham), foreign investors bemoaned the shortage of skilled workers to fill roles in their companies. EuroCham board member Mark Van Den Assem was quoted as saying that young personnel were usually not confident enough to take over managerial posts, while subordinates doubted their capabilities.

Critical thinking skills are vital for effective problem-solving and decision-making, since they allow individuals to react in a balanced way to difficult situations by weighing the evidence and responding in a measured and beneficial manner. In addition to intellectual skills, other traits found in good critical thinkers include empathy, humility, and autonomy.

The devil reads Pravda

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” Saul Bellow’s words have a timeless application to the act of governance, be it spin-doctoring in a democracy or propagandizing by the “Ministry of Truth” in an Orwellian-style totalitarian state.

Such practices are something I witnessed daily when I began working as a freelance writer and subeditor for one of Vietnam’s state-owned newspapers in November 2007. The paper, Thanh Nien, is a national English-language version of the Vietnamese edition, published by the elaborately titled Forum of the Vietnamese Youth Federation. Indeed, some of the subtle manipulations of “the truth” fall into my hands as subeditor and “reporter.”

Thanh Nien is one of the freer media outlets in terms of its editorial policy. “Freer” basically means that it is allowed to run corruption stories: the chief of police who took bribes, the minister receiving bulging manila envelopes in order to fast-track a construction project, land reclamation scandals, and so on. It’s a long and growing list. Such stories give the illusion that the endemic, deep-rooted corruption is being tackled.

The paper’s name translates as “Youth,” as does its main print rival, Tuoi Tre. Youth is an important concept in this still insidiously communist country. Youth means the future propagation of the old Marxist ideals. Indeed, Vietnam can only have been one of a handful of countries to celebrate Marx’s 190th birthday.

At work, I sit down to edit stories of war heroes, decoding “Pham Xuan An: American leaders continued to blame each other for intelligence leaks covertly orchestrated by the stealth Vietnamese mole.” Such stories are plucked straight from the Vietnamese edition and mean nothing to the foreign readership of the paper. But orders come from higher up to leave page four free for the 14th episode of such inspirational espionage. My stories are summarily bumped with a shrug from the page editor, and I already know why.

The April 30 holiday, these days tellingly relabeled as “Reunification” Day, is approaching. The State is reminding the population which side won, while the army reasserts its presence in the city. These bored young recruits, many on national service, choose easy targets, such as old ladies hawking fruit on the streets or impromptu street noodle stalls. Such illegal vending is tolerated for 10 months of the year, either through some kind of kickback or sheer wiliness on the vendor’s part. But now a point must be made to the population at large. Now is the time for a sharp reminder from the puppeteer still pulling the strings. So the propaganda posters go up, noting that triumphant date with the classic symbol of a white dove flying above the “Reunification Palace.” And the tools of someone’s livelihood are seized — tables and chairs, pots and pans, bunches of bananas.

Earlier this year, an old regional sticking point, the Spratly Islands archipelago in the South China Sea, reared its head in the news. Territorial ownership is asserted by half a dozen countries in the area, including China, Taiwan, and the Philippines, although Vietnam has the strongest claim to these islands. Interest is piqued by the rich fishing stocks and reserves of oil and gas the archipelago possesses. In March, China began making noises about its rights to claim the islands — a country that, in 1988, was involved in a naval battle with Vietnam off one of the reefs.

At the time I was teaching Business English to university students, and one young man, Trinh, decided to do a class talk on the Spratly crisis. He brought in maps, Wikipedia references, and newspaper cuttings to show why the islands were rightfully Vietnam’s. The class applauded his jingoistic stance, a carbon copy of the nationalistic propaganda that the papers were full of at the time. 

Bypassing the information superhighway

Fast Internet connections are widely available today and cheap in all urban centers. The only sites blocked are those to Geocities, where the Vietnamese overseas community has its pro-democracy sites. Such activists are now inevitably labeled “militants” and “terrorists” in the Vietnamese press.

But, thanks in part to the lack of English skills at higher levels, most sites like the BBC and Google are not blocked by a China-esque firewall. One would hope that this might mean some of the ideas about freedom of the press and democracy might make it though. 

And yet this is a country that since 1975 has actively encouraged suspicion. It’s the ultimate neighborhood watch scheme. Everyone spies on each other and reports suspicious activity to the police. It is an inversion of Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted phrase: the price of un freedom is eternal vigilance.

All this may sound like a lot of 1950s McCarthy-era paranoia, as I myself thought when I first arrived, until I began to be followed to and from the newspaper. Each day, the same motorbike taxi driver (known locally as xe oms) began to appear either outside my house or outside the newspaper whenever I was there. It was sinister, unnerving. Par for the course, an Australian colleague said.

A life less ordinary

So, at times I find myself terrified and tested — when the heat is drawing out beads of sweat by the hundreds, and the bike horns, car horns and, worst of all, bus horns, are bursting my eardrums, scattering my patience and shredding my nerves. At those times I despair for what Vietnam has already become, and what it will be like 10 years hence.

At times I find myself enlightened and elated — a trip to a local temple alive with Buddhist chants, chance encounters on the street, how the city’s pollution turns the sun into a ball of red fury as it sets on another wearying day.

And, after four years, I would say that the key to unlocking the city is this: Despite all the accoutrements of capitalism that have accompanied its phenomenal economic growth in recent years — SUVs, mobile phones, laptops, Wi-Fi hotspots — Vietnam is still is starkly, unpleasantly totalitarian.

The roots of propaganda are sown young and sown deep. Some of the most highly educated and well-traveled Vietnamese people I have met here, including lawyers, doctors, and business people, have all reverted back to a potent, disturbing nationalism when any issue that portrays Vietnam in a negative light has been raised. 

Vietnam, number one. Ho Chi Minh, number one.

That’s the country’s myth and mantra. And it’s what the youth are sticking to, at least for now.

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Reviews

When the foxes guard the henhouse

The unusual relationship between John McCain and the media.


A review of Free Ride: John McCain and the Media by David Brock and Paul Waldman.

In this informative and thought-provoking critique of the media and its relationship with Senator John McCain, David Brock and Paul Waldman argue that McCain, the Republican candidate for the 2008 presidential election, has "cracked the code" of dealing with journalists and that’s why he’s received such favorable press coverage in the past.

The authors propose that John McCain has been well received by the media in the past because of his excellent rapport with journalists — he gave it regular access, he was willing to talk on the record, and he was never afraid to be the “guy next door” who shoots the breeze and sometimes says things he later regrets. The authors also demonstrate how McCain has cultivated his "maverick" image, encouraging reporters to think of him as a trailblazer who breaks with his own party, when his voting record shows a mainstream Republican with a few pet issues.

Another factor the authors address is the nature of the media itself. Smaller media outlets frequently use wire stories from the bigger news outlets, which tends to create a more homogeneous view of a candidate than a news consumer might otherwise get. They also compare the type of coverage he gets from his home state media, which tends to be less flattering  than the national media. The dustups between McCain and local journalists are legendary in Arizona. Brock and Waldman stick to the facts in exploring McCain’s long history with the press, neither fawning over the man nor suggesting that the national media has allowed itself to be manipulated by a cunning media strategy.

It’s a quote-heavy book that draws on numerous sources to illustrate the arguments presented on John McCain’s treatment of and by the media, from print and cable television news reporting as well as the senator’s own record, interviews, etc. The book paints the picture of a master at work, using the media carefully and deliberately in his political career.

What the book doesn’t answer, however, is why McCain abandoned this strategy when he became the Republican nominee for president. Instead of the open, collegial relationship the press had come to expect from McCain, it was instead kept at arms length. He treated it as a traditional Republican candidate would treat the press: as an enemy. Predictably, with their access taken away, the press turned on McCain. The majority of his coverage since mid-September has been negative, and the standard protestations of liberal media bias emanated from the campaign.

It is unclear why the McCain campaign would throw away one of its candidate’s greatest assets in pursuit of the presidency. This book details what a powerful weapon it was, and how skillfully McCain has wielded it in the past. In exploring McCain’s previous relationship with the press, one comes away with a new view of McCain and who he really is as a person and as a politician, rather than a nuanced view of how and why the media behaves the way it does toward the candidate. One almost feels that it is the media that is getting the free ride.
 

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Fiction & Poetry

Disinformation revealed

But will truth triumph in the end?


the efficaciousness of the media
a modern day ballyhoo
preaches prevarication
to a congregation
of fictile sheep
 
this semantics of salesmanship
is newspeak defined
advocacy masked
rumor paints a scapegoat
with the brush of psychological warfare
 
october’s tricks
seek to dupe november
with messianic promise
as a distressed populace 
pray for a miracle
 
a facade that deludes
wears yet the domino of pretext
cloaked in political mythology
pernicious propaganda prevails
disinformation wins out
 
or will it …

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Reviews

God and the “chosen one”

An evangelical Christian looks at what religion means to Obama.


 

The religion of Barack Obama has become a matter at the forefront of the 2008 American presidential race, from the media storm surrounding his former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, to assertions that the democratic nominee harbors a closeted Islamic faith. In his latest volume, The Faith of Barack Obama, Stephen Mansfield attempts to trace the arc of the Illinois senator’s spiritual development, casting it as a paradigm of contemporary faith with potentially profound political resonance.

Beginning with the admission that the book is "written in the belief that if a man’s faith is sincere, it is the most important thing about him, and that it is impossible to understand who he is and how he will lead without first understanding the religious vision that informs his life," Mansfield frames his work with an exceptionally honest recognition of the writer’s worldview. He regards spirituality as the imminent force of one’s life, identity, and behavior.

With an atheist mother, a stepfather practicing folk Islam, and educations at Catholic and Congregational schools, Barack Obama was not raised with unified religious influence. His faith today is one that he selected as an adult, not one that he received osmotically through his rearing. Mansfield implies Obama to be a man fortunate to have risen from the spiritual mishmash which his mother, Anne Soetoro, allowed. Mansfield somewhat disparages her as he writes, "She paid the price for her [religious] detachment by ultimately having no belonging, no tribe, no people to claim for her own," and, "Only through a steely shielding of the heart, only through a determined detachment, could a child of Barack’s age be exposed to so much incongruous religious influence and emerge undamaged."

Yet Obama’s early introduction to diverse forms of spirituality informs his belief that various religions may act as vehicles to the same objective Faith. Though later he chose to worship via the United Church of Christ, he refuses to view it as a denomination holding a monopoly over religious truth. He can appreciate pluralism despite his particular affiliation with the sect, saying in 2006, "Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers."

Obama did not commit to a particular church until adulthood, when he began attending the Trinity United Church headed by Reverend Jeremiah Wright in Chicago’s South Side. Seeking what he called a "vessel" for his beliefs, Obama chose it as his own. It was a church that permitted close intellectual examination of the spiritual, a method not unlike the textual deconstruction he practiced as a student of political science as an undergraduate at Harvard. It was a church in which sermons often conflated religious life with fighting oppression, much as Obama did in his job as a community organizer. It was indeed a vessel for him to enter as himself without needing to excessively remold himself. Mansfield infers that Obama did not immediately abandon the Trinity United Church after incendiary remarks, such as "God damns America," were made by Wright because of this newfound sense of belonging.

Still, Obama did not leave everything of the Trinity United Church behind, retaining a conviction in that religion and civic life need not be always divorced. In 2006 in a speech at a conference called "From Poverty to Opportunity: A Covenant for a New America," he deviated from the norm of secular liberalism by saying, "Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square…to say that men and women should not inject their ‘personal morality’ into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality."

Mansfield depicts Obama as the ultimate example of this generation’s spirituality, one not of rigid dogma but one of plasticity permitting interfaith fluidity, integration with civil life, and most of all, doubt. Though the senator has expressed belief that faith will lead him to eternal life, he has also confessed that when asked by his daughter what happens upon death, he vacillated between telling her he was uncertain or simply providing a comforting answer. Obama has professed his belief that Christ is the Lord’s son but does not believe Christianity is the sole path to God. He has attended church regularly for twenty years and staunchly supports women’s rights in Congress, yet has admitted that someday he may realize error in his pro-choice sentiments. To Mansfield, Obama is a model of this generation’s believer, that is, a believer who does not always adhere to dogma, does not always sever church and state, does not always insist that he knows but permits doubt into his faith.

This new religion is one that Mansfield compares to three other kinds of faith typified by Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and George W. Bush. The difference to Mansfield is not so much the doctrinal as narrative. While Clinton has experienced faith as the exercise of social decency, McCain has kept a quietly personal religiosity separate from his position as a senator, and Bush has felt an evangelical call which provided a sense of destiny to his foray into politics. Mansfield asserts that Obama, by choosing his religion yet tolerating the religion of others, by refusing to allow faith become the sole possession of Republicans, and by allowing morality a place in public life, may heal recent wounds of partisanship, class stratification, and racial or religious rivalry to move towards an improved nation. His is a faith that today could change America.

Though certainly Mansfield often makes overly broad statements without providing evidence of their veracity, proclaiming that we live in a "faith-fixated age" and that "brilliant dresses, hats, and fashionable suits [are what] one expects of a black church in America," he offers a detailed study of Barack Obama’s spiritual development. At times it is evident that he must fight his own prejudices of what religion is, such as when he rather dismissively writes that Obama epitomizes "a new, postmodern generation that picks and chooses its own truth from traditional faith, much as a man customizes his meal at a buffet." Yet Mansfield is not so myopic as to miss that a man such as Barack Obama, who has defied so many preconceptions of what it means to have belief, may indeed help Americans have the faith to change.

Next month: A review of Free Ride: John McCain and the Media by
David Brock and Paul Waldman

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Commentary

Loss through change

Another perspective of urban renewal.


Most people hear about urban renewal and consider it a good thing. They think about slums and ghettos being turned around into safe, clean, and prosperous neighborhoods that in turn become close-knit communities. They have images of children playing baseball in the street and neighbors getting together to talk and plan festivals. It’s a popular image that accompanies a popular catch phrase. It’s also wrong. What people don’t think about is the loss of community and the locals who are forced out due to the increasing property taxes that stem from “renewal.”

Most metropolitan areas have neighborhoods that are considered “unsavory” and present an image that the city would not like to portray. Cities respond by beginning the urban renewal process. First they’ll install a park or two and a community center. Then they’ll give tax breaks to certain businesses and homebuilders in an attempt to lure them in. Then they’ll advertise about how this area that “decent” people used to avoid is now the place where they need to be. The area then takes on a tourist feel, as people begin to flood the area hoping to become part of the new “hip” place to live. Overpriced boutiques sprout up, while old food markets get torn down to make way for the large organic grocery store chain. Playgrounds and empty lots get replaced by Starbucks and tapas restaurants. Ordinances get passed to get rid of street performers in favor of kiosks that give directions. Streets get completely renovated until the area no longer resembles the community that used to thrive there.

These changes cause problems for the people who have lived in the area. Their rents go up, while their old gathering places come down. Many of them can’t afford the groceries in the new trendy organic market, and they could never dream of affording the clothes in the boutique that replaced the old vintage shop. Their bars and restaurants are no longer places to meet their friends but are filled to capacity with the new crowd. The city has taken over their community festivals, which now feature large corporate sponsorships and are so crowded that the locals can’t even park at their own homes. New neighborhood associations mandate restorations on the old houses they live in. The Joneses move in, outspending neighbors in vain attempts to best them. Gone is the concern or respect for the people who were there before them. Alienation settles in, as old neighbors and friends move out.

In a decade’s time, I’ve watched firsthand the life of an entire neighborhood from ghetto, to renewal, to trendy, to cliché, to decline, and back into ghetto. Once the locals move out and the neighborhood loses its character, many of the newcomers no longer find it desirable. The once-hip place gets left behind, as its residents look to the next happening place to call home — typically another community undergoing renewal. So as the old neighborhood becomes totally vacated, taxes and rents get lowered until the only people moving in are those who can’t afford anything else. Of course after some time, these new residents will have set up their own community and brought some sense of character, and the city will take notice and begin the entire process again.

I think it’s important for communities to exist in a large city. A city is not defined by buildings and attractions but by the people who call it home.
It is they who preach the loudest when their parks and roads are not being properly maintained. It is they who protest when a new parking deck is being planned for an empty lot where their children play. They are the ones who gather in droves when neighborhood crime rates spike.

If urban renewal is to spread, perhaps cities should consider putting it into the hands of the locals. Instead of businesses and politicians deciding which businesses would improve an area, residents should have the say as to what they might enjoy. They might choose a dive bar over that expensive wine bar.    

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Commentary

Autumn visitors

Shaking up the campus.


Autumn – the season of change, of turning inwards for warmth as the summer sun fades -– is always a time for excitement at universities. Classes begin, friendships are rekindled, and roommates meet for the first time. Students are reminded once again of the unique pleasures and challenges of school living, of the joys of this liminal space brimming with knowledge for those between youth and the “real life.”

At Columbia University, where I am an undergraduate senior, autumn is also high-profile visitor season. At least once a semester, an infamous guest appears on campus, addresses over-excited students, and then exits. Often, the Daily News or the New York Post weigh in on the event:  “Columbia Hosts a Thug” opined the Post when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared on the scene last September.

This year’s visitors came on the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Students were ecstatic when they found out that Columbia was hosting a forum for presidential candidates Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain  as part of the ServiceNation Summit, a two-day gathering of leaders highlighting volunteer and national service. The candidates’ presence, especially that of campus favorite Obama, a 1983 grad, was expected to exorcise the ghosts of fall speeches past.

In late 2005, I was a freshman when I saw John Ashcroft, who’d stepped down as Attorney General earlier in the year, speak to a hot undergraduate-filled auditorium. Some students brought banners decrying torture; others presented rational arguments during the question-and-answer portion of the event. I stayed up the rest of the night, buoyed by adrenaline, to write a paper due the next day at 9 a.m. At the fourth or fifth hour of my vigil, I realized that the political themes of the Ashcroft spectacle – the debate over security, national identity, civil liberties – had informed my understanding of Thucydides’ reading of the Peloponnesian Wars.

This is what they meant by extracurricular education, I thought. I was pleased.

The next fall, when I was a sophomore, the College Republicans invited the Minuteman vigilante group’s leader Jim Gilchrist to discuss the perils of letting immigrants over the Mexican border. Many student groups, led by the Chicano Caucus, viewed the event as deeply offensive, even threatening. I was covering the swelling protests on campus for a student magazine when a cluster of friend reporters cried out that chaos had broken out. After an introduction by an African American preacher, Gilchrist began spewing invective against the heckling students in attendance. A Chicano Caucus-led contingent then burst onto his platform to unveil a banner that read “No Human is Illegal” in English, Spanish, and Arabic. Minutemen supporting Gilchrist responded by trying to rip down the banner. College Republicans jumped into the fray, and a Latino student was kicked in the head by a middle-aged, burly, booted vigilante.

In the weeks that followed, “The O’Reilly Factor” had a heyday with the debacle, University President Lee Bollinger – a free speech lawyer – denounced the student protesters, and the Columbia blog at which I was an editor received dozens of threats and vile messages. One read simply: “your worse then the mooselums [sic] who flew the planes into the buildings.”

My bright-eyed freshman enthusiasm for Thucydides on the wane, I stared head-on at the ugly side of racism, media bias, and violence underpinning various aspects of American society. 

Within weeks of returning to campus, this time for my junior year,  we received a jolt of news: Iran’s Ahmadinejad, who’d reportedly called for a “world without the United States and Zionism,” had been invited to speak at the university’s World Leaders Forum. The press exploded. On the day of the speech, nearly sick with excitement, I entered an auditorium buzzing with reporters, students both angry and curious, and sedate professors, while outside, thousands of students watched on massive screens. It was here that Ahmadinejad said, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country” and called Iran “friends with the Jewish people.” 

My friends’ reactions ended up on USA Today, The New York Times, international wires as well as Fox and CNN. I soon learned that Richard Bulliet, a history professor at Columbia’s Middle East Institute, was behind Ahmadinejad’s invitation. In an interview with me for The Bwog, he explained, “My feeling, what I wanted, was to see to what degree this event can serve as a brake on the push towards war.…What kind of a triumph would it be to bring down Ahmadinejad?”

So with these memories of speeches past, I geared up this September for what I thought would be the most exciting autumn addresses yet: Obama and McCain, either of whom could become the next president of the United States. The excitement was all the more palpable because of their Columbia connections: Obama as an alum and McCain as the father of a 2007 grad.

“You realize that he’s had the exact same education as us,” a female student said of Obama. Her eyes brightened. “He’s read The Wretched of the Earth too.” For McCain’s part, he wasn’t just a Columbia parent; he also delivered the keynote address to graduates in 2006. We felt these things were significant.

By 8 p.m. on the big night, thousands of students had swarmed over the steps of Low Library, Columbia’s popular  hangout, to watch the event on a large screen. The expanse of stone and brick was covered with picnics, games, books, blankets, beer bottles, water jugs, cigarettes, and cameras. Clusters of students became territorial about their 2-by-4-foot plots of brick ground, and bathroom runs were out of the question. There was something epic about our rock concert stance, as if we expected to wave lighters or break out in mass dancing.

McCain, we were told, had won a coin toss to be the first interviewed by PBS correspondent Judy Woodruff and Time editor Richard Stengel. McCain said America should expand its military without a draft. He also criticized Columbia for not allowing Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) recruitment on campus, a measure first taken to protest the Vietnam War and later reaffirmed because of the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward gay personnel. After a commercial break, Obama took the stage. He too called for the expansion of the military, and he also criticized Columbia’s stance on ROTC.

Suddenly, things were not as they had seemed. We had assumed Obama read Fanon, that he understood us and represented our intellectual desires. But on the ServiceNation stage, under the scrutiny of television viewers, he joined McCain in criticizing our school for its hard-line stance for gay rights. We were at a loss.

In my first three autumns of college, I came to understand that the truths we held self-evident were really strands of many truths tied together with frayed edges. Politics was messier than I ever imagined. And big issues – about civil liberties, racism, and foreign policy, to name a few – were so complex it was a wonder anyone made any progress. Watching McCain and Obama laud service, I hoped desperately for a deep, real change.

Additional Reading:

The rationale of Richard Bulliet

President Ahmadinejad delivers remarks at Columbia University

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Fiction & Poetry

Songs of change

Five poems.


My Light
 
Could I take your hand?
In my mind the skin feels
               uh
too close

walk with me
there’s this fence
one two three …
five strand wire
and sheep

amidst the sunlit grass
blade by blade step through
step      
how the hillside climbs
away in rolls and slides
tracks and shelves
where the sheep trail
little feet climb

from the top
where the Maori cemetery
hushes your mouth       gaze
out to the glass horizon
where the whales boom

I want to show you
                        the sea wall,
the tiny huts two beds bunks
outside dunny

and the wood pigeon
carrying the sound of five hundred
journeys in each wingbeat
downstroke
fat with plums

show you the cut cross
clean above the salt bones of driftwood
sparking up the dark

take my hand
I’ll try not to mind
how close you are

see the morning rise?
This is mine.

Separation
 
As I was cleaning my bathroom,
I found a place beneath the doorframe
where two edges of vinyl touched.

I’ve cleaned this floor many times
and never noticed that line before.

Funny, so often we don’t see
how completely two have joined
until they come asunder.
 
 
Night Dust
 
As I walk the glistening halls of night
my bones sing of calcification.
Fluid thrums from the caverns
beneath my teeth.

Poker machines lolly-gagging tunes
play in the spaces my throat
tries to swallow.

This is a new kind of dark,
where one day melts into another
in a way you just can’t be bothered with.

Moonsong
 
Flowers are embroidered in glittering beads
along the curves of my thighs.

You’ve heard my voice chime
deep silver along the horizon
as I rise
but you don’t remember.

I have many names,
Crow and Sickle, Arctic, Wolf,
Barley and Blood, as I shift
in shade and shape.

I cup light in my palms for you to bathe,
but you must come to me unclothed,
stripped of all pretensions.
I care nothing for the weight you bear.

Rest, for you have not known rest.
Divest yourself of clutter
and concealment. You are
a manifestation of love,

and I am a crone born from fires of stone
and cooled to airless ice. I hold
the traction of tides and seasons.

Time upon time I have died and renewed.
If I wash you clean in the bowl
of my lap and chant my names,
might you remember me?

Southern Alps at Midnight
 
The soldier on maneuvers
stands in the howling dark,
on rock crystallized to white.
 
The night strips away camouflage,
opens his ribs and creeps around lungs,
to germinate a small seed,
the dream that is his life,
whenever he thinks of home.

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Commentary

Amalgamation

A collective identity.


 

     As I step uncertainly through the doors beyond the Nothing to Declare lane, a catholicity of stimuli greets my senses. A sea of earth-toned faces of various gradations waits eagerly. Arab North Africans, dark-haired Andalucianos, and fair-skinned Vascos mix with expectant German and American tourists, completing a cultural mosaic. The dry, crisp smell of winter hits my nose, making it tingle slightly. I think I am already engulfed, when suddenly I hear it: the deep, sonorous music of words. 

    It slides off tongues quickly, but consciously, pointedly. It lacks the song-like sprightliness of Swiss-French and the sharp, long tones of Swiss-German. Dialogue now has a smooth, rich molasses quality; it clings to the ears like the lingering aftertaste of a robust red wine on an attune palate.

   “Querida mía, hace mucho tiempo.”
   “Hola guapa, que tal?”
   “Como fue tu viaje cariño?” 
   I am inundated, overwhelmed, enraptured.

    In Salamanca, Spain, I was una americana to the Spaniards, “so Euro” to the Americans, and to the three Gabonese in the entire city, I was une Camerounaise—une belle café au lait, that they would gladly bring home to Mom and Dad. My identity shifted constantly, based on the story I told people. When I felt like being adventurous, I laid it all out—a ten-minute saga describing my Cameroonian origins and upbringing, my current dual residency in Geneva and Providence, and the fact that I now simultaneously call three continents home.

    Other times, surrounded by scrutinizing Spaniards who claimed “hablas muy bien para una americana,” I claimed Boston as my home turf, although I have never lived there, and neither of my parents are from there. Given my time at Brown University, only fifty short minutes from the city, and the many summers I escaped Cameroon to find solace in Boston’s commercialized downtown districts, I figured I could make this slight breach of the truth. Mom often attested that she was from Boston when questioned. Although she was born in Georgia and lived most of her life outside North America, “Boston is the place where I spent the most time within the U.S.” she would justify. Calling it my own didn’t seem too far-fetched, I decided. —

    When I felt like being exotic, I snobbily expounded on my life in Geneva with tales of Gruyère and Vacherin fondue savored with Chasselas wine, indulgent soirees at expensive Swiss night clubs, and daytrips through the Alps. With these slightly fictionalized accounts, I dazzled the Americans, coloring their pre-existing fantasies of Europe as a bastion for cultural and gastronomic excellence.

    But encountering sub-Saharan Africans in Salamanca made me squirm.

    “Mais, tu parles français avec un accent américain? Et la langue de ton pere?“ they would ask, as if my seventeen years in Cameroon and native Cameroonian father guaranteed that I would speak French and the language of my father’s ethnic group perfectly. The backlog of memories from my upbringing in an isolated international, largely American, community in the heart of Yaoundé would stream before me, strangling my tongue. I didn’t speak perfect French, or my father’s Bamileke language, because  we spoke English at home. And so that was my final answer.

    Whenever I came into contact with Cameroonians the realization that I was half-white often emerged amid these heated cultural discussions, often followed by a barrage of professions of love and marriage proposals.  To these I simply answered no, in Spanish, the language that helped erase some of the societal barriers that threatened to separate us extranjeros. Most often it served to unite us across cultures, creeds and colors in our new country.

    As I grappled with my identity, for perhaps the first time since freshman year—when I was encouraged to associate and self-identify based on my race—I  had to recall my personal mission for my study abroad. My desire to experience Spain was the primary objective, and although this understanding would be colored by culture and identity, I would not allow these issues to obfuscate that goal.

    The truth is that I am an amalgamation of all these cultures, each subsequent experience in my life shedding a little piece of itself into my collective identity. Pooled together, these seemingly disparate parts have become the all-encompassing me.

  ***

    It has been three months since my American comrades and I have hit Iberian soil, and tonight we have begun yet another noche de fiesta.

   We sashay along, Marlboro Lights in hand, teeth tinged blue by cheap Ribero wine, swaying to the music in our heads. Passing by O’Hares we laugh at the American mini-circles of exclusion, holding the walls for balance against the turbulent forces of legal drinking. We smirk at the Spaniards calling out their piropos to us with that sensually slurred manner, undoubtedly attributable to the calimocho we have all been drinking for hours. I am sloppily reflecting on the lewd, wine-savoring stereotypical Castellanos before us, the kind we hear about from politically correct northeastern American tourists returning from their first European vacations, utterly scandalized. And then, puzzlingly, I am gripped by something.   

    There is something all too familiar about los Castellanos, both men and women. It is an indescribable, amorphous passion for life that one cannot fully describe and must simply be experienced. It is something that many Americans are removed from in their commercialized, commoditized lives-on-the-go and something many Europeans tend to regard as inappropriately effusive in societies where emotions are expressed through a veil of reservation.

    It is a fervor that reminds me of the countless celebratory, makossa music-infused Cameroonian nights, garnished with bitter plums, ndolé greens and rice, topped off with palm wine. I remember the numerous troops of joggers who would trot by our school in Yaoundé singing in harmonious tones almost unaware of their beautiful sound; the creativity of the little boys in my quartier, who would use metal and rubber from old flip-flops to create trucks and cars to play with. I am taken back to the cries that would shake the valley when a goal was made or missed during a Cameroonian football game and the pride with which Cameroonians embrace their culture—seeking out occasions to speak their native tongues, wearing their traditional clothes in cultures of suffocating uniformity and commercialism, gaining simple happiness by meeting other Africans in foreign lands, and artfully recreating customs and traditions through music, food, and art. The Cameroonian and African zest for life is something that I had never seen reproduced so powerfully in any other country.

    But Spain embraces its own customs as fervently and passionately as Cameroonians. I was taken aback each time I observed the multitude of older men sitting in plazas sipping on cafes con leche and tortilla espanola while reading El País; the way the city shuts down at two p.m. and everyone goes home for the sacred family lunch, followed by the religiously-observed cena six hours later; the constant responses of no pasa nada and tranquila which categorize the Spanish mentality; the tapas bars and vinotecas bursting with people eating, conversing, watching their favorite teams battle it out in La Liga, and of course the passionate, drunken uprisings upon each potentially goal-resulting flick of the foot. This lifestyle, and the way los Castellanos embrace it, strikes a deep chord in me; it resonates and harmonizes with the other facets of my identity. It is as if somehow a piece of Cameroon has nuzzled its way into mi Salamanca, this tiny diverse town.
   

     Mom always remarked on the dancing at parties thrown by her African friends. People were never shy; everyone was extremely outgoing and eager to move. Whereas at parties sponsored by her white American friends, people had to be pried off their chairs and lured to the dance floor, or jostled out of their comfortable chatting circles after one too many beers. This memory comes to me as I sit at the bar at Capitoleum, surrounded by eager Castellanos trying to chat up my friends and me. I am amused. As a short, dark-haired Andaluciano approaches me, I smile. He thinks I’m flirting with him, but I’m really smiling at the memory, lifted from the rest,  rising to the forefront of my mind. “Anímate, be alive,” he encourages. He is aggressive, nearly knocking me off my chair with his forceful, tugging hands. As we rise and join the stream of dancers, I lose myself in exuberance.

Glossary

Spanish terms:

“Querida mía, hace mucho tiempo.” – Darling, it has been awhile.
“Hola guapa, que tal?” – Hello gorgeous, how are you?
“Como fue tu viaje cariño?”  – How was your trip, sweetie?
Una Americana – an American woman
“Hablas muy bien para una Americana” – You speak Spanish well for an American woman
Extranjeros – foreigners
Piropos – cat calls and flirtatious comments
Calimocho – typical Spanish drink made of beer and red wine
Los Castellanos – Spanish people
Cafes con leche – coffee with milk
Tortilla Espanola – Spanish dish made of eggs, onions and potatoes
El País – Spanish periodical
Cena – dinner
No pasa nada/tranquila – don’t worry about it
Vinotecas – wine bars
Salamanca – small town in Central-West part of Spain

French terms:

Une Camerounaise – a Cameroonian woman
Une belle café au lait – a beautiful coffee with milk
Gruyère and Vacherin – two types of cheeses native to Switzerland
Chasselas wine – typical Swiss wine often eaten with fondue
“Mais, tu parles français avec un accent américain? Et la langue de ton pere?” – But you speak French with an American accent. And what about your father’s language?
Bamileke – Language spoken by the Bamileke people of Western Cameroon
Makossa – type of music popular in Cameroon
Ndolé – Cameroonian dish made of greens and bits of beef
Quartier – neighborhood

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Commentary

Writer in exile

Three seasons away from freedom.


 

It was fall in Mongolia, and the dusk falling round the State Department Store, the central meeting place in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, made it hard to see anyone’s face — not that I knew what the man I was supposed to meet looked like. I had just arrived for the year to work with writers, and my desire to see the creation of a Mongolian branch of International PEN was shared by Dugar, an Inner Mongolian writer living in New York City.

The two of us had never met. Dugar got my name from the Freedom to Write and international programs director Larry Siems at PEN in New York when Dugar called to ask about the possibility of establishing a Mongolian PEN Center. Larry happened to know I was in Mongolia, trying to make that very idea a reality. Dugar emailed me and asked me to look up an Inner Mongolian writer living in exile from China, in Ulaanbaatar: Mr. Tumen Ulzii Bayunmend. I thought the two were friends, but later I’d find out that Dugar knew of Tumen Ulzii because Tumen Ulzii was a prominent essayist — he wrote about the Chinese government’s actions toward Inner Mongolians — and a leading figure in the People’s Party of Inner Mongolia.

The man I met in front of the State Department Store didn’t look like a refugee, which goes to show how many assumptions I had. Tumen Ulzii has an open, smooth, and youthful face. We wove through the crowds of young people hanging out in front of the State Department Store, and made our way onto Peace Street and into a melee of knockoff sunglasses stands and Korean restaurants. That night at Broadway Pizza, with only the most basic Mongolian words under my belt and about ten English words under his, Tumen Ulzii and I relied almost entirely on pens, paper, an electronic dictionary, beer, and universal gestures for conversation.

Tumen Ulzii is keen and quick. He told me about himself first, then about his move to China, his wife and daughter who are still there, and the books he wrote about race and politics that brought Inner Mongolian fans in from the countryside just to meet him. These same books precipitated a ban on his writing in China and the police raids on his office and home after he left China for Mongolia in 2005. The reason so many Inner Mongolians speak out against the Chinese government — or would like to — is the long history of oppression like that suffered by Tibetans; the effort for cultural preservation, expression, and autonomy among ethnic minorities has often led to clashes with the Chinese government, and Tumen Ulzii’s story is just one of many.

Differences between Inner and Outer Mongolia

The country of Mongolia is the territory once referred to as Outer Mongolia, and the territory of Inner Mongolia lies in China. The size of the difference between Inner and Outer Mongolians depends on who you ask.

Inner Mongolians see themselves as part of a larger Mongolia, but this view is not shared by the Outer Mongolian public, and anyone from any part of China is at risk here due to a sentiment proven by the “fucking Chinese go home” graffiti outside my apartment, and the recently acquired black eye of my young Chinese friend Li, who is here to study. Ulaanbaatar is a small city, and Tumen Ulzii, audibly from a Chinese region, does not feel safe.

Language differences between the two are also apparent; Tumen Ulzii speaks differently from Outer Mongolians. Inner Mongolian dialect has a “j” sound where Outer has a “ts” sound, and the pronouns are a bit different. Inner Mongolians still use the traditional Mongolian vertical script for everything from school notes to street signs. Tumen Ulzii, also fluent in Japanese and Chinese, is confounded by the Cyrillic type used here in (Outer) Mongolia. My Mongolian teacher, Tuya, is the only younger Mongolian I’ve met who knows traditional Mongolian script well. Though the Cyrillic type was instituted here in (Outer) Mongolia only in 1944, it has taken deep hold. The pages of Tumen’s notebook, however, are covered in the rows of lacy black script whose vertical nature, Mongolians say, makes you nod yes to the world as you read instead of shaking your head no.

Refugee situations are not easy

On a much colder and clearer day in January, Tumen Ulzii and I walked the five minutes from my apartment to the Mongolian branch of the United Nations (U.N.). Uniformed men in their early 20s guarded the compound. Even without my passport — I had left it on my dresser to remind myself to get more pages at the American embassy — they let me in. Tumen Ulzii and I crossed an eerily quiet parking lot filled with white vans to a pink, Soviet-style building, where the receptionist asked about my lack of documentation. We walked into the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office, whose walls were home to UNICEF posters and the air smelled of coffee, and I asked one large Mongolian man, Mr. Och, what the holdup was on Tumen Ulzii’s refugee status.

Refugee situations are never easy, and this was no exception. Mongolia does not have an official UNHCR branch, only a liaison office, so the decision to grant Tumen Ulzii refugee status had to come from the nearest branch, which happened to be in … Beijing. Mongolia also has no provisions for asylum seekers in its law, so as long as Tumen Ulzii remained one, he was at risk of deportation and then punishment at the hands of the very government who had its police officers storm his house and strip-search his wife.

Tumen Ulzii has not been the only one. His friend Soyolt, another Inner Mongolian dissident, was arrested on January 7, 2008, upon touchdown in Beijing on a business trip. Soyolt was in the impenetrable world of arbitrary detention without charge or trial somewhere in China for the next six months while his wife and three children remained powerless here in Ulaanbaatar. He was allowed one phone call back in January, and he reported that Chinese officials had told him that if he made a fuss or alerted any foreign media, things would get worse.

The imminent Olympic Games in Beijing seems to be both a blessing and a curse for Chinese dissidents: Attempts by the Chinese government to silence them during the buildup to the Olympics has increased, but for the lucky dissidents who get noticed by the international community — a community currently paying extra-close attention to China and its human rights record — the imminence of the Olympic Games can help their cause.

Mr. Och at UNHCR told me to secure a letter of support for Tumen Ulzii from Freedom to Write at PEN in New York, and that a decision should come in the next week — something he would tell me for three months. Afterward, Tumen Ulzii and I went to get a beer. Tumen loves that I like beer. It was midafternoon, but around here people drink beer at lunch — at least the demographic I work with (read: middle-aged male writers).

“Bayarlalaa, minii okhin,” he says. Thank you, my daughter. “Sain okhin,” he says. Good girl.

Visiting with friends and family

Tumen Ulzii is extremely intelligent, but there are some things he says that boggle me. He can understand lesbianism, but not male homosexuality, and he wants to know why it exists, and how the sex happens. He thinks Hitler’s fine, since he wasn’t as bad as Stalin. He likes President Bush, purely because Bush is the president of the United States.

He does have a few good friends here. Uchida is a gentle Japanese man and a great friend of Tumen Ulzii’s. I met with both men several times at the pub around the corner from where I live. Uchida, who studied in Inner Mongolia, showed me cell phone pictures of his four-month-old baby — the baby and her mother live in Japan. When I wrote up a bio of Tumen Ulzii to forward to PEN’s Freedom to Write program, the men checked it over, with Uchida translating, while I dug into fried meat and rice. Though they are both in their 40s, they looked and sounded like school buddies hunched over a cheat sheet, casual and affectionate. Afterward, I told them I needed to go and clean my floor. They told me they would like me to stay and drink beer with them instead.

“Do tomorrow,” Uchida said.

“What do tomorrow?” I asked, and at the same time, one man mopped with an invisible mop and the other swept with an invisible broom.

Tumen Ulzii had Tuya and me over for a real Inner Mongolian dinner at his modest and bare but immaculately clean apartment, which was on the worst side of town, near the black market. To begin, he gave me a bowl of milky tea with some kind of grain cereal at the bottom. This was suutetsai, a dish nomadic Mongolians have at every meal, which consists of green tea, milk, and salt. He then surprised me by thumbing off pieces of meat from the boiled sheep leg on the table and dropping them one by one into the bowl, something he kept doing throughout the meal. It wasn’t half bad, once I expanded my mindset to one that included garnishing something like crunchy Cream of Wheat with mutton.

The second time I visited Tumen Ulzii at his home, I came by myself during the February holiday of tsagaan sar (“white moon” or “white month”). He had invited me weeks beforehand to be present on the first day of his wife and daughter’s 10-day visit. He and his daughter Ona, a delicate university student speaking very good English, picked me up in a taxi (which in Ulaanbaatar is usually a beat-up stick-shift car driven by a regular guy who could use a thousand or two tugriks). We stopped for groceries; he wanted to get beer for me and he wanted Ona to have one too, like me, something which she does not usually drink and which I tried to stop drinking.

On the way up the stairs, Tumen Ulzii took us one floor too far, then couldn’t figure out why his key didn’t work, and Ona gave him grief for it in universally understandable tones. That night Tumen Ulzii came alive, bickering with Ona, their voices singing in Mongolian and Chinese across the kitchen. Tumen Ulzii is immensely proud of his daughter; she tested into the top 10 percent of university students in China. I took videos of them singing traditional Inner Mongolian songs and smiled at his wife, a quiet geography teacher a few years older than Tumen Ulzii. I felt guilty for knowing what was done to her at the border the last time she visited her husband, trying not to imagine it now that I had seen her tired face.


An official refugee, at last

Spring 2008 … not spring by the standards of my home in California — it snowed last week — but sunny enough for sunglasses as I waited for Tumen Ulzii in front of the State Department Store. He approached in a long black coat and shades that made him look like a spy in a big-budget movie. He smelled my cheeks, the customary Mongolian greeting, and as we walked away from the throngs, he said, “Min! United Nations, okay!” and put his thumb up. I whooped and called Och, who confirmed the news. Tumen Ulzii had become an official refugee, eligible for resettlement. The letter Larry Siems at PEN Freedom to Write in New York sent expressing concern about Tumen Ulzii had been crucial to the decision.

To celebrate, Tumen Ulzii took me to a Korean restaurant. He laid several strips of fatty meat (Mongolian meat always comes this way) on the griddle set up at our table. My Mongolian was better than it was six months ago when we first met, but we still did a fair amount of the gesturing. He raised his beer, pronouncing me an Inner Mongolian daughter.

Resettlement, yes. But where?

Uchida comes and goes from Japan every couple of months, always with new pictures of his child to show Tumen Ulzii. Their friendship thrives despite distance, so when Tumen Ulzii resettles, there is no doubt they’ll remain in touch. Meanwhile, Tumen Ulzii’s keen to know which presidential candidates are leading in my country, and overjoyed that Obama is dark-skinned. He now wonders where I think the best place to resettle would be. America? He mimes an injection into his arm, then, reading from a book, puts his arm high into the air: “Hospitals and university fees are high in America.”

Resettlement can be a long and difficult process. Canada or Europe, we hope. He is very concerned that Ona go to a good university. He loves dogs, but can’t have one here — somewhere he can have a dog. Tumen Ulzii insists that when I visit Hohhot next month I stay with his wife.

“Sain okhin,” he says, kissing the top of my head. Good girl.

 

 

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Photo Essays

Streethaiku

Street Haiku thumbnailSeeking the zen of the present moment.


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An Xiao grounds her street photography in the aesthetics of haiku and Henri Cartier-Bresson, as she seeks the Zen of the present moment in the hustle and bustle of busy city streets. She refined her tastes for city imagery while living in New York, Los Angeles and Manila.

Her award-winning work has appeared with publications and galleries internationally and throughout the New York City area, including the dual-continent Circular Exhibition with Hun Gallery and Gallery Ho in Seoul, the Asian Contemporary Art Fair with Tenri Gallery, and the Brooklyn Museum. More information about An Xiao can be found at www.anxiaophotography.com.

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