Commentary

 
Canaries, St. Lucia
Commentary

Choosing What to Trade

Being a Peace Corps volunteer is about cultural exchange, but you don’t always get to decide what culture gets exchanged.

Hannah Jiang

Children running in the street

“H

ey, Ching-Chong. Bus fee.”

The driver’s words slapped me across the face. I handed him some money and waited for my change. Everyone on the bus was silent, watching. “Here you go, Chong-Chong,” he quipped while handing me a coin in return. My face turned red.

“Please don’t call me that. I really don’t appreciate it.” I felt my voice quivering but hoped that it sounded steady.

He laughed. “Okay, darling. What’s your name?”

“I’m Hannah.”

“Okay, Hannah.” He walked around the bus to collect the other passengers’ fares and muttered something in Kweyol, the local dialect. A few people chuckled. Then he climbed into the driver’s seat and we took off on the winding road toward my village. I put my headphones on and tried to calm my pounding heart.

I am a Peace Corps volunteer in St. Lucia, a small Caribbean island country north of Venezuela. Not many Americans know much about the island beyond the fact that the season finale of ABC’s The Bachelor was filmed at a resort here a couple years ago. Likewise, not many locals from my community know much about America aside from what they’ve seen on television.

One of the stated goals of the Peace Corps is to fill these sorts of gaps in cultural awareness. As volunteers, we explain what it means to be American to the people we meet here, and we share our experiences abroad with those back home. Instead of trading goods, we are trading cultures.

I teach English to schoolchildren in Canaries, a rural fishing village with a population under 2,000. It is one of St. Lucia’s poorest and most underdeveloped areas. Although luxurious hotels and resorts dot the island, jobs within tourism remain largely inaccessible to the people in my community. There are no attractions, restaurants, or gas stations in Canaries, so even when visitors do drive by they have no reason to stop.

Cut off from the tourist world, most villagers have never been exposed to the idea that America is ethnically diverse. Canaries has had Peace Corps volunteers in the past, but as far as anyone can remember, all of them have been white. As a result, confusion about me—the first Chinese American to live in the community—has been inevitable.

There was a teenage girl, fourteen or so years old, who approached me urgently as I walked to an evening aerobics class. “Miss, I just have to ask,” she said. “Are you from China or Japan?”

“I’m actually from America, but my family is from China.”

She said, “Oh,” and ran on.

There was an older man who gave me a ride to the grocery store and told me he was “also” a Buddhist. “If you don’t believe me, I have Buddha statues all over my home. Want to stop by to see?”

“No thank you, I’m actually not Buddhist.”

There was an elderly lady on the bus who mistook me for a member of a Japanese volunteer group visiting the island. “You did such a lovely job at the choir performance last weekend!”

I thanked her for the compliment.

In my application to join the Peace Corps, I wrote that one of the challenges I expected to face during my time abroad was having to answer the question, “If you’re from America, how come you look Chinese?” The possibility hadn’t discouraged me, though. In fact, before I left for St. Lucia, I was excited about sharing what I knew about America’s racial diversity with the locals I would meet. I assumed they would be open-minded and just as interested in American culture as I was in theirs.

Getting called “Ching-Chong” made me think I had been too idealistic.

classroom-students-teacher-canaries-st-lucia

One day, I was riding in a large food-supplier truck heading to Castries, the island’s capital, where I had a meeting scheduled that afternoon. It was a forty-five minute drive to town, and to pass the time I chatted with the two men in the truck. They soon discovered that I was a Peace Corps volunteer from the States. Kenny and Shem had heard of the Peace Corps before, but they weren’t at all interested in learning about anything related to America. They wanted Mandarin lessons.

“Teach us some bad words in Chinese!” they prodded me. Kenny, a friendly man with cornrows, took out a pen and paper to jot down the phrases phonetically. “We’re going to say these to our boss next time he makes us angry!”

“Is your boss Chinese?” I asked, nervous that this would eventually be traced back to me.

“Nope. He’s Lucian. He won’t have any idea what we’re saying!”

When we reached Castries, I got out of the truck and waved goodbye. After Kenny and Shem drove off, I found myself thinking about our conversation. Thanks to me, the two of them had learned enough Mandarin phrases to get themselves fired. But they hadn’t learned anything about America, the country I was supposed to be representing. I began to realize that even though I’m here in St. Lucia to exchange cultures, I don’t necessarily get to decide which culture I exchange. Kenny and Shem had heard my story about being Chinese American, yet Chinese culture was what they had insisted on trading with me.

Perhaps this wasn’t a bad thing. Recently a local friend asked me, “You don’t know karate, do you?”

I told him no, not at all.

“Well, you know, people here watch a lot of kung fu movies and that’s the main thing they know about Chinese people. They probably all assume you know karate.” He paused. I wasn’t sure how to fill the silence. “You should let them think that,” he continued. “It might keep you safe here because nobody’s going to want to harm you.”

I smiled. His words were unexpectedly reassuring. Maybe, I thought, it was okay to leave the choice in their hands.

vista-canaries-st-lucia

One of my favorite things about St. Lucians is their love of sharing food—something they have in common with the Chinese, as my own family’s experiences have taught me. For people here, sharing food establishes trust and a sense of community. My school principal will buy fish from our village, clean it, cook it with local seasoning, and give it to me in a Tupperware container to take home. A teacher will surreptitiously hand me mangos in the middle of class while the children are doing their work, whispering, “These are from our tree.” Students will come to school with a small bag of love apples, present one to me and say, “Teacher Hannah, look.” “For me?” “For you.”

The first time I brought food for the school staff, I chose something quintessentially American: toasted blueberry bagels with Philadelphia cream cheese. None of them had ever eaten bagels before, and they all wanted seconds to take home. At the end of the school year (some trays of brownies and Christmas sugar cookies later), I decided to share something completely different: mantou, a steamed bun that my grandfather would make for us every time our family visited him in China.

I remembered how he would spend all day making the mantou. Carefully mixing the flour with water, yeast, and a little bit of sugar. Kneading the dough meticulously with his hands. Rolling, cutting, and forming it into the bun-shape so familiar to us. We would eat his mantou every day for breakfast until the batch was gone, and then he would happily make more.

I told the teachers that the mantou was Chinese bread that they could either eat plain or with any kind of butter, jam, or sauce. They were amazed that the bread didn’t need to bake in the oven, and that it was so powdery white, without a trace of brown. They loved it. Most of them ate it with local cheese.

Though none of them knew it, bringing my grandfather’s mantou to my school was an important moment for me. It was the first time I chose to share my Chinese culture with the people here. This time, they hadn’t needed to prompt me with their questions. This time, I hadn’t agonized over whether I, their cultural ambassador from America, was exchanging something “un-American.”

rainbow-canaries-st-lucia

I was two years old when my parents and I immigrated to the States. Growing up, I felt as if we were all learning what it meant to be American together. The ways of my parents were often at odds with the ways of my classmates’ parents. My classmates went to church on Sundays; I went to Chinese language school to learn Mandarin. My classmates brought PB&J sandwiches for lunch; I brought rice and vegetables, with a pair of chopsticks. My classmates had turkey, stuffing, and pie for Thanksgiving; I had Chinese hot pot.

As my brothers and I got older, our family started traveling to China during the summers to visit relatives. For Mom and Dad, these trips were like going home. Everything in China was familiar to them. I could tell that a sense of peace washed over them when we were there—they became less anxious, laughed more easily, and seemed to know everything intuitively. For me, though, these trips were the opposite of peaceful. They made me feel even more displaced, even more conscious of the fact that as a Chinese American, neither culture was truly mine.

When I started living on my own, I decided that being in this sort of limbo wasn’t healthy—I needed to commit to one culture. Because I felt that Chinese culture had isolated me from my peers when I was younger, as soon as I had the choice to turn away from it, I did. Aside from the occasional Mandarin conversation with a cab driver, late-night order of Chinese takeout, or short trip to visit my family, nothing about my adult life was culturally Chinese. The lunches I brought to work, the holidays I celebrated, the movies, books, and music I consumed—all of it was American.

By the time I arrived in St. Lucia, I had developed a tense, almost in-denial relationship with my Chinese heritage. I had put so much effort into belonging to something else that when people here reminded me of my ethnicity—when they asked about Chinese culture and insisted on exchanging it with me—I felt like they were challenging my fundamental sense of self.

Sharing my grandfather’s mantou was the moment I made peace with my identity. I realized that my culture isn’t confined to a particular country—not America, not China. It’s the blend of values, customs, and traditions that I’ve absorbed throughout my life, from all of my surroundings.

For other volunteers—those who conform to what people in more remote parts of the world imagine Americans to look and behave like—maybe the act of cultural exchange is straightforward. But for me, it cannot happen so simply. And just because my experience is different, I’ve learned, doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.

The bus driver and I have never spoken about our “Ching-Chong” encounter, and we probably never will. But I still ride his bus all the time. He knows the exact curve of the hill where I call out, “Stopping, please,” and will drop me right in front of my house. On my way home the other day, he glanced up at me in the rearview mirror before that turn in the road, and I nodded at him. Without my saying a word, he pulled over. “Thank you,” I said to him as I climbed out. “Take care, darling,” he said back.

Hannah Jiang is currently a Peace Corps volunteer in St. Lucia, where she teaches at a school and contributes to the national news station. A Yale graduate, she previously worked in Manhattan for an executive search firm.

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Twelfth of July, Donegall Street, Belfast, 2013. Dominic Bryan, via Flickr
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Commentary

Cold Peace

Best of In The Fray 2015. The Troubles are gone, but the anger and suspicion remain in Northern Ireland—especially in working-class Protestant communities left behind by the peace process.

Chris Schumerth
Gray-suited marching band walks by
Twelfth of July, Donegall Street, Belfast, 2013. Dominic Bryan, via Flickr

A few years ago, I found myself in a very Protestant part of Belfast trying to convince neighborhood kids that they should be nice to Catholics. I was working for a nonprofit, driving all over Northern Ireland to direct sports programs that bussed groups of children back and forth between Protestant and Catholic enclaves. Americans would probably describe the work we did as “peace-building,” but locals in Belfast called it “community relations.”

My colleague Joanne, a Catholic, had come with me to east Belfast to talk to kids who were part of a soccer program there. Programs like this are often funded by foundation grants that mandate a community-relations component. The danger is that the participants sometimes felt duped. They were there to play soccer but found out they had to listen to our spiel first. Challenging the convictions they’d grown up with invited resentment, too, especially when the hosting adults didn’t really buy in. And that’s the exact scenario Joanne and I ran into.

A sixtyish man named John (a pseudonym) greeted us. The conversation started out friendly enough, but then he informed us that our allotted time had been cut in half. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked. “The boys really just want to play football.”

To cut our time was a breach of contract, but I wasn’t about to bring that up. John wasn’t done talking, anyway. He had another request: could we please refrain from mentioning Gaelic football tonight? (In Northern Ireland, Protestants play rugby and Catholics play Gaelic football, but we made a point of talking to our kids about both sports.) Gaelic football is a sectarian game, John insisted. He doesn’t want to be friends with any of those Catholics anyway. Buncha terrorists. Besides, he knows some of them, and they wouldn’t go near a rugby pitch. And don’t even get him started on those Lithuanians who keep coming in and stealing his people’s jobs.

Neither Joanne nor I really knew what to say. To be honest, I just wanted to get the hell out of there. There were other adults from the soccer club around, and they seemed embarrassed. They awkwardly pulled us away and led us to a room with window views of the pitch. For the rest of the evening, teenagers circulated through the room to participate in our activities. We talked about Gaelic football. We said that anybody should be able to play sports because they’re fun and a good way to bring people from different backgrounds together.

One boy was not so sure. “I know one person around here who would disagree with all that,” he said.

The boys sat up straight when John entered the room and sat ominously at the end of the table. I let Joanne do as much of the talking as possible, and she handled it like a pro. She’d been working in community relations for years. To my surprise, John stayed quiet, and I wondered if someone had told him to ease up on us for the rest of the evening.

Men carrying Union Jack and other flags, flanked by police vehicles
Photo by Dominic Bryan, via Flickr

Northern Ireland may have originated as a legal entity in 1921, when the British Parliament split Ireland in two, but its history of nationalist conflict stretches back to when King Henry II of England first landed in 1171 and took control of the island. Much later, from 1919 to 1921, the Irish Republican Army fought British forces in a war for Ireland’s independence. It was during those years of conflict that the infamous episode known as “Bloody Sunday” occurred. On November 21, 1920, the IRA assassinated fourteen British operatives in Dublin. Later that day, an occupational police force known as the Royal Irish Constabulary retaliated at a football match, killing fourteen civilians.

After Ireland was partitioned, the southern part of the island became independent. A sizable Irish Catholic community lived in Northern Ireland as well, and the Irish nationalists, or republicans, wanted to join the new nation. But Northern Ireland’s population was mostly unionists, or loyalists, who wanted to stay a part of Great Britain. The tensions between the two sides culminated in the Troubles, a conflict from 1968 to 1998 that led to more than 3,600 deaths. As many as 50,000 were injured, sometimes from gruesome practices like kneecapping.

When I arrived in Belfast for my job, I barely knew the distinction between Northern Ireland and its tourist-friendly neighbor to the south. Back in the United States, my father’s family are practicing Catholics, and my mother comes from a family of Protestants. I thought this background would help me understand Northern Ireland, but I was completely wrong. To call the dispute there a religious conflict is almost a misnomer. Sure, there are Protestant and Catholic churches that subscribe—with differing levels of rigidity—to conflicting beliefs about God. But the most salient identities in Northern Ireland nowadays seem to have little to do with disagreements about, say, transubstantiation. Instead, they have to do with culture—and also, to some degree, class.

Furthermore, the conflict today is played out in often hidden ways. As my coworkers warned me, questions about which school you attended or what part of the city you live in or what sport you play are often subtle attempts to peg allegiances. They are about figuring out what side you are on—what flag you fly in a war over national pride and cultural dignity that has never really ended.

Drummer banging drum that reads "Protestant Boys"
Photo by Dominic Bryan, via Flickr

A few weeks after my encounter with John, I was near the city center, driving home from work. I stopped at a red light. Before the light changed, a mob of people holding British flags rushed into the intersection. They planted themselves there, chanting. I tried to slide over to the right lane to make a turn. Several protesters anticipated my move and ran over to block the way. I wanted to keep driving, but I didn’t need any legal troubles, especially as a foreigner. So I stopped and waited. The demonstration backed up more and more traffic behind me, but the crowd was in no hurry.

This was my first experience with the demonstrations that were happening all over the city, every night for weeks, in response to a Belfast city council decision that the Union Jack would only be flown at city hall on specific holidays rather than every day. On a few occasions, Protestant disgust with the decision had turned violent, with young men burning cars and throwing bricks and petrol bombs at police officers, and explosive devices winding up in cars and in the mail.

My coworkers and friends in Belfast—many of them educated, liberal, and middle-class—were impatient with the protesters. “It’s just a flag,” they would say. Or, “It’s just a few crazies. I don’t understand how people can be so ignorant.”

As I sat in my car waiting for the protesters to disperse, it was easy to sympathize with that attitude. But the more time I spent in Northern Ireland, the more that I realized that things were complicated. For instance, there was a socioeconomic component that hardly anyone mentioned. Many of the protesters came from the neighborhoods where I worked. I knew what the housing looked like there, what the children wore. They were working class. The most embittered among them seemed to be men with few prospects, whose best option to make money was either applying for welfare or joining the military. I could understand the appeal of simply drinking one’s life away in a pub with other rowdy and angry men, instead of dealing with a hopeless future. On top of all the pressures these working-class men and women faced in their day-to-day lives, now politicians were stripping away their very identity: first their political power, and now their national dignity.

Through work, I met Will Maloney, a documentary filmmaker who had worked extensively with low-income Protestants in Belfast. He was well-connected and had even gotten to know a few men with paramilitary backgrounds, guys with terrifying pasts. “Most unionist parties didn’t come from the working class,” he told me. “They were considered parties of the State. So some Protestants in Northern Ireland have a history of underrepresentation.”

After I got trapped in that street demonstration, I wanted to learn more about what Protestants thought about the flag. I attended a panel discussion with representatives from all of the country’s major political parties save Sinn Féin (the highly nationalistic Irish Catholic party). As an American, it was interesting to watch a real multiparty debate. In addition to the Protestant/Catholic split, there were varying conservative and liberal perspectives under those two broad religious banners. I trusted one panelist in particular: Trevor Ringland, a former rugby star with a Protestant background. Sometime after his playing days ended, he had transitioned into politics. He seemed to genuinely want what was good for all sides.

Northern Ireland, Ringland said, had moved from violent conflict to a cold war—and now, to a “cold peace.” The next step, he argued, had to be a “constructive peace,” which would require more from the Northern Irish than living in separate neighborhoods and attending separate schools. It would require integration. It would require feeling, seeing, and healing old wounds.

I was moved by his speech, but I also could not help but notice that Ringland’s political moderation came from a privileged perspective. Yes, he had lived through the Troubles, but he had also been a professional athlete—and not just any rugby player, but the player on Ireland’s team who had scored the “Try of the Century” against the Scots to win them the Five Nations Championship in 1985. He was a local hero who had lived a good life, and so it was possible for him to believe in a good life.

Not everyone in the room had that luxury. Although the Good Friday Agreement, the 1998 peace accord brokered by US president Bill Clinton, had aimed to bring about a more equal and just society in Northern Ireland, one Protestant panelist called the peace process “incomplete.” Among those left behind were certain Protestant communities—specifically, the least educated, least employed ones.

The conversation got tense during the audience Q&A. Someone asked why, if the nationalist community was really interested in a “shared future,” did a park in Newry get named after a “terrorist”? Others accused loyalist protests of hurting the Northern Irish economy and its international reputation. Tempers flared, audience members interrupted speakers, and tears flowed.

I went home thinking about how the Northern Irish weren’t really that different from Americans. They chose segregation not because it’s better, but because it’s easier.

Man with flag dances and smiles
Photo by Dominic Bryan, via Flickr

I had been hearing about the Twelfth of July ever since I arrived in Northern Ireland. The holiday commemorates the Battle of the Boyne. In that decisive encounter in 1690, Protestant forces led by King William defeated King James’s Catholics near the Boyne River, some thirty miles from Dublin. Many Protestants practically live for the day, while some Catholics hate it so much they leave town. The Twelfth has become so fraught with emotion that there is a government agency—the Parades Commission—charged with keeping the celebration safe. That year, a controversial ruling by the commission prohibited marchers from taking a return route through Ardoyne, a feisty Catholic area in north Belfast.

I was determined to experience at least part of the holiday, so I headed downtown to the celebrations. After parking my car, I walked in the direction of piping flutes and banging drums. A crowd of thousands stood on each side of the street, watching band after band march through. I saw blue football jerseys for the Glasgow Rangers in every direction, and the Union Jack used in all sorts of creative ways: as a shirt, skirt, even a hat.

Before, a friend had told me that what is so disturbing about the Twelfth is that its uniting force—what is actually celebrated—is hatred of a particular demographic. Watching the parade, I detected a certain triumphalism in the way some people were celebrating. But it seemed to be only part of the story. I mostly saw smiles. There were angry men there, but there were also old ladies, mothers, and children. People shared their food. Musicians played their tunes. Marchers tossed their poles. I felt myself getting in step with the martial beat of the drums, just like I’d done years ago as a cadet in military school.

My own best guess is that any real shared future in Northern Ireland will find a place for the Twelfth of July commemoration. I don’t think working-class Protestants—or any of us, for that matter—can entirely shed such a potent part of their identity, even in pursuit of peace. By the same token, extinguishing the hatreds and distrust that give that celebration a bad name will require taking seriously the sometimes inconvenient voices of this sizable group.

The more disconcerting part of the Twelfth of July celebration took place the night before. Protestants all over the city gathered around bonfires after dark. A few of my friends took me around to see them, though my friend Paddy warned me—or maybe “begged” is more accurate—not to call out his name. When I heard “bonfires,” I thought of quaint little gatherings: roasting marshmallows, singing Kumbaya. Not so. In Protestant neighborhoods the partygoers lit pallets stacked with wood, their flames reaching as high as three stories. The heat was so intense that we had to stand hundreds of feet away. I was surprised the practice was legal.

Children ran around, while parents danced to blaring music. The beer flowed, and some people were clearly drunk. The police presence seemed minimal and indifferent.

Just off Shankill Road in north Belfast, I spotted a tent where a woman was selling cheap beer out of a cooler. I walked over and ordered a drink. A man behind me heard my American accent.

“Where ya from?” he asked.

“I’m from the States,” I said, uneasily. Other people were turning to listen to us. “I’ve been here for almost a year.”

“What are you here for?” he asked.

“My job,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask what my job was.

“What part of town do you live in?”

“Lower Ormeau Road,” I said, thankful that I lived in a neighborhood that wasn’t predominantly Catholic.

“Who are they?” he asked, pointing at my friends.

Maybe I was paranoid, but by then, I was almost certain this man was really only interested in one thing: Was I Catholic? Did I have Catholic sympathies? Was this all a big joke to me, peeking in on the Protestants?

I doubted that continuing the conversation would lead to anything good. It was time to end this little dance. “It was nice to meet you,” I said, excusing myself.

I chugged my beer and tossed the bottle in a trashcan. Then my friends and I got back in our car and drove away.

Chris Schumerth is a writer who lives in Indianapolis. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of South Carolina. His writing has appeared in Salon, the Miami Herald, Relevant Magazine, and Punchnel’s, among other publications. Twitter: @ChrisSchumerth | Blog: chrisschumerth.com

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Tiedoli, Italy
Commentary

A Half-Sentence

A note inscribed in the margin of an ancient book connected me, across an ocean and a century, to a fateful decision.

Peter M. Nardi
Small stone church with two spires
The Church of S. Giovanni Battista in Tiedoli.

The musty aroma of mushrooms was everywhere. It was the Fiera del Fungo, a festival of porcini mushrooms held every year in the northern mountain town of Borgo Val di Taro, Italy, and I was here sightseeing with two colleagues of mine. What had lured us was the mushrooms, creatively incorporated into dishes of all kinds—from soup to gelato. But what that smell evoked in me was memories from an ocean away, of my childhood in the Bronx and the times when my grandparents, immigrants from Italy, would excitedly open a package of funghi from the “old country.”

That was my real reason for visiting Italy. I wanted to see the part of the country where my grandparents used to live. The college where I teach happens to have a study-abroad program in the nearby city of Parma, and in 2005, I flew out there and met up with two of the program’s directors. One morning, we drove out to the festival in Borgo Val di Taro, taking a few hours to indulge in the town’s more famous dishes. Then we decided to head into Tiedoli.

My grandfather Pietro had grown up there. A small village nestled on the edge of the Apennines mountains, Tiedoli was not even on our Google map. We drove up a winding road until we came across a tiny, barely legible sign that reassured us we were headed in the right direction. As we drove into Tiedoli, I could make out the double steeples of a church—by far the largest building among the village’s smattering of houses and farms.

I wondered if the church had any records of my grandfather. We walked over to the building, an imposing stone structure topped by a statue of John the Baptist. A priest emerged from the front doors just as we arrived. I asked him if there were documents dating back to the 1880s. He laughed. Their records went back to the 1700s, he said.

The priest quickly found a book with baptismal notices from 1886, the year my grandfather was born. He slowly turned the pages, folio-sized sheets filled with handwritten paragraphs of names, dates, and family information. All of a sudden my grandfather’s name jumped out. There it was, in a baptismal announcement in Latin.

The priest confessed he could not read Latin—“O tempora! O mores!” I wanted to exclaim—but I assured him that between his Italian and my four years of high school Latin, we could probably stumble through the paragraph.

Although we have different middle names, my grandfather, my father, and I share the first name Peter, or Pietro. The name, which means “rock,” goes back to the founding of the Roman church. My grandfather would sometimes remind me that June 29 was our name day—the feast of St. Peter.

Author in front of house door and sign
Standing in front of a house in Tiedoli and a sign with the village’s name.

I have always admired my grandfather. He left Tiedoli to join the carabinieri at the turn of the twentieth century, at a time when members of the national police force looked not unlike the figure stamped on the old Galliano liqueur bottle. He was stationed in Rome, and there he learned about the cosmopolitan world outside the farm country where he had grown up.

When he was in his mid-twenties, Pietro left Italy to seek a new life in America. Many decades later, he told me stories from those early years. After passing through Ellis Island, he looked for work in New York. Signs in store windows told Italians not to bother applying for jobs. But my grandfather would not be discouraged. His first gig was sweeping up in a burlesque house, where the pay amounted to whatever coins had been tossed at the dancing girls and left on the floor. Eventually, he worked his way up to becoming the chief room-service waiter at the prestigious Hotel St. Regis, where he served Winston Churchill, Orson Welles, and the silent film star Nita Naldi.

Pietro met my grandmother Celestina in New York’s ethnic neighborhood for northern Italians—what is now the Murray Hill section of Manhattan. As it turned out, she had grown up in a small hill town just twenty miles from Tiedoli. They were married for fifty-two years before she died. He lived to the age of eighty-nine, remaining to the end a smart, self-educated man who loved to read the newspapers.

When my grandfather died in 1975, I was in my late twenties. I realized then how fortunate I’d been to be able to ask him some of the questions I wished I had brought up with my other grandparents before they died.

Baptismal notice in ancient Italian book
My grandfather’s baptismal notice.

According to my grandfather’s August 10 entry in the church’s baptismal records, he had been born the day before, on August 9. The names of his parents—my great-grandparents—were also listed. The entry noted that his father was an orphan with no parents identified. (Back then, these words could have meant that the parents had died, or that the child had been abandoned for being illegitimate.) My grandfather had once told me that it would be difficult to trace our family tree because of his father’s unknown lineage. He often joked about being a possible descendant of the composer Giuseppe Verdi, who was born about fifty miles away, near Busseto, around the same time as my great-grandfather was.

As we were about to close the folio, I noticed a note in the margin next to my grandfather’s entry. The words were written in a different handwriting and ink, and in Italian, not Latin. Went to America 1913, it read.

That’s when the operatic tears started to flow. In those four words lay a major decision in my grandfather’s life. The path he had chosen had taken me, almost a century later, down the road to this village, this church, and this baptismal notice. It had taken my family to another country and another way of life.

In that overwhelming moment, a half-sentence note in the margin connected me to something much larger than myself.

Peter Nardi is a professor emeritus of sociology at Pitzer College. He previously wrote a column for Pacific Standard on critical thinking and has written numerous academic publications on the role of friendship in men’s lives. Site

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Commentary

Fresh and Fetid: Remembrance of Lunches Past

The cool kids had Lunchables and Mondos. I had a neon cooler ripe with the aroma of kimchi.


Eddie Huang and his mom in front of the supermarket
In search of Lunchables. Eddie Huang (Hudson Yang) and his mom Jessica (Constance Wu) journey to the supermarket.

“Ugh, what is that? Gross!”

About seven minutes into the pilot episode of ABC’s new comedy series Fresh Off the Boat, eleven-year-old Eddie, the new kid in school, is invited to sit at the cool kids’ table during lunchtime. He’s conscious of making friends, especially the right kind who will ease his entrance into the local social structure. But Eddie quickly blows his first impression when he pulls out a Tupperware container of homemade noodles.

“It’s Chinese food. My mom makes it,” Eddie explains.

“Get it out of here!” the table’s alpha boy yells. “Oh my god, Ying Ming is eating worms! Dude, that smells nasty!”

Fresh Off the Boat adapts the memoir of Eddie Huang, chef and owner of Baohaus, a Taiwanese restaurant in New York. Though his recollections were turned into “a cornstarch sitcom,” as Huang claims in an angry Vulture op-ed about his own show, Fresh still highlights an experience that hasn’t been visited on network television in decades: life as an Asian American. Huang spoke with comedian Margaret Cho—whose All-American Girl twenty years ago was the last sitcom to depict an Asian American family—about his doubts whether Hollywood would do justice to his story. “I believe in you,” she told him, “and to be honest, we need this.”

Indeed we do. But I hadn’t realized how much “we” needed this cathartic mainstream exposure until I started watching the show. The scene brought back surprisingly vivid memories of elementary school, its lunchroom hierarchy, and my mom’s cooking. I had accepted these memories as amusing anecdotes, dinner-party fodder. But Huang’s show elevated to comedy an important experience all-too-familiar to many Asian American (and other) kids: the search for a seat in the cafeteria.

My own search began as a fifth-grader in suburban Maryland. As in many school cafeterias, the cool kids sat together. They always seemed to bring brown paper bags with ham or turkey sandwiches on thin, crustless Wonder Bread. They drank out of juice boxes. They snacked on Doritos, Fritos, or treats like Gushers or Fruit by the Foot. The most envied kids had boxes of Lunchables and Mondos (artificially flavored drinks heavy in high-fructose corn syrup), the ultimate beverage of choice.

I found my place lower down the totem pole with a more marginalized and diverse crowd. My best friend Julia, a Jewish girl, had in her packed lunch healthy items like fruit, Yoplait yogurt, pita, hummus, and Ziploc bags of carrot or celery sticks. Rachel usually either brought a lunch in a recycled paper bag or bought from the cafeteria a tray of chocolate milk, soggy canned green beans, tater tots, and chicken nuggets. Another Jewish girl, Aviva, ate latkes and other foods unrecognizable to me. And Shobi’s mom made her incredible pocket sandwiches stuffed with a deliciously aromatic mixture of soft spiced potatoes, onions, and peas. Like a grilled cheese sandwich, these were gently fried with a nice brown crust. I would later learn they were samosas.

One day, my mom packed a doshirak (Korean for a compartmentalized lunchbox) of rice, bulgogi (marinated beef), and kimchi (spicy fermented cabbage) in an insulated cooler with a mottled neon green-and-orange pattern. The aroma of the kimchi assaulted the noses of my dining companions as soon as I unzipped my lunchbox.

“Ugh, what is that?!”

“It’s Korean food,” I said apologetically.

Mortified, I confronted my mother as soon as I arrived home after school.

“Why did you pack kimchi in my lunch, Mom?” I cried.

“Because I was out of other banchan,” she replied nonchalantly, as though the lack of other Korean side dishes served with every meal was sufficient explanation for her egregious error.

“Why can’t you pack me a normal lunch like the other kids’?”

I was angry with my mother’s lack of understanding. All I wanted was one of those brown paper bags or a box of Lunchables. Not a cooler box of pungent foreign food.

And I wanted better clothes. As in the opening scene of Fresh, my mother also rejected my sartorial choices. Her final judgment: too expensive. I went to school every day in no-brand T-shirts and ill-fitting Mom Jeans, while the most popular girls—Kristen, Ashleigh, and Julie —had closets filled with Limited Too, the preferred retailer of ten-year-old girls. What I would have given to sit with the cool kids in a new Limited Too outfit and laugh while flicking my shiny ponytail.

In retrospect, I wanted to be popular as much as I wanted to belong.

The day after his humiliation in the cafeteria, Eddie dumps his homemade lunch in the trash. When his mother finds out she is upset and baffled. “But you love my food!”

Eddie attempts to articulate the gravity of the situation in a monologue far more effective than my childhood protests. “I need white people lunch!” he tells his mom. “That gets me a seat at the table. And then, you get to change the rules. Represent. Like Nas says . . . I got big plans. First, get a seat at the table. Second, meet Shaq. Third, change the game. Possibly with the help of Shaq.”

In its inaugural episode, Fresh hit the nail on the end: Eddie does love his mother’s food. That is a part of who he is, his heritage. But he is also mindful of where he is going and who he is expected to be. Despite the difference in details, I related to Eddie’s balancing act and his constant negotiation between how much of his culture to bring to his evolving identity and how much to leave behind.

When I was ten, I didn’t realize that this experience would add to the richness of two of the many ways I identify myself—Asian and American. I didn’t think about how lucky I was to experience the cultural complexity of American society, laid out on the table every lunchtime in our virtual ethnic-food fair, where I tasted my first samosa thanks to Shobi’s mom. And I didn’t know how fortunate I was to have eaten fresh homemade meals without artificial, processed ingredients.

My mom’s love came packed every day, in a brightly colored cooler.

Sandra Hong is a freelance writer based in Hong Kong. After a stint in finance, she delved into her love of eating and cooking by attending the International Culinary Center in New York and then working in a restaurant and a cafe in Hong Kong. She devotes her spare time to running, traveling, and volunteering for the Hong Kong chapter of Slow Food International.

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Separatist fighters survey the steppe after recapturing Saur-Mogila from Ukrainian forces. Sergei Kopylov, via joyful-life.ru
Saur-Mogila, Ukraine
Commentary

Unearthing Another War

Best of In The Fray 2014. Last year I visited Saur-Mogila, a burial mound in eastern Ukraine that commemorates the Soviet soldiers who died driving back the Nazis during World War II. Today it is a battleground for a new war, as separatists fight for independence and Russia moves its troops into the lands it once liberated.

Michael Long
Photos by Sergei Kopylov

In the frigid autumn sunlight I climbed the stone steps of Saur-Mogila. The burial mound, located atop a bluff encircled by the bronzed steppe, covers the bones of Soviet soldiers killed during the Second World War. More than 23,000 died fighting the Germans for this hilltop along the eastern edge of Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. The panoramic view from the summit is coveted for reasons both aesthetic and strategic, and I could easily see why. At 277 meters, Saur-Mogila is the highest point in the region.

Continue reading Unearthing Another War →

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Jerusalem
Commentary

A Stranger in Jerusalem

I had come to Jerusalem to remember my grandmother’s life and mourn my marriage’s demise. As I made my way to the Wailing Wall, a shopkeeper stopped me with a question.


Photos by Kyle Trafas
Men standing in front of the Wailing Wall
Visitors to the Wailing Wall take part in the centuries-old Jewish tradition of placing slips of paper with prayers into the cracks of the wall’s broken stones.

The hot white wind whistled quietly as I walked through the rows of Jerusalem’s labyrinthine cemetery, built on a mountainside.

I would have never found my grandmother’s grave here if it weren’t for Inna, her lifelong friend. They had met in college back in the Soviet Union, where we all had once lived. I had called Inna as soon as I landed in Israel, the last stop on my solo journey around the world.

Inna led me past a wall of tombs until we arrived at one bearing the black granite letters of my grandmother’s name.

The last time I had seen my grandmother was more than two decades earlier, before she bought a one-way ticket to Israel in hopes of curing her Alzheimer’s. It was a tumultuous time. The Soviet Union was collapsing, and many were heading abroad. My grandmother, a literature professor, had started to notice early symptoms of her condition. Rumor had it that in Israel they knew a cure. My grandmother decided to leave everything behind and make the move, joining Inna in Jerusalem.

There was no one else in this section of the cemetery, and in the morning stillness I felt my grandmother beside me. The warmth of her skin. Her round, tanned face. Reddish curls that bounced when she moved. A laugh that rang like wind chimes.

I didn’t want to leave her, but the taxi was waiting.

As our car weaved through the cemetery and back toward the city, Inna said, “I’m really glad you came to visit your grandmother. I see a lot of similarities in you.”

I felt the same way. My grandmother and I had shared a sense of independence that had propelled us to leave one life in search of another. Twenty years after my grandmother made her life-changing decision, I also bought a one-way ticket, leaving behind family, friends, and a marriage that no longer worked.

Now, on the final lap of a journey meant to help me put myself back together, I wished I could ask my grandmother about her life and gain a little wisdom to live my own. But she was gone. I wanted to ask her friend more about her, but there was no time. Inna had to rush home for the Jewish holidays, and I had to meet my brother at the Wailing Wall.

When I entered Jerusalem’s Old City through the ancient Jaffa Gate, the scene was dizzying. A boiling river of tourists flowed down the alleys of the street market. I was running late, so I hurried past the shopkeepers doggedly hawking their wares. Red carpets. Wooden crosses. Miniature chess sets. Green carpets. Gooey baklava. Silver jewelry. Evil-eye charms. More carpets.

Looking down the covered walkway of a bustling street market
A street market in Jerusalem.

“Can I ask you a question, miss? Excuse me, miss! I just wanted to ask you …”

I flew by them, weaving my way through the tourists haggling over souvenirs, ducking under giant trays of fresh sesame-seed bread carried by deft young men.

Then, something stopped me.

I was in front of a shop selling unpolished silver antiques—oil lamps, samovars, menorahs. But what caught my attention wasn’t the merchandise. It was the old shopkeeper.

His eyes matched the deep blue of his simple work shirt. They exuded the calm of someone who belonged under the shade of an oak tree in a peaceful meadow, not in the madness of an urban bazaar.

There was something entrancing about this Middle Eastern Buddha who smiled at me and said, “Come, take five minutes inside.”

“But I’m in a hurry, someone is waiting for me,” I said skittishly, without moving.

“Our whole life passes as we hurry,” he replied. “When we are kids, we hurry to grow up. Then, we grow up and hurry to …”

“Yes, I know,” I interrupted, remembering the hectic life I had left behind. “Everyone always hurries. But actually, I’ve been traveling and haven’t felt hurried this whole year.”

“And? Did you find yourself?” he asked, as if he knew exactly what had sent me away from home and brought me to his doorstep.

“I think so,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do, anyway.”

He considered me quietly. “You keep a guard, but you shouldn’t. You’re beautiful, intelligent, sensitive, and a little stubborn. Come,” he gestured toward the depths of his silver cave. “I want to talk to you.”

I could have said no and left for the Wailing Wall, where my brother was probably already waiting. Instead, I walked to the back of his store and sat on a soft cushion. He sat in front of me, his small figure framed by rows of ivory bracelets. An antique clock slept above his head.

“Are you in love with yourself?” he asked.

Wait, what?

I considered his strange question. It seemed that I’d been able to leave my marriage precisely because I loved myself enough to save what remained of me. And yet the experience of the divorce had made me feel like a failure.

The most truthful answer I could give was, “Sometimes.”

“Why sometimes?”

I paused again, my eyes focused on the bracelets hanging in front of me. “Can you love yourself even though you feel that no one else loves you?”

The skyline of Jerusalem's Old City, with the Wailing Wall in the foreground and the Dome of the Rock in the background
The Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock in the distance.

To my embarrassment, I felt a tear roll down my cheek as I said the words. I despise self-pity, so I turned away and pretended to look around the store. Trying to find something else to talk about, I made a comment about an old samovar on one of his shelves. But the shopkeeper made no reply. When I finally turned to face him again, he was looking at me with curiosity, not pity.

“To love yourself doesn’t mean to be selfish,” he said. “To love yourself means to be at peace with your body, your soul, with who you are. I see that you’re hiding yourself because you feel ashamed of your tears, but even with tears you are beautiful.”

My tears now started streaming down my face.

“Love is simple,” he said, pressing his hand to his heart. “I know I haven’t known you for very long, but … I love you.”

He said it so naturally. Looking into his serene eyes, I believed him.

Who said that love is the lifelong emotion that wives feel toward their husbands and mothers toward their children? Why can’t love be a sudden burst of sunshine in a dusty shop in Old Jerusalem?

The two of us sat there. I could hear the clamor of the market, just steps away.

Three women walked into the store, and the moment passed. I looked at my watch. I was now an hour late.

Wiping away my tears, I rejoined the crowds in the street, making my way to the Wailing Wall.

Sasha Vasilyuk is a writer based in New York City. She was born during a cold Russian winter and grew up in the golden hills of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her essays and articles on art, culture, business, travel, and love have been published in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Russian Newsweek, Oakland Tribune, and Flower magazine. She received the 2013 North American Travel Journalists Association silver medal for her Los Angeles Times cover photo "Barra De Valizas." She is currently working on a collection of essays about her year-long solo journey around the world.

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Russian president Vladimir Putin. Photo courtesy of Kremlin.ru
Commentary

Power Play

Russia's actions in Ukraine show that for Vladimir Putin, the Cold War never ended. Now the US and its allies must prepare for another lengthy power struggle. But no international coalition can be effective while Russian energy reserves supply a quarter of Europe's natural gas. A long-term US energy strategy is the best way to counter Russian power.


Russian president Vladimir Putin before the Russian flag
Russian president Vladimir Putin. Photo courtesy of Kremlin.ru

This week, Crimea voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine. Flouting international censure, Russia has just annexed the breakaway region. The US and its European allies have responded to the crisis so far with sanctions, but  Russia has scoffed at these rebukes, stating they would have “no effect” on Russian policy.

US president Barack Obama has stated that America does not see Ukraine as a piece on “some Cold War chessboard.” But Russian president Vladimir Putin clearly does see the world this way. And he is winning. He has captured Crimea like a pawn and is now likely looking toward other parts of eastern Ukraine, planning his next move. It’s America’s turn, and it is letting the clock run out.

The US and other NATO countries need to stop fooling themselves that they can intervene in Ukraine (here is a very interesting dissection of why). In fact, they should stop pretending that they have any real influence over Russia’s actions. Until Europe no longer depends on Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom for a quarter of its natural gas, there will be no real way to crack down on Russia. The US and its allies need to start developing a long-term strategy to counter Russia’s global influence and aggression, and the key to this will be a comprehensive energy policy: giving Eastern European countries like Ukraine an energy alternative to Russia’s natural-gas monopoly.

At this point, I should admit a personal bias. I was born in the former Soviet Union, in what is now Ukraine. My family comes from Vinnytsia, a city of about 350,000 located roughly halfway between Odessa and the capital city of Kiev. My parents were political dissidents, whose marriage ceremony took place in a prison camp for those who opposed—or just disagreed with—the USSR. While attending Moscow State University, my mother spent her spare evenings bent over a typewriter, manually copying banned manuscripts for underground distribution: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell, and other authors I took for granted, reading them in the security of a New England high school years later. My uncle was persecuted by the KGB for his poetry, and ultimately expelled from the country. So, I have no sympathy for Russia’s slow return to totalitarianism over the past decade.

I also recognize the warning signs. Russia’s systemic persecution of minorities, such as recently enacted laws against the gay community. The country’s ever-bolder moves to beat down dissent, such as a literal public flogging of the political punk band Pussy Riot. The moves to silence free speech and the press. Bullying of smaller neighbors to spread Russia’s influence and agenda. Most worrisome, the cult of personality being built around a leader who presents himself as all-powerful and paternal. Russia is marching down a familiar path. And speaking as someone whose family remembers the horrors of Russian pogroms and Soviet purges, I know where the path leads.

America spent forty years and trillions of dollars in the last Cold War with Russia. And now it needs to prepare to do so again. It needs to play Russia’s Cold War-era power game—and win. If left unchecked, Putin will turn the clock back to the Soviet era, recreating the authoritarian police state the retired KGB colonel probably misses and stamping out democratic movements throughout Russia’s sphere of influence.

Russia now effectively controls the southern peninsula of Crimea, the strategic location of the port city of Sevastopol. Now that Putin has annexed the region, he will need to negotiate with Kiev’s new leaders (Crimea relies on mainland Ukraine for most of its utilities). Meanwhile, clashing political protests have turned deadly in several eastern Ukrainian cities that, like Crimea, have ethnic Russian majorities. According to Ukraine’s new government, Russia is inciting the unrest. It may use the violence to justify more military interventions, following the same pattern it used in Crimea—and before that, in South Ossetia, a region it helped separatists to wrest from Georgia in 2008. In a worst-case scenario, this could lead to civil war. However, it is more likely that Putin will simply use the threat of military action as another bargaining chip, to force Ukraine to agree to considerable political concessions. He doesn’t want to destroy the country, but to cement his control over it.

Even if Russia invades other areas of eastern Ukraine, there will be no meaningful military response. After more than a decade of costly and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has no stomach for further armed conflict. And without America’s army, no country will be willing to support Ukraine in a bloody conflict with a former superpower. Ukraine’s new leaders know this. Though they have mobilized their army, they have no real plans to fight Russia. Their troops are merely an attempt to draw a line in the sand, a show of strength to discourage further aggression.

Nor can Ukraine count on Russia bowing to international pressure. The US and its European allies did announce sanctions against Russia this week, restricting the travel and freezing the international assets of a short list of Russian and Ukrainian officials. However, these amount to little more than a wag of the finger—and Russia interpreted them as such. Europe’s dependence on its gas means that few will sign onto the kind of serious economic sanctions that could actually hurt Russia. So instead, we get harshly worded threats—Obama’s warning that Russia will face “greater political and economic isolation”—and other largely symbolic rebukes, such as the push to evict Russia from the G8 club of nations.

Reviving the aborted US plan to set up a missile-defense system in Poland might deter Russia. And stripping it of the honor of hosting the 2018 World Cup would certainly bruise Putin’s pride. But even if Europe and the US retaliated in these harsher ways, they would be unlikely to change Russia’s bellicose foreign policy. The fact that Russia invaded Crimea right after spending years of effort and many tens of billions of dollars trying to improve its reputation with the lavish Sochi Olympics proves how little international opinion matters to it. Putin is willing for his country to be the world’s black sheep, as long as it is one of the most powerful ones in the flock. Domestically, his aggressive stance in Ukraine has actually caused his popularity to skyrocket, making it even less likely that he will back down.

In all honesty, Kiev’s only viable option is to negotiate a diplomatic agreement with Russia to end the crisis—one that will likely be more of an appeasement than an agreement. In the short term, there is little that the international community can do to help.

However, short-term thinking is part of the problem. So far, the international media have largely focused on Russia’s belligerent actions on the ground. Yet Russia’s chief geopolitical weapon is not its troops, but its energy resources. Russia has 47.8 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, almost five times as much as the US. And Russia is not afraid to use Gazprom as a weapon to punish recalcitrant nations, as it proved when it shut off gas to Ukraine in 2006 and 2009. Now it is threatening to call in Ukraine’s $1.5 billion gas debt, which may collapse the country’s already unstable economy. It may cut off gas to Ukraine once again. (Luckily it is now March—the last time Russia withheld gas was in the middle of a brutal winter.)

If America hopes to put an end to Russia’s growing antagonism and totalitarianism, it needs to fight fire with fire. The US has newly tapped reserves of natural gas, thanks to the recent boom in shale-gas production. In a few short years, it will go from being a major importer of natural gas to being an exporter. Expanding existing hydraulic fracturing operations in the Marcellus, Bakken, and Eagle Ford shale plays will expedite the production of this strategic energy resource. More importantly, the US can enact policies to promote the export of natural gas to Europe. In this way, the US can weaken Russia’s sway over the continent and make sure its allies’ energy dependence no longer hobbles any international efforts to keep Russia in check.

In countries like Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia, nuclear power is another means of shielding these countries from Russian influence. Ukraine, for example, has fifteen nuclear power plants. Most of the logistical support and fuel for its nuclear infrastructure comes from Russia. Imagine if this assistance came from the US instead. Beyond technical assistance and partnerships, the US can also intervene more directly in the energy market. For instance, when price disputes in 2009 prompted Russia to retaliate by turning off Ukraine’s natural-gas supply, the US could have subsidized nuclear-energy prices, neutralizing the Kremlin’s strong-arm tactics.

If the US invests in nuclear reactors in Eastern European countries, it would also counterbalance Russian power in the region in more subtle ways. The natural partners in these co-ventures would be the billionaire oligarchs who already control most of the infrastructure in these countries. These men wield great, almost feudal, power. Lucrative energy agreements with them would allow the US to buy their influence—and counter that of Russia.

Ukraine is currently trying a similar strategy, appointing oligarchs to governorships in the eastern part of the country. The gamble is that by tapping these men for leadership posts, Kiev’s leaders can indirectly win support and prevent these regions from seceding. The risky strategy seems to be paying off. In the eastern city of Donetsk, the billionaire Serhiy Taruta was appointed regional governor; soon after, the city’s police force evicted pro-Russian protesters from the parliament building they had occupied and arrested Pavel Gubarev, an organizer of mass demonstrations pushing for Donetsk to separate from Ukraine. While partnering with shady oligarchs can be a politically unsavory course of action, it could prove effective.

Fracking and nuclear power have serious environmental risks. But it is important to remember that Russia’s former satellites are already heavy users of these two sources of energy—about half of Ukraine’s electricity is produced from its nuclear reactors. And there is no reason that the US can’t help these nations build an infrastructure of solar panels, wind turbines, and other alternative sources of energy, too. Along with natural gas and nuclear energy, investing in green technologies would not just help America kick its addiction to Middle East oil, but would also enhance its ability to defend Ukraine and other fragile democracies around the world.

In the twentieth century, our Cold War conflict in Russia was waged just as much in the laboratory—to win the Space Race and the nuclear-arms race—as on any battlefield. Now, America and its allies are engaged in an energy race—and are woefully behind. The US can’t just respond to each new crisis manufactured by Putin with ineffective sanctions and stern words. It needs to take the long view. For once, it needs to think about its endgame.

Editor’s Update, March 27: President Obama stated yesterday that Europe needs to “diversify and accelerate energy independence,” and America could play a role in this: “The United States as a source of energy is one possibility, but we’re also making choices and taking on some of the difficulties and challenges of energy development, and Europe is going to have to go through some of those same conversations as well.”

Correction, March 22: An earlier version of the article mistakenly listed Ray Bradbury, rather than George Orwell, as the author of a banned manuscript. 

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The village of Hasroun, with its signature red roofs, in the Qadisha Valley region.
Beirut
Commentary

Tourism in a Time of War

People warned me not to go. Government advisories declared “avoid all travel.” But I ran off and fell in love with Lebanon anyway.

Story and photos by Alexis Lai
The Bekaa Valley with tents in the foreground
The Bekaa Valley and the shelters of Syrians (not necessarily refugees) who work in the adjoining fields.

Please, please, please cancel your ticket. It doesn’t matter how much it costs,” implored the beefy man serving our table at a local Lebanese restaurant in Hong Kong. “If you want to eat Lebanese food, just come here.”

I had just told him I was embarking on a two-week trip to his native country at the end of September — a revelation that seemed to have triggered in him the beginnings of a heart attack.

“But I want to go to Lebanon,” I said.

“There are snipers!” he insisted, aghast.

“What snipers?” I asked.

“Hezbollah! My friend in Byblos is afraid to leave his house!” I also risked being kidnapped by desperate Syrian refugees, he warned.

The next day, I woke up to reports that the US State Department had ordered its nonessential diplomats to evacuate Lebanon. The Obama administration and Congress were weighing punitive military strikes on neighboring Syria for using chemical weapons. The US had already slapped the country with an “avoid all nonessential travel” warning, which was later upgraded to “avoid all travel.” In the Lebanon sections of online travel forums, numerous threads were devoted to variations of the same question: “Is it safe to visit?”

I wondered if I was being reckless, but I was committed to my trip — not only financially, but emotionally. I had lived and traveled widely in North America, Europe, and Asia, but I had never visited the Middle East. Now in my late twenties, I thought it was time to change that. Surely, there had to be more to the Middle East than the dominant narrative in news reports of a dangerous, war-torn region, ridden with sectarian conflict, a bomb or bullet just around the corner.

With only two weeks of vacation, I thought visiting Lebanon, a relatively small country, would give me the chance to see a lot. I also felt a certain affinity for Lebanon that I didn’t for other places in the Middle East. Perhaps it had started with the delicious moudardara I’d discovered a decade ago in Toronto. I wanted to experience a culture celebrated for its sophistication, and see its storied capital, Beirut.

 

Lebanon's number of visitors has plummeted since the start of the Syrian civil war

Lebanon has not shaken the violent image it acquired from its bloody 1975-1990 civil war between Christian and Muslim militias, which drew in various outside groups, including the armed forces of Israel and Syria. More recently, Beirut was devastated by a month-long war in 2006 between Lebanon’s Shia militant group Hezbollah and the Israeli military.

Tourism had recovered quickly in the years after the Israel-Hezbollah War, reaching a peak of more than two million visitors in 2010, according to the ministry of tourism. The New York Times hailed Beirut as one of the top places to visit in the world: “The capital of Lebanon is poised to reclaim its title as the Paris of the Middle East.” Yet 2011 brought another calamity: the civil war in Syria, a country that shares deep ties and a porous border with Lebanon. The number of visitors has since plummeted — and was falling further when I arrived last September.

I knew from news reports that the Syrian civil war had spilled over into Lebanon, in the form of hundreds of thousands of refugees and bombs targeting both the pro-Syria Hezbollah movement and its critics. (The internal situation in Lebanon has long been influenced by its neighbor: Syrian armed forces occupied Lebanon during and after its civil war, and were only ousted by the Cedar Revolution triggered by the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005.) I had an eye out for all these dangers.

Three children wearing school backpacks in Tyre
Children leaving a mosque in Tyre. They pleaded for a photo, posed earnestly, and then examined the result carefully before scampering away.

But I ended up not thinking as much about my personal safety as I’d thought I would. I found myself dwelling instead on the beauty around me. I immediately fell in love with the country’s signature palette of colors. Verdant fields carpeted the Bekaa Valley that borders Syria, brimming with apples, wine grapes, and cannabis. Majestic homes constructed with yellow-white stones gleamed in the affluent south-central village of Deir el Qamar. Sun-faded red roofs dotted the rugged mountains of the Qadisha Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Most striking was Lebanon’s gorgeous shade of blue. I saw it time and time again in the Mediterranean Sea, most memorably from my hotel balcony in the venerable port city of Byblos, where the waters shimmered brilliantly in the sunlight, the shore silent except for the crashing of the waves. I saw it in the sky, too — during my trip to the Roman ruins of the eastern city of Baalbek, it was the glorious backdrop to the six restored pillars of the Temple of Jupiter. There I sat down on a rock and savored the view.

The six pillars against the blue sky
The six restored pillars of the Temple of Jupiter in the ancient Romans ruins of Baalbek.

Reputed to be a Hezbollah stronghold, Baalbek was singled out for an “avoid all travel” warning in advisories issued by the UK and Canada. But I did not run into problems there or anywhere else along the clockwise loop I made around Lebanon. In fact, aside from clusters of soldiers outfitted in berets and camouflage in some parts of the country — most visibly in downtown Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and the southern coastal city of Tyre — nothing I saw on my trip suggested that Lebanon was facing any kind of threat.

Children playing near pigeons in Beirut's Place de l’Étoile
Children play around the Place de l’Étoile in downtown Beirut.

In Beirut, life seemed to go on as usual. Children played with toys around the clock tower in the Place de l’Étoile downtown. Joggers lined the Corniche waterfront promenade. The fashionable set congregated at cafes along Zaitunay Bay. Students, with their arms wrapped around textbooks, strolled along the streets near the American University of Beirut campus.

Even the security checkpoints set up throughout the Bekaa Valley were essentially speed bumps: soldiers usually waved my driver past without a word. I had to show my passport only once.

I was surprised to be the only traveler at most of the major tourist attractions I visited and the homestays and hotels where I roomed. I enjoyed having museums, ancient ruins, and wineries all to myself, but it was sobering to think what the deserted places meant for the many people whose livelihoods depended on tourism. Following a huge drop in visitors during the summer season, hotels in the Beirut area laid off a quarter of their employees last year, the As-Safir newspaper reported. Seasonal hotel workers were hit even harder, with more than 70 percent of them — 14,000 people, most of them college students — losing their jobs.

In the eastern town of Zahlé, along the famous Berdawni Valley strip, strings of lights twinkled in vain, the many outdoor cafés bereft of diners and full of idle waiters in bow ties. As I ate breakfast alone at my hotel, the staff dutifully laid out silverware at the dozens of empty tables in the restaurant, their labor an empty exercise.

As I traveled around Lebanon, I unwittingly became a celebrity of sorts, drawing surprise and appreciation from locals baffled as to why a young Chinese woman would choose to visit at this time — let alone on her own. People would often go out of their way to help me, eager to make sure I had a pleasant experience in their country.

“Thank you for visiting Lebanon. Thank you for visiting our museum,” the curator of the Beirut National Museum said to me. The staff had referred me to her when I asked in English for directions to my next destination. She was shocked to learn I was visiting the country for fun and didn’t know a single person. She insisted on walking out with me to help me flag a shared taxi. “I don’t want you to have a bad experience and get ripped off,” she explained, proceeding to give the driver stern instructions in Arabic.

On a couple occasions, complete strangers went out of their way to drive me around. When I walked into a donut shop in Beirut asking for directions, a friendly university student offered me a ride home in her car. We ended up meeting for dinner a few days later, both of us eager to swap thoughts and impressions about Lebanon. Later on, I found myself in a teeming crowd at the headquarters of a cell-phone service provider, waiting to register my phone for a local SIM card but utterly confused about what I needed to do. The well-manicured middle-aged woman standing next to me took me under her wing. She explained the process, helped me cut the line, and then drove me across town to my next stop.

South of Beirut, in the ancient coastal cities of Sidon and Tyre, I also depended on the kindness of strangers to help me find my way. Whether it was a small boy at a shop where I bought a bottle of water, a sunglasses vendor, or a shabbily dressed man with a bicycle, the locals I approached would drop what they were doing and walk me to my destination.

When I jaywalked — unavoidable in the big cities — normally aggressive drivers would slow down when they spotted me. And the drivers of shared taxis seemed to know about my existence before I had even stepped foot in their cars. “I’ve seen you before walking around,” they told me on more than one occasion.

“I’ve become ‘famous’ in Lebanon,” I joked to Jamil, my elderly homestay host in Beirut, when I called him from the airport to say goodbye.

The startling blue of the Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea, as seen from the coastal city of Tyre.

My story is not intended to minimize the real crisis that Syrians and their neighbors in the Middle East are facing. According to the United Nations, there are now 2.3 million Syrian refugees in the region. The largest group — more than 800,000 — are in Lebanon. Recent bombings in Beirut and Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, are widely seen as retribution for Hezbollah’s support of the Syrian government. Attacks have also been directed at those opposed to Hezbollah: last month, a car bomb killed the former Lebanese finance minister Mohamad Chatah and six others in downtown Beirut. Chatah was a fierce critic of the Syrian government and Hezbollah.

Yet it’s easy to let stories of violence reported in the media narrow our view of a place. In Lebanon, there is incredible beauty and tranquility to be found, even if conflict smolders around it. And there are people eager to share that beauty, as I learned from the generous locals I met.

It is also worth remembering how far Lebanon has come since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War and the civil war that ended just over twenty years ago. Given its troubled history, it is surprising just how many tourists the country was drawing before the Syrian civil war began. Feted in the Western press, Lebanon seemed on the path to becoming a cultural and economic hub of the Middle East once again.

Alexis Lai standing on a mountain trail
Hiking in the Qannoubine Valley. Photo by Rami Al Semaani

That is the renaissance that locals like Jamil hope will bloom once the latest proxy crisis ends. Jamil has lived through all of Lebanon’s recent travails, including the civil war. The violence has exacted a price from his family: in the living room of his home is a photo of a slain nephew, a rose placed before the frame. Yet Jamil remains a staunch advocate of visiting Lebanon, waving off any security concerns. He dismissed the dangers that the waiter in Hong Kong had warned me about, furious at what he viewed as foolish and irresponsible remarks by a fellow countryman. When I told him I planned to visit Baalbek, he told me not to worry: “The closest you’ll get to Hezbollah is someone trying to sell you a T-shirt.”

Then and now, when I think of Lebanon, I don’t think of war. What comes to my mind is that beautiful shade of Mediterranean blue, the pristine silence of the mountains, the delicious apple I picked from a tree while camping with some new friends above the village of Hasroun. In a country renowned for war, I found peace.

Alexis Lai is a journalist based in Hong Kong. Her work has been published by CNN.com, the Wall Street Journal, and Radio Television Hong Kong, among others. Raised in Canada, she has lived in six countries and traveled in more than twenty. Twitter: @alexisklai Site: http://www.about.me/alexislai

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Commentary

How My Mother Lives

After her mother's unexplained death, a young woman ponders the long-term toll of not having access to adequate health care. A toothache brings on psychic hysteria about whether her own eventual demise will align with that of her mom.


photo of graffiti
Photo by MP Cinque

I don’t know why my mom died at the age of forty-nine because my father refused to allow an autopsy. His superstitious and deeply traditional beliefs mean I’ll never know the cause of my mother’s death. Was it a complication from having high blood pressure? Did she have a heart attack? At this point, all I can do is speculate — so I do.

A theory I’ve come up with recently is that her death may have been caused by problems with her teeth. When my mom was in her thirties, her teeth began falling out for some unknown reason. By the time she died, she had only a few left in her mouth. I wonder if the pain and swelling in her face before she died was due to an untreated tooth abscess. A recent study shows that oral infections are causing more hospitalizations, and if left untreated, a tooth abscess can be deadly when bacteria spread.

“When money and access are not problems, an abscessed tooth can easily be treated with a root canal or an extraction,” reports the New York Times. “But increasingly, Americans rely on hospital emergency rooms for dental care, instead of regular dentist visits — a trend exacerbated by a lack of insurance coverage and trouble paying out of pocket.”

I remember times when I was growing up that my family used old newspapers instead of bathroom tissue because my parents couldn’t afford toilet paper. Having narrowly escaped homelessness, my father solicitously cut the newspaper into squares, and we laughed at the extent of his effort because that somehow made it less dispiriting. Some days we had electricity, and some days we didn’t. But the presence of stressed out, overworked parents was ubiquitous.

My tale of ill-fitting, hand-me-down, thrift-store clothes and sharing a bedroom with my older brothers is not unique. Anyone who grew up poor can tell you similar stories of the challenges that come from not having what you need, materially and emotionally. They can also tell you what it’s like to make decisions about their lives without the assumption of ever achieving financial security. It never occurred to me that I could have a life that didn’t involve economic struggle, and I wonder if my decision to become a writer isn’t a result of this. Who would seek out a lifetime of poverty other than someone for whom it was a prophecy?

Being a writer means I have no health insurance, no steady paycheck, and no stability. While writers who aspire to upward mobility say they’re simply “low income,” as though the condition is temporary, my intimate familiarity with life below the line of poverty makes me uninterested in feigning comfort through euphemistic niceties. It’s not comfortable juggling deadlines for a dozen publications while not technically being employed by any one. I thought I had accepted my lot, but a few weeks ago I began having problems with my teeth.

The dull ache persisted for days. Overwhelmed by my circumstance, I immediately assumed the worst. This was the beginning of the end. In two years, I’ll be thirty, and my teeth will start falling out. Soon after, I will die penniless and alone just like my mom.

I know this line of thinking probably seems extreme. A toothache doesn’t typically bring on psychic hysteria about one’s impending death, but if my life has taught me anything, it is that every misstep can be the start of a downward spiral. One illness can be the difference between making do and ruin.

For months I’ve been putting together a referral binder for a women’s recovery center where I am a volunteer. As soon as my tooth began to ache, I poured through the dental resources, frantically calling each practice to beg for an appointment. They all said the same thing: our budget has been slashed, and we are unable to accept new patients at this time.

One clinic told me their wait-list is over a year long. Another said my only option was to show up at 6 a.m. because the only way I would be seen is if I were one of the first three people in line, although that was only for extractions. All the receptionists I spoke with were deeply apologetic, and I could hear the sadness in their voices. I assume they spend a good amount of their days turning away people in need. Despite these women’s compassion, I cracked. I reached my emotional limit and commenced to sob.

As I wept, I thought back to every crappy clinic I’d visited. I remembered the crackpot doctor who used Google to answer my routine questions. I recalled the times I’d been ripped off because I couldn’t afford another option. I thought about the number of clinic staff who’d told me that if I only had a child I didn’t want and couldn’t care for I’d be eligible for health insurance through the California Medical Assistance Program (Medi-Cal) — but even that doesn’t include coverage for dental work.

I realized I’d gotten so used to receiving poor treatment that I no longer believed I deserved better care. I wonder how many other uninsured Americans believe the same.

I wonder about the lives of people who have health insurance. I imagine the ease of having a dentist who will make an appointment for me because they fear losing my business or care about my well-being. I consider what it must be like to drive to an air-conditioned dentist’s office without having to wait for a perpetually late bus in the smoggy, summertime heat while being harassed by men on the street. I think about handing over a copayment instead of waiting for the visit’s bill, and carelessly allowing the dentist to address my toothache without fear of how much each piece of gauze will cost me.

I want to say I felt happy for the people for whom going to the dentist is not a time of stress and struggle, but my tears in that moment contained only hatred for them and the entire American medical system.

We often don’t consider the long-term toll — personally and as a country — of what it means to have a nation of people who can’t access adequate health care. In addition to our physical depreciation, new research confirms the negative neurological effects of a life plagued by financial anxiety. Having scientific data to back up my personal experience is oddly comforting yet disconcerting. Mostly, it is evidence of the injustice of poverty.

photo of Tina with her mom
Tina with her mom.

When the poor are treated as collateral damage in a fight between wealthy, well-insured politicians, people like my mom die. It wasn’t so long ago that she and I were snuggled together on the couch, giggling at the sight of my dad cutting that newspaper into squares. And when I am able to find the humor to commiserate with others like me about the absurdity of our situations, I know my mother lives on through me. She gave me what she could when we had nothing at all.

I still haven’t been able to see a dentist about my toothache, and though I have moments when I fear my mother’s and my fates will be the same, the memories of what my mom gave me drive me to keep fighting for something better than she had — so I do.

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Commentary

His Eyes

The expression of a male stranger catches a coffee shop patron by surprise. His eyes remind the young woman of her late father’s, leading her mind to drift between the past and present.

By Shannon Schaefer Perri

photo of Shannon at the coffee shop

For a little girl, I had many big questions while growing up. My mother usually recommended I write them down, so I wouldn’t forget, and then ask my father. No matter my age, my father always treated my questions with awe and philosophical fascination. I remember sitting in our downstairs living room — the one without the TV — me in my pajama set with my wet hair freshly combed, while my father sipped a glass of red wine. I’d feel so grown up, my mom in their bedroom, my younger sisters already upstairs asleep, and my father and I speculating.

I’d ask him greedily: What happens when we die? Do animals have feelings? Does he prefer to be awake or asleep? He’d tell me he secretly wondered if our whole universe was just a cell on the body of a giant creature — the moon an amoeba. I’d ask him if time really exists because sometimes it didn’t seem to. His eyes would widen while the skin around his brown eyes, the same ones I have, would stretch as he spoke and listened.

I’m sitting at a coffee shop, still heartbroken over my father’s death four and half years ago. I’m trying to write, pursue my dreams and all, because my father would have liked that. Yet, I can’t write because an elderly, plumpish man without much hair is distracting me with every lift of his silver eyebrows. He looks nothing like my wavy-haired, spirited father, but something about his eyes, or maybe the thin skin around his eyes, reminds me of him. I try not to stare at this man while he speaks to his friend, but I feel as though he’s flicking pieces of my father at me with every shift in his facial movements. How can this be? It’s like dreaming of my father only to wake up and realize he is dead. Yet, seconds ago he seemed so alive.

It’s trickery for this man to reach into my deepest ache with his eyes and confuse me. I am startled by this man and must remember he’s not my father. And that my father is not here.

I remember getting the call. That particular night I had been studying for a test the next day, books sprawled across my kitchen table. I missed the first few calls, as I had put my phone on silent to concentrate.

When my mother finally got through, she said my father had had some sort of seizure and the paramedics were sending him via STAR Flight to Seton Medical Center Austin. My mother and sisters were driving the hour-long distance. I was already there in the city for college.

I arrived at the hospital before my family, but for more than twenty minutes the doctors wouldn’t let me see him. I paced in the white-tiled waiting room. I wondered if I should have emailed my teacher to cancel my test for the next day. I wasn’t sure exactly what was happening, but I walked around, overwrought that my father could be feeling all alone when I was only a few rooms away.

When I finally did see him, he was talking loudly, but his voice had no variation. He sounded like a robot. He hadn’t had a seizure, but a massive stroke, and his brain was swelling. He kept asking me to squeeze his hand. He wanted to feel his hand on his right side, but he couldn’t because his right side had gone paralyzed.

photo of Shannon as a child with her fatherHis left eye darted around, panicked. “Squeeze my hand, Shannon.”

“Daddy, I’m squeezing it.”

“Squeeze harder.”

“Daddy, can’t you feel that?”

I try not to look back at the man in the coffee shop. I could hear his voice soften. My father’s voice used to soften. My father had the most booming, charismatic voice. It was also the most gentle. I’d like to stop thinking about my father now. I’d like to write and get on with my life.

Yet against my better judgment, I begin to study the wrinkly face and protruding gut of the man in the coffee shop. My skin begins to radiate heat. I bite my lip and begin typing furiously — about nothing — on my old yellow laptop my father had bought me.

How come this man gets to live? My father was young and healthy. I want his soft voice, not this stranger’s. Why couldn’t it have been the other way around?

Shame breaks my anger down.

This man seems nice enough. I can’t make out what he’s saying, but I hear his voice. Its familiar cadence starts to soothe me. My mind drifts to another memory of my father. I was twenty years old, and for the first time I saw raw despair in my father’s eyes — or at least it was the first time I was able to identify it.

We met for dinner at a small-town Mexican food chain called Margarita’s, halfway between my college and home. My father ordered a top-shelf margarita on the rocks, while I daringly ordered a Negra Modelo to impress him, two months shy of my twenty-first birthday. I wasn’t carded, and my father didn’t even care.

His face wore a hardened look of intensity that scared me. He wasn’t doing well at work. He and my mother were struggling. He wasn’t where he wanted to be, and he said that time was running out. He wanted to be happy, he was fifty-six, and he wanted to do the best with the time he had left, he said.

“Daddy! Stop! Fifty-six is young these days.”

“I have a lot of life to live. I’m not ready to die, Shannon.”

“Well, of course you’re not.”

But he did, shockingly, just one month later.

I wonder if the fatal blood clot that traveled up to my father’s brain had already started clumping then. I wonder if a part of him knew what was coming.

It reminds me of when I visited Wyoming. I walked along several rivers, and occasionally I’d see natural debris cluster together, clogging the waterway. I guess this is what was happening inside of my father, to the point that his brain couldn’t take it.

photo of Shannon as a teen with her dadAs the eyes of the man in the coffee shop widen, I see my father clearly. I now understand why this man reminds me so much of him. It’s a very specific facial expression — the same one my father wore when in meaningful conversation, usually about something existential.

I want my father back every day. I see him and feel him, and I’m unsure that he could actually be gone. I have all the same questions as when I was a little girl. Yet, I am stuck. If there are answers, do I really want to know them?

I’d rather be tormented like this, unsure where he is, than to be certain he’s gone. I’d rather be lost and searching than in a place he’ll never be.

Shannon Schaefer Perri is a writer with a background in social work. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her dog, birds, cats, and husband. She is one of the cofounders of the upcoming literary magazine, the Austin Review. This essay is her first published work. Twitter: @ShannonPerri1

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Commentary

Looking Back on Abortion in America

In this excerpt from her recently published book Generation Roe, pro-choice activist Sarah Erdreich talks with women who had an abortion and discusses the complicated set of emotions they bring to the abortion debate — even decades after the procedure.

By Sarah Erdreich

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt of Sarah Erdreich’s book, Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement. See the accompanying blog post by Mandy Van Deven, In The Fray’s managing editor.

When people know you work in the pro-choice movement, the stories come out. All of the sudden, you’re a safe person. You can be trusted to hear personal stories about terminating a pregnancy because you won’t judge or criticize. When you go through life hearing such stories, one thing becomes quite clear to you: all kinds of women have abortions. According to the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute, one in three American women will have an abortion before the age of forty-five.

Rachel (not her real name) is one of my mother’s oldest friends. I have known her and her husband practically all of my life. But it wasn’t until I told them I was writing a book about reproductive rights that Rachel opened up about her own experience with abortion, back in the mid-seventies.

Several years into her marriage, Rachel became pregnant. She had already had two healthy pregnancies, but this pregnancy didn’t progress normally. Rachel was vague on the details when she recounted her story to me, but she made it clear the abortion was medically necessary.

Had I not been offered that option, I very well could have lost my life.… There will always be doubts if I did right or I did wrong, but the right thing is that people can make the choice. I was fortunate that I had good medical care, and I was able to understand my options. But not everyone has that liberty.

“I’m not the least bit ashamed of what I did,” Rachel added. “In fact, I feel somewhat empowered by the choice because that was my right.” Yet Rachel only agreed to be interviewed if her real name was not used.

The day after I spoke with Rachel, I spent some time with a longtime friend of my father’s family. Toward the end of our visit, she mentioned that she had had an abortion many years earlier. Months later, Vicki (also a pseudonym) told me the whole story.

In the early seventies, Vicki became pregnant. Her husband threatened to leave her unless she had an abortion. They were living in a city that was hundreds of miles from her parents, siblings, and closest friends – and in one of the few states that had liberalized its abortion laws by then. “It was [the state’s] law to first see a psychiatrist,” Vicki said. “I remember I told the psychiatrist that if my husband wasn’t in the picture I would not consider abortion, but I guess obtaining the husband’s approval was routine.”

The entire procedure was covered by Vicki’s health insurance. After it was done, her husband — who, she said, had “badgered” her to get the abortion — called her a murderer. She later divorced him.

Vicki never told her family about her abortion.

My ex-husband is the only one who knows. I wanted to tell my mother, but that wasn’t news I wanted to break in a long-distance telephone call. That was back when long-distance calls meant something.… If I’d had more confidence to trust my feelings, and realized I was capable of supporting and raising a child on my own, I would not have had an abortion.

When I worked for the National Abortion Federation, I heard many women express gratitude that they could legally have an abortion, even as they regretted the particular circumstances — an unstable relationship, economic hardship, age, or a lack of education — that made abortion their best choice. To appreciate the right to make your own decision, even as you deplore the circumstances that led to that decision, is a complicated set of emotions that established pro-choice organizations haven’t always successfully addressed.

Groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the National Abortion Federation generally stick to messages about how common and safe abortion is, but they don’t offer a great deal of in-depth discussion about the range of emotions women may experience after having an abortion. Instead, they offer first-person stories, which overwhelmingly talk about abortion in positive terms. While studies have shown that most women feel relief after their abortions, women who have more ambivalent feelings afterward may not find comfort or support in these stories and messages.

The anti-abortion movement has been incredibly persuasive in its insistence that if a woman has mixed feelings following an abortion, then abortion itself must be unethical. In testimony before Congress in 1981, pro-life advocate and therapist Vincent Rue coined the term “post-abortion syndrome” to refer to an adverse physical or emotional response to abortion. While neither the American Psychological Association nor the American Psychiatric Association recognize post-abortion syndrome as an official diagnosis, the term quickly gained traction in the anti-abortion community.

In 1987, Ronald Reagan asked his surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, to write a report about the effects of abortion on women. An avowed opponent of abortion, Koop believed that the procedure traumatized women. He had even coauthored a book, Whatever Happened to the Human Race, which discussed post-abortion trauma. Even so, he was reluctant to do as Reagan asked. Koop was careful to distinguish between his personal beliefs and scientific evidence, and he refused to let ideology pressure him into taking a stance that the available evidence did not support. Answering Reagan in a January 1989 letter, Koop wrote that he could not conclude one way or another whether abortion was harmful to women.

Koop’s position shocked and incensed his fellow conservatives. President George H. W. Bush declined to appoint him secretary of health and human services in the new administration, and Koop left office one month before the end of his second term as surgeon general.

In 1988, the American Psychological Association commissioned a study to review the research on the psychological effects of abortion. After a survey of over two hundred studies, a panel of six experts found that only nineteen or twenty met what they considered reliable scientific standards. Based on those studies, the panel concluded that “legal abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in the first trimester does not pose a psychological hazard for most women.”

While some women did experience distress, they were in the minority. One study found that “seventy-six percent of women [who had a first-trimester abortion] reported feeling relief two weeks after an abortion, and only seventeen percent reported feeling guilt.”

It is important to note that women seeking later abortions reported more distress after their abortion, as did women who had difficulty making their decisions. While eighty-eight percent of abortions are performed within the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, women who have the procedure done in the second or third trimester overwhelmingly say that the timing was due to a delay in making the necessary arrangements — including raising money and securing an appointment. Fetal abnormality is another reason: many birth defects that are incompatible with life are not discovered until the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy, or even later.

My college years were shaped by the experiences of several close friends who chose to have an abortion following unplanned pregnancies. I learned from their situations that no matter how deeply pro-choice someone might be, it is still normal to have mixed feelings about having an abortion.

“I would never fault a woman who had an abortion for not wanting to share that with other people, because it’s too difficult,” Shannon Connolly, a medical student at the University of Southern California, told me. “But I hope they would be able to. Until abortion is normalized and people are able to say it’s just another part of health care, we won’t be able to talk about it in a meaningful way.”

Sarah Erdreich is a women’s health advocate, writer, and pro-choice activist. Her work has appeared in On The Issues, Lilith, Feminists For Choice, and RH Reality Check.

This excerpt has been slightly edited to adhere to In The Fray‘s style. 

Read the accompanying blog post by managing editor Mandy Van Deven.

Correction, July 15, 2013: Due to an editing error, the writer’s name was misspelled in several references.

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Commentary

I Ran with the Bulls in Pamplona

Last July, four women undertook the life-threatening adventure of running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. They did it to feel the excitement. They did it to test their bravery. They did it to inspire other women to take their chances among los toros, too.

By Jeannie Mark

photo of author preparing to run with the bulls in Spain5:30 a.m.: Oneika’s alarm bellows, dragging me from the darkness. Allowing my foggy mind to waken, I lay inert for a moment to process the reason for such an early wake up call. Today, we run with the bulls.

6:00 a.m.: The girls and I start to dress. The four of us slide on our white pants, lace up our runners, and tie red sashes around our waists. I tie my red bandana firmly against my throat. The day before a Japanese tourist was dragged by a bull when his bandana was snagged by its horn. I turn to the girls and say, “Tie up everything tight. No loose shoelaces, sashes, or bandanas.” Why do I feel the need to pretend to be brave and play mother hen? Deep down, I’m not positive of anything.

6:10 a.m.: The girls and I continue the conversation we’ve been having for days: where is it best to run? We’ve received many recommendations. The top of Estafeta. Fifty meters down Estefata. Telefonica, near the bullring. We agree that the last place we want to end up is the bullring. There’s a waft of fear about human pileups. Nicole B. jokes that she fears other runners more than the bulls. A consensus is reached. We’ll go fifty meters down Estafeta, stick to the right-hand side, and try not to leap toward a bull. Secretly, I want to touch one.

6:14 a.m.: Nicole B. vocalizes her nervousness. She says she’s always like this. I tell her that if she doesn’t want to run, she shouldn’t. It’s an individual decision. I feel the pressure though. This was my idea and backing out isn’t an option.

6:21 a.m.: Oneika reconfirms our plans. She’s been an interesting force during this trip. As we watched the bulls run on television the day before, Oneika squealed with unchecked enthusiasm. This morning she seems more sober. “Stick to the right, yes?” she asks. “Let’s not get near the bulls.” I realize she’s adventurous, but intelligent about it. I long to be like her instead of just grossly impulsive.

photo of a statue of San Fermin.6:30 a.m.: In San Fermin colors, we leave our flat to meet with a fellow runner, Jarmo Jarvi. We head down a ramp close to where the bulls are housed before the run and stand near the old city wall. A statue of San Fermin has been placed in a cubbyhole and sealed off by glass. This is where corredors sing to the divine and pray for a successful run. Daylight is beginning to trickle in. Mornings in Pamplona are chilly, yet I feel a furnace in my belly. Am I losing or gaining courage?

6:45 a.m.: Serious runners are starting to gather. The nerves among our group are beginning to swell. Oneika and Nicole B. break into hip-hop and pop songs to slice the tension. I join in. Nicole S. doesn’t display signs of cold feet. She laughs at our silliness.

7:00 a.m.: We meet a reporter and cameraman from Cuatro TV. Beatriz, the reporter, spots us easily. The proportion of female corredors is dismally low. The cameraman tells us he’s run before and asks where we plan to start. He says starting on Estafeta is unwise. It’s narrow and there are no barricade openings for us to slip through. We glance at each other nervously. He offers to show us what might be safer. At Telefonica, he says, there’s a curve. After that, it’s a straight run towards Plaza del Toros, the bullring. He leads us down Mercaderes, turns onto Estafeta, and inches closer to Telefonica. We weave through partiers, runners, and watchers. I glance up at the balconies and wonder if they pity me – or if they watch in awe.

photo of people watching the bulls run from balconies7:12 a.m.: The cameraman engages with la policía before we make it to Telefonica. Words are exchanged, and so is an understanding. He says we can’t linger here, or we’ll be shuffled off as spectators. An unease rumbles throughout the group. Do we stick to Estafeta, where any of us could become a target without escape? We begin to make our way back to the beginning of the run. I can tell Nicole B. isn’t comfortable with changing strategy midstream.

7:19 a.m.: We wait in the bosom of the crowd of runners. Male pheromones surround us. The reality is hitting me now, so I imagine how I’m going to run. Elbows out, nimble on my feet. Veterans say this is the worst part of el encierro. Beatriz reappears and interviews us in the throng of testosterone. Word spreads through Pamplona, and we become known as the four chicas – the female runners who are challenging the bulls.

7:25 a.m.: In the crowd, I talk to a small Colombian man who says he doubts he will run. Why he hasn’t left the street yet is beyond me. A tall, muscular man pushes toward me. The look on his face is pure fright. He bows out of the run. My limbs are rigid, and my head is on fire. An audible quake shakes me. It is the chant of the corredor. I join in and begin to feel looser. We are all in this fate together. Whatever happens next, we accept.

photo of young women who will run with the bulls7:45 a.m.: The mass of bodies begins to move, and we move with them. I’m worried we won’t make it to the spot we want in time. Our trotting turns into a light jog as we weave down Estafeta toward the corner of Telefonica.

7:51 a.m.: A bit breathless, we make it. I’m now fully awake to this. I feel the pulse of the crowd. I hear the screams of people trying to psych themselves up. Behind me are five young women clutching a doorway. I turn to one and yelp, “Girl power!” We all high five each other.

7:53 a.m.: Police comb the crowds, removing anyone they deem unsuitable to run. With the cobwebs cleared, we are left with a collective jangle of hopes and fears. It’s almost on and I can’t escape now.

8:00 a.m.: A rocket goes off and the mass of runners stirs. People start jumping up and down, trying to see down the street. One of the girls shouts, “What do we do? Start running?” I tell her to hold steady. I haven’t heard the second rocket. People start to rush forward, but I yell, “Wait until you see horns!”

news clipping that features the author8:01 a.m.: We see horns. I scream, “Run!” And we do. Adrenaline rips through me. All I can make out are hides of animals, blending together in shades of brown and tan. Horns swerve in lightening motion. I expect the slippery cobblestones to conspire against me, but by some miracle, I stay upright. Men and women zoom past me, elbowing me and pushing my shoulders from behind. I steel myself against them. Shouts are popping my eardrums. I swivel my head and see a tan bull shaking the earth beside me. If I angle to the right just a bit I can touch his smooth, furry skin. I’m amazed that in all the chaos I can freeze this moment in my mind. Then it’s gone and so is he.

8:02 a.m.: All I can focus on are flashes of other runners. White and red sensory overload. I see Jarmo and Nicole S. in front of me. I know Nicole B. is behind me, but I keep running. A couple is sprawled on the cobblestones ahead, but instead of tumbling with them, I jump over them. This is where my nerve fails. I spot an open barricade through which I can dive, but I don’t. I cling to my adrenaline like a strung out junkie.

8:03 a.m.: My body moves more lithely than I’d imagined. I shout at Jarmo to keep going. I see the tunnel for Plaza del Toros and realize I’m headed for the bullring, which is precisely where I don’t want to go. There is a human pileup at the entrance. I screech to a halt, unsure what to do. There are more bulls coming, and if I don’t move, things could turn bad. Before I can react, the pile of people disentangle themselves and clear the path. I shoot past them into the bullring, gasping for air. A Spanish man grabs me and plants a sloppy kiss on my eye. He exhales all the air from his lungs and laughs wildly. He’s ecstatic to be alive. I notice for the first time that I’m also intact. I made it.

photo of author after the race, being interviewed8:04 a.m.: I notice the atmosphere in the ring. The stands are overflowing. The bystanders are roaring. Some runners have hopped up onto the barriers,where they can avoid humans and bulls. Others are sitting in the stands. Flashbulbs are bursting as photographers capture the pandemonium. I find Jarmo and Nicole S. Jarmo and I embrace. His lip is slightly bleeding. We’re both sweaty, out of breath, and talking excitedly. Nicole B. flies in finally. As she hugs us, a flock of people surge into the ring. The last bull has arrived.

8:06 a.m.: We find Oneika in the stands. She had dived through a barricade after an elbow landed in her eye.

8:07 a.m.: I’m tingly, and playful like a child. When they release the cows into the ring, I leap in and start dancing. Runners with cojones do leaps over the cows. The runners congratulate each other with a handshake or a slap on the back. A woman calls to me, “I’ve been watching you. You are brave!” She anoints me with a high five.

Conclusion: So, we did it. And survived. Would I run again? For some loco reason, I’m game to try.

photo of author celebrating her successful run

Jeannie Mark officially quit her life in 2010 to pursue her dream of world exploration. You can find more about her run with the bulls on her blog, Nomadic Chick, and the website Girls Running With Bulls.

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