The Heart of the Buddha is a moving novel about a woman who travels to the remote Asian country of Bhutan in search of her beloved twin sister. Author Elsie Sze uses the journey of Ruth Souza to shed light not only on a country that is fascinatingly different from the western world, but also on the Buddhist religion and the relationship between two very different women. Call it, perhaps, “chick lit” Bhutan style.
Ruth’s sister Marian is a librarian from Toronto (like Sze herself). She writes regularly to Ruth while working in Bhutan, but disappears after completing her six-month contract. Concerned about not hearing from Marian in over two months, Ruth embarks on her journey. The novel interweaves Ruth’s first-person account of her experiences with a “memoir” Marian had written about her life in Bhutan, which is Ruth’s “only key to the mystery of her disappearance.”
In the memoir, Marian reveals herself as impulsive (maybe an alter ego for Sze herself) and more in touch with her sensuality than the more straight-laced Ruth. She has gone to Bhutan to have “an experience few will ever have” and, on an excursion into the Himalayas, ambles by a naked man preparing an outdoor steam bath. “He had an athletic form, with broad shoulders, brawny arms, a well-proportioned torso: an Apollo in action,” she writes in the memoir. She is interested yet embarrassed when she realizes he is a Buddhist monk.
Six days later, they bump into each other under ordinary circumstances (dressed), and while conversing, seem to find themselves falling head over heels for each other. Unfortunately, Buddhist monks aren’t allowed to experience carnal love (reminiscent of Catholic taboos), but since the librarian and the monk cannot ignore their passion, they take a secret and dangerous journey into Chinese-occupied Tibet to retrieve lost Bhutanese religious writings in order to atone for the sin that will be committed when he leaves monkhood. The countryside and religion of Bhutan are revealed to us as the memoir unfolds.
For her part, Ruth finds herself attracted to her Bhutanese travel guide. She too tries to deny these feelings, but passion, again, is hard to resist. “At last we were no longer (just) sending signals with looks and touches like high school boys and girls,” she says. Marian, who is usually guided by her feelings, becomes more rational, while Ruth, the logical one, becomes more passionate. Sister stories are often tales of integration of conflicting aspects of oneself. As Ruth says, “Perhaps, like the yin-yang circle, we complement each other, and our differences make us whole.”
Sze is Chinese-Canadian herself and identifies the sisters as Chinese-Portuguese. She lived in Bhutan while researching the book and lovingly evokes the atmosphere and landscape of the country. Ruth visits a small town to attend a religious event, and she describes the scenery as “golden terraced mustard fields, scattered with farmhouses and prayer flags, sloped down to a river valley. In the further distance were hazy layered foothills ranged across the sky like a blushing dream. A majestic chir pine decked with a white prayer flag at its top trembled by my balcony.”
However, the focus is more on the Buddhist religion of Bhutan than its everyday culture. The use of phallic symbols and statues to portray sex in the Buddhist tradition is depicted humorously. Ruth listens to a loudmouthed couple from Texas who describe their experience at a special temple:
“As soon as I walked in, this young monk touched my head with an ivory phallus, then a bamboo one,” Marge said, breaking into a brassy chuckle. “At my age, it will take a lot more.”
“He hit me with them too. I bet they’re more potent than Viagra. I feel I can carry on until I’m ninety,” her husband cackled.
Sze suggests that this way of combining sexuality with religion is strange and very different for those who come from the Christian-based world in which body and spirit are separate.
What’s intriguing but confusing is that the handsome young monk who Marian meets isn’t allowed to indulge when he desires the librarian. Sze doesn’t explain why monks can’t have a relationship. Is it similar to Catholicism insofar as clergy are committed only to their service to God? Since Buddhism appears to appreciate physical love, it would be fascinating to know why the monks can’t express their sexuality.
The parallel stories of the sisters are interesting, but the flow of the story seems a bit stilted. Sze says she wrote this book in English only and doesn’t feel proficient in Cantonese. But the book feels like it was written by someone whose second language is English, and Sze’s prose has a slight hesitancy. Or maybe the writing style just demonstrates the innocence of sheltered young women as they experience first love. Ah, charmingly shy naïvete!
On the ground with a New Yorker during the UN General Assembly.
Story and photos by Suzanne Farrell
Police keep watch from the UN roof.
A police officer wearing protective gear and holding an automatic machine gun stands in the middle of First Avenue. An armed motorcade rolls by him and into the parking lot he’s guarding. A dozen people with cameras wait at the top of the stairs that provide access from my street to the avenue below.
It’s a Wednesday in September, and I’m headed to the pharmacy.
Where I live
I share a block, which includes three fire hydrants, twenty street parking spaces, and a mail carrier named Bill, with the Perutusan Tetap Malaysia Ke Pertubuhan Bangsa-Bangsa Bersatu, or Permanent Mission of Malaysia to the United Nations.
Bill is frustrated that the recent shakeup at the Postal Service has left him with an unbalanced route — all his buildings are residential except one, the Malaysian Mission, simply because it’s on the north side of the block, and that’s where he rolls his mail cart. He tells me, almost every day, that he’d rather cross the street to serve another residential building than stay on the same side to serve a commercial one.
I often see VIP guests arrive at the Malaysian Mission. They step from black Lincolns and gather on the sidewalk in tight bouquets of hand-painted sarongs. Well-behaved children attach themselves to thin wrists. The groups disappear into the sleek high-rise while the Lincolns idle, their drivers dozing in the cool air furnished by the running engines.
My neighbor Joanne idles, too, at her first-floor window, until the dignitaries and their families are inside. Then she peels out, knocks on windows, and shouts at the drivers to move along: “No parking! Don’t you see the signs?” Every evening, Joanne tirelessly writes letters to the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission and calls 311 with plate numbers. She logs the offenses of the drivers — toxic exhaust, valuable loading and unloading spots taken, candy bar wrappers on the street, plastic bottles filled with urine tossed in the gutter — and reports them to our local community board services agency. As to the last of the offenses — the bottles — I’ve never seen one. Perhaps I’m distracted by the gold thread in the sarongs, burning in the late afternoon sun as it reflects indiscriminately off each west-facing window of the United Nations headquarters.
What happens inside that building has always been, and will likely always be, a mystery to me. As for community appeal, I like the glistening exterior, the row of flagpoles, and the general vibe of importance. (Once, a motorcade bearing then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan passed by me, and I turned downright giddy.) I like the banners outside my building that welcome visitors to “UN Way.” Alongside “No Parking 8-6” signs are flags from Uzbekistan, Peru, Costa Rica, Kiribati, and other countries.
Protester and police officer share a moment on the corner.
This is Tudor City, an eighty-year-old neighborhood on the eastern edge of Midtown Manhattan. Unlike other New York neighborhoods, Tudor City is just two square blocks, from Forty-First to Forty-Third Streets between Second and First Avenues.
This section of the island of Manhattan gently slopes upward to a granite cliff that once offered unobstructed views of the East River. In the shadow of the cliff, down on First Avenue, slaughterhouses and tenement buildings were erected in the early twentieth century. The architects who designed Tudor City’s gigantic gothic-style apartment houses included only small windows facing east to minimize the stench from below.
In the late 1940s, the slaughterhouses were torn down, and the United Nations Headquarters was built in their place. Though it is sometimes difficult for me to understand why Midtown Manhattan was chosen for the UN Headquarters and not a large open area somewhere with ample parking space, I chalk my lack of understanding up to post-9/11 worries about security. In 1945, New York apparently looked like an ideal — and safe — place to build the United Nations flagship complex. The topography does ensure that a car cannot drive straight to the UN’s front door. And the UN, juxtaposed with the gothic buildings, has Hollywood allure. The spotlights from late-night film shoots transform our neighborhood from night into day.
I moved here right after September 11, 2001. The prices in Midtown, particularly in Tudor City, had dropped substantially in the wake of residents fleeing for the presumed safety of the suburbs. My first impression of the place was that it was a Midtown anomaly, situated so close to Grand Central Station but with two little parks and the feel of a cul-de-sac. I noted snipers on several rooftops.
The annual UN General Assembly
Joanne, naturally, is the one who alerts us every year when the UN General Assembly is coming. Diplomats from over a hundred nations come to meet, greet, and speak. Every issue under the increasingly dangerous sun is discussed: environment, health, war, energy, food, water, genocide.
Out here, it’s like a festival of lights for my neighbors and me — red and blue flashes from police cars, neon protest posters, shiny orange cones. Being part of it by virtue of living in it, however, can be frustrating. The New York City Police Department, feds, and private security staff lock down the area.
The diplomats, however, don’t always stay in the neighborhood. (Qaddafi and his tent are a case in point. This year the Libyan leader, wary of elevators, tried to erect his private canvas sleeping space in Central Park and on Donald Trump’s estate in White Plains. He was denied both times.) Diplomats have needs. They visit friends and go out to dinner. My graduate school adviser, Diane, used to live quite a distance from the UN, on the Upper West Side. Still, she was stopped on West Seventy-Ninth Street: “Next thing I knew I was up against the wall being yelled at. There were tanks or Humvees and men with automatic weapons. I was in shock, but it turned out they were just providing security for Arafat, who’d come to a stationery store on the block to buy a fountain pen.” The footage of President Obama’s visit this year shows him jogging on a city street that has been emptied of cars and people. Diane and I laugh about the great lengths security staff will go to so that heads of state can do “normal” things.
Joanne forwards a notice to our building from Deputy Inspector Ted W. Bernstein, commanding officer of the Seventeenth Precinct. The accompanying map reads like a battle plan: street closures and coned-off lanes, checkpoints and vehicle inspection sites. No parking is allowed, except, it seems, for those indomitable black cars that crawl our block like roaches.
This year there is an added threat of terror. Reports of a plot, allegedly one of the most complex and sophisticated since 9/11, lead the news cycle. Authorities have discovered plans to explode homemade bombs in Grand Central Station and other New York transit hubs. Though the plot seems to have been thwarted, security is heightened, particularly on the subways. But it’s UN Week, and we are encouraged to take the subway rather than cabs or buses. I can’t decide if I’m comforted or disconcerted when Police Commissioner Ray Kelly announces that the city, accustomed to living in a state of high alert, is doing what it always does to remain secure.
One of the many side effects of UN General Assembly Week.
A day on the ground
After the pharmacy, I hop on a bus at Nelson and Winnie Mandela Corner (just about everything in this neighborhood is named for a diplomatic star or two) and head toward the west side to pick up my camera from a repair shop. The trip takes twice as long as it usually does, and by the time I’m back, I’m ready for an afternoon latté. While waiting in line at Starbucks, I watch a bus pull up to the curb and empty itself of men in black, green, and red T-shirts. They unfurl flags and straighten out signs.
By the time I have my coffee, the men have turned up Second Avenue, along the stretch that has been renamed Yitzhak Rabin Way, and I follow them on my way to Alpian’s Dry Cleaners to drop off some clothes. I hear the noise from Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, on Forty-Sixth, well before I arrive.
“United Nations, we need your help, right now, right now,” a group from Tibet chants. I can’t cross Forty-Sixth Street at Second to continue on to the dry cleaners on Forty-Eighth because of the throngs of people and police barricades on both sides of the street. I can’t cross to the other side of the avenue either because a crowd of people has gathered as far as I can see up Forty-Sixth. While I debate what to do, a man selling buttons that read “Obama Rocks” and “Green Up Iran” proudly announces to no one in particular that he has only two of his thirty-six “America: A Nation of Immigrants” buttons left.
I reason that if I walk with the flow of foot traffic and not against it, I will be able to turn left on First Avenue and continue on my way. Halfway down the block I find an opening between barriers and sneak into the center of the street where it’s a little less crowded. I walk alongside several people with cameras and a woman with a megaphone. We pass the Holy Family Church, where parents are waiting for their children to get out of school.
Suddenly, the woman yells into her megaphone, “Hey hey, ho ho, Ahmadinejad has to go.” I look around. The crowd has organized into a march behind a banner as wide as the street. In front of us, cops pull barriers from the side of the street to erect a blockade. I follow some quick thinkers through an opening before it closes up. Behind the barriers, those ahead of the pack, some tourists and some journalists, are stuck. The cops won’t let them out. Protesters are still moving forward, repeating the woman’s spirited calls.
I’ve never been part of a protest. My vast experience as a couch observer of the news, however, makes me concerned that the protesters might push up against the barriers and strain to break through, try to overtake the UN, possibly Ahmadinejad himself. I wonder if the police will act especially brutally, if some child who has just come out of the Holy Family School will be accidentally crushed. Last year while I was in Argentina for a wedding, farmers there protesting the government blocked the roads with their equipment, causing such backups the bride’s ninety-year-old grandmother sat in a bus for eighteen hours when it should have been a two-hour trip.
Nothing that dramatic happens, of course. The police officers wait patiently on the other side of the barriers, chatting. Onlookers snap pictures. And the protesters stop exactly where they are told to stop. In a display of what I see as great restraint, power, and organization, they speak their collective mind, in unison, repeating the same simple statement. Hey hey. Ho ho. Ahmadinejad has to go. It moves me with its immobility. The voices alone, though loud, must sound like music three blocks south at the UN Headquarters.
Protesters holding an array of flags, including Free Tibet and American flags, listen quietly to a speaker.
On either side of the Iranian march are groups from Taiwan, Cameroon, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and Israel squeezed in together. An older man with a long, grey, scraggly braid yells at the protesters, “It’s a society of wimps! You’re wasting your time, you assholes!” Remarkably, a group sits on the ground in the center, unfazed, eyes closed in meditation or prayer. Behind them, a sign reads, “Falun Dafa is Great.”
The chaos of so many nations with conflicting wants is muted by the general human need of expression and order, mail delivery and lunch, money and prayer. It’s almost as if there are too many sides to make for conflict during the Assembly, or that conflict itself is what makes the Assembly operate smoothly. No matter what is going on behind those reflective windows, out here there is some sort of peace.
My arms are tired from balancing my coffee and purse with my camera bag and the clothes for dry cleaning, though I’m grateful for the camera, as I too become an onlooker taking pictures. Finally, I make it up First Avenue to Alpian’s. On the way home, I stop in Amreen’s Hallmark to buy a birthday card for my niece. I ask Amreen’s daughter, who works the register, how it’s gone so far.
“Good. Not too busy,” she says as she rings up the $3 card.
“Have you had more customers than usual?”
She shrugs. “No, but we have sold out of some stuff.” She points toward a shelf. “We’ve sold a bunch of our New York trinkets!”
As I approach my building, a motorcade stops right in front. Suited men get out and flank a town car. Behind it, a suburban full of men in vests holding machine guns waits. I’m about five feet from them. My building’s awning is behind me, and a group of tourists is watching. A woman walking her dog approaches. The shih tzu makes his big decision of the afternoon — curb or tree — and chooses the curb. The dog squats, the woman watches with plastic bag ready, I snap a photo of the men with guns, the suited men on the street wait for a signal then return to their vehicles, and the motorcade rolls away.
Inside I ask José at the front desk how the day has been. “Beautiful!” he says. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. A neighbor writes on her Facebook wall, “I walked outside to protests by every ethnic and religious group known to humanity. Then, President Obama passed by in a car, waving. I almost got picked up by secret service, and [literally] bumped into Katie Couric. The traffic is only a small price to pay for this much fun!” In true UN General Assembly style, we get a little bit of the spotlight — and the festival of lights — every year.
Joanne, however, is already on to other things. I get an email about bus route interruptions as construction on a new Second Avenue subway line proceeds. And as for my friend on Facebook, she soon follows her comment with another: “On second thought, I’m so over the important people hanging out in my hood. They are clearly diluting my status as a local celeb.”
High security just outside the author's building.
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In April of 2009, when it seemed as though summer would never arrive in midcoast Maine, I began photographing my perennial garden every Thursday (my favorite day of the week) to more closely observe and record the changes; to remind myself, through the seasons, of both the growth and death that takes place outside my door.
Best of In The Fray 2009. A look at two books written about one man: Mary Tillman’s Boots on the Ground by Dusk and Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.
The life and death of Pat Tillman has a symbolic resonance that continues to echo far and wide. In a country rife with anxious masculinity, he was a powerful example of a certain American ideal: a strong, independent-minded man with both brawn and shrewd intellect, a taste for challenge, and a compassionate, questioning soul.
Tillman — an NFL player, amateur philosopher, volunteer soldier, and freethinker who believed the Iraq War was wrong — was killed accidentally by his fellow soldiers in Afghanistan. Because he died during a war-mongering era that represented the worst aspects of American masculinity — and because his friendly-fire death in April, 2004, was subsequently packaged by the Bush administration as a heroic death in combat — the public hasn’t lost interest in his story. He’s been the subject of countless articles and TV news specials, and his mother Mary wrote a memoir, Boots on the Ground by Dusk, about him and her family’s search for the truth about his death. Now journalist Jon Krakauer, author of the best-selling adventure yarns Into Thin Air and Into the Wild, has added to the body of knowledge with his book Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.
Both books portray Tillman as a young man whose joie de vivre and need to delve further into life was insatiable — and led to his fateful army enlistment. His mother writes about him repeatedly hurling himself out of the crib as a baby, while Krakauer describes him leaping over and over again from a cliff to a tree branch as a young man.
Mary Tillman writes in straightforward prose, a mixture of present and past tense, telling an agonizing, step-by-step story of her journey from grieving mom to crusader for the truth, intertwined with memories of her son. Boots on the Ground is filled with tiny, tangible moments that carry personal weight: “I looked up at the eucalyptus tree where Pat would so often sit when he was young. The light shining through the leaves and shredded bark was so bright, my vision blurred and I diverted my eyes,” she writes of a day when people had come to pay respects to her deceased son.
“We all look around uncomfortably at each other. Something isn’t right about this,” she says when describing her family’s meeting with an army official. “At the close of the meeting we agree to disagree, but I promise them we are not going away,” she says of the end of another unsatisfying summit.
But while Mary Tillman’s story is of a family driven nearly mad by the army’s lack of empathy for its pain, Krakauer has a different purpose. Where Men Win Glory depicts a government driven senseless by the need to justify its aggression. War is an inherently dark and messy thing, he reminds us in a book that ranges from intimate personal excerpts taken from Pat Tillman’s diary to a history of foreign engagement in Afghanistan. What made the wars of the Bush administration so singular — and senseless — was a culture in which the appearance of “mission accomplished” mattered more than the reality.
As Krakauer shows, Tillman didn’t die simply because a group of soliders fired wildly and indiscriminately at its own comrades. It was also because, in order to make it seem as though they were getting something done in the “War on Terror,” desk commanders insisted on splitting Tillman’s unit up, disregarding the ground officers’ orders, and on rushing the soldiers through a dangerous area during the daytime when they were vulnerable to insurgents. The desk commanders wanted, quite simply, “boots on the ground by dusk.”
Perhaps even more chillingly, the effort to keep up the appearance of success by masking the ugly truth of Tillman’s death from the public and his family went far up the chain of command. The evidence, says Krakauer, indicates that Tillman’s regiment “engaged in an elaborate conspiracy to deliberately mislead the family, and high-ranking officials at the White House and the Pentagon abetted the deception.”
Where Men Win Glory is also an interesting counterpoint to The Terror Dream, in which author Susan Faludi focuses on the story of Jessica Lynch, who was “rescued” from a hospital in Iraq and, like Tillman, falsely branded as a hero to boost wartime propaganda. Krakauer notes the similarities between the two cases — as did the congressional hearings that examined both of them.
Ultimately, the Tillman books complement each other: Mary Tillman’s is personal and detailed, Krakauer’s is tightly written with a wide scope. The story is so compelling that many will want to read both, although those with no previous knowledge will find Krakauer provides the clearer introduction to the story.
The Menorah in Flames sat on the bank of the Danube, in a district called Dor_ol in Belgrade. I walked on Jevrejska Street toward the river in search of it. The Danube was soothing and peaceful here: Boats were moored on the opposite bank, and a well-paved bicycle path ran parallel to the river. Midmorning traffic was made up of young women pushing baby buggies, old men taking leisurely strolls, and an occasional cyclist. And then there was me, a traveler from Canada, roaming the city while my husband worked as a foreign consultant.
Belgrade had to be one of the cities in the world with the most monuments. Busts, whole statues, fountains, pillars, plaques. Big ones, small ones. Marble, stone, bronze. In parks, on quiet streets, in public squares. On pedestals, in niches, on columns. Everywhere.
But where was the Menorah in Flames? In the guidebook, it looked like a tree without leaves, a trunk with brown and bare upturned branches. It was put up half a century late —1995 — in memory of Belgrade Jews who died following Hitler’s invasion of Yugoslavia in the Second World War. I came upon it sooner than expected. It was about 10 feet high and 10 feet across at its widest, cast in bronze, and situated on a quiet lawn not far from a modest apartment complex. I walked up the granite steps to its marble base. The monument was deserted except for a young boy jumping on the steps, making a game of it, while his mother watched with an air of nonchalance. I was within touching distance of the monument. Then I saw objects protruding from the flames — human heads with faces contorted in agony, skeletal arms with clenched fists, feet attached to scrawny segments of lower legs. I circled the monument; every angle depicted the same disturbing protrusions of horror. Body parts in flames, a tree of death.
Popular memorials
Disconcerted, I made my way back to the old city, following the bicycle path that wound along the promontory where the Sava met the Danube. Looking away from the river, I saw the Kalemegdan Fortress, rising up above me, multi-tiered and beautiful, cross-sections of its ruined ancient Roman buttresses exposed. Dominating the fortress on the edge of its western corner was the Messenger of Victory, dubbed “The Victor” by Belgrade residents. It was erected in honor of the liberation of Belgrade in 1918 from Austria-Hungary. The Victor was a statue of a naked man, his right hand holding a sword, a bird on his left palm. He stood on a tall stone column, rising to a height of over 300 feet. He had the taut physique of an Apollo, his brawny muscles in full view, as was his unmistakable manhood.
Two middle-aged women passed me as I was taking a zoomed-in picture of Victor in all his naked glory.
“Nice. Tourists always take picture,” one of the women said, her eyes following my camera.
“It commemorates Serbia’s liberation at the end of the First World War.” I tried to sound knowledgeable.
The woman pursed her lips, shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe. It’s there long, long time. It’s there when I was small girl. Enjoy Belgrade. Beautiful city.”
Hidden finds
Ascending a huge flight of steps, I emerged onto a quiet cobbled street in old Belgrade, Kosančićev venac. A bust of a soldier in a helmet and armor ensconced in an arch-shaped niche adorned the front façade of an old house — another important find from my guidebook! It was the bust of Ivan Kosančić , a 14th-century hero killed in 1389 in the Battle of Kosovo, in defense of Serbia against the advancing Turks. Here he was, a symbol of heroism and patriotism, tucked away in an unfrequented and humble street, neglected by local residents, yet posing proudly for an occasional tourist like myself.
I soon came to a wider and busier street where the Orthodox Cathedral stood, its steeple towering over the surrounding 19th-century buildings. Across the cathedral was a rustic white two-story house with black window frames and a slanted red-tiled roof. An old gas lampshade bearing a big question mark on each of its four opaque glass panels was perched on a swirled wrought iron support, which protruded above the humble wooden front door. Tourists called the place the Question Mark Café. It was the oldest café in Belgrade, built in 1823.
Some monuments were not intended to be
The interior of the café, or kafana, resembled a 17th-century Dutch painting. Daylight streaked in through dark tinted glass-paned windows to give it a grey and gloomy atmosphere. A couple of dim lamps with milky-white glass shades hung from the wood-beamed ceiling over low, rugged wooden tables and matching stools.
I sat down at a table and ordered tea. Two men sat not far from me, talking in English. The younger one sounded North American, possibly Canadian. His companion looked 50-ish and had a distinct accent. I shot a glance at the two fellows. The one who was possibly Canadian looked over.
“Where’re you from?” he asked pleasantly.
“Toronto.”
“A fellow Canuck! I’m from Calgary. Care to join us?” He made a motion with his hand at the extra stool at their table.
I got up from my seat and walked over to them.
“I’m Terry, and my friend’s Zarko. He’s from here. So, what brings you to Belgrade?”
“I’m Louise. My husband’s here on business. I’m making use of the chance to do some sightseeing. Actually, I’m taking a walking tour of the monuments in Belgrade, with the help of my guidebook.”
“This café is a real monument,” said Zarko. “The Serbian Prince Milo_ had it built in the nineteenth century. The church officials from the cathedral across the street objected to its name, The Cathedral Café, so the owner put up a question sign until he could find another name. He never gave it another name. The question mark became the café’s name. I tell you, this café has survived numerous wars and atrocities. If it could speak, it would tell terror tales of foreign dominations and domestic unrest. It’s a testament to Balkan history of the last two centuries. To me, this is a monument in the truest sense.”
“It sure is. And it’s still serving its original purpose after all these years,” I said. “I’m on this monument walk because I want to have a feeling for the place and learn about its history and its people. But I’m afraid these days, local people don’t always know why a certain monument’s there or what it commemorates.” I was wondering just how many local residents knew of the reason behind the Menorah in Flames, or The Victor, or the bust of Ivan Kosančić.
“No matter what, monuments are here to stay. I wish you luck in your walk,” Zarko said. “And remember, some unforgettable monuments were not intended to be.”
“Like this kafana,” I said.
“Like this kafana,” echoed Zarko, nodding.
An undeniable, assertive presence
I soon continued my way and combed the main streets of Belgrade. Kralja Petra, with its Renaissance-styled architecture, was the scene of 19th-century elegance. It ran into the busy pedestrian street Knez Mihailova, lined with turn-of-the-century buildings, many of which housed shops selling designer merchandise. The street was crowded with serious and window shoppers alike, as well as tourists heading briskly toward Kalemegdan Park and Fortress at its north end. Lucky for me, Belgrade was a city easily accessible by foot. I became a part of the city crowd, but what distinguished me was that I walked at a much slower pace than most. I soon learned that the only way to survive crossing one of the city’s wide streets was to take a subterranean walkway, usually lined with stalls selling sundry merchandise, and re-emerge on the opposite side. Yet even in the midst of the hustle and bustle of Belgrade’s administrative and commercial hub, the monuments remained an undeniable, assertive presence.
I balked at the sight of a little dog desecrating the Monument of Gratitude to France — a bronze female figure in a flowing robe, brandishing a sword, situated on a high pedestal at the entrance to Kalemegdan Park. It symbolized France rushing to the aid of Serbia in the First World War. I cringed in disgust at the garbage and litter stuffed into the hollow center of a life-sized bronze figure of Serbian Romantic writer Djura Jak_i_, seated in a leisurely pose in front of his house in the pretty Bohemian district of old Belgrade. And what about the bronze statue of Vasa Čarapić, a hero and martyr of the First Serbian Uprising against the Turks? One of the statue’s pointed peasant shoes had become a convenient hanger for a road worker’s jacket.
Sobering reminders, new beginnings
Finally, I was ready to call it a day. As I headed toward our apartment, I chanced to pass what was left of the transmission center of the Belgrade Television complex. Its bombed-out ruins showed a cross-section of the floors, loose bricks, twisted metal, exposed pipes, torn roofing, caved-in walls, shards of building materials, and possibly human ashes.
“NATO did it,” a local passerby said to me as I took aim with my camera. “Bombed so many places.” He was referring to the NATO bombings of Belgrade and other cities in Serbia in 1999, over ethnic issues in Kosovo.
Regardless of the who, to whom, and why, the ruined transmission center was itself a monument too disturbing to ignore. The ruins, left as they were the day after the bombing, was not a monument erected long after the event. Rather, it was a real, sad, and sobering reminder of the casualties of war. Some unforgettable monuments were not intended to be.
And my mind returned to the Menorah in Flames, whose image was too painful to recall, too mind-shattering to forget, whose poignant message not only chronicled one of Belgrade’s darkest hours, but also touched the very soul of humanity.
Do monuments, whether unintended or purposely erected, signify closure of events past, be they glorious or infamous, uplifting or horrifying? Or do they serve as proud and sometimes cruel testaments of what has gone before? Lessons that can be learned? If so, monuments are not the end, but simply the beginning of a new chapter.
“You look like you came from a meeting with Bill Gates!” announced Simon Cowell, American Idol’s irascible judge, when the clean-cut contestant Anoop Desai appeared at the Season 8 auditions dressed in shorts, flip-flops, and a button-down plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Throughout the season, it seemed as though Desai’s competitive edge was underscored by Cowell’s perception of his squareness.
While it was not actually uttered, the word “nerd” hung there suspended and then descended to fit squarely around Desai. The world Twittered about the racial stereotypes embedded in that remark. “Call him ‘Kumar’ and be done with it,” said one Internet wit. To my mind, the remark raised a whole range of issues, not the least being racial.
The original “nerd”
Dr. Seuss’ 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo first introduced the word “nerd” as a longhaired, unkempt crosspatch with a mouth that held still and straight, with no indication of laughter: “And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an IT-KUTCH a PREEP and a PROO a NERKLE a NERD and a SEERSUCKER, too!”
In the mid-50s and ’60s, the term morphed into meaning a “square” or a “drip,” a connotation that has persisted till today, and is used with much derisive inflection around middle and high school lockers.
A hair’s-breadth difference between nerds and geeks does exist, and New York Times columnist David Brooks explains the difference: “At first, a nerd was a geek with better grades.” In casual parlance, however, both terms are sometimes used interchangeably, with the established understanding that a nerd is a grade-getter and most probably athletically challenged, and a geek is, generally speaking, obsessed with an obscure passion.
The ascendancy of nerds can be closely tied to the rise of Silicon Valley. Considered the intellectual capital spreading out of and from Stanford, the Valley produced and fostered the modern-day renaissance nerd: inventors, entrepreneurs, innovators, researchers, and investors. As companies like Intel, Cisco, and Sun grew in size and profitability, the population of nerds exploded in the Valley. Then came the age of startups, whence Valley entrepreneurs began to attract media coverage and wealth — considerable wealth. Bill Gates became the richest man in the world, and Silicon Valley became the mecca of success, prompting Robert Metcalfe’s comment, “Silicon Valley is the only place on earth not trying to figure out how to become Silicon Valley.” The outsource era spotlighted India, and global Indian companies like Wipro, Infosys, and TCS entered the world stage.
Changing perceptions on “nerdiness”
The likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Biz Stone, and Nandan Nilekani, among others, changed putative standards of nerd perceptions. What was reviled and shunned yesterday became sought after and acclaimed today. Forbes’ “Big B” list has more than a few of the names listed above. A meeting with any one of these nerd luminaries could be part of a utopian dream.
With the election of Barack Obama, a paradigmatic nerd as head of the country, the nerd-acceptability factor grew even more significantly. No quibbling about Obama’s nerdiness, for even Michelle Obama once remarked about her meeting Barack for the first time, “I had already sort of created an image of this very intellectual nerd. And I was prepared to be polite and all that.” More recently, Ms. Obama has dismissed the perceived negativity associated with nerds and exhorted students to work hard and get good grades, habits that typify being studious and square.
It used to be that the nerd of the ’50s and ’60s typically wore jeans, a T-shirt, and scruffy shoes, and was possibly tall and lanky with greasy hair and thick black-rimmed spectacles. He slouched when out in the sun and spoke with an intensity that was disconcerting. The image today is of someone who is given to tucking shirts into the waistband of trousers, jeans, or shorts and has acquired the rudiments of social polish, yet still speaks with unnerving authority on subjects. To all who judge by outward appearances, the look of a shirt hanging outside trousers can dispel long-held notions of a dorkish appearance. But, Anoop Desai was dressed in shorts and a shirt that hung loose and long. So why then Cowell’s remark?
What does intelligence look like?
In a 2002 study of perceived intelligence and facial attractiveness, Looking Smart and Looking Good: Facial Cues to Intelligence and Their Origins, conducted by Leslie A. Zebrowitz, Judith A. Hall, Nora A. Murphy, and Gillian Rhodes, the researchers concluded that “attractiveness was correlated with perceived intelligence at all ages.” For sure, Desai’s regular facial fairness falls under the rubric of “attractive.” Then, does it stand to reason that Idol judge Cowell made the subliminal connection between the symmetry of Desai’s face and his intellect? Does it also stand to reason that in the vocal talent world, intelligence is misplaced?
Now, let’s approach the racial elements of Cowell’s remark. Self-effacing Indians who win spelling bees and man technology desks are not typically seen on strobe-lit stages. Once before did a Louisiana governor attempt to combat perceptions of his nerdiness with a staged speech. The result was a disastrous reinforcement of social awkwardness, his political brilliance now dubiously regarded.
According to Benjamin Nugent, author of American Nerd: The Story of My People, one form of racism is stereotyping an ethnicity. The stereotype can be seemingly positive, but with costly side effects. Take Stacey J. Lee’s study, chronicled in her book Unraveling the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth. Asian American high school students were asked to respond to several questions, one of which was, “How did the model minority stereotype influence Asian American student identity?” Not surprisingly, perhaps, Lee found that even model minority stereotypes establish blueprints for behavior, and those that do not achieve model minority success can end up with low self-esteem and “silence” their own non-model minority experiences.
Brains and talent a poor marriage
The concept of nerdism is inherently built into the minority Indian model. So, as Anoop Desai stood before the four Idol judges and as the words issued forth from Simon Cowell, the stereotype was being ground into the American consciousness. An Indian, dressed like a nerd, or not, was quintessentially a nerd and had no reason to believe he could be successful on the Idol stage where the bikini-clad had possibly more right. A meeting with Bill Gates, the dream of millions, was to be disdained and had no relevance to the drama of reality television. A marriage of intellect and artistic talent makes for a pretty poor match.
This visual essay is a response to the process of expatriation and application for U.S. citizenship, and explores early representations of Filipinos as viewed in the United States.
The rescue in June 1993 of nearly 300 illegal immigrants from a ship called the Golden Venture which had run aground off Queens, New York, was the culmination of a harrowing voyage that had begun 120 days earlier. The immigrants were from China’s Fujian province, lured, like so many others, by the promise of freedom in America. Considering their ordeal and the repressive regime from which they had fled, they might have expected to be welcomed with open arms. But as international crime reporter Patrick Radden Keefe shows in his incredibly well-researched The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, they instead became unwitting victims of the ambiguities of U.S. immigration policy. Some would be held in prison for nearly four years while applying for political asylum.
The ill-fated voyage of the Golden Venture was arranged by Cheng Chui Ping, a grandmother and Fujianese immigrant to New York known around Chinatown as Sister Ping, who had thrived as a “snakehead,” shuffling mostly young Fujianese men from country to country with fake passports and visas, eventually landing them at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. She was, says Keefe, “something like a village elder in the claustrophobically intimate corner of Chinatown where she resided.” One admirer told a local newspaper she was “even better than Robin Hood.”
Smuggling-by-air was expensive so, hoping to increase her profit margins, Ping partnered with a Chinatown gang member in purchasing the Golden Venture to make regular trips to the United States. The old vessel survived the crash off Queens, but just barely — the crew was so clueless that it nearly docked the boat off South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials took the passengers into custody.
The grounding of the Golden Venture happened on the watch of President Bill Clinton, who, according to Keefe, was still smarting from the June 1980 riot of thousands of Cuban refugees from the Mariel Boatlift who had been housed in the Fort Chaffee Reserve Center in Arkansas. Amid outrage over his decision to accept the refugees, he lost his bid for re-election as Arkansas governor later that year. Clinton, suggests Keefe, wasn’t going to give his critics any more ammunition by appearing “soft” on the Golden Venture passengers.
Bill Slattery, director of the INS’ New York office, led the charge to classify the passengers as criminals, not victims. Shipped out of state to Pennsylvania and Louisiana for their asylum hearings, they were out of reach of the pro bono representation they could have gotten in New York, where many more immigration cases were handled. At the time, notes Keefe, “asylum caseloads were exploding, and immigration judges were often underresourced and overworked. As a result, this most solomonic determination — who should be saved and who should be sent back — became an arbitrary and erratic activity.”
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 made the United States more sympathetic toward Chinese immigrants, but that attitude didn’t last — the State Department, working with Slattery, felt secure in disregarding most of the Golden Venture passengers’ stories of persecution. One passenger told Keefe he left his home in Fujian at age 17 after police told his family he was being targeted for arrest. Of the boat’s total payload, only about 10 percent were granted asylum.
These days, ambitious sons and daughters of China are just as likely to move to a different province to learn English and management skills, as chronicled in Leslie T. Chang’s excellent Factory Girls, as they are to stow away on a ship to an uncertain and low-paying job on foreign shores. But human smuggling on a global scale is far from over, and those who formerly came to the United States from China will be replaced by those from Iraq or Morocco or Ecuador. As Keefe points out, “spoiler countries” have not ratified the United Nations’ anti-smuggling protocol, effectively making them portals for “snakeheads” and their passengers. Those traveling on the Golden Venture passed through at least two of these countries — a low count compared to some of Sister Ping’s other voyages.
Was the Golden Venture an aberration? The current debate over health care reform certainly suggests future refugees could suffer a similar fate (anti-immigration activists have portrayed immigrants as a costly drain on any publicly-funded health care system). “We don’t need illegals,” one protester yelled at a town hall meeting last month in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “Send ’em all back. Send ’em back with a bullet in the head the second time.”
As for Sister Ping, she was arrested in Hong Kong in 2000 after six years on the lam from U.S. officials, using false passports and contact with her husband to continue plying her “snakehead” trade. She is now serving a 35-year sentence in federal prison — mandatory retirement in the land of the free.
“I didn’t have any big achievements or contributions in my life,” my grandfather said to me, “but I painstakingly worked, and as an average member of the working class, I’m still very capable.”
My grandfather is known for his practicality and plain-spokenness, but not for his sentimentality. Driving with him and my grandmother on a trip to their childhood village of Xiqi, his sudden sincerity caught me off guard. As we wound our way through Anxi County’s numerous mountains, I realized the magnificent vistas of peaks girdled by tea terraces and sleepy hamlets was triggering something inside him.
“I worked on this road that year when I wasn’t accepted to any universities,” my grandfather said. “This is it. Right here. Your grandmother and I both worked on it.”
Although the location was the same, the paved, narrow, serpentine road was a far cry from the original trail my grandparents helped build 54 years ago. Burdened with his landlord class background, my grandfather suffered persecution from the village peasants who forced him to build the road, carrying bricks that were too heavy for him. Having graduated from Anxi High School, my grandfather’s background also led to his rejection from every university to which he applied. That year, he had no choice but to toil in the fields. Understandably, he doesn’t have many kind words to say about Mao Zedong.
“Some people said that back then, if Mao farted and proclaimed his fart smelled good, you couldn’t say he was wrong. If you did, you were a counter-revolutionary.”
In the car, my grandmother grumbled, “Why are you saying all this?”
“There’s freedom of speech now,” he snapped back. “Americans can criticize even their president. Stop pretending like we live in a Marxist-Leninist society.”
Xiqi’s villagers have stopped pretending. Maoist sayings painted on the walls of houses to demonstrate one’s revolutionary fervor had faded nearly beyond recognition. The once bright red ink had weathered away or perhaps had been scrubbed off by disillusioned peasants. One saying stated “Everyone must bear responsibility for counter-revolutionaries,” while another stated “Everyone engages in production, every household ensures security.” These slogans, forged during the Cultural Revolution and condemning capitalist roaders, have been replaced by Haier and China Mobile advertisements.
Xiqi has always been a starting point and never a destination. The countryside was where you stayed if you didn’t have what it took to make your way out to the cities. When my grandmother’s oldest brother broke through to higher education, villagers slaughtered pigs, carried him on a litter, and performed songs for three days. Xiqi’s people have always looked outward, trying to escape from the impoverished valley in which they were born. Those that succeeded have paid respect to their forbears by visiting and donating money to the village.
Xiqi’s surrounding mountains, which villagers said resembled a prone tiger, were once stripped bare of their trees by peasants desperate for firewood because they were unable to afford gas or coal. Today, saplings once again clothe the tiger, but now row after row of tea terraces are also carved into its flanks. Before Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, Xiqi peasants relied on subsistence farming to scrape out a meager living; now they’ve devoted acres of farmland to growing tea as a cash crop.
There were probably, at most, a couple hundred people in the village when I visited, all of them engaged in some part of the tea production process. Many dwellings were abandoned, and rivers that once accommodated sampans were now trickles of water. Most of the males were away selling enormous cloth bags filled with tea leaves in a nearby town, while the women, donning straw hats and crouching in the soil beneath a fierce noonday sun, picked tea in the fields. The very elderly and the very young walked around amidst mongrel dogs and flocks of chicken and geese; adolescents and young adults were nowhere to be seen.
But according to my grandparents, compared to the rest of rural China, Xiqi’s peasants have done very well for themselves. Funded by revenue generated from hundreds of acres of tea shrubs and donations from wealthy, overseas family members, Xiqi farmers have built better homes, temples, and village infrastructure —all signs of their rising standard of living.
Expensive, four-story houses fitted with shiny, ceramic roof tiles and enclosed by metal gates have sprung up next to dilapidated hovels. Many families had moved into their new residences and placed their ancestors’ spirit tablets in their old rammed earth homes.
Some ancestors are better off. Pooling together their money, family members have constructed many new kinship clan shrines. A new temple built in 2007 for the Taoist god Xuan Wu cost over a quarter of a million dollars (USD). Intricate dragon statues and stone carvings decorate the temple’s interior, while power lines, water pipes, and paved roads can be seen crisscrossing through the village from the temple’s threshold.
My grandparents left their village thinking they would never return. Rural life was grueling, and there was nothing in Xiqi for them except political discrimination, poverty, and hunger. Yet here they were again, showing me the mud houses where they were born, the room where they learned to play the lute with their cousins, and the elementary school where they first met while teaching night classes to illiterate peasants.
“I walked out of my hometown by going to college,” my grandfather reminisced about the second time he applied and made it in. “If it weren’t for college, I’d be just like the village peasants right now. I’d be stuck there. My face toward the loess, my back toward the sky.”
Determined to escape from their rural upbringing, my grandparents confronted larger-than-life forces of revolution, calamitous famine, and massive socioeconomic upheavals. My grandmother left her family at the age of 16 from Xiqi to seek work in the city, while my grandfather chose the unpopular college specialization of geological surveys just to have a chance at leaving the village. Later, his job of searching for ore took him on far-flung journeys through at least two-thirds of China.
Although my grandparents grew up in a rural environment, they say they could never become used to living in Xiqi again. Despite the rising living standards brought by Deng’s economic reforms, the village has remained the same at heart. Many of the customs and folklore that existed 39 generations ago survive to this very day despite wave after wave of social engineering projects fixed on the eradication of the village’s traditions. Spirit tablets burned in the fires of the Cultural Revolution were remade. An effigy of Xuan Wu about to be shattered in the “Smash the Four Olds campaign was secretly saved. Peasants still live their lives in ways similar to past generations.
On our way back from Xiqi, my grandparents said that if I hadn’t asked to see their old village, they wouldn’t have gone on their own. Although much is still the same, from their perspective, the place and its people have changed. The layout of the village looks eerily unfamiliar. Close family and friends have either moved out or passed away. What used to be home no longer feels like a place they know, and they don’t plan on visiting much in the future.
“We have no more close relatives left there,” my grandmother said. “We’ve done all that we ought to do.”
My grandparents visited their parents when they were alive, swept their tombs when they passed away, lit joss sticks, burned spirit money, and donated money for family shrines and Xuan Wu’s temple. They feel they’ve fulfilled their filial duties, and they want to move on.
“Do you remember? When Grandmother was still alive, Mom frequently went back,” my own mother told my uncle afterward. “Ever since our grandmother passed away, Mom doesn’t feel like that place is home anymore.” In many ways, it is my grandparents who have changed, not the village.
I tend to romanticize the past and harbor nostalgic feelings for bygone eras to create a safe haven where I can seek shelter from the present. As a reminder of my own uncertain life trajectory, the here and now often feels doubtful and, at times, frightening. This is the same fear my grandfather felt while laboring away on the village road the year every university turned him down. It is the same fear my grandmother felt when she left home at the age of 16 to seek work in a city 280 miles away. By looking back on their accomplishments in the face of overwhelming odds, their fear has evolved into pride, but mine is just beginning. Xiqi was a chance for me to see their humble conditions and remind myself that my family has produced individuals who will never be passive, but who will instead constantly struggle and strive for the best.
So this is not a story of how I returned to my ancestral home, felt rooted, found meaning, and found myself. I’m not sure that would be a very interesting story. As much as I wanted to feel a sense of belonging to the village where my ancestors have lived — generation after generation, for nearly eight centuries — Xiqi felt foreign and its lifestyle incompatible. My immediate family has gone a long way in three short generations. My grandparents’ native tongue is Min Nan; my mother’s is Mandarin; and mine is English. My grandparents believe in Taoism and Buddhism; my mother has been baptized; and I’m still confused and undecided. The drastic changes Xiqi and my family have undergone remind me that the pace of today’s world is only increasing, and even things I once imagined to be everlasting can change.
But I still listen rapt with attention when my grandparents tell stories about how they beat pots and pans during Mao’s Kill a Sparrow campaign until sparrows fell out of the sky from utter exhaustion, or about how the water monkey, a mythical underwater creature that dragged village children to a watery grave, was vanquished. By writing down their stories and memories, I pay tribute to ancestors and my grandparents in my own way.
It’s almost time for dinner on the next-to-last night of Ramadan. Hassan Ahmed sits on a well-used sofa facing a big-screen TV that dominates the front room of his small, two-bedroom apartment in the Kennedy Park neighborhood of Portland, Maine. He’s watching an Egyptian movie playing on an Arabic satellite station. After a commercial break, Hassan, a Sudanese refugee who came to the United States in 2003 with his family, relaxes his body and leans back into the couch. His dark black skin stands out in contrast to the white jelabia he wears. His short hair is starting to recede from his forehead, where expressive lines form when he’s thinking. The room is illuminated with soft yellow light from a floor lamp in the corner. Outside, the sun hangs low in the sky and the street is empty. A bitter wind blows off the Atlantic several blocks away — another cold Maine winter not far behind.
In the apartment, the thermostat is turned up near 80 degrees. Ahmed, Hassan’s 13-year-old son, sits at the far end of the L-shaped sofa, on the other side of a glass coffee table that is draped with a paper tablecloth decorated with colorful balloons. Hassan’s wife, Maria, her black hair hanging loosely down past her shoulders, is in the small kitchen preparing dinner. Their two young daughters, 12-year-old Samar and seven-year-old Abrar, sit quietly on wooden chairs between the kitchen and the TV. Dinner is only minutes away, and everyone is hungry after a day of fasting.
In the kitchen, Maria opens the oven and slides in a tray of roughly cut goat meat and chopped onions. The meat is from a farm on the outskirts of Portland. Hassan drove out to the farm this morning to help slaughter the animal for tonight’s meal, following dhabiha, the Islamic ritual method in which the animal’s neck is cleanly slit with a sharp knife. After a few minutes under the broiler, the onions and meat begin to sizzle. The aroma reaches out of the kitchen and into the living room where the movie plays.
From time to time, Hassan gets bored with the movie he’s watching and switches between Arabic stations from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Lebanon, as well as Indian and Chinese stations. He moves from one station to the next quickly, pausing only long enough to see what is on and then moving along. His son Ahmed provides a running commentary of what programming each station shows. He says the Egyptian stations have lots of violence; the Indian stations have lots of singing and dancing; and the Saudi Arabian stations have lots of news.
Ahmed, still wearing his yellow T-shirt and shorts from soccer practice this afternoon, asks his father to change the channel to football. “Soccer,” his sister Samar says, correcting him. “They call it soccer here.” Ahmed looks up at her quizzically before brushing the comment aside, as if he’s heard it before but finds the difference trivial. Hassan happily picks up the remote and hits a few buttons. But now there are two pictures on the screen: a movie and a soccer game. Hassan looks over at Ahmed in exasperation and says something to him in Arabic as he hands the remote to his son, who takes it confidently and quickly corrects the problem. The girls giggle in their seats on the side of the room. The hands on the clock that hangs on the wall between the living room and the kitchen turn slowly. The meat in the oven is almost done.
Hassan and his family are Furs from Darfur, “the land of the Furs” in Sudan, where Arabs have forced black Africans to conform to their culture and strict interpretations of Islam for generations. Recently, Arab domination has turned into widespread violence, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands dead and more than two million Darfuris driven from their homes. Hassan calls the violence committed against his people by the Sudanese government genocide. It’s due to fundamentalism, he says.
Like most everyone from Darfur, Hassan is a Muslim, although he states matter-of-factly that the Arabs forced Islam onto his people. He prays and follows halal and raises his children as Muslims, but he is distrustful of those who claim a special knowledge of God. Who can really claim to know such things? Portland has a mosque, but Hassan does not go there for Friday prayers. He says the people there, mostly refugees from Somalia, are fundamentalists. He didn’t leave his homeland and forsake his profession — he was a journalist before he fled; now he works in the production line of a printing plant — to spend his time with fundamentalists, he says.
At 6:45 p.m., with the living room fully engulfed by the kitchen’s aromas, Ahmed excitedly digs through a pile of papers next to the TV until he finds the one that lists sunset times for this year’s Ramadan. Muslims throughout the world fast from dawn to sundown during the month of Ramadan, the holiest month in the Islamic calendar. It is thought to teach humility and sacrifice. By fasting during the day, Muslims show their commitment to God and learn about self-discipline and the plight of the less fortunate. Then at sunset each night, iftar, a large meal, is shared with family and friends.
“Six forty-seven,” Ahmed announces as he looks up from the sheet of paper. “One more minute.” He has been fasting all day today, one of four days during this Ramadan, in practice for all 30 days next year.
After Ahmed’s announcement, the children rush to the kitchen and come back with platters of food, which they place on the crowded coffee table. Then the whole family sits on the couch surrounding the coffee table. As the clock hits 6:47, Ahmed takes a bite of meat. But before he can enjoy it, Samar grabs the paper with sunset times from the spot on the couch where Ahmed left it. Her hunch confirmed, she shows him the correct time for the day: 6:57. “Tomorrow is the last night,” she says gently. He chews the meat slowly and swallows, then blushes and sinks back into the couch.
With 10 minutes to go until sundown, the family sits around the table telling jokes and laughing about Ahmed’s mistake. Daoud, a family friend in his 20s who is tall and slim and very dark, arrives at the door and is greeted with much joy. He is offered a seat in a chair that has been moved into the room for him. He sits and joins the conversation. Hassan tells how Ahmed confused the days and ate before sundown. He recounts how Samar corrected Ahmed and how the whole family burst into laughter. It has not yet been five minutes since it happened, but already Ahmed’s mistake is becoming something of a family legend, the kind that gets repeated every year and grows into something much bigger with each telling.
Daoud is just as amused by the tale as everyone else, but Ahmed is ready for the story to be forgotten. After the jokes die down, Daoud looks up at the TV screen and is reminded of an image he saw recently. He was watching TV at home, and suddenly it was showing a refugee camp in Darfur. He recognized someone on the screen, someone he knew back in Sudan. How strange it had felt to be here in Maine, where the cold wind blows off the ocean, and to see someone familiar so far away on the arid plains of Darfur. A silence hangs in the room as everyone’s mind shifts to another world.
But this is not the time for such thoughts. There is enough time in the day for worries and troubles, for anxieties about work and bills and loved ones. There is enough time for remembering one’s homeland, where men on horseback gun down civilians and makeshift bombs rain down from government planes, where people feel the drought to their very bones. There is time enough in the day for all that. Now it is time to be with family and friends, to think about the future and what could be, to tell stories about small mistakes made by boys trying to be men, and to enjoy food after tasting hunger.
On the table sits a tray of goat meat and onions, a plate piled high with flatbread, a bowl of pineapple slices, and two bowls of meat in its own broth. A small bowl is filled with red pepper flakes to dip the goat meat in. Pitchers of juice and cups and napkins — the table is so crowded there’s barely room for it all. Everyone looks around, waiting as the hands move around the clock and as the sun inches toward the horizon. Shadows are disappearing into darkness outside. The street is still empty. The wind still blows cold off the ocean just blocks away. But inside the thermostat is turned way up, the open oven still gives off heat, and everyone in the living room crowds around the table.
“It’s time to eat,” Hassan announces.
“But it’s only six fifty-five,” Samar exclaims.
“No matter. Let’s eat — it’s close enough,” he answers her with a smile.
Went hiking near Mount Rokko with the Canadians. Before we were supposed to meet up, Otousan called and I told him what I was doing. “Oh, that’s really good; I used to go hiking there a lot.” I felt a little surge of happiness as the ties to my father tightened and solidified a little more. It was another clue to who he was, from a source that I had never really had access to.
Near the top of the mountain, I rang a huge bell at the shrine in honor of my birthday. It pealed in a low murmuring ring that reverberated in the spring air.
*
The Bunraku play was The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. Apparently, everyone loves a classic love-and-death story — the theater was packed. The narrator sang the plotlines and the dialogue, stretching the syllables so that they almost seemed pliable. In one of the most famous scenes, Tokubei is hiding underneath the kimono of Ohatsu, his lover, to avoid being seen by his rival. To signal that he is willing to die with her, he presses his neck against her ankle and draws her foot along his neck. Their bodies move slowly, deliberately; his impassive face, white and still, leans wearily against a beautiful vermillion and purple kimono.
*
When he saw me in the café, he had that stunned “oh!” look on his face … not really sure why. It hadn’t been that long. It felt weird for about two seconds, and then everything fell back into place, like nothing had happened. Like we were still just those two transplanted Canadians that had found each other.
How was it still so easy to be around him?
On the walk to the izakaya, he referred to our inside joke regarding my failure to siphon money from him, but in the past tense. We watched the flames kiss the skewers of chicken, cartilage, and pork, and listened to the fat drippings hiss in protest as they were turned quickly on the grill. His awkward attempt at using guidebook Japanese only won him a raised eyebrow and a confused grin from the cook, not the draft beer he wanted. He looked at me, sighed, and chuckled as I requested the beer for him.
Afterward, we walked to the Kyobashi train station. I had to go to Starbucks to use the washroom, so we stopped in the middle of the station’s white-tiled walkway, conscious of the negative space and tiny pools of rainwater.
*
Post-dinner, there was lengthy debate over whether to go to the Cavern Club to see a Beatles cover band play, or to Betty’s, a drag queen bar. The lads from Liverpool won out. Ni(shi)no and the vice principal, “Chuck,” were giddy. I laughed at Nino’s excitement, remembering a late afternoon after school when he taught me how to play “Blackbird” on the guitar in an empty classroom.
After three sets, we decided to leave, but at the point of departure, Chuck groaned and announced he wasn’t going to go home that night. And thus, the all-nighter was born. Chuck and Nino first headed off to a restaurant for more food, and I went to the post office. Nino left the restaurant to find me, and then we got fantastically lost in the dark, winding alleys of a shotengai. I questioned his status as a son of Osaka, and he laughingly assured me we’d find Chuck. We found him, eventually, and he was disgruntled by our lateness. Nino was extra nice to him. Around 1:30 a.m. we left the restaurant. Inspired by the Cavern Club, the two decided they wanted to wail the night away, paying loving homage to “Strawberry Fields” and women named “Eleanor Rigby” and “Michelle,” swaying and singing famous choruses in tone-deaf, katakana-ized English. I looked at Nino, his face alit and happy, as he stood with Chuck’s arm slung over his shoulder, nodding for me to come with them. I smiled back, and ran to catch up with them.
*
It was loud. I looked over and saw everyone with their noisemakers and bento boxes. The players were really far away, but I could see Tani getting ready to hit. The oen leader was getting ready to start up the cheer, so I picked up my noisemakers and got ready to hit them in time to the syncopated rhythm. With a guttural yell, a voice and body seasoned by years of unwavering devotion, he swooped the enormous Hanshin Tigers’ flag side to side, and we stood up, yelling, clapping, and cheering in unison in the humid summer night.
*
We drove up a long and winding road that led us to Mount Fuji’s fifth station. By then it was pitch black, and I was feeling a bit sleepy. We had to park about 2 kilometers away from the station. Upon exiting the car, I immediately noticed how much cooler it already was.
At the fifth station, Wayne disappeared, sending Linda on a frantic search. While waiting to purchase a big walking stick, a bunch of guys dressed up in colorful felt dragon and monkey costumes ran into the store. A nice American man took a “before” picture of us, and we were off.
There was a part where the trail became flat ground, and we could see Yamanashi spread out in front of us in an awesome and glittering panorama. So pretty.
Onward and upward!
The rest of the climb was a big, black, windy blur. There were spots where the terrain turned traitorous and treacherous. In some parts I was worried that if I stood up straight, I would be blown off the side of the mountain and die a horrific death. We came to a tricky section of almost vertical rocky terrain, which in itself was challenging to navigate, but dim lighting conditions and a herd of descending hikers made for an even more frustrating climb.
Onward and upward?
Then it started to rain.
There were moments when I had to swallow the urge to cry because there was just no time for that. It’s a wobbly feeling realizing that there is no way out. You have to keep climbing, no matter how much you just want to shut down.
We reached the eighth station around 4 a.m., soaked, tired, cold, tired, and tired. We found Julia, who had arrived about an hour earlier and had managed to seduce most of the staff with her Drew Barrymore-like looks. “You like ‘Charlie’s Angels’?” “Oh! Yeah, I do …” “You look like!” “Oh. Okay, thanks …!” I fell asleep while sitting on a crate, but was still incredibly cold and dazed upon waking. At that point, I had no interest in making it up the summit. I just wanted to get off Mount Doom, I mean, Fuji …
Around 4:30 the rain stopped, and we headed out, onward and downward. My first glimpse of the view literally stopped my heart. We were above the clouds. It was amazing. I’d never seen anything like it (and probably never will again).
*
i was never good at finishing things.
my heart feels muddled and heavy.
you know those times when you must cry, for your own sake…watashi no tame ni…
but I’m at Kansai airport. waiting for my plane … home…
Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls tells the piercingly painful tale of two sisters’ odyssey from Shanghai to San Francisco.
By Sarah Marian Seltzer
Shanghai Girls: A Novel By Lisa See
Random House. 336 pages.
To dismiss Shanghai Girls, with its flowery, pink-tinged cover, as “women’s fiction” or even as a light summer read belies the very serious nature of author Lisa See’s ambitious novel. What starts as an amusing tale about two young women — sisters Pearl and May — frolicking through bohemian Shanghai, posing for paintings in their new silk gowns, and wondering which of them is prettiest, turns sinister quite quickly. The violence that engulfs China with the advent of World War II parallels the violence that they experience when they truly begin to understand their status as women. They are bargaining chips for their father, who has traded them away in arranged marriages to pay off his debts. They are targets for prowling Japanese soldiers. And when they come through these struggles with the scars to prove it, they become workhorses and, hopefully, son-producers for their shared father-in-law in America (they’re paired off with brothers in arranged marriages), although eventually, they form real family ties with the husbands they’ve been bound to on paper.
From escaping the shelling of a fashionable Shanghai street, to crouching in abandoned shacks as they listen to soldiers on the march committing murder, to tossing and turning on their long trans-Pacific journey, to sitting stoically through endless interrogation as they try to enter this country, the sisters endure atrocities and privation. But perhaps the most compelling aspect of their story is its deviation from the “immigrant-family-makes-good” cliché. Try as they might — and they do try — Pearl, May, their husbands, and even a college-bound daughter are never quite accepted into mainstream American society. In fact, as the story draws to a close, they’re being interrogated by the FBI for alleged communist ties, with calamitous results.
See, the daughter of novelist Carolyn See, is a Chinese American herself who has devoted much of her work — including Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005) and Peony in Love (2007) — to exploring Chinese culture and history. As we follow Pearl and May’s journey in Shanghai Girls, See tells dozens of historical stories that illuminate the struggles of her characters. One of these stories captures the glamour and excitement of prewar, pre-Communist Shanghai, full of smoky cafés, artists, radicals, and beautiful women. There are also incredibly dark stories about the Japanese invasion of China, the fate of immigrants stalled in limbo at California’s notorious Angel Island, the endless striving of immigrant families once they reached these shores, and the endless discrimination that met them here. There’s even a story about the way Hollywood treated Asian characters and actors (not very well, needless to say).
But the sweeping narrative is anchored by the intimacy of the two women. Together throughout all their trials and tribulations, Pearl and May are classic fictional sisters — both unimaginably close and fearfully jealous. “She’s funny; I’m criticized for being too serious. She has an adorable fleshiness to her; I’m tall and thin,” Pearl, the narrator, explains in her staccato, singsong tone.
She’s convinced that she’s the sister everyone thinks is inferior, the sister who has borne the most burdens over time. After their family suffers a horrific wartime trauma on the road out of Shanghai, Pearl’s resentment of her sister simmers beneath the surface for decades, even if she and May continue to stick together and even adore each other. But in the course of several knock-down, drag-out fights between the sisters, See suddenly, like a flash of light, switches to May’s point of view. “You’ve always been jealous and envious of me, but you were the one who was cherished by Mama and Baba,” May says to her sister in one of the novel’s final scenes. When she speaks, it’s sure to put a wrinkle or three in Pearl’s version of the truth.
Even though May’s final revelation of a long-kept secret is ultimately predictable, the sisters’ dueling outlooks create tension when the plot slows down, and their ability to reconcile and forge on together provides a ray of hope. “Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life,” Pearl explains.
See — whose copious acknowledgments at the end of the book confirm her considerable research — arrives at an uncomfortable truth about the American past. America, she shows, hasn’t simply laid out its golden-hued dream at the feet of hardworking newcomers. Those who work double shifts and play by the rules don’t (and didn’t) necessarily end up in the house with the white picket fence, particularly if they look too different or are plagued by cruel stereotypes. But to her credit, See also infuses Shanghai Girls with a positive message about forgiveness and the way friendship and family can help us pick ourselves back up even after the worst has happened.
UPDATE, 3/8/13: Edited and moved story from our old site to the current one.
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