Features

 

On the shoulders of giants

Tramping in New Zealand.

There are moments, like long stretches of New Zealand’s Whanganui River, when time flattens out and one need do nothing but simply exist, floating along the surface and enjoying the fine day. My wife and I spent three such days on the Whanganui River Journey, one of New Zealand’s famous Great Walks. To dip your paddle into the river is to dip into a perfect reflection of the deep, wild valleys and the clear blue sky. At times the river is so peaceful that these moments can stretch into infinity, and time, a construct for lesser beings, vanishes.

 

 

There are other moments, both in life and on the river, that demand action. A canoe can be an unforgiving method of travel on rapids, all too apt to turn sideways and capsize, dumping its occupants into the roiling current. When the front of your canoe enters a rapid, the water beneath it begins to move faster, until the boat and the river are moving at the same speed. It is critical at this point to maintain the boat’s momentum, and so you paddle as hard as you can, reaching and pulling at the churning water while wrenching at the river with your paddle, maneuvering your canoe around rocks and keeping yourself upright and inside the boat. It is a rush, a blur of action independent from conscious thought, and it is even fun when you spill into the river. If you do find yourself in the river, you just wring yourself out, collect your belongings, and continue on your way. The sun is warm and the water soon calms.

And if your way should include your rental car grazing a guardrail, you should laugh and try to forget about it, and remember that Kiwis are nice people. I learned this at a panel beater in the small town of Renwick, in the heart of the Marlborough Valley, New Zealand’s wine country. The owner of the local shop looked at the scratch, squinted, and said, "I think we can get that out." While he worked on the car, we told him our story. In a few minutes, the scratch was gone and we were on our way. "Just tell everyone that Kiwis are nice people," he said, refusing our money. Consider yourself told.

 

 

 

There are more than 20 vineyards within a few miles of Renwick. The spectacular countryside and density of the vineyards makes the bicycle an ideal mode of transportation for a wine tour. The wineries in the region offer free or low-cost tastings and sell their wines in their "cellar door" shops. The regional specialty is Sauvignon Blanc, but slight climactic variations means that each vineyard grows slightly different grapes, producing distinct wines. You learn quickly that the bartender is the gatekeeper to each winery’s finest vintages, and it is in your interest to make friends with this person, since he or she decides if you are good enough for the good stuff. It pays to speak the language: You may refer to a Sauvignon Blanc as reminiscent of an unoaked California Chardonnay, or comment on how the Pinot Noir of the region is spicier and less dusky than French or Italian varieties. We tasted many inferior vintages, but we were finally rewarded with a taste of a fine, single cask Pinot Noir at the Nautilus Vineyard, where an ex-pat American cracked open the vineyard’s Special Reserve for us. It was brisk and unique, inviting and beguiling, much like the rest of New Zealand.

Queenstown is the adventure capital of New Zealand, a country famous for its adventurers. We were ready for an adventure; it is what we came to New Zealand for. Some people like bungee jumping. Some enjoy parasailing. Others are more into skiing, snowboarding, mountain-climbing, hang gliding, or jet-boating, all of which is available in or around Queenstown. Not us. We prefer trekking up a steep hill and back down the other side, preferably across streams and other difficult terrain. We settled on the Rees-Dart track, a four-day jaunt into the Southern Alps.

 

 

 

It was great. We slept in DOC huts and walked through open alpine tundra, above the tree line, rocks and hardy plants clinging to the hills around us. When a heavy fog rolled in and enveloped us in its thick, misty embrace, it felt as if we were walking across the surface of Venus. The atmosphere was ghostly; people drifted in and out of view, and the moisture in the air absorbed sound like a wet sponge, enforcing an eerie silence that hung over the trail.

But when the sun finally broke through, peeling the gloomy mist away, it felt glorious. The warm rays slanted down, carving thick slices through the mist and awakening us from our slumber. The wet landscape glistened in the bright light, and the mountains’ snow-topped peaks winked and sparkled at us. I smiled as we clambered over boulders and across small streams, tramping through the New Zealand countryside in a local tradition as old as human settlement in the region.

 

 

 

After our hike, we continued north from Queenstown, and climbed Avalanche Peak, near Albert’s Pass, our final exploration of New Zealand’s astounding natural beauty. The peak overlooks a valley in the middle of the South Island. A highway and a railroad snake past the small town at the pass. As I stood there at the crest, a frozen instant in time, I felt as if I were on the shoulders of giants, with snowy peaks soaring to the sky all around me. I was born in the flat, featureless Midwest, but my grandfather is from Colorado. It is from him that I get my love of the mountains. They are breathtaking in their sheer size, and the blue-white snow that clings to the tops looks so majestic — a powerful reminder of my relative size and place in the world. I do my best to remember this and stay respectful. It is all any of us can do.

 

 

I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

 

A boy grows in Brooklyn

After years of wanting a baby and undertaking 11 rounds of artificial insemination, Lynn finally became pregnant.

Nine months later, she and her partner, Lori, welcomed Jack into their Brooklyn home. Photographer and neighbor Claire Houston documents the couple’s first months of motherhood.

 

[ Click here to view the visual essay ]

 

From the page to the stage

The universality of David Sedaris — a review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

 

After selling millions of books worldwide, penning an Obie Award–winning play with his equally well-noted younger sister Amy, and cultivating the kind of sweater-vested, lefty politico audience that must keep the suits at National Pubic Radio (NPR) waist-deep in spicy tuna rolls, how exactly does David Sedaris manage to keep himself fresh and culturally relevant? At the top of his game, Sedaris has always been the thinking man’s humorist — the kind of literary lothario that even your grandmother has heard of (and adores, naturally). Now, with his sixth collection of witty, observational-styled essays, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Sedaris has reached a crossroads in his epic career: either grow with your core base, or fade into pop cultural obscurity.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames, along with its accompanying global book tour, can best be viewed as an ongoing case study in misfit dysfunction — a natural continuation to Sedaris’ trademark genre of wry, autobiographical narration. Whereas his previous collections have revolved primarily around the outrageous hijinks of his thoroughly unpredictable Greek family, the stories presented in Flames display a heightened sense of maturity and confident self-awareness, the sort of which that courses breathlessly through every page and every chapter. If Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris’ 2000 release about moving to France with his partner and his struggle to cope with learning a foreign language while thriving in a foreign land, stood as his literary adolescent years, then Flames represents full-fledged adulthood: a coming-out party for a now-seasoned world traveler; an awkward pupil of culture now especially skilled at the unusual art of adaptation.

As its inflammatory title suggests, Flames spends more than 300 pages highlighting emotions of fear and discomfort and the many perils of frequent travel, and no one recreates the outsider experience quite as vividly as Sedaris (in classic, peak form) does. There’s a reason why he is able to affix the title “noted humorist” to his business cards, and in Flames, the humor is no less sharp or wryly observant than in prior works. The difference here is that Sedaris is writing from an interloper’s perspective more frequently than he has in the past, and his descriptions of third party discomfort play as well as the book’s more personal elements do.

An early chapter entitled “Keeping Up” finds Sedaris watching vacationing American couples arguing loudly outside of his apartment window, taking desperate stabs at figuring their way around Sedaris’ adopted home of Paris, while concurrently mangling the French language as though it were a garbage-bound piece of paper. (One woman even mistakenly believes that her meager Spanish skills will suffice for the trip.) Still another story brings Sedaris to the doorstep of his father’s neighbors in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he makes acquaintances with a flamboyant 15-year-old, whose own Southern-fried parents proudly proclaim to be a homosexual. Odd, Sedaris sniffs in his biting narrative. In his own Southern childhood, identifying oneself as gay would have been nothing short of a death sentence; you’d have to find yourself a girlfriend “who was willing to settle for the sensitive type.”

The best story in Flames, however, is the memoir’s last: a multipart epic about the author’s two-decade-long love affair with smoking cigarettes and subsequent decision to give them up for good. It’s an arduous undertaking that has Sedaris and his partner, Hugh, relocating to Japan for a three-month excursion, steeped in the fundamental principles of cultural misfit-hood. Broken up into three distinct sections — “Before,” “Japan,” and “After,” respectively — the story offers an inside man’s perspective into Sedaris at his very best and most introspective, and indeed, the entire account reads as though the passages were copied directly from the pages of his diary. “The Smoking Section” is equal parts poignant and melodramatic, altruistic and self-serving, all at once. It is here that Sedaris demonstrates his remarkable ability to spin seemingly mundane scenes into funny and interesting lifestyle pieces, with no shortage of heart. By its conclusion, one can’t help but wonder why moving to Tokyo wouldn’t be just as, if not more, effective a method for kicking butts as attaching an endless parade of nicotine patches to one’s forearm would be.

As a performer, Sedaris’ star shines equally as bright, but in a radically different manner than his comedic persona radiates when regulated to the page. Currently underway on a multicity North American book reading tour, Sedaris has taken to reading out loud from works by other authors, a few of his as-yet unpublished essays, and even a smattering of excerpts from his personal journal, offering a rare glimpse of the author when he is unfiltered by the bounds of the editing process.

It’s fun to watch Sedaris relay his unique brand of offbeat, awkward humor to the audience in person, and listening to the introductory origins of each story provides the kind of elated enhancement that is more often applied to the most cherished of fantasy fiction, but rarely to the kind of observational memoir writing of which Sedaris has repeatedly proven himself a master. Robbed of the protection of editors and literary distance, many equally capable writers would more than likely find themselves foundering onstage. In his public readings though, Sedaris demonstrates that, on paper or off, he’s able to use his biting and keen sense of humor to make pathways into his audience’s hearts; put quite simply, he’s just a funny guy.

Converting humor from the page to the stage is no easy feat, and many fine nuances are often sacrificed in translation. The fact that Sedaris has been able to consistently maintain a long-lasting relationship with his avid readers stands as an overwhelming testament to his genius and talent as both a writer and a performer. The trick to remaining relevant is to grow and mature with one’s audience — a difficulty that has seen many gifted artists forfeited in its wake. Sedaris, conversely, continues to regenerate the kind of radiant humor and spark in both his writing and his performing that has simultaneously drawn in younger readers while keeping his core base unwaveringly interested. Upon reaching the summit of Flames, one gets the sense that this isn’t Sedaris’ zenith; rather, it’s something of a new beginning.

 

Suicide in paradise

Why do Sri Lankans kill themselves in such large numbers?

Many descriptions of Sri Lanka today are of the “paradise lost” variety: What was once a stunningly beautiful island with sparkling beaches and lush jungle is now a war torn country mired in a protracted ethnic conflict. The 25-year war between the government of Sri Lanka and the rebel group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which has killed 80,000 people by some estimates and displaced hundreds of thousands, continues to grind on and hinders the tropical island from ever reaching its potential splendor.

There’s little truth to these descriptions, commonly found in tourist’s guides and the odd magazine piece. Death did not suddenly arrive on the doorstep of the paradise island 25 years ago. On the contrary, before Sri Lankans were killing each other in war, they were killing themselves.

 

 

In the early 1940s, Sri Lanka’s suicide rate was fairly average, but over the next decades it started to creep upward, gradually rising from roughly six people per 100,000 to nearly 10 people per 100,000 by 1961. Shortly thereafter, the number of suicides took a shocking leap, doubling between 1961 and 1971, and doubling again between 1971 and 1983, the year the civil war began. By 1995, 47 out of 100,000 people were killing themselves each year — one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

To get a sense of what these statistics really mean, consider that in the period between 1990 and 1995, it’s estimated that approximately 38,500 Sri Lankans took their own lives. That’s nearly half as many as have died in the entire war in a single five-year period. Some people argue that the killing of ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka should be called “genocide.” But is there a word in existence that captures the tragedy of tens of thousands of people killing themselves? “Epidemic” doesn’t begin to accurately relay the horror of it.

Judging by the suicide rate, Sri Lanka is not a country of particularly happy people. But the reasons for this can’t be blamed on the civil war, the most publicized aspect of Sri Lanka’s recent history and the easiest culprit. The burgeoning suicide rate throughout the 1950s and 60s doesn’t support a direct correlation. Other theories, such as a high number of failed love affairs in the country or a widespread inability to deal with negative emotions, seem to fall short of being able to explain the magnitude of the problem.

 

 

Further complicating the matter is the fact that indicators used to measure a country’s general happiness, like gross national happiness (GNH) or subjective well-being (SWB), show that Sri Lanka scores are average. According to these scales, which take into consideration levels of poverty, health, conflict, and education, Sri Lankans are less happy than people near the top — Americans and northern Europeans — but more happy than Indians, Russians, and most of Africa.

Measurements of happiness such as these should be treated with suspicion; they aim to capture through statistical analysis what is essentially intangible, a state of being within the human heart and mind. But with very broad strokes they can give a view of how people see themselves. Are they satisfied with their lives? With their work, relationships, and health? Overall, Sri Lankans score the same SWB rating as the Portuguese, and yet their suicide rate is much, much higher.

One of the more disturbing yet compelling explanations for the high number of suicide deaths is the use of severely toxic pesticides in Sri Lankan agriculture. In 2007, a team of doctors presented a paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology which claimed that the increase in suicides coincided with the rising importation of deadly pesticides, such as methamidophos, monocrotophos, and endosulfan. When ingested, these chemicals act similarly to nerve gases developed during World War II and are extremely fatal. During the years of Sri Lanka’s soaring suicide rate, pesticide poisoning accounted for two-thirds of these deaths.

 

 

In 1995 and 1998, the Sri Lankan government enacted bans on importing highly and moderately toxic pesticides into the country, and within a few years the number of suicide fatalities decreased significantly. It’s unclear whether the number of attempted suicides decreased at all, but today the suicide rate hovers at around 22 per 100,000 people — nearly double that of the United States, but half of what it was during Sri Lanka’s peak. The researchers behind the epidemiological paper attempted to isolate factors other than these import bans to explain the decrease in suicides, but couldn’t find any. “We found no evidence that the trends were specifically associated with beneficial changes in levels of employment, alcohol sales, divorce or with periods of civil war,” they wrote. 

In myriad ways, the implications of these findings are troubling. If the mere presence of deadly pesticides was responsible for the start of the suicide epidemic in Sri Lanka, it could be inferred that the suicidal impulse had been there much earlier but the methods weren’t nearly as effective. It could also be inferred that the ban on pesticides and subsequent decrease in suicide deaths has merely stanched an ongoing tragedy. From what limited current data exists, Sri Lankans still seem to attempt suicide in relatively large numbers, but the fatality rate is lower.

 

 

The sources of this epidemic remain unexamined in part because psychological research in Sri Lanka is a relatively new and undeveloped field. There have been few if any widespread studies by experts from within or outside the country that attempt to document and analyze the underlying causes of Sri Lanka’s suicide rate.

“We have many who are interested in the field, but have little systematically collected knowledge of ‘Sri Lankan’ psychology,” said Dr. Shamala Kumar, a university professor of psychology, in an interview with a Sri Lankan newspaper in November.

In a sense, experts have so far only managed to explain how Sri Lankans killed themselves in such great numbers in past decades. But the emotional, psychological, and philosophical heart of the problem remains a mystery.

 

Dispatch from the 4th International Conference on Gross National Happiness

Learning from Bhutan.

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

The project has three main goals:

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

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

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

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

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

Additional reading:

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

 

Happiness in Bhutan

A national ideal.

My romance with Bhutan began in February 2000, when I flew for the first time from Bangkok to Paro, the only airport town in Bhutan. The airport had no radar detection device. Planes could only land and take off in broad daylight, in good visibility. At the time, “planes” meant the two aircraft owned by Bhutan’s national airline, Druk Air. As we neared Bhutan, the arid landscape gradually gave way to layers of mountains looming grey and purple in the distance, becoming luxuriant with vibrant shades of green as the plane glided over them. Mountains and valleys interlocked with one another like fingers of hands clasped in prayer. I had the inkling I was about to experience something quite different from what the biggest cities and fanciest resorts of the first world could offer.  

 

 

The day my husband Mike told me about his potential assignment to consult in Bhutan, I looked up the country on the Internet. Cradled in the foothills of the Himalayas, about the size of Switzerland, was the Kingdom of Bhutan, with India to the south, east, and west, and Tibet to the north. Further research told me the country had no constitution or political parties, no freedom of assembly, press, or religion. No church to attend, only Buddhist temples. No electricity in most parts of the country, and limited TV broadcasting even in places with electricity. No traffic lights anywhere, not even in its capital, Thimphu. No fast food restaurants. And little medicine except the indigenous kind.

There was a dress code: National dress was required to be worn in public. My findings were depressing enough to make Bhutan a curious — even fascinating — place to see. 

As tourists in the first two weeks before Mike started work, we had a guide who took us from Paro to Thimphu and across the mountain pass Dochu La to Punakha, the winter home of the Central Monastic Body. We also journeyed eastward to the Bumthang district in central Bhutan. We even braved the narrow, nerve-racking, mountain-hugging roads south all the way to Phuentsholing, on the border of India. The fortress-like dzongs, or monasteries, intimidated and awed me. Houses decorated with auspicious, painted symbols of dragons, flowers, and wheels caught my fancy, while wooden phalluses — hung from roofs to ward against evil — initially rendered me speechless. Buddhist relic-filled chortens, prayer wheels big and small, and forests of prayer flags fluttering in the wind were spiritually uplifting.

But what really filled me with wonder was that every man, woman, and child looked happy.

Happiness radiated from weather-beaten faces, with their windburned cheeks and smiles that showed teeth stained red from betel nut addiction. It was quite obvious that happiness in Bhutan was not born of material wealth and comfort, for those were lacking everywhere I looked. The Bhutanese people as a whole might be poor by Western standards, but they are not destitute. Begging and unwelcomed soliciting are not in the Bhutanese vocabulary. While tourists to many countries would have to pay to get a picture taken with a local outfitted in his or her national dress, I got all my pictures taken with Bhutanese men in ghos and women in kiras for free, for my payment often came in the form of letting adults pore over my Lonely Planet Bhutan or showing children the magic of my binoculars. What a breath of fresh air. The children might look shabby, with snotty faces and dirt-encrusted fingernails, but they all had school and parents who provided for them.

And they all looked happy.

A highlight of that first trip was a night in a farmhouse in a small hamlet during our Bumthang Cultural Trek. That evening, we shared a meal with the family, comprising a couple and their two sons. We sat on the floor around the bukhari, or wood-burning stove, in a kitchen surrounded by soot-blackened walls. The room was dimly lit with a low-wattage bulb, which our host proudly told us was fed by electricity generated by a solar panel on the roof. We dined on buckwheat pancakes, yak stew and curries, and lots of chilies, which Mike and I politely declined. Arra, a strong wheat- or rice-distilled drink, was poured, warming the body and the spirit.

In spite of the dark and drab surroundings of the interior, it did not take much to feel the contagious effect of happiness. That night, Mike and I were given the best room in the house in which to sleep: the altar room, reserved for the deities and VIP guests. In the darkness of the room, lit only by a flickering butter lamp on the altar, surrounded by statuettes of Buddhist saints and thangkas depicting deities, I was not afraid. Mike fell asleep as soon as his head hit the mattressed floor, but I stayed awake for a long while, thankful for the opportunity to be sharing in the happiness of an extraordinary nation.     

On my second visit to Bhutan, in 2002, I went to the public library in Thimphu and picked up a copy of Kuensel, the national weekly. “Chorten vandal sentenced to life,” the headline read. Also on the same page: “Eight HIV cases detected in Bhutan.”

Little international news made it into the paper. Neither did anything critical of government policies. Surely there must be some souls unhappy with contentious issues even in the most fairytale paradise on earth?    

“They are careful of what they print, aren’t they?” I remarked to a man reading nearby.

He gave me a curious look, and said, “Yes, it’s a pretty good paper.”

Up until 2008, the country had no constitution. But for 100 years, the Bhutanese people had placed their faith in the king and his benevolent, if absolute, governance. Peace and harmony reigned in this kingdom which, to the developed world, might seem deprived of the fundamental rights of democracy and freedom. On my visits to Bhutan, I have observed that the Bhutanese are intrinsically happy, if happiness could be summed up to trust in their beloved king and his government, contentment with their way of life, faith in their religious beliefs, harmony with their environment, peace with all sentient beings, and the highest regard for the cultural and spiritual traditions of their country. 

With a new king and Bhutan’s first constitution, the kingdom has entered a new era, one of democratic beginnings. The Internet has become accessible, more programs are broadcast on television, and new hotels are being erected.

It’s progress by Western standards.

But what about happiness?

 

 

Elsie Sze is the author of the novel Hui Gui: A Chinese Story, which spans from the war torn China years of the 1930s to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong. Her forthcoming novel, Heart of the Buddha, is about Bhutan.

Additional reading:

Books offer clues to finding happiness in tough economy
Substantiating GNH
Lessons in Gross National Happiness

 

Riding (uphill) to prosperity

A town thrives because of biking, but not everyone is happy.

The only noise you hear is the water rippling over rocks, as the Lehigh River cuts through a steep valley near Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Bikers ride along a paved path that gently slopes at a 2 percent downward grade. The lush carpet of trees on the mountains eventually gives way to a small picturesque town that looks like a place you’d see in the Swiss Alps.

This little town of 4,800 supports two bike stores that shuttle riders to the beginning of the Lehigh Gorge Trail, as well as quaint stores, B&Bs, and several restaurants. The weekends buzz with activity.

 

 

Jim Thorpe has come a long way from its days as a depressed mining town to the biking center it is today.

The first time we came through Jim Thorpe, it was to raft. But since then we’ve been back three times to mountain bike, stay in hotels, eat at restaurants, and shop on Main Street.

We spent plenty of money there, so I was surprised to hear about the anti-bike sentiment. Bike tourism seems to have lifted this town from its depression. Why would a town bite the hand that feeds it?

“It’s animosity between the locals and the visitors,” said Tom Loughery, corresponding secretary of the Jim Thorpe Area Council. “Existing residents had no idea that the town had something special to offer. They complain that it now takes 10 minutes to get across town, and the restaurants are crowded.”

They don’t seem to link the visitors to the newly-renovated homes and buildings and the full tax coffers.

No irony was lost when this town changed its name from Mauch Chunk to Jim Thorpe. Thorpe was a versatile athlete of American Indian descent who won two gold medals in the 1912 Olympics, but these were rescinded when it was learned he’d earned a minimal amount of money during college playing basketball. Although he played professional football and baseball, his later life was marked by poverty and alcoholism.

Mauch Chunk had been a thriving coal and railroad town. In an attempt to replace those dying industries with tourism, town leaders agreed to let the widow of the disgraced athlete bury his body there in 1953 and changed the name in his honor. The tourists never came, until the 1990s. But it wasn’t to see Thorpe’s grave. It was to go biking.

Copious studies support the idea that biking can boost an economy. Mountain biking has been the fourth most popular adventure activity among U.S. adventure travelers, according to a 1997 study by the Travel Industry Association of America. Sixty million adult Americans bicycle each year. Bicyclists spend money on this recreation, which creates jobs and brings revenue to communities. The Outdoor Industry Foundation reports that bicycling contributes $133 billion to the U.S. economy each year.

Declining towns can capitalize on their natural gifts. Not every mountain biking center needs spectacular rolling rock trails like Moab, Utah, or the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains that Durango, Colorado, offers. Woodlands and flatlands can be developed into biking arenas. Plus, the trails can be cleared with volunteer efforts and a few inexpensive tools. In Jim Thorpe, timber roads and coal mining roads had already been cut through the woods.

Looking for new sources of income, West Virginia aggressively pursued bike dollars in the early 1980s. It sponsored races and reaped the benefits by establishing itself as a biking mecca. The Hatfield-McCoy trails that were opened in 2000 have proven very successful. After a decade of work to build community support and of agreements with 20 different landowners, the shared-use trails have added $51 million to the economy, drawn 303,000 visitors, and created 1,572 new jobs.

Yet some still oppose biking there.

“The Nature Nazis think they are saving the world from mountain bikes,” complained Matt Marcus, owner of Blackwater Bikes and the president of the West Virginia Mountain Bike Association, describing his experience with officials from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

“Anti-bike groups claim that bikes cause erosion and trail widening,” said Drew Vankat, policy adviser for the International Mountain Biking Association, “when in fact research has shown bikes cause no more impact than horses.”

Vankat has been at the forefront of a battle with the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado. The Forest Service director in Denver proposed eliminating bikes on the Monarch Crest Trail — based on research done before mountain bikes were even invented.

“They don’t want to lose pristine nature and feel if you allow bikes, it will open up the floodgates,” Vankat said.

The town of Jim Thorpe felt the backlash too.

“The state of Pennsylvania outlawed biking on state game lands, and while only four trails were affected, the perception was that there was no more biking in Pennsylvania. That was in 2004, and it really hurt the economy,” said Loughery of the Jim Thorpe Area Council. “We’re working hard to gain them back.”

To be fair, not every cyclist is courteous. Some refuse to ride single-file or around a puddle while off road, widening the trail. But the benefits far outweigh a few examples of bad behavior.

The Forest Service argues that allowing bikes into the woods would open the door to allowing in four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). So the agency takes the position of “no wheels at all.” That’s easier: The Forest Service is under siege from powerful companies like Kawasaki Motors. Bike manufacturers lack the deep pockets to fight for inclusion. Although ATVs are noisy and pollute with their fossil-fueled engines, equating pedal-powered bikes with ATVs makes no sense.

Depressed regions have an opportunity to recreate their image and character. While not as powerful as coal or steel barons, bike riders can help towns overcome flagging economic fortunes, if they can overcome the naysayers.

Additional Reading:

Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania
Lehigh Gorge Trail

 

101 billionaires

The other side of Russian capitalism.

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

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

[ Click here to view the visual essay ]

 

A moose-flogging, cheerleading dominatrix?

Or is it just open season on another woman candidate?

 

Since Alaska governor Sarah Palin became Sen. John McCain’s running mate, the barrage of misogynist media criticism has been relentless. Does any of this anti-woman talk sound familiar? Just when I thought we had left the chatter about Hillary Clinton’s pearls, cleavage, and cackle in the dust, the media got me again.

We all understand that McCain chose Palin for political reasons. She has the highest gubernatorial approval rating in the country: 80 percent. Her accomplishments, lauded by conservatives, have included cutting taxes, balancing the budget, and putting the kibosh on the Bridge to Nowhere.

With so many would-be Clinton voters left behind after Barack Obama chose Joe Biden instead of a successful and seasoned woman who says she received more of the popular vote during the primary than Obama himself, McCain obviously chose Palin to try to snare some of those voters. In picking Biden, Obama was using the same strategy. He was aiming to shore up his own national security shortcomings and to grab the blue-collar, Catholic voters who supported Clinton — the same voters he’d denounced a few months before as people who “cling to their guns and religion.”

The media tore immediately and salaciously into Palin, branding her as unqualified to be vice, let alone president. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has repeatedly called Palin an “empty vessel” told what to say and do. The Daily Kos, without evidence, claimed that Palin’s 15-year-old daughter was the real mother of Palin’s newborn son. A Salon article featured Palin in a dominatrix outfit, flogging a moose. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times has compared her to a cheerleader and a Lancôme salesperson. A reporter from Denver’s local Channel 7 news was even caught on camera, moments after Palin’s nomination, saying she had a “nice ass,” and suggesting the running mates were sleeping together. And in perhaps the most egregious, anti-woman comment to date, CNN’s John Roberts questioned Palin’s ability to be a mother and vice president at the same time.

We haven’t heard reporters question Barack Obama about whether he could be a father to his two children and president at the same time. Nor have we heard them comment on Obama’s butt cheeks, or seen him placed in sadomasochistic sexual attire.

Even more to the point, why haven’t the media focused on Obama’s inexperience? Fact: Obama has the least amount of political experience, measured in years, of any candidates on a national ticket in the past 100 years. In perhaps the most telling line of the primary season, Hillary Clinton noted: “Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the White House. I will bring a lifetime of experience. And Senator Obama will bring a speech he gave in 2002.” Ouch.

Instead of focusing on her pregnant teenaged daughter or her husband’s 20-year-old DUI charge, reporters should focus on Palin’s record. She has taken strong positions on abortion, gay rights, and the environment, and has drafted key, if not controversial, legislation for her state.

We’ve seen the clips of Palin’s sportscaster days and have heard more than we want to know about the teenaged father of her daughter’s baby. Let’s talk about the issues that matter to Americans — and leave Palin’s family life and X chromosome out of it.

 

Disaster for sale

Our media’s favorite brand is fear.

 

Even in an economy broadsided by the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history, not everyone is losing money. Advertising Age reported in September that Campbell Soup’s sales rose 13 percent in the second quarter.

Maybe cash-strapped consumers are embracing condensed soup as a meal alternative both inexpensive and nourishing. Kudos to the integrated marketing communications media for pulling off a cunning ploy based on the information processing model of advertising effectiveness, a theory developed by William McGuire in Behavioral and Management Science in Marketing.

What do we see besides violence and fear in the news media? Armed with modern technology, savvy corporate professionals shower their audiences with an array of terrifying images and narratives. Every bomb blast is “BREAKING NEWS!” and every weather disturbance the “STORM OF THE DECADE!” This constant propagation of danger has addicted our culture to panic and destruction.

Since the advent of advertising agencies, conglomerates have been seeking their help to promote their brands. For news media, that brand is fear. Based on McGuire’s model, the news media first catch our attention by inundating us with coverage of economic woes. This sparks panic and a shift in consumer behavior, which translates into money redirected and profits collected. In this way, shrewd corporate media planning is the lifeblood of the 24-hour news cycle.

But according to statistics on worldwide deaths caused by organized violence, the world is getting less dangerous. Harvard’s polymath professor Steven Pinker even states that we are probably living “in the most peaceful time of our species’ existence.” So why does it not feel that way?

Fareed Zakaria, in a May 2008 Newsweek article called “The Rise of the Rest,” explains, “We are told that we live in dark, dangerous times. Terrorism, rogue states, nuclear proliferation, financial panics, recession, outsourcing, and illegal immigrants all loom large in the national discourse. Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, China, Russia are all threats in some way or another.”

Coverage of worldwide danger is what’s truly increasing. “The last 20 years have produced an information revolution that brings us news and, most importantly, images from around the world all the time,” says Zakaria. That’s most visible in technology. Video games and movies bring our enemies closer: into our living rooms.

What we see on television determines what we know. The news program is a mechanical presentation of events, and carefully scripted and sequenced. It is not the media’s fault that these events have occurred. However, selection, length of time allotted, and intensity of coverage are very much corporate decisions.

There always has been, and always will be, something to fear. Remember the Y2K crisis of 2000? In the months leading up to the New Year, it was impossible to avoid news coverage of this apparently inevitable disaster. Would every computer crash because of clock overload? An article in the December 30, 1999 edition of USA Today stated: “Here at the predicted end of cybertime, the future looks bright but a little brittle.”

As a student at one of the nation’s preeminent media studies departments, New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, my “innocence” in this media society is now more than three years past. Still, I am suddenly panicking, inundated with coverage of the Lehman Brothers collapse and the $700 billion dollar “bailout.” By tuning into mainstream media, we have all been conditioned to fear and uncertainty, and desensitized to violence. We have consequently relinquished our own ability to understand what is real, as our reality is spoon-fed to us.

Campbell Soup knows this. Why else would a canned foods company dedicate so much money to media planning to effectively deliver the advertisers’ message to the market? In 2006, Campbell Soup consolidated its $300 million international media planning account with Mediaedge:cia, a media planning agency with around $17.9 billion in billings. These professionals know canned foods are inexpensive products that decrease in demand when consumer income rises.

Does the crisis reporting have some link with the weakening dollar? President Grover Cleveland (the face on the $1,000 banknote) is probably rolling in his grave at this fiscal atrocity. But you can still see many attractive foreign women leaving Bergdorf Goodman with bags full of full-priced luxury “bargains.”

 

Attempting aşure

Blending identities in learning to make an old, traditional Turkish dish.

 

Aşure, or Noah’s Pudding, is an ancient Turkish recipe. It has pretty much everything in it, including garbanzos, wheat, beans, rosewater, dried figs, apricots, and nuts. It’s not smooth and creamy like other puddings; it’s lumpy and chewy. It seems healthy because there are so many fruits, nuts, and whole grains in it. I have often heard people say aşure is “an acquired taste.” In this case, “an acquired taste” means it’s pretty sticky and gross, but despite appearances, it’s traditional, and people enjoy eating it.

As a half-Turk on my mother’s side, I have eaten the pudding many times. However, I have never actually made it because it’s one of those really daunting dishes to prepare. Plus, every chain store in Turkey carries the instant, packaged version, so if I ever got desperate to have some, it could be ready in 20 minutes.

However, I want to learn how to make some traditional dishes as part of my stay in Turkey, so I open my Internet browser to see what’s involved. “Oh yeah, no problem,” I tell myself, scrolling up and down ethnicfood.com. I can totally make this for my grandparents.

I have made other dishes for my grandparents, but none quite as demanding as aşure. In Turkey, “one-stop” grocery shopping is uncommon. Every town has its own magnificent farmers’ market, as well as a butcher, bakery, and kuruyemiş (dried food store). I think of the kuruyemiş as a trail mix store. My local place sells treats like dried apricots, figs, pumpkin seeds, and walnuts by the kilo. My favorites are the dried chickpeas because they have a nutty flavor, and they are really crunchy, like corn nuts. I take great pleasure in exploring the Turkish purveyors and chitchatting with the vendors, but it’s time-consuming to shop this way, so tracking down the aşure ingredients takes me several days. I keep poking my head into corner stores and asking, “Incir var mı? Aşure için?” Do you have figs? For aşure?

Aşure? Aşure yapiyor musun?” You are making aşure? Shopkeepers always have a look on their face as though they’re thinking, “It’s pretty funny that this foreign girl is making aşure.”

In a few days my grandparents are coming home to Istanbul from their summerhouse on the Aegean. While they have been away, I have been in their Istanbul house, studying Turkish, cooking, and looking for a job where I don’t have to speak the language.

Kanlica and tea culture

My grandparents’ home is in a town called Kanlica, on the Asian side of Istanbul. The Bosphorus Strait divides Istanbul into two continents — Asia and Europe. And though the two are separated by only a three-minute ferry ride, the European part of the city is much more urban and progressive than its Asian counterpart. There are lots of universities and 20-something students supporting radical causes on the European side, but Kanlica is like a sleepy little resort town.

Commuting back and forth between the continents is one of my favorite parts of life in Istanbul. At the end of my day on the European side, I usually wind up lugging all of my Turkish dictionaries and notebooks, as well as groceries, back home on the ferry. I like to sit on the top deck and stare at the waterfront mansions as we glide by. The properties that pepper the edge of the Bosphorus are among some of the most beautiful and expensive real estate in the world. Wealthy Ottomans who treasured the view of the Bosphorus built most of the waterfront mansions, or yalilar, in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the buildings are still an important part of Istanbul’s landscape.

One of the most incredible homes that I pass daily is 30,000 square feet and was put on the market for $100 million in 2007. As most of the homes on the water, its stately European design mingles with Islamic touches, like dome-shaped windows. An expansive outdoor dining area and swimming pool connect the main home to the enormous pool house, where I imagine the residents sit and drink their afternoon tea when it’s too hot to sit in the sun. It always seems like the ferry passes by this house too quickly. I never have enough time to inspect the elaborate latticework or to catch a glimpse of the house staff setting out the breakfast trays. The boat ride might be too short, but I really appreciate the five-minute break the ferry affords me after a long day of carrying all of my things around like a pack mule.

I’ve become friends with the guys who run a teahouse next to the Kanlica Iskele, or Kanlica ferry port, so if I wave at them as I step off the boat, they call, “Cay ister misin?” — offering me tea before I walk home. Tea culture is very important to Turks. People often meet at teahouses and sit for hours, swirling the sugar in their glass teacups. Although I have grown to delight in the strong black tea accompanied simply by sugar cubes, I still get incredibly antsy sitting over tea for such a long time.

I do, however, like to stop and talk with Mehmet and Cenan because I think they are extremely generous to want to hang out with me. I must be maddening to interact with. This is how conversations generally go: Mehmet will ask me some very simple questions, like how was my day or if the tea is nice. Then I stare at him with my head cocked to one side and my eyebrows furrowed as I try to assemble a Turkish sentence in my head. After an uncomfortable silence, the grammar of a two-year-old awkwardly stumbles out of my mouth, and I say triumphantly, “Iyi. Ben iyi!” Or, “I good!”

 

It might not be elegant, but I am very proud of this milestone in my language development, because I can now gruffly bark out infinitives, eschewing silly nuisances like prepositions and proper conjugations.

Two days before my grandparents come home from the summerhouse, I plop down at Mehmet’s little table by the ferry port with my heavy bags. I proudly point to my shopping bags and exclaim, “Aşure yapiyorum!” I’m making aşure!

My friends are clearly tickled by this, but they also look a little shocked. Perhaps I’m imagining it, but I think Cenan is skeptically eyeing my skinny jeans. Maybe my outfit doesn’t look Turkish, but I’m half-Turkish, I swear!

Aşure? Sen?” he asks in disbelief. You?

“Yes! Yes! Fig, apricot, sugar, wheat, rosewater … uh-huh. Very big, this like!” I throw my arms out to the side. “Saturday! Saturday I bring. I bring! Okay, okay. I have to cook. Saturday!”

A “proper” Turkish girl

I’m pretty excited as I spread all of the ingredients out on the kitchen counter. I carefully measure out the sugar, water, and wheat, and put them in a big pot. A little bit later, I add the chickpeas and white beans I’ve been soaking for 24 hours. When I plop in the orange peel I have cut up, the kitchen starts to smell fruity and sweet. Now I have to start chopping the enormous pile of fruit and nuts. But the time is well spent because this is what you do to be a proper Turkish girl, right? You spend hours cooking aşure for elderly people and for ferry port boys.

Unfortunately, I have very little idea about what a “proper Turkish girl” would do. That identity has been worrying me since I arrived in Istanbul and noticed that I didn’t really fit my grandparents’ “proper Turkish girl” template. The primary thrust behind my aşure-fest is to attempt to be more of a proper young lady in my grandparents’ eyes, since I haven’t been fulfilling their expectations very well.

In the United States, I live in the liberal “la-la land” of San Francisco. I had some idea about what to expect from Turkey in terms of the food and the language, but I was unprepared for the behavioral expectations for Turkish ladies. The cultural expectations are significantly exacerbated by the fact that my grandparents have a very traditional perspective on feminine behavior. I have now come to think I’m supposed to stay home and read quietly with my grandparents, and only leave the house when accompanied by my grandfather. So now I think that if I partake in some very old Turkish traditions, I’ll show them I can be the kind of Turkish woman they expect and compensate for my not-so-demure disposition.

The problems seem to start with my fashion choices. For instance, people don’t really rock the faux hawk in Kanlica, especially among women. All the women have incredibly beautiful dark locks cascading midway down their backs. (Doesn’t anyone have bad hair days around here?)    

Unfortunately, it’s not just my brash haircut that sets me apart. I’ve managed to shock everyone in my family with my affinity for public transportation and my tendency to run all over Istanbul, visiting the historic sites … alone. As if that weren’t un-Turkish enough, my grandmother seems to have issues with the way I dress. She affirmed my suspicion that I’m not exactly feminine enough when she commented, “You have the pretty leg. You always wear the jean. You should wear the skirt.”

“Oh, yeah. You’re right, Anne Anne (grandmother), sure,” I replied as I looked in the mirror and self-consciously smashed down a flyaway hair on top of my boyish hairdo.

 

The proof is in the pudding

At first I was pretty frustrated with the generational friction between my grandparents and me, but I am really trying to take a deep breath and understand our differences as part of this experience.

That is why I am spending this Thursday evening standing over a steaming pot of ancient recipe, to hopefully channel my inner “good little Turkish girl.” Unfortunately, I accidentally botch the ingredient ratio, and the whole operation seems to have a texture problem; somewhere in this process I wind up with way too much water. Ay! I can’t believe I cockily promised the iskele boys this vat of pudding. I am never going to be able to walk past the ferry stop again.

Thankfully, Fatma, the lady who cooks and cleans for my grandparents, stops by the following day and fixes the consistency. But only after she cackles at me as I forlornly swing the fridge open and wail, “Aşure yapiyorum ama iyi değil! Bak!” I’m making aşure, but it’s not good! Look! I also point at a set of jars on the top rack, telling her “…ve, turşu yapiyorum ama bunlar çok tuzlu!” And I’m making pickles, but they’re too salty!

Leave it to a jolly, aging Turkish lady in a long skirt to save a really hopeless batch of pudding. It takes Fatma 10 minutes to dump the aşure back into a big pot and cook out most of the extra water. Then she pours the mixture into individual bowls, covers them neatly with plastic wrap, and puts them back in the fridge.

As soon as the pudding cools, I run outside to the night guard with a dish and a spoon. He checked up on me when the water boy, Ali, suddenly became infatuated with me and started chasing me down on his scooter every morning, shouting, “Tea! Leyna! One minute! Tea with me tonight!” So he is first on my list of aşure recipients. "Buyrun! Aşure!” Here you go! Aşure!

Next, I take off for the ferry port with a bowl of aşure for Mehmet and Cenan. It’s such a small-town thing to be hand-delivering my homemade pudding. I am even using glass dishes because I know that each of the recipients will wash and return them. The guys are really nice about the gift, but Cenan mentions the extra water more than once. I get pretty defensive and reply that it’s my first time and that I will make it again.

The real test is my grandmother. When she comes home the following day, she does her usual once-over of the house. I can see the wheels in her head turning. Are the counter tops sticky? Nope, clean! Are the flowers in the garden blooming? She opens the back door and walks along a row of green bushes. No, they seem to be taking their time. She goes back into the kitchen. Have the dishes been washed? Yes! Everything looks very orderly.

Once my grandmother completes her ritual, I tell her about the pudding and open the refrigerator. “From a package?” she asks. I put my hand on my chest in mock horror. “No, no, no. I made this aşure from scratch! I went to every store! I bought almonds, figs, apricots — everything. Fatma helped, but only a little tiny bit.”

“Oh Leyna, you are something,” she says, shaking her head. “This is not the easy!”

I shrug and bat my eyelashes. “It’s not hard,” I tell her. “I just had to ask around for the different ingredients.” 

My grandparents leave Istanbul for the winter shortly after I present them with the pudding. They were really worried when they left me alone before, but they seem a little less reticent this time. I think I managed to prove myself by running all over town to find the ingredients for my aşure. Clearly if I am capable of handling the ingredient hunt, I will be able to survive the remainder of my stay in Turkey alone.

In terms of the proper Turkish girl idea, I hope I demonstrated that I am not a complete savage. Okay, I admit that my hair is not always perfectly kempt, and I’m balancing precariously between being not quite Turkish and not quite American. But it’s not always easy trying to figure out where you belong. For the moment, I think it’s perfectly fine if my identities blend in a way that is less than graceful and less than defined — just like my watery pudding.

 

Propaganda’s children

Life among Ho Chi Minh’s heirs.

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Red thread

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The government,” she replied.

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

“It’s a good thing.”

“Really. Why?”

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

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

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

Human resources headaches for foreign investors

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

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

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

The devil reads Pravda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bypassing the information superhighway

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

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

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

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

A life less ordinary

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

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

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

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

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

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