Commentary

Reflections on a new democracy

A decade after the demise of apartheid, South Africa is a democratic society. But the country still has miles to go before it can be considered egalitarian.


Students at Frank Holele Preschool and their families create paintings of the South African flag during a parents’ day event in October 2004 at the educational facility in Bendel, South Africa.

It’s sometimes difficult to really understand why I’m here.

I get up every morning, take a bucket bath with two scoops of water, gather my daily teaching materials, and trudge to school through two miles of thick sand.

Through the peak of the mid-morning heat, I move from classroom to classroom, hoping to catch teachers on their breaks, trying to convince them, indirectly, that they have an impact on the lives of children. I cringe as a teacher strolls into the room after her tea break and pinches a misbehaving child in the arm. She repeatedly insults him for being noisy while she was out of the room. He squeezes his eyes shut to hold back tears, wondering why the other children didn’t get equal punishment. Historically, wrong answers have been met with physical and emotional punishment, so I try to work with teachers on methods of discipline and praise.

I encourage them to allow conversation in the classroom, and show them that peer teaching and learning are important ways for children to gain the critical thinking skills necessary for participation in a changing society. Living with their uneducated grandmothers after being orphaned by AIDS, many of these children are responsible for chores that leave them little time for schoolwork. Many have fathers who work for the mines, live far from home, drink irresponsibly, and cannot put food on the table.

Often, teachers become the mothers and fathers to these children who lack responsible, loving, supportive figures in their lives. While I encourage them to praise and support their students, their confused faces remind me that providing for their own families is the real reason they are working, the reason they trudge through those mounds of thick sand. Many of them will not hesitate to tell me that they wish they could go home, and some days, in frustration, I wish they would. But before I lose hope, I must remind myself that the people I work with have lived a history of hearing that they are worthless. They have been handed scraps from the white man’s table, causing a work ethic of “the minimum is enough.” The legacy of apartheid has destroyed the spirits of the people, discouraged them from working to improve their lives because of an ingrown belief that they are unable to do so.

It is 2004, and I am witnessing South Africa as it marks 10 years of democracy.

In 1982, when my friend Isaac was 17 years old, he worked as a gardener in a suburb of Pretoria. After working many hours to create a manicured lawn with vibrant colors — a lawn he knew he would never have — the mistress would call him for lunch, holding out two dirty dishes filled with cold food scraped from the bottom of a pot. She placed one dish in Isaac’s hands and the other on the ground for the eager and drooling guard dog. With his head bent in respect, Isaac was obliged by law to say, Thank you, Madam” in Afrikaans, even though his own language was Setswana.

Once she was satisfied that he had taken his first bite of food, the mistress walked back inside, shutting the wooden door in front of him. Isaac quietly dumped the remains of his food into the hungry dog’s dish and glanced at the sky. The sun indicated that he had two more hours of the workday left, and he picked up his pruning shears. When the sun finally reached the horizon, Isaac closed the gate behind him, and breathed a sigh of relief to be returning to Soshanguve township, to his family. Fellow workers quietly greet on another on the street, falling into their comfortable lilting language and stride, leaving their day of work behind. Occasionally, Isaac speaks of his mistress, and how he wishes that a humble request for a different dish would not get him fired. Most often, beneath their hunger pangs, they proudly discuss their families, their friends, and the best place to spend their daily wages on vegetables for the family dinner.  

In 2004, I went on vacation with my co-worker and friend Salome, spending four days in the township of Mahwelereng in Limpopo Province. Previously, I would have been breaking the law by setting foot in the township, but for 10 years the democratic constitution has granted individuals of all skin colors the right to move freely around the country, to live where they choose, and to vote for the country’s president.

In Mahwelereng, Salome introduces me to her friends, and as one of the first white faces to spend a night in the township, I am greeted with smiles, waves, generosity, and kindness. I spent an evening with her in the local tavern, sitting with friends in a circle of dirty chairs. The run-down building had cracking wall paint, and when the wind blew, a smell of stale urine emanated from its side. In spite of the surroundings, everyone was smiling, with teeth glowing in the dingy lights. One person was dancing to the crackling stereo in a torn Target polo shirt, and others were leaning against the wall telling jokes and holding their stomachs in laughter.

At first, my skin color brought glances of surprise and hesitation, but as I continued to chat in Setswana and reached out to slap the hands of friends, more people began to approach me to shake my hand. As I grasped the soft vaselined hands of the young, and the rough, callused hands of the old, I asked myself, “Why am I greeted with such warmth?”

Even though I am American, and not South African, I share the skin color of the oppressor. Because of a past where skin color alone determined one’s place in society, South Africa’s black citizens have every reason and right to be angry at people like me. Instead, these people accepted me as one of their own. In admiration of their acceptance and their ability to forgive, I asked many of them the same question: “Why?” One man with deep wrinkles at the corner of his eyes grabbed my hands and squeezed them tightly. He held his chin high, as he looked deeply into my eyes and said in Setswana, “Kate, by seeing you here, I think I know what democracy really feels like.”

After that night, I pondered that answer, and that man who lived through many years of apartheid and 10 years of freedom. What should democracy “feel” like? Policy states that Isaac, Salome, and the residents of Mahwelereng deserve to be treated as equals. This equality must mean that Isaac should have just as much right as his former employer to own a manicured garden, to use the same toilet as she does. Isaac’s children have the right to a quality education — equal to that of their white peers — and his family deserves access to running water.

If the people of South Africa live in a democracy, why does Salome live only feet from her neighbor, while lush gated compounds exist right across the street? When she visits a gas station equipped with a porcelain toilet, she is pointed to a fly-infested latrine — the “non-whites only” label peeling conveniently from the rotting wood door. Isaac’s children attend a school where they must share textbooks and climb over each others’ desks as the teacher struggles to locate a stub of chalk. His oldest boy is discouraged from looking for a job, because his family needs him to harness the donkeys to the cart every day in order to fetch water from the village tap.

Policy states that the country is a democracy, freed from the terror of apartheid. In response, the world smiles and congratulates. But when will this democracy begin to offer basic human rights to all of its people?

These citizens of South Africa want to be heard, to feel human in the eyes of their government and fellow citizens. Until their human rights are met, the policies of democracy will only succeed on paper. The children of South Africa must be taught that equality can be achieved. They must be taught critical thinking skills that will give them the ability to overcome a fate that was pre-determined by the color of their skin. In a country with a history of fierce discrimination, the only way to achieve true democracy is to embrace the fact that we are all people, and to recognize that each person deserves basic human rights. In South Africa I was reminded that equality and freedom must never be taken for granted. Our blood is all red, we all laugh in happiness, we all cry in sadness, and we all dream.”

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Interviews

Old traditions die hard

Author Irene Kai talks about her memoir, The Golden Mountain.


Recently, InTheFray Literary Editor Laura Madeline Wiseman spoke with Irene Kai about her recently published memoir, The Golden Mountain. Their conversation — and Kai’s thoughts on the American Dream — follow:

The interviewer: Laura Madeline Wiseman, InTheFray Literary Editor

The interviewee: Irene Kai, author of The Golden Mountain

In The Golden Mountain while visiting your old school in Hong Kong as an adult it seemed like you came to a moment where you decided you were done with being a seven-year-old girl and were ready to be an adult woman. After coming to the realization that you were no longer going to let certain people treat you as a child, what motivated you to begin the journey of writing your memoir?

When I was living in Los Angeles, at the pinnacle of success, I realized that I have achieved the American Dream as I understood it. I was [on] the brink of exhaustion, emotionally and physically. I started to question what my life [was] about, [since I had] spent most of my life [trying] to get to where my family and society claimed would provide respect [from family and the United States] and found out things had never changed. I was still the person who lived under everyone’s thumb. So I went on the journey of deep remembrance, to understand where I came from and where I wanted to go from there with clarity and understanding.

And that motivated you to begin the memoir?

Yes, it took three years, seven hours a day between crying and writing. An extremely healing process.

In The Golden Mountain the sections on your great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother flow smoothly. How were you able to create the cohesiveness apparent in the text? Did you speak to living family members to fill in the gaps during those three years of writing or is The Golden Mountain simply a compilation of all the stories you were told?

I lived with all of these women. Since my great grandmother and I were the outcasts, we spent a lot of time together and she told me many stories. I have been practicing meditation for many years. When I started to write, I would go into deep meditation and the memories came back like a movie and I just recorded them.

You only write in the first person in one section, the section on you. Yet the sections on your great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother are written in third person. Why did you choose to organize the book this way? And did you experiment with other ways to tell this story?

To tell you the truth, I was trained as a visual artist. I came to the [United States] when I was 15, so I missed out on all the lessons on grammar and learning how to speak. I have no training as a writer. Believe it or not, it just fell into place as I wrote. It is pure GRACE.

In the book, there’s a clear sense that women in your family always knew their place and acted in such a way to encourage others to follow that same axiom. What seemed to be the turning point for you to break from that cultural tradition?

For thousands of years, women in China [have] only [been able to] survive through marriage. They are owned by the husband’s family … where would they go if they got kicked out of the family? [I had timing] on my side and location, the United States. I survived by getting a job, building a career, which … in China … was impossible.

Do you think that is still true for women in China today, particularly under the current regime?

China is changing rapidly. For the first time in the history of China, women now have jobs, they don’t have to be married to survive. But the old tradition is hard to [get rid of]. Amazingly only a few months ago, I read in a Chinese newspaper that the government just changed the law claiming that employees no long require their employers’ permission to get married. I couldn’t believe it. They also still have to get the government’s permission to travel and to relocate. The first sentence of my book says it all, “I am sorry, it’s another girl.” In the 1970s China imposed the one child policy. Routinely, family disposed of daughters because it was against the law to have more than one child. Traditionally, the Chinese needed to keep boys to help out the family and when the parents got old, the son and daughter-in-law [would] take care of them. If they only have a daughter, who is going to take care of them when they get old? The daughter belongs to her husband’s family and it is her obligation to take care of her in-laws.

In The Golden Mountain you do a very good job of conveying that telling family secrets is a Chinese taboo, particularly in your family. How has your family reacted to The Golden Mountain?

My sisters didn’t take it too well. Teresa still doesn’t talk to me. I asked their permission before I wrote, but after they read the book, they were disgusted. No one talks about the book. They just pretend it didn’t happen. My children have gone through a lot.
They were caught between their loyalty to me and to their aunts and cousins. Teresa’s daughter wrote me a nasty email and sent it to all the members of my family including my children. She asked if I [know] what love means. Family is all we have, it doesn’t matter who hits who when we should just love each other. Meanwhile, her father is an alcoholic and so is her husband. The chain of abuse just goes on and on. My children stayed out of everyone’s way and kept quiet but I know they are proud of me. Bob, their father really surprised me. After he read the book, he called and said, I was a schmuck.” I nearly fainted.

Are you planning on writing another book and if so, what will be the topic?

I have another book coming [out] in 2006. It is a book of photography. The title is: What Do You See? They are photographs of my hands but [they] look like genitals. It is a challenge for readers to face their assumptions and ask deeper questions about their judgments.

To read Laura Madeline Wiseman’s review of The Golden Mountain, click here.“

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Reviews

Always Know Your Place

Best of In The Fray 2005. Four generations of Chinese women battle and bend to the cultural restrictions that ensure all women know their place in Irene Kai’s first book, The Golden Mountain.


The “golden mountain” — this memoir’s name for America — is the place to make your fortune, at least for Irene Kai’s family. But venturing there, for women, doesn’t loosen the cords of a Chinese tradition that mandates subservience, self-sacrifice, and submission to men.

The Golden Mountain, winner of numerous awards, including 2005 Best Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine, offers a vivid portrayal of four generations of Chinese women attempting to live within the confines of their culture.

Through her portrayal of the first three generations — the author’s mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, Kai attests to her savvy as a narrator and offers an admirable tribute to her female ancestors. Kai’s memoir begins with the story of her great-grandmother, Wong Oi, a peasant woman who believed, for most of her life in China and Hong Kong, that journeying for a month is better than studying for three days.

With dreams of earning fortunes in the golden mountain, Wong Oi’s husband and eldest son leave her and the other children for 10 years. Wong Oi vicariously journeys with them through the elevated status that having family in the United States brings her. Knowing that her family’s lot (read: wealth and status) will improve, particularly under her guidance, Wong Oi accepts, even embraces, their departure.

The results, we discover through the stunning landscape Kai paints of her great-grandmother’s newfound lavish life, pay off.

Wong Oi, for instance, sips Jasmine tea in her new mansion’s garden while gossiping with relatives. Similarly, when rebels disrupt this life of luxury by destroying the homes and land of the wealthy, Wong Oi’s family included, we see Wong Oi’s family resettle in Hong Kong, and more tellingly, Wong Oi struggling to regain her social status. She attempts to do so, most notably, by demanding her husband take a concubine, a tradition of rich families in China. But while the concubine helps Wong Oi win back her status, she brings Wong Oi great misery: Her husband, we discover, prefers the concubine, leaving Wong Oi to retaliate in the only way she knows how: by emotionally torturing his mistress. Wong Oi’s suffering is the price she pays, Kai skillfully demonstrates, for her strict adherence to tradition and her refusal to embrace changing Chinese family expectations.

Gendering women

While Chinese family expectations may change, Kai suggests that the women in her family — beginning with her grandmother, Choi Kum — are subjected to strict gender roles. Choi Kum, for example, does not have her feet bound, inviting perpetual teasing by her cousins, who claim she will never find a man willing to marry her. Similarly, when Choi Kum expresses remorse at Chinese patrilocal marriage customs, her mother responds with the axioms: “Know your place and accept your fortune”; “Silence is a virtue”; “You will have an easier life if you bend with the wind.” Bending is exactly what Choi Kum does as she mothers 10 children, most born less than 15 months apart, and works 12-hour days — including the day after her first child is born.

Things begin to change for Kai’s mother, Margaret, who is the first to rebel against her elders’ advice. Demonstrating the significance of this generation gap / cultural tide, Kai goes to great lengths to develop this contrast between the older and newer generations. While the first part of Kai’s memoir describes the self-effacing Choi Kum and the traditionalist Wong Oi, the second part reveals that the two elder women are essentially foils to Margaret and Irene Kai. Margaret is a fighter: She loses some, she wins some. But she clearly has no intention of surrendering her voice. At 15 she pleads with her mother to let her marry for love “like the Americans,” but is promised nevertheless to James, Choi Kum’s eldest son, who sleeps around and becomes addicted to opium. Despite the gossip and shame it brings to the family, Margaret retaliates by also taking on lovers.

As we discover, the author follows in her mother’s footsteps, rebelling to become an independent woman. She seeks a master’s degree and eventually leaves her abusive and controlling husband. But it is the culmination of this rebellion — the writing and publication of The Golden Mountain — that is perhaps the greatest rebellion of all, the ultimate challenge to the taboo of revealing family secrets.

But for all of her transgressions, Kai characterizes herself in terms that are anything but defiant. Instead, Kai, in the book’s greatest shortcoming, depicts herself as a victim of life, men, and family. She recalls, for instance, being beaten with a green stick and expected to care for her younger sister. Irene’s mother, Margaret, tells others, “She just has a face that begs to be hated,” calls her “Crying bag,” and yells, “You are as stupid as a pig.” Meanwhile, Kai is used and abused by men, being sexually assaulted by her uncle and grandfather and subjected to lascivious teachers, emotionally crippling boyfriends, and a vicious husband. As her memoir reveals, neither Kai’s family nor her culture ever taught her this behavior might be wrong, even though much of this part of Kai’s life takes place during the second and third waves of the feminist movement.

Kai only makes the delineation between sexualized and gendered rights and wrongs when she is much older, despite the feminist force of her era, which asserted that domestic violence is a social problem, rape and sexual assault are crimes, and the personal is political.

The book’s flaw, then, isn’t merely the position Kai found herself in her younger days. It’s also in the telling she does as a theoretically liberated adult woman. With the majority of The Golden Mountain conveying Kai’s sorrow, the author gives preference to her own victimization by various forces such as the art industry, university students and professors, and a husband that systematically eradicates her sense of self. Although Kai was most likely both a victim and a fighter, she downplays her triumphs in The Golden Mountain. The end result of Kai’s disavowal of personal triumphs — at least for this reader — is a depressing mischaracterization of human nature, typically full of the wretched and the golden, the shadows and the lights. The ending is thus anything but cathartic — or golden.

To read Laura Madeline Wiseman’s interview with Irene Kai, please click here.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

England’s transsexual priest


“What’s important is that she’s a person made by God, loved by God and given gifts by God who feels that she’s called to be a priest, and that’s a call that’s been checked out by the church rigorously … Gender realignment surgery helps address that issue, and it’s about bringing mind and body into wholeness.  I see this as something restorative and healing.”
— Bishop of Hereford Right Reverend Anthony Priddis, speaking about the recent ordination of Sarah Jones, 44, as a priest in the Church of England.  

British law and the National Health Service recognizes gender dysphoria, in which an individual believes that his or her gender identity is incongruent with his or her anatomical sex. Sara Jones underwent sexual reassignment surgery at the age of 29 to become a woman.

—Mimi Hanaoka

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Political Prose

‘We smoked and fucked him’

What you allowed to happen happened. Trends were accepted. Leadership failed to provide clear guidance so we just developed it. They wanted intel. As long as no PUCs [“persons under control,” i.e., detain…


What you allowed to happen happened. Trends were accepted. Leadership failed to provide clear guidance so we just developed it. They wanted intel. As long as no PUCs [“persons under control,” i.e., detainees] came up dead it happened. We heard rumors of PUCs dying so we were careful. We kept it to broken arms and legs and shit. If a leg was broken you call the PA — the physician’s assistant — and told him the PUC got hurt when he was taken. He would get Motrin [a pain reliever] and maybe a sling, but no cast or medical treatment…. People would just volunteer just to get their frustrations out. We had guys from all over the base just come to guard PUCs so they could fuck them up. Broken bones didn’t happen too often, maybe every other week. The PA would overlook it. I am sure they knew.

—U.S. Army sergeant, 82nd Airborne Division

Human Rights Watch (HRW) came out with a new report this week that presents graphic accounts of torture by U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the extent of the prisoner abuse problems afflicting an overextended U.S. military, and the damage that poor leadership has caused to the Iraq war effort. The report features interviews with two sergeants and one officer stationed at a base in central Iraq who said they witnessed the torture of Iraqi prisoners — torture that was ordered, the soldiers said, by their superiors and by intelligence officers. The practice was so common that soldiers had developed a lingo for it, the report says: “‘Fucking a PUC’ referred to beating a detainee, while ‘Smoking a PUC’ referred to forced physical exertion sometimes to the point of unconsciousness.”

One factor that encouraged prisoner abuse was that the soldiers guarding a detainee were often the very ones who had been shot at by that detainee hours before — contrary to the military’s own policy, which states that prisoners should be placed in the custody of military police far from the frontlines. Not surprisingly, soldiers put in these situations would go beyond the need to collect intelligence and start collecting their pound of flesh. A sergeant described one such incident of retribution:

We had these new high-speed trailer showers. One guy was the cleaner. He was an Iraqi contractor working on base. We were taking pretty accurate mortar fire and rockets and we were getting nervous. Well one day we found him with a GPS receiver and he is like calling in strikes on us! What the fuck!? We took him but we are pissed because he stabbed us in the back. So we gave him the treatment. We got on him with the jugs and doused him and smoked and fucked him.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s denials that the Geneva Conventions apply to its war on terror have created a kind of moral havoc within the ranks. Before the invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers were trained to avoid torture, period. In fact, the Army’s own Field Manual 34-52 on Intelligence Interrogation states explicitly that the use of force is not an effective interrogation tool: “Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.” In today’s military, however, soldiers guarding detainees no longer have clear rules for deciding what is permitted and what is not. They are simply told that they must extract information and that their actions must be “humane” — a dangerously vague standard. “Well, what does humane mean?” said an officer. “To me humane means I can kind of play with your mind … To [another officer I spoke with] humane means it’s okay to rough someone up and do physical harm … We’ve got people with different views of what humane means and there’s no Army statement that says this is the standard for humane treatment for prisoners.”

When stories of prisoners being humiliated and beaten at the Abu Ghraib prison became public, terrorists trying to sabotage the U.S. military in Iraq suddenly had a perfect recruiting tool: concrete evidence of the evil of the American occupation. Now there is reason to believe these abuses are more widespread than first thought, and not just the actions of “rogue” soldiers. In fact, soldiers at one base told an officer that they had taken Abu Ghraib-like photographs but burned them once the Abu Ghraib guards started “getting in trouble for the same things we were told to do.” “It’s unjust to hold only lower-ranking soldiers accountable for something that is so clearly, at a minimum, an officer corps problems, and probably a combination with the executive branch of government,” said the officer.

Did the abuse halt after the media broke the Abu Ghraib scandal? Things “toned down,” said the sergeant, who was interviewed between July and August 2005. “We still did it but we were careful. It is still going on now the same way, I am sure. Maybe not as blatant but it is how we do things.”

The irony is that in torturing detainees with the goal of stamping out the insurgency, the U.S. military has driven even more Iraqis to the cause of the insurgency. That connection was quite clear to one of the sergeants interviewed:

If a PUC cooperated Intel would tell us that he was allowed to sleep or got extra food. If he felt the PUC was lying he told us he doesn’t get any fucking sleep and gets no food except maybe crackers. And he tells us to smoke him. [Intel] would tell the lieutenant that he had to smoke the prisoners and that is what we were told to do. No sleep, water, and just crackers. That’s it. The point of doing all this was to get them ready for interrogation. [The intelligence officer] said he wanted the PUCs so fatigued, so smoked, so demoralized that they want to cooperate. But half of these guys got released because they didn’t do nothing. We sent them back to Fallujah. But if he’s a good guy, you know, now he’s a bad guy because of the way we treated him.

As the officer interviewed in the HRW report makes clear, the abuses he saw were not perpetrated by “dishonorable” individuals. These were courageous soldiers who also happened to be human, he said. They were being put in charge of people who might have tried to kill them or their friends. At a minimum, they deserved leaders who could set clear boundaries and accept responsibility for what happened. The fact that they have not received such leadership has jeopardized America’s mission in Iraq, both morally and practically:

We’re mounting a counter-insurgency campaign, and if we have widespread violations of the Geneva Conventions, that seriously undermines our ability to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim world…. [I]f America holds something as the moral standard, it should be unacceptable for us as a people to change that moral standard based on fear. The measure of a person or a people’s character is not what they do when everything is comfortable. It’s what they do in an extremely trying and difficult situation, and if we want to claim that these are our ideals and our values we need to hold to them no matter how dark the situation.

—Victor Tan Chen

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Critically Speaking:  They’re here!


The karma of creativity in TV land works in mysterious ways, thus the abundance of alien, psychic, and in-search-of shows to hit the networks beginning last season and continuing this fall.  If you’re the type of viewer who liked Twin Peaks and the X Files, then you’ll be a happy couch potato camper with shows such as Lost, Medium, Invasions, and Threshold invading the airwaves this season.  

The buzz is in abundance for the hit show Lost (Wednesday at 9 p.m., ABC), and with recent Emmy Award wins it is sure to keep up the momentum, at least for another season.  What Lost has going for it is a great cast and a nice blend of action, mystery, intrigue, and human drama.  The problem with shows that have a continuing mystery as part of the fabric of the show is the need to sustain a level of anxiousness while always revealing secrets to satisfy viewers and keep the storylines in perpetual motion.  The X Files was successful because it would pepper the central storyline of FBI agent Mulder’s search for evidence of his sister’s alien abduction with stand-alone episodes that explored other bizarre paranormal experiences while retaining the core human relationship between the leads.  Lost has such a large cast and so many storylines that it will be difficult to keep it going for multiple seasons without becoming a parody of itself or getting so “inside” (like Twin Peaks in its second season) that audiences get turned off and leave in droves.    

Another sophomore show is Medium (Monday at 10 p.m., NBC), starring Emmy-winner Patricia Arquette, that is half cop show, half family show and half paranormal show.  Aha, you say, that adds up to 150 percent.  You are correct and that’s the problem.  Medium  is very adept at depicting a middle American family; it has all the elements that make a cop show interesting; and it portrays the psychic ability of the main character in a believable manner, but those are too many things to pack into one show.  If they would drop one of the three — family, psychic, or cop procedural — then I think they’d have a decent series, but at this point, there isn’t enough of either to keep me coming back week after week.

Two alien invasion shows have landed dramatically this season, and both contain great casts, excellent production values, and mystery storylines.  The better of the two, Threshold (Friday  at 9 p.m., CBS), had a two-hour premier that instantly grabbed you as it introduced the members of a secret government cabal headed by the Deputy National Security Advisor, played by the accomplished Charles S. Dutton.  After a cargo ship appears to have been attacked by an alien craft, an elite group of specialists called The Red Team are brought together to check out the strange goings on.  Headed by the attractive Carla Gugino (Karen Sisco), portraying a worst-case-scenario expert whose worst case happens to be alien invasions, the group consists of individuals with a distinct expertise and personality that makes each character, and their interactions, very watchable, much in the vein of the Star Trek franchises.  

Speaking of Trek, the superb supporting cast has Brent Spiner (Data in ST: Next Generation) as a forensic microbiologist, Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent) as a womanizing mathematician and linguist, Rob Benedict (Felicity) as an astronautical engineer, and the resident commando, Brian Van Holt (Black Hawk Down) who keeps them all out of harm’s way.  What I like so far about Threshold is that it seems proud of its intelligence and the way it portrays the science by only explaining things when needed and in a seamless, organic manner, much like the characters in ER banter medical jargon.  I hope that the series doesn’t pander to network executives wanting to sex things up and that they let the geeks of the world word-of-mouth it to success.  If not, it can have another life as a feature film (see Serenity).

The other alien show is Invasion (Wednesday at 10 p.m., ABC), where presumably aliens have infiltrated a small South Florida town after a large hurricane blows through.  It is Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the 21st century.  A lot of critics have been raving about this show, touting its high production values and superb cast, but the premier didn’t impress me, and succeeding episodes haven’t gotten much better.  They have successfully set up all the players and their dynamics, but I just wasn’t blown away.  I saw no signs that the show would explore any new territory in the aliens taking over the world storyline and certainly not better than how Threshold is tackling the premise.  Only time will tell if Invasion can keep the big lead it inherits from Lost.

Another new show that should be included with this group is The Night Stalker, a reimagination of the 70’s TV movies and show that started this whole genre.  Since it was a favorite of mine as a kid, I want to savor the new version over time and weigh in later on whether it lives up to its predecessor.

As they say, stay tuned.

Lost: Must See.  
Medium: Pass.  
Threshold: Must See.  
Invasion: Wait & See.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Quote of note


“The general image of the Arab woman is that she isn’t happy…Well, we’re all pretty happy.”

Karen Hughes, under secretary of state for public diplomacy, was confronted yesterday by an audience of educated Arab women who don’t want to be “liberated” by the Bush administration. Hughes suggested in her remarks that Saudi women should be allowed to drive and fully participate in their country. Audience members drawn from the student body of Dar Al-Hekma (a liberal institution) rejected her remarks as disconnected from their personal experience, suggesting that the Bush administration’s negative image in the Arab world may present an obstacle to needed dialogue about civil participation and women’s rights in the region.

—Laura Louison

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

A gay Greek


In my second year of college, I missed high school. What I missed was the band hall. I reminisced about my best friend flirting with her longtime girlfriend, my sly realist poking at my idealistic bubble, or the gaggle of people that floated around us in our aura of support. We had created a gay-straight alliance without meetings. Soon, we were interrupted by college, and I lost my community.

I spent the next year lost in the swarms. Bright lights lit up every word. Queer Straight Alliance! College Democrats! Ordinary Women! Nothing felt right. I had spent my community on the promises of a brighter tomorrow, only to go broke. As a gay man, the gay community that I depended on in high school now relied on rumors and booze. The more I stayed in college, the more I longed for high school. We had a vocabulary problem. My definition of queer meant support, community, and coffee. To me, their definition meant sex, gossip, booze. I could not rectify those differences. I struggled against my own idealism, fearing that I had run out of steam. Then, Google happened.

On a misplaced remark, I discovered the Gay Greek. Twenty minutes on the Internet, too much enthusiasm, and a national election later, Delta Lambda Phi at Kansas State University gave birth — to me and my brothers. That moment could not have come any sooner. Three months later, I tripped into near suicidal depression.

Spring of 2005, I spent most of March and April locked in my house. If I left, I found myself puking randomly or being so nervous while driving I had to pull over while my anxiety attack subsided. I barely resembled the founding president from a few months earlier. I slept twelve hours a day for weeks. I stopped seeing my therapist. The medical community was for refills or medicating the side effects. The only constant in my life, and what eventually pulled me through, was my fraternity brothers — The Delta Lambda Phi boys.

My fraternity brothers watched over me while I played Russian roulette with psychotropic medications. They empathized as I cried during Duracell commercials, and I beat up myself up over being so fragile. Emerging with Effexor, I could find myself again underneath the battle scars of medication with the community that I had hoped to find but instead was privileged to build.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Bible lite


For those who have been vaguely enticed by Christianity but can’t be bothered to read the tome that is the Bible, there’s hope and a new gimmick on the market; Reverend Michael Hinton has, after years of toil and vicious editing, edited and published the new 100-Minute Bible. Miniature both in content and in style, 11,000 copies of the notebook sized Bible will be distributed to British churches and schools.

The Bishop of Jarrow, Rev John Pritchard, served as a consultant on the book and offered a rigorously non-theological take on the 100-Minute Bible, in which all 66 books of the Christian holy text have been condensed like a literary cheat sheet.  “This is an attempt to say, ‘Look, there’s a great story here – let’s get into it and let’s not get put off by the things that are going to be the sub-plot. Let’s give you the big plot’,” was the Reverend’s sunny outlook.

Indeed, it is precisely the “big plot,” of the Bible — its nuances, its theological distinctions, and its literary, historical, and sacred characteristics — that such an attempt at abridgement destroys.  And Mr. Pritchard should know better.  

—Mimi Hanaoka

    

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Muslim Barbie?


A bikinied Barbie doll might send shivers of loathing down a pious Muslim Damascene parent’s spine, but apparently Fulla, a doll that is curiously and impossibly proportioned like Barbie but imbued with “Muslim values,” is sending parents scurrying to the toy stores.

There have been other dolls garbed in traditional Islamic attire, including an Iranian Sara (who is veiled), an American Razanne, and an absurd Orientalist fantasy of a doll called Leila (who is Moroccan) that Mattel, Barbie’s creator, peddled as a slave girl flitting around an Ottoman court. But this new Fulla stands out because people are actually buying her in countries such as Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, and Syria (where she was spawned), even with her hefty price tag of 16 U.S. dollars, when the average Syrian per capita income is about 100 U.S. dollars a month.

Fawaz Abidin, Fulla’s brand manager for her creator, NewBoy Design Studio, explains Fulla’s popularity by insisting that “this isn’t just about putting the hijab on a Barbie doll…You have to create a character that parents and children will want to relate to. Our advertising is full of positive messages about Fulla’s character. She’s honest, loving, and caring, and she respects her father and mother.”

The emotional and spiritual qualifications of a plastic doll aside, the interesting aspect of Fulla is whether, how, and to what extent she will affect attitudes towards the hijab, the popularity of which she may popularize and work to solidify for a younger generation.

The hijab most recently drew international attention with the head scarf bans in France and regions of Germany and the attendant movements that formed to guard the rights of women to wear Islamic garb.

—Mimi Hanaoka

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:

personal stories. global issues.