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Get your history geek on


 

 

False Advertising
(The J/M line today)
Circa 1918

Snuggle on the IRT (today's 2/3 line)
Circa 1955

Waiting on the old Redbird trains at Borough Hall
Circa 1970 (of course — check out the dude's pants)

 Lexington Avenue El (now the 4/5 line) going over the Brooklyn Bridge (now only foot/car traffic allowed)
1941

 Under the El on Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn
(Tracks long gone)
1919

And I couldn't resist a shot of my neighborhood corner, which surprisingly looks just the same, minus the trolley car.
Circa 1949

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Blog

Prelude


Try to remember your earliest memory. The further back I think, the more fragmented and shattered my memories become. Sometimes, they’re memories that have been cultivated by my family, and I suspect their careful tending to each early image in my mind has shaped the events, changed it to match our shared stories more closely than the actual events that occurred. Human memory is strange like that: What seems real may be based more firmly in fantasy than anything else. The earth’s memory, however, is much more reliable.

As those of us in the northern hemisphere ease into autumn, the earth begins a familiar routine. Loons, hatched this spring, race across the surface of great northern lakes and take flight, heading to Florida for the winter without being told that the cold weather is about to come. Their instinct is their memory, and they need not be told. Wild rice ripens and falls, in a more bountiful version of the leaves of maples, oaks, birches, the trees of Frost and Thoreau. All around us are signs that the summer is ending, yet in this ending is a glorious, shining beginning: the start of fall, the season of the harvest, the reaping of the seeds that have been coming to fruit all summer.

This month, InTheFray explores stories of beginnings. In Floating through space and time , Francis Estrada looks at Filipino culture in the United States and various representations thereof. During Ramadan, the end of the day signifies the beginning of a meal for Muslims. Kyle Boelte tells the story of a family from Darfur living in Maine in his piece Ramadan dinner. David Xia explores the connections between endings and beginnings and his only family history in Un/certain trajectories. Finally, Ellen G. Wernecke reviews The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream.

We hope that you enjoy the change of the season and this time of beginnings and endings. Thanks for reading InTheFray!

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.

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Photo Essays

Floating through space and time

Propaganda and anthropological display.


This visual essay is a response to the process of expatriation and application for U.S. citizenship, and explores early representations of Filipinos as viewed in the United States.

[Click here to view the slideshow.]

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Reviews

Snakehead

A review of Patrick Radden Keefe’s account of a Chinese-immigrant-smuggling operation.


   

     The rescue in June 1993 of nearly 300 illegal immigrants from a ship called the Golden Venture which had run aground off Queens, New York, was the culmination of a harrowing voyage that had begun 120 days earlier. The immigrants were from China’s Fujian province, lured, like so many others, by the promise of freedom in America. Considering their ordeal and the repressive regime from which they had fled, they might have expected to be welcomed with open arms. But as international crime reporter Patrick Radden Keefe shows in his incredibly well-researched The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, they instead became unwitting victims of the ambiguities of U.S. immigration policy. Some would be held in prison for nearly four years while applying for political asylum.

    The ill-fated voyage of the Golden Venture was arranged by Cheng Chui Ping, a grandmother and Fujianese immigrant to New York known around Chinatown as Sister Ping, who had thrived as a “snakehead,” shuffling mostly young Fujianese men from country to country with fake passports and visas, eventually landing them at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. She was, says Keefe, “something like a village elder in the claustrophobically intimate corner of Chinatown where she resided.” One admirer told a local newspaper she was “even better than Robin Hood.”

    Smuggling-by-air was expensive so, hoping to increase her profit margins, Ping partnered with a Chinatown gang member in purchasing the Golden Venture to make regular trips to the United States. The old vessel survived the crash off Queens, but just barely — the crew was so clueless that it nearly docked the boat off South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials took the passengers into custody.

    The grounding of the Golden Venture happened on the watch of President Bill Clinton, who, according to Keefe, was still smarting from the June 1980 riot of thousands of Cuban refugees from the Mariel Boatlift who had been housed in the Fort Chaffee Reserve Center in Arkansas. Amid outrage over his decision to accept the refugees, he lost his bid for re-election as Arkansas governor later that year. Clinton, suggests Keefe, wasn’t going to give his critics any more ammunition by appearing “soft” on the Golden Venture passengers.

    Bill Slattery, director of the INS’ New York office, led the charge to classify the passengers as criminals, not victims. Shipped out of state to Pennsylvania and Louisiana for their asylum hearings, they were out of reach of the pro bono representation they could have gotten in New York, where many more immigration cases were handled. At the time, notes Keefe, “asylum caseloads were exploding, and immigration judges were often underresourced and overworked. As a result, this most solomonic determination — who should be saved and who should be sent back — became an arbitrary and erratic activity.”

    The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 made the United States more sympathetic toward Chinese immigrants, but that attitude didn’t last — the State Department, working with Slattery, felt secure in disregarding most of the Golden Venture passengers’ stories of persecution. One passenger told Keefe he left his home in Fujian at age 17 after police told his family he was being targeted for arrest. Of the boat’s total payload, only about 10 percent were granted asylum.

    These days, ambitious sons and daughters of China are just as likely to move to a different province to learn English and management skills, as chronicled in Leslie T. Chang’s excellent Factory Girls, as they are to stow away on a ship to an uncertain and low-paying job on foreign shores. But human smuggling on a global scale is far from over, and those who formerly came to the United States from China will be replaced by those from Iraq or Morocco or Ecuador. As Keefe points out, “spoiler countries” have not ratified the United Nations’ anti-smuggling protocol, effectively making them portals for “snakeheads” and their passengers. Those traveling on the Golden Venture passed through at least two of these countries — a low count compared to some of Sister Ping’s other voyages.

    Was the Golden Venture an aberration? The current debate over health care reform certainly suggests future refugees could suffer a similar fate (anti-immigration activists have portrayed immigrants as a costly drain on any publicly-funded health care system). “We don’t need illegals,” one protester yelled at a town hall meeting last month in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “Send ’em all back. Send ’em back with a bullet in the head the second time.”

    As for Sister Ping, she was arrested in Hong Kong in 2000 after six years on the lam from U.S. officials, using false passports and contact with her husband to continue plying her “snakehead” trade. She is now serving a 35-year sentence in federal prison — mandatory retirement in the land of the free.

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Commentary

Un/certain trajectories

Where one story ends, another begins.


“I didn’t have any big achievements or contributions in my life,” my grandfather said to me, “but I painstakingly worked, and as an average member of the working class, I’m still very capable.”

My grandfather is known for his practicality and plain-spokenness, but not for his sentimentality. Driving with him and my grandmother on a trip to their childhood village of Xiqi, his sudden sincerity caught me off guard. As we wound our way through Anxi County’s numerous mountains, I realized the magnificent vistas of peaks girdled by tea terraces and sleepy hamlets was triggering something inside him.

“I worked on this road that year when I wasn’t accepted to any universities,” my grandfather said. “This is it. Right here. Your grandmother and I both worked on it.”

Although the location was the same, the paved, narrow, serpentine road was a far cry from the original trail my grandparents helped build 54 years ago. Burdened with his landlord class background, my grandfather suffered persecution from the village peasants who forced him to build the road, carrying bricks that were too heavy for him. Having graduated from Anxi High School, my grandfather’s background also led to his rejection from every university to which he applied. That year, he had no choice but to toil in the fields. Understandably, he doesn’t have many kind words to say about Mao Zedong.

“Some people said that back then, if Mao farted and proclaimed his fart smelled good, you couldn’t say he was wrong. If you did, you were a counter-revolutionary.”

In the car, my grandmother grumbled, “Why are you saying all this?”

“There’s freedom of speech now,” he snapped back. “Americans can criticize even their president. Stop pretending like we live in a Marxist-Leninist society.”

Xiqi’s villagers have stopped pretending. Maoist sayings painted on the walls of houses to demonstrate one’s revolutionary fervor had faded nearly beyond recognition. The once bright red ink had weathered away or perhaps had been scrubbed off by disillusioned peasants. One saying stated “Everyone must bear responsibility for counter-revolutionaries,” while another stated “Everyone engages in production, every household ensures security.” These slogans, forged during the Cultural Revolution and condemning capitalist roaders, have been replaced by Haier and China Mobile advertisements.

Xiqi has always been a starting point and never a destination. The countryside was where you stayed if you didn’t have what it took to make your way out to the cities. When my grandmother’s oldest brother broke through to higher education, villagers slaughtered pigs, carried him on a litter, and performed songs for three days. Xiqi’s people have always looked outward, trying to escape from the impoverished valley in which they were born. Those that succeeded have paid respect to their forbears by visiting and donating money to the village.

Xiqi’s surrounding mountains, which villagers said resembled a prone tiger, were once stripped bare of their trees by peasants desperate for firewood because they were unable to afford gas or coal. Today, saplings once again clothe the tiger, but now row after row of tea terraces are also carved into its flanks. Before Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, Xiqi peasants relied on subsistence farming to scrape out a meager living; now they’ve devoted acres of farmland to growing tea as a cash crop.

There were probably, at most, a couple hundred people in the village when I visited, all of them engaged in some part of the tea production process. Many dwellings were abandoned, and rivers that once accommodated sampans were now trickles of water. Most of the males were away selling enormous cloth bags filled with tea leaves in a nearby town, while the women, donning straw hats and crouching in the soil beneath a fierce noonday sun, picked tea in the fields. The very elderly and the very young walked around amidst mongrel dogs and flocks of chicken and geese; adolescents and young adults were nowhere to be seen.

But according to my grandparents, compared to the rest of rural China, Xiqi’s peasants have done very well for themselves. Funded by revenue generated from hundreds of acres of tea shrubs and donations from wealthy, overseas family members, Xiqi farmers have built better homes, temples, and village infrastructure —all signs of their rising standard of living.

Expensive, four-story houses fitted with shiny, ceramic roof tiles and enclosed by metal gates have sprung up next to dilapidated hovels. Many families had moved into their new residences and placed their ancestors’ spirit tablets in their old rammed earth homes.

Some ancestors are better off. Pooling together their money, family members have constructed many new kinship clan shrines. A new temple built in 2007 for the Taoist god Xuan Wu cost over a quarter of a million dollars (USD). Intricate dragon statues and stone carvings decorate the temple’s interior, while power lines, water pipes, and paved roads can be seen crisscrossing through the village from the temple’s threshold.

 

My grandparents left their village thinking they would never return. Rural life was grueling, and there was nothing in Xiqi for them except political discrimination, poverty, and hunger. Yet here they were again, showing me the mud houses where they were born, the room where they learned to play the lute with their cousins, and the elementary school where they first met while teaching night classes to illiterate peasants.

“I walked out of my hometown by going to college,” my grandfather reminisced about the second time he applied and made it in. “If it weren’t for college, I’d be just like the village peasants right now. I’d be stuck there. My face toward the loess, my back toward the sky.”

Determined to escape from their rural upbringing, my grandparents confronted larger-than-life forces of revolution, calamitous famine, and massive socioeconomic upheavals. My grandmother left her family at the age of 16 from Xiqi to seek work in the city, while my grandfather chose the unpopular college specialization of geological surveys just to have a chance at leaving the village. Later, his job of searching for ore took him on far-flung journeys through at least two-thirds of China.

Although my grandparents grew up in a rural environment, they say they could never become used to living in Xiqi again. Despite the rising living standards brought by Deng’s economic reforms, the village has remained the same at heart. Many of the customs and folklore that existed 39 generations ago survive to this very day despite wave after wave of social engineering projects fixed on the eradication of the village’s traditions. Spirit tablets burned in the fires of the Cultural Revolution were remade. An effigy of Xuan Wu about to be shattered in the “Smash the Four Olds campaign was secretly saved. Peasants still live their lives in ways similar to past generations.

On our way back from Xiqi, my grandparents said that if I hadn’t asked to see their old village, they wouldn’t have gone on their own. Although much is still the same, from their perspective, the place and its people have changed. The layout of the village looks eerily unfamiliar. Close family and friends have either moved out or passed away. What used to be home no longer feels like a place they know, and they don’t plan on visiting much in the future.

“We have no more close relatives left there,” my grandmother said. “We’ve done all that we ought to do.”

My grandparents visited their parents when they were alive, swept their tombs when they passed away, lit joss sticks, burned spirit money, and donated money for family shrines and Xuan Wu’s temple. They feel they’ve fulfilled their filial duties, and they want to move on.

“Do you remember? When Grandmother was still alive, Mom frequently went back,” my own mother told my uncle afterward. “Ever since our grandmother passed away, Mom doesn’t feel like that place is home anymore.” In many ways, it is my grandparents who have changed, not the village.

I tend to romanticize the past and harbor nostalgic feelings for bygone eras to create a safe haven where I can seek shelter from the present. As a reminder of my own uncertain life trajectory, the here and now often feels doubtful and, at times, frightening. This is the same fear my grandfather felt while laboring away on the village road the year every university turned him down. It is the same fear my grandmother felt when she left home at the age of 16 to seek work in a city 280 miles away. By looking back on their accomplishments in the face of overwhelming odds, their fear has evolved into pride, but mine is just beginning. Xiqi was a chance for me to see their humble conditions and remind myself that my family has produced individuals who will never be passive, but who will instead constantly struggle and strive for the best.

So this is not a story of how I returned to my ancestral home, felt rooted, found meaning, and found myself. I’m not sure that would be a very interesting story. As much as I wanted to feel a sense of belonging to the village where my ancestors have lived — generation after generation, for nearly eight centuries — Xiqi felt foreign and its lifestyle incompatible. My immediate family has gone a long way in three short generations. My grandparents’ native tongue is Min Nan; my mother’s is Mandarin; and mine is English. My grandparents believe in Taoism and Buddhism; my mother has been baptized; and I’m still confused and undecided. The drastic changes Xiqi and my family have undergone remind me that the pace of today’s world is only increasing, and even things I once imagined to be everlasting can change.

But I still listen rapt with attention when my grandparents tell stories about how they beat pots and pans during Mao’s Kill a Sparrow campaign until sparrows fell out of the sky from utter exhaustion, or about how the water monkey, a mythical underwater creature that dragged village children to a watery grave, was vanquished. By writing down their stories and memories, I pay tribute to ancestors and my grandparents in my own way.

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News

Ramadan dinner

Faith and family in a new land.


 

It’s almost time for dinner on the next-to-last night of Ramadan. Hassan Ahmed sits on a well-used sofa facing a big-screen TV that dominates the front room of his small, two-bedroom apartment in the Kennedy Park neighborhood of Portland, Maine. He’s watching an Egyptian movie playing on an Arabic satellite station. After a commercial break, Hassan, a Sudanese refugee who came to the United States in 2003 with his family, relaxes his body and leans back into the couch. His dark black skin stands out in contrast to the white jelabia he wears. His short hair is starting to recede from his forehead, where expressive lines form when he’s thinking. The room is illuminated with soft yellow light from a floor lamp in the corner. Outside, the sun hangs low in the sky and the street is empty. A bitter wind blows off the Atlantic several blocks away — another cold Maine winter not far behind.

In the apartment, the thermostat is turned up near 80 degrees. Ahmed, Hassan’s 13-year-old son, sits at the far end of the L-shaped sofa, on the other side of a glass coffee table that is draped with a paper tablecloth decorated with colorful balloons. Hassan’s wife, Maria, her black hair hanging loosely down past her shoulders, is in the small kitchen preparing dinner. Their two young daughters, 12-year-old Samar and seven-year-old Abrar, sit quietly on wooden chairs between the kitchen and the TV. Dinner is only minutes away, and everyone is hungry after a day of fasting.

In the kitchen, Maria opens the oven and slides in a tray of roughly cut goat meat and chopped onions. The meat is from a farm on the outskirts of Portland. Hassan drove out to the farm this morning to help slaughter the animal for tonight’s meal, following dhabiha, the Islamic ritual method in which the animal’s neck is cleanly slit with a sharp knife. After a few minutes under the broiler, the onions and meat begin to sizzle. The aroma reaches out of the kitchen and into the living room where the movie plays.

From time to time, Hassan gets bored with the movie he’s watching and switches between Arabic stations from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Lebanon, as well as Indian and Chinese stations. He moves from one station to the next quickly, pausing only long enough to see what is on and then moving along. His son Ahmed provides a running commentary of what programming each station shows. He says the Egyptian stations have lots of violence; the Indian stations have lots of singing and dancing; and the Saudi Arabian stations have lots of news.

Ahmed, still wearing his yellow T-shirt and shorts from soccer practice this afternoon, asks his father to change the channel to football. “Soccer,” his sister Samar says, correcting him. “They call it soccer here.” Ahmed looks up at her quizzically before brushing the comment aside, as if he’s heard it before but finds the difference trivial. Hassan happily picks up the remote and hits a few buttons. But now there are two pictures on the screen: a movie and a soccer game. Hassan looks over at Ahmed in exasperation and says something to him in Arabic as he hands the remote to his son, who takes it confidently and quickly corrects the problem. The girls giggle in their seats on the side of the room. The hands on the clock that hangs on the wall between the living room and the kitchen turn slowly. The meat in the oven is almost done.  

Hassan and his family are Furs from Darfur, “the land of the Furs” in Sudan, where Arabs have forced black Africans to conform to their culture and strict interpretations of Islam for generations. Recently, Arab domination has turned into widespread violence, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands dead and more than two million Darfuris driven from their homes. Hassan calls the violence committed against his people by the Sudanese government genocide. It’s due to fundamentalism, he says.

Like most everyone from Darfur, Hassan is a Muslim, although he states matter-of-factly that the Arabs forced Islam onto his people. He prays and follows halal and raises his children as Muslims, but he is distrustful of those who claim a special knowledge of God. Who can really claim to know such things? Portland has a mosque, but Hassan does not go there for Friday prayers. He says the people there, mostly refugees from Somalia, are fundamentalists. He didn’t leave his homeland and forsake his profession — he was a journalist before he fled; now he works in the production line of a printing plant — to spend his time with fundamentalists, he says.

At 6:45 p.m., with the living room fully engulfed by the kitchen’s aromas, Ahmed excitedly digs through a pile of papers next to the TV until he finds the one that lists sunset times for this year’s Ramadan. Muslims throughout the world fast from dawn to sundown during the month of Ramadan, the holiest month in the Islamic calendar. It is thought to teach humility and sacrifice. By fasting during the day, Muslims show their commitment to God and learn about self-discipline and the plight of the less fortunate. Then at sunset each night, iftar, a large meal, is shared with family and friends.

“Six forty-seven,” Ahmed announces as he looks up from the sheet of paper. “One more minute.” He has been fasting all day today, one of four days during this Ramadan, in practice for all 30 days next year.

After Ahmed’s announcement, the children rush to the kitchen and come back with platters of food, which they place on the crowded coffee table. Then the whole family sits on the couch surrounding the coffee table. As the clock hits 6:47, Ahmed takes a bite of meat. But before he can enjoy it, Samar grabs the paper with sunset times from the spot on the couch where Ahmed left it. Her hunch confirmed, she shows him the correct time for the day: 6:57. “Tomorrow is the last night,” she says gently. He chews the meat slowly and swallows, then blushes and sinks back into the couch.

With 10 minutes to go until sundown, the family sits around the table telling jokes and laughing about Ahmed’s mistake. Daoud, a family friend in his 20s who is tall and slim and very dark, arrives at the door and is greeted with much joy. He is offered a seat in a chair that has been moved into the room for him. He sits and joins the conversation. Hassan tells how Ahmed confused the days and ate before sundown. He recounts how Samar corrected Ahmed and how the whole family burst into laughter. It has not yet been five minutes since it happened, but already Ahmed’s mistake is becoming something of a family legend, the kind that gets repeated every year and grows into something much bigger with each telling.

Daoud is just as amused by the tale as everyone else, but Ahmed is ready for the story to be forgotten. After the jokes die down, Daoud looks up at the TV screen and is reminded of an image he saw recently. He was watching TV at home, and suddenly it was showing a refugee camp in Darfur. He recognized someone on the screen, someone he knew back in Sudan. How strange it had felt to be here in Maine, where the cold wind blows off the ocean, and to see someone familiar so far away on the arid plains of Darfur. A silence hangs in the room as everyone’s mind shifts to another world.

But this is not the time for such thoughts. There is enough time in the day for worries and troubles, for anxieties about work and bills and loved ones. There is enough time for remembering one’s homeland, where men on horseback gun down civilians and makeshift bombs rain down from government planes, where people feel the drought to their very bones. There is time enough in the day for all that. Now it is time to be with family and friends, to think about the future and what could be, to tell stories about small mistakes made by boys trying to be men, and to enjoy food after tasting hunger.

On the table sits a tray of goat meat and onions, a plate piled high with flatbread, a bowl of pineapple slices, and two bowls of meat in its own broth. A small bowl is filled with red pepper flakes to dip the goat meat in. Pitchers of juice and cups and napkins — the table is so crowded there’s barely room for it all. Everyone looks around, waiting as the hands move around the clock and as the sun inches toward the horizon. Shadows are disappearing into darkness outside. The street is still empty. The wind still blows cold off the ocean just blocks away. But inside the thermostat is turned way up, the open oven still gives off heat, and everyone in the living room crowds around the table.

“It’s time to eat,” Hassan announces.

“But it’s only six fifty-five,” Samar exclaims.

“No matter. Let’s eat — it’s close enough,” he answers her with a smile.

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Blog

Now that is something: Duggar family expecting 19th child


 

  •  With 19 children, the Duggars will be using resources roughly 17 times more than an average family. Who cares about global warming or climate change or depleting natural resources? Let God figure that out.
  • Michelle Duggar has already spent 12 years of her life pregnant. How about her health and well being? No forget that — they have to obey God and have as many kids as possible. No qualms putting the mother's health and well being of the kids at risk.
  • And let us not forget the 18 kids that are already here. They have to enjoy not getting enough personal time and attention from parents too busy handling a mini-township.

Yes, let us be happy for Michelle Duggar. She is having her 19th child, and the only question people can think of asking is if there is a plan for more.

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Blog

Overheard on the subway, part 4


Guy #1: …so that's why our ancestors ran from animals, unless they were going to eat them.

Guy # 2: Every day is a battle, man.

– Manhattan-bound 2 train, morning rush hour

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Blog

Outcast


It has been a hectic week. As usual, I have left my university essay for the last week, after wasting a month in the hope that the essay would just disappear. I've now learned that procrastination is not something that can be banished after 12 years of school and four years of university — it just clings onto you like a soaking wet t-shirt. I now have three days to write a 20-page essay that I have not yet started. Therefore, instead of spilling out my thoughts on society, I wrote out the beginning of a short story that I have been working on. It's titled Outcast.

Outcast

I couldn't do it. The darkness penetrated my headlights as the rain whipped the windscreen, threatening to shatter my only shield: Hope eroding into nothingness. Again and again.  Vertigo. I envisaged the barrage of rain merging with my anguish, feeding it as my fingers trembled over the steel-cold trigger. I couldn't do it.

"TURN RIGHT!" my Mercedes screamed at me.

Below, a torrent raged on either side of the bridge. I looked into the review mirror; my drug-varnished eyes were swollen from the incessant crying. Pause. A blankness consumed all thought as I spun the steering wheel to the right, driving bonnet first into the river.

I sat calmly as water rushed into the car and gradually asphyxiated me. Nothing.

I held the metal tube to my head and pulled the trigger. Nothing.

I felt the bullet embed itself snugly in my cerebrum while I watched everything turn red. Nothing.

I waited for a while, then swam out, dried myself and walked back to the shed; ticking off "be empathetic" on my mental to-do list as I walked.

It was the usual Monday morning:

"What's on TV?" I asked ritually, knowing already that there was nothing that I would like. I blinked at the screen: reality show…soapie…reality show…reality show….soapie…movie…Hmmm…I lodged myself into the couch; it was going to be a long day.

"Why do you keep asking me that?" Jack snapped, six point five seconds too late. It was his morning tantrum, a vice that, as much as he tried, he could not rectify. I didn't mind it much, but, to him, it seemed to be the Great Wall of China between him and his ultimate goal of godhead. He blamed it on his 16-hour memory — medically, it did not exist but was something that his parents had told him as a kid and that he had continued to believe religiously. Of course I never corrected him. I found it entertaining watching him remembering to forget. 

If Jack had to describe his life he would compare it to that ancient game of snakes and ladders:  every day he progressed up the board and every morning he landed on a snake and was sent back home. Jack was not the embodiment of righteousness, but he tried, and his sins were forgiven away due to the innate good of his actions. Except in the mornings, when he remembered that he didn't remember and cursed away all traces of his chant-induced tranquil demeanour.

"WHERE ARE MY F***ING SOCKS?"

Of course, it was never a surprise when they went missing; Weasel tended to be quite explicit when he stole things. He didn't know how to steal. Gerald had attempted teaching it to him, but Weasel was an absolute klutz — an intelligent idiot whose only hope of survival was Jack's socks.  He was the type of person that one could never stay angry with. He had the constant look of a puppy chewing on inflated water boots and an inherent drive to please people. It made me want to kick him and chase him out into the cold just to watch him whimper. I was waiting for the right day. Monday was never the right day.

"F***ING HELL, WHERE IS WEASEL?!"

I returned to the TV screen, wondering whether I should remind him of his quest for spiritual fulfillment before he went too far. I hated the responsibility of making such decisions. In truth I didn't actually care about what people did or how they did it; the concept of good had become subjective, and not even I had the power to entrench it in a single-sentence definition.

Hardly anyone listened to that voice of reason at the back of their heads any more. They all needed direct responses: "signs." It was such an inconvenience. Even when I did provide them with hints, they brushed it aside as mere coincidences. People had forgotten how to freefallingly believe; they had to see and feel in scientific jargon before doing anything. My existence had equated to that of the dinosaurs who had aimlessly roamed themselves into extinction.

I heard Jack stampede down the stairs, his clenched fists punching the railings as his morning tirade bottled itself in his throat, waiting to explode. I decided to intervene before he entered the room: "Probably stoned in the middle of nowhere. Would you like a cup of coffee?" It was my voice of masked reason.

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personal stories. global issues.