wonderlust

Dana

2011-09-14T01:26:00.005-04:00

A couple weeks before I left America last year, on a tepid, early summer night, I visited the Pentagon memorial for the first time. There are 184 benches laid out in opposite directions, each hovering over a small pool of water. The benches that face the Pentagon are for the people who were in the building, so that when you read their names, you see the Pentagon in the background. The benches facing the other way remember those who were in the plane. They face the sky.

The benches are arranged in rows representing years of birth. The first row represents 1998. It has one bench; Dana Falkenberg was three. When you look at Dana’s bench, you see the sky, and inscribed inside the little pool below, you see the names of her family members, the ones we also lost. Her parents were taking her and her older sister Zoe to Australia that day. Their mother, a Georgetown professor, was going to be a visiting fellow. To get to Australia from Washington, you have to fly from Dulles to LAX first. And you have to do this on American, so that you can connect in Los Angeles to the Qantas flight that will take you to Sydney or Melbourne or Canberra, which is where Dana was going. The Falkenbergs were flying from Dulles to LAX on American Airlines flight 77. Thirteen days after visiting the memorial, and nine years after I first arrived in America, I flew from Dulles to LAX on American Airlines flight 75, before catching the Qantas connection to Sydney. I was going home.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary, my kids will watch me watching the reading of the names, and they will see me come close to tears whenever a family member comes to the end of her list of about a dozen names and, still struggling to say the words, ends with, “And my father, we miss you and we love you.” My kids, or maybe on the fiftieth anniversary, my grandkids, will see my eyes well up and they will ask, were you there? Did you know anyone? Did you know anyone who knew anyone? And to all these I will answer no. So why are you crying then?

I’ve never really been sure. In the days and weeks after September 11, in the common room of my freshman suite, I could not pull myself away from the TV and the stories of survivors and the bereaved, and those still searching. There was something compelling about the heartbreak, maybe something vulnerable about this country I had thought I knew and yet just started to know, the same way you don’t want to pull away from a conversation with someone who has just or finally opened up to you, who has just or finally revealed what it is that makes them hurt; their hopes and, yes, their fears. Maybe in the ten years since, as I’ve come closer to learning about grief and loss, and maybe in the years ahead, as I am sure to learn more, maybe the names and the stories affect me more, reach deeper into my soul and squeeze tighter. There is so much to say, big ideas about war and peace, about government and religion, about human rights and civil liberties, about how we interact, how we respond to crises and how we, as people and as nations, deal with loss. How we grieve. There is so much to say, and yet I don’t know what, or how. I think if they ask, if my kids or grandkids must know why something so long ago can still make me cry, I will tell them about Dana Falkenberg. I know I will still remember her name.

STS-135

2011-07-07T03:04:00.006-04:00

I bought the ticket. Flew all night, drove all day. From Hong Kong to New York to Orlando, where I picked up a rental, parked it on a sandy stretch of the south Atlantic shore and fell asleep in the back seats with the windows open and the lukewarm Florida breeze drifting through. No room at the inn. Jetlagged, I woke up without an alarm just as the sun rose over the Cape and the familiar figure in the distance, the size of my thumb. As morning grew, so did the crowd around me, thousands, cars lined up along the coast as far as you could see. A family of four stepped out of the minivan next to me and began to unload their picnic wares; the father offered me a beer. I unfurled a towel, stepped up and onto the hood of my rental, and took a swig. Daydreamed I was halfway to Tranquility and then, T-minus nothing at 11:26 a.m. eastern daylight time, I heard the rumble, felt the tremor before the truth, the storm before the storm, like plates shifting, grinding. The ground shook, the people shouted, and I watched, as Atlantis rocketed into a powder blue sky. The last one of its kind.

STS-135, the way I dream it.

I went to Space Camp in the eighth grade. This is probably the best time to go: at 13, you're just starting to be able to understand how cool some of the science is, how real it is, how there are these invisible forces that propel us, forward, and how explosive are the chemical reactions that power our progress. At the same time, at 13, at least when I was 13, you're not yet beset by either peer or parental pressure to get your head out of the clouds. You get to be the launch controller during a shuttle mission simulation, you get to try on the spacesuit and bounce around on the one-sixth gravity chair, and you think, yeah, I could do this one day. I could go to space.

The names help. Discovery. Endeavour. Atlantis. Heavy with gravitas, built to inspire. They would be corny if they weren't imprinted on the wing of a spacecraft that launches itself 200 miles into the sky, can make a three-point turn while in orbit and dock with an international space station or parallel park near a super space telescope so its astronauts can do a spacewalk and pull out some tools and fix the telescope. In outer space. And then this 200,000 pound machine makes its way back to Earth, burning through the atmosphere, landing like any other airplane on a runway. How is this for real? Spacewalk. Space telescope. Space station. Spacecraft. This is the stuff dreams are made of; even just the idea that there are wings on the thing and we are talking about flying.

I could've gone, could've been on that flight to New York tonight. I have the money, even the time. But I can't. It's a step too indulgent, a stretch, like if I did this I would be messing with my karma. I've gotten to go to a lot of awesome things in my life, to the Olympics in Beijing, the Inauguration in DC, and so many, many places that are the stuff of other people's dreams. I'm scared of pushing my luck, that that rainy day will come and I won't be able to afford an umbrella. You can't have everything. You can't be everywhere. Some things in life you just miss; you miss them because you never had them, or you miss them because you had them and lost them. I'm lucky enough, so very lucky, that I don't miss much. If I'm 13 and I want to go to Space Camp, I go. If I want to go to the Olympics, or the Inauguration, I go. If I want to be a lawyer, or a writer, I go. But you don't get everything. Some things in life just suck; some things you just miss. I wish I was going to watch the last space shuttle launch tomorrow. I wish I could see the crowds, feel the earth shake like no other way there is. I wish I could feel my dreams rising with the shuttle, the closest realest thing we have to seeing ourselves go to infinity and beyond. I wish. We are promised as children that we can go wherever our dreams will take us, and no wonder some of us dream to be astronauts, so we can go as far as we can go, dream as far as we can dream.

I will never have the space shuttle. Even if I left right now, I wouldn't make it in time. I will never have in my eyes its smoky trajectory burning through the sky, or the rocket fumes in my nose, or the thundering in my ears, the trembling at my feet. I will never have the space shuttle. I will only ever be able to dream it.

Which is probably just the way it should be.

June 16, 2011

2011-06-25T01:20:00.001-04:00

I got caught in a deluge the other night, and when it hit me, it hit me just like that, italicized, like the rain was coming down so hard even the words to describe it were soaked and falling to the ground. I was in the back streets of Sheung Wan, an old part of town on the outskirts of Central that rests against the side of a hill. Steep stone staircases run up and down and through the area, and on a sunny Sunday morning you can play snakes and ladders with the past, sliding down to a street of antique stores that sell Bruce Lee posters from the 60s and twin-lens reflex cameras from the 30s, or climbing up to peek inside the few Edwardian mansions that remain, the once proud homes not of colonial officials, but of the Chinese compradors who even then—or maybe especially then—had a thing about putting the white man in his place.

But on a dark and stormy Thursday night, the staircases cascade into waterfalls, the rain drowns out the sounds of today and the clouds block out the sights, and suddenly, in those back streets of Sheung Wan, it’s like you’re walking through an old photo, or playing out a scene from In the Mood for Love. You could just as well be looking out from under your umbrella into the Hong Kong of the 1950s, a turbulent, less hopeful place, the Hong Kong of my father. There is one street just like this, Bridges Street, with staircases on either end, an art-deco church, the red-brick YMCA building built at the close of the First World War and, across from it, the old Chinese YMCA secondary school. In the dark, in the downpour, it looks exactly what it must have looked like to my dad as he came to school here each day as a teenager, not long before he immigrated to Australia. Maybe he stood there one rainy day just as I did, looking down the street past the church and the school, beyond the staircase, wondering where this road was going to take him, and if it was ever going to take him home.

22

2011-06-04T04:19:00.001-04:00

Kamikaze

2011-03-15T06:24:00.001-04:00

I remember very little of the history of modern Japan, even though it was one of the last classes I took in college. Words like "Meiji" and "Kamakura" start to evoke something in my mind, but I'm not exactly sure what, and I definitely cannot recall when.

But there is one story that stuck, a story that isn't even about modern Japan. It was probably covered in that first lecture, the one that begins all modern history classes: how we got to this point.

How did we get to this point? A tsunami swallowing up the land--and the people--that named it. Nuclear meltdowns in the country best prepared to prevent them. And elsewhere, thousand-dollar-a-day mercenaries hired by a crazed dictator who has sworn to fight his civil war to the last man, the final drop of blood. The Saudi army marches into Bahrain. An American spy shoots and kills Pakistanis in downtown Lahore before an unmarked van speeds by to rescue him. Carnage, even on the I-95, a Chinatown bus accident so gruesome the Times report reads like a horror film. They were coming home from gambling, from Mohegan Sun. That one, more than any other, could have been me.

How did we get to this point? It is 2011. I can check the weather on my phone--I can watch live video of the weather, anywhere in the world, from anywhere in the world, while I am on the move, with the flick of my finger, on the same pocket-sized screen of a phone that I use to videoconference with my mother five thousand miles away, for free--and yet a great nation--by any measure, one of the greatest--holds its breath for fear which way the wind blows.

Over 700 years ago, at the height of its dominance, the Mongol empire unleashed on Japan--twice--the largest naval attack the world had ever seen. The second attack would remain the largest naval attack ever attempted until the Allies stormed Normandy more than 650 years later. After conquering parts of Europe and South Asia, all of Central Asia, China, and Korea, the Mongols went after Japan. The Mongols sent 4,400 ships, and 140,000 men. The Japanese prayed for the wind.

The wind came. 130,000 men died. Hardly any were Japanese. And the Mongols never attacked Japan again.

That's the story that stuck.

I doubt I will ever know what it is like to be truly exposed to the elements. It is not only because I tend to live in places less prone to natural disasters and war. It is mostly because I will always have this, this privileged cocoon from which I write, a life blessed with the comfort of knowing that wherever I go, whatever dangerous situations I might come across, I can always go somewhere else, because I have the passport, and the money, and, always, the choice. This, I think, is what it means to be sheltered.

The world feels frustrated, almost panicking. In Japan today, in Libya and in Bahrain, and in the Bronx hospitals where bodies are being left unidentified because those who know them are afraid to come forward, people seem to have little choice. They seem to be only able to leave things to the way of this sometimes too trying world, in the hands of someone or something else. And we, with them, we pray for the wind.

再見

2010-10-24T10:57:00.002-04:00

We say 再見 as a parting wish, to see you again, aspirational, a hopeful infinitive because it assumes there is no end to our acquaintance. That, it seems, is how I know this place. These streets are not native to me; I was born a long way away, didn't even come here until I was five. But somehow, Hong Kong keeps drawing me back.

Racenight traffic. Typhoon warnings, people hoping--and drinking--they'll get the day off because of a direct hit supertyphoon that wasn't. The minibus driver innocently pointing his hand to the bright red 滿 sign. That perfect, rare October weather. These so familiar rhythms in just my first few days back, this song I know all the words to but keep playing over and over again.

The city knows this about me. It won't let me become a citizen, but I am--have always been--that special kind of resident: permanent. The city knows maybe too much about me, more than I care to share with the world. And so by happenstance I find myself living on a road where my father grew up, a road that bears my name, where old friends and mostly friendly ghosts of my past catch up to me and say, hey, we meet again. 再見. Words that could just as easily be a greeting, not a farewell, because when it comes to Hong Kong, I should just stop pretending I will ever really say goodbye.

Accra, Ghana

2010-08-28T18:23:00.002-04:00

Home is a funny thing. I have thought and written about it enough that I now bore myself when it comes up, and though it may take me a bit longer than most to say where home is, I have decided that there is no easy answer, for anyone, anywhere, to say what home is. But I know there are shades of home, levels and zones of comfort that grow on you, so that even after just two weeks in one place, when you go to another, you find yourself wanting to go back. Back home.

That’s how I felt as I slid back into Ghanaian territory a few days ago, in spite of the officer who yelled at me for trying to take a photo of the border crossing. Maybe home isn’t a place you--or at least I--ever reach, but at least you can feel it when you’re moving towards it, a few sometimes grimy steps closer to what you know, even if you’ve only known it for two weeks. After preferring taxis for most my time in Ghana, a tro-tro (a van with lots of people in it) was suddenly and pleasantly familiar, certainly moreso than whatever means of le transport I could find in Togo. Then sitting in the tro-tro, knowing where I was going, knowing even where I would be sleeping that night, felt like I was eight or nine again, back from a family vacation again, coming out the doors at Kai Tak, walking into our apartment, floors always freshly cleaned while we were away from home.

There is a suburb in the northeast of Accra called Achimota, far enough from the center of town that taxi drivers snarl a little when you tell them that’s where you want to go, before invariably saying, “Traffic!” and bumping up the fare a few cedis, at least for us obrunis. Achimota is home to the African Brewing Company, which produces that universal liquid form of sustenance called Guiness, as well as Star, one of the two major local brews. A nearby roundabout, ABC Junction, is named after the brewery, though it is not so much a junction or a roundabout as it is a good-luck-to-you convergence of traffic from all imaginable directions on roads yet to be paved. Coming from Accra, if you survive a left turn at ABC, it will take you down a small road, past a mysterious Chinese Recovery Clinic, before a right turn down an alley leaves you at the foot of the Telecentre Guesthouse. Or, as hundreds of Unite For Sight volunteers have called it for varying lengths of time over the last few years, home.

It’s hard to say what stood out so much about Ghana, or at least Accra, but that gives the mistaken impression that it was unsatisfying, that I flew all this way to a part of the world I’d never been to before and can’t really show much for it. Though we travel almost by definition to seek out what is exotic, it felt reassuring and maybe even more worthwhile to find myself in a part of the world I’d never been to before and not OMG my way through each day. That which was at all exotic, at all weird and previously unheard of, was really not so much, or else how did it become so familiar, so fast? It takes but a few days to get used to sucking a milkshake out of a bag (genius), or water out of a bag (less genius), or really just sucking anything out of a bag. It takes even less time to find yourself stuck in an Accra traffic jam, sticking your hand out of the window with some pesawas to buy whatever random crap--and it is a lot of crap, and it is very random--the street vendors have to offer. They are street vendors like anywhere else in the world. In Accra, they just happen to actually be on the street, in the middle of the street, running up and down the street to give you change once traffic starts moving again. And after all, everything they sell is, kind of like me, made in China at some point further up the manufacturing stream.

That which was familiar was intensely, intimately, familiar. Ghana, where every little chop bar offers this one dish, jollof rice and chicken, which is only one or two spices removed from my family’s consensus favorite meal in the Vietnamese suburbs of Sydney: 炸雞紅飯. Ghana, where every young man is wearing either a soccer or basketball jersey, often the ubiquitous Samsung written on Chelsea blue, but even, every now and then, “Starbury” emblazoned across the front. And Ghana, where every few blocks on small side streets a couple guys have set up refrigerator-sized speakers that blast out more 90s RnB than I have heard, at least outside of my own earphones, since about the eighth grade. It’s on the streets and on the radio, always, the kind of music I know better than any other: Joe, Dru Hill, Blackstreet, K-Ci & JoJo, Brandy, Monica, and other random songs I can karaoke by heart from soundtracks of movies I never saw because Set it Off and Hav Plenty were not ever going to be released in the theaters where I grew up.

Oh and Ghana, where girls get in the club for free but guys pay a small fortune just to enter, never mind the overpriced drinks. Home.

The last couple nights at the Telecentre, when most of the other volunteers had already left, I hung out at night on the couches in the lobby, watching the surprisingly good movie channel and chatting with Naomi, one of the girls you might call a night receptionist but really just sleeps on the couch, watches the movie channel (or Africa Magic!), and chats with volunteers. Turning 21 next week, she told me how she had for the first time gone to a club just a few days before, and how happy she had been to dress up and dance and just enjoy herself. She’s studied business in college but now wants to start over and switch to nursing. She is single and lives at home with her mother. So basically, that Times article last week on twentysomethings that everyone who is twentysomething read the first couple pages of is almost just as much about Naomi as it is about me, or you.

At one point, maybe because American Pie was on, and later another movie where Heather Locklear falls in love with a much younger surfer dude in Hawaii, Naomi started talking about relationships and lectured me about still being single at 27, which conveniently happened to be the same age as the surfer dude. She told me to remember some deep, if basic, truths about people, and love, and though it’s all been said before, it never hurts to be reminded.

That perhaps best describes my time in Ghana, where the other volunteers were all still in or just out of college, which is not a huge difference in years, but can sometimes feel like a different era altogether. Where I feel like I’m coming to the end of--or at least slowing--my hopscotch around the world, most of the others seemed to be just beginning. Where, a world away from home, I sought comfort in the familiar, others seemed to relish the strange and unexpected.

When the other volunteers were still around at the Telecentre, one of the other movies that came on was Under the Tuscan Sun. I like Diane Lane, but probably not quite enough to have watched Under the Tuscan Sun under any other circumstances. And yet sitting around on those couches with my newest of friends, the ceiling fans rocking gently overhead, the movie’s less than subtle theme of holding on to childish excitement and passion struck a chord. Twenty seven is too young, far too young, to need to be reminded of childish excitement and passion, but when everyone around you is at least five or six or seven years younger, it strikes a nervous chord; when you are less than two months from signing away your life to a law firm, it strikes a nervous chord.

I can’t say I’ll miss the horrendous gridlock, or the cold showers, or drinking water out of a bag. I can’t tell you that Ghana changed me in any major way, or that the experience has somehow altered the course of my life, that I am heading anywhere different today than I was a month ago. But on that long road to home, on this journey whose uncertain destination I am finally starting to embrace, my time in Ghana will be like one of the many speedbumps we rolled over on our daily van rides to those outlying villages in need of some basic eye care. It will be a place where from my hurried pace I slowed down, gently eased up and over a short break in my stride, and was reminded of the dangers of speeding through life.

If I can feel at home in Ghana, I suppose I can feel at home anywhere.

Keta Secondary

2010-08-25T19:24:00.003-04:00

Late in the summer of 1967, a young Oxford graduate from Bristol landed in a town called Keta, on the southeastern corner of Ghana, just off Togo, where each year the lagoon overflows and makes it two hours harder to get to Accra. He taught Latin at Keta Secondary School for a year, the lack of hot water enough to make him grow a beard. When he left Ghana, he found a job with a British chemical company, for which he worked and traveled around the world, mostly in Asia, for the next four decades. And two years ago, he married my mum.

I went back yesterday to Keta, maybe something like the way us immigrant kids get asked how often we go back, to a motherland many of us never came from. The headmaster welcomed me with a now familiar Ghanaian handshake and finger snap--the kind I could never get right in middle school and still can't--bought me lunch and a pineapple/mango/passion fruit smoothie (excellent, says this juice connoisseur), and apologized that all the old records had been destroyed. But he ordered a couple underlings to dig up some old black and white photos, and through these I scrutinized the sore thumb white male faces for any resemblance at all to my stepdad. I found a couple that may or may not be him, tender-faced with a beard and full head of hair, in which he would be, incredibly, five years younger than I am today.

As I left Keta Secondary School to catch a tro-tro back to Accra, the headmaster predictably but nevertheless warmly told me that this, this little place in West Africa perched on the edge of a lagoon and the Atlantic Ocean, would always be my home. I thanked him for his kindness, and for lunch, and went on my way down the road that, for now, before the coast erodes again, still led back to Accra.

Manila, 23 August 2010

2010-08-23T19:17:00.004-04:00

There is a lot of crap going on in the world right now, to a lot of people who don't deserve it. Of course, there always is. Right now it just happens to be lots and lots of flooding, worst in Pakistan, but real bad in China, too. Today, like any day in recent memory, a couple dozen Somalis made the simple decision to step outside their home and died for it. And I spent the day driving around the outskirts of Lomé, watching normal Togolese live lives that are for no good reason a whole lot harder than mine.

But if I feel injustice today--injustice, as in that soul-crunching chorus of what the hell was that for?--it is for the craziness that went down on this bus in Manila.

It is hard to think of a less offensive group of people in the world than the people of Hong Kong. I am biased, sure. But really: they are generally not very religious, have no military, are happy to be part of China but do not care for Chinese domination, dress decently well, queue in line better than anyone, and, like most people in the world, really just want to make a comfortable living above all else. Sometimes that includes going on vacation, as far as Europe or as close as the Philippines, maybe a long weekend or a couple days off what is surely close to the hardest-working environment in the world.

I felt the same way during SARS. All these people, just wanting to get by, and working hard to do that, held hostage, savagely killed--killed!--by a freak accident none of them did anything to provoke. It just seems so utterly unfair, so randomly cruel and twisted a thing to happen to a people who are all about playing it straight and by the rules. They're not even much of a sentimental people, but on June 4 every year they light candles, and when there's a big earthquake in China they donate billions, and today, all flags on government buildings are at half-staff. I just saw Donald Tsang on CNN, our ever stiff and unemotional leader, and he looked genuinely shocked and just completely sad.

Me too. WTF.

Lomé, Togo

2010-08-21T19:13:00.002-04:00

I am in Togo. I am not really sure why.

I actually know, or once knew, a fair bit about Togo. I knew the political parties, the important dates and places, and the human rights violations. They were one of our biggest constituencies at the time, Togolese asylum seekers. I remember one guy in particular, whose case dragged on for months, as I sat with him through re-interview after re-interview, trying to put together the missing pieces, the strained itinerary that led him from somewhere near where I am typing right now, over continents and across oceans, all the way to the UNHCR offices at 250 Shanghai Street, a half-hour taxi ride from where I grew up.

But I am not here, in Togo, to flip a script. As interesting as I found interviewing asylum seekers, it doesn’t exactly make you want to visit the places they were running from. And as far I knew before opening up the Togo section of my West Africa Lonely Planet, there wasn’t much to visit here anyway. Even after opening up the Togo section, there doesn’t seem to be much to visit. It’s not you, though, Togo. It’s me.

And yet here I am, here in Togo, just because.

Just because it was somewhere else to go, another border to cross. I enjoyed the volunteer gig in Ghana over the last 10 days more than I thought I would, but still would have felt cheated if I had flown all the way out here, dropped all that money on that pricey plane ticket (and a multiple-entry visa), and not gone to at least one other country, not crossed one more border. Just. One. More.

I am slightly addicted to border-crossings. I seek them out wherever I go, insisting on going overland even when it is not only more time-consuming and draining but often more expensive, too. I get a mild high whenever I enter the short--or sometimes not so short--strip of land between immigration checkpoints, always pausing to think about what happens when something happens in these no man’s lands. I am also always just a little afraid, ever ready to run through my options if they won’t take my passport, or ask for a bribe, or for whatever reason just go nuts on me for making their day.

Most of all, I am always, always in awe of how real a border crossing is, how removed it is from the newspaper headlines and presidential summits that proclaim something can be done about the way people move. Nothing gives the finger to international treaties and migration policies negotiated behind closed doors at the highest levels of diplomacy like a couple Togolese immigration officers sitting under half a wooden shack, their plastic chairs sinking into the sand as they write down my passport details by hand in a ginormous ledger book whose binding is on duct-tape life support. I get an unhappy grunt when I motion to borrow a pen to fill out the visa application. I do not borrow the pen. While I am being processed, whatever that means, dozens of others cross the line from Ghana to Togo behind me, and all the immigration officers can do is yell at them. Some stop. Some don’t.

When I pay my 10,000 CFA visa fee with a handful of small bills, the officer takes them and without a word hands them to the hustler who has been bugging me about giving me a ride into the city. Plan B begins rolling in my head, replaying the familiar, but still untested, dilemma of whether it is riskier to refuse to pay a bribe or to offer to pay a bribe. The hustler hands the officer back a nice, single 10,000 CFA bill. It turns out he is a human cash register/money changer/taxi driver dispatcher. I get dispatched, but not before my driver storms out of the car because, I gather, the hustler wants a commission from my taxi fare. The driver gets back in, everyone is still yelling, but I just want to go. So I close my door as the hustler asks me for some money, hoping very much that I am not closing it on his hand, and the driver becomes my best friend forever in the whole country as he drives away with purpose, ignoring the hustler’s repeated banging on the side of the car.

I record these details not because it is anything so crazy or out of the ordinary. I picked Togo because it was the less crazy country to go to that was adjacent to Ghana, and though each time I cross a border there is a good chance it is the only time I will ever cross that border, I know there are plenty other travelers--all of them psychotic--who do this all the time, all over the world.

No, I record all this because it is a way to relieve the exhaustion, because I am exhausted, and it is time to begin the process of accepting that really, I am just too old for this shit. Not because I think 27 is too old to be dragging yourself through dodgy border crossings. Much more because the thrill is dissipating. Instead of wanting to see more, I count down the days before I get to go home, wherever that is. The images still fascinate me, the impossibly wide and always very dusty cavern between policy and reality. The sounds, the scenes, still entice me, another slice of the human experience to fill in on this atlas, my coloring book. But the thrill; the thrill seems to be giving way to stress, to crossing over the fine line between, and yielding to frustration, to not this again, and what am I doing here, and why am I here alone?

Togo, this place where I can’t answer those questions, may just be the place where I hang up my too-worn solo travel sneakers. I am about done with this whole traveling alone deal. It’s time I take my talents to South Beach, time to stop going places just to go places, time to start going somewhere, with someone. It could be Togo, it could be Hong Kong, it could be anywhere; I still want to go everywhere. Just not like this anymore.

Jeremy Lin

2010-07-21T08:53:00.005-04:00

About Jeremy Lin signing with the Warriors, I said to some friends, "Talk about dreams coming true."

One of them says many absurd things but will spout a line of truth every now and then. His reply:

"any black guy from ghetto who goes to nba has dream come true."

Which is fair enough. But I don't know that black guy's dream. I've never lived it, never felt it, never dreamed it. Jeremy Lin? That dream? That dream I know.

My mom indulged my love for basketball. She bought me boxes and boxes of basketball cards, asked her colleagues to help her find the jerseys I wanted whenever she was in the States for business, let me put up a lifesize poster of David Robinson in my room. But I don't even need to describe what she thought--or rather, what she never thought--about my chances of playing in the NBA. Not only is there nothing to describe, but everyone here knows it. Knows the utter absurdity of something like that, so absurd it's not even absurd. It's just...nothing.

Even when my basketball dreams were most vivid, when I spent hours on a summer day chucking up threes in game sevens as the buzzer sounded in my imagination, they were so ludicrous that even I knew they would always just be dreams. I went to basketball camp in high school, but by then the dream was well past due; I never once entertained any real thoughts of how I could play ball at a US high school level, or if I could try to walk on a college team. Even before it was clear I would never be good enough--and that was pretty early on--when I was a fifth or sixth grader playing in pick up games with guys two or three years older, I never thought, hey, what's the road to playing college ball? How do you actually get to the NBA?

The circumstances are different, very. Clearly, this kid was already a stud in high school, winning a California state championship and all. But I bet you there are camcorder tapes in his family's Palo Alto basement, of middle school games, organized or on the blacktop, and he's playing with a bunch of other little Asian American tweeners, with ridiculously baggy And-1 t-shirts and shorts, and some nice kicks, and when they pass they do a little lookaway, or they stick their tongue out as they go for a layup, or try a couple mixtape stunts that have no practical use. And from this footage you could superimpose footage of my middle school years, and it would barely leave even a watermark. We wear the same Lakers jersey, only his is number 8, Bryant; mine is number 9, Van Exel. We even rock the same sneakers, maybe some Air Max Uptempos, his being retro releases of mine.

My friend is right. Jeremy Lin probably never had to worry about food on his plate or clothes to wear, maybe even got his pick of Jordans if he got a couple As on his report card or something. And if he never made (or makes) it to the NBA, boo freaking hoo, he walks out the door with an degree in econ from Harvard and into a bank or law school. If you're talking rags to riches, the absolute distance he travels from one world to another, he has nothing on some of the hard knock kids who start inches away from bullets to their graves and wind up suiting up for the All-Star Game in the middle of a season in which they will make eight digits of dollars. For sheer degree of difficulty, there is no comparison.

But there's still something the Caron Butlers of the world will never know. There's that look, not even dismissive--the thought is so ridiculous it doesn't even need to be dismissive--from your mom when you're 12 years old and you tell her you want to play in the NBA. It doesn't even fall into "Are you kidding me?" or "Don't be crazy." It's already moving on to the next thought. Turn off the Mega Drive. Eat your dinner. Do your homework. Do your Chinese homework.

I'm not bitter about any of it. My window to the NBA closed sometime around my second trimester of gestation. I'm just saying, Jeremy Lin, Golden State Warrior. That's kind of a big deal.

Manute Bol

2010-06-20T10:55:00.002-04:00

Manute Bol died today. I suppose all of the NBA in general is in some ways one big freak show, where we pay lots of money to watch men who would be frighteningly gigantic in any other setting run and jump up and down a court and throw a little ball into a little hoop. But Manute Bol was a freak among freaks. He was so damn skinny that if he were born in another era, I'm afraid to say he probably could have been in one of those real, travelling circus freak shows. And when I was seven or eight years old, first getting into basketball, that was how I remember him. A freak.

He actually wasn't bad. He led the League in blocks a couple times, and made more of a career than either Gheorghe Muresan (although Muresan did also have his fledgling acting career) or Shawn Bradley. In the 7'6" club, only Yao really has anything on him. But even Yao has never put in six threes the way Manute Bol did once. I couldn't find footage of that game, though I'm sure it happened, but there is a highlight reel of him hitting threes in general. There is also this great clip of him getting punked by a young Sir Charles.

(Funny how these days we can instantly create our very own memorial video tribute, instead of waiting all year for the Oscar reel.)

Still, on his basketball career alone, Manute Bol's death doesn't get mentioned on the frontpage of either the New York Times or ESPN. No, that happened today because of an adjective the obits keep using in addition to "former NBA player": humanitarian. As all the articles say, after retiring from the NBA, Manute Bol often went back to his native Sudan for what all the articles call peace and reconciliation work.

I don't know how I feel about this. There has always been something shady to me about this side of Manute Bol. For one, I doubt he ever had much money. A healthy NBA salary, sure, but an NBA salary from the 80s and early 90s, maybe a half a million a year at the very most. And for some reason, whatever work he did in Sudan never got the same kind of press or NBA support that Dikembe Mutumbo's work did. I'm sure part of this is Mutumbo being able to play the game better, and not merely the game of basketball, and maybe whatever Manute Bol was doing in Sudan simply wasn't the white man's idea of charity and good deeds.

But I can't help this gut feeling I have that Manute Bol was always being used. I saw him once, in person. He came to speak at Yale, about the work he was doing in Sudan, but it was a strange talk. Not at all well-publicized, and only a few dozen students showed up. I don't think it's going too far to say we were probably all there just to say we saw Manute Bol, and not because of anything to do with Sudan. What was even weirder was that he barely said anything. There was a normal-sized white guy with him who did all the talking, and it was about this program where they were trying to raise money to buy and then free slaves.

This kind of thing is unavoidably controversial. Obviously, there are good intentions, but equally obviously, it seems like a very bad idea to perpetuate the market for slaves by buying them, even if you're doing it to free them. I think I remember Manute Bol saying a few words about how he had recently bought back one of his sisters, and it was just such a bizarre thing to hear. I know there are other kinds of vigilante NGOs out there like this, and maybe it's courageous, maybe they simply have the balls to do what most of us don't, but it's still bizarre.

It was only more bizarre because this was right around the time Manute Bol had signed up with a minor league hockey team in Connecticut. There was no shame in the team's management openly saying they merely wanted to sell tickets, but they also used the line that part of the proceeds were going to whatever organization Manute Bol was supporting at the time, which was presumably this slave buyback operation. There was really no pretending here: it was a freak show, plain and simple. Pay the price of admission and see a 7'6" African man put on padding and a hockey mask and attempt to ice skate. I remember he also got into a pretty serious car accident right around this time.

His death today is no less weird. The guy was 47. Died of some rare kidney disease and skin condition, all of which were announced not by family members but by the executive director of a new group Manute Bol has been associated with, Sudan Sunrise, which the news reports say is trying to promote reconciliation in Southern Sudan, but these vague descriptions sound suspiciously like whatever description this executive director gave when asked on the phone by a reporter what it was the group did exactly. I know nothing about it or the situation in Sudan, but it just seems fishy, and it feels like the group almost certainly has a political or religious agenda.

To be sure, most groups do have some kind of a political or religious agenda. I just can't shake this shady feeling I get about everything to do with Manute Bol. On the one hand I have this very simple, fun, childhood image of his bony limbs swimming in a Sixers uniform, waving his Dhalsim-like arms to protect the basket and occasionally hoist a three, and on the other I see a sad freak show subject who seems like he's been manipulated his entire life, even up until his death. Again, I'm completely uninformed about the details of his life or his work, but I get the impression so are all the obituary writers.

Which is exactly what makes all this so weird and unsettling. I don't know. I just don't know.

So much crap

2010-06-15T03:47:00.006-04:00

One more box.

I thought I was getting better at moving. I've tried to mature, to not try to squeeze out every last corner of my luggage, or still be sending things off hours before my plane leaves. Where I used to fly with two large suitcases everywhere (plus carry on plus backpack), I now make sure to fly with one large suitcase and one medium-sized bag (plus carry on plus backpack). When I moved my stuff into storage in DC a year ago, I did it all by myself, emptying out my whole apartment over a week and a half piece by piece on handtrucks and carts two blocks down to the storage facility. Impressive, but utterly ludicrous. So when I moved stuff back out of storage at the beginning of the year, I hired a moving company. Couple hundred dollars perfectly well spent.

But in terms of moving moving, like packing up all my shit and moving, I seem to be stuck somewhere between puberty and college. I have now sent boxes out in three batches, each one meant to be the last. Six boxes out on Friday, four more over the weekend, and three today. That I once--as in, four days ago--thought six boxes would be enough to get seven years of crap from the US to Hong Kong and Australia is appalling, just ridiculous. And there would be even more boxes if it weren't for a very generous friend who is keeping some of that crap for me for when I come back to take the bar.

The scale of my underestimation is so ginormous, for someone so experienced in moving, that you might as well have had me lease an exploding oil rig in the Gulf and pretend that the ruptured well was something closer to a leaky faucet rather than the biggest environmental disastercatastropheclusterfuck this side of the Industrial Revolution. I just thought I was better than this. I'm supposed to be the wily veteran of moving, able to draw cheap fouls and flop and get in the other team's head. The last few days has exposed me for the overconfident rookie I really am. Knowing what I know now, I thought I should've been the kind of person who said, look, I've got a ton of crap, so let me just accept from the beginning that I'm going to need to ship out 15 to 20 boxes.

But no. Instead, after shipping out six and then four and then three, and stuffing my one large suitcase and one medium-sized bag (plus carry on plus backpack) so that their seams are leaving stretchmarks, there sits next to me a small pile of books and just more crap that will need to go in one. More. Freaking. Box. I will send it out sometime ~~tomorrow~~ morning. My flight is at six in the afternoon. And so here I am, it's (well past) 3 a.m. I must be lonely, squeezing out every last corner of my luggage, still sending things off hours before my plane leaves.

Never again.

21

2010-06-05T00:23:00.003-04:00

I've thought about it for years, and I just don't know exactly how I feel about June 4, 1989. Over time, I've come to understand it as something not so easily understood. It used to be something pretty visceral, an ideological foundation, and a big part of a since-discarded ambition to play a part in shaping the future of China. Now, though it has never in my mind become defensible or justifiable, I cringe a little whenever that horrible moment in time is used to characterize China as a whole. Tiananmen, I want to remind people, has been around a long time.

I remain confused.

Maybe all I should say is that there is this statute right outside Georgetown Law, that I've seen almost every day for much of the last three years, because it's right where I get off the bus, and it's the Goddess of Democracy, the one created by students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 as a sister to Lady Liberty. And so many times when I've seen it, I've thought, when I'm ever in DC on June 4, I'm going to go and pay my respects, the same way I do in Hong Kong, at the annual candlelight vigil that is the only open commemoration of the Tiananmen Square protests on Chinese soil.

One hundred and fifty thousand people showed up at the Hong Kong vigil last night, the most ever recorded by the police, even more than in 1990, and after even the organizers said there would be a steep dropoff from last year's gathering, which was huge because it was the twentieth anniversary. I write about it every year, because it amazes me every year, tens of thousands of normal people who sing songs and light candles, literally both a beacon and island of freedom for the world's oldest civilization. I'm not sure anything makes me prouder to say I'm from Hong Kong.

So this afternoon, being in DC, on June 4, I took the bus to that statue outside my school. I stood for a while and sat for a while, and explained to curious passersby why there were several bouquets of flowers there today. A few teenage Ethiopian-American girls giggled over whether it was similar to a university protest in Ethiopia a couple years ago, and asked me to take their picture for them. The woman of a scruffy couple smelling of alcohol said, "They shouldn't do that, kill people for protesting." Later, a few sentences into my explanation, it suddenly clicked for one motherly Hispanic woman. "Yes, June," she said. "I remember."

Not long after, a few Chinese men parked around the corner and started setting up some chairs and a banner, for what would be a simple remembrance later in the evening. One of them asked me, in English, if I lived nearby, and I said no, and then in Chinese, I just graduated from school here.

"I'm from Hong Kong," I said.

"You must have been still small then."

"Yeah."

"Lots of people in Hong Kong still remember, right?"

"Yeah, tens of thousands, every year."

"All these years later, they still remember."

They still remember. I think that's all I really want to say. I still remember, and I will keep remembering, and for a very simple reason, much simpler than all the difficult historical and political nuances. It's the same reason that I think first drew me in. It's this: if I had been a college student in Beijing in 1989, I can't help but think I would have been there.

Barbri

2010-05-26T00:02:00.000-04:00

I have been hearing about the ridiculousness of bar review classes from the very beginning of law school. Everyone goes through it, after all. Thousands of law graduates, every year. I think usually the urge is to write about unique experiences. This is not one of them. But that's part of what makes it so bizarre.

After paying $125,000 to study the law for three years, I graduated on Sunday and then began on Monday this new course to study the law again, only in two months, for another few thousand dollars. I was literally back in class not 24 hours after receiving my diploma, to learn in three days the same subject I spent a whole semester on in my first year. And then I will spend another three days covering another subject that took another semester during law school, and after we've covered everything we learned in law school, we'll spend a few more days here and there covering all the things we didn't learn in law school.

This is strange enough. What makes it even more surreal--and again, this is an experience almost every single American law student goes through--is that it's all done by video. I pack my computer in my bag at home, catch the bus to GW Law School, walk up the stairs to the second-floor lecture hall, sit down, and for four hours a day watch the larger-than-life image a of a professor projected on a screen. And in law school lecture halls all over the country, this same video is being played, like we were all watching the moon landing or something. If you get there early, you can hear the morning class watching the end of the same lecture, and if you stay late, you'll hear the night class watching the beginning again.

So far, the professor has been great; lays out the law really clearly and tells funny stories to help us remember the material. But I will never actually meet him. We laugh at his stories, but he'll never hear us. I really can't overstate how odd it feels to catch myself genuinely laughing at one of his jokes, and to see everyone else in the classroom laughing, at a picture on a screen. I guess it's no different than going to the movies.

But it is different. It's completely different. We're studying for the bar exam, to be qualified as lawyers. That's not at all like watching a movie. And since the majority of students go through bar review with this one company, most of the bar exam takers, who come from all different sorts of schools with all different sorts of course requirements and offerings, will all only be thinking of the same lectures by the same professors on the days of the exam. I'm both looking forward to and dreading the moment when in some huge conference hall or ballroom in an Albany hotel, everyone turns to the same question about a hypothetical that today's professor made a great joke about, and we will laugh at the same time, the way all 20 of us kids in my AP Physics class laughed at the same time when we saw a question we definitely hadn't covered in class.

This is how people become lawyers in this country. Strange days.

A missing box

2010-05-21T20:41:00.001-04:00

I graduate in less than 48 hours.

Right before I started law school, I sent a box of my things from my friend's place in Stanford to my new dorm address in DC. It was stuff I had left at his place on the way back to Hong Kong right after college, knowing I would be back in a year to start at Georgetown. I sent it media mail, because that is really the only affordable way to send anything of any significant weight, and it was, mostly, media: my favorite history books from college, including The Search for Modern China, and my DVD collection, including the first four seasons of The West Wing. I cheated a bit by also throwing in a light French Connection jacket.

When I got to DC, the box hadn't arrived at my dorm. A week later, it still hadn't arrived. Another week later, still nothing. Maybe most frustrating was that I had actually ordered delivery confirmation, and the online record showed that it had been delivered, but to a slightly different zipcode. So I then went on a scavenger hunt around the various post offices in the area, trying to figure out where in this craziness my box had gone. Each post office would refer me to another. Thinking I might have written the wrong address, I went to each building with an address that resembled my dorm's. Nothing. I even hung around my dorm waiting for the mailman to arrive, to ask him personally if he remembered such a box. I seem to remember him saying he seemed to remember. Useless.

Because it wasn't insured, the only thing I ever got from USPS was a check for about $15 for lost mail. I was in regular contact with some USPS not-so-higher-up who said she was bringing it up at her weekly meeting but to no avail. And then I took a break from school, and this clearly fell off my radar. But I did make a couple more attempts when I came back another year later. Nothing, of course.

It grates at me just to think about it again. It's like this tiny, insignificant knot inside my stomach that is nevertheless a knot and can't ever be untied. Because I just can't imagine what the hell has gone on with my stuff in that box. Could it really just have gotten lost and thrown away at some point? With all that stuff in it? Or is someone sitting at home right now with my books on his coffee table, along with his feet, resting on a couch watching my DVDs, while wearing my jacket?

There were lots of pirated DVDs in there, I admit (The West Wing ones were real, I swear). And I sent it media mail even though there was a jacket thrown in. But is this really fair punishment for that? I haven't thought about it for a long time, but when I do, it has this way of making my life incomplete.

adfsadlkfjslkdj.

A friend once wrote a short piece about a coin she found, musing about all the places it could have traveled to end up in her pocket. It was so hopeful, so happy, like the feather in Forrest Gump floating along to that nostalgic theme music.

This is kind of like that. Only the opposite.

The Chase-Down Block

2010-05-05T21:08:00.006-04:00

Maybe the single thing I like most about the Times is that despite it being everyone I know's first stop for news, it doesn't take itself too seriously. Even the hard news stories sometimes have a wink in them, and often they just have completely loony stories like the Chinglish piece over the weekend. Today they wrote a whole article about LeBron's chase-down block. If you have watched any basketball at all in the last couple years, you know that block. But I had no idea they had a name for it.

(The article links to one of ESPN's Sports Science segments, which I've always found pretty lame, but this one does actually illuminate just how ridiculous LeBron is.)

The chase-down block, as I now know it's called, has a special place in my heart. Almost a decade ago, I got to do that which gets inevitably rarer as you get older: I lived an actual dream of mine.

When I was in kindergarten, my family went to watch a game at the annual HKIS Christmas basketball tournament, when it was still played at what was then the high school gym, which I grew up knowing as the middle school gym, and which is now the elementary school gym. And we kept going to a couple games each year because we usually hosted players from other schools. My mom thought this was our way of contributing to the school, since she didn't usually have time to do the parent-faculty stuff.

By about third grade--right around when my mom bought me a Utah Jazz cap--I was starting to take a serious interest in basketball. Made my parents find copies of USA Today so I could cut out the box scores and especially to go over the final regular season stats (I was a one-man Elias Sports Bureau, which, by the way, I think I once read is really just a one-man gig). Taped Inside Stuff and actually rewound Rewind. And the cards. God damn, the cards. The thrill of opening a whole box, 24 or 36 packs inside. To this day I think you could blindfold me and I could tell you what brand a card is by the way it smells.

When, the summer before fourth grade, we moved to an apartment complex with its own basketball court, it was all over. No other sport would ever come close. In third grade, I won an award for being the star goalie on my soccer team; by fifth grade, I was the backup goalie who still couldn't get goal kicks off the ground.

We were still hosting visiting players, and at least I was still going to watch the Christmas tournament games, now held at the Tai Tam campus. Naturally, I relished the TAS-HKIS rivalry, and I remember names like Migz Carreon and David Mock, or Mike Lane and Mike Elliot, as if they had been in the NBA. I actually remember a specific play, where Mike Lane was on a fast break going from the far side of the gym to the side with the locker rooms, and he pulled a spin move on his defender while letting off a bounce pass at the same time. I remember the HKIS crowd snickering when the TAS players would get back on D and slap both hands on the floor and yell, "Defense!" That was where I thought that came from. I had no clue it was a Duke thing.

I remember picking up the programs each year, going through the rosters like they were NBA media guides, always looking for which teams had the tallest players. Anyone over six feet was someone to look out for. And yeah, I dreamed that I'd be on there one day myself. I used to wear my HKIS hoodie and dribble my ball down to the court, imagining I was being introduced to the crowd. Sure, I dreamed about getting introduced at the Delta Center, too, the game seven buzzer-beaters, but every kid did that (just not at the Delta Center).

Somehow, I don't think I ever thought it wouldn't happen. I've spent most my life thinking I'm better at basketball than I really am. I was the last freshman on not just any freshman team but a 16-freshman freshman team. There were only 15 uniforms, so I alternated with freshman 15 (ha). One game, coach sent me in even though it was my off-week, so I went on with a jersey or maybe even a t-shirt without a number. I got called for a technical, the only time I've ever been T-d up.

Junior year, I got cut altogether. Even when I finally made the team as a senior, coach kept giving me asterisks: I was an alternate at first, and even when a couple guys pulled out to play tennis, coach made clear I was on the team because I was the only leftie. Oh and I was smart. Because, you know, AP classes help you on the court and all.

One final thing had to go my way before I got to be on the Christmas tournament roster, because we had one more player on our team than was allowed. Dustin Hinton, a new kid who was in my homeroom, had made the team with a style of play I can only call Jerry Sloan basketball. This guy volunteered to sit it out, somehow just knowing how badly I wanted in. I don't remember ever expressing the feeling to him. I think he just sensed it. He was, I swear, from Utah.

Our first game was the one game each year that the school required all other students to watch, or at least strongly encouraged them to by canceling class for half the day. I remember being in our warmups and going through the layup line, trying not to look too excited. It was a great game; we beat Jakarta in the last minute. But the only time I got off the bench was to cheer.

It was only after we lost a couple, when it was clear we weren't going to finish in the top half of the draw, that coach played us seniors a lot more. And in the last few minutes of a tight rematch with Jakarta, I was still on the floor. I think I may have even scored a few points. Neither team couldn't have been up by more than a basket when a white kid on Jakarta stole out on a fast break. I ran my ass off. He had no idea, and as he went up for the layup, I swatted the ball out of bounds. It was, I wish I had known then, a chase-down block.

The kid, patronizing as hell, turned around and said, "Nice block." I pretended to ignore him. A few minutes later, we lost on a missed three at the buzzer. The next day, we played for next-to-last place and lost again, to a Beijing team whose two best players were a couple guys I had spent the better part of my adolescence playing with in Taipei, who had been way ahead of me on that 16-freshman freshman team. We finished last. At our own tournament.

Clearly, I have never gotten over my basketball failures. The final day of that season, collapsed over a bed in a hotel in a military base in Guam after another last place finish, is one of the more miserable moments of my youth. When people ask me if I played in high school, I am almost ashamed to tell the truth, and I always add, apologetically, "It was in Hong Kong."

But if it had been anywhere else, I'd still be dreaming. No way I'd have ever made any other basketball team. No way I'd have gotten to play competitive, organized ball and travelled to do it. And no way I'd have my very own chase-down block.

欻冰

2010-05-03T02:33:00.003-04:00

There's a 7-Eleven a couple blocks down from my apartment, and I think it's great. I'd only been in once before tonight, but I always look at it when I walk by because, well, it's 7-Eleven. 7-Elevens dominated my life before I came to the States. In Taipei and Hong Kong, if you start at a 7-Eleven and then walk in any direction for 15 minutes, you will come across another 7-Eleven. No joke. In my apartment complex alone, there were two. Maybe three.

So I'm walking towards a cafe/diner place earlier tonight to get some dinner and do some work, and just before I pass the 7-Eleven, a couple guys walking towards me are talking and the only word I catch from their conversation is, "Slurpee." I decide right then that I will have myself a Slurpee, though I hold off until after I do some eating and studying, on the walk back to my apartment.

Slurpees and their next of kin have been an important part of my life.

In Taipei, circa 1986, my obasan would buy me chua bing in those thin plastic baggies that she would then empty out into a bowl. I remember it being purple.

In Hong Kong, circa 1990, I think I probably had my first actual Slurpee, from the 7-11 at Repulse Bay Beach. My brother and I always got Slurpees at 7-Elevens starting around then. Always the Coke flavor. I can't seem to remember if they even had any other flavors back then.

In Taipei, circa 1994, I hung out a lot at the TAS snack bar. Doughnut in the morning, chicken nuggets for lunch, and a pretzel with cheese after school. And also a slushie at some point. Usually the orange flavor, I think. So really just a Fanta Slurpee.

In Taipei, circa 1996, the convenience store across the street from my apartment changed from whatever chain it was before to Niko Mart (it changed once more before I left, but curiously, it was never a 7-Eleven). And I walked in one day and saw their chua bing/Slurpee/slushie machine and thought I'd give it a try. I picked the orange-colored flavor. It came out more ice than slush, so more chua bing than Slurpee. But it wasn't orange-flavored.

It was something else, something wonderful. It was the very flavor my obasan used to get me in a plastic baggie when I was three years old. I had been searching for this flavor my whole life up to that point, but no purple-colored flavor ever came close. But this was it. 百香果. Nice, easy characters which I could read. And which I later learned was passion fruit.

So my memory was playing tricks, but to this day I don't know if it was tricking my vision or my taste. Was it really purple when I was little? Or was the sweet goodness of passion fruit so delicious that I had to convince myself this was the taste that made me first fall in love with chua bing?

I have wondered this all my life.

Room 200

2010-05-01T18:49:00.001-04:00

Just came out of my last class, held on a sunny Saturday afternoon because the professor had to make up for one a few weeks back. I thought about not going; it was probably going to be taped, and it was a sunny Saturday afternoon. But I went, even woke up early to finish the reading. I have always made an effort to be at all my last classes, if only to be part of the applause for the professor at the end. I was so impressed the first time that happened in college, and I do believe I've been to every last class since.

But this wasn't just any last class. It had been twenty years coming. Forty semesters. If it's been about 150 days a year, 5 hours a day, for 20 years, that's 15,000 hours in class, and these were my last 2. Maybe I'll go back to school one day. Maybe. But for now, I am well educated enough.

I could tell you that my last class was criminal law, and the subject was insanity, and that might get some chuckles, the kind of thing that makes you want to say, "Isn't that ironic?" without actually wondering if indeed there is any irony involved. But I would rather tell you that we talked about the guy who the Supreme Court said could stay locked up in the criminal ward of a state hospital for 25 years because he was found not guilty for reason of insanity. For shoplifting. Or that we discussed whether Andrea Yates knew what she was doing when she drowned her kids, and whether she knew it was wrong because it was Satan telling her to do so.

There's a lot of interesting legal substance to these issues--I wouldn't have enjoyed law school at all if I didn't think so--but I've always wondered what happened beyond the pages of my casebooks. The opinions we read tend to end with an order to remand the case back to trial, and you rarely learn what actually happened to the person whose name you type over and over again throughout your notes, in your outlines, on your exams. They are almost always fascinating stories, the tough calls, because why else would they end up in a casebook? And when I hear a fascinating story, I want to know how it ended, not just (and often not at all) what the majority on the court thought about the legal issues.

Especially in criminal law, when we spent half the semester talking about murder and rape, it could get overwhelming for me to think about the scale of the drama that must have backdropped each case. We snicker in class about the ridiculous circumstances that lead to tricky legal issues--who's guilty when some kid dies playing Russian Roulette?--but can you even begin to imagine what that kid's mom went through? Or the friends who were playing with him? Whole lives upended by a fantastically stupid mistake, the memory of it producing who knows how many sleepless nights or disgruntled marriages. And a generation letter, a bunch of Georgetown law students sit in room 200 and laugh over whether the bullet was placed to the left or the right of the chamber.

Even the bad guys, the ones we read about not because there's any doubt that they did the deed, but because maybe they should only get rape instead of accomplice to murder. How did they live out the rest of their days, whether in a cell or not? So many of the cases we read are relatively recent; sometimes I just want to know what bars the guy is looking out from behind today and what he's thinking right now, at that same instant we sit in class and discuss what he was thinking then, the flash of time before his rival drag racer hit an oncoming car and killed everyone in it.

After twenty years of going to class, the rhythms of my life knowing precious little else besides going to class, I may never go to another class again. But I will always be looking for stories.

Susan Storm Richards

2010-04-29T00:41:00.006-04:00

There is a Planned Parenthood my bus passes by on 16th Street. I don't usually notice it when I'm on the bus, but I walk down there often enough, and occasionally there are escorts standing outside with fluorescent orange vests on ready to help someone in, as well as one or two dour-looking folk who hold up pro-life signs or pray with their rosaries. One older white woman I've seen more than once. She's creepy.

A few semesters ago, I was in my school's asylum clinic and represented a Central American woman who was a victim of domestic violence. DV is a controversial ground for asylum--we lost at our first hearing and our appeal has been pending for six months now--so we had to gather as much evidence as we could to show there was some kind of political angle to it. So I tracked down an anthropologist whose research was on gender violence, and she gave us a great affidavit describing the invisibility of women in Central America after the civil wars of the last generation.

She wrote about how in Central America, in its hierarchy of violence, domestic violence is at the very bottom, incongruous as it is with the more public narratives of wartime massacres and gang violence. And so women have no communal space to find shelter, no space to find solace except the space in her bedroom between her husband and herself, which is of course no space at all.

On my bus this morning, going down 16th Street, for some reason I looked out the window as we passed Planned Parenthood. The traffic happened to keep us stopped there for a moment. There were three pro-lifers there this time, and two escorts, and a young couple trying to get in, being hassled by one of the pro-lifers. My first instinct was to roll my eyes at the pro-lifers and think, jesus, just let the girl live her own life. As the pro-life man kept bugging the couple, the two other pro-lifers got down on their knees and started praying.

But then I looked at the couple as they tried to fend off the man politely, avoiding confrontation. The man was talking directly at the girl, as her boyfriend nodded his head and looked the same way I probably do when I try to get off the phone with a telemarketer without hanging up on them. And what I could not help but notice was the boyfriend's hand on the girl's back, maybe not pushing, but certainly nudging her forward, trying to get her past the pro-life man.

And I thought, that sucks. A lot. Being literally caught between a crazy old man who was probably telling her she was about to commit murder and her clueless child of a boyfriend who was probably scared out of his mind of being a daddy. It was like watching both sides yell at each other, over and above the most important player in this tough, tough game that no one can win.

At the liquor store on the corner of Corcoran and 17th, Northwest

2010-04-13T00:05:00.002-04:00

Guy at the counter when I bring up a bottle of champagne is a middle-aged Ghanaian man. Asks if I need a bag.

"Yes please."

He tells the guy next to him that I must be English, saying yes please and all, or maybe Canadian. This guy next to him seems like a DC local, sounds like a DC local, especially when he looks at me and hmphs back, "He's probably from Southeast."

Ghanaian Man, like he had it in a holster: "Southeast Asia."

I'm just standing there, getting out my wallet and getting my money out of my wallet, sort of stunned (1) that DC Local awesomely just doesn't do stereotypes, going more with common sense, no reason why the Asian kid isn't also DC Local. And sort of stunned (2) that Ghanaian Man, without me saying anything more than yes please has pegged me in close to exactly the right hole: from the Commonwealth and Southeast Asia.

I finally speak up when Ghanaian Man decides to settle it and asks me straight up where I'm from, my favorite question of all time. So in return for him being completely on point for me, I abandon my usual stereotype-dispelling lie (pick 'em NY or CA) and instead dispense with the truth.

"Hong Kong."

And Ghanaian Man smirks and says to DC Local I told you so without telling him so. Then he eyes the Chinese Taipei flag on my cap with the Olympic rings and says, "Yeah you were out there for the Olympics, weren't you?" DC Local rolls his eyes, apologizing to me without words, minority telepathy that says, sorry for my fob friend who thinks all one billion Chinese people went to the Olympics just because they were in China. Again I want to reward DC Local for his awesomeness, but the truth is out there.

"Yeah, I actually was at the Olympics."

Ghanaian Man is beaming. DC Local is quiet. Except, "'Bout time he got something right."

Ghanaian Man asks me where I was born, and when I say Australia he just laps it up like he had me at yes please. But DC Local gets the last word, at least in my book, because when I explain that I lived in Hong Kong most my life, he asks if I was there for the handover.

And I'm like, yeah, I was.

And he's like, yeah 'coz that was pretty cool.

And I'm like, yeah, it was.

And that's like, the most informed conversation about where I'm from that I've ever had through three years in the District of Columbia, capital city of the United States of America.

There was another liquor store across the street. Glad I picked this one.

My dear Mr. President:

2010-04-10T00:56:00.017-04:00

When John Paul Stevens took the oath of office as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States on December 17, 1975, my mother was two months older than I am today. Three weeks earlier, some kid at Harvard had written the word "Micro-soft" for the first time.

William Douglas, whom Justice Stevens replaced, took the oath on April 17, 1939, three days after John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath. My grandmother was nine. When she turned ten, the Japanese invaded her hometown.

Justice Douglas had replaced Louis Brandeis, who took office on June 5, 1916, less than three weeks after a couple guys named Sykes and Picot divvied up the Middle East, hopelessly unaware of what they were getting the world into. Later that year, my great-grandfather (from the other side) commanded the Third National Protection Army in Guangdong's fight for independence from Yuan Shikai. It may have been the only good fight he fought.

Justice Brandeis was the sixty-seventh justice of the Supreme Court. The woman who replaces Justice Stevens will be the one hundred and twelfth. Three guys; forty-five justices and ninety-four years on the bench between them. As a third-year in law school, that is a whole lot more opinions than I ever want to have to think about again, and those three wrote some pretty good ones.

But as a history major, as a student of the court and its country's cases and controversies, that is a whole lot more of the world than I can ever hope to live. I don't agree with life terms, but they sure make things interesting.

Better Weather

2010-03-22T19:46:00.000-04:00

It was gorgeous in Washington this weekend. It may not have been an especially long winter, but it was intense. Yesterday, I took a look at my boots for the first time since the snow stopped falling. They were brand new in January, and yet they already know what it is to be weathered, creases already in the leather, watermarked for life by the blizzard of 2010. It's raining again today, but the weekend, at least, was gorgeous.

So I took a walk on Saturday because it was perfect out. Perfect to soak up the sun, enjoy the greenery, see the monuments. And perfect to party. Tea party.

It was just funny at first. I'm not sure I'd ever met a real life teabagger before, and it was ticklish to see that they all seemed to live up to the caricature. Outlandish homemade signs. A woman lying on the ground yelling, "Pelosi, go home back to your Soviet Union." Harmless, really, and not too different from the people in Dupont Circle who were throwing their shoes at a giant blow-up doll of George Bush the day before the Inauguration.

But then I walked around to the other side of the Capitol, where several hundred, maybe even a thousand, teabaggers were lining up around the steps of the House. They were trying to form a human wall, they said, around the congresspeople inside, either to confront them when they tried to enter the House or to be close enough that their loud yelling--and there was a lot of yelling and it was very loud--would disrupt proceedings inside the building.

My immediate reaction was one of betrayal. That I was somehow helping their cause by simply being there, adding to the headcount, sitting on the other team's bench. I smiled to hide a smirk. I tried hard not to laugh at the misspelled signs. But then I realized it wasn't so funny.

The louder the yelling got, and the more sing-songy the chants, the more I felt the conspicuous absence of other people of color, and the conspicuous presence of me, not exactly looking like I fit in. I tried to weave in and out looking for good photos, but wherever I went, I was surrounded by a very large group of angry white people yelling whatever they were being told to yell. I think sometimes people call this a mob.

I know I wasn't remotely close to being in any kind of real danger. There were Capitol Police everywhere. And even if it plays to the stereotype, I can always whip out my "I'm not American" card and duck and cover. But it wasn't the idea of being the only minority in the crowd that got to me. It was the idea that, in another age, not really all that long ago, these were the kind of people that gathered in large groups and yelled something awfully similar to "Kill the bill!" And when you overhear them talking about the "illegals" that were also protesting this past weekend for immigration reform, and you see the less than subtle voodoo effigy, it's hard not to think that even today, if there were enough of them in a crowd, if they were angry enough and yelling loud enough, someone could get hurt much more than enough.

Maybe that's taking it too far because I'm not exactly predisposed to giving teabaggers the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that's because they don't deserve it. Or maybe they're just envious, because they saw the kind of crowds and the enthusiasm of the Obama campaign--however cheesy and bandwagony--and want something like that for themselves. So there they were, yelling. "Kill the bill!" "Vote no!"

I went back to the Capitol last night because after all that, I basically wanted to see them shut the hell up. A lot of people seemed to have the same idea--because, you know, liberals respect the process--so I had to wait in line for almost two hours to get into the House galleries. They were shuffling groups in for 15 minutes at a time, and someone must have been looking out for me, because I got shuffled in for the exact 15 minutes of the vote on the Senate bill.

The House chamber is a whole lot smaller and more intimate than it looks during the State of the Union, and when all the Representatives are on the floor yelling their yeas and nays in unison it has the feel of those old basketball gyms that literally rock when the crowd gets going. Much cooler than C-SPAN. When the yeas hit 216, and as they counted down to the end of the vote, the Democrats did their best impersonation of all of us naive young multiethnic immigrant pothead hippies on the campaign trail that the teabaggers hate so much.

"Yes we can," they chanted. Beats "Vote no" every time.

It was gorgeous in Washington this weekend.

HRC

2010-02-26T01:50:00.017-05:00

(Alex Wong/Getty)

I didn't get in. When they closed the doors there was one guy in front of me and that's it. Echoes of a South Carolina night two (!) years ago, when we were the next batch of people they were going to let in to the Obama victory speech and they shut the gates. This time, Capitol Policeman said everyone was there just to see her, really, so it was unlikely anyone who got in was going to leave. But I had gotten up at seven-thirty for this, and someone was depending on me to watch this hearing, and I mean, it was Hillary. The line before she arrived was so long that I didn't really see her when she walked in, but her voice traveled down the hall when she greeted whoever welcomed her at the door.

"Hey, how are you?"

Just like it sounded (on TV) on the campaign trail.

So I waited. The intern in front of me did, too. And 45 minutes later, Capitol Policeman points to us and says, "Two." He waved us in the direction of an aide or page or whatever you call the congressional staff who mind the doors of committee hearing rooms, and she told us one seat was in the back, the other in the front. Maybe the intern in front of me was shy, maybe he just understood House decorum better than me, but he walked to the back so I had no choice. Front. Very front. Ten feet from Hillary front.

I sat down next to a State Department staffer who for the first few minutes kept glancing over at me. I thought he was wondering what some random Asian kid in a sweater was doing sitting in Hillaryland. After the hearing, he recognized me by the vending machines in the Rayburn cafeteria and told me he was glancing over at me because the Secret Service agent next to him had been glancing over at me. Apparently it looks suspicious when you sit down ten feet from the Secretary of State with your hand hidden inside a thick winter coat you folded over your arm as you sat down. Oops.

For the next two hours, and then two more hours at a smaller hearing in the afternoon, I watched Hillary demolish the field. At first I thought the Democrats who fawned over her in their opening statements were probably just old superdelegates of hers, but when even the Republicans couldn't seem to help but praise her, it was clear she was smarter than all of them and they knew it.

For the Representatives, it was an easy day's work. They had a couple prepared questions about one or two countries and didn't have to pay attention to anything any of their colleagues were saying (and they didn't: truly awe inspiring to watch congresspeople thumbing away on their Blackberries with the Secretary of State in attendance). It was like that gameshow from a couple years ago where a hundred former winners take on one new contestant.

She beat them all.

It was incredible. Like Wikipedia for world affairs was running in her head. Iran. Iraq. Afghanistan. Pakistan. The obvious ones, of course. But then Armenia and Turkey. Cyprus. Russia and China. Yemen. Yemen. Yemen. Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Western Sahara. Bosnia and Kosovo. Israel and Gaza and Israel. Refugees and internally displaced. Orphans from Haiti. A USAID worker detained in Cuba, a new embassy in London. It was like the only problem in the world she didn't mention was what I was there for, but to be fair, she wasn't asked about it.

These weren't even things she was supposed to be talking about. She was supposed to be talking about the budget, about the money State is requesting for 2011. Instead, all these politicians who never get any facetime with her wanted to be able to say they asked Hillary Clinton a sexy question about Iran and nuclear weapons or Yemen and the Christmas Day bomber. Well at least they don't get to say they stumped her. Because she destroyed them.

One Republican asked her why there was foreign aid going to China, of all places. She said it was earmarked for American organizations working in China. He said something like, "So you're saying Congress forced it upon you."

And she said, "Those are your words, Congressman."

Another Republican asked her why a press report he read suggested State was cutting funds for the Millennium Challenge Corporation. She said, uh, no we're not, I'm the Chair of the Board of Directors of the MCC and if you read the freaking budget we sent you in advance, you would see we want to increase funding for it by 15 per cent. Then the guy asks, so the press report wasn't accurate?

And she's like, "Congressman, I don't know why I would ever doubt the accuracy of a press report."

Everyone laughs. Republican gets nailed.

I was pretty down in the summer of 2007, when the Obamachine had lost its startup excitement and Hillary was up 30 or 40 points. And I was really up that night in South Carolina two years ago, when she and Bill's crazy, finger-jabbing rants got whooped 55-27. She could have never matched the magic of election night and the Inauguration, and I don't think she'd be doing any better of a job than he's doing right now.

But in January 2017, there isn't anyone else I want to be taking the Oath of Office but Madame President Hillary Rodham Clinton. I just hope she ages better than McCain has.

Snomfg

2010-02-09T21:49:00.002-05:00

After the snow stopped falling on Saturday afternoon, the weekend felt like a theme park, like those winter wonderland sets they put up in malls in Hong Kong that are so over the top with the fake houses and trees and gazebos that are marshmallowing with whiteness. Only this had poofy white toycars, too. And it was, like, real.

My street.

Monday was nice. Sunny, people happy to have the day off, appreciating what little transportation was available.

Today, I'm not so sure. Not sunny, people kind of like, huh? I'm gonna have the whole week off?

Across from the Indian Embassy. I thought he looked a little cold.

Him not so much.

Yeah ok.

The snow is back. Four inches already tonight. Six to eight more on the way. Snoverkill, for sure. This is getting a little psycho.

Snomageddon

2010-02-06T15:15:00.001-05:00

Snow.

There was a cop to the left who yelled at these guys to "stop throwing the fucking snowballs."

More snow.

Lots of snow.

豉油雞飯

2010-02-05T22:10:00.000-05:00

Snopocalypse. Nothing to do but stay at home. And try something new.

I am no chef. I am the family dishwasher. But step by step, I am sloshing through the snow-covered path along my quest to be able to cook my 10 favorite dishes of all time.

#4: 豉油雞飯. I am awesome.

Kerala

2009-12-21T01:56:00.000-05:00

Women on the beach in Varkala.

The people you meet when you travel alone in India.

On the train into Kerala, my cabinmates were two middle-aged Scotsmen who, not an hour into the trip, pulled out this bottle of Smirnoff as well as a steel water bottle that looked like mine only it poured out Scotch. Then one said to the other, “We’re going to a Communist, Muslim state! Bloody ’ell, can’t get much worse.” But they were clearly enamored with India, and they were joking, and it was kind of hilarious.

Then on the Kerala backwaters, I shared a houseboat with two Aussies who were self-proclaimed Socialist revolutionaries. They debated over popular misconceptions of Lenin and whether he really said all he needed was more power. The guy was reading a history of the Russian revolution. The girl was on her way to Delhi where she was going to stay with members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). They weren’t joking, and it was still kind of hilarious.

Finally finished the book while coming and going on a boat on a river. Awesome.

Another sunset, another moonrise.

After over 5,000 kilometres, spread across 14 train rides, 3 of them overnight, this was my last one. We had arrived at the station not knowing when the next train to Kochi was leaving, so I asked the guy in the ticket window when the next train to Kochi was leaving, and he pointed to the one at the platform that was just starting to move. I looked at the train, and back at the guy in the ticket window, and asked him how much it would cost. Before he could answer, I asked, “Can we just get on now?”

He offered a now-familiar variety of sounds and head movements that seemed to answer in the affirmative, and the train was starting to accelerate, so I ran. I ran to the train, grabbed the door rails and jumped onto the carriage for my last, great Indian train ride.

Always wanted to do that.

Scenes from Kochi.

Keener’s. Heh.

These guys invited me—for a donation, of course—to help with pulling up the fifteenth century Chinese fishing nets. I think I did alright.

Got to get up close, too.

And see dolphins.

The guy on the left was the boss of the operation. And after a few minutes with him, I kept getting the nagging feeling that he reminded me of someone. Couldn’t figure it out. Then I was looking over these photos, and saw this one with the cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and imagined it was a cigar, and replaced the white and blue trim of his shorts with red and black, and cut off his shirt sleeves and added a “23” to its front and back. You know what I’m saying?

Kathakali.

Bugs. Constant from my first day to my last.

And that’s all, folks.

Goa

2009-12-16T08:49:00.000-05:00

I confess I've been anticipating this post since before I even left for India, as I started to get a feel for the contour of my itinerary. This is a huge, huge country, and I had just one month. But one month is at least enough to do this:

Start in the mountains.

Go through the desert.

And finally, gloriously, arrive at the sea.

Mumbai, the wedding

2009-12-14T10:14:00.002-05:00

This I did not plan. I was just walking, exploring, with some sense of a destination but not really, when I heard what I now instantly recognize as the marching band of a wedding. Wedding season is on crack right now; there were two huge weddings going on both nights I stayed at the Novotel, and when I went to see what the Marriott was like, a waiter told me there were five weddings going on in the hotel—that night. And outside of glitzy Mumbai, you can’t go more than a couple hundred meters on a big Mumbai street without coming across what was once a large, nondescript open space but is now a spruced-up, outdoor banquet hall with tacky entryways and Christmas lights.

So when I heard the marching band, and then noticed the crowd, as well as the guy in a costume sitting on a horse, I got closer to take some photos. There was a group of four foreigners who had already gotten closer to take their photos, and suddenly they got swooped up into the procession. People were yelling at them (in, you know, a friendly way) to dance and, as I was about to discover, that’s a hard invitation to turn down.

Look closely at the back of his t-shirt. Familiar campaign logo? Funny, because it turned out they were Australian.

I got pulled in soon enough. It was all pretty liberating, really, because you spend a lot of time feeling hesitant or intrusive about being a tourist or trying to take a photo, and now every other person in this large crowd was basically threatening you if you didn’t dance with them or take their photo.

Groom seemed kind of stressed, to be honest.

Some of the cousins of the groom invited me to eat with them, and when they walked me down a sidestreet is when my skeptical traveler instinct kicked in and I started to wonder how far I should go with this. But in broad daylight, with large crowds of very happy people—and young kids—still surrounding us, I kept on. Seemed harmless to have a meal, and I was hungry, anyway.

Then they told me to come back tomorrow night, for the second day of celebrations when the younger brother of the groom was also getting married. I hesitated slightly in giving them my phone number, and they noticed, calling me out for it but then assuring me they were honestly just hoping I could be part of the fun.

To reassure myself, I kept coming back to two things: that it was I who first approached them when I wanted to take some pictures, and that there were still loads of young kids around who kept squeaking to have their pictures taken. I figured this would have to be a pretty crazy elaborate plot to have set all this up just to trick a few tourists, and even then, what could they be tricking me into? This was all happening out in the open, on the streets, and there were no shackles preventing me from bolting into a taxi the instant I felt uncomfortable. So I went back the next evening.

And I was part of the fun.

What can I say? It lived up to the hype.

Not a whole lot of Bhangra (though when there was, I had very eager instructors), but it was still non-stop music and dancing and just madness. Kids were screaming their heads off. The group of guys who had invited me were pulling me aside for surreptitious yet large sips of beer. More dancing, on other people’s shoulders, on the tops of trucks, everywhere. Just madness.

Here I stand, on the shoulders of giants, er, other Indian wedding guests.

Was also kind of relieved that the Australian guys got re-invited, too.

Really damn loud firecrackers and fireworks. China’s greatest export to India. Only they are much, much louder in India.

Oh yeah, and then there was the actual marriage.

Finished the night by eating beef sausages. Yup. The guys actually seemed kind of upset that all foreigners think all Indians don’t eat beef. I was tipsy at this point, so this whole discussion of stereotypes in between the wedding madness and the dancing and the beers was like, whoa. At one point, I told them Jackie Chan was my uncle and they were like, whoa. And then I told them I was kidding.

“Ah, Keane, so now you think you can joke with us, huh?”

Joke, dance, eat, drink. You make fast friends at a Mumbai wedding.

Mumbai, not the wedding

2009-12-14T09:45:00.001-05:00

Treated myself to a couple nights of this.

Then reverted back to more of this.

Can you say slacker advertising staff?

Hey I used to wear a Fubu hat, too.

On the Haji Ali causeway.

Couldn’t resist.

Beast of a train station.

Lots of pick-up cricket.

I spent several painful months writing my senior essay about this kind of thing, but I’m still always amazed how, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, some streets in Mumbai or Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur or Shanghai can all look the same, with that twisted charm of Empire, at once appeal and disgust that you’re suddenly in Victorian England only it’s hot and muggy.

I didn’t come across any kind of official markings or memorials, at least not in English. There was one long wall parallel to Marine Drive that I saw while speeding by it in a taxi that had a mural of not-quite-graffiti, “I love Mumbai” painted every few meters, accompanied by some pretty graphic artwork as well as stronger statements against terrorism and evil and that sort of stuff. But in the places where it all went down, the only explicit recognition of the attacks, that I could read, was on the boarded-up perimeter of the Taj Mahal Palace, which pronounced that it was “Restoring a symbol of Mumbai’s enduring spirit and dignity.” And even that doesn’t really count as explicit.

The creepiness of the carnage was its nonchalant-ness, right? That those guys pulled up in a little boat like this to a ramp like this and just ambled their way up and across the road and into the city’s most luxurious hotel. It’s straight out of Counterstrike, and that’s not meant to be amusing; that’s exactly what freaks me out the most.

I’m sure throngs of people have always gathered at this waterfront and just hung out for hours watching the boats come in, probably for centuries, even, as long as they’ve been allowed to. I’m sure if I had come on November 25 last year, I could have taken the same picture. But I couldn’t help but see all these people and think about what happened here and imagine that they were all almost standing guard, keeping an eye out for who or what might be coming over the horizon, and making sure those bastards stay the hell out of their city from now on.

Ahmedabad

2009-12-12T10:46:00.001-05:00

Visited Gandhi's ashram on what I only realized that morning was Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And then this quote from him reminded me that Gandhi was a lawyer, too! And that lawyers don't have to lose our souls!

Well, at least lawyers named Gandhi.

To walk, or not to walk?

Lots of Indians selling lots of electronics. Just like Tsim Sha Tsui.

Except for these guys.

Waiting for the bus.

Cinema as sanctuary.

I finally found a real mall. Been looking for this for a while now, wondering where amongst all the auto-rickshaws and cows and thalis was the Great Indian Middle Class I keep reading about. Watched another movie, De Dana Dan (tagline: "The great entertainers are back!"), entirely set in Singapore, which set in some homesickness in me, or at least comfortsickness, and I admit I'm starting to look forward to getting home. I think it's okay that this travel thing can be as much marathon as joyride, and that part of the reward is sticking it out.

Udaipur, less quickly

2009-12-10T16:16:00.000-05:00

Someone asked me for my favorite part of the trip so far. Well, it’s hard to say hands down that it was my favorite, but let me tell you a bit more about the few days I spent in Udaipur. By the end of my first night there, I’d added it to the list of my favorite places in the world. I sat on the edge of a restaurant that set on the edge of the lake and had a panoramic view of both the City Palace, on land, and the Lake Palace, on water. And it reminded me of an almost medieval version of Hong Kong harbour, and that made me happy. I asked one of the waiters whether you could walk along the waterfront by the City Palace, where I could see streetlamps, and he said you could, and that made me happy, too. Water and waterfront walks at night often propel places to the tops of my lists.

The next day, I sought out that waterfront, and I found it, but I also found that you had to pay an entry fee to walk part of it (which I did), and that you had to be a guest at a couple super-exclusive hotels to walk the rest of it (which I wasn’t). I walked as far as I could until a security guard turned me back, and when I asked where the nearest public waterfront area was, he said it was another hour’s walk away. Behind him lounged rich-looking folk with nice suitcases being carried onto their private ferries to the Lake Palace Hotel. I walked out past the only driveway with Benzes that I’ve seen in India so far.

So Udaipur fell off the list of my favorite places in the world. But it’s still pretty gorgeous. That night I sat in the open terrace of the restaurant at the top of my hotel, and I took a blanket from my room and drank a beer while typing out some thoughts, including the seeds of these. I listened to the music (and the emcee) from a lavish wedding going on at Jagmandir Island, and the hotel manager came up and chatted with me for an hour about his life and girlfriend back home in Jaipur, about my iPhone, and about how he was nicknamed Ricky after the Australian cricketer Ricky Ponting.

I spent the next day doing things I’d never done before, not in India, not on any trip, not anywhere. I took a cooking class in the morning, and a painting class in the afternoon. The cooking class was interesting and entertaining, and also kind of delicious. The painting class wasn’t any of those, but before I knew it, I had spent three hours imitating a small painting of an elephant and if I may say so, it came out pretty good. It was strangely relaxing. I couldn’t believe I had spent so much time just focusing on this little rectangle of a picture, dabbing awkward brush strokes on a trunk here and a tail there, almost ruining it all with my inability to paint a straight border before I got the teacher to rescue it. As I wrote in the teacher’s guestbook when I finished, it was just the right way to while away my last few hours in Udaipur.

Udaipur, just quickly

2009-12-10T16:09:00.002-05:00

Best city yet.

This is what greeted me when I arrived at my guesthouse and the manager took me upstairs to take a look at the restaurant. In my almost-three days in Udaipur, I spent a good amount of time up here, having a meal on the terrace or reading up on the rooftop while looking over the Lake Palace and Jagmandir Island.

I was close enough to the Lake Palace that I was picking up its wi-fi signal. I could, of course, only access the log-on website for guests, which tauntingly displayed all the amenities non-guests were missing out on.

Met another two young students yesterday at this ghat that was the closest point you could get to the Lake Palace. They were less genuine, but still harmless, and also not trying to sell me anything. One kid was more talkative, and he introduced himself to me first. They were both commerce students, but the quieter kid was like about eight times smarter. Not long after the conversation began, I told the talkative kid that my flight out of India would take me first to Kuala Lumpur. As he asked me what country that was in, the smart kid muttered, "Petronas Towers," the first sounds out of his mouth. The smart kid knew about the Kospi and the Hang Seng and the one-child policy and exactly what NASDAQ stands for, while the talkative kid would just say things like, “China’s population is the biggest!” and “Hong Kong is good for electronics!” I wonder who was copying who’s homework in that friendship.

Stopped by a store (not the store above) the other day because they were selling postcards for five rupees, half the usual price. Then the guy (not the guy above) showed me boxes and boxes of really crappy postcards. They were just really crappy. And it reminded me of when Joe Krystofik and I took all the basketball cards we didn’t want anymore, all our doubles and triples and crap players like John Battle or Jon Koncak, repackaged them in pieces of printer paper stapled together, and sold them for HK$10 to unwitting younger kids in the mezzanine passageway at the Manhattan.

Speaking of selling things, I don't think anyone should have to be anyong-haseyo-ed this much. I genuinely don’t have anything against being mistaken as Korean, but I feel like even if I was Korean, I’d be tired of it by now. It's happened from the day I arrived in India, but it reached its full identity crisis peak in Udaipur, where I honestly got two or three anyong-haseyos every minute I walked the streets.

I got so tired of it that not only did I start telling the salesguys I was from the U.S., but I would embellish the lie by telling them so were my parents and grandparents, and that it was my ancestors over a hundred years ago that came over from China. All I got were confused looks, which I guess is only fair when you're trying to prove a point that isn’t true. I wonder if an actual fourth or fifth-generation Chinese American would feel more or less frustrated than me.

And I haven't passed just for the usual Korean or Japanese; try Bhutanese, as well as Brazilian (as remarked by Brazilians, no less).

Also in Udaipur: more cows.

And the world's biggest turban.

Finally, while in Udaipur, I played two games:

1. How many ways can you shoot the Lake Palace?

2. And how many pots can you balance on your head while dancing?

Jodhpur

2009-12-10T07:50:00.003-05:00

Eggs.

Dudes.

The Blue City.

At the end of my stay at Mehrangarh Fort, as I looked out from the ramparts over the city, two super nice, super genuine young Indians began talking to me. One was named Sachin, as in Sachin Tendulkar, they pointed out. So I tried to explain that I was Keane, like Robbie or Roy Keane. They nodded, but I’m not sure they knew who Robbie or Roy Keane were. You could tell they weren't trying to sell me anything because they said goodbye at one point and only started talking to me again because I said hi to them when I saw them on my way out after I’d been to the bathroom.

We walked down the hill together, trying to make the most of a broken English conversation. They were B.Ed. students. They giggled when we talked about girlfriends. You could tell, just from their look, that they were super nice, super genuine guys. Refreshing, really.

But when we got to the clock tower area, we got pulled aside by "Tourist Assistance Police" who thought these two kids might be trying to pull something on me. They were surprised, and seemed to give honest answers, which the police seemed to believe but nevertheless shooed them off while lecturing me inside a little booth about being careful of strangers. By the time I got out of the little booth, my newest friends were nowhere to be seen.

Score another tourist assisted for the Rajasthan Tourist Assistance Police.

Jaisalmer

2009-12-06T08:12:00.025-05:00

Woke up this morning after a night spent sleeping on the sands of the Thar desert, and Eric, who also slept in, yes, the desert, says, “Man, there’s a lot of sand here. Then as our guides pack up the blankets, I see a critter scampering around on the sheet I slept on, the shape of which I had only ever seen—at least alive—in books and pictures. You know: two big claws in the front, one long, sinister tail at the back.

Yeah, I slept on a scorpion.

Thankfully, I didn’t know until the morning. But that didn’t change the fact that I slept in fits. As far as I can remember, it was the first night I’ve ever slept truly under the stars, without even a tent or a tarp for cover.

Our camels had gotten us to the dunes just before the sun set. It seemed to accelerate as it neared the horizon, sliding faster and faster into dusk. And then when it disappeared altogether, and the grayscale faded to black, they started to turn the stars on, maybe dozens at a time. Then more, and more, until in the far, far reaches they were packed so tightly together they formed clouds, or were they galaxies, the kind of night sky common to some but countable on one hand in my memory.

It didn’t look like that, of course, but that shot made me happy. As much as I’d like to, I don’t think I qualify as a full-fledged space geek, but I know my share of Apollo astronauts, and I’ve gawked at my share of Hubble photos. So it was a kind of mini thrill to prop up my little D40 on my backpack, leave it open for 30 seconds, and then find something in the LCD that kind of, just kind of, resembled those deep field images of the farthest points of light in the universe.

After just an hour or so, the stars faded as the moon began to rise directly opposite to where the sun had set. When our guides ran out of songs to sing around the campfire, we began preparing for bed, laying out sheets and blankets and more blankets, and it was still really damn cold. There were no mattresses as advertised, and the sand was surprisingly hard, so, as I said, I slept in fits.

As the evening wore on, and then fully through the dark of night, I woke up every couple hours and tracked the trajectory of the moon as it followed, from left to right, the course of what felt like a giant, invisible pro-tractor centered at my feet. Each time I switched lying from one side to the other, I would open my eyes and the sky would be brighter, the dunes would go on farther, as the moon rose higher, until it was directly above me.

In that wistful space between sleeping and waking, I honestly thought I could feel the world turning. I sensed I could pincite the fixed point of the sun that we had rotated away from hours earlier, and we on this sliver of Indian desert were now passing by the moon as it too passed by us on its own rotation. And the sky began to find color again, and the blue I saw each time I woke up was less light, less faint, until there are footsteps around me and Eric makes the astute observation that there is a lot of sand in the desert and the guide packs away my blankets and there is a scorpion on my bedsheet.

But even then, the moon hovers in the sky, maybe two-thirds of its way to the other side of the Earth, and the sun starts peeking over the dunes just south of where the moon had risen, and I get up and drink some chai and remount my camel and trot out of the desert.

As the world turns.

Jaipur and Jodhpur

2009-12-06T07:46:00.003-05:00

Kid fixing a bike. Same way the Wright Brothers got started.

I say Joshua Tree, you say Khejari, through the, um, rose-colored windows of an A.C. 2 Tier carriage.

Fancy thali.

Fancy wedding. Complete with marching band and portable streetlamps. Or maybe just your average, everyday wedding?

Agra

2009-12-03T14:25:00.003-05:00

My black and white shots came out like pencil sketches, others were seemingly out of perspective, like it's some kind of optical illusion on all of us. Something about the bulbous dome, too pregnant for its size, really, exaggerating the majesty of something that actually isn’t that big. But sitting on its platform, with only the sky behind it, and that morning, overlooking an invisible river. Awesome.

Everything about it seems to be playing tricks with your eyes. The layout, the gardens, the angles. The mist was surreal. At once feeling like every photo has been taken before and like every photo is bound to be gorgeous. Arriving and asking myself, how the hell do you shoot the Taj? Leaving and thinking to myself, I just shot the shit out of the Taj.

Delhi

2009-12-03T12:45:00.001-05:00

I have to say that I've never felt more wary of being scammed than after spending a couple days in Delhi. Maybe people feel the same way their first time in Beijing or Shanghai, but I've never heard of anyone getting shit on their shoe in China.

For those who haven't read the boxed text in Lonely Planet about it (yeah, it has its own little section) it's where one guy distracts you while the other somehow drops a modest glob of poo on your shoe and then says--at least he did to me--"Oh, there's shit on your shoe!" Then he whips out his shoe-cleaning kit and offers to clean it off for 250 rupees. This sounds like a lot, particularly when you immediately suspect he's the one who put the poo on your shoe, when the original conspirator who distracted you comes back and says, look, pay him 100 rupees, that's how much it is in India. So you pay him 100 rupees. I mean, what choice do you have? There's poo on your shoe.

We're still trying to figure out where exactly they get the poo, with what they carry the poo around, and how they throw the poo on a shoe. I asked him where the poo came from and he pointed up at the sky. "Birdshit!" Without going into what you might call the color commentary, I guarantee you it was not birdshit. Bullshit.

I hate to judge a city by its scammers, and there were redeeming factors like India Gate at night (above) and the food and the buzz and the intense craziness and the Chicken Maharaja Mac. But really, what is up with the scammers?

Yum.

The tagline, in huge font on billboards all across Delhi: "Some love stories have blood on them."

Wasn't exactly what I was expecting of Bollywood: tortured moral-dilemma love story cum fundamentalist Muslim terrorist thriller set in the space from suburban to subway New York. It sure looked like they were saying some pretty deep things about modern Islam and racial profiling; I'll never know. But between the deeply deceived female lead pulling a bullet out of her lover's chest in the shower and a Muslim-looking-and-sounding man being pulled aside for a "random" search at a US airport, there was no real need for subtitles.

Amritsar

2009-11-28T09:33:00.004-05:00

Pretty darn awesome.

Origami toilet paper!

Thanksgiving dinner.

Free lunch at the Golden Temple.

Anti-speeding signs seen so far:
"Marry me, divorce speed."
"Dear, I like you but not your speed."
"Better late than never."

John McCain would feel at home here; all the taxi drivers, hawkers, and scammers begin their speeches with, "My friend..."

Fell victim to my first--and probably worst--scam today: shit on my shoe, straight out of the Lonely Planet warning. Ridiculous.

McLeod Ganj

2009-11-26T11:28:00.009-05:00

My third trip to the Himalayas. Why do I keep coming back to mountains and monks?

So I didn’t actually see him. But that’s okay, because a week ago, I had no idea the Dalai Lama was even going to be in Dharamsala while I was there, let alone be giving public teachings to a group of Russian Buddhists (who knew?). Without having registered to attend, the best I could manage was a spot in the courtyard outside the main temple where they were showing a live telecast that was simultaneously translated if you were able to find a cheap FM radio. I was told that you could find them everywhere in town and, perhaps with a dash of irony, that they were all made in China.

After seeing Tibet a couple years ago, I couldn’t come down one way or the other about the whole situation. Maybe that's just the inevitable clash of being both Chinese and some kind of human rights person. But I remember feeling one thing for sure, which was that it was unsettlingly sad that through two weeks in Tibet, I did not once see a picture of the Dalai Lama.

In 36 hours in Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj, the Dalai Lama was everywhere. Local Indian stores and restaurants even displayed handwritten signs thanking the Dalai Lama for bringing tourism to the area. That felt about right.

What felt wrong, of course, was that the Dalai Lama and his fellow Tibetans shouldn’t have to be here at all. UNCHR’s favorite poster slogan is, “Einstein was a refugee.” Setting aside for the moment massive Chinese protests, UNHCR could just as easily launch a catchy PR campaign with the slogan, “The Dalai Lama is a refugee.” Him and thousands of others, who for some reason often get left out of today’s refugee policy conversations.

And even though I purposefully started my trip up here with a mind to see what things are like for the Tibetans in exile, I too forgot that they are in fact all refugees. Last night, I attended a panel discussion about gender equality in Tibetan society, and my translator was a young Tibetan man who broke into perfect Mandarin when I told him I was from Hong Kong. Which made perfect sense; he told me he had graduated from high school in Lhasa before making his escape, trekking for 28 days over the Himalayas and into Nepal before finally being resettled in Dharamsala several years ago. His parents, who were (Chinese) government officials in Lhasa, did not come with him.

He had to go before I could offer to buy him dinner and ask him more about just how crazy the journey must have been. It seemed like a missed opportunity, a fleeting chance to learn from the source about two issues that have been big parts of my education: refugee movement and Chinese sovereignty. Here was my moment to take all my asylum-seeking-interview-advocacy-stuff experience and apply it to something real, something personal. And I blew it.

The panel ended late, and I wandered into town too hungry to spend much time looking for a decent restaurant, so I went straight back to McLLo, the traveler hotspot I ate at the night before. It was packed, live music and everything, so I had to share a table. To my right were a few Canadian backpackers. Across from me, two Tibetan men, both with long, straight black hair down to their shoulders. One of them looked a whole lot like Jackie Chan.

The other man broke the ice by raising his mug of Kingfisher to mine, and when he asked me where I was from, I said Hong Kong and ran with it, telling him that his friend looked a whole lot like Jackie Chan. Jackie Chan was super happy. He said he had seen all the movies, and loved how the real Jackie Chan was such a good martial artist and comedian at the same time. Then I bought another round of Kingfishers.

They were both from Amdo in Tibet. They spoke some basic Chinese, though not nearly as fluent as the translator I met earlier in the evening. Both had left Tibet years ago, had spent a month crossing by foot over into Nepal, and had lost friends along the way. I hadn’t missed my chance after all. And then it hit me: they’ve all made that journey. Every single Tibetan in Dharamsala. My two newest friends. Their friends, sitting at another table. The group elder, all of 30 and now based in Montreal. The newest arrival, 20, originally from a Tibetan part of Sichuan, who rattled off the 四大天王 in quick succession when I asked him what Hong Kong actors he liked. The prettiest girl in the room, at the end of the table, also a recent arrival.

All of them, and every other Tibetan in town, had made what is maybe history’s most ridiculous—just plain ridiculous—border crossing, over and through the tallest, most perilous mountains in the world, eluding not just your average smalltime border patrolmen but rather that beast we call the People’s Liberation Army. They had all lost friends en route. They had all left family behind, perhaps forever. And all for what? To hatch some pie-in-the-sky plan to retake Tibet? To join some insurgent secessionist movement and ignite the dissolution of China as we know it?

Are you kidding me? These guys were out partying on a schoolnight, singing along as the band played “Wonderwall” and downing Kingfishers the same way all twentysomethings consume alcohol, from McLeod Ganj to Lan Kwai to frat houses all across the States: in large amounts. Maybe that’s not the image the Tibetan community wants to show the world, but for me, it made things make sense. These guys gave up all they knew and roughed it up and over seven or eight thousand meters of rock and ice because, corny as it is, they just wanted to be free. Free to have as many pictures of the Dalai Lama as they want. Free to study English and the world. And yeah, free to get trashed on a Wednesday night.

I don’t know how that contributes to greater Tibetan autonomy or some kind of peaceful settlement. I just don’t know. But I do know that every Tibetan I met had no reservations about having a drink with me, both before and after I told them I was Chinese. I know that they all love Hong Kong movies, and they all said, at least to me, that they love Chinese people, if not so much the Chinese government. It reminded me how, over some beers in a Lhasa bar two years ago, a couple hippie Chinese youths told me they thought Tibetans should govern Tibet, that after living in Tibet themselves they had decided it was a culture and a people all its own, separate from anything they knew as Chinese.

Feels like the world could do worse than to solve problems through young, impressionable minds formed by experience, not propaganda. Plus drinks.

Delhi

2009-11-24T00:33:00.001-05:00

Made it.

After an inauspicious pre-game trip to Melbourne--during which my 1.5 hour flight from Sydney became a 13-hour odyssey that included a delay, a cancellation no one knew about, another delay, a mechanical problem that forced us to switch planes after having already boarded for an hour, two more hours sitting on the runway in the new plane, then torrential downpour in Melbourne which cut the power of the restaurant where we had been waiting an hour for sashimi that could no longer be served because the fridge was down--after all that, I am here.

Bare first impressions after a morning stroll down Chandni Chowk, and already I can't help but continuously compare things to China. My mum told me recently that sometimes she just can't believe we all come from the same world, that we are all human somehow, that for whatever reason these Delhi sidestreets popped up they way they did, utterly different from hutongs in Beijing or alleyways in London.

It's baffling. But comforting, too.

KLIA

2009-11-24T00:20:00.001-05:00

Summertime

2009-11-18T08:19:00.000-05:00

They make you handwrite your exams here, and that meaty piece of muscle right below my pinky was cramping and smudging and spitting out as many tangential legislation cites as possible right up until time was called. I didn't answer the question completely, but I was done. Thirty-nine semesters of school. Done.

One to go.

I used to hate afternoon exams around this time of year. I would step into the lecture hall leaving behind a bright--if chilly--day, and when I emerged from three hours of reciting IDs from Thucydides it would be 5pm but completely dark already and a couple layers colder. Daylight savings continues to confound me.

But here in the antipodes, it was sunny and blue and warm when I stepped outside the building. It was how I remember the last days of the year in elementary or middle school. Teachers taking down those wavy construction paper borders that were stapled around bulletin boards. The bulletin boards themselves cleared of show and tell pictures or, today, of concert fliers and student government campaign ads. And then this pure brightness seeping through the windows and bouncing off white walls, in the days when you could rely on clear skies during the Hong Kong or Taipei summer.

Those days in my memory are true, happy days, sprinkled with some bittersweet ones whenever I wouldn't be coming back to the same place in late August. I can only guess that my mind associates those days with all the awesome things that accompanied them: yearbooks, whole-grade trips to Water World, weeklong sleepovers, even, I confess, CTY.

Now maybe I get to add to that list. Late Monday night I touchdown in Delhi, before flying up the next day to Dharamsala and then--so I hope--snaking my way south overland until the Subcontinent goes south no longer. I know little about India, and I hope I understand that I probably won't know much more by the time I'm done. But I know this much: when I look out from my window seat as the wheels of the plane separate from Australian soil, I will remember what it feels like to push open the double doors on the last day of school, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the brightness. I will sense freedom, unburdened by the past year and eager to wake up the next morning, or afternoon, without anything to do. I will be anxious. I will be hungry.

And I will be happy.

My side of the mountain

2009-11-15T09:44:00.011-05:00

"Literally" is a word I try not to use liberally. But when my grandma turned 80 this weekend, an Indonesian kitchen straight from the streets of Bandung sprung up in suburban Australia and it may just be the closest I'll ever get to saying that there were, literally, mountains of food.

And hills and valleys and plateaus, too.

Water

2009-11-13T21:33:00.005-05:00

They found water on the moon today. Isn't that, like, a huge deal? How is this not a bigger story than it is? Someone send a boy in a balloon up there.