Privé, all over again

There used to be an actual line.  That we had to actually wait in.  We used to line up from the elevator bank in the Harbour View Hotel across the bridge and over to the Great Eagle Centre, or double-backed towards Central Plaza, and we used to wait.  We waited in the balmy near-summer heat if it was the prom after-party, or in the wincing wet cold when we were back from college for the holidays.  We waited, we paid cover, we had tickets.  We were young.

We didn’t drink as much then, at ing.  We did shots, but not hard shots; we got tables and bottles, but we didn’t stand on the tables and we didn’t drink from the bottles, didn’t hoist them over each others’ mouths and count to three.  The whole place, and the space, the pace, felt less frenzied, if no less drunk (we tolerated less), and the hip-hop floor in the front or the bar in the back with the karaoke booths off to the side always had room to linger.  The time between now and then, its passage between Privé and ing, is like a decade-thick dampener, and it makes me want to say they used to play the music softer at ing, that conversations used to be audible, though I know that can’t be true.

If ing shuttered on our childhood, we passed through adolescence inside Hei Hei, where the lines started to bunch up, into packs, along and around the On Hing Terrace stairs.  We got in because some of us were members now, and because if you went enough, and you waited around long enough, you always knew someone who knew John.  There was the small pool outside no one ever swam in, not intentionally, and the one far side of the island bar that was raised a couple steps, higher ground, the best vantage point from which to survey who were the cutest girls, and if (and what) they were drinking, and why we can’t ever seem to stop doing this.

And if when Hei Hei closed, too, we were meant to reach some kind of adulthood at Privé, if because some of us were now old enough to be owners it meant we were somehow more seasoned, or just needed more sleep, we weren’t, and we didn’t.  We sat on the tops of the couches on the upper floor with our backs to crowds below, and we did harder shots, we drank straight from the bottles for longer and we stayed out in the night later.  I think of all the strange pathways at these clubs, to the karaoke booths at ing, and between the elevator lobby and the bathrooms at Hei Hei or through the kitchen at Privé, and I think I could enter through any one of them and exit out any other, time machines taking me nowhere.

A couple months ago, when the lights came up at Privé for what I had naively assumed would be the last time, my first thought was how much we had aged in these places, and how different we all are from when we used to line up along the bridge outside ing.  But then I realized that though we had changed, these were not the places where we changed; these were the places where we get to be the same, no matter what year it is or how old we are, these are our refuges of sameness, our Neverlands, where for better or worse we stay, if not forever young then at least forever foolish.

Dana

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

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.

22

Kamikaze

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Manute Bol

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

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

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

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

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.

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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

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

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

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

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

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.