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.