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.