So where was I? As I was saying, traveling during Covid is not exactly relaxing. Entry rules can change overnight, and flights may be canceled at the last minute. No really means no, just like on your first date, all those moons ago. You ain't getting in, so stop begging.
On my last day in Skopje, I got a Covid test just after dawn, with the negative result arriving just two hours later. It was far from a Shawn Kemp slam dunk. The day before, I had drank rakija from a bottle shared with two strangers. Walking around, my friend Alex and I had run into two friendly old farts, just sitting in the shade, watching pigeons. When one gave me the plastic bottle, I just had to gulp down a bracing shot, then another one. It would have been extremely rude to rebuff such as spontaneous gesture of kindness and universal brotherhood.
One man was 70-years-old, and the other was 78 and a former truck driver. Each had a cheerful disposition, bulbous nose, firm posture and fine complexion. With Alex translating, I asked the ex truck driver if he had a girlfriend in each town, and that got him talking all right.
"I've had sex with over a thousand women! That’s right, over a thousand. If I saw a beautiful woman, I had to fuck her!"
This casanova had driven as far as Kuwait, so we asked if he had pleasured an Arab woman. No, unfortunately, although one did all she could to seduce him.
"She pulled up her burqa, and there was no panties, but I couldn't." We all cracked up. He popped his eyes, bunched his fist and lifted his arm in an illustrative uppercut, to mimic that distant arousal. "I just couldn't. In Kuwait, if you stole, they chopped your hand off." The long-hauler didn't care to have anything of his chopped off.
He spoke quite fondly of the Tito years, and even did a Partizan salute, so I aped the man after my parting shot of rakija. When he said, "I loved Tito," his friend chimed in, "I loved Jovanka!"
*
Alex is a take-charge kind of a guy, which means he's a facilitator, protector and sometimes bully. He'll do what he thinks is right. In school, Alex stood up for kids who were picked on, even if it meant fighting their harassers. Alex slapped classmates to stop them from smoking.
In college, Alex argued with a hardline Marxist professor, which resulted in him getting an unjust D. Years after Socialism's collapse, however, Alex caught this man leaving a church, so he shouted, "Hey, I thought you didn't believe in God!"
Surprisingly, the old red graciously responded, "I was wrong."
Seeing a single typo on my Covid test result, Alex went to the lab to get it corrected. "We don't want to take any chances."
Set, Alex drove me to the airport after midnight, in an orange-lit smog. "Look at this pollution," Alex grumbled. Parts of the highway were under repair, yet poorly marked. "That's just typical," Alex shook his head. In the backseat sat Alex' son, Slave, and our mutual friend, Darko.
Thirty-six-years-old, Darko's an underemployed dentist just waiting to emigrate to Australia. I had visited his grandma's village, Prostranje, to see all of its empty houses. Half a century ago, Prostranje had a thousand people. Now, there are only ten, and no one is doing anything, not even farming. Guided by Darko, I dropped in on a 95-year-old man and his 62-year-old son, a former factory worker. A grape arbor graced their house's entrance, and strings of hefty, curling red peppers were dangled to dry. Once, 15 people were crowded into this handsome, solidly built house, now crumbling on the outside.
Inside Prostranje's well-maintained 19th-century church, I admired the still-vibrant and rather spectacular frescoes. This is heritage, lovingly preserved. Using pitchforks, dark devils with darting red tongues poke naked sinners into hell, where wolves may devour them. I inspected its made-in-America bell. Inside its long-dead elementary school, there was a mini pub with four photos of Tito, in a medal-bedecked military uniform, suit, and, with a hunting rifle slung on his back, looking suave and regal on horseback. Yugoslav maps and army jackets shared a wall with a religious icon. Behind the bar, there was a photo of a half naked woman, barely covered by lurid green leaves.
Darko, "I come here, my parents come here, to fix our old house. We do everything ourselves. I feel good when I'm here, because this is my village, my history. My family has been here more than 300 years."
Despite all that, he'll have to leave his beloved North Macedonia soon, because he's still unmarried and living with his parents, like so many other professionals in this broken economy.
Just before disappearing into the airport, I hugged Alex goodbye, gave Slave a fist bump and accepted a gift pen from Darko.
"We'll meet again," I optimistically said. "Maybe in Sydney!"
"Yes, we'll meet again!"
*
My plane was supposed to leave Skopje at 4:45PM, with a layover in Istanbul of just 1:45, but my departure was changed to 2:35AM, which meant I had to slump, slouch, schlep around and nod off inside Sabiha Goksen for 16 hours! I couldn't go into town without a visa, a requirement I had forgotten about.
In the international transit section, there were McDonald's, Burger King, Starbucks, Subway, Popeyes Louisiana Chicken and Sbarro, plus Turkish chains Mado Cafe, Maca Cafe, Secco Kafe, Karafirin Bakery, Simit Sarayi and Usta Doneci, etc. Trattoria Milano, Heroes Sports Bar and a few others had gone out of business, presumedly because of the coronavirus crisis. With so much time on my hands, I could observe there was very little traffic at this airport, though occasionally, it would be swarmed for half an hour or so, thus giving the impression that everything was still normal.
Set apart in the mezzanine was a very pleasant eatery called Big Chefs, so that's where I sheltered for several hours. With its tables civilly spaced, everyone had his serene bubble, and the music was elegant. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald's singing Irving Berlin's Cheek to Cheek has to be among the peaks of American culture, and Betty Carter scatting, riffing and growling One of My Favorite Things is pretty damn awesome too. I felt blessed.
Suddenly, I heard English coming from the next table, but it was spoken so softly, I had to strain to make sure it was really the Queen's. The young couple turned out to be from Liverpool, and they had only come to Turkey to get new teeth. He was a mechanic and she's an accountant.
Flashing his sparkling chompers, the bearded man said, "I only paid 1,800 Pounds. In England, that would have cost me 5,000."
"Where did you go?"
"Izmir. It's down south, by the ocean. This doctor is very famous. A lot of English people go to her."
His tank topped girlfriend added, "I got mine done, too." Showing off blameless teeth, she smiled. "I paid 5,000. It would have cost me 14,000 back home."
"Looks great!"
In Turkey ten days, they never had a chance to even hang out in Istanbul, one of the world's most resonant cities. It's really deep, man. Now they were going back to work. Before Covid, they had planned a trip to Paris and Amsterdam, which they had never seen. They had traveled a bit, though, with trips to Tenerife, Krakow, Torino and even Bali. Years from now, people will look back in astonishment at how accessible this entire earth was to even the working class of privileged countries.
*
Just before we boarded, a middle-aged Turk was turned away from another flight. Enraged, he unleased a tirade that stopped and started, with no security guard nearby to calm him down. There was so much hurt in his anger, I almost expected him to sob.
In any totalitarian state, just getting on a plane is nearly a miracle, so if you haven’t experienced this abject hope, anxiety and fear, consider yourself pampered. Freedom of movement is among the first to be taken away, and it’s already begun.
My Pegasus mistress tore my boarding pass so gently yet authoritatively, I felt acute love, then moved on. Though mine was a window seat, a woman had taken it, so I sat in hers. Flying into Beirut in the dark, I wouldn’t be seeing much anyway.
The passport, Covid and customs checks at Beirut's airport were surprisingly hassle-free, so, just like that, I was out in the warm Lebanese air. I had a driver, Ali, to take me to Al-Quala'a, just over an hour south of Beirut, and why was I going there? To be close to Israel, of course, for can any Jew resist this visceral yank?
*
It wasn't quite midnight, yet all the streets and houses were barely lit, and there were almost no open cafes or restaurants. Although I knew Lebanon was in a severe economic crisis, I wasn't aware there were scheduled electricity blackouts daily, and capital control had been imposed for a year, so that Lebanese could only have rationed access to their own money in the bank. On top of a corrupt government, there was also Beirutshima, and a suspicious series of wild fires that many Lebanese attribute to Israel. Before you dismiss them as paranoid or "anti-Semitic," a meaningless word here, consider how many times Jews have attacked their country, and that Jewish fighter jets daily violate their airspace. That roar above the clouds has become so familiar, locals barely notice it.
Wiry, dark and mustached, Ali's a cheerful ex-cop of roughly my age. Although I had been informed he didn't speak much English, Ali had more than enough to chatter with me. He had learnt English by watching American TV shows and movies, he said. His first foreign language was French.
"You never took an English class?" I asked.
"Never!"
"That's incredible." Perhaps Ali had worked overseas, I thought. "Have you traveled much?"
"No, I do not travel. I love Lebanon too much!"
I couldn't help but chuckle at that odd answer.
Ali, "My daughter is in Australia."
"Wow! You should go see her."
"No, she come to see me. She has three sons."
"You haven't seen them?"
"One, six-years-old, has come to Lebanon."
"That's good."
"My wife go to Australia. She stay there two months."
"So she travels..."
"Yes, she been to Syria, Iraq, Iran, Australia."
"I love to travel."
"A friend invite me to America. He say he pay for my plane ticket, give me money to spend. I say no. Another friend invite me to Arabia. If I don't want to go to America," he laughed, "why I want to go to Arabia?"
"Just go, look around, eat new food?"
"No, I like it here. I love Lebanon."
On our right, there was just enough light to reveal the ocean. Highway signs indicated unfamiliar towns and cities, and even Sidon was unrecognizable because it's called Saida here. A brightly lit, humongous bakery flashed by. Al Forno was like a casino.
Ali was sipping from a can of Heineken. "I drink when I drive. I drink beer and scotch and whiskey. I drink beer in the morning, afternoon, evening, night."
"How many beers do you drink a day?"
"I don't count them."
"Do you drink beer at a cafe, in your village?"
"I'm the only one, drink beer, in my village!"
"Wow! So where do you drink?"
"I must go to another village," meaning Christian ones, such as Sarba, a village inhabited by descendants of 11th century Serb crusaders.
We passed several churches, with one giant one, on top of a hill, in Maghdouché. Jesus and Mary had sheltered in a cave there. We saw mosques, of course, and Hezbollah billboards and banners.
Since they are on the front line against Jewish power, you'll be delivered too when they win, God willing, whether you call Him Jesus, Allah, Buddha or Vishnu. You must join me, then, in rooting for these Arab fighters. If only the rest of us had their balls and brains, this war would already be over.
When Ali says “before the war,” he means Lebanon before 1975, but his country has been continuously under siege or attacked by Jews since 1948, with the founding of Israel. More than any other nation, Jews trigger war. It’s what they do, for profit, revenge, conquest or sadistic, righteous fun, judging by how much they cheerlead each new one.
Just think of all the wars they started in the last century alone. Just think of the one you’re submerged in, right now.
That fuse is getting short. Three more days before hell breaks loose. It’s all planned at your expense. Though way late, you still must act, if only to save what’s left of your ass. There’s still some flesh there, though pitiful. It may grow back.
Showing posts with label Istanbul. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Istanbul. Show all posts
Saturday, October 31, 2020
Hezbollah or Bust
As published at Unz Review, 10/31/20:
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
Saturday, October 26, 2019
Belonging, Not Belonging, Who Cares?
As published at Smirking Chimp, Unz Review and TruthSeeker, 10/26/19:
In Saigon, I can easily go a week without seeing any white person, but today, I ran across two white Mormons on bicycles, with one having this paper sign on his backpack, “TIẾNG ANH MIỄN PHÍ” [“FREE ENGLISH LANGUAGE”].
I also passed a young white man pulling a suitcase down the street, his face showing discomfort from the intense heat, at least, and probably because he was all alone, without a single syllable to connect him with anyone. It seemed he was headed towards the bus station, a good mile away. He could have gotten there on the back of a motorbike for just a buck, but to do that, he had to speak some Vietnamese, for this was nowhere near downtown.
Half an hour later, I saw him on another street, going in the opposite direction, so he was walking in circles, apparently. Looking determined, the lanky man in shorts marched briskly along, a foot away from swarming motorbikes. Don’t bother me, his face was trying to say, I know what I’m doing.
Actually, the dude wasn’t that forsaken, for there were English schools all over the neighborhood, with white people inside each. This knowledge must have emboldened him to meander through this alien environment. Even if he spoke no English, it had to be comforting to know there were other whites, or at least foreigners, around. He wasn’t the only one who didn’t belong.
Lost in Tokyo, I approached the only black man on the street for directions. He helped me. Needing to use a phone in Kuala Lumpur, I cheered up to hear Vietnamese spoken nearby. She lent me hers.
Also in Tokyo, a white guy could tell immediately that I wasn’t Japanese and, more surprisingly, as likely an American. Relieved to arrest a compatriot on the sidewalk, the Iraq War vet and military contractor was garrulous. He had been drinking all night.
Even in Vietnam, I was clearly an outsider in 1995, on my first trip back. Besides my lighter skin and Americanized body language, I was also dressed like no one else. Once, a stranger touched my jeans in admiration. They were called “cow pants” then. Unlike most people, I never picked my teeth in public or squatted.
In 2019, it’s much harder to single out a việt kiều [overseas Vietnamese], for many people here have adopted the American casual look of jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, flannel shirts and sneakers, etc. The conical hat is still common, but ao dais have become extremely rare, regrettably. Colorful printed pajamas are usually found only on the frumpy middle-aged.
Haircuts are cooler. Tattoos spider. Urban sophisticates browse foreign cuisines, jet overseas and are mesmerized by American films, so their demeanors and postures, too, have evolved, or been tinkered with, I should say. You no longer see men holding hands.
With more cash, dental care has much improved, and at each dentist office, white models beam from signs. As with so much else, whites provide the standard and target. My teeth, by the way, are among the worst here. In three decades, I have visited the dentist exactly twice, and only in Vietnam.
Until a century ago, Vietnamese routinely lacquered their teeth black. That custom is long gone. The 20th century was one of accelerated and often violent changes. Marveling at its conveniences and gadgets, we survivors often forget its staggering body count, social rending and psychic brutality, even as we continue to endure it. Millions of souls have been flushed down the progressive toilet.
The 20th century promised to liberate you from traditions, customs, family, nation, hometown, marriage, friendship, love, memory and even biology, so how could you resist? Thinking you have gained the moon and more, you lost your only birthright, an anchored life on this heavenly earth.
Unmoored, people lose their mind. At my Philly apartment complex, there was a young white man who would dress up as Tarzan in our courtyard. Half-naked in the semi dark, he would look up, half fearful, half excited, at all the windows.
“We should call the cops,” my alarmed wife would say.
“No, the guy is harmless.” I understood such loneliness.
Another young white guy would spend up to four hours washing his BMW, a gift from his dad which he almost never used. He had nowhere to go, really, no one to meet. The entire world had been lost to him, and there was nothing left but the electronic screen.
In Penang, Malaysia a few months ago, I was astonished by the stone and wooden sculptures, ceramic figurines, carvings, murals and architecture of Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi, a clan house. If this was an example of Chinese art in a distant immigrant community, then how marvelous are buildings in China itself? Outrageously, thousands were wrecked during the Cultural Revolution, so that Chinese scholars must travel to Penang to study the splendor of Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi.
Visiting Guatemala in 1956, Norman Lewis encountered a missionary who bought traditional Zutuhul blouses with copulating horses, only to burn them. The Indians were given Mickey Mouse ponchos and skirts.
With exceptions, and I’m being very measured here, your heritage must be protected and endlessly studied, for its wealth can’t be adequately assayed even after several lifetimes. Walk backward. Look back!
Yet, some tough guy has thundered, “And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcasses upon the carcasses of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you.” Verily, I say unto you, Communism and Christianity are squirted from the same urinary meatus. Please don’t save me!
With its righteous mobs and myriad ordnances flung from the sky, as if by God, more was destroyed during the 20th century than all others combined, but it’s the ongoing ideological violence I’m trying to define and battle, and it’s basically this: the local or provincial is supposedly backward and inferior to the global and cosmopolitan, and to reach this higher state, one must begin by learning the lingua franca, which is now English, or some bastard version of it.
Squatting on the ground and picking my teeth, the few that are left, that is, with none shiny black, unfortunately, I most emphatically declare, “Fuck English!”
Fuck, too, Evelyn Waugh, Norman Lewis, Paul Bowles, Paul Theroux and all the rest, for they have polluted my beautiful, radiant mind of color with the slave masters’ suffocating lingo. With each sentence, I’m being drawn and quartered by all of Western civilization.
To acquire another language is hard enough, but to have a prolong intercourse with an alien culture is nigh impossible. Very few have done so. Most never stray far from the guided tour bus. While some may find disorientation liberating, most will balk.
There is an atavistic fear of being a misfit in a crowd, of being eyeballed, fingered, targeted or swarmed, and this terror is amplified if you have no words to fend off, explain, ingratiate or even grovel with. Speechless and diversely striped, you’re indeed a helpless animal.
In 33 Moments of Happiness, German Ingo Schulze has a narrator describe Russia, “Never, not in any other country, have I felt so vulnerable, so defenseless. I knew: If something happens to me here, no one will help me. If I stumble, they’ll trample me down, if I scream, they’ll rob and strip me. They can spot foreigners at a glance. As if we were a different color.” Funny man.
You don’t even have to be of a different color. Last year in Phnom Penh, I met by chance a Vietnamese, Ni, who had arrived in Cambodia in 1991 with just $15, which dwindled to $2 in two weeks. Unable to find work, Ni figured he’d have one last meal, then run in front of a bus, but as he debated this solution, a Toyota Camry actually knocked him down.
Out leapt the enraged driver, and as Ni was being slapped around and abused in rapid, incomprehensible Khmer, bystanders did nothing. If I fight back, they might just finish me off, Ni thought, for I’m just a “youn.”
Ni was sure he was digested, as the Vietnamese like to say, for he was about to be excreted back into the earth, just as he wished anyway, for after this humiliating beating, he would still have had next to nothing, nowhere to go and no reachable friends or relatives.
In Istanbul, I was also cornered and roughed up a bit, but I got away, and I’m not blaming anybody, for I was stupid. In a different Istanbul neighborhood, a restaurant owner refused to charge me, so delighted was he to have a visitor from so far away.
Miraculously, a savior appeared to change Ni’s entire life. Leaping off his motorbike, the middle-aged man shoved Ni’s tormentor away, and even punched him, to the crowd’s astonishment. They shouted at each other.
Suddenly, the Camry driver looked frightened, backed off and babbled what sounded like apologies. Even more unbelievably, he emptied his wallet to hand Ni two thousand bucks.
“Take it,” Ni’s rescuer shouted, in Vietnamese!
“No, two hundred is enough, brother,” so he pocketed that.
Though Vietnamese, Ni’s savior was a general in the Cambodian Army.
When Vietnam invaded Cambodia on Christmas Day of 1978, it took them just two weeks to reach Phnom Penh, and there, they set up a puppet government. With a client army built from scratch, they inserted Vietnamese officers. Some of these adopted Cambodian names and stayed behind even after the Vietnamese withdrawal in 1988. History is filled with obscured facts and secrets.
The general put Ni up in a hotel, treated him to many meals. Seeing that Ni was bright and enterprising, he set Ni up in a lumber exporting business. With the general’s contacts, it thrived, which bred other ventures, so by the time I met him, he was the owner of a hotel, restaurant, construction firm and, most lucratively, a bonsai dealership that could sell a single tree for as much as $350,000.
I met Ni’s Vietnamese wife, who arrived in a Toyota Camry. As she drove us around, Vietnamese pop music from decades ago filled our bubble. They had five children, with the three oldest sent to Vietnam to attend universities.
“If you want to move to Cambodia, I can help you out with the paperwork or whatever else,” Ni said to me twice. “I mean it.”
Ni considered me mình, you see. We belong to a many hearted flesh. “Mình” in Vietnamese means body, oneself, we, us or one’s spouse, so there’s a merging of one’s everything with all those who share the same language, culture, history and blood. It’s the most natural and ideal state, according to this one word. This month, mình beat Indonesia 3 to 1. Mình eat rice daily, they eat bread.
Speaking of soccer, a recent match between Malaysia and Indonesia ended 3-2, with two goals each scored by naturalized players, the ex-Gambian Mohamadou Sumareh and ex-Brazilian Beto Goncalves. Sumareh arrived in Malaysia at age 17, while Goncalves showed up in Indonesia for the first time at age 28. Citizenship has become more of a bureaucratic quirk than anything reflecting reality.
Invest two million Euros in Cyprus real estate and you can become a citizen of that country within six months. I saw a poster in Saigon, “BECOME A CITIZEN OF THE REPUBLIC OF CYPRUS / AND GET RESIDENCY IN CYPRUS / THROUGH INVESTMENT WITH THE BEST REAL ESTATE AGENCY IN CYPRUS,” so without speaking Turkish or Greek, and knowing nothing about his new home, a Vietnamese can suddenly become a Cypriot. I strongly suspect, though, he will remain a mình in all senses.
Without two million Euros, can a Vietnamese just show up in Nicosia and claim he’s an undocumented Cypriot? After all, no human is illegal.
I started this article at Mộng Cầm Café, named after a girlfriend of the poet Hàn Mặc Tử, but only the most literate Vietnamese would even recognize that. Then I moved to Kidzooona, a shopping mall playground. As my two-year-old nephew, Suki, played, I typed. Now, I’m at a Family Mart, the Japanese convenience store chain. To loosen my few remaining brain cells, I’m downing Tiger Beer and Doritos. Whatever works, man. It’s never easy.
Looking out the plate-glass window, I just witnessed a funeral procession, with its dragon hearse and mourners in white, and an oboe’s whining drifting in. Across the street is “Anna Dental Clinic.” For cachet, its sign is also in English. You’re killing me.
Two days ago on this block, I photographed a young woman wearing an army green jacket, “ROMH NEW GENETION A PSYHIC LOVE HVE WILL EXIODE ACRCS ALL COURES YOU WLL.” She would be a star poet in the Bard’s MFA Writing Program. I should know. I taught there for four summers.
I began this article thinking I would talk about Edward Hopper, Robert Henri, the Ashcan School and how the local must be nourished by homegrown art that reflects it, but alas, I couldn’t finesse any of that in. Maybe soon? At my advanced age, however, soon may turn out to be never. I’m feeling more digested by the second.
Sweating and grimacing, perhaps that lost white man is still wandering?
.
In Saigon, I can easily go a week without seeing any white person, but today, I ran across two white Mormons on bicycles, with one having this paper sign on his backpack, “TIẾNG ANH MIỄN PHÍ” [“FREE ENGLISH LANGUAGE”].
I also passed a young white man pulling a suitcase down the street, his face showing discomfort from the intense heat, at least, and probably because he was all alone, without a single syllable to connect him with anyone. It seemed he was headed towards the bus station, a good mile away. He could have gotten there on the back of a motorbike for just a buck, but to do that, he had to speak some Vietnamese, for this was nowhere near downtown.
Half an hour later, I saw him on another street, going in the opposite direction, so he was walking in circles, apparently. Looking determined, the lanky man in shorts marched briskly along, a foot away from swarming motorbikes. Don’t bother me, his face was trying to say, I know what I’m doing.
Actually, the dude wasn’t that forsaken, for there were English schools all over the neighborhood, with white people inside each. This knowledge must have emboldened him to meander through this alien environment. Even if he spoke no English, it had to be comforting to know there were other whites, or at least foreigners, around. He wasn’t the only one who didn’t belong.
Lost in Tokyo, I approached the only black man on the street for directions. He helped me. Needing to use a phone in Kuala Lumpur, I cheered up to hear Vietnamese spoken nearby. She lent me hers.
Also in Tokyo, a white guy could tell immediately that I wasn’t Japanese and, more surprisingly, as likely an American. Relieved to arrest a compatriot on the sidewalk, the Iraq War vet and military contractor was garrulous. He had been drinking all night.
Even in Vietnam, I was clearly an outsider in 1995, on my first trip back. Besides my lighter skin and Americanized body language, I was also dressed like no one else. Once, a stranger touched my jeans in admiration. They were called “cow pants” then. Unlike most people, I never picked my teeth in public or squatted.
In 2019, it’s much harder to single out a việt kiều [overseas Vietnamese], for many people here have adopted the American casual look of jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, flannel shirts and sneakers, etc. The conical hat is still common, but ao dais have become extremely rare, regrettably. Colorful printed pajamas are usually found only on the frumpy middle-aged.
Haircuts are cooler. Tattoos spider. Urban sophisticates browse foreign cuisines, jet overseas and are mesmerized by American films, so their demeanors and postures, too, have evolved, or been tinkered with, I should say. You no longer see men holding hands.
With more cash, dental care has much improved, and at each dentist office, white models beam from signs. As with so much else, whites provide the standard and target. My teeth, by the way, are among the worst here. In three decades, I have visited the dentist exactly twice, and only in Vietnam.
Until a century ago, Vietnamese routinely lacquered their teeth black. That custom is long gone. The 20th century was one of accelerated and often violent changes. Marveling at its conveniences and gadgets, we survivors often forget its staggering body count, social rending and psychic brutality, even as we continue to endure it. Millions of souls have been flushed down the progressive toilet.
The 20th century promised to liberate you from traditions, customs, family, nation, hometown, marriage, friendship, love, memory and even biology, so how could you resist? Thinking you have gained the moon and more, you lost your only birthright, an anchored life on this heavenly earth.
Unmoored, people lose their mind. At my Philly apartment complex, there was a young white man who would dress up as Tarzan in our courtyard. Half-naked in the semi dark, he would look up, half fearful, half excited, at all the windows.
“We should call the cops,” my alarmed wife would say.
“No, the guy is harmless.” I understood such loneliness.
Another young white guy would spend up to four hours washing his BMW, a gift from his dad which he almost never used. He had nowhere to go, really, no one to meet. The entire world had been lost to him, and there was nothing left but the electronic screen.
In Penang, Malaysia a few months ago, I was astonished by the stone and wooden sculptures, ceramic figurines, carvings, murals and architecture of Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi, a clan house. If this was an example of Chinese art in a distant immigrant community, then how marvelous are buildings in China itself? Outrageously, thousands were wrecked during the Cultural Revolution, so that Chinese scholars must travel to Penang to study the splendor of Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi.
Visiting Guatemala in 1956, Norman Lewis encountered a missionary who bought traditional Zutuhul blouses with copulating horses, only to burn them. The Indians were given Mickey Mouse ponchos and skirts.
With exceptions, and I’m being very measured here, your heritage must be protected and endlessly studied, for its wealth can’t be adequately assayed even after several lifetimes. Walk backward. Look back!
Yet, some tough guy has thundered, “And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcasses upon the carcasses of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you.” Verily, I say unto you, Communism and Christianity are squirted from the same urinary meatus. Please don’t save me!
With its righteous mobs and myriad ordnances flung from the sky, as if by God, more was destroyed during the 20th century than all others combined, but it’s the ongoing ideological violence I’m trying to define and battle, and it’s basically this: the local or provincial is supposedly backward and inferior to the global and cosmopolitan, and to reach this higher state, one must begin by learning the lingua franca, which is now English, or some bastard version of it.
Squatting on the ground and picking my teeth, the few that are left, that is, with none shiny black, unfortunately, I most emphatically declare, “Fuck English!”
Fuck, too, Evelyn Waugh, Norman Lewis, Paul Bowles, Paul Theroux and all the rest, for they have polluted my beautiful, radiant mind of color with the slave masters’ suffocating lingo. With each sentence, I’m being drawn and quartered by all of Western civilization.
To acquire another language is hard enough, but to have a prolong intercourse with an alien culture is nigh impossible. Very few have done so. Most never stray far from the guided tour bus. While some may find disorientation liberating, most will balk.
There is an atavistic fear of being a misfit in a crowd, of being eyeballed, fingered, targeted or swarmed, and this terror is amplified if you have no words to fend off, explain, ingratiate or even grovel with. Speechless and diversely striped, you’re indeed a helpless animal.
In 33 Moments of Happiness, German Ingo Schulze has a narrator describe Russia, “Never, not in any other country, have I felt so vulnerable, so defenseless. I knew: If something happens to me here, no one will help me. If I stumble, they’ll trample me down, if I scream, they’ll rob and strip me. They can spot foreigners at a glance. As if we were a different color.” Funny man.
You don’t even have to be of a different color. Last year in Phnom Penh, I met by chance a Vietnamese, Ni, who had arrived in Cambodia in 1991 with just $15, which dwindled to $2 in two weeks. Unable to find work, Ni figured he’d have one last meal, then run in front of a bus, but as he debated this solution, a Toyota Camry actually knocked him down.
Out leapt the enraged driver, and as Ni was being slapped around and abused in rapid, incomprehensible Khmer, bystanders did nothing. If I fight back, they might just finish me off, Ni thought, for I’m just a “youn.”
Ni was sure he was digested, as the Vietnamese like to say, for he was about to be excreted back into the earth, just as he wished anyway, for after this humiliating beating, he would still have had next to nothing, nowhere to go and no reachable friends or relatives.
In Istanbul, I was also cornered and roughed up a bit, but I got away, and I’m not blaming anybody, for I was stupid. In a different Istanbul neighborhood, a restaurant owner refused to charge me, so delighted was he to have a visitor from so far away.
Miraculously, a savior appeared to change Ni’s entire life. Leaping off his motorbike, the middle-aged man shoved Ni’s tormentor away, and even punched him, to the crowd’s astonishment. They shouted at each other.
Suddenly, the Camry driver looked frightened, backed off and babbled what sounded like apologies. Even more unbelievably, he emptied his wallet to hand Ni two thousand bucks.
“Take it,” Ni’s rescuer shouted, in Vietnamese!
“No, two hundred is enough, brother,” so he pocketed that.
Though Vietnamese, Ni’s savior was a general in the Cambodian Army.
When Vietnam invaded Cambodia on Christmas Day of 1978, it took them just two weeks to reach Phnom Penh, and there, they set up a puppet government. With a client army built from scratch, they inserted Vietnamese officers. Some of these adopted Cambodian names and stayed behind even after the Vietnamese withdrawal in 1988. History is filled with obscured facts and secrets.
The general put Ni up in a hotel, treated him to many meals. Seeing that Ni was bright and enterprising, he set Ni up in a lumber exporting business. With the general’s contacts, it thrived, which bred other ventures, so by the time I met him, he was the owner of a hotel, restaurant, construction firm and, most lucratively, a bonsai dealership that could sell a single tree for as much as $350,000.
I met Ni’s Vietnamese wife, who arrived in a Toyota Camry. As she drove us around, Vietnamese pop music from decades ago filled our bubble. They had five children, with the three oldest sent to Vietnam to attend universities.
“If you want to move to Cambodia, I can help you out with the paperwork or whatever else,” Ni said to me twice. “I mean it.”
Ni considered me mình, you see. We belong to a many hearted flesh. “Mình” in Vietnamese means body, oneself, we, us or one’s spouse, so there’s a merging of one’s everything with all those who share the same language, culture, history and blood. It’s the most natural and ideal state, according to this one word. This month, mình beat Indonesia 3 to 1. Mình eat rice daily, they eat bread.
Speaking of soccer, a recent match between Malaysia and Indonesia ended 3-2, with two goals each scored by naturalized players, the ex-Gambian Mohamadou Sumareh and ex-Brazilian Beto Goncalves. Sumareh arrived in Malaysia at age 17, while Goncalves showed up in Indonesia for the first time at age 28. Citizenship has become more of a bureaucratic quirk than anything reflecting reality.
Invest two million Euros in Cyprus real estate and you can become a citizen of that country within six months. I saw a poster in Saigon, “BECOME A CITIZEN OF THE REPUBLIC OF CYPRUS / AND GET RESIDENCY IN CYPRUS / THROUGH INVESTMENT WITH THE BEST REAL ESTATE AGENCY IN CYPRUS,” so without speaking Turkish or Greek, and knowing nothing about his new home, a Vietnamese can suddenly become a Cypriot. I strongly suspect, though, he will remain a mình in all senses.
Without two million Euros, can a Vietnamese just show up in Nicosia and claim he’s an undocumented Cypriot? After all, no human is illegal.
I started this article at Mộng Cầm Café, named after a girlfriend of the poet Hàn Mặc Tử, but only the most literate Vietnamese would even recognize that. Then I moved to Kidzooona, a shopping mall playground. As my two-year-old nephew, Suki, played, I typed. Now, I’m at a Family Mart, the Japanese convenience store chain. To loosen my few remaining brain cells, I’m downing Tiger Beer and Doritos. Whatever works, man. It’s never easy.
Looking out the plate-glass window, I just witnessed a funeral procession, with its dragon hearse and mourners in white, and an oboe’s whining drifting in. Across the street is “Anna Dental Clinic.” For cachet, its sign is also in English. You’re killing me.
Two days ago on this block, I photographed a young woman wearing an army green jacket, “ROMH NEW GENETION A PSYHIC LOVE HVE WILL EXIODE ACRCS ALL COURES YOU WLL.” She would be a star poet in the Bard’s MFA Writing Program. I should know. I taught there for four summers.
I began this article thinking I would talk about Edward Hopper, Robert Henri, the Ashcan School and how the local must be nourished by homegrown art that reflects it, but alas, I couldn’t finesse any of that in. Maybe soon? At my advanced age, however, soon may turn out to be never. I’m feeling more digested by the second.
Sweating and grimacing, perhaps that lost white man is still wandering?
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Thursday, December 31, 2015
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
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This wasn't too far from the Taşköprü tram stop. The boy running this internet cafe was about 14. There was no price list, so I showed him my coins. He took two liras, equal to 69 cents.
I had eaten at a joint where the waiter was about 11. Delighted to see a Vietnamese at his eatery, his dad didn't charge me. I had rice with white beans, eggplant with minced lamb and tea, the last bought by kid waiter from a nearby place.
Near this internet cafe, I saw a girl of about seven bring groceries to an old lady. From her third floor window, the old lady lowered a basket, tied to a rope, for the child to put groceries in. Then she dropped a coin. The kid ran away most happily.
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This wasn't too far from the Taşköprü tram stop. The boy running this internet cafe was about 14. There was no price list, so I showed him my coins. He took two liras, equal to 69 cents.
I had eaten at a joint where the waiter was about 11. Delighted to see a Vietnamese at his eatery, his dad didn't charge me. I had rice with white beans, eggplant with minced lamb and tea, the last bought by kid waiter from a nearby place.
Near this internet cafe, I saw a girl of about seven bring groceries to an old lady. From her third floor window, the old lady lowered a basket, tied to a rope, for the child to put groceries in. Then she dropped a coin. The kid ran away most happily.
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