the sins of snootiness and sanctimony

I don't quite know what to make of Kristof's newest, "Learning from the Sin of Sodom": http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28kristof.html?em

First off, in regard to US international aid organizations, I knew World Vision was big, but I didn't know it was the biggest!! I guess it's really not that surprising, as who funnels more donations than churches?

Here's the part of the article that lends it its title:

Mr. Stearns argues that evangelicals were often so focused on sexual morality and a personal relationship with God that they ignored the needy. He writes laceratingly about “a Church that had the wealth to build great sanctuaries but lacked the will to build schools, hospitals, and clinics.”

In one striking passage, Mr. Stearns quotes the prophet Ezekiel as saying that the great sin of the people of Sodom wasn’t so much that they were promiscuous or gay as that they were “arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49.)

Hmm. Imagine if sodomy laws could be used to punish the stingy, unconcerned rich!

And here's Kristof's piece-of-cake solution... it's more idealistic and preachy than anything, but I wonder if he has a point:

A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals. They’re also less likely to spend vacations volunteering at, say, a school or a clinic in Rwanda.

If secular liberals can give up some of their snootiness, and if evangelicals can retire some of their sanctimony, then we all might succeed together in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity, like illiteracy, human trafficking and maternal mortality.

denial

I canNOT believe school starts tomorrow.
Luckily, I teach only one class. I got a warning from the secretary not to be late because the administration is going to be making sure all of the teachers get to class in time. Hah! Let's hope "The Book Thief" doesn't keep me up all night again so that I can get up early enough.

another familiar stranger

Soon after I posted the last blog, I realized the title was also appropriate for yet another happy hair man story, aka the lame chronicles of a girl who doesn't know how to flirt in a language and culture not her own:


For the past week, ever since shops started to reopen, I've been trying to avoid passing the hair salon. Will the happy hair man remember me? I was afraid to find out. We ended things awkwardly, with me turning down his BBQ beef stick because of some serious stomach issues.

I was getting anxious because I inevitably have to pass there every day to get my grub on, and until today, no happy hair man appeared. Is he the same kind of migrant worker in Leslie Chang's book? The kind that switches careers and life plans (and salons?) after the holiday to signify a fresh beginning? Again, I was afraid to find out.

Today he was there! I saw my handsome happy hair man!

After spending the afternoon listening to Sashamon (making Rach a reggae mix!), I went to buy a box of chocolate milk from the store, and he was heading down the alley as I was coming up. I was busy jamming my straw into the box when I heard a loud, "HELLO!"

Who the hell says "hello" around here? This time, I wasn't afraid of the answer.

Turns out he had just gotten back to Lidu. Da buttafly on my shoulda was suddenly the butterfly in my stomach.

ohhhhh snap.

a familiar stranger

I bought my tickets to go home. I didn't expect the airlines to agree with my personal opinion that it's much more difficult to leave China than it is to come back. The only site that had tickets to Hawaii available was the gimmicky-sounding "cheapOairlines," and my airfare out of here was a good $500 more than the one coming back.

But whatever, I'll be back from July 29 to August 15, fahh real, yo.

I'm excited. Family, doggy, friends, Kam's wedding, the beach, tennis, spam musubi, toilets that flush down toilet paper, no spittle and baby shit on sidewalks...
At the same time though, I'm a little nervous.

I'm not going to belong. I won't understand the people I love. They won't understand me.
Like a 13,ooo year old Chinese migrant (see below), I'm an outsider everywhere I go.
Strangely, I don't feel lonely here, even though I'm more alone than ever (I prefer the term "independent," haha). But will the loneliness sink in once I'm in the company of a life that's no longer mine? The irony that rules my days is nodding is ugly head.

As the migrants in today's Dongguan know, losing your cell phone often means losing your friends. "The easiest thing in the world is to lose touch with someone," Leslie Change notes repeatedly in her book Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. This quote knifed me every time because it kept reminding me of how my Verizon phone doesn't work this far up the Yangtze, and also of the fact that I've verbally spoken to only 4 friends in the whole time I've been here. Damn you, Facebook, for making "keeping in touch" far too easy to be taken for granted. But anyway, I wonder if "finding" your cell phone can also mean finding your friends? Or rather, if a working phone will translate into working friendships?


A vital wound made by Factory Girls:

"It is not a new story. The ache of the traveler returning home is a classic theme in Chinese literature. One of the first poem a school child learns, from the eighth century, is about a man who goes back to his village after a lifetime away, to find that he no longer belongs.

I left home as a youth, and as an old man returned,
My accent unchanged but my temples turned gray.
The children see me but don't know who I am,
Laughing, they ask where the stranger is from."



Shoot, if any little kid laughs and asks where I'm from, I will cry.

Humbled by Hessler

Peter Hessler is the pride and joy of Fuling, at least as far as my site mate and I are concerned. After reading his book, River Town, and comparing his experiences with my own, I couldn't help but wonder if such big disparities exist not so much because times have transformed this town, but that he and I just see the world entirely differently.

I tend to think books can change the world, that words set change into motion. But should change be the purpose of writing? After half a year of Peace Corps service, a humbling experience in and of itself, I can't say that I entirely disagree with Peter Hessler's opinion on this matter:

taken from http://urbanatomy.com/index.php/arts/why-i-write/2770-why-i-write-peter-hessler


Does writing change anything?
To be honest, I don’t care, not in the strictest sense. I’ve never been a political person; I tend to get bored when people talk about policy and big-picture things. I suppose that my time in the Peace Corps made me more realistic about a person’s impact, and more cynical about a certain type of idealism.

But Americans are attached to this idea, especially with regard to the developing world. You look at the books that sell well in the States, the best-selling books about poor places, and they tend to be about a foreigner who is trying to save people. You have Three Cups of Tea or Mountains Beyond Mountains. Individually these books can be great, and they tell important stories, but it concerns me a little that this approach tends to dominate the bestseller readership with regard to the developing world. The other main option is books about atrocities – child soldiers, or sex slaves, or things like that.

I wonder about the impact of these books, and I wonder about the vision they promote of the developing world. Americans seem to read these books and conclude: Thank God I was born in the good old U.S. of A. instead of in some crazy country like this. Or they think, We really need to fix these places. They conclude that if you’re going to live overseas, you need to be either a saint or insane. There’s no sense of normal life in a developing country – no sense that you might live in one of these places and have an enjoyable life, and make friends you respect and like. Obviously, there are some countries where it’s just not possible to live a normal life, because things are so troubled – but these places tend to dominate our perception of the world; they are represented disproportionately.

As a result there’s no real connection with the people, not in terms of understanding them and being able to put yourself in their shoes. These books don’t come out of a deep anthropological instinct. The basic interest is more along the lines of changing the world than understanding the world. But this has always been the classic American weakness beyond its borders. People want to get involved, and they want to change the world, but they don’t want to be patient. And they aren’t inclined to grant others the dignity of figuring out their own path.

One thing I liked about being in China was that I couldn’t over-estimate my significance, either as a teacher or as a writer. When I arrived with the Peace Corps, the country was clearly going its own way, and that’s still the case. Foreigners have some impact, but they aren’t guiding the country, and it’s not a playground for NGOs like so many parts of the world. The state-level stuff is of questionable value. When a head of state like Obama goes to Beijing, he’s performing certain rituals that are part of big-picture politics, but he’s not making a lot of earth-shattering decisions that will change China. In a sense, he has a lot less leeway than a migrant going to Dongguan looking for a factory job. So as a writer you’re best off sticking with that migrant or somebody like him; you should try to understand Chinese people. You try to figure out their stories and their motivations, and you try to write in an artful way. As far as I’m concerned, that’s enough. Good writing should enlighten and entertain, and it should have some quality of art. But it doesn’t have to change policy or raise funds for a cause. Plenty of other people are trying to change the world, often in heavy-handed ways that do as much harm as good.

But perhaps Jung Chang, author of the fantastic Wild Swans, gave the best answer:

Does writing change anything?
Yes, my life.

huo mai le (buried alive)

The HSK will be the end of me.
I500 MORE words to learn before November.
I thought I knew a lot more than I actually do, but after an assessment I realized that the characters I do know just pop up frequently. Bastard.

All this anticipated effort makes me wonder how much I'd really like to stay an additional year to study. Am I just afraid of going back? Already I dread Skype conferences because nobody understands me. I guess I didn't realize that the PC was going to make me a permanent misfit on both sides of the dateline.

But on the other hand, I'd like to stay because I'm determined to fit here. This is home now. Buried alive.

amusement parks

ethnicity on display:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/world/asia/24park.html

oh, geeez...

The Female Factor

Cool series: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/world/series/the_female_factor/index.html

I <3 the Cambodian slideshow.

To Read: Nonfiction

1. "Water Wars" by Vandana Shiva
2. "When the Rivers Run Dry" by Fred Pearce
3. "Country Driving" by Peter Hessler
4. "Oracle Bones" by Peter Hessler
5. "This Bridge Called My Back" by Gloria A
6. "Dangerous Liasons" by Anne McClintock
7. "Scattered Hegemonies" by Inderpal Grewal
8. "Decentering the Center" by Uma Narayan
9. "Global Critical Race Feminism" by Adrien Wing
10. "Descent Into Chaos" by Ahmed Rashid
11. "The Year That Changed the World" by Michael Meyer
12. "Gender Violence" by Sally Engle Merry
13. "Global Feminisms" by Aili Mari Tripp

To Read: The "Classics"

1. "Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert
2. "Fathers and Sons" by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
3. "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
4. "Animal Farm" by George Orwell
5. "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley
6. "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath
7. "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka
8. "The Outsider" by Albert Camus
9. "Don Quixote" by Miguel Cervantes

To Read: Literature

1. "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino
2. "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" by Italo Calvino
3. "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Marukami
4. "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Marukami
5. "The White Tiger" by Aravind Adiga
6. "The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai
7. "The Promise" by Chaim Potok
8. "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith
9. "Waiting" by Ha Jin
10. "The Life and Times of Michael K" by JM Coetzee
11."Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann
12. "Zoli" by Colum McCann
13."The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver
14. "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz
15. "Diary of a Madman" by Lu Xun
16. "Say You're One of Them" by Uwem Akpan

Daughter of Fortune

Isabel Allende gifted me a love for words. I remember picking her up while I was an intern at a newspaper, at a time when I was bored to death with writing obituaries. I started with Eva Luna, and it was like an explosion. That such beautiful and passionate prose came from the imagination of a former journalist, perhaps even a former obituary writer, blew my mind.

Since then I've read several of her works, the best of which has been House of Spirits. Allende's got this special way of mixing magic and history, and I can't get enough of it, even though her last few books, including Daughter of Fortune, has left unsatisfied my crave for her wizardry.



Set in the mid-nineteenth century, Daughter of Fortune chronicles the life of Eliza Sommers, a British-Chilean orphan, as she abandons her rigid, upper-class world in Valparaiso for the gold-crazed California. Typical of Allende, this heroine's reason for doing so is love... or at least, the illusion of love.

After learning she is pregnant, Eliza secretly leaves her stern aunt and uncle to locate her lover, a gold-hungry peasant with revolutionary ideals. She barely survives the harrowing journey to California, a land made chaotic and seemingly unprincipled by the waves of newcomers looking for wealth. It's in this land of "freedom" that Allende explores issues of gender and race. Eliza, who for her own safety dresses like a man, slowly finds her yearning for lost lover replaced by that for her best friend, Tao Chi'en, an eastern medicine practitioner who's calling in life is to rescue young Chinese women from San Francisco's brothels.

The story really is fantastic, and it's packed with all the things I love in a novel: romance, adventure, history and politics. But it contains only an ounce of magical realism, which is Allende's forte, and the main reason why I so admire her. There's less fire, less poetry.. and it's just not as beautiful as it should have been.

injustice

"They crush an ant with a hammer."

Because I want to see people and I want to see life

I was thinking about my life last night while listening to "There's a Light That Never Goes Out" by my new obsession, The Smiths.

My goals are the same: I want to go to grad school, teach at a university, and work with trafficked women in Asia, but then, when all that is over, all I really want is to run a bookshop. That would make me so happy.

"..because I want to see people and I want to see life..."

My little store will be the definition of cozy - nothing at all like Barnes and Noble. Instead of wallpaper, the insides would be lined with shelves of used books, all of which members could borrow. I'd sell new one's, too, including works by local poets, novelists and academics. The shop would be just big enough to fit a bunch of comfy sofas, bean bags and coffee tables. And there will be a cafe and bar, where in the evenings there will be poetry readings and hot people making music with their guitars.

I'd like to do this when my kids are grown and I'm content with reclining for good at home in Hawaii.... but imagine if this were to happen in Asia where there's a decent-sized expat community? Staffed with women trained upon leaving shelters?

"Driving in your car, I never never want to go home, because I haven't got one anymore......."

The Road

I read way more than I can remember, and in an effort to cling, at least vaguely, to the plots, characters and poetry of these all too dispensable novels, I thought I'd begin to leave a more lasting mark of the impression they left on me.


I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road during Peace Corps In-service Training following a book exchange with Victoria. I didn't think it was possible to swap a book comparable to Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things, which she loved, by the way, but Victoria did not disappoint. We were busy as hell with day-long workshops, and in my much needed downtime, I'd shut my hotel room door on all the merrymaking across the hall and read. This was the perfect book in which to throw my weary, anti-social soul.



McCarthy immediately drops the reader into a dying America. Bandits and murderers roam the Road, on which layers of ash cover the shells of vegetation and half-eaten human corpses. A nuclear catastrophe? McCarthy never says, but such details of this man-made disaster pale in significance to the story that follows an unnamed man and his son as they wheel their shopping cart of belongings toward what they hope is safety.

"The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle."

What I found most remarkable was McCarthy's portrayal of the relationship between the man and his son. The man did whatever it took to protect his son, even at the risk of alienating himself from his son's affection, showing the simultaneous strength and fragility of the bond between parent and child.

McCarthy's parsimonious prose left room for me to internalize a sense of doom in the fear, anguish and desperation of these two emaciated survivors. However, he was, best of all, careful to do no more than nudge me toward a discovery of the faith that one cannot help but have, even in a humanity that barely exists.

alone?

I wonder what it will be like to do all of this alone? I wonder if it will be better to do it alone than with someone else?
I don't want to rework another person into our habits.

bum

Oh man, I feel like such a bum.

Nothing is open around here. The buses aren't even running.
Street BBQ and oatmeal are the only food options around here, and the former keeps giving me the doots, although that's a problem I've had for the last month. (wtf is wrong w/ me????!!! I bet I've flushed my brains down the toilet by now!!!)

I need to do something else but read, sleep and download movies I don't get around to watching.
I should study.. something. I should go for a walk, at least. But I can't think, can't move, can't do anything. Because I'm a bum.

And because, for the love of God, I just want to be in Cambodia.