eleven degrees north

Under the Banana Tree

2013-05-19T19:03:00.000-05:00

It’s raining in New York today—a steady, chilly flurry of fine raindrops that glues piles of sodden leaves to the sidewalks and collects in sloshing gutter-pools. It’s an in-between rain, heavy enough to discourage foot traffic but not so heavy that Sunday errands are completely abandoned.

Sunny days remind me of California—of blue skies and ocean swells and a smog-line on the horizon. Rainy days remind me of the Philippines.

Three and a half years ago I had my first rainy season—my first experience of rain without end, of cataracts drumming down endlessly on aluminum roofs, of trisikad wheels cutting furrows through riverine streets. I shivered through cold bucket baths and spent evenings on the porch of my host family’s home, watching the water pinball down the branches of the neighbor’s rambutan tree. I played Go Fish with Kate and Meryl and Nina while the little ones, Pan-Pan and Pau-Pau and Ann-Ann, tottered around on mud-splattered feet. There was also a game called Popcorn, a slightly more sophisticated version of Duck Duck Goose, and since I was clumsy and slow I was usually the goose.

Later, when I had my own house, I’d awake to the blissful sounds of rain and throw my doors and windows open. I lived on the back alley of my subdivision, and behind my house stretched acres of empty fields—lush, green, raw fields. I had a banana tree whose golden fruit mysteriously vanished while I was at work—its enormous elephant-ear leaves drooped seductively over my fence, attracting scavengers. During the rains I sat in my doorway and watched rivulets streaming from those leaves. Stood under them, dry, feeling the coolness of the bagyo air.

I miss it. I miss it.

Who’s living in my house now? Has the subdivision expanded? Does it have an internet café yet? Does my favorite panaderia, Solo Bakeshop, still exist, and does it still sell delicious chocolate ripple bars for twelve pesos apiece? Are Honey, Rona and Jo-Ann still around?

When I think about the Philippines and what has changed there since I left, it’s often in terms of tiny details. The jeepney fare (6.50php base in 2010). The hand-painted sign for “Sesame Street,” the road on which my second host family lived in their big yellow house. The sugar-strewn fingers of fried dough that I picked up on market days, doling them out as I ran into people I knew in the vendor stalls. And who is the mayor of my little town these days? Whose face glowers out at the people from distasteful municipal banners?

I recall the oddest things at seemingly random times. A boy at my center once told me a tale about how a giant bird had chased him, picked him up in its talons and carried him aloft. (This is what Filipinos called “story-telling a lie.”) I hadn’t thought about it in months, but it came back to me yesterday apropos of nothing.

I used to follow many PCV blogs, keeping tabs on what others were doing, where they were living, whether their towns seemed worth a visit. Now many of the blogs have gone silent, and I’ve fallen out of correspondence with most of the people behind them aside from a Facebook post here and there. It happens, and I expected it, and I’m probably among the worst of our 69 original batchmates in terms of keeping in touch. But on occasion I wonder what this PCV from Batch 267 is up to, and whether she still thinks about our first Thanksgiving in Guimaras, or if that fellow trainee from Bacolod still stays in contact with his crazy host family.

The celebrations—birthdays, Masskara, barangay fiestas. Hanging out at Dulgie's. The things we ate (and didn’t eat). Visiting each other’s worksites for leadership camps, sports tournaments, and to sit as judges for essay competitions. Long bus rides across mountain ranges and up coastlines. Worrying health symptoms that we were sure meant malaria or dengue or dropsy. Stretches of deflating boredom and failure and moments of hysterical confusion.

Now, in New York, I sneer at Filipino street food prettified into gourmet cuisine (with exorbitant charges for kamayan nights, as if eating with the hands is a privilege). It’s all Pinoy-inspired or Pinoy fusion. Where can I get a fifteen-cent grilled chicken intestine alongside a plate of white rice with soy sauce and kalamansi?

Of course, three interceding years have smoothed the rough edges of Peace Corps life. It’s much easier to recall the scintillating blue of Siquijor's waters than the crushing disappointment of a project gone awry, or the struggle with dialects, or the poverty that we were always just one government-sponsored jet ride from escaping.

But in New York it’s still raining, and so I remember.

Of Pitbull, Presley, and Pascal’s Wager

2013-01-27T19:02:00.000-06:00

"I'm not trying to pick you up," she began, and from long experience I knew what was coming next. It was an older woman, so she was going to comment on my hair.

"But you have very nice hair." I looked up and smiled. "And eyes."

Three hours later I staggered out of Starbucks, the weight of seven decades piggybacking me out onto the snowdrifted sidewalk. Jackson Heights shone bright after a marathon session in the dim cafe, and my head resounded with tales of earthquakes, murder and Mick Jagger.

Ellen was from a Greek island, one of the Ionians—the "Seven Islands," she called them, though there are many more than seven. Aristotle Onassis had owned one of them, Skorpios, in Greece's better days, though by the time he and Jackie O had tied their knot Ellen was long gone, riding the trade winds (and a convenient family marriage) to the States.

Her family had owned a beautiful house in Greece—her eyes glinted with memories as she described it to me—which they'd abandoned after an earthquake, Ellen claimed, had split the earth open as she watched.

She recalled the foreshocks, her mother collecting Ellen and her siblings and herding them outside.

"The neighbors said 'You're crazy,'" she said, smirking at the recollection. She sat back in her chair, staring back in time and across the Atlantic. Her mother was justified: in the orchard where they took refuge, they were free from the cascading dangers of that family manse.

There was a definite nostalgia to her Greek memories, but she hasn't returned since 1995. "I don't have any family anymore. I don't know anybody"—and besides, the country isn't exactly the most appealing destination at the moment. Greece's recent economic troubles have dried up the tourist faucet and her professorial sister, who takes a group of students for a month in Greece every January, faced an empty signup sheet this year.

There weren't any terrorists. Greece wasn't a dangerous place. But to the well-heeled traveler a poor place, like a poor person, is usually suspect.

—

It was a long, twisted tale, her life in Greece and the United States, but as soon as I heard her entree into my consciousness I knew I'd better strap in. My hair—which my kids in the Philippines mocked as bastos, rude, for its frizzled unruliness—has been the impetus for more conversations with women than any other aspect of my life, be it physical, professional or dispositional. Granted, the women are always at least twice my age—with no upper limit.

"My hair used to be down to here," I told her, tapping my shoulder. "College."

She shook her head disapprovingly at that. "You're too young to be of the 60s."

Even so, she appreciated that I lacked a shorn head, and she insisted that there were more bald men today than in her youth. She glanced around the cafe, probably making sure there were no bald men in the vicinity, and told me that she had her own suspicions as to why male baldness was so prevalent in our modern age.

I leaned in closer.

"Hats."

I raised my eyebrows.

She nodded to herself. Hats.

Her own hair was a fine red ochre, transitioning to grey near the roots. Medium length in the back, shorter in front, providing a clear stage for the very definition of a hooked nose. She told me she was probably the same age as Mick Jagger who, I discovered later, turns 70 this year. I counted backwards from Ellen’s earthquake story. She was exactly right.

—

A brief discourse on Mick Jagger.

Ellen preferred Elvis Presley to the rockers of the 60s. She shook her head in rapturous wonder at the thought of his voice, his swinging hips, and his peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

("You know about those?" she asked me, and cackled when I nodded Yes. She was tickled when I revealed that I was from Mississippi.

"Where Elvis was born! In—"

"Tupelo," I finished for her. Our friendship was cemented at that moment.)

Even so, she told me about watching the big guns of the past few decades belt out their tunes at Sandy relief concerts, marveling that Paul McCartney ‘s voice had hardly changed and that old Mick was still such a showman with his tight pants, stringy hair and finger-in-a-wall-socket dance moves.

Speaking of electroshocks—but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Ellen also had a soft spot for doo-wop, and as she named her favorite singers—none of whom I recognized—I could hear the strains of long-gone voices harmonizing. She struggled to remember one name: he sang this, looked like this, what was his name...?

"Frankie Lymon," asserted the man sitting to my right, who had been stuffing envelopes with what looked to be a homemade basketball newsletter, Something Something Roundball, and had spread his laptop, paper-phernalia and various foods and drinks across most of our shared table and the two northernmost thirds of the sofa.

"Frankie Lymon!" Ellen pointed a gnarled finger at the roundball man, gleefully gathering him into our conversation.

Later we became a foursome with the addition of Judy, a Jackson Heights contemporary of Ellen's. The two women shared a distaste for rap ("black music"), but there was one rapper Ellen liked. It was one of those quirks of aesthetic taste that I will never understand but which undoubtedly make the world a richer and weirder place.

Her favorite rapper is Pitbull.

—

On to Judy, who had a long history with Ellen that started, like most friendships, with an amalgamation of meats.

"Wait'll I tell you about the hotdog cart!" Ellen told me after Judy had sat down with us. At this point I finally stopped saving my place in the book I was reading and settled back for the long haul.

Judy had owned a hotdog cart back in the 80s. It was a heavy contraption that she stored in a nearby garage—not hers—and lugged out to a street corner to feed the good people of Woodside. (This was pre-Jackson Heights; she and Ellen had both lived in Woodside at this point.) Or rather, she didn't lug it out—it was too heavy for her—so she'd paid Ellen's son to do the lugging. The wage was two dollars.

I expected more to the story, but that was pretty much it. The hotdog tale was not as riveting as I'd hoped it would be. In retrospect, having any kind of hopes for a story about hotdogs, hotdog carts or hotdog cart storage seems to be setting oneself up for disappointment.

Anyway, they'd struck up a faint acquaintanceship through Ellen's son, but had lost all contact after first one and then the other left Woodside and settled separately in the westerly lands of Jackson Heights.

(Following the move, Ellen had witnessed—as much as anyone had witnessed—the infamous murder of Julio Rivera in 1990. From her apartment window “I saw a young man dressed in white—white shirt, white pants—crossing himself like a Catholic.” He’d turned a corner, and from out of eyeshot she heard a scream. The murder weapons, she told me, were a screwdriver and a hammer. On this point, she and the New York Times differ.)

Many years into their lives in the Heights, Ellen and Judy had met again in this very Starbucks. Ellen was holding court from my corner of the couch ("If he gets up you'll see my name on the seat,” she told the room at large) and recognized Judy, who didn't reciprocate and needed to have their history recounted before her memory was sufficiently jogged.

Throughout our conversation Ellen had referenced her pictorial long-term memory more than once, and I believed her: aside from the Frankie Lymon slip, she'd reeled off dates and places and names at an impressive pace.

"But my short-term..." she said, trailing off, opening a hand as if to let a flock of memories fly off to other worlds. Was she going to tell me why? Of course she was.

"Do you know how many shock treatments I had?" she asked. Having no idea what number was polite to guess—it felt like predicting somebody's weight—I stayed silent. "Forty-seven. Forty-seven shock treatments. And you know what, my whole time in the hospital is a blank. I don't remember any of it."

She'd suffered from depression in the mid-90s, when first her father and then her mother passed away within a year of each other. "There were other things too," she said, waving those other things away, clearly not comfortable talking about them.

So now she had a small vacuum in her prodigious recall.

Judy mentioned, rather smugly I thought, a friend of hers who had benefited from shock therapy. Ellen wasn't interested in arguing the point. Even with the blank page in her history, she still remembered the minutiae of her life, from that Ionian earthquake to her husband's death just a few years ago.

—

He'd been hospital-bound, undone by the asbestos he'd inhaled as a floorer. (Mesothelioma. Inoperable.)

Her sons were adults then, sibling opposites. Mark, the sensitive one, had a business operating payphones in New York, and as his father languished, his business was also dying. (Cellphones. Convenient.) One night he prepared to head for his office from the hospital. The physician had told him his father would die the next day.

Ellen shrugged. "How did they know? The doctor just told us, 'We know.'"

Mark hit the button for the elevator, heard the beep from a text message on his cellphone, and rushed back to his unconscious father's side. The message read "Go see your father." It was from the father. He died within minutes.

"He'd probably sent that message dozens of times before—'Go see your father.' But it wasn't saved in Mark’s phone then. It just popped up that night." Ellen said, "I'm not religious, but you just don't know."

—

"That's why it's better to believe than not," Judy told us. Judy was something of a know-it-all. "If you believe in God and He's not real, you don't lose anything. But if you don't believe and there is a God, you could lose everything."

From Pitbull to Pascal's Wager, all within one slow coffee.

Five million words you’ve just gotta read

2012-10-09T08:46:00.001-05:00

Upon reaching an entirely meaningless and inaccurate milestone on Goodreads, I've been inspired to put together a list of my favorite 50 books of all time. Ask me next week and it'll be different.

I reluctantly limited each author to only one book, otherwise I could never have winnowed the list down to just 50 entries. The books are in no particular order, but those marked with an asterisk are the ones I would, gun to my head and for highly varied reasons, call my top ten. (At this particular juncture in time.)

* Big Sur (Jack Kerouac)
One of Kerouac's later works, Big Sur chronicles the author's terrifying, thinly fictionalized descent into desperate paranoia following his sudden celebrity after the publication of the generation-defining novel On the Road. Other Kerouac works that should be on this list: Tristessa, The Dharma Bums.

Whiteman (Tony D'Souza)
A fiercely written, deeply felt novel of Cote d'Ivoire. Recommended by a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer; it came out of nowhere to become one of my favorite books in years.

* The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri)
Poetic, gruesome, gorgeous, unapologetically political, repugnantly zealous. One of the most amazing achievements in the history of literature. And yes, you should read beyond Inferno.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell)
The story of a Dutch clerk on Dejima, the tiny island that is Japan's only outlet into the greater world as the 19th century dawns. Other Mitchell works that should be on this list: Cloud Atlas.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Katherine Boo)
An unaffected look into a modern Mumbai slum. Boo's reporting is more compulsively readable than most novels.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (5 books) (Douglas Adams)
The Hitchhiker's Guide pentalogy is a perfect example of absurdist humor working. (The recent film adaptation is a perfect example of it not.) Adams' writing is perfectly pitched—except in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, when he apparently forgot that he was writing humor at all.

Salvage the Bones (Jesmyn Ward)
Ward's narrator is a teenaged Mississippi girl with a struggling family, a baby on the way, and Hurricane Katrina looming on the horizon. Cuts through the sentimental nonsense that so often passes for tragedy lit.

* Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami)
Murakami's most affecting and intimate novel. Set in 1960s Japan, the book's narrator faces early-adulthood ennui while juggling relationships with two memorable women. A decent film based on the book was released in the US earlier this year, but it marginalizes Reiko, the book's best character. Other Murakami works that should be on this list: South of the Border, West of the Sun.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
I'm tempted to go with Garcia Marquez's epic magical-realist novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, but in the end, this simple novella of an old man and his recollections is the work I'm more likely to re-read. Other Garcia Marquez works that should be on this list: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera.

* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Michael Chabon)
I fell in love with one character and wanted to be another. Fits my image (if not necessarily the reality) of World War II-era New York City perfectly.

The Lord of the Rings (3 books) (J.R.R. Tolkien)
It's hard to envision Tolkien's Middle Earth now without conjuring up images of Peter Jackson's creations, but there was a time when mere words on a page, plus a few sketchy maps, painted an entire world filled with fantastic creatures, epic adventures and the simple bravery of a few little halflings. Other Tolkien works that should be on this list: The Hobbit.

* A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
Burgess's work is not just comically brutal and linguistically brilliant, it's a tightly-wound story about state ethics versus personal freedom. Other Burgess works that should be on this list: Honey for the Bears.

The Odyssey (Homer)
Set the template for epic poems centuries down the road, but Odysseus's sojourns around ancient Greece were first and best. Other Homer works that should be on this list: The Iliad.

Candide (Voltaire)
"It is the last day!" Crude, irreverent and bluntly hilarious, Voltaire's send-up of blind optimism still bites.

The White Tiger (Aravind Adiga)
Scathing and hilarious madcap commentary on modern India from one of the most memorable narrators I've ever read.

King Lear (William Shakespeare)
Has some of Shakespeare's most perfectly written scenes and thunderously resonant language. Other Shakespeare works that should be on this list: The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

* A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)
Hemingway's somber meditation on making and escaping war has both starkly beautiful prose and crushing conclusions about our fragile human creations. I've read the book on my own time, studied it for classes, and written my senior thesis on it, and I've only come to appreciate it more with the repetition. Other Hemingway works that should be on this list: The Old Man and the Sea, The Green Hills of Africa.

The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
It's impossible not to be charmed by the slapdash illustrations and fantastical characters in The Little Prince, or to be moved by the book's philosophical themes of kindness, dedication, and a sense of home.

* 1984 (George Orwell)
Few works have been more referenced and less heeded than Orwell's dystopian masterpiece. It was a tough choice between this and Orwell's nonfiction, which reveals even more clearly his strong humanism and political depth. Other Orwell works that should be on this list: Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, Burmese Days.

* East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
More often than any other work, East of Eden is what I tell people who ask me for my favorite book. The synthesis of Steinbeck's entire body of work, and yet one that can be summarized in one word: timshel. Other Steinbeck works that should be on this list: Cannery Row, Travels with Charley, The Grapes of Wrath, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, The Moon Is Down.

Breakfast of Champions (Kurt Vonnegut)
Vonnegut makes it onto the list more on the strength of his oeuvre than on the brilliance of any particular book, but Breakfast of Champions is him at his cynical (yet humane) best. Other Vonnegut works that should be on this list: Cat's Cradle.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thompson)
Wonderfully manic and surpassingly erudite, all at once. A book about everything your sense of shame normally keeps you from doing.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Dai Sijie)
An evocative, intimate story of re-education during Mao's Cultural Revolution.

* Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
Quite possibly the most hilariously clever book I've ever read. Milo the cook's antics alone warrant Catch-22 a slot in this list.

The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
Everyone is at least a little bit crazy in Plath's exploration of big-city neuroses. Her narrator Esther, who chafes under the strictures of male-dominated mid-century New York, may actually be the sanest among them.

Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
Nabokov's brilliance was in his depiction of the new world—the United States—under siege by the stale, corrupting influence of old Europe. The pedophilia is just a sideshow; the real timelessness of Lolita is its razor-sharp portrait of robust, postwar America. Other Nabokov works that should be on this list: Speak, Memory.

Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison)
Though I was disappointed by her thin (in every sense) newest novel Home, few can match Morrison's prose when she's at her best. The richness of the writing in Song of Solomon almost makes the actual story superfluous.

The Sound of Waves (Yukio Mishima)
Everything about Mishima was epic, from his literary reputation to his death by seppuku after the completion of his final novel. But it's The Sound of Waves, one of his most austere and personal works, that captures Japan and its natural (and sometimes misleading) beauty best. Other Mishima works that should be on this list: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Spring Snow.

River Town (Peter Hessler)
The Peace Corps memoir to rule them all. Hessler's snapshot of modern China caught in the oscillations of constant rebirth is already a travel lit classic.

Riding the Iron Rooster (Paul Theroux)
Theroux's curmudgeonly attitude and dark humor hit their perfect pitch in his travels through China. Neither as self-conscious as The Great Railway Bazaar nor as tortuous some of his fiction. Other Theroux works that should be on this list: The Lower River, The Pillars of Hercules.

I, Claudius, Claudius the God (2 books) (Robert Graves)
A wildly entertaining fictional romp through the world of one of ancient Rome's many oddball emperors. Narrator Claudius is perfectly poised between reason and insanity.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (Alexandra Fuller)
Fuller's memoir is the story of living in an Africa without Africa—a place carved out from native land to emulate Western normalcy, even though Fuller's family is anything but normal.

The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
A complex and frightening story about a traditional Southern family's fall into ruin. Manages to be psychologically compelling even today—a testament to Faulkner's ability to explore the depths of the human mind.

The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
A good old Russian epic with all the trimmings: convoluted characters, political intrigue, and familial tragedy. Other Dostoevsky works that should be on this list: Notes from the Underground.

My Ántonia (Willa Cather)
The book's slender plot hardly matters, because Cather's prose shimmers like the grasses on Ántonia's Nebraska prairies. One of the most achingly gorgeous books I've ever read.

Junky (William S. Burroughs)
Heroin days in Greenwich Village. Published years before Naked Lunch and the cut-up style that became his trademark, Burroughs' straightforward tales of being down and out in New York City still manage to be more compelling than his later work.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz)
The book that finally bridged the gap between Dominican despots and Lord of the Rings. Oscar Wao hums along on the strength of its main narrator, Yunior, whose slangy explanations of political intrigue and science fiction are equally interesting.

Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller)
Famously profane, alternately hilarious and astonishingly intelligent, Miller's Tropic of Cancer follows a semi-autobiographical narrator as he explores Paris in the early 1930s, begging for cash, pursuing women and putting off his writing career. Other Miller works that should be on this list: Tropic of Capricorn, just for completeness.

Salt: A World History (Mark Kurlansky)
Kurlansky can write about anything and make it interesting, but salt's ancient importance is a natural catalyst for his curiosity. The story of the mineral that moved the world is as fascinating a biography as that of any human. Other Kurlansky works that should be on this list: Cod.

The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie (3 books) (Agota Kristof)
A hazy narrative about disconnection in wartime, each book in Kristof's trilogy is defiantly unbeholden to its antecedent. Events are revisited and revised, characters morph, and the reader is never quite sure that Kristof has laid out the definitive version of events.

* The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Tom Wolfe)
Ignore his most recent novel, the old-man-yelling-at-the-kids travesty that was I Am Charlotte Simmons. A few decades ago, Wolfe was a sharp-eyed chronicler of American culture, and no work fit his idiosyncratic prose style better than this expose on Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Other Wolfe works that should be on this list: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Right Stuff.

The White Album (Joan Didion)
Didion's collection of essays captures the loopiness of California, particularly at the close of the 60s. Her piece "Quiet Days in Malibu," though written decades before I lived there, still captures the town's odd duality of being buzzwordly famous and yet almost normal.

Ask the Dust (John Fante)
A struggling Los Angeles writer falls for a Mexican waitress. We've all been there—Fante just happened to write the definitive, 1930s-flavored version.

Last Exit to Brooklyn (Hubert Selby Jr.)
Less a story than a mosaic of hard-boiled New York, written in Brooklynese and gushing with grotesque, amusing and poignant portraiture. Selby's vision is at times nightmarish—and entirely counter to today's locally-sourced, defiantly conformist borough. Other Selby works that should be on this list: Requiem for a Dream.

Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino)
Usually I excoriate fiction authors for writing ideas rather than stories, but Calvino's characters (mathematical formulae, celestial formations) are clever and funny enough to work without an overarching narrative. Calvino’s the master of literary whimsy. Other Calvino works that should be on this list: Invisible Cities.

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Gatsby is the emblematic novel of the Jazz Age for good reason—no other book captures the era’s cultural changes and spiritual malaise quite as well. Other Fitzgerald works that should be on this list: This Side of Paradise, The Love of the Last Tycoon.

The Things They Carried (Tim O'Brien)
A collection of powerful Vietnam vignettes that reach far beyond the usual horrors of war literature. O'Brien's scenes are so sharply written that the book reads like a terrifying memoir.

Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
Skip the whaling parts, your teacher said—but the whaling’s at least half the fun. Other Melville works that should be on this list: Typee.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey)
If Kafka'd had a perverse sense of humor, he might have written Cuckoo's Nest. Kesey's mental patients are stuck in a world controlled by both immediate and unseen forces, until newcomer McMurphy shows them how they'd fit in just fine with the insane world beyond their hospital walls.

Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
A cautionary fable about pretty much everything—the baseness of human nature, divisionary politics, rancid pork, and nuclear warfare. It also contains what is, I think, one of the most shocking deaths in modern literature—and it's not the one at the end of the story.

In the Company of Frogs

2012-08-15T10:25:00.000-05:00

One frog’s fountain flows forth magnificently, a glittering spuming arc in the late-afternoon light. His brother’s perpetual drool splutters out into a sad little puddle at his feet. An elderly man totters over, reaching into the weaker stream to rinse his hands. Spying him, a young boy dashes over and covers the mouth of the more enthusiastic frog, shielding the old man from an inadvertent shower. The man doesn’t notice, but I do, and I raise my polystyrene food container to the boy in salute.

Bounded by the Bowery, Essex, East Broadway and Grand, this chunk of Chinatown in Manhattan may be my very favorite part of the city. It helps that my top cheap meal—$1 pork dumplings and $1.25 veggie sesame pancakes at Prosperity Dumpling on Eldridge—is here, but even at those rare times when I’m not craving pork orbs swimming in soy sauce, sriracha and soup broth, a stroll through this section of town gives me both acute relief from Manhattan’s concrete sterility and fond reminiscences of eastern travels.

Streets here could have been airlifted wholesale from Hong Kong, complete with vertical signs lettered in sharp-edged characters, boba tea outlets with names like Quickly and Kung Fu, and cross-continental walking tours of Chinese cuisine. (Including the delicious, cumin-laced lamb burger from Xi’an Famous Foods, imported from one of China's most epically historic cities.)

But on this swampy afternoon I’m not too keen on walking, so I grab my dumplings and settle into the little playground at the corner of Hester and Eldridge. I choose the corner with the frog fountains, of course, where the gurgling of water dilutes the street noise ever so slightly. At the other end of the square, the play equipment swarms with children recently released from their school shackles. The benches are staked out by chattering elders, who I imagine have been holding court since sunrise.

A little girl wobbles over to the handwashing frog, her dark kinked hair flowing in lush twin cataracts down to her shoulders. With wide-eyed toddler goodwill she’s smiling at everything—the fountains, the doting park patrons, even me. Her gap-toothed older sister keeps watch from afar.

We’re between buildings and shade settles over the square, tempering the summer heat. Fewer children venture over to the cooling fountains as I inhale my tenth dumpling. On the adjacent bench, one of a quartet of gossiping old women breaks off from her group to perch on a frog, grinning like she’s that same little girl from minutes earlier, advanced eighty years or so in body if not in spirit. She knows she’s being irreverent and juvenile, and doesn’t care one jot.

She’s living in the moment, in the company of frogs.

Subway snapshot

2012-08-02T08:05:00.001-05:00

2011 New York City subway ridership (hold shift and click-and-drag to move the map):

2011 ridership information is taken from the New York MTA's website. Some of what I call "stations" are actually "station complexes," which are two or more connected stations--for example, Chambers Street/World Trade Center/Park Place. The MTA counts these complexes as one station in their statistics. Geographical coordinates are from Google Maps.

I didn't include shuttles, the 6/7 express trains, or night-only stops. The size of each circle is proportional to the number of riders who entered the system at a particular station, not the number of riders who pass through that station. For stations with connections--the ones that look like pie charts--the share of the pie is not proportional to each line's ridership, but is only meant to be a visual indicator of where lines cross. Mouse over each station for additional info, and let me know if I missed anything major or make any glaring errors.

The first thing that gets me about the New York City subway map is how cushy Brooklynites have it. Brooklyn has almost exactly twice as many stations/station complexes as Queens (157 versus 78), but fewer than 300,000 more people (2,532,645 versus 2,247,848). Subway stations in Queens accepted an average of 3.08 million riders each in 2011; those in Brooklyn, only 2.25 million. (For the Bronx it's 2.16 million, and for Manhattan a whopping 7.6 million.)

And it's not just numbers. Many commuters from Queens basically have two major options--the 7 and the E/F/M/R, which run adjacent to each other for most of their length. Huge portions of the borough are completely unserviced by rail, while Brooklyn's riders have the luxury of relatively lightly-used lines crisscrossing most of its area. (Brooklyn is also around 15,000 acres smaller than Queens.)

Of course, Manhattan is where the real crush is. The borough has nine of the ten busiest stations in the system (at nearly 19 million riders in 2011, Flushing-Main Street in Queens manages a respectable tenth place), including Times Square (the busiest at over 60,000,000 riders), Grand Central (42.8 million) and three massive stations on 34th Street which together accepted nearly 90 million passengers in 2011. The large green bulges down the eastern side of Manhattan are a testament to the need for the in-the-works Second Avenue Subway line--those circles can't get much bigger than they already are with current infrastructure.

A few tidbits:

Only five stations connect four differently-colored lines: Times Square (red/blue/yellow/orange), Fulton Street (brown/red/green/blue), Court Square (purple/orange/light green/blue), 74 Street-Broadway/Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue (purple/yellow/orange/blue) and Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street (red/orange/yellow/green).
The stations furthest in each compass direction are: Wakefield/241 Street (north), West 8 Street-NY Aquarium (south), Far Rockaway-Mott Avenue (east) and Bay Ridge-95 Street (west). Yep: the most westerly station in the system is actually in Brooklyn. I'm so used to seeing the tilted and skewed MTA map that I assumed one of Manhattan's stations would take that title.
The system spans around .327 degrees of latitude and .275 degrees of longitude. That's about 22.6 miles north to south and 14.4 miles east to west.
The station with the lowest number of riders is Aqueduct Racetrack, with only 54,183 in 2011--but that's misleading since the station is only active on race days. Absent that one, Beach 105 Street on the A line in Queens is the most lightly-used with 80,580 passengers.
There are no lines that touch all four boroughs, nor is there any line that is completely contained within one borough. (Unless you count Staten Island's railway.)

The Ballad of Jesus Christmas

2012-07-16T07:21:00.000-05:00

“Jesus Christmas. I hate this.” Bent double, rubbing his forehead, lumpy hand-rolled cigarette spraying ashes into my lap while he dances at the edge of blasphemy. “I hate this. I really do.”

I can’t tell if he wants to talk, but there are plenty of empty spots in Christopher Park that aren’t right next to me. It’s a tiny splinter in the West Village, surrounded by a nonsensical tangle of streets (West 4th intersects West 10th; Stonewall Place is also Christopher Street; segments of Waverly Place both hit the park and pass it by).

Last time I sat here to read, a man paced the park, crossing the bulk of it in fifteen steps, screaming into his cellphone. “You know when I got suspicious? When you said you were tired. You go out and spend my money, my money, then you’re too tired to see me. My money.”

At one point the connection died—“Hello? Hello, baby?”—and his timbre warmed, became almost concerned. The signal returned: “My money. You lying—“

Life out in the open.

The man with the cigarette—Mr. Christmas—is bemoaning some unknown sorrow, a deep-down sentiment, while I try to read my book. I’m a few minutes early for my shift and racing to finish Prehistoric Times, a bizarre Eric Chevillard novel that barely makes more sense to me in English than in its original French. Somehow I like it anyway.

Ashes, borne on an easterly breeze from the Hudson, fleck my pages. New York’s smoking ban is a formality as routinely ignored as jaywalking laws, but Jesus Christmas did ask my permission before lighting up. I hate the smell, hate the crumbling embers that catch on my clothing, but his asking makes all the difference.

As he said, “Decent people ask.”

I told him to go ahead.

He’s emaciated, goateed, unsteady, hands trembling while he rolls the tobacco. “Thank you,” he tells me, not looking at me, concentrating on his flimsy paper. “I appreciate that. I really appreciate that.”

On my other side, a squat, middle-aged man with a duffel bag reads his own book. I can’t see the title. After some time a young man in workout clothes approaches him.

“I think I’m buying a tape from you.”

The squat man unzips his duffel bag. It’s full of VHS tapes, all wrapped individually in plastic grocery bags. He pulls one out and the young man gives it a once-over.

“Wow, it’s in great condition.”

The squat man just smiles as he takes a thin wad of bills from his customer. I try to get a glimpse of the tape, but the young man has already wrapped it up again. They thank each other for the business and the young man walks off. The duffel bag is quickly rezipped. The entire transaction took half a minute.

Cigarette smoke wafts by, an unsubtle sting. Tourists take photographs of themselves next to pale-painted bronze statues and, across the street, youthful and enthusiastic Starbucks employees hand out samples of a new energy drink in sunset-colored flavors. (Stevia-powered, of course, for modern lifestyles.) People stream out of subway stations, each wave of commuters from the red 1 train bringing a new cloud of conversations.

I close my book. Twenty pages left—perfect for my nightly commute back to Queens. Jesus Christmas is still rubbing his brow, puffing his cigarette, muttering.

He still hates “this,” whatever that might be. There’s a lot of “this” going on in the Village.

Los Angeles, NY

2012-05-28T10:23:00.001-05:00

Looking north from Sycamore Cove (2006)

On hot days in New York—and after eight months here, I’ve had a few—I remember California and its beach-salt smell mixing with pollution blowing over from Los Angeles. On the hottest day in my memory—during Labor Day weekend, 2007, a dry blast of heat that for sheer Fahrenheit beat out any Philippine swelter—I hopped into my little red Civic and drove up to Sycamore Cove, a dimple in the coastline past interminable Zuma but well south of Oxnard.

The cove is a vegetated place, with bushy-topped trunks popping out of the sand like truffula trees—very different from the denuded sands to the south, the nearly unbroken golden crescent stretching from Santa Monica through Venice Beach and beyond. On a normal day, there was space in the cove to stake out a shady spot and lay a beach towel. Labor Day wasn’t a normal day.

The beach had become essentially a fleshy carpet, swarming with bodies like a stomped anthill. The mingled breaths of a thousand tanners formed a mushy, CO2-heavy layer that muffled the lower atmosphere like a descending smog. Under this extra weight, the dimple collapsed into a cavity, a sinkhole, a pitfall. This was not an attractive—or hygienic—place to be. The state’s beaches are most appealing at their emptiest.

California’s cities are the opposite: they’re best when packed and busy. Without people—downtown on a weekend, Western or Wilshire at three in the morning—Los Angeles is a shell, like a plastic holiday egg cracked open and plundered. It’s flat and repetitive, a big sky country without nature. Its arteries run dry and hot as the concrete conduit of the LA River.

When I lived in California, the city limit sign for Los Angeles claimed three and a half million people. The rest of the county contributed over six million more—but unlike in New York, the population has an entire valley, and beyond, through which to distribute itself. The place sometimes felt like a tent city—a temporary dwelling for pop-up events, for shopping afternoons on Rodeo Drive and Hollywood weekends.

The periodic emptiness best suited the highways, which rise and swoop and curve through the city, a testament to the car culture on which Los Angeles is built. But you’d never recognize it during rush hour, when a mile of interstate lasts an hour.

Late at night, LA could still feel like a city of the future—lights shining up on the Getty’s hill, a haze (the neon kind unrelated to airborne particulate matter) settling over Hollywood, and wide, desolate streets. Speeding through the metropolis on a cool night is almost as good as cruising along the beach.

The daylight dispels the illusion and reveals Los Angeles for what it really is: a city rooted in the past, sepia filter fixed firmly in place. A billboard city, built against nature, fed by waters siphoned off to make green things grow in a desert. Designer sunglasses and imported palm trees.

But it has everything if you’re willing to look. In the middle of an otherwise dead downtown, I listened to a man play a harmonica secured around his neck, tambourine strung and ready, MUSIC IS LOVE printed in neat black capitals on his mic stand. It was a cherry blossom festival—hanami—but in LA’s Little Tokyo, the blossoms were rarer than hula dancers and martial artists. It was a cultural collaboration, which pretty well describes the entire city. It’s mostly incoherent and makes perfect sense.

Little Tokyo hanami, Los Angeles (2008)

New York is workaday, or at least it likes to project that aura. New Yorkers don’t take nonsense, except at absurdly-priced artisanal farmer’s markets, and they don’t let anything interrupt their business. (They’re oddly terrified of rain, though. It’s a city of hydrophobic witches, oversize umbrellas sprouting like toadstools when a cloud appears.) They’re also unashamedly proud to live where they do. I rarely heard Angelenos describe themselves as such, but you’ll never have to guess whether somebody is a New Yorker. They’ll tell you.

It’s a cohesive place with a sensible grid, public facilities that mostly work, and constant construction and renovation to keep it from falling apart. From the harbor, Lower Manhattan looks like it’s already sinking under the water, but with LA ready to fall off into the sea with the next trembler, New York seems like a downright cautious city in comparison.

Lower Manhattan (2008)—it looks very different now with One World Trade Center looming

Two ends of the country, two very different cities, mentalities, self-perceptions. And both of them stunningly diverse—the highest compliment a town can have.

The Big (Green) Apple

2012-05-14T11:35:00.000-05:00

New York has several of the tallest buildings in the world. It has the two most-visited tourist attractions on earth. It contains a single smallish island that, during the day, crams well over one percent of the entire country’s population onto its shores. Its metro system is among the busiest and most extensive anywhere. The city has more people than Switzerland.

For just those reasons, New York’s parks are all the more miraculous.

Central Park tends to grab all the headlines, for good reason—the 843-acre rectangle has been defying Manhattan’s urban development for 155 years, despite having a land valuation of well over $500 billion in 2005 dollars. The development of the park was almost shockingly prescient and farsighted—who in the mid-1800s could have predicted the massive extent of New York’s growth? Frederick Law Olmsted’s design minimizes the effects of the surrounding city, not just by being big (it’s not even the biggest park in the city—Pelham Bay Park and Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, Staten Island’s Greenbelt, and Flushing Meadows in Queens are all larger), but by providing a surprising amount of landscape relief. The park has hills and valleys, lakes, prairie lawns, rock piles, tunnels and bridges. It fences out the encroaching city rather effectively.

Central Park is the obvious one, the park everybody knows about and expects. What’s surprising is to learn that New York is littered with such green spaces. Some of them are huge (Pelham Bay Park is over four square miles—that’s three Central Parks, or about twenty-five Vaticans). Some are miniscule—Nine Heroes Plaza, a shrimpy triangle a few blocks from my apartment in Elmhurst, is smaller than the café I’m sitting in right now. (Odradek's Coffee House.)

The city has over 1700 properties in its park system. (How many cities have 1700 of anything?) I’ve only been to a small fraction of them, but after last night’s ramble in Fort Tryon Park, I may have a new favorite.

Fort Tryon Park is a relatively small (67 acres) park on the western edge of Manhattan’s panhandle, just north of the George Washington Bridge. What’s exceptional about it is the physical setting: it towers over the rest of the island, perched on a rocky hill with lovely views of the Hudson to the west and not-quite-as-lovely views of the Bronx north and east. The pathways are varied and interesting, set almost in a terrace pattern, with cultivated flower gardens, rock-lined tunnels, and dense tree growth fringing the perimeter.

The lawns are smaller and more intimate than Central Park’s great green quilts, with space still for wildlife (saw one skunk, smelled another). Its rock-hewn arches seem almost medieval—fitting for a park that contains the Cloisters, an art museum in the shape of a monastery. Watching boats putter under the Washington Bridge’s mighty span, I thought the city seemed almost relaxed.

Fort Tryon Park’s very existence is aberrant. The city is meant to be flat, steely and loud. There aren’t supposed to be any skunks. (Insert Wall Street joke here.) But here it is—a towering presence held together by something other than rivets, a system of pathways worn smooth by feet rather than wheels.

Before my first visit to New York in 2006, I imagined the entire city being Lower Manhattan-esque—all high walls and narrow streets, with perhaps a couple of hours of direct light when the sun hit its zenith. I love Lower Manhattan for these exact attributes—I can get happily lost in that mess for hours—but it was a huge relief to discover that there was more to the city. With Fort Tryon in the bag, I can tick one more site off my list.

Only 1600 or so to go.

Parsnips like white elephants

2012-05-07T08:41:00.000-05:00

New York is made out of tunnels, bridges and roads, boxy skyscrapers, green patches of park, a couple of rivers, three big islands and many smaller ones, a few bays, air thick with wireless signals and blaring horns, ringing phones, profanity, the aroma of pizza. Everything is falling apart, in an entropic sense—the brand-new floors being added to One World Trade Center are already past their prime, even as their last rivets are set. The green shoots springing up in Central Park and Flushing Meadows and even my humble Clement Moore Homestead Park have nothing in their future but autumnal amputation.

Luckily, there is an urban renewal team bent on keeping the parts of New York whole and attached. Their tools are stickers, spray cans and masticated gum. Blank surfaces are smoothed over with painted banners, hiding piecework brick behind graffiti. Plastic adhesives reinforce street signs and light poles. The city doesn’t condone these repairs, but it should be grateful for them—they distract from the ugly sameness, the brilliant glare from a billion spotless panes of glass.

The incongruity of urban vandalism makes it a relief—finally, here is something unplanned, unstudied, unfunded. Its presence is predictable enough, but its manifestations are not—to balance that tagger handle uninspiringly splattered onto a convenient wall, there’s a complex and beautiful work of art on the next block. (Drawn, moreover, without grants, pricy tools or name recognition. Odd how we only tend to endorse works of public art that pass our litmus test of respectability, rather than creativity or spontaneity. The muses have a lot of paperwork to get through these days.)

Thank goodness we still have the wrong side of the tracks. The 7 train runs aboveground through Queens, burrowing into the earth to pass underneath the East River into the city. As the train approaches its point of descent, the spiny skyline of southern Manhattan looms off to the left. Much more interesting is the decrepit building squatting next to the tracks on the other side. Its uniform façade is buried under layers of spray-painted words. It’s a roster—a list of artists who will never have gallery exhibitions, who will never call their work pastiche or parody, who don’t care to label their art a bourgeois fetishization of anything or demand that you view their scribbles through this or that lens.

Art interpretation seems to have become an entirely internal act, completely independent of the art itself. What matters is that you were challenged (soul-deep, please) by the white-canvas-with-blue-stripe. What matters is that you were surprised, startled, shaken by whatever internal monologue you fabricate on your imaginary Olivetti. (Write it feelingly enough and you could end up in the New York Times. This also applies to food criticism, so start crafting your parsnips-like-white-elephants similes.)

I’ll take tags and stickers and withered advertisements, thanks. I’d rather see an artless political plea—Ban Fracking Now—or be stopped short by a Nazi swastika. (Then taken aback when I realize that it’s not a swastika at all.)

The pieces of this city jigsaw are often ugly, blunt, offensive, absurd, but they’re current and free, elements too often lacking in New York. And they’re unsponsored, too. Which is the bigger eyesore—a few cents’ worth of removable paint, or a $172 million corporate billboard?

This Is the Way They Operate

2012-04-22T17:16:00.000-05:00

“You! I’m gonna kill you!” Estelle’s finger jabbed in the direction of a middle-aged woman walking past our bench outside Espresso 77 in Jackson Heights. Rain was trailing down halfheartedly, shunted away from us by a skimpy awning, but Estelle kept her umbrella at attention anyway.

The passing woman looked startled and almost instinctively guilty, clutching the cottony evidence of a dry-cleaned shirt. Estelle glared and gibbered. I thought I was in the presence of an octogenarian lunatic—until I realized she was ranting about dry-cleaning receipts. Then I was sure of it.

“She owes me her life,” Estelle told me, while the woman lingered within earshot. “She came to me and said ‘Let me clean your house.’ I said ‘Are you a cleaner?’ She said ‘No, but I need money.’ So I paid her. Hell of a cleaning job. But thanks to me she went back to school. She’s a teacher now.”

Estelle was about halfway through her hour-long rest stop on my bench and had already threatened to kill two people—the other was her own daughter, who was already dead—so I was minding my words carefully. Not that she needed much of a response from me: her stories unrolled without any provocation on my part. She’d started in with anecdotes about her husband, who had died of cancer after a lifetime of nicotine addiction.

“His nurses told me he had been hiding cigarettes in the room. I said ‘He’s not hiding them—I’m bringing them.’ They told me he had a week to live—you think I’m gonna withhold them now?” He’d had one tall nurse and one short—Big One and Small One to Estelle. “I’d say, ‘Small One, clean him up, get him ready.’ I never used their names.”

One day she walked into the hospital and an orderly informed her, regretfully, that her husband had died. She went in to see his body and he was sitting in his room, reading the newspaper. The nurse had confused two parties.

The kicker came at his funeral. Estelle didn’t want a big to-do—“I wanted a gravesite and that’s all. So I got this guy to say a few words at the gravesite, and I said I’d give him $400. He said ‘Okay, that’s fine.’” She just wanted a few kind words—“’Wonderful husband and father, and we’ll miss him.’

“So he comes and this kid comes over to me and he says to me, ‘I’ll be getting the check?’ I said ‘Yeah, I’ll get you the check for $400.’ He says ‘No—$700.’”

“I know he knows who owned the cemeteries. The mafia. They controlled them. I think they still do. So he says to me, ‘I was told to get $700 or not to let him get buried.’ So what would you do? I gave him the $700.”

Luckily, during her law-practice years, Estelle had done a favor for some mob boys—straight-arrow stuff, she assured me, not a whiff of trouble; just making sure they had some farmland to retire on—and Peter Savino, a local mafia man (and informant later in life), had promised to do “anything in the world” for her.

She got her $300 refunded.

To hear Estelle talk, the history of the mafia was the history of New York, and she herself had frequently taken advantage of their largesse. “I said to Peter, ‘You know anybody that makes those Venetian blinds?’ The next morning around nine o'clock the bell rings and I go to the door. There's a man there, he's in his car, and he says ‘Peter Savino sent me over to measure for the blinds.’” She cackled. Her daughter, she let me know, got the pretty pink blinds.

She certainly knew a lot about the organization’s crooked deals. “Seven cents each” she claimed the mob collected for New York’s replacement windows. “All these buildings in Manhattan—I mean, come on. You can't even measure.”

Estelle had been operating somewhat in the shadows even before her mafia connections developed. After the war, her husband had been tasked—by whom never became clear—with securing prostitutes for some visitors to New York. He was too innocent for the job. “He didn’t even know what hookers looked like,” she told me, tapping my shoulder and smirking knowingly, as if to say: What kind of man doesn’t know that?

I shrugged my shoulders.

She had gotten the girls—of whose stunning beauty she assured me, the implication being that today’s prostitutes just didn’t measure up—but shot me a nasty look when I asked if she had ever done such a thing again. She only did it to help her husband, she insisted. She didn’t get into that kind of stuff. Never. Nope.

Maybe not. But throughout her lecture Peter Savino popped up with such regularity, promising her everything from Venetian blinds to free wedding catering from the finest restaurant in Manhattan, that her disclaimers seemed slightly disingenuous. She might have been on the fringes, but the benefits apparently spiraled out that far.

“There you go,” I said. “Anything you need.”

“Anything you need,” Estelle marveled. “They don’t even hesitate. This is the way they operate.”

A Pox on the Brooklyn Bridge

2011-12-17T20:53:00.001-06:00

The most beautiful part of the Brooklyn Bridge is a metal rod protruding from the edge of its pedestrian walkway. This rod is on the south side of the walkway, closer to Brooklyn than Manhattan, covered in rust and connected to a large pipe daubed with gloppy grey paint and plastered with graffiti stickers.

The most beautiful things on the bridge that are not part of the bridge itself are the dozen or so padlocks dangling from this metal rod.

The bridge is renowned for its design—its thick, substantial stone columns, the sturdy reach of its powerful arms spanning the East River—but what really make the bridge beautiful are its flaws: the pits in its sculpted stone, its oxidized metals, the anomalous abandoned padlocks hanging like neglected Christmas ornaments in February. The entire massive majesty of the bridge bows to a vibrant orange pox on a hunk of metal left out in the rain.

Relentless engineering has produced one sort of perfection—the perfection of lines, of pressure point supports and cable tensions—but flawlessness of this sort is only necessary, not beautiful or interesting. The Brooklyn Bridge is fortunate in its old age, because thanks to the effects of time and weather and sloppy artistry it has in some ways achieved a sort of attractiveness in addition to its functionality.

It’s certainly no longer notable for its technical achievements—as I crossed it on foot recently I marveled at the sheer amount of human effort needed to span such a narrow creek as the East—but as it wears away, it gains a beauty of its own: the beauty of roughness, of edges rubbed smooth or broken off jagged, of stains and natural colors. Give me this any day over perfect spires and spit-shined glass.

People themselves will certainly never be perfect, so the pursuit of and obsession over an arbitrary perfection and precision in aesthetics seems a bit inhuman. And it can be callous—see the example of New York’s pending “Freedom Tower” (now thankfully known by the less offensive name “One World Trade Center”), an image-driven structure that, when completed, will plumb the depths of both blind nationalism and sheer silliness with a rooftop needle culminating at precisely 1776 feet. Why? Because America, that’s why.

Then again: I like clean lines sometimes, and dramatic swoops, and shapes you never see in nature. My aesthetic sensibilities are no more stable and unchanging than anyone else’s. As Whitman triumphantly yawped: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself.”

But the sight of those rust-rashed padlocks was more compelling than the bridge itself, and their erratic clinking in the river’s cross-breezes seemed more complex than any human-arranged symphony.

I tell myself this even as I sit (right at this moment) in the carefully-curated lobby of the Ace Hotel on West 29th, drinking coffee prepared by self-conscious baristas who probably spend as much time finding the perfect tilt to their fedoras as they do pouring milk into leaf and heart designs. I’m arranging and rearranging these words as if I can hit upon their perfect sequence. Writing about nature’s sublime ravages.

Do I contradict myself?

Theater of the Tunnels

2011-12-07T21:53:00.001-06:00

Screeches, wails, electronic static fuzzing the edges of some irrelevant PSA—“This is an announcement from the New York Police Department”—out of such bedlam come the sounds of another subterranean monster. Its lights glow in the distance. The columns separating the tracks break up the scene, like the edges of film frames flickering across a screen. Your train and this other train are edging closer, smoothly eating up the distance between them, looking like they will converge into one.

Then the tracks straighten out. The trains run parallel, two bits of flotsam in the same current.

This is my favorite subway moment: when you can look out the window and see, two meters from your face, a familiar, commonplace and utterly untouchable tableau, a scene that can never be rewound or replayed. A single-run performance in the darkened theater of the tunnels. The train car opposite is exactly the same as the one you’re in yourself, but it never seems that way: somehow that other car always has a homey air, a comforting quality of light, a reassuring calmness and quiet. It’s like looking into a candlelit cottage from a snowy sidewalk and feeling a phantom warmth.

It’s all an illusion, of course. Those other commuters are only heading to their jobs in the morning and back home in the evening, and their subway cars are no cleaner and smell no better than your own. And yet something—the dense darkness in-between, perhaps, or the sepia tint from two thicknesses of old glass—makes that other scene inescapably evocative and unerringly superior.

And there is something compelling in such a moment of unconsummated closeness. You can always run back after somebody you pass on the street, but you’ll never again find that person you locked gazes with across that unbridgeable underground gap. She’s an express train on the E line, and you’re a local R, and your parallel tracks might as well be parallel universes—no crossing over allowed.

Maybe in Hollywood: undoubtedly there has been a ridiculous romantic comedy about two unlikely strangers (she a hardened cynic, he a reckless dreamer) sharing a mutual glimpse through those two panes and, exactly ninety-seven minutes later, settling into each other’s arms at some unlikely locale—the top of a skyscraper overlooking the East River, or under the Brooklyn Bridge.

But that’s much too neat and cheap to be interesting.

Dragonfruit and sugarcane

2011-11-22T19:53:00.001-06:00

New York: the city of lights, of sounds, of dreams of the future and visions of the past, city of sewers and parks, of Walt Whitman and John Lennon and the Village Voice, of the Port Authority and Occupy Wall Street; the village of the Dutch and city of the world, an archipelago anchored to the mainland by a single poor peninsula but yearning, like the huddled masses called by its fabled statue, to breathe free.

All of that. But this post is about Elmhurst.

I returned from Asia only to find another Asia, my little neighborhood enclave of Filipinos and Chinese, of restaurants festooned in Korean characters and cutesy cartoon manga, Vietnamese banh mi and ca phe sua da and green and red and Panang curries, two pho joints nearly side-by-side and identical which I compare and contrast even though, in truth, I can’t tell the difference between their rich broths and slippery-splashy rice noodles and cilantro sprigs and the fresh bean sprouts that crunch crisply between my teeth.

Through my window, along with the morning sun, floats the warbly Chinese crooning accompanying the housewives’ daily synchronized calisthenics in Moore Homestead Park. (They are dedicated up to a point: on particularly cold mornings their numbers are noticeably diminished.) At one vertex of the park’s triangle, New York Supermarket and Hong Kong Supermarket compete for the same block. Like Pho Bac and Pho Bang, they are the same entity in slightly different garb.

Along the main street are smaller markets with fruits lined up outside in a way that reminds me—unavoidably, nostalgia-bubblingly, heart-wrenchingly—of the Philippines. There are the mangoes I once ate with relish (marked up several hundred percent and sporting a sprinkling of black blemishes courtesy of the journey from their tropical home, wherever they were planted and plucked). There the pomelo, the papaya, the indigo sugarcane I watched growing, falling in harvest, and burning in sacrifice to the field-gods of Negros Occidental.

It’s a crossroads, Elmhurst, not a translocation of my Peace Corps haunts; a Hong Kongtown, not a Little Manila. We never had dragonfruit in Iloilo, and the smattering of languages I hear on the sidewalks is marvelously incomprehensible to me—for every snatch of Taglish there are dialogues in languages that have never known the Latin alphabet except as a crude phonetic crutch. Hearing everything, understanding little, I listen to dramas unfold in such a swirl of accents that I’m sure everything is happening here, now, in this pocket of Queens miles and mindsets away from the palace-complex of Manhattan and its royal hordes of caffeined drones.

Coffee in, cash out.

Java Village, Sugar Club, Hulu and Joju and Quickly, Glober Market—the stereotypically- and hilariously-misnamed grocery that causes me amusement and politically-correct guilt in equal measures—First Taste Bakery and Winners Bar and Ploy Thai, Chao Thai, Boon Chu Thai, the food stalls that have no names and no advertisements except the ones wafting from their fryers and ovens and stovetops and coffeepots, halal groceries and churros, a long thrumming boulevard of Asia and the Middle East and Latin America along a street called Broadway.

I am biased, of course, but in my mind this is the real Broadway—not that tart-of-a-street in Manhattan with its gaudy jewelry shops and chain stores and $60 live movies and the shameless, matching-t-shirted shills begging bedazzled tourists to come to tonight’s comedy show somewhere on Times Square, the world’s flashiest bordello.

My Broadway is quieter. Slower. It isn’t even very broad at all, though it spans multitudes. And unlike Manhattan’s harlot, my Broadway still has hiya. Hiya and a sense of self.

One day I stepped out onto the sidewalk and was met by a thick coverlet of red and yellow: it was as if
every tree in the park had decided to drop its leaves overnight, to blanket the sidewalk against the gathering winter. On that quilted battlefield, old men growled over their xiangqi boards—a vision from Guangzhou, where I watched such city-park commanders marshal their wooden soldiers exactly so almost precisely one year ago. Their speech was the same as their compatriots’ in China. Their body language was the same. For all I know, their diets and daily routines and sensibilities were the same. And this is America?

Yes.

October Chill

2011-11-13T17:17:00.001-06:00

I mostly receive expressions of sympathy, and sometimes of alarm, when I tell New Yorkers that I’ve never been through a real winter.

“Oh,” they say, looking me up and down, eyeballing my wardrobe and estimating fat thickness. “Do you have winter clothes?”

“I’ll get some,” I assure them cheerily, not bothering to admit that I am in fact already wearing what I consider my winter clothes – jacket, shoes, and a hat when it really gets nippy. Which it hasn’t, not by New York standards, though my Mississippi-California-Philippines background has established a rather different set of definitions.

So I found myself stumbling through the winter’s first snow two weeks ago, wet and cold from the slushy mess sweeping down Seventh Avenue. I had spent most of the day staring out of the windows of the bookstore, transfixed by this small amount of snow that quickly eclipsed the one significant snowfall of my youth (a sprinkling, but to us Gulf of Mexicans a blizzard). The bookstore was warm and homey, its soft lights inviting, and it felt like nothing so much as a well-kept cottage in some snow-swept northern village.

The snow wasn’t exactly piling up outside, but it wasn’t keen on leaving, either, so when my shift ended I slipped and slid up the sidewalk, angling for a warm café and hot coffee. Café Grumpy was packed: the stools were taken, the standing-room-only tables (another novelty to me—oh, brave new world with such a lack of seating) were surrounded by a collection of strangers smiling amicably or suspiciously (it’s hard to tell which, sometimes) above their cups, and there was only a narrow corridor between the counter and the dangerous gallery of caffeine fiends.

But the air was warm—warm enough to cover my glasses with a fine sheet of fog when I entered, and to generously apply new coats even as I wiped them clear. The girl at the counter wanted to know what I was having. I told her coffee. She asked what kind, pointing to the coffee menu, as if I was the kind of person to nitpick between Guatemalan and Costa Rican beans. (After due consideration and thoughtful lip-pursing I decided on the Costa Rican.) Without a place even to stand, I stumbled back out onto the sidewalk, clutching my coffee and relishing its warmth, especially when I slipped and it sprayed out onto my hands.

I went home and enjoyed the rest of the day’s snow from the vantage point of my bed, watching it swirl in the air above Moore Homestead Park and pile up on parked cars. It was a nasty, wet snow, and I had a soaking jacket to prove it, but it was also vaguely magical, and it reminded me unavoidably of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

The next day I bundled up and went exploring in the vast wilderness of Central Park, but first I stopped by Roosevelt Island, which I suppose is primarily known for lying between Long Island and Manhattan but being neither. It’s a slender spit of land shrugging off the East River to either side – from the center of the island I could see both channels – and providing a pleasant sense of calm before the mighty metal bulk of Manhattan. To my delight, there was a tram from the island into the city. (That’s how insular-minded New Yorkers can be – Manhattan is “the city,” and everything outside that compact space, even Brooklyn, is hinterland.) To my greater delight, it is part of the metro system and thus required nothing more than a swipe of my trusty card.

The tram car rose alongside the Queens bridge, providing nice views of the south end of Roosevelt Island, the Queens coastline and Manhattan’s saucy curves. We docked after far too short a time, and I took off for the park.

Snow still nestled in the park’s niches, in the cool spaces shaded by trees or hills, though the temperature had jumped up above freezing and the sun was blazing from a clear blue sky. The trees hadn’t yet lost their leaves – this was the earliest snow in many years – and the snowflakes, so delicate individually, had piled onto the greenery, snapping and toppling limbs across the paths. Apparently nature hadn’t yet prepared for itself.

Even in the great frozen North, October snow is an ephemeral thing, and it was dripping away into the park’s hollows as I emerged onto Seventh Avenue. It was a lovely Sunday even without the diminishing carpet of snow, and hordes of people were taking advantage of the open skies and bright sunshine.

The day was following the pattern of the previous day: go outside, get cold, buy coffee. But before I put away my camera and sought refuge in a darkened café, I caught one last scene: a man with a telescoping lens reclining in the shadow of a cathedral, snapping away at an elderly headscarfed woman resting on the church steps. I caught the man as he caught the woman, and the only thing missing was a camera in her hands, pointed at me, to complete an absurd triangle.

Coney Island, maybe

2011-10-22T21:16:00.000-05:00

Aside from the maddening carnival-music-loop droning from one of its beachside amusement parks, Coney Island on a Sunday in mid-October was almost the opposite of its own lore. The boardwalk, particularly at its western extremity, was quiet and desolate. A stiff wind blew clouds of sand in from the beach. Now and then a headbanded jogger puffed by, blinking the grit out of squinted eyes.

Coney Island is a far jaunt from Queens, thanks to the dearth of trains connecting my borough with Brooklyn. I rode the F train the whole way, rumbling west under Roosevelt Island, making the familiar dip into midtown and then looping back onto Long Island. The car emptied steadily: Manhattan ate most of the riders, and the remainder trickled off as we approached the beach. My last companion exited at the stop before mine, and I was all alone for the final few hundred meters.

The Coney Island crowds that pack the beaches during the summer – I’ve seen them on postcards from the 1930s, so I knew they must exist – had gone into their long hibernation, and aside from the joggers and a duo of windsurfers carving the brisk waves, I pretty much had the run of the west end. It was chilly and clear, a gorgeous day, perfect for a ramble.

As I walked east towards Brighton Beach, I saw more signs of life: parents pushing strollers, fishermen dotting the pier, and two hairy, ancient curmudgeons in suspiciously thong-like attire sunning themselves and commenting on the procession of passersby, as they had done every Sunday for the past hundred years or so.

The famous parks were at low capacity, despite the halfhearted spiderwebs strung across entryways to capitalize on the Halloween season. In lieu of rickety old rollercoasters and greasy carnival lumps, people swaddled in their brunch suits ordered pre-fixe meals at boardwalk cafes. (Forget the etymological implications: “brunch” here apparently means any Sunday meal before nightfall, though I suspect a particularly determined pack of brunchers could easily extend their gathering beyond midnight, subsisting entirely on bruschetta bites and celebrity gossip from the week previous.)

It may be far removed from its heyday, but like any storied place, Coney Island retains traces of its ancestry. The big red Parachute Jump, a carnival ride long out of commission, still towers over the boardwalk. It resembles a monstrous sprinkler head poking out of the wooden lawn, but whatever craziness it once sprayed has long dried up.

But I bet those two old curmudgeons remember it all.

Occupy Wall Street, occupy the world

2011-10-16T20:24:00.001-05:00

“Are you press?”

I couldn’t tell if the man was wary or excited by the prospect. I had just taken a picture of his little daughter. Amid the slow-moving ocean of protesters, gawkers, cops, journalists, and a couple of girls very keen to make it across Times Square to the Best Buy, she was balanced on his shoulders, bearing a sign calling for a books-not-bombs fiscal policy.

I assured the man that I wasn’t the press, though even as I was saying it I wondered what that word even meant anymore. The Occupy Wall Street protests have been documented far more comprehensively by amateurs, including the protesters themselves, than by the mainstream media.

That seems to be changing rapidly now as the protests gain steam in New York, Boston, London, Rome and many other cities. The loosely-affiliated protests have their own particular goals – Tokyo protesters, with the memories of Fukushima still fresh, have united against nuclear energy – but they are all flames from the spark struck by the bands of campers who converged on Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan on September 17.

Those bands have expanded, diversified and coalesced. There were still drum circles here and there, and some rattling strings of hippie beads, but the crowd I fought through at Times Square was well-stocked with our society’s odd symbols of respectability – sculpted coifs, shiny trinkets, stiff white collars and black suit jackets and uncomfortable shoes. Retired schoolteachers raised banners alongside youthful longhairs; the mouths beneath trendy berets and traditional hijab chanted together.

Most of the media focus, unfortunately, has been on the loudest and most absurd individuals: the bedecked, the painted, those with the golden vocal cords, and especially the idiots wearing 2011’s misunderstood pop-protest accessory of choice, the Guy Fawkes mask. They make for the finest objects of ridicule, but they are also the minority. The protest crew, however it may have started, now truly spans an impressive spectrum.

Indeed, the outcry against the protesters seems to be much more homogeneous than the protesting group itself. Without exception, every negative remark I’ve personally heard about the OWS folk – and working both in midtown and in the West Village, New York’s centers of wealth and bohemian gentrification respectively, I’ve heard a few – has come from someone displaying the nonchalant accoutrements of wealth, as well as a conspicuous deficiency of melanin. If anyone can pull off a respectable “trust-fund baby” crack, it’s not going to be a wealthy white retiree taking a post-brunch ramble along West 10th with her identical girlfriend.

No doubt the Times Square gathering prodded some to annoyance, as the east side of the plaza became almost impassible between 43rd and 44th. (In my opinion, it was quite an improvement over the hordes of tourists who normally reigned over the square.) Under the gaudy lights of the most-visited attraction on earth, the center of the center of the world, thousands of people screamed their slogans to the skyscrapers.
Being heard is no longer the problem; that phase is over. And whatever comes next, that in itself is a mighty accomplishment.

Wall Street’s Day of Irritation

2011-09-18T20:05:00.002-05:00

Like the two photos above, September 17’s “Day of Rage” in lower Manhattan sent mixed messages. Inspired by this year’s protests in the Middle East and northern Africa, and named after Chicago’s Days of Rage activities in the late 1960s, Saturday’s activism was… well…

What was it, exactly?

It was a call for the end of unlimited political campaign contributions. It was an indictment of government overextension – and a protest against NYC budget cuts. Marchers called for the fair treatment of Troy Davis and Bradley Manning. “Ron Paul 2012” banners flew comfortably next to signs calling that very same politician a lunatic. The Day of Rage was a lot of things.

One thing it wasn’t: a snapshot of the American political landscape. It was more of a mosaic, a colorful collection of sincere and distinctly conflicting viewpoints converging against the verdure of Bowling Green Park. (Wall Street, the intended venue, had already been fenced off by an anxious NYPD.)

Activities were as varied as the signs protesters held up to passing tour buses. Attendees held yoga sessions on the grass; marchers paced purposefully (that is, each to his or her own purpose) around the iconic Wall Street Bull; people strummed guitars, held forth on economic policy to anyone willing to listen, or just sat, smoked and took it all in. Many of those on the green, myself included, mingled primarily for photos and interviews.

The people I talked to couldn’t really explain what the protest was about. One boy, come down from Boston with his father for the event, explained patiently to me that this was by design – that the call to commune in Manhattan that day was only the beginning of the process. Protesters were due to hash out their message in “town hall” meetings over the course of the day; the product of these meetings would become their formal demand.

They’re in no hurry: despite the “Day of Rage” moniker, the protests are actually intended to extend for days, weeks or even months. When internet organizers called for attendees to “Occupy Wall Street,” they meant it literally, and some protesters insist that they’re in it for the long haul.

Despite the yoga, emotions were running high on Saturday. When the police began lining up metal fences around the northern tip of Bowling Green, protesters jeered at their “freedom pens,” claiming they were being unfairly contained. As the mass of protesters gradually migrated to the more spacious south end, I perched on the steps of the National Museum of the American Indian, snapping pictures of the crowds in the plaza below. A man nearby, clad in proud tie-dye and waving a “Veterans for Peace” banner, affably discussed the protest with me.

But when a policeman approached the steps where we stood and demanded that the man move down to the plaza – apparently his banner was an illegal instrument on the museum steps – he lashed out angrily, screaming about his service to his country in Vietnam and his right to protest just where he wanted. At his outburst the entire crowd in the park swiveled as one and gazed up at the steps, and suddenly my little patch of land was center stage. I sidled off to the side as cameras clicked and the Vietnam vet raged on, arm extended, blessing the attendant crowd with a classic peace sign.

He soon relinquished his spot to a preacher clad in dove-white and possessed of a practiced tongue. “We are a century storm,” he bellowed through a megaphone. “We are waking up… we will risk it all – amen!”

And the crowds screamed “Amen!”

What they were agreeing to with such religious zeal, probably nobody really knew then. Perhaps they know now, or will know in the days to come. Perhaps the Manhattan occupation will come to something in the end. I guess we’’ll know for sure if Troy Davis is freed, or if corporations are limited in their campaign contributions. Or if Ron Paul is elected.

Or, you know, if he’s not.

Pebbles on a mountain

2011-02-13T19:21:00.001-06:00

(Above) This is where I traveled.

(Below) For some perspective…

It’s a big world.

Five Vietnam: Hanoi and the End

2011-02-08T15:51:00.000-06:00

Hanoi’s Old Quarter is tiny streets and miniscule alleys packed with sellers of all things, from vegetables to headstones. The roads have baffling twists and mysterious termini: you may round a corner and have a beautiful lake filling your view, or you might find yourself on the doorstep of Kentucky Fried Chicken. In sheer numbers, the bodies and machines filling the streets can’t match Ho Chi Minh’s frenzies, but Hanoi’s more constricted environment makes every road crossing or packed sidewalk an obstacle course.

The Quarter certainly does feel old. Beautiful aged buildings are everywhere, and traditional markets line some of the winding alleyways. While it’s also the hub for budget-minded tourists, most of the locals – except for the ones catering directly to foreigners – go about their business without so much as a glance at the intruders.

Preparations for Tet were in full swing: everywhere I saw people carrying huge bunches of flowers, and orange trees – apparently a common gift and decoration – filled up Hanoi’s parks. Unfortunately, my flight was on the morning of February 2, the eve of Tet, so I didn’t get to experience the New Year in Vietnam. When the day turned I was somewhere in the air between Guangzhou, China and Los Angeles.

The energy of the Old Quarter was undoubtedly my favorite aspect of Hanoi. It could get exhausting – but then, it felt like a place that should be exhausting. At the same time, greater Hanoi was an attractive, park-spotted city, well-oriented for rambling. One afternoon – after failing to see the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh, which was apparently open only in the morning – I took some back alleys, the kind to which you’re never quite sure there’s an exit until you hear the traffic from a real road up ahead. I ended up at a large pond entirely surrounded by multistory buildings, with entrances only large enough for motorbikes. Along one side of this pond was a long wall separating the walkway from a row of apartments; smack in the middle of this wall, a mirror reflected a man’s half-shaved face and his engrossed barber.

I was definitely struck with a sense of last-chance-to-see, since Hanoi was my ultimate stop. This gave me the odd idea that I should be doing something in particular to mark my final days in Asia – seeing some famous sight or throwing major dong at a special meal. But I realized that nothing would be more appropriate for the end of my trip than simply looking and listening. With rare exceptions, I never set out for a place with specific intentions, and usually I’ll gladly take aimlessness over an itinerary.

So I looked: at joggers around Hoan Kiem Lake, women washing dishes in buckets on the sidewalks, people taking in laundry under the sullen grey skies. I listened: to the chatter of men in the coffee-drinking circles, the admonitions of mothers to their children, and the insistent hum of engines. Everything ordinary – that’s what I wanted for my last couple days.

Fittingly, my grand exit was more of a sneaking crawl under cover of darkness. I woke up before 5am, when the streets were miraculously quiet, and tiptoed downstairs to shake the hotel proprietress awake so she could unlock the doors. She was sleeping peacefully on the lobby couch, protected from the chill by a thick sleeping bag. After clearing my throat ineffectually, I reached out and tentatively applied the smallest touch to her ankle region. I did this probably half a dozen times, increasing the pressure almost imperceptibly each time, before she woke and sat up blearily. I felt terrible. I had told her the day before that I had to check out early, but that fact assuaged my guilt not at all – especially since she and her husband had been extremely kind and helpful during my short stay.

“Did you pay?” she asked, rummaging around for my passport. “Yes, last night. I paid the older woman. Your mother?” I guessed. “Older woman?” She seemed confused, but let it pass, and finally handed over my passport and opened the doors, shivering as the chill cut through her pajamas.

“Thank you so much,” I said guiltily. She smiled slightly.

“And Happy New Year."

I walked the dark, empty streets to my airport shuttle. I sat in the cold airport. Boarded the plane. We took off.

Four Vietnam: Drops of Hue

2011-02-05T18:43:00.000-06:00

In Hue it rained, and most of what I saw was filtered through a café window. I never had to brave any downpours; instead the clouds decided to drip just enough to discourage too much exploring. I embarked on two expeditions to the Citadel, Hue’s old walled imperial city, and turned back both times. (This was due to a combination of rain and a general lack of interest in seeing the country’s tallest flagpole – which I was able to glimpse from afar, in any case.) I did enjoy walking along the banks of the Perfume River, a wide expanse blanketed in mist and dotted with colorful tourist boats, but the raindrops made me pay for the sight.

So really, I didn’t do much in Hue. I sat down with endless cups of Vietnamese coffee and wrote in my journal and read Banana Yoshimoto’s N.P. I tried to stay warm. I ignored the sounds filtering through the inexplicable window that linked my bathroom to the hotel room next door. Pretty soon it was time to go, and with a handful of peanuts and a squished butter cake (a gift from Hai) to sustain me, I boarded my last bus. My final stop was that fabled capital of old Indochina, city of lakes and temples: Hanoi.

Three Vietnam: Finding Luck in Hoi An

2011-02-04T10:50:00.000-06:00

In keeping with my belief that unplanned travel is often the best, Hoi An ended up being one of my favorite stops. I forfeited the remainder of my ongoing ticket to Hue, but a new ticket for the next day was only about 3USD and the extra was worth it.

Hoi An’s primary tourist attraction held no interest for me whatsoever: the town is known for its tailors, and clothing shops abound. One store proudly displayed a letter from a foreign customer who, along with his wife, ended up buying somewhere north of sixty clothing items during their stay. Unfathomable. Perhaps more than any other place I went in Vietnam – where tourists were in general easily found – the foreign contingent in Hoi An asserted itself with a kind of selective interest: I saw almost no foreigners outside of a half-dozen or so streets that form the town’s core. I was also greatly amused when I came upon a Highly Interesting Cultural Event being held on a sidewalk – some locals burning trash. Two separate international types were videotaping this while the Vietnamese laughed at them.

What I really liked about Hoi An was the river, which was green and sluggish, and the buildings, which were yellowed and old. The river flows alongside the Ancient Town, a collection of narrow streets and alleyways that harbor the typical tourist requisites along with many, many cafes. My favorite part of my brief stay was walking these streets and talking with the local artists about their work. There were several photography galleries as well, mostly displaying the output of a local photo club.

As always, there were also lots of people angling for foreign dollars. I’ve found it pretty easy to turn down overpriced trinkets and vegetables and motorbike rides, but I was willfully suckered in Hoi An by Dao and Tuan, a couple of shrewd kids who insisted that I needed to buy a buffalo zodiac pendant for luck. (Apparently the Vietnamese substitute a water buffalo for the ox of the Chinese zodiac.) I got them to cut their price by two-thirds but knew I was still getting swindled – especially after, realizing they were out of buffalo, big sister Dao handed Tuan a fraction of what I paid to go get me a buffalo pendant from some unnamed third party. I respected their polite tenacity and also appreciated their willingness to chat. I may have lost points with them when I tied the buffalo to my wrist instead of around my neck, but after some consideration Dao decided that it would bring me luck nonetheless.

And now the bit about food. Thanks to an abundance of international restaurants I mostly ate western food in
Hoi An, and it was mostly good. I’ve talked about the coffee and the pho, but another thing I’ve loved about Vietnam is the crusty baguettes that are frequently served with meals. It’s something I only recently realized that I really miss from back home.

More than anything, Hoi An was simply picturesque. As I moved through Vietnam I saw more and more preparations being made for the February 3 Tet holiday, and Hoi An was in full swing: altars bearing food and incense were being set up along the sidewalks, red banners and decorations adorned many of the cracked walls in the Ancient City, and dragons were in conspicuous attendance. All of these preparations were set against a town that, while catering to tourists, still managed to maintain its own separate spirit. The morning before I left, I was out early on the streets watching worn old women carry impressive loads of bananas and peppers on their backs. A girl stepped out of her shop and performed a brief, private ritual with sticks of incense. And the fog rolled on the river.

Compared to the rest of my bus trips, the hop to Hue was brief – only four hours – but it gave me my best look at Vietnam’s countryside. This was because, for unclear reasons, the driver yanked me out of my seat halfway through and made me sit on a fold-out chair right at the front of the bus. (I think my booking agency screwed up my ticket, and as a result I had to forfeit my seat to someone else.) This ended up being great for me because I had more leg room, more fresh air and the best view of anyone. Some of this view was Da Nang’s ugly urban sprawl and some of it was the feeble walls set up by developers building resorts on fabled China Beach – I had at one point considered going to China Beach, and this ride made me glad I didn’t – but we also rode through rather beautiful mountain passes and valleys.

I also had the pleasure of watching the bus driver threaten to toss off a group of young Vietnamese men who had gotten a bit too rowdy. He literally turned off the highway, stopped the bus and turned around to chew them out. It was fantastic.

Throughout it all, drizzle plunked down onto the windshield. Since Ho Chi Minh I had been hoping for a respite from the grey weather, but I wasn’t getting it now… and I wouldn’t get it in Hue.

Two Vietnam: Grey Skies Over Nha Trang

2011-01-31T06:19:00.000-06:00

It was on my bus out of Ho Chi Minh that I realized I had been living on a relatively small island for the past two years. The bus just kept going and going and never seemed to be going anywhere; it took us thirteen hours and around 450 kilometers to reach Nha Trang, and I kept thinking… where’s the water? Are we going in circles? On Panay Island, where I lived in the Philippines, 450 kilometers would have been sufficient to cross the entire landmass several times over. In fact, a list of land-routes in the Philippines exceeding 450 kilometers would be short indeed – crossing Luzon north-south and Mindanao both ways, and that’s about it.

This was my first “sleeper bus,” though it was a day trip and I didn’t sleep. These buses basically have seats that recline almost to horizontal, which is great, but there’s no place to put luggage, which is not. Everything has to go in the compartment under the bus or, if you must carry it on, behind your seat… which prevents it from reclining all the way. I had my laptop and camera in my backpack, so I wasn’t about to let it leave my sight.

Even so, the sleeper buses are more comfortable than regular ones for long trips. I would much rather have taken a train, but I managed to time my trip to coincide perfectly with the two weeks before Tet, when Vietnamese all over the country are returning home to celebrate the holiday. The tourist scene has been relatively tame – I’ve had no problems at all finding accommodation and frequently I’ve been stuck with half a dozen restaurant staff staring at me as I eat, being the only patron in the place – but transportation has been a touch more complicated. I had hoped to ride some trains in Vietnam, but they seem to have been booked solid for weeks.

So buses it has been. I would say my sleeper buses (which cater to tourists) have been roughly two-thirds foreigners and one-third Vietnamese. I was seated next to one of the latter group for much of my trip to Nha Trang. We attempted to converse, and after a lot of scribbled notes and gesticulating we were still a long way from understanding each other, but it was an enjoyable way to spend several hours. Hai was a college student in Ho Chi Minh returning to her home in Phan Rang for either the weekend or the holiday. She asked me to help her with English, which I did awkwardly and inefficiently, and in return she taught me some Vietnamese phrases that I still can’t pronounce. We shared some food and laughed together at the sleeping Russian kid next to me – his tongue lolling and eyes rolling – and she made the usual comments about my hair.

Nha Trang itself was different from what I’d expected, probably because the only really developed beach-resort-area I’d been to in Asia was Boracay. Boracay was a beach, with lots of hotels and resorts and restaurants and stalls thrown directly onto that beach. Nha Trang seems much more intentional: the beach is contiguous with a substantial city, but most of the structures are built off the beach itself and separated from the sand by a road. And the beach is more park-ish, with walking paths and playgrounds and whatnot.

The place was less raucous than I was led to believe – no doubt thanks to the time of year; Nha Trang certainly contained enough tourist infrastructure to host a Little Paris, Germantown and other suchlike transient international communities – and I saw nary a patch of blue sky during my entire stay. That was fine – it never got too cold, and the ocean was pretty in the greyness even if I didn’t swim in it. Mostly what I did in Nha Trang (this is going to become a tiresome refrain, I’m afraid) was eat.

I stayed four nights – I hung about for a long time here because I wanted to relax and recover from a lingering illness – and I managed to avoid ever going to the same restaurant twice. Including coffee breaks and dessert stops, I probably hit at least twenty-five cafes during my time there, and almost all the food was good. Actually, the only thing that disappointed me was the pho, which was much inferior to what I had gotten in Saigon.

I did explore the town to some extent and found some lovely winding back alleys. I was a bit skeptical as always about the foreigner-friendly market with its brand-name t-shirts. Sure, there were also rows of bottled and preserved scorpions for sale, but in context they seemed about as exotic as jars of pickles at a grocery store.

On a positive note, I also visited a photography gallery exhibiting the work of a local Vietnamese artist named Long Thanh. It was marvelous. His photos – which he takes on black-and-white film and develops himself – are stunning scenes of daily life in Vietnam. They’re exactly the kind of photos I admire most: the kind that recognizes the beauty in something mundane – the kind that shows the photographer’s love and admiration and respect for his subjects.

My next destination was Hue, but I didn’t make it to Hue. After twelve hours or so on the road, we had to switch buses for the last stretch. As I and my fellow passengers stood in the drowsy early-morning air, waiting for the pickup, I looked around at the pleasantly old buildings and and thought… Actually, this looks good. And so I trudged off to find a place to stay for one night in Hoi An.

One Vietnam: Café Saigon

2011-01-27T18:54:00.000-06:00

The inescapable thing about Ho Chi Minh is the motorbikes. Every light change unleashes a flood – a deluge – of humming bikes, flowing three or four to a lane. Riders clutch bags, bunches of vegetables and small children as their mounts tilt and buck. Crossing streets in Ho Chi Minh (which is still often referred to as “Saigon”) requires a little bit of courage and a large amount of faith, but the effort is paid off by the magical feeling of deadly metal machines speeding inches from your body and the conviction that you could sit down and host a picnic in the middle of the highway without getting nicked by the skillful drivers. I saw people drop things from bikes, I saw them leaning at impossible angles, but I knew I’d never see one fall.

And technically I didn’t. But my bus out of Ho Chi Minh slowed at a bottleneck caused by a twisted, ruined bike lying meters from a white-sheet-covered lump. Bright red blood was seeping out from under the sheet as gawkers on the street and in passing vehicles stared.

But in my personal experience, bikes will, with a minimum of fuss, swarm around pedestrians like ants skirting a puddle. What makes these scenes more striking is the sheer dominance of motorbikes as the preferred mode of transport; Manila’s traffic may have been just as chaotic, but its mix of jeepneys, motorbikes, tricycles, pedicabs, buses and private vehicles gave it a fitfully competitive atmosphere. In Ho Chi Minh, the bikes at times almost seemed to be running on rails and according to timetables.

I didn’t get to witness this spectacle immediately because I arrived from Manila some few minutes after midnight, when the streets were quieter. As usual I had nothing booked in advance, my only guide being the words “Pham Ngu Lao (budget hostels)” scribbled on the back of an ATM receipt. Pham Ngu Lao was the section of town where one could, or so I had read, find cheap accommodation. I didn’t know where it was and I wasn’t even very confident about its pronunciation.

This did not go over well with the Chinese-Filipino student with whom I shared a cab. (He had approached me with the ride-sharing suggestion at the currency-exchange desk of the airport. I suppose I was the least-threatening traveler on his flight.) We made small talk during the ride and he (rather nervously, I thought) pointed out the hammer-and-sickle insignia that adorned walls and signs along the sidewalks. Maybe he thought I was a little bit cracked to be wandering communist Vietnam’s largest city after midnight without any kind of plans, but – in Pham Ngu Lao, at least – this seemed to be rather the norm.

I dropped into bed, exhausted, as soon as I found a hotel with somewhat reasonable rates. In mid-morning I got up, left my hotel, and started eating. I haven’t stopped yet.

My first meal in Vietnam was, probably, the best pho bo I’ve ever eaten. Now, this was in a highly-touristed area and I make no claims as to its legitimacy as Vietnamese cuisine, but from that point on I craved the beef noodle soup at least a little every day. In form it was similar to pho I’ve had in the US and the Philippines – broth with rice noodles, onions, cilantro, bean sprouts, lime and cuts of beef – the main difference being that the broth was much richer than I’d tasted before. I had to force myself to eat other things. Luckily, nearly everything I’ve eaten in Vietnam has been either delicious or really delicious. The highlights from Ho Chi Minh were crispy fried Vietnamese noodles and ostrich steak. And oh, the coffee…

I’d never before liked Vietnamese coffee, which in its typical form in the US and the Philippines is a sickly orange mix of condensed milk and a bit of coffee, sweetened to candy-like proportions. Well, in Vietnam I’ve had coffee every day, and usually two or three times. The coffee is usually served sweet, but I hesitate to just call it “sweet coffee” because that implies (to my mind) an entirely different taste. Suffice it to say that I’ve never had coffee like it before, and that has been my loss. It’s thick and strong, cheap (a small glass in a little local cafe is generally about .50USD) and especially good iced.

I did things other than eating in Ho Chi Minh, though they were rather minor in comparison. I visited the War Remnants Museum, which is essentially an account of the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Its displays are suitably graphic – photographs of dead soldiers and dying non-combatants, preserved fetuses deformed by chemical attacks, recovered guns and burst shells. Many of the war’s iconic photographs are on display, including perhaps the two most well-known of all: Phan Thị Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm attack, and the execution of Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem.

I also had some happy reminders of the Philippines. Four times in Ho Chi Minh I was stopped by people commenting on my curly hair, and – I thought this was so strange – three of those times the commentators were Filipino. Each time we had a lively conversation about Philippine dialects and food – “And menudo? Caldereta? Tortang talong, you know that?” – and I duly expressed my admiration for their country and how much I missed it already.

Although my time in Ho Chi Minh was interesting, I was really looking forward to some time away from big cities. After all, since I finished my Peace Corps service in November I had been through Manila, Osaka, Tokyo, Shanghai, Xi’an, Chongqing, Guangzhou and Hong Kong – all middling-to-huge metropolises. My first choice was Quy Nhon, a midsized and supposedly laid-back beach community about a third of the way up Vietnam’s coast, but a long and confusing discussion with my hotel’s booking desk revealed that all the trains were full and the buses were too. (I’m not exactly sure that this was, in fact, the conclusion, but after running around in some half-English circles, we definitely weren’t getting anywhere.) The conversation turned inevitably towards another beach community, one not as far as Quy Nhon and much more popular. I reluctantly bought the ticket for a sleeper bus, telling myself that no matter how tourist-infested the place was, I would at least have a pretty beach at my disposal. And my fate was set: I was going to Nha Trang.

Red sky Boracay

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Last year I passed into the New Year in Boracay; this time around I gave the holiday a miss and came a few days afterwards. (Thus avoiding “super-peak season” prices.) There’s little to be said about Boracay that hasn’t been said before – or, more specifically, that I haven’t said before. Since my site was only a few hours from the island, and since some travelers used Iloilo City as the entrypoint to Boracay, I’ve said a lot about it. It’s too crowded. Too commercial. Too much of a non-Filipino enclave.

But it does have a pretty beach and good food and, like all beaches in the Philippines seem to do, it faces west.

Boracay is at its best when sun, sand and waves are all that exist – or when they are complemented by young locals placing their carefully lighted candles into sand lanterns, or busily shuttling cockroach passengers along the beach in toy cars. There’s a lot of ugliness on the island, but it still shines on occasion.

I knew this second goodbye to the Philippines would be more definite – I won’t be making another trip there anytime soon, though I certainly hope to get back someday. This time, unlike in November, I had a ticket back to the US. But I still had two weeks before I would be making that last series of flights home. In the meantime, I had one last country to explore, and a little after midnight on January 20 I touched down in Ho Chi Minh City to begin a long crawl up Vietnam’s coast.

I went back to the Philippines

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Filipinos have a well-worn repertoire of national Sights and Spectacles to recommend to visitors. There’s Boracay, of course, the country’s dominant party beach; the Chocolate Hills of Bohol, a series of brown papillary bumps in the earth; the tarsiers, the world’s smallest primates, also found in Bohol; Palawan’s underground river. Many Filipinos have never visited some or any of these sights, but the list is pretty standard, and near the top of that list can usually be found the rice terraces of Banaue.

For me, the most striking thing about the rice terraces is not their appearance, impressive though they are, but rather their sheer antiquity. Some of the terraces have been maintained by Luzon’s Ifugao since long before such a people as “Filipinos” existed. And for all of modern society’s accoutrements, the terraces remain in use in communities far from any oceans, cities or Jollibees. The finest terraces of them all (well, such is the general consensus) are etched into the mountainsides at Batad, which is a reached by a long trike ride and a longer hike from Banaue. Batad’s small local community caters to visitors with its many simple guesthouses, and foreigners are no odd sight – on our hike in, many of the locals we passed asked in proficient English if we needed guides or lodging in the town.

The truth is that, while the terraces are worth seeing, I was more interested in the mountain culture and the people who lived in what I thought of as an inhospitable place. Many of the trails are impassable by anything mechanical, and even on the well-worn road out of Banuae we witnessed a jeepney struggling through the mud mixed up by recent rains. (We also came upon a mysterious earth-mover digging out a hillside in a place where there seemed absolutely no way to way to get the huge machine there – the trails up and down the hill were far too steep and narrow. It looked like it had been airdropped by a truly monstrous helicopter.) Of course people there survive, working their terraces and housing and feeding curious outsiders, but their adaptations to life in and from the mountains must be marvelous to “urban” eyes. Even their bodies change: we saw that many locals had feet with remarkably splayed toes, tweaked to better navigate the mountain paths that wind around their valley.

I didn’t return to the Philippines a month after my service ended just to see the rice terraces, of course, but I liked the sidetrip. I enjoyed visiting Japan and China, but I discovered just how huge the difference is between traveling and living. Back in the Philippines I felt comfortable: I knew how to get around, I could communicate, I recognized a lot of the local quirks. The Philippines was my home for over two years, after all, which was not enough time for me to understand it, but it was enough for me to become comfortable with a lot of things that were initially jarring – and enough for me to welcome the sweet sounds of Ilonggo all over again.

I spent Christmas back at my center in Iloilo, after a harrowing ro-ro (roll-on, roll-off) trip from Manila involving three cramped bus journeys, two intemperate ferry jaunts and twenty-seven total hours. A few of my coworkers knew I was visiting, but it was a surprise for nearly all of my kids – and I was mobbed before I even got inside the center. It was fantastic to see them again, to go through our well-worn routines and conversations.

My third New Year in the Philippines turned, and this time I had a ticket home. But I wasn’t redeeming it quite yet.