Global Stories – Literary Journalism

Transcription

GLOBAL STORIES
LITERARY JOURNALISM:
THE BEST OF CLASS
EDITED BY GENE MUSTAIN
Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong
For members of all the Literary Journalism classes at the JMSC over
the years…thanks for making it a successful course.
For the beautiful Doreen Weisenhaus and for the scholar-athlete
Jake Mustain…thanks for the excused absences from
Family Reading Hour.
Journalism and Media Studies Centre
G24 Eliot Hall
The University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 2859-1155
Fax: (852) 2858-8736
E-mail: [email protected]
http://jmsc.hku.hk/
Edited by Gene Mustain
Published by Journalism and Media Studies Centre,
Distributed by Hong Kong University Press
14/F Hing Wai Centre
7 Tin Wan Praya Road
Aberdeen, Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 2550-2703
Fax: (852) 2875-0734
E-mail: [email protected]
www.hkupress.org
© Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong 2011
ISBN 978-988-194-604-1
Global Stories – Literary Journalism: The Best of Class, edited by Gene Mustain,
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0
Hong Kong (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/hk/
or contact Creative Commons HK at Journalism and Media Studies Centre,
The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
Cover design by Christy Choi
Book design by Matthew Leung, Journalism and Media Studies Centre
Global Stories
Literary Journalism:
The Best of Class
Edited by Gene Mustain
Global Stories
Literary Journalism: The Best of Class
Journalism and Media Studies Centre at
The JMSC was founded in 1999. It offers graduate and undergraduate
degrees as well as seminars and courses for news professionals at all levels
of expertise. Located at the crossroads of China, Asia and the West, its
programs and research have made it a focus for understanding changes
underway in journalism throughout the region.
Introduction
INTRODUCTION
We began offering Literary Journalism, the graduate-level course that led
to this book, in the fall of 2001. It is the obvious choice now, but back then
I struggled a bit with what to name the course. During class, we would be
analyzing a type of writing that one expert had called “extended digressive
narrative nonfiction” – writing, in other words, that you might read in a
novel or short story, except that it is true.
Extended Digressive Narrative Nonfiction is not a good course title.
Over the last 40 years, as such writing became a separately recognized and
studied genre, possible alternatives emerged in academia: Art Journalism,
Creative Nonfiction, Documentary Narrative, Literature of Fact, Literary
Nonfiction, and another that made no sense to me, Factual Fiction.
Someone even suggested: The Literature of Actuality. In the United States
during the 1960s and 1970s, some writers used New Journalism, but then
others argued persuasively with examples that extended digressive narrative
nonfiction was not new.
In fact, it had been around for about three centuries.
Before I came to Hong Kong in 2000, and while I was finishing my
professional newspaper career in New York, I taught a course for one
semester, part-time at night, at New York University (NYU) in extended
digressive narrative nonfiction – for short, let’s just call it nonfiction. To
prepare for the class, I sat in on some daytime sessions of the same course
led by NYU faculty members who had taught it before. I also read some of
their course materials, including a 1973 essay by the masterful nonfiction
writer (and eventual novelist) Tom Wolfe, one of those who for a time used
New Journalism.
In his essay, Wolfe compiled a list of techniques common in fiction
that can work as well in nonfiction. The first item on Wolfe’s list, which I
continue to stress in my classes today, is to portray the action of a story in
scenes, rather than by historical summary. In other words: Show, don’t tell.
In the reporting stage, that means writers should witness the key events of
a story first-hand; if that isn’t possible, they can reconstruct the key events,
the important scenes, through interviews and other research.
Wolfe’s list of techniques for fiction and nonfiction writers include four
others. I will briefly tell you about two of them now because they help
further illustrate what our course is about and because they, along with
Wolfe’s advice about scenes, are the ones that my graduate students use
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Global Stories • Literary Journalism: The Best of Class
most. You will see the evidence of this in stories in this collection. First,
writers use dialogue – full conversations between and among characters
– rather than simple quotations. Dialogue places readers in the middle of
conversations. Second, writers use “status details” about people’s habits,
manners, customs and the “pattern of behavior and possessions” by which
they “experience their position in the world.” This gives a story’s characters
psychological depth.
The NYU course was known as The Journalistic Tradition. To me,
the title implied that the course was more about journalism history than
nonfiction, so I didn’t want to use it in Hong Kong. I also didn’t want titles
such as Creative Nonfiction or, heaven forbid, The Literature of Actuality.
Those sounded as though they belonged in the English Department, which
is where a lot of courses about nonfiction end up in universities that don’t
have journalism departments.
The University of Hong Kong (HKU), an English-language institution
since its 1910 founding, when Hong Kong was a British colony, had a
journalism department, the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC).
Even so, I felt uneasy using “literary” and “journalism” together in a course
title. It seemed pretentious. I realize now that this was because “literary”
was a word I seldom used in my professional life. In my 30-year career,
I had written three nonfiction books, won many awards and gained a
newsroom reputation as “good with words.” In New York, and in Chicago
before that, and in a small town near Chicago before that, I was fortunate
to work alongside many talented people. They did not use “literary” to
describe their work, or mine. Our comments to one another were usually
brief: “nice story” or “good piece.”
In New York, after I got to the Daily News in 1986, I was assigned to a
quartet of newsroom desks that we occupants called the “pod.” Everyone
in the pod went on to write nonfiction books. One, Gail Collins, is now
a columnist for The New York Times. At the Daily News, we also had a
grumpy Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist (Jimmy Breslin, also a novelist)
who grunted hello on his way to composing 1,000 poetic words a couple
times a week. In Chicago, my friends at the Sun-Times included two more
Pulitzer winners and several who rose to the upper echelons of journalism.
A couple went on to write for television and the movies. One of them, Eliot
Wald, became head writer for the famous U.S. comedy show, “Saturday
Night Live.”
Even in that small town outside Chicago, my company was fast. My
mentor at The News-Sun was Ward Just, a former reporter for The Washington
Introduction
Post and writer for Newsweek. After the death of his father, who owned the
paper, he came to town now and then for a few days to help run things.
He had written two nonfiction books and was at work on a novel, the first
of 15 that would take him to the top rung of U.S. fiction. Luckily for me,
he took an interest in my work. He took me out for beers and sent several
“nice-story” notes. But even he never used the word “literary,” although in
a note about a profile of some secretive millionaire that I wrote he said I
could have been more descriptive, in the manner of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the
novelist.
The bottom line on this career background is that such newsrooms as
the ones I worked in keep you humble, and sensitive to pretension.
But I was in the Ivory Tower now, a quite respectable one. HKU is one
of the top five universities in Asia and consistently ranks among the top 25
in the world. So I looked around and learned that top universities in the
U.S. had courses they called Literary Journalism. Then I read a book called
Literary Journalism, published in 1995 by Mark Kramer and Norman Sims.
In that book, in an essay, “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists,” Kramer
– one of the form’s leading practitioners, and later director of the Nieman
Program on Narrative Journalism at Harvard University – discusses how
the term “literary journalism” evolved and writes these words:
“…As a practitioner, I find the ‘literary’ part self-congratulatory and the
‘journalism’ part masking the form’s inventiveness. But ‘literary journalism’
is roughly accurate. The paired words cancel each other’s vices and describe
the sort of nonfiction in which arts of style and narrative construction long
associated with fiction help pierce to the quick of what’s happening – the
essence of journalism.”
It was hard to argue with that, so I put my unease aside. Literary
Journalism, it was, at HKU and the JMSC. Then, as now, Literary Journalism
is an elective course. Over time, it has remained a popular choice among
students even though the JMSC has introduced several other electives
to meet students’ growing needs and interests in online, broadcast and
documentary journalism. In the Spring semester of 2010, the tenth edition
of the class, we had 20 Master of Journalism students. Six students who sat
in on classes during the opening two-week-long “add-drop period” decided
not to take it.
My guess is that most decided against it because they saw little practical
value. They were not going to learn much that they had not already learned
in other classes that would help them find jobs in conventional journalism,
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which is about things that happen or may happen, and about things that
may help people navigate life better. By “conventional journalism,” I also
mean the straightforward reporting of news found in many media. In
such stories, information is usually presented in descending order of
importance. Language must be accessible to a wide audience. The stories
are usually not long, and if they are reporting on controversial issues, they
should be “balanced” or “neutral.” In many societies, such journalism plays
a vital role: Keeping the public informed about important matters. (I do
not include “investigative journalism” in the conventional category. It has
different characteristics and can be even more vital. But it is usually the
preserve of veteran journalists, rather than those new to the field.)
Journalism can be art
What we study in our class is a different kind of journalism, one that
in skilled hands can take a story rooted in reality to the level of art. Art,
I say? Yes. Fiction is art, or can be, in the same way that a painting, a
poem, a play and a symphony can be art. All can be art because they evoke
emotions and explore ideas. They make us feel and think. So does Literary
Journalism. Like novelists and short story writers, Literary Journalists use
their intelligence and technical prowess to create true stories about humans
and our condition. Like novelists and short story writers, they enable us to
experience and comprehend life more fully.
The more remarkable fact about the Spring 2010 class and others before
is that large majorities of students decide to stay in the course, even though
a casual glance at the intimidating list of writers whose work we might
analyze in a given semester tells students this: It takes a lot of experience
and major talent to report and write a high-quality nonfiction story. They
also soon learn that the stories are usually longer than those of conventional
journalism. Their language is more inventive. Their organization is more
complex. Their authors typically don’t worry about balance or neutrality;
they take a point of view.
We never have time in the course to get to all the authors on our list,
which is intimidating, and which has grown over the years. Every year I add
a few and every year students in the class suggest a few as the class unfolds
and they get ready to do one of their two major assignments for the course –
a “presentation,” in which they and usually a partner will speak to the class
about an author and analyze excerpts of the author’s work. In their analyses
of the excerpts, their goal is to show how and to what effect the author
employed writing techniques akin to those that I will have discussed in the
work of other authors I will have analyzed by that time in the class.
Introduction
I almost always agree with the students’ suggestions for the list because
they know by then the quality it takes to qualify. The list includes a Nobel
Prize winner (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a former newspaperman in
Colombia); two Pulitzer Prize winners (David Finkel, Ian Johnson); several
pioneer Literary Journalists (Richard Harding Davis, Charles Dickens,
Egon Kisch); several novelists and journalists (James Agee, Truman Capote,
Joan Didion, John Hersey, Gay Talese), and many contemporary nonfiction
writers and journalists (Janine DiGiovanni, Dexter Filkins, Jon Krakauer,
Susan Orlean).
Many students in our course come from Hong Kong and mainland
China. They speak and write English well, but naturally retain strong
connections to their cultures and homelands, and so they and I have looked
for Chinese authors whose works are available in English and have added
them to the list. These include Liu Binyan, who twice paid heavy political
prices for practicing a Chinese style of Literary Journalism (baogao wenxue)
that allows for more invention than its Western counterpart, partly to shield
subjects from government retaliation, as well as Ma Jian, Jung Chang and
Su Xiaokang.
Western writers who have lived in Asia, China or Hong Kong, or who
have traveled in the region, such as Martin Booth, Ian Buruma, Jan Morris,
Peter Hessler and William T. Vollman, are also on the list.
In addition to China, Colombia and the U.S., the list includes authors
from many other places: Czechoslovakia, England, Germany, Italy, the
Netherlands, Norway, Russia and Wales. The diversity reflects our students’
diversity. They come from around the world, increasingly in the last six
years as our program evolved into a mostly full-time program. Some who
come to our classroom want to share with classmates the work of an author
they have previously read and admired.
I tell students that one of my two goals for the semester is for them
to become better readers. I became a better reader when I sat in on those
sessions of the daytime editions of The Journalistic Tradition class at New
York University in 1999 to prepare myself for teaching the same course
at night. By then in my life, I had read thousands of books, fiction and
nonfiction, and magazine articles as well as countless newspaper stories. But
especially as a student in Michael Norman’s class at NYU, which I attended
the most, I began to become a better reader.
I began to become a better reader because I began to learn formally
about form and style – about how a piece of work is organized and how
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it expresses its content. More quickly than before, and more organically, I
began to see form and style taking place on the page.
Until that point, everything I had done as a writer was driven by instinct
– by what sounded “right.” If during college or earlier in my career I had
taken Norman’s classes or those of others whose books and materials I read
as I developed my course in Hong Kong, I am certain I would not have
wasted so much time at the keyboard, waiting for sometimes very elusive
sounds.
In Hong Kong, in addition to the book by Mark Kramer and Norman Sims,
the other books and collections of articles that helped me greatly included
Writing for Story by Jon Franklin and The Art of Fact by Kevin Karrane
and Ben Yagoda. I also gained valuable insights from Thomas Connery
in A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism, Ronald Weber in The
Literature of Fact and Gay Talese and Barbara Lounsberry in The Literature
of Reality. More recently, I learned from The Literature of Journalism by R.
Thomas Berner and Intimate Journalism by Walt Harrington.
In the first couple of years, I used the Franklin book and the KarraneYagoda collection as class texts, but students regarded them as too U.S.centric, so I stopped using a class text. Instead, I use work from our everexpanding list, using the full text in the case of shorter stories whose
word count is below what HKU’s copyright rules permit me to use, or
representative excerpts in the case of books. In either case, along with copies
of the material, I provide students lists of questions designed to get them to
think about the emotions and ideas in the story, and how to recognize and
analyze the piece for its form and style.
Although we will not build the course around it, but will instead continue
to focus on the authors on our intimidating list, I will use this book as a
supplementary class text. It will help students prepare for their writing
assignments, show them what their predecessors have accomplished and
give them something to strive for – a spot in the second edition.
Better readers, better writers
Literary Journalism at the JMSC is not a skills-development class. Because
we do so much reading, we don’t have weekly exercises or assignments like
we do in our reporting and writing classes, some of which I also teach.
We call it a “studies” class, meaning it is a “discussion-and-analysis” class.
At the end, we want students to be able to discuss and analyze a piece of
nonfiction at a high level.
Introduction
Even though it is not a skills class, my second goal for the course is for
students to become better writers. Their second major course assignment is
to write one work of nonfiction of about 2,500 words that shows knowledge
and command of some of the techniques we discuss in class. Although I
encourage them to begin thinking about possible topics early on, I advise
them to put off the writing until after the course is over or nearly over, until
we have studied many writers – until they have done a lot of reading. I see
some of their work in other classes, and even though the nature of that
work is different, I see evidence every year that many become better writers
during the course.
I am certain that the reasons for this are tied to the first course goal
– they became better readers first. And then they became better writers
because of all the nonfiction they read, because of all the discussions about
writers we had and because of all the materials we looked at that talked
about technique, such as that list from Wolfe.
Early on, I also give them another list. It is a handout that I adapted
from the aforementioned Mark Kramer’s essay on “Breakable Rules for
Literary Journalists.” In his essay, Kramer compiled a list that included
some of the main characteristics and practices of the form. First was the
idea that Literary Journalists get deeply into the worlds of the people they
write about because they want to show “felt life.” Showing felt life is simply
showing the way people really are, with all their qualities, good and not-sogood, in ways that deepen readers’ understanding. It takes time for a writer
to get the material to achieve such knowledge of a person. It also takes a
person willing to trust the writer.
The second item on Kramer’s list has two parts, and involves implied
contracts – one that writers make with readers, one with the people they
write about. With readers, it is that the writer does everything possible to
get reality right; nothing is invented. With people, it is that they are made
to understand what they are getting into, which is the public spotlight,
and that the writer needs access to their lives – access that rivals what they
would give close friends.
With apologies to Kramer, I will summarize the other six of his eight
“Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists” and put them into numerical
form:
3) They usually write about routine events. The need for access to their
subjects’ worlds forces them to seek stories in places that can be visited. For
instance, it would be difficult to profile a lawyer because the confidential
nature of lawyer-client relationships bars access to a lot of good potential
material.
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4) They write in an “intimate voice” – a voice that can be frank, informal,
ironic, or whatever, but it is a unique voice – a sociable, human voice. The
voice represents only the writer, not an ideology, government, publication
or corporation.
5) They employ a writing style that is clear, but elegant; lucid, but
descriptive. The goal is uninterrupted expression. That means they do not
use any language that causes the reader to wonder, what does the writer
mean?
6) On occasion, they turn away, or digress, from the primary narrative
they are telling and talk to readers about some related idea or material in
the story. They often do this when compelling action in the story is about
to happen.
7) They use structure. They mix their primary narrative with other
stories starting and unfolding at different points along the way, as a way of
amplifying and reframing events in the narrative.
8) They develop meaning by building upon the readers’ sequential
reactions to events in the story. They make readers care about what happens
next because readers have experienced events with the characters. They
take readers on a journey.
Finding and showing ‘felt life’
Our course unfolds over a 12-week semester. In addition to Literary
Journalism, a typical full-time student in our course will take four others.
A part-time student will take one, but that is while working at a full-time
job, and in Hong Kong, people work long hours. Demands on student time
are one reason why the suggested length of the writing assignment is only
2,500 words. Students will have already spent a lot of time reading and a lot
of time preparing for their first major assignment, the course presentation,
so 2,500 words is fair (students are free to go longer; many do; in fact, most
of the writers in this collection did).
Most of the nonfiction we analyze is longer, although sometimes I
will dissect a newspaper column by someone such as Jimmy Breslin and
show how in 1,000 words a writer can take that form to the level of art. In
any case, the biggest issue with the writing assignment is not length, but
topic. Remember, the first item on Kramer’s list of “Breakable Rules” is that
Literary Journalists get deeply into the worlds of their subjects because they
want to show “felt life” – the way people really are. But how deeply can
Introduction
students get into the worlds of their subjects during a 12-week semester,
when they are not full-time writers and face demands from other courses,
or a full-time job?
To overcome these problems, I urge students to look for topics in their
own lives – current situations they might be experiencing in which they
know the characters and their motivations, or events they have experienced
or witnessed and can reconstruct through interviews and reporting, or
stories to which their jobs give them natural and deep access.
Every year, the students’ solutions to the problems are extraordinary. I am
biased of course, but I think this collection shows that, one way or another,
they found good material and wrote good nonfiction. I am reluctant to
use “student work” to describe their efforts. For one thing, at the time they
wrote the stories, some were already top professionals, in journalism or in
other careers. For another, some were older, wiser and more experienced
in the world than some other graduate students. They had back-packed to
faraway places; lived away from their native countries.
This book is going to take you to distant lands. You are going to Botswana.
To Mexico. To Germany. To Italy. To England. To Canada. To Nepal. To the
Philippines. To Vietnam. To Cambodia. And of course to Hong Kong, to
China and along its old Silk Road. You are going to India twice. To the U.S.
three times. You are even going to Cyberspace. I do not know of a more
global collection of nonfiction.
This book is going to take you to remote regions and crowded cities.
It will take you very near Ground Zero in New York City, on the day two
hijacked airliners caused two great skyscrapers to collapse and killed many
people. It will take you to weddings and funerals and to parties and death
museums. It will take you into courtrooms, barrooms and emergency
rooms. You will meet a model and a murderer and doctors and druggies. It
will take you into a boxing ring, a football match and a rock concert. It will
put you on a white-knuckle plane ride and in a bus about to fall off a cliff. It
will show you how to fight brush fires, search for tigers, cram for an exam
and adapt `to cultures where no one has ever met anyone like you before.
Along the way, you will experience love, joy, hope, grief, pain and
despair, like the characters in the stories, including many of the authors
who chose to write from the first-person point of view. This book is about
emotions and ideas; it is about humans and their condition; it is about the life
around us.
I know you expect me to say that it was hard for me to read through
a decade’s worth of work and make the selections for this book. But I am
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going to say it anyway. It was. I am saying it out of respect for the people
I am disappointing, including some who at one point thought they were
going to be in it, but whose places were taken by class members who came
along later. But we had to make choices and I did not make them lightly.
It was not by design, but the 25 pieces we have here end up reflecting that
unique diversity we have at the JMSC.
They also do one more thing. They show that in terms of extended
digressive narrative nonfiction, our class is world-class, university division.
It is time for me to get out of the way. Enjoy the rest of the journey.
Gene Mustain
Director, Reporting and Writing Program
Journalism and Media Studies Centre
May 2011
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Gene Mustain
Table of Contents
LIANA CAFOLLA
One Night in Mexico
WILLIAM BI
Visitors, Indians Feel Sting of Globalization
AMANDA CLIFT-MATTHEWS
Assembly-line Justice – Win or Lose, Always a Draw
YUBING GAO
The Year of Fate
SEAN ZINTL
If It’s Thursday, It Must Be Saigon
ANN CHU
The Life and Times of Shanghai Barbie
ANGHARAD JAMES
Life in Downhill and Uphill Nepal
LOUISE WONG
Murder and Loss in the City of Glass
TAMARA DE GUZMAN
A Son, a Father and a Terrible Night
ANDREA FENN
Ten Thousand Euros, A Hundred Thousand Yuan
CATHY LI
Love, Art and History: A Silk Road Journey VANSON SOO
Goalkeeping and Game Theory
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01
06
15
23
29
36
43
52
58
65
72
77
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SHAO XIAOYI
Voyage of Discovery for the Ni Girls
RYAN ANDREWS
Down and Out in Delhi
JULIET YE
The Special One Studies for an Exam
JOSHUA BAINS
Wondering and Wandering in the Death Camps
CHRISTY CHOI
The Outer Limits of Technology
MABEL SIEH
Dreams of Memories Lost
SANDRA SIGGINS
On the Trail of Tigers
COLIN REID
World Trade Center: Apocalyptic Wonderland
DOUG NAIRNE
The Flicker of a Heartbeat
KARI JENSEN
Open Skies, Closed Doors
CORNELIUS RYAN
Fight Night in Phnom Penh
NICK WESTRA
In Botswana, a Fiery Band of Brothers
BONG MIQUIABAS
A Dramatic Night in Tree City, USA
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103
109
117
123
130
138
143
150
156
163
1
Fall 2001
One Night
in Mexico
When we thought of Mexico, we anticipated warm, friendly Latinos
quick to joke and laugh. But as we travelled the country, what we found
instead were impoverished people who endured wretchedness stoically and
mostly in the solemnest of silences. For one night, we lived in their world.
By Liana Cafolla
It was already dark when we arrived at the bus station. People thronged
about, men, women and children of all ages and sizes. Eating, smoking,
feeding babies. It looked chaotic, yet it was quiet. Tickets were not yet on
sale for the bus we wanted. Outside the station, the only light came from a
small glass-fronted bar across the street, and we went there to wait, glad to
set down our rucksacks and to sit under the air conditioning. We ordered
the usual two Coronas.
The evening was as hot and sticky as the day had been, just like it had
been every day since our arrival in Mexico 10 days before. We were both
lightly covered in dust. It congealed with our sweat to cover us in a kind of
dirty paste. Now we were heading south, towards the ancient, restless states
of Oaxaca and Chiapas, and the airless humidity seemed to increase with
every kilometre. But for now at least we were cool.
It was not an attractive bar. The tables were white plastic – functional,
cold and square, and slightly sticky to the touch. The neon lights were harsh
and too bright. The place was devoid of colour, and it wasn’t very clean. At
the table next to us sat three Mexican men. One played a guitar, and the
other two sat silently drinking Coronas, taking no notice of the music or
each other. They were immobile and silent, and looked like they sat every
day at that table, and had long ago run out of conversation.
Almost in unison, the three finished their beers. The guitarist stood
and moved purposefully towards us, guitar in hand. He glanced at our
rucksacks lying on the ground behind my husband’s chair. Years ago Ian
had stitched an Irish flag onto his. It was now grubby and discoloured on
the worn canvas. The guitarist studied it a second and then turned to Ian.
2
“Hey, Americanos?” he demanded. Ian looked at him, exasperated with the
presumption that had followed us all the way from Guadalajara.
“No,” he said shortly, “Ireland. Irish.”
“Ahh!” said the guitarist, nodding knowingly, “Canada.”
Ian gave up. The guitarist though had now made contact and decided
enough intimacy was established to move on to more important matters.
He leaned and spoke softly into Ian’s ear. He would play the guitar for him,
for me, he whispered. It would make me very romantic and responsive. And
all for just a few pesos. He spoke urgently, insistently. His table companions
looked on silently. He was clearly under pressure. Their empty Corona
bottles loomed at him. Ian gave him the money, and the guitarist strummed
a short song and sang along badly, then went back to his table and ordered
three more beers. Ian and I resumed our conversation.
A few minutes later, the guitarist moved stealthily towards us again. We
glanced at the table alongside. The three Coronas were almost empty. This
time, we knew what to expect.
We saw movement at the ticket desk, and I crossed over to buy tickets to
our destination of Puerto Angel, a supposedly little known beach paradise
on the Pacific Coast. The girl at the desk was adamant.
“No pase,” she said, when in my halting Spanish I asked for two tickets.
I was bewildered. What did she mean? Two tiny words, but they could be
interpreted to mean so many things.
I tried again, and got the same response. I went back to the bar, and
we considered. Perhaps the tickets were still not yet on sale. Maybe the
bus wasn’t here yet. Or had been cancelled. Maybe she wanted to see our
passports. Maybe the bus didn’t stop right at Puerto Angel, or maybe she’d
never heard of the place. Ian took our much-folded map of Mexico, and
crossed resolutely to the ticket office.
A few minutes later he returned. No tickets. “No pase,” he repeated.
My turn again. Painstakingly, I explained to the girl using just about
every word of Spanish I knew and a few I’d just made up that we would
be happy to buy tickets to anywhere near Puerto Angel. It didn’t matter
if the bus didn’t go right there, we would find our way. She looked at me
impassively.
“No pase,” she repeated.
3
I decided I wasn’t moving until I got the tickets. We had come too far.
We were both silent for a while, then she reeled off a long sentence, pointing
outside to a newly arrived bus. I thought she said we could buy tickets from
the driver. Elated, I ran out, called to Ian and we boarded the bus and paid
the driver for our tickets. After some time, the bus drove off. We slept.
***
When we awoke, the bus had stopped, and the driver was shaking Ian,
telling us to get off and take our things. The other passengers were already
disembarking. Half asleep, we stumbled off the bus and stood with the others
in the dark, waiting. No one spoke, either to explain or to ask questions. We
could see nothing but we could hear a loud sound, like rumbling thunder,
close by. Suddenly the driver switched on the headlights, and they lit a path
ahead, a short bramble-strewn mossy path leading to a muddy riverbank.
We followed the driver to the river. The thunderous rumbling grew
louder with every step. At the riverbank, why we had stopped became
apparent. The road to Puerto Angel lay on the other side, and there was
no bridge. It had been washed away the night before. There was just a
small boat at the bank’s edge, a wooden boat with a small motor and some
wooden benches. It looked shaky and feeble and very old. The passengers
climbed in, unquestioningly, one by one. As I got in, I hesitated, wondering
if I should tell someone I couldn’t swim. But there was no one to tell, so I
said nothing.
The boat began to move across the water, the way lit only by a small
flashlight held by someone near the front. We were packed tight in the boat,
and yet it felt cold on the river. There seemed to be no heat emanating from
the other passengers, no shared bodily warmth. Nobody spoke.
Suddenly, the flashlight swung to our left, and we could see the source of
the noise. No more than 100 feet away, water cascaded into a huge, wild and
thundering waterfall. We were less than halfway across. The water around
us moved at what seemed the strangest angle, blasting from our right and
thrusting furiously under the boat to our left, and on at full speed to the
deafening waterfall. Surely we too would soon be rushing towards it to our
left, the little boat no match for the water’s fury. Even the noise alone would
be enough to compel our few planks to the left.
4
I tensed and waited to be swept away. For a long time, nothing happened,
or maybe I just closed my eyes. But somehow the little boat resisted; finally,
suddenly, miraculously, we reached the other side. Getting out, my legs
trembled. Later, someone told us a child had fallen overboard the previous
night, and was gone with the water. But we had made it. That was all we
could think about. And now we would continue our journey.
But of course, our bus was still on the other side of the river. Here instead
were more buses, seven or eight of them, lining the narrow road. All were
dark and silent. The driver on the far side had turned off his headlamps and
now only a single torch offered light. Our fellow passengers stood silently;
it seemed nobody knew what to do. In the quiet we heard mosquitoes
buzzing. I retrieved repellent from my rucksack and we rubbed it over our
exposed skin. Then we were motionless again, nothing to do.
The Mexicans seemed to have neither moved nor spoken since we’d
arrived. Then one man began to shout, and move from one motionless bus
to the next, thumping heavily on the luggage compartments beneath, and
calling out. Voices answered, stifled and sleepy, like the yelps of wounded
dogs. The thumping man continued to bang and call more insistently,
and eventually, a man crawled from one of the compartments and moved
wearily to the door of the bus above him. He turned on the interior light,
and the bus immediately took on a welcoming and homely appearance.
Everyone started to get on. But I thought, what if it’s not headed to
Puerto Angel? It could be going anywhere.
I asked the driver as we boarded. “Puerto Angel?”
“Si, si,” he responded tiredly, not looking up, and in no way interested.
I suddenly felt the idiocy of my question, of my attitude. I was with about
40 people who were grateful, as I had been just moments before, to have
crossed the river safely. But my relief was so short-lived. We were among
people who had risked their lives to cross a roaring river, not because they
were on holiday, looking for adventure, carefree backpackers like us, but
because they had to. Their lives and stories and struggles had to continue
on the other side of the river, whatever the cost. They had no choice but to
put themselves in others’ hands. That forced vulnerability, so alien to me,
was their reality. At the bus station, they knew the tickets weren’t being sold
because the bridge was gone. The driver was desperate enough, and these
passengers too, to risk it anyway. And there I was, my only concern which
way the bus was going.
***
5
As it turned out, the bus was going nowhere. Even before everyone had
found a seat, the driver shut off the lights, left the bus and resumed his sleep
in the luggage compartment. The other passengers settled themselves as
comfortably as they could on the thin, lumpy seats. Ian and I looked at each
other in bewilderment. There was no answer to our unspoken question. We
tried to sleep.
It was difficult. The Mexicans made more noise asleep than awake.
There were snores from every corner, long and low, short and sharp, an
orchestra of whining and dissonant inhalations and exhalations interrupted
by slapping sounds. These sounds came from all around. After a while, we
realized it was the snorers, whacking at mosquitoes. Somehow, eventually,
we dozed off.
We woke to clamour, confusion and sunlight streaming through dark
trees we could see through the window. The driver had returned, everyone
was awake and shouting, refreshed and full of vigour. The commotion
around us continued, and now looking more closely out the window, we
could see why. The bus was parked right at the edge of a precipice so deep we
could not see the bottom. The prospect of a lethal descent into a fathomless,
tropical rain forest was right beside us, and highly possible as the driver was
now attempting a three-point turn.
All the buses were facing the wrong way, towards the river. The road was
very narrow, maybe 20 feet wide and tightly lined on both sides by buses.
The manoeuvre seemed destined to fail. But the crowd was exhilarated by
the challenge. People had moved from the left side of the bus to our side, the
side of the precipice, and were leaning out the windows and even the door,
yelling instructions to the driver. It seemed the bus would surely topple
from the unequal weight of the people, if it didn’t go over with the audacity
of the manoeuvre. The driver made painful progress, jerking to the right
and then back, as if he’d changed his mind, the gears grinding painfully, the
brake seeming to work only at the last possible moment.
We held our breaths. Backwards and forwards we went, a little towards
the precipice, a little back, as if the driver were teasing. We seemed to be
getting nowhere. The gears kept grinding, and then somehow we were
facing the road again. Finally, we got on our way. The night and all its terrors
were gone. Puerto Angel and all its picture-postcard beauty lay ahead, but
somehow it was not so important any more.
Liana Cafolla came to Hong Kong in 1999, planning to stay for about
three years. Today, she has two children and one master’s degree in
journalism to show for her time. She works as a freelance journalist, and
has no plans to live anywhere else.
6
Spring 2006
Visitors, Indians Feel
Sting of Globalization
Globalization has turned Bangalore, India’s IT capital, from a sleepy
hamlet to a thriving metropolis. Travelers on spiritual quests lament
that the seductions that they are trying to escape are making their way
to India, while Indians are baffled by Westerners’ refusal to see that they
too deserve modernization. What happens then when a pop icon comes to
play to a crowd of affluent Indians and the Western diasporas?
By William Bi
During the three-hour train ride from Mysore to Bangalore, a passenger
sees every gradient of today’s India: from the princely, sleepy former
kingdom of Mysore through the rural villages, where electricity is a luxury
and white oxen haul bale and tilt the earth, to the exploding urban rush of
Bangalore.
After escaping the peddlers at the Bangalore station, I hopped onto an
auto rickshaw to get here, the Crossword bookstore. I am about to meet a
friend, with whom I’ll see Sting perform tonight at the Palace Grounds.
The Crossword bookstore in downtown Bangalore is a quintessential
escape for Western travelers. It has the latest New York Times best sellers
and air-conditioners that wipe away the south Indian summer heat. If you
want a browsing break, its Coffee Day café, India’s Starbucks, offers iced
mochas or soya smoothies.
As I read titles on book spines, I suddenly hear a woman behind me
scream my name and shout, “Oh, my God!”
I turn and see an excited Alia, holding her hands up. “So happy to see
you!” Then she tucks her chin, closes her eyes and screams again while
spinning her hands rapidly.
I had met Alia last year in Mysore. She was studying yoga and her
boyfriend Bruno was taking photography lessons with a retired local artist
they revered as “Bruno’s guru”. We all fell in love with Mysore’s charm.
Indians and travelers alike often wax lyrically for its sandalwood, incense,
silk, arts, music, and of course yoga. A few days ago, through emails, we
7
learned we were both in Mysore, and agreed to meet here today for the
concert.
Alia is of French and Moroccan heritage, and so has African, Arabic and
French features – including pale blue eyes and curly brown hair – that are
striking. She is tall, in her early 30s and somewhat estranged from her birth
country. “I hate France, I don’t feel it is my home,” she said once, as her face
tightened and her eyes turned steely. “People have so much, but they are not
happy. It is a depressing place with nothing but problems, and most of those
are really so small.”
Alia has lived an unusual life. Her parents separated when she was young.
She left France at 19, and has not returned except on occasional holidays.
For more than ten years, she has travelled, studied and worked throughout
the world, but never stayed anywhere long enough to call it home.
A smiling young man has followed Alia into the bookstore. She
introduces him as Rohit, a family friend of her yoga teacher. Rohit comes
from a coffee plantation family in the legendary Coorg region. Like Rohit,
Coorgis tend to be tall and dark, and to have angular features. They are the
result of the British mixing with the tribal people on the cool hill stations
of Southern India. The region is blessed with good weather, which yields
rich crops of coffee and tea. The fearless nature and privileged heritage of
Coorgis earned them the right to be the only people in India allowed to
bear firearms.
Rohit is an architect. Like many young professionals in India, he is
self-assured and eager to be a good host. He has taken the day off to show
Alia around. We shake hands and I feel the soft warm grip characteristic of
Indian men.
“Want to go somewhere else?” Rohit asks us.
“Sure!” We are eager to see Bangalore through local eyes.
***
One block behind Mahatma Gandhi Road, or MG Road, is Bangalore’s
busiest commercial district. In early afternoon, cars pile up in white heat
and thick smog. Crowds squeeze by on narrow sidewalks. Shops brim with
consumer electronics and clothing. A restaurant called Pizza Corner is
packed with people.
Rohit leads us to yet another Coffee Day, though one without a bookstore.
We order another round of lattes and smoothies. Rohit lights a cigarette.
8
“So? What have you been up to?” I ask Alia when Rohit goes to the
washroom.
“Oh, my God. After we left Mysore last year, Bruno and I had a vacation
on the Goan beach. I studied Iyengar yoga in Pune, then we went to French
Guinea.”
“Wow, that must’ve been fun?”
“Well, we stayed with a friend, it was okay. But it was so French, you
know? Everybody was rich, so much privilege, it’s sick, you know?” Alia
chews out her French-accented English and her eyes grow cold again. “But
the locals were so poor. Bruno and I couldn’t find any work, and we didn’t
like the place, so we moved back to France.”
“Where is Bruno now?”
“Bruno is in Russia.” With that her face instantly brightens. “He found
a job managing a restaurant in Moscow. He said he wants to save up and
come to India again and study more photography.”
“And how did you meet up with Rohit?”
“Haha, he’s just my teacher’s family friend.”
“He seems to like you a lot, from what I can see.”
“Really? Well, what can I do? I’m a beautiful girl, haha!” Alia recovers
as she sees Rohit walking back. He walks with an almost predatory hunch
because of his build. One can picture him stalking his hunt in a rainforest.
Yet he is gentle and eager-to-please.
As we sip ice-cold coffee, we discuss what we like and dislike about India
while surfing on my Mac notebook to order tickets. They range from 900
to 2000 rupees, roughly $25 to $55 dollars, about a third of a traffic cop’s
monthly salary. The organizers said ticket proceeds would go to a relief
organization helping victims of a recent tsunami.
“Are you hungry? Shall we have some food?” Rohit is eager to show the
city has more than a bookstore and a coffee shop.
“Sure.” The guests too have had enough coffee.
***
We get in Rohit’s Maruti Suzuki Esteem. He turns on its radio and Alice
Cooper blares out. He steps on the gas and the exhaust betrays a broken
9
muffler. I holler from the backseat that we go for some dosa, or pancakes,
but Rohit has something else in mind.
After an hour in exhausting traffic, we come to Koramangala, Bangalore’s
newest chic suburb. Brand new townhouses align broad boulevards. A newly
finished five-story mega shopping mall towers under huge swaggering
block letters: “The Forum”. The Esteem roars up four levels of the car park
and Rohit backs it into a row of small compacts.
Inside is a non-descript urban complex. Not a single Hindi script is to
be seen. Banners that read “Peter England” and “Pierre Cardin” drape the
mall. But real luxury brands, Prada, Gucci or LV, are not visible. Bangalore’s
luxury consumption is still in its infancy.
Rohit takes us to a Tommy Hilfiger store, managed by his buddy Ashvind.
A tall and lanky young man with glasses and mild manners, he seems more
like a computer programmer than a shirt salesman.
“Basically, how do Canadian people like Hilfiger clothes?” Ashvind,
shaking his head, asks me. In India shaking heads can mean many things,
including initiating a conversation.
“I don’t know much about fashion, but there were rumours that Mr.
Hilfiger doesn’t like Asians,” I reply. “But I’m not sure if that’s true. Just to be
on the safe side, I don’t wear his clothes.”
I regret my politically sensitive answer right away, so I add, “But in terms
of fashions, I think many young people would say that they are hip.”
Ashvind shakes his head in approval after hearing that. He turns to his
staff and gives some instructions, then asks if we would like to purchase
discounted shirts. We decline.
Rohit and Ashvind lead us to a McDonald’s at the end of the mall.
We conceal our disappointment and follow them inside. Aerosmith is
screaming “Amazing”. The setup is a replica of a 1950s diner, with Andy
Warhol’s painting of Marilyn Monroe and pictures of Bentleys and muscle
cars.
Beef burgers are off the menu. The popular items are Chicken Maharaja
Mac (which reminds me of the “Le Big Mac” scene in “Pulp Fiction”),
Crispy China, Filet-O-fish, fries and Coca-Cola. Risking irking our hosts, I
decide not to order anything. Rohit and Ashvind look puzzled. Alia orders
a large cup of fries.
“We go to a pub?” Rohit suggests after an awkward meal.
10
“Yay!” Alia waves her arms and spins her hands again.
“Sure!” I say. My yoga practice be damned. I have not had a beer in a
month. But I insist that we’ll have to eat some masala dosa first.
***
Another half hour in the boiling traffic later, Rohit parks his car at a
construction site, and we enter a two-storey building that looks either halfdemolished or half-built.
A black metal stairway leads to a small fire exit. The sound of bass can
be felt vibrating through the black brick wall. Rohit bangs on the door,
and before long it swings open. A thin young man with a black Megadeth
T-shirt and a shoulder-length mop pokes his head out. He smiles when
he sees Rohit, flashing white teeth. His face is dark brown and he sports a
carefully groomed black goatee. He opens the door, and Rohit introduces
us to his friend Ravit.
Inside is a tiny bar about three prison cells combined. A beam of
afternoon sunlight pierces a cloud of cigarette smoke, adding a blue tint to
the dingy atmosphere. Posters of Jimmy Hendrix, Roger Waters, and other
old-time rockers hang on the black walls.
“Rock and roll is dead...” Lenny Kravitz’s voice shrieks through the
speakers.
We chuck back intensely good ice-cold Kingfisher draft and talk about
music. Rohit speaks to Ravit in Hindi and points at us. Ravit nods and blows
out a plume of smoke.
“Do you like Jimmy Page?” Ravit smiles and his curious eyes turn to
me.
“I liked him when he was with Led Zeppelin, but I find his solo work
boring frankly.”
“No way, man! I think he is the greatest guitar player – what do you
think of India?”
I repeat my rehearsed answer – of course I like it very much, it is very
technologically advanced, and modern, and people are generally smart and
friendly. This time the answer pleases Ravit.
“But you must know India is corrupt, and people are bad. You should be
11
careful as a foreigner,” Ravit adds. “People are nice to you because you are a
foreigner, but they just want your money.”
Wanting to avoid an argument, I put aside my disagreement, and
nod earnestly like a child warned by his parents before his first day at
kindergarten.
“So why are you studying yoga?” Ravit asks Alia.
Alia, looking solemn and ignoring the question, suddenly lurches from
her seat, and implores Rohit, “Can I have a cigarette?” After resisting the
urge for the whole day with Rohit, she has finally broken down.
Rohit flicks one from a pack of Marlboros and turns the pack to me.
“No thank you.”
“Pssss…” Alia takes a long drag and sinks into the couch, all smiles
again. It is desecrating to discuss spirituality in this Bohemian rock’n’roll
setting, so we change topics to sports, to girls and boys and to India.
“Indian people are poor,” Rohit says. “But we had everything. We just let
ourselves be cheated by Americans, that’s all.”
“How so?”
“For example, mobile. Before Indian people didn’t need mobile handsets.”
He says this with absolute conviction. “Before India people all knew yoga;
they talked to each other through their minds, that’s all.”
“Telepathically?” I make no attempt to conceal my mockery.
Rohit ignores that remark. “Before we simply concentrated our mind
onto that person, and that person would be able to hear our messages.” He
takes a drag on the cigarette, and blows it away authoritatively.
Rohit is not alone. India is a land of paradoxes. It produces brilliant
scientists, yet many Indians believe more in spirituality than science, and
they do not see any incompatibility between the two.
Early last year, an ayurvedic (traditional Indian system of medicine)
doctor was lecturing a group of mostly Westerners. He brilliantly described
the detrimental effects of modern medicine and the wonders of traditional
healing. In virtually the same breath, he recalled testimony by a woman
who gave birth to one hundred babies.
“But that is…not possible,” a British girl timidly said.
“No madam,” scoffed the white-robed doctor. He wagged his finger and
12
shook his head, eyes popping. “You should not have doubted me. I have
seen it, one hundred percent, with my own eyes, you see. It’s like that.” He
pointed at his own eyes.
With that, the mostly Western audience fell in silent awe.
Rohit, as an educated professional, bears the same congenital ability
to see science as a matter of convenience rather than finality. Science and
commerce may have helped Indians raise the living standard and lift the
country’s esteem, but there are two eternal paradoxical truths so far as they
are concerned: 1) Indian culture is corrupt, but somehow it is also the most
moral and superior. 2) Indian people are by and large poor, but they had the
first of everything.
Some of the richest, most powerful and most respected Indians are
living saints like Sai Baba, Amma or Divine Mother, Yogi Ramdev and the
thousands of swamijis, or the enlightened souls. Even as India claims to have
a secular government, it is deeply rooted in religious beliefs. The majority
of Indians still worship gods several times a day, and hold an innate awe for
the divine.
Before we leave, I ask the bartender to pour a litre of cold draft beer into
a Nalgene water bottle to defy the alcohol ban at the Pepsi-only concert.
Our hosts are amazed. Rohit pats me on my back and nods. “Very clever
man.”
“Rock’n’roll!” Ravit raises his glass.
***
It is another hour of Bangalore’s jammed traffic. The bottle of beer lasted
three blocks. By the time we arrive at the Palace Grounds, the floodlights are
on. Crowds of young people stream toward the gate. None carry hotdogs or
beer, as both are taboo for public events. Instead, masala chat (a salsa-like
snack with fried donuts), samosa and popcorn booths line the paths.
“Could you put this on you?” I hand my camera to Alia. Photography is
strictly forbidden, a sign reads.
Alia slides one hand under her dress and the camera is in her bra. Rohit
watches, smiling.
A team of uniformed guards with bamboo sticks cheerfully stop us. They
examine bags and frisk us while asking where we are from. Alia’s frisker is a
woman who seems thrilled to touch a Western female, but she avoids Alia’s
breasts, to our relief.
13
Inside, a huge black stage looms above a half-empty sports ground. A
mostly Indian audience stands in patient anticipation.
Lights dim, and whistles go off. With a guitar’s loud roar, Sting appears
in a pin-striped Armani suit. With his image projected onto a big screen, he
looks more like a banker on Bloomberg TV than a rock star.
Sting greets the audience with a loud “hello” in the local language, and
the crowd cheers. Sting then warms the crowd with a song from his new
album. It has some vague lines about love and spirituality.
Alia is growing pale and her enthusiasm has long waned. The beer has
made her sick and the smoke guilty. But she is not regaining self-control.
Two skinny men come up and say hello.
“From where are you, the States?” one asks, trying to speak with an
American accent.
“Yes,” I reply; in this situation it makes no difference whether I am
Canadian or American.
“Would you like to smoke some marijuana? Very good quality. Free.”
The other fellow holds out a small plastic bag.
I decline the offer, but Alia’s eyes light up. She nods and raises her arm
in excitement.
The two men and Alia disappear. Rohit follows them. When Alia returns,
she is white as a ghost. Her eyes are glazy and her face stiff.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“It’s bad stuff.” She clears her throat and tries to squeeze out a smile.
Rohit watches her like a big brother, then offers a cigarette, which she
takes right away. Before long Alia squats behind a mount of dirt and starts
to convulse.
I look up and see the crowd swinging to “Roxanne”. Two young American
girls stand with bemused expressions. Two local men are chatting them
up.
“I’m stung by Sting,” one says. “I think he is so cool. You?”
“Ah, well, I think he’s okay.” One girl tries hard not to look bored.
“Are you from America?”
Alia is standing and smiling again, showing signs of recovery. Standing
against the crowd, she seems tired and alone. I walk up to her. She looks at
me, and laughs awkwardly.
14
“This is strange,” she says.
“No, it’s just you. I’m enjoying it,” I reply half-jokingly.
“Yes. It must be just me then. Haha.”
Sting is on “Every Breath You Take”, signaling the concert’s end. The
crowd claps and sings along. I mutter a couple of lines and hope there will
not be an encore.
But alas, the encore game plays here too. Sting reappears and sings
another plain-vanilla from his latest album, “Sacred Love”.
When we get back in the car, Rohit cruises around looking to buy more
booze. We stop at a Chinese restaurant with a flickering neon sign: “Green
Onion.” It was empty save one table. We sit down and order a round of
drinks. No one is talking. Alia turns down a cigarette from Rohit. He senses
our lack of enthusiasm, and for the first time today, we feel awkward sitting
together, as if we had mistaken each other for someone else.
It was a quiet drive to Rohit’s apartment, which has the smell of
sandalwood incense and piles of books, dishes and old shoes. He says “good
night” and crashes to bed.
The guests are given the floor. I roll out my climbing pad and crawl into
my sleeping bag.
Alia settles under a blanket. We lie on the floor dimly lit by streetlight,
facing each other. Mosquitoes swarm us tenaciously despite the incense.
Alia’s eyes are wide open. Her dark curls are nudged under the blanket,
leaving just enough space to breathe.
I hear a soft sob and I freeze. Alia slides one arm out of her blanket and
stops in front of me. Her fair skin glistens and her long fingers, half-curled,
are smooth and slender. I reach out and hold her hand. It’s freezing cold.
“I want to go back to Mysore,” she whispers, struggling to hold back
tears.
“I know. We’ll catch the train first thing tomorrow.”
After leaving his job as an energy analyst in Calgary, Canada, William
Bi had a two-year “sabbatical.” He visited other parts of Canada, Thailand
and far-flung corners of India before settling for awhile in Mysore, India.
Between practicing yoga and volunteering at a local Buddhist school,
he sampled South Indian vegetarian cooking and perfected motorcycle
survival skills on Indian roads. After finishing his JMSC graduate degree,
he became a commodities reporter in Beijing.
15
Spring 2004
Assembly-line Justice –
Win or Lose, Always a Draw
Professional privilege means that true, behind-the-scenes accounts of
legal proceedings are rare, so I wanted to see if I could use my experience to
shed light on the process, whilst at the same time maintaining confidences.
The events described here also had a profound effect on my career and
represented a turning point in my ideology.
By Amanda Clift-Matthews
“Please stand,” said the usher as three of Wolverhampton’s finest took
their seats at the front of the wood-paneled courtroom. A plaque depicting
the Crown’s coat of arms cloaked the room with a shroud of authority.
The magistrates looked down, unsmiling, from their tiered platform and
surveyed the room. I was unable to meet their eyes. Outside, the town
pounded with the lunch-hour stampede. Inside, my heart thumped. The
chairman opened his mouth and the room drew breath—
“Case dismissed.”
The young prosecutor recoiled as though the words had just punched
him. Earlier, matters seemed to have been going rather well—
“This boy, the one that threatened you with the knife, did you notice
anything unusual about him?”
“Oh yes,” replied the victim, peeping above the witness box, “he had a
gold tooth.”
Three pairs of eyes swiveled towards my client as his mouth snapped
tightly shut.
I felt sorry for the prosecutor. His father was a judge, as was his father
before him and no doubt his father’s father, a long line of bewigged ancestry.
But such judicial pedigree had only burdened him with an air of privilege
and outmoded sense of fair play. The legal profession was no longer a
gentleman’s sport, but a game only the streetwise could win.
The truth was, however, that the magistrates’ decision gave me little
pleasure either. “Lunch?” I offered to his downcast profile.
***
16
In the heart of Britain’s industrial revolution, the town of Wolverhampton
was once famous for its blazing smokestacks and prolific assembly lines.
Now the Black Country, as it is called, is better known for its school-age
prostitutes, petty thievery and Saturday night brawls. Factory carcasses play
host to bingo halls and defunct foundries to wine-bar chains. Dilapidated
industrial monoliths form the backdrop against which disaffected youths
languish, left to rot in an unemployment wasteland where vice thrives like
weeds.
Now and then, the criminal justice system attempts to rake in perceived
culprits. A grandiose former town hall houses the city’s magistrates’ court.
The building itself is intended to mimic a French chateau, but in all my
time inside and out of its hallowed walls, I never saw its fine crested roof or
baroque splendor. I was blind to any vestige of history or aesthetics. All I
noticed was the grubbiness within – crumbling plaster, stuffy air and prefab
décor – a befitting temple to British justice.
The magistrates’ court is the lowest criminal court in Britain and where
“white wigs” – that is, fledgling barristers who haven’t worked long enough
to dirty their robes – are let loose on hopeless cases. We were also cheap and
therefore perfect for the underfunded and overworked juvenile division.
It was inside one of the two Wolverhampton youth courtrooms that I sat,
sometime in the late 1990s, with my gold-toothed, 11-year-old client and
listened to the Bench hand down its verdict.
***
My offer of lunch declined, I ventured into the courthouse’s refreshment
area alone. The cafe was a small nook where stout dinner-ladies served
oozing white toast and brick tea through a makeshift serving-hatch. Feeling
my way through the Marlboro smog, I managed to locate a table where two
colleagues from chambers, and the solicitor who had booked me for that
day’s case, were already seated.
“I see you pulled one over M_______, ha!” backslapped my instructing
solicitor.
I explained how he had failed to satisfy the rule requiring the prosecution
to prove that a child under the age of 14 knew the difference between right
and wrong.
“The CPS criticise us for not getting them to plead …,” he said, as he
plopped down a congratulatory polystyrene cup in front of me, “… but why
17
should we when we get results like these?” Someone in a yellow basketball
shirt at the adjacent table belched bacon roll into my face. It was true; the
Crown Prosecution Service often grumbled that my instructing solicitors
nearly always proceeded to trial. Indeed, why should we get the client to
plead guilty? I thought, perhaps because he or she is guilty?
The discussion shifted to how my colleagues were getting on. One
possessed a hangover, so had made a pact with his prosecutor to crack
their case. It seems she too had also been out the night before and was
only happy to oblige. Apparently his client was resisting, but nothing a little
pressure couldn’t fix. My other colleague was stuck mid-trial in front of
the stipendiary – a single magistrate and a trained lawyer – and a man of
limited humour for whom police officers never lied and defense counsel
were time wasters. Not much point in doing preparation, she was saying,
because her guy was obviously going down. She held out a pack of cigarettes,
“Another?”
***
Upon learning of my profession, people invariably asked me how I felt
about defending someone I knew to be guilty. The truth was, I really had
no idea. I never asked. One learns very quickly that guilt or innocence is
irrelevant. As with poker, the game is not so much about your hand, but
what you convince your opponent it to be. And cases were rarely that
clear cut. Forget television shows like “Perry Mason” or “LA Law.” Or even
the OJ Simpson saga. Junior barristers provide advocacy on a shoestring.
Impassioned pleas are strictly the preserve of the Old Bailey or television.
Like any job, our productivity often depended on whether we had one
too many drinks the night before, or fancied another cigarette. Sometimes
we got lucky, sometimes we were able to claim that our client didn’t realise
that holding one of his peers at knifepoint might be wrong. Clients could be
acquitted after stealing a car and raising two fingers to the recording security
camera; grievous bodily harm could be whittled down to common assault;
and death threats to mere disturbances of the peace. At the same time,
mothers of starving children could be imprisoned for stealing groceries,
exuberant kids portrayed as lawless hooligans, experimenting students as
drug barons and men near incarcerated for damaging a flowerpot. The
truth is that Britain’s criminal justice system is closer to its national lottery
than people would ever wish to believe. The innocent are convicted while
the guilty go free.
18
It was with these uninspiring thoughts in mind that I remained in the
café and resigned myself to flipping through my brief for the following day.
By all appearances, my man was a nasty piece of work: plying his girlfriend
with drugs and then forcing her to sell her body. He was charged with
procuring an underage girl to become a prostitute – maximum sentence for
an adult: life imprisonment. Lucky for my client, he was a few days shy of
his eighteenth birthday. Teenage pimps must be a rarity, I thought, but then,
this is Wolverhampton.
***
At ten o’clock the next morning, a young man was standing outside one
of the youth court doors and ignoring a crowd of lounging adolescents
comparing trainers and personal music players.
“R_______?” I asked. Large, brown eyes turned towards me with a
graceful feline sweep.
“Yes?” His skin was caramel smooth and blemish free, his afro
conservatively cropped. The dewy fragrance of the freshly showered
perfumed the air.
“And I’m his mama,” interjected a rotund and amply fleshed woman. “I
told him that girl was trouble,” she boomed, cuffing her son across the head
as he looked sheepishly away.
R_______ was dressed simply in a checked shirt and fitting trousers. No
baggy pants trailing mid-way between the thighs, no branded underwear,
no gold jewelry or exaggerated earphones, in fact none of the accoutrements
I had come to expect of a 17-year-old youth court attendee. More confusing
still, he was accompanied by a reprimanding parent. This was my pimp?
By contrast his accuser was precisely what I had expected. A familiar
sight: skinny, white, bruised legs protruded from a short and dirty skirt;
her hair hung loose and matted. Her manner bold, but her eyes were utterly
vacant. Yep, she was a pro alright.
I knew then that this case wasn’t typical. My client deserved more. My
mocked ideology and liberal sensibilities were about to be vindicated as I
sought to prevent this young man being crushed by production-line justice,
guilty until proven innocent.
***
19
Any common law legal system, like Britain’s, is adversarial. The accuser
and accused pitch their wits against each other in an evidential sparring
match. Each party seeks to expose, conceal, emphasize or mitigate the
truths about his or her case.
An essential element to the adversarial system is cross-examination,
which is the ability to give your opponent a good grilling. Sometimes all
that is called for is to increase the number of decibels and add a few snide
remarks; if you toss in a couple of objections and reprimands from the
judge, you have a happy client. But when there is a chance to win, crossexamination becomes a strategic ambush. You lure the witness along a path
and make him so busy worrying about where you are taking him that he
forgets to note the route back. It is exhausting work; you must never lose
your way, even though every question may cause a change of direction,
darting one way and then another, until finally the witness finds himself
trapped, caught at the centre of a maze.
However, like any contest there are rules and when there are rules, there
are exceptions to them; there are also ways of circumventing them and of
course, even ignoring them.
***
The courtroom was busy as usual: police sergeants were milling about
taking messages to and from the prosecutor; probation officers and social
workers dished out reports, filled forms and checked schedules. Nevertheless,
a concentrated flurry of activity at the front of the room suggested something
unusual was up. The court clerk had begun to flip hurriedly through pages
of dense legal text; meanwhile the prosecutor beckoned me over –
“I’m going to apply to have the girl’s statement read on the basis that she
is in fear.” I must have looked blank. “ …Section 23? Criminal Justice Act
‘88?”
Section 23 was one of those provisions you dutifully learn at bar school,
then never expect to read again. It allows a witness to be excused from
testifying in such circumstances as if dead, ill or in fear. But the potential for
profound unfairness to the accused means that it is a rare and exceptional
provision. If a witness doesn’t testify, then he or she is spared the good
grilling, which means there is no opportunity to show him or her to be
a pathological liar, or serial manipulator, or even just someone with an
awfully big grudge.
20
In R_______’s case, it was his accuser’s word against his. There didn’t
appear to be any other material evidence: a routine arrest, a denial in
interview and the witness’s convictions for soliciting during the time she
was alleged to be pimped. The entire case was based on her credibility and
yet I was to be denied testing it. I cast my thoughts around for alternatives:
bring in an expert to say that prostitutes rarely give up their pimp? A
forensic scientist to trace the drugs to a different dealer? The town’s CCTV
footage to prove my client’s alibi? But this was Wolverhampton and legal
aid and I didn’t have strings of witnesses at my disposal or eons of time to
chase other leads.
“So will you please repeat why you don’t want to give evidence?”
The girl glanced sideways at R_______ and then looked back down at
her chipped nail polish.
“ …’coz I’m afraid,” she mumbled through a curtain of matted hair.
“So you say, but the defendant hasn’t threatened—”
“Irrelevant,” interjected the court clerk, “her fear doesn’t have to be
reasonable.”
This is ridiculous, my mind screamed, but like Alice at the trial before
the King and Queen of Hearts, no one else seemed to notice the absurdity.
***
The rest of the day passed with mysterious calm. For now, fate had
already been decided. But by nightfall I was besieged with panic. Over and
over I repeated my closing argument, refining it until I had worked out
every cross-reference to the evidence, every intonation and every pause.
Sleep, when it came at all, came in fits and starts and I rose early.
Arriving at court, I was surprised to see R______ conversing with
another pro: a young blonde, who was not yet sixteen but already a regular
at the courthouse. When he saw me he broke away. I remembered then
why I had been so certain that our witness was a pro; of course I seen her
here before: the two girls chatting nonchalantly not so long ago, before each
receiving a fine for soliciting, which would force them back out onto the
streets in order to pay.
I looked at her criminal record sheet; her convictions for soliciting must
therefore be incomplete: our witness had been arrested for soliciting after
21
the dates for which my client was accused, which meant she was either
working for herself or there was another pimp. It wasn’t much, but might it
be just enough to raise doubt in the Bench’s mind.
It was a few hours later when there came a rap at the door to signal that
the magistrates had finished their deliberations. I did my best to stick to the
script and make my impassioned plea. A further conviction was admitted
into evidence after persisting that the clerk verify the court records. My
hands trembled and my mind stuttered, and I was conscious of attempting
to smooth the waver in my voice.
As the magistrates sat down I tried to read their expressions, searching
for some clue as to their decision. I looked the chairman in the eye: Don’t
you dare.
Some indignant groans could just about be made out from the police
officers at the back of the courtroom, when a pair of fleshy brown arms
engulfed me from behind. “Come here, come here,” she cackled. I tried to
move towards R_______ in order to share the moment with him, but with
less than a half-smile, he had gone.
For the first time I wanted, no craved, my victory dance, when at last I
could be unashamed of my opponent’s congratulations and unembarrassed
by my client’s tearful thanks. I needed to wear my badge of honor with a
pride that would erase all those occasions where winning had been such a
sham. But my opponent was too gobsmacked to speak and my client had
already slipped away. Once again, all I had to content myself with was my
own satisfaction.
***
The following week I was back at Wolverhampton magistrates’ court.
The afternoon was hot and airless and even more stifling than usual. I
watched a card game between colleagues distractedly.
“Did you see that your old client R_______ is here again today?” a voice
said.
“No?”
“Been arrested again, hasn’t he? Same charge, different girl.”
“R_______?”
“Now that he’s turned 18 mind, he’ll be off to Crown Court.
22
“____”
“The lad’s up with the big boys now!”
I looked at my colleagues as they flipped cards onto the table: my
brothers and sisters-in-arms striving for the underdog. Together we had
pledged to make a difference. Wasn’t this why we worked here and not
in some cozy office, with a boardroom for conferences instead of a cell,
our student loans replaced with an expense account? Two of them were
laughing about a time when they competed to include the greatest number
of references to Tennyson in their closing arguments. Another was leisurely
reading the paper and smoking a cigarette. He had a trial this afternoon,
but his face was impassive. Not a single jitter of the fingers was evident as
he lazily inhaled.
It was then that I realised that R_______ had always been with the big
boys. It was me who didn’t belong.
After getting her master’s degree from the JMSC in 2004, Amanda
indulged a brief foray in journalism before being been drawn back into
the legal profession, where for several years she has worked pro bono on
a high-profile Hong Kong murder case. She remains as disillusioned as
ever by the criminal justice system, but the lure of a genuine miscarriage
of justice was simply too hard to resist. One day, she hopes to write about
the experience.
23
Spring 2010
The Year
of Fate
We don’t believe in fate, do we? I dedicate this to my grandma and to
my parents. They raised me, made me strong, and, above all, taught me
love.
By Yubing Gao
The Red Briefs
“Dad?” I screamed. “You are buying those red briefs?”
When did my father, this 60-year-old professor who prides himself
on a sense of understated elegance, acquire such an unfortunate taste for
underwear?
“It’s the Year of Rat in two days,” he grimaced, “your dad’s year of fate,
yeah?” Bending down and flipping the pack of briefs on the rack to look
at the size, he cut the conversation short as the words of Gong Xi Ni, or
Congratulations to You – a popular festival song for Chinese New Year –
mingled with the sounds of other shoppers.
We Chinese believe caution is needed in the year of one’s Chinese zodiac
sign. Also called the year of fate, it’s when one is most likely to offend Tai
Sui – the religious stars that govern the zodiacs – and bring disasters. Red
underwear, legend has it, helps. Red chases away ghosts and evil spirits; it
appeals to the gods and foretells good fortune; it’s in the Chinese blood; it
cheers us up; it redeems the daunted soul.
Call it superstition – and my father, the self-made man, is the last person
to swallow it. The youngest child of a bank clerk and a housewife, he was
only seven when his father died. His illiterate, unemployed mother had to
tend five children by sewing clothes and smuggling rice and meat from
suburban farms to restaurants in the city, under the watchful eyes of the
Japanese surveillance army – they could have killed her if she were caught.
Despite the turbulent, poverty-ridden childhood, my father grew up healthy
and strong – the hope of the family. The elder brother and three elder sisters
24
had started working early to alleviate the financial burden, and to finance
my father’s further education. He earned his place in the best primary and
secondary schools, and quickly emerged as one of the brightest in class with
a promising future.
Then the Cultural Revolution erupted, and my father went to the
countryside to be a farmer along with millions of other teens. But he didn’t
believe in or accept fate. During ten years in the countryside, while raising
pigs, plowing land and living on corn paste, he finished mining through the
university syllabus himself. After returning to the city, he got married and
my parents had me – what a blissful family, people said. Yet, he couldn’t
settle for that type of “destiny”. He pursued an opportunity to study for a
master’s in philosophy at a top university in Shanghai, and never looked
back. Now he is a well-established professor, the chairman of the institute of
humanities at the university and the chief editor of an influential intellectual
magazine.
That’s him – now looking at the red briefs. His calloused, coarse hands
crack at fingertips, after those ten years of hard labor. Few would believe
they are the hands of a revered scholar. Even fewer would understand what
could lead him to seek comfort in such apparent superstition.
It was 12 years ago – when he last had his year of fate (there are 12
Chinese zodiac signs, hence the year of fate is once every 12 years). Three
major mishaps struck three females dearest to him that year – within a
painful span of three months, in fact. One woman was lost forever.
The Telephone Rings
“Pardon?” I heard my father’s voice shaking as he answered the phone.
An uncomfortable premonition entered me as I walked toward him.
“Where is she?” he panted. “I will come right away.” He put down the
phone without looking at me. “Your mum was hit by a cement mixer.” He
tried to be as composed as possible in front of a 12-year-old, as if a cement
mixer was just a toy car, and a motorcyclist hit by a cement mixer is a
question of secondary school math for probability.
“Can I go with you?” I begged, my eyes swelling. I had never encountered
anything like this. Horrendous movie scenes started to flash in montages
in my mind. Grandmother had quietly collapsed next to me, with her
crutches. She had been lying in bed for a few days, her body weak after
severe constipation.
25
“No. You stay at home,” dad ordered. “Here, take the money and buy
some dinner. Look after grandma.” He didn’t look at me. His sentences were
short and precise. He had no time. It was not for me to bargain.
My mother had just started riding the new, fashionable, woman-friendly
motorcycle. She was elated to reduce the two-hour commute to work that
involved three buses, to a 45-minute, self-controlled motorcycle ride. She
wanted to be a good employee but she also wanted to hit home by six to
prepare dinner for her busy husband, her elderly mother-in-law and her
young daughter.
When I finally got a chance to see my mother at the hospital, I had so
much I wanted to say, but I found myself fumbling for words. “Mum? I
murmured. “Is it painful?”
“A little bit,” my mother replied, smiling, just like silver screen heroines
who have made some sacrifice for a glorious deed. “How is grandma?”
“She is all right.” I was going to tell the truth, but changed gears when I
saw her legs in a plaster cast. “She wanted to come to visit you.” Grandma
had just had a bout of diarrhea, possibly from the buns I bought for her
from a street breakfast stall, and she wasn’t eating. I reached out to touch
mum’s cast and my heart sank.
“Don’t you worry,” she said, smiling again, her hand reaching for mine,
“mum is coming home in two to three weeks and will be able to walk again
in a few months.”
I looked at my father and he nodded to reassure me. I had never
imagined my dad would age. He always had this glow of youth about him,
in his eyes particularly. He often carefully groomed himself to reveal that
spirit. But in that hospital, at that moment, he was an exhausted, anxious
man in his late 40s. All of a sudden, grayish white hair had started to crawl
onto his forehead, and his eyes appeared watery from constant rubbing. He
had aged overnight, no doubt from sleepless nights caring for mum in the
hospital while worrying about my grandma and me.
***
“Dad?” I picked up the phone, thinking he must have missed me again.
My parents had sent me to stay with a friend of theirs in the countryside
for two weeks during the summer holiday. Mum had been home for two
months and was well on her way to recovery. We had also hired a domestic
26
helper to take care of the household chores, so that dad could get back to
his work. “Go, girl. Have some fun and let us have some peace,” my parents
joked.
Sending me away, I know, is to help me recover from the emotional
turmoil of my mum’s accident. Yes, I was that sheltered. My parents never
stop pampering me – their only child and their ultimate hope. Like many
parents who went through the war years and the Cultural Revolution, they
give me the best they can afford, so I can do what they couldn’t. My father
pays particular attention – maybe because I look, think and act like him.
He called every day when I was in the countryside. Sometimes, “just to hear
your voice,” he said once, and I could imagine him smiling at the other end
of the phone line.
But something was terribly wrong today. He did not ask me how I
spent the day. “Your grandma. She hasn’t eaten for days. She is in critical
condition.” He seemed to have lost his voice, “Go to your little auntie’s home
tomorrow morning and she will bring you home, okay?” He said something
else, but I couldn’t hear him – a buzzing sound was amplified through me,
impairing my hearing.
So I am saying farewell to grandma? A burning question that I didn’t
dare to ask. My mind went blank. I couldn’t even resort to movie scenes –
death was too formidable to imagine. I never saw either of my grandfathers
alive but I was close to both grandmothers. My mum’s mum helped raise
me while my dad was away studying. My dad’s mum – the lady I was
supposed to say farewell to – stayed with us through much of my teenage
years. When my dad made lecturer at the university, he moved my mum
and me to Shanghai, and took over the responsibility of tending his disabled
mother. He had had no proper housing, only a small dormitory room,
and had been contributing cash instead of taking his turn caring for her.
Grandma dissolved in tears – she had been waiting for my dad to pick her
up for too long.
She was the most persevering and dignified woman I have ever known.
Despite her illiteracy and lack of professional skills, she single-handedly
raised five children through the years of hunger, war and political instability.
Always finding clever, but sometimes dangerous, ways to make ends meet,
she never borrowed a cent from anyone. Living strong, she was also the
epitome of elegance. No matter how difficult life became, she would carefully
hand-wash her cheongsam, stretch the fabric when it was half-dry so that
it looked ironed. She particularly doted on my dad and my little auntie,
thinking they were the youngest and, therefore, the weakest.
27
The prospect of finally living with her youngest son motivated her.
She challenged herself to stand again on crutches at age 78. She further
managed to throw away the crutches and walk again in less than a year.
She was sewing and making rice dumplings again – her stitch-work and
dumplings were so delicate and fine that I could feel her zest for life. She
also played cards with me, making such cunning moves and declaring so
many triumphs that I, in revenge, hid her slippers.
But then, in time, she lost that zest. “My time might be close,” she said
one day as we played another card game. “Of course not!” I loudly protested,
“I am going to take away your slippers so you can’t go anywhere.”
She doesn’t need the slippers. She is going. Now. My little auntie kneels
down by her bed, stroking her arm in a desperate but futile effort to keep
her from leaving. The old lady planned this – she refused to eat anything
and would not go to the hospital. She wanted the dignity of dying at home,
her youngest son’s home, she said. Living on the drip, she sustained for a
week. Her eyes shut and her face calm, she tinkers her fingers. My dad,
sobbing quietly, immediately goes over to her to hear her last words. She
wants to return the gold ring she had asked my little auntie to let her wear
for a day, her last day. She also murmurs “pillow”. She has sewn in the pillow
127 yuan that she saved from her “pocket money”.
The Ultimate Blow
It was mid-July, three days after my grandma’s departure. More than
50 relatives had arrived to attend the funeral. The hall was packed. I stood
by the gate for there were no seats and it was suffocating inside – from the
heat of a dry relentless summer, from the weeping of the women, from the
pensive silence of the men, from the desolation at the bottom of my heart.
The music started, striking a thousand chords of grief. The blaze of the sun
at noon ferociously cut through me, as if to reveal all my secrets. I saw a
dozen golden flies fluttering in front of me. My feet were disintegrating and
I couldn’t open my eyes. “Bingbing!” Someone was calling my name…I do
not know what happened afterwards.
I had fainted because of what turned out to be myocarditis, an inflamed
heart muscle. But my dad did not know that at the time. All he could see
and feel was that the bad luck of his year of fate had now struck his darling
daughter in what appeared to be a serious way. His perspective on life could
never ever be the same.
***
28
“Oh yeah!” I spirited up, “better get a dozen so we can fend off the bad
stuff!” I bent down alongside my dad to look at the red underwear.
My dad laughed before sinking into reverie. “Our ancient ancestors had
the wisdom,” he said, “‘man proposes but god disposes’. I didn’t really believe
it until 12 years ago when your mum, your grandma and you were just hit
one by one. It’s not so much about myself. It’s about the people around me
that I can be most helpless with.”
“Shall we go look at other stores, though?” I joked, trying hard not to
cry. “Maybe we can have the best of both worlds – luck and look – for you,
a 60-year old professor!”
My grandma would have preferred nicer-looking ones, too, if they were
in part to commemorate her.
After four years of investment banking, Yubing Gao quit to pursue
childhood dreams. She completed the JMSC master’s program in 2010,
and is now on her way to discovering the world with her heart and her
pen. She is a 2005 graduate of the University of Cambridge.
29
Fall 2001
If It’s Thursday,
It Must Be Saigon
I always thought the life of a travel writer to be a glamorous one –
involving long lunches in exotic places – until I did a stint with Charlotte,
my long-time friend and a seasoned travel journalist.
By Sean Zintl
Why don’t you come to Vietnam?
The question is lightly tossed, but with Charlotte Shalgosky, an invitation
to travel is always genuine.
“I have to get back to Notre Dame Cathedral,” she says. “I have to find
that plaque again – and you’ll love Saigon!”
It’s Wednesday evening, and Charlotte and I are having tea in the topfloor lounge of Hong Kong’s Ritz Carlton hotel. It has been almost a year
since I last saw her, but not much about her has changed, and her schedule
is as tightly packed as ever.
“I’ve got to be back by 6:15 to call Albert,” she sighs as we pick at the petit
fours against the backdrop of the city’s glittering skyline.
“And there’s no way I can get to the other side of Hong Kong Island
before Harold leaves on his junk: my flight leaves at 9:30, but if I check in
[for the airport] at Central I still have time to wrap up with Christine,” she
adds, going through her list of things to do in the hours before she has to
board her flight to Bangkok.
“Did you see Katherine? Oh great! Please remind me to plug in my
phone. Otherwise I’m dead in the water: I need to arrange a pick-up as soon
as I get to Bangkok – I’ll only have a few hours before I catch my connecting
flight to Saigon…”
My friend Charlotte – a travel writer and photojournalist – is constantly
on the move. She changes countries the way other people change outfits,
sometimes several in one day.
30
At the best of times it’s a struggle to keep up with her whereabouts: A
hastily written email informs me she’s in Kenya; another a few days later tells
me she’s in Cambodia. From a friend I’ll hear she’s in Paris… Stockholm…
Barcelona....
Last year, however, I was able to pinpoint her whereabouts more precisely.
As a driver in the 14-day Africa Beetle Rally, she had a geo-positioning
device fixed to her car’s roof. This relayed the information back to a website
and showed exactly where she was.
For two weeks I kept up with Charlotte’s daily progress over the Internet
as she raced from Durban, South Africa, up into Swaziland and back into
South Africa to meander through its famed Kruger National Park (where
elephants on the road seriously impeded progress). I watched as she crossed
into Botswana and headed towards Maun.
On Day 8 came a brief, heart-stopping moment. The website entry that
day said that Charlotte and her co-driver had rolled their Beetle in the
Kalahari Desert, seriously damaging it but, to my relief as I read on, not
them. They were soon back on the map racing across the desert to Namibia
– and a few days later they crossed the 3,000-kilometer finish line in Cape
Town.
But this evening in Hong Kong, Charlotte is planning her foray to
Vietnam.
“Listen, if you get to the Vietnamese embassy first thing tomorrow
morning you can request an express visa – I’ve done it before, they can
process it in a few hours – then I’ll book your ticket through my agent –
she’s always doing things in rush for me – and I can collect it before lunch.
That way you can have it when you go to collect your visa later…”
It sounds like a plan. I’ve been wanting to get to Vietnam for some time
now and Charlotte’s enthusiasm and go-getter attitude act as a spur.
***
Less than 48 hours later, we’re both standing outside the Continental
Hotel in downtown Saigon.
“Oh, look,” she says.
“It’s all yellow this time…
“This is where Graham Greene wrote the Quiet American. See the
31
balcony up there? That’s where they sat because it was safe from the hand
grenades. Come on, let’s go inside.”
So we cross the lobby of the Continental Hotel, marvel at the ornate, sixsided gilded 1920s art déco clock which slowly revolves to show the time in
Moscow, New York, London, Tokyo and Sydney, and walk out into a cool,
still courtyard shaded by high-reaching Frangipani trees. A small plaque on
one of the trees tells us they are Frangipani Rubra, planted in 1880.
Charlotte prowls about scanning the scene from behind a camera
lens. She vigilantly searches for the easily overlooked details. Crouching,
frowning against the light falling from an uncooperative angle, she hones in
on a swirl of colour, a play of light, and commits what she sees to film. She
works swiftly and noiselessly, a tigress stalking her quarry.
She calls me over to look at one of the framed photographs in the
lobby. “Patchwork” by Françoise de Mulder shows one of the first North
Vietnamese soldiers to enter the city as it surrendered to the north in 1975.
The exhausted trooper has his sodden boots tied to his backpack. Barefoot
and weary, he gorges himself on a bowl of rice, while sitting on the steps of
the Saigon Opera House.
Later on, we make our way to the same opera house, sink onto the same
steps. But this is 2001, not 1975, and it is not long before we are accosted –
by a five-year-old boy. His hair is neatly parted to one side, and he wears a
perfectly fitted suit with a bright rainbow-striped tie and sandals.
“Hey,” he says in English with an American drawl. “Wanna buy some
postcards?”
Charlotte sizes up the pint-sized vendor and spins him a reply in
Chinese, which she speaks fluently after having studied and lived in Beijing
for several years. She jibes him gently, telling him she doesn’t want to buy
his cards because she is making her own.
Only momentarily taken aback by the unexpected sight and sound of
a Western tourist speaking something which sounds like Vietnamese but
isn’t, he plants his hands on his hips and quips: “Some postcards of old
Saigon then?”
Charlotte winks at me, stoops beside the boy and gives him another
runaround.
“Okay,” he persists, then drapes himself across her shoulders, “how
about some Christmas cards then?”
32
It is this sweet gesture that suddenly reminds me that he is indeed only
a child – the previous self-confidence and adroit patter were adult qualities
developed for the job. He lingers for a moment in Charlotte’s comforting
cradle. Then suddenly his eyes narrow as he spots a more likely tourist
couple across the square. He quickly reaches up, pinches Charlotte’s cheeks
with both hands and, clutching his plastic bag of cards to his chest, backs
with mock gravitas into the four lanes of traffic disgorging thousands of
mopeds and cycles down Dong Khoi Avenue.
Charlotte turns to capture the Opera House lit now by the late afternoon
sun. I walk down Dong Khoi looking for a shop to buy film and again I
am accosted: this time by shopkeepers, stallholders, taxi drivers, pedicab
operators, street vendors, beggars, all clamoring for attention and for
money.
It is more than two decades since the war ended, but here there are
frequent and disturbing reminders – the beggars with stumps where limbs
should have been. A pedicab driver cycles by using one foot, the stump of
his other resting against the back of the passenger seat. A little farther down
I see a man on his knees; only when I pass him do I see raised behind him
the stumps that were his feet. Later on I see a one-legged man – he has no
arms.
From their age, one guesses they are victims of the war. But later I will
see youngsters with one leg, or no hands, or no feet. They are victims of
landmines and bombs which continued to go off long after the war ended.
By the time I get back to the Opera House I am dazed by the dozens
of poverty-stricken beggars, by the ceaseless clamor and the never-ending
roar of traffic down Dong Khoi. I’m now also in the grip of a sweat which I
strongly suspect to be the result of a somewhat-less-than-fresh fish lunch.
“Oh my dear – you do look beat,” says Charlotte. “Why don’t you head
back to the hotel while I finish off here? I only have about another hour of
daylight left….”
I weakly assent and thankfully clamber into a taxi. In a few moments
the cab becomes part of the swirling stream of traffic. Mopeds rush by from
every direction – hooting, tooting, beeping, swerving, veering in a neverending eddy of noise and color. Faces come into view and dissolve into
the flow, nose scarves or surgical masks tied tight to try and fend off the
noxious traffic fumes. A group of neatly coifed women wearing arm-length
gloves in a multitude of colours whisks by, followed by a laughing posse of
schoolgirls in traditional billowing white ao-dais, conical hats and today’s
de rigueur platform shoes.
33
It takes the taxi driver just over an hour to cover the few kilometres back
to the Omni hotel. I’m only too happy to pay his fare of US$3 and head to
my room for a shower before collapsing into bed.
Charlotte arrives at about 8:30 p.m.
“I just have to speak to Sharon quickly – she’s the PR manager. Did I
tell you I’m going to do a review of the hotel and I need some information?
Hope you feel better – we should get an early night tonight – need to be up
early tomorrow….See you later.”
It’s 10:30 p.m. by the time she gets back, 12:30 by the time she’s labelled
her many rolls of film, eaten some toast for dinner, taken a bath and written
some notes before lights out.
***
At 6:30 a.m. the day’s first light filters into the room.
“Oh God – I feel like I’ve been flattened by a steamroller,” Charlotte
groans as she pulls herself to the window and draws the curtains.
Then suddenly: “Oh look – the light is beautiful! It reminds me of the
time we were in the Andamans…
“Ha ha – we’d motored out for nine hours from Phuket when the skipper
discovered we’d left the dingy behind and we wouldn’t be able to get to the
reefs. We had to go all the way back…”
Determined not to land ourselves in a similar predicament, we set about
making sure we have everything we need for a busy shooting schedule
ahead of us: Film, (black and white, Kodak Ektachrome E100S for high
color contrast, Supra 800S for high-speed shots), water, plasters for blisters,
sun block, maps, guidebooks, money in several different places to foil
pickpockets.
Breakfast is a quick affair – a bowl of fruit salad, two slices of toast and
a cup of tea – and we’re soon out onto the street headed for Notre Dame
Cathedral.
We step into a taxi and surge into the stream of traffic. Waves of schoolgirls
flow past in wafts of billowing white while elegantly gloved businesswomen
glide smoothly through the deluge on mopeds. The taxi careens down the
middle of the four-lane road, straddling the double-white line, occasionally
swerving out into the oncoming stream of traffic to bypass a slower moving
motorbike.
34
“Last time I was in Saigon I used to ride around on a Harley Davidson,”
says Charlotte. “I was writing a story about the girlie bars. Only problem
was, every time I’d arrive on a Harley they’d think I was an undercover cop
and all the girls would disappear…”
As we edge through the traffic we pass a pair of street hawkers. In front
of them are two cages. In one, a monkey; in the other, a civet. Between them
about a dozen terrapins tied with pink raffia binding struggle to get loose.
Later in Cholon market we will see many more animals – cats, dogs, rabbits,
birds, monkeys, snakes – in cages so tiny they can barely move.
By the time we get to Notre Dame the sun is high and hawkers are
descending with ferocity upon the German and French tourists getting off
buses. We walk to the cathedral, past a legless beggar and two old women
holding out their straw hats to catch coins.
The inside of the cathedral is cool and dark. I walk down the aisle and
take a seat next to the apse housing the fourth station of the cross. Behind
me a Vietnamese woman recites her rosaries in a lilting sing-song voice.
A swallow flies in from outside, wings its way down the aisle towards the
crucified Christ hanging in front and darts into its nest behind his cross.
Charlotte is intently scanning the walls of the small chapels to the left of
me. Each one is lined with little plaques.
“They’re commemorative – or dedicated to whichever saint is housed
here. Many of them are messages of thanks for prayers answered. Sometimes
they even refer to miracles,” she says, pointing to one in particular:
Accident de Tramway
Du 26 Mai 1926
Reconnaissance à Notre Dames de Lourdes
Pour Cuérison inespérée!”
I study the words a bit and come up with the English translation:
The Tramway Accident
of 26 May 1926
Recognition to our Lady of Lourdes
For an inexplicable cure!
“This is the heart of the story I’m writing,” Charlotte says. “I came
here last time and saw all these messages of hope and faith. I just had to
come back.”
35
In front of us row upon row of the small plaques bear silent testimony
to grace and fortune bestowed upon the faithful – enigmatic messages
mingled with more straightforward outpourings of thanks:
“Thank you for our little sister of war
Who was cured of blindness
By your Grace alone!”
“Praise be, Hail Mary”
“Thank you for the unhoped-for miracle”
“Thank you for a life saved”
“Thank you for helping pass exams”
“Thank you for grace received”
Behind us a woman’s voice lifts and rises, holds a plaintive cry and falls
silent. The muffled roar of traffic filters in from outside.
It’s not long and we’re back in a taxi, part of the endless swirling current.
Charlotte needs to get back to the hotel. Her flight to Singapore leaves in
three hours.
She launches into the by-now familiar pre-flight rundown: “As soon as
I get back to the hotel I have to write Debbie a letter, phone Carl to let him
know when to expect me… and I’d better make sure Carol received the
prints…”
In a few more hours she’ll be half a world away, rushing to meet the next
deadline, looking for the next new angle. Suddenly she turns to me.
“You wanna come to Burma?” she says. “I’m going to write a story about
elephants.”
Sean finished his master’s in 2002 while working as an editor at The
Standard in Hong Kong. He has since worked at newspapers in South Africa
and London, and as a freelancer. He also has worked at the Department
of Trade and Industry and the Houses of Parliament in the UK. He now
works as an intranet manager for the UK media and entertainment
company, BSkyB.
36
Spring 2004
The Life and Times
of Shanghai Barbie
My friendship with Mei Ling taught me to appreciate different points of
view and to become more appreciative of my good fortune in life. Happily,
a dozen years on, we are still good friends. I gave her (and the character
Paul) different names in this story so that I could write candidly about
them.
By Ann Chu
It was a night like many I’d had before. The makeup was being applied
hurriedly in the brief pools of fluorescence from each passing lamppost…
flash… flash… flash...thump… thump…thump. They flew by in time with
the beating of my heart as the rickety Volkswagen sped down the street. It
was 11:10 p.m. I was late, and a little nervous.
Ten minutes and ten yuan later, I was ejected into the cold drizzling
March rain. It was almost always wet this time of the year in Shanghai, but
at night nobody noticed. ‘97 looked exactly the same as it had three years
ago. It was as if I’d never left. The blood red walls housed a thriving mass of
hopeful revelers, pressed together and writhing in sync to loud, pulsating
beats. The women wore layers of iridescent powder and paint on their faces,
carefully applied to cover past disappointments. Here, every night was a
chance to change your fate and rid yourself of the bad hand life had dealt
you, or at the very least, here you could forget. After sundown you could
always find a motley crew of Romeos lingering at the bar, hoping to become
someone’s, anyone’s, Prince Charming. ‘97 was a Mardi Gras where excess
was encouraged and indulged.
I pushed into the steamy throng. She was there, sitting quietly at a table
in the corner of the room, smoking a Marlboro Light and wearing a slight
look of boredom on her pale porcelain face. Her eyes lit up when they saw
me. She dropped her cigarette and rose.
“My darling, you’re late!”
“I know, I’m sorry. I forgot how to get here.”
37
We laughed and hugged. The tension between us took refuge in our
embrace.
It was at ‘97 that we first met seven years ago, sometime around sunset
and Happy Hour in early September. She had turned down my friend’s
offer to buy her a drink, not because she had the money to buy her own, but
simply because she had the power to say so. She told me she hated women
who went “fishing for foreigners.” ’97 became our home nearly every night
for about a year after that. We donned our painted masks and lost ourselves
in a carnival of escapist fantasy. Here we could be good girls or bad girls,
rich girls or not. It was a pretend world where the stresses of everyday life
were left with the bouncer at the door. We had danced, we had laughed, we
had loved and we had cried in a whirl of emotions that can only truly be felt
when you are 18 and innocent.
She had told me her English name was Barbie. I laughed until I realized
she was serious. Barbie, she explained, was the most beautiful and successful
doll in America; she herself had learned that from a traveling businessman.
In her matter-of-fact manner, she told me she was going to be the Barbie of
China. At 5 foot 10, with her long legs, gleaming black hair and startlingly
large almond eyes, she could have been Barbie’s Asian counterpart. Indeed,
shortly after leaving her home in Ningbo at 17, Barbie graced the pages of
many magazines in Shanghai and embodied the dreams of young girls to
make, or meet, their riches in the Paris of the East.
In China, success isn’t guaranteed to those who pursue traditional
methods of education and employment. Barbie’s fashion-design degree
from one of Shanghai’s many technical institutions was useless in helping
her find a job that paid at least the moderate sum of 4,000 yuan a month.
When Deng Xiaoping flung open China’s doors and declared that “to get
rich is glorious,” he left legions of uneducated laborers blinking in the glare
of freewheeling capitalism.
Now, more than 20 years later, hundreds of millions of people scramble
to get rich any way they can. For many young women, competition and
school fees make education after high school next to impossible. In any
case, posing for pictures was easier and could bring home more than 10,000
yuan in a slow month. Modeling guaranteed access into the city’s hottest
nightclubs and meant hordes of wealthy passport-toting admirers. Walking
a runway was a young woman’s ticket out of China.
Barbie and I lost touch in 1998 after I flew back to Los Angeles to finish
school. We couldn’t afford to call long distance. Her English wasn’t good
38
enough to write me a letter. My Mandarin wasn’t good enough to understand
her emails. Three years later, Barbie came to visit me in Hong Kong with her
new boyfriend on her first trip outside China. I was working long hours for
not much money in my first real job out of university. We went shopping.
***
“What do you think of this top?” she asked.
“Just so-so.”
She bought three of them. One in pink, one in black and one in white.
That day everything happened in threes. Three designer tank tops, three
designer dresses, three pairs of earrings, three stuffed animals, three pairs
of designer shoes. I watched silently as my once-frugal friend counted out
what seemed to be an endless amount of cash: one thousand, two thousand,
three thousand. Over and over and over.
“So how’s work in Shanghai?”
“Not so good. There aren’t that many jobs around and I can’t be bothered
to lose weight anymore. I hate going on castings and competing for the
work.”
“Oh.” Barbie had always been hard-working.
“It doesn’t matter anyway; I have enough money to spend. Paul’s offered
to pay my rent and my mobile phone bill.”
“Oh.” Barbie had never been one to accept something for nothing.
“He’s given me $80,000 [Hong Kong dollars] to spend while we’re here.”
“$80,000?!” That was about $10,000 US. She was only visiting me for a
week!
“Paul,” I found out later, was the head of a major American record label
in China. He was from Hong Kong and spoke Mandarin, English and
Cantonese fluently. He was in town to attend some meetings for some star’s
upcoming Asia tour. Paul had a great sense of humor. Paul had a generous
personality. Paul also had a wife and a young daughter in Beijing.
That weekend, I took Barbie to a club in the Lan Kwai Fong district.
“What do you want to drink?” I asked, offering her a Marlboro Light.
“Oh, I’ll just have some hot water”.
39
“Some what?!”
“Some hot water,” she yelled above the music while pushing the cigarette
away. “Paul doesn’t like me to drink or smoke.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“Doesn’t it bother you that you’re the other woman?”
“No, of course not.”
Silence again.
“How often do you see him?”
“Whenever he comes to Shanghai”.
More silence.
“Are you happy this way?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I dunno, I just never thought you’d be with…”
“A married man?”
“Well, yeah, I guess”.
“What difference does it make if he’s married or not? We get along really
well.”
With each second of silence that passed between us, our worlds seemed
to drift farther apart. I began to panic. Since when did she begin buying
designer clothes? Since when did she even like designer clothes? What had
happened during our four years apart that made her change so drastically?
What type of relationship did she have, could she have, with a married man
anyways? Had she taken up fishing for foreigners while I was away? Where
was the Barbie that insisted she could buy her own drinks? The questions flew
through my mind as I stared at the stranger in front of me, and at the chasm
that lay between us.
She broke the silence suddenly.
“I know exactly what you’re thinking. Don’t judge me.”
“What? I wasn’t… I …”
“I know you don’t like the fact that Paul’s married.”
“No… it doesn’t really matter… as long as…” I wanted to say what any
40
supportive friend would say in a situation like this, but the truth was, I’d
never been in a situation like this before and deep inside I knew that I was
judging her.
“You don’t understand. You’ll never understand. You live in a different
world than I do. You have a passport and you can go anywhere you want,
whenever you want. You were lucky enough to be born outside of China.
You have so many opportunities that I don’t have. We’re not 18 anymore,
this isn’t pretend. This is real life.”
I was stunned into silence.
So she continued.
“You’re not an only child. You don’t have to support your parents. They
paid for you to get a great education in America. Of course you don’t like it
that I’m dating a married man because you never would, you would never
have to. Your parents buy you nice things or you buy them for yourself. But
it’s not the same for me, for many of us in China. Don’t judge me. We’re
different from you. We’re not as lucky as you.”
I wanted to protest. I wanted to tell her that my life wasn’t that simple,
and that I too, helped support my family. I wanted to explain that although
my parents left China years ago, they had sacrificed many of their dreams
to pave the way for my future and that all their hopes also weighed heavy
on my shoulders. I wanted to tell her that a university education still often
meant grueling 10-hour workdays and that the money that I spent also was
hard-earned.
But I didn’t say a thing.
***
I was silent because I realized then that many Chinese people raised
overseas, including me, passed judgment on the lifestyles of young women
in China simply because it’s easy to believe that everyone shares, or should
share, the same set of values we do. I knew that in those few minutes, Barbie
had said everything many young women in China wanted to say to people
like me when they heard me speaking my accented Mandarin and saw me
buying my own drinks, my own gifts. Don’t judge us. You have so many
opportunities that we don’t have. We’re not as lucky as you. My shame hung
thick in the air, choking me like fumes of smoke in an air-tight room. She
had knocked me off my high horse. My Western ideals lay scattered on the
ground. I was sorry.
41
“I am sorry.”
“Never mind.”
She left the next day, with Paul, for Shanghai. We didn’t talk much after
that. An email here or there, but they were short and correctly courteous.
This was my first trip back to Shanghai since then. I came without judgment,
ready to agree to whatever life Barbie had chosen; yet I stood there in the
corner of ‘97, at a loss for words.
“What do you want to drink?” she asked, offering me a cigarette.
“Uh… vodka tonic.”
She flagged a waitress and ordered my drink before lighting my cigarette
and then her own.
“You’re smoking again…?” I asked.
“Of course, I was never a quitter!”
“But what about…?”
“Paul and I broke up. It was never going to work. He was in Beijing all
the time, and my work is here.”
Barbie had quit modeling last year to become a television presenter
in Shanghai. She had her own show and had explored the farthest flung
corners of China for stories on minority ethnic groups. She had witnessed
their extreme poverty and their simple happiness. She told me that those
experiences taught her what it meant to be “man yi” or “satisfied” with your
place in life. She made 15,000 yuan in a good month. She lived alone in an
apartment she paid for. I didn’t see any designer labels.
I stared intently, looking to see what mask she had chosen to wear
tonight. What stared back wasn’t something I had seen. Gone were the
theatrics we used to love. There was no mask there. Barbie smiled at me and
raised her glass of hot water. We toasted.
She rose to leave shortly afterwards. It was ten minutes after 1 a.m. The
sun would rise alone that morning. I walked with her outside.
“I’m Mei Ling now,” she said, referring to her Chinese name. “No more
Barbie. No more married men.”
She laughed at my look of surprise. She hugged me and then was gone.
As I watched her taxi speed away, it dawned on me that I was wrong. This
wasn’t like the many nights I’d had before; those nights were gone. Each of
42
us, in our own hurry to realize the lives that lay ahead, had judged the other,
simply because it was convenient and easy. I slid into a taxi, thankful Mei
Ling had taken the time to show me the person behind the mask.
After getting her master’s from the JMSC in 2004, Canadian-born Ann
Chu continued working in the CNN International Asia-Pacific newsroom.
Later, she moved to the corporate side and now handles CNN’s affiliate
relationships with broadcasters across the region.
43
Spring 2006
Life in Downhill
and Uphill Nepal
Much happened while I taught English in Nepal in 2000, but what left
the biggest impression was the difference between the lives of Nepalese
women and my own. My life would have been much different had I been
born at a different time, or within a different culture. I hope this story
sheds light on another way of life without seeming to judge it.
By Angharad James
“So, what do you think of our culture?”
I spun round, a handful of curry halfway to my mouth, desperately
trying not to drop the sticky yellow grains on my new sari.
An hour-long struggle that morning to execute the complicated folding
process had left me helpless with a pile of pink silk around my ankles and a
face to match. After my cry for help, half a dozen hands had deftly arranged
the six feet of exquisite material into an elegant garment that stayed in place
without a single stitch, safety pin, knot or needle. “Pukka Nepali keti ho!”
my Nepali “big sister” Manju had exclaimed, trying to reassure me that
despite my boyishly cropped hair and fair skin I now resembled a proper
Nepalese girl, fit for the festivities.
Gungadin Atreya – known to all as “Gunga Sir” – the bride’s father, now
stood before me. The pink and orange patterned topi on his head gave a few
inches to his height, but he still barely reached my chin. A garland of yellow
chrysanthemums and blotch of red tikka on his forehead showed the day’s
significance as did his dark eyes, which shone with pride.
“Better than your England, no?” He gestured expansively towards
his garden packed with people, mountains of roti, and the family buffalo,
adorned with flowers.
I nodded respectfully and took in more of the scene. Nearby his 17-yearold daughter Sabitri sat cross-legged under a canopy. Garlanded in red and
gold, she kept her kohl-rimmed eyes downcast, sneaking glances at the man
she’d met that morning, and with whom she’d now be spending the rest of
her life.
44
Meanwhile, Sabitri’s mother remained in the house, howling and rocking
back and forth, inconsolable that in a few hours her youngest daughter
would be leaving for a new home at the other end of the country, destined
to see her family again a handful of times in her life.
I followed the sobbing sounds and found the distraught mother in an
upstairs bedroom, surrounded by other women, soothing and patting her,
remembering their own wedding days, the days they’d lost their daughters.
The room was airless, the mother’s moans relentless. I slipped back
outside, but found the atmosphere of the men getting rahksi-laggio on
imported whisky more oppressive.
“So you like our Nepali wedding?” Gunga Sir asked. His persistent tone
told me that a respectful nod would not suffice this time.
“It’s very…different. You see… in England, when I get married… it will
be my choice, not my father’s.”
“Oh, your Western way of doing things is better? Like your Prince
Charles and Lady Diana.” He cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. “A
very happy marriage, yes?”
Touché. The man may live in the tiny village of Khanigaun, in the Nepal
foothills, where mail is delivered by donkey and fields plowed by handdrawn oxen, but even he was aware of the marital difficulties of the House
of Windsor.
Gunga Sir’s view of the West was gathered from the snowy images
barely visible through his ancient television set. Other than Lady Di, the
only Western women he could name were Pamela Anderson and Monica
Lewinsky. And now me: an absurdly idealistic university graduate out to
save the world armed only with an English teaching qualification, Nepali
phrasebook and six-month supply of anti-diarrhea drugs.
I was never going to win this argument: as a devout Hindu, he believed
marrying off his children was an earthly duty that would ensure good karma
in the next life. Engaging him further would inevitably lead to questions
about why my father let me roam solo around the world and the implication
that at age 21 I was on my way to becoming an old maid. Instead I smiled,
praised the food and let him get back to strutting around, chest puffed like
a rooster, accepting compliments for the feast, which had taken his wife and
daughters a week to prepare.
45
It was Marg, an auspicious month in the Nepalese calendar. The foothills
echoed with drumming from other wedding parties; in all, extravagance
was a key measure of success. Gunga Sir could be sure that the large number
of goats that had been slaughtered and a stereo system that was blasting
Bollywood favourites would ensure his daughter’s wedding would be the
talk of village tea-shops for weeks.
With relief I spotted Preeti, Sabitri’s best friend, squatting in a field
nursing her youngest and went to join her. When I asked why she was alone
she said it was her time of the month and therefore she wasn’t allowed to go
near the food or join the festivities.
I knew menstruating Nepalese women were banned from cooking,
prayers and even touching their husbands because they were considered
unclean. I’d heard tales of women locked in cowsheds for days and getting
only dirty food to eat, but I hadn’t considered what it would feel like to be
banned from being there for your best friend on the biggest day of her life.
Preeti, normally lively and talkative, was subdued. While the girls had
known they would be separated eventually, they’d had only two weeks to get
used to the news. A deal had been struck for Sabitri’s dowry and with the
end of Marg drawing near, Gunga Sir had seen no reason to wait.
“Are you sad for Sabitri?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “I’m sad for me… She is lucky, he is handsome, no?” She
forced a smile. “And anyway, he is the friend of her elder sister’s husband.
They say he is a nice man.”
I looked back at Sabitri and her new husband, eyes cast down, encircled
by a chanting Hindu priest.
He may be considered suitable by her father, but what if the couple wasn’t
compatible? What if she couldn’t make friends in her new village? What if
her mother-in-law made her life difficult? In Nepal, the newest woman to
join the family was always lowest in the pecking order, made to do the worst
chores and given only leftover food after the rest of the family had eaten.
What if she didn’t produce a son? Or worse, what if the couple couldn’t
conceive at all? A woman could be divorced or in some cases murdered for
such a crime. Such stories were sometimes whispered.
None of which I discussed with Preeti. What was the point? She knew
better than I did what a gamble it was, having come here at 16 from her own
village in the next valley.
46
She moved the newborn to her other shoulder and gently burped it,
softly humming along to the music. At 24, she was already a mother of
three, well on the way to the Nepalese woman’s average of six. With the
country’s infant mortality rate (high even by South Asian standards) and
an average female life expectancy of 53 (two years less than men), many
Nepalese women end up spending most of their lives pregnant.
I finished my meal in silence; the chewy goat curry and such depressing
thoughts were hard to stomach. But a band of pupils from the school soon
spotted me and dragged me off to dance. I pulled off my usual party pieces,
swaying and singing to the few Nepalese folk songs I’d learned, much to the
guests’ amusement. Although relieved that my sari stayed in place, my heart
wasn’t in it.
As the setting sun began to gilt the tips of the distant Himalaya pink,
the groom’s party prepared for its long journey home. First they’d have to
hike three hours to reach Kamale Bazaar – a cluster of market stalls by the
nearest road, the farthest Sabitri had ever been from home. They would
spend the night there before commencing their four-day trek, by rickety
bus and on foot, up winding mountain roads to his village in Ilam, Nepal’s
easternmost district on the Nepal-India border, near Darjeeling.
The clanging and hooting of the wedding band faded into the distance.
Unable to bear the women’s howls or watch Gunga Sir gleefully supervise
the counting of wedding gifts, I made my excuses and picked my way home
up the hill in the fading light.
***
My mind full of the day’s events, I went to my room without realizing
anything was amiss. I didn’t notice that Manju, my “big sister” with whom
I was staying, hadn’t bustled out as she normally would, to quiz me on the
wedding in the rival family below.
Khanigaun was technically one village split between a cluster of
settlements – “matti” (uphill) and “talla” (downhill). Great rivalries existed
between the two with frequent disputes over water; the lower villagers
resented the fact that streams were diverted by those uphill to water their
fields first.
Gunga Sir’s family, the Atreyas, was the most influential in “talla”; Gunga
Sir was head of the village school where I taught and also Khanigaun’s
Congress Party representative.
47
Despite an offer from the Atreyas, the non-governmental organization
that placed me in Nepal had posted me with the Lamsals – the most
influential “matti” family – a fact that clearly irked Gunga Sir. I had gone to
Sabitri’s wedding to give Gunga Sir and the Atreyas “face”, a small gesture
of compensation.
I was staying instead with Bikas Lamsal, Khanigaun’s village chairman
(and head of the rival Sun Party) and his wife Manju. Bikas owned the
village’s only industrial enterprise, a small rice-processing mill, and therefore
had a large house with a spare room – now mine – that also doubled as the
village’s telephone station. I was grateful no one was there now making a
call; I was eager to ditch the sari and jangling bracelets, slip on my tracksuit
and escape into a novel.
BANG!
The flimsy wooden door flew open, rattling on its rusty hinges. Bikas
emerged, his face thunderous. “Come. Help me cook.”
Bikas, snubbed by the Atreyas, had attended another wedding in
Khanigaun that day, but he’d allowed Manju – on my persuasion – to attend
the wedding of an old friend of hers in the city of Pokhara where she had
grown up.
She hadn’t come back.
I quickly scurried to the village tap to wash pots and collect water for the
rice, then crouched in the darkness in the nearby vegetable patch; clumsily
uprooting spinach leaves, praying I wasn’t unwittingly about to start village
warfare by stealing the next-door-neighbors’ crop.
In the kitchen, in tense silence Bikas and I fiddled awkwardly, attempting
to sift the rice, peering through unlabeled plastic pots of spices, unsure
what went into the dahl mixture. I’d helped out sweeping the floor and
chopping vegetables dozens of times before whilst gossiping with Manju,
but she’d always taken charge of the meal. Bikas evidently knew as little as
I about how to put together the Nepalese staple of dahl baht; one thing he
was certain of, however, was that as the most important man in that village,
there was no way he was waiting on his foreign guest.
“I’m not your servant,” he muttered before stalking outside to drink
whisky on the porch, leaving me to struggle alone. Fortunately the Lamsals’
kitchen was a rarity, featuring as it did, a light-bulb, a shelf with an ancient
two-ring hotplate and – luxury of luxuries – a rice cooker. Most other village
kitchens had only a makeshift fire in the corner with a tiny gap in the roof
for smoke to escape.
48
Despite these advantages, the meal was, unsurprisingly, not a great
success. Halfway through a power shortage plunged us into darkness.
Normally an inconvenience, tonight it provided a welcome excuse to escape
to bed as soon as dinner was over.
I lay awake a long time that night. The sound of rats scurrying beneath
my bed had long ceased to disturb; what was more disconcerting was the
side of Bikas I’d just witnessed. Manju had once hinted that Bikas would
hit her when he was angry but his manner was usually so kind and gentle I
could never imagine it. Tonight, studying his closed, cold face, I could.
Bikas and Manju were a seemingly perfect couple. Tall and handsome,
Bikas was the eldest son of Khanigaun’s richest high-caste Brahmin family
and had political aspirations that extended beyond the village. Pictures of
Mao and Marx adorned his bedroom walls, but he saw no irony in that he
also owned the village’s only means of production.
***
From what I could tell, Nepal’s political parties seemed to keep the
country’s limited wealth within the hands of its elite. They squabbled
amongst themselves whilst Maoist guerillas gained ground in the desperately
poor countryside. The Maoists’ violent Robin Hood tactics – blowing up
helicopters in popular trekking areas to ensure more work for local porters,
for example – were helping them gain a popular following.
Manju also was part of the political elite. Bikas was betrothed to the
petite bright-eyed daughter of a prominent Sun Party politician whilst
studying in Pokhara, Nepal’s third largest city. But their initial happiness
had soured as she struggled to adapt to life in Khanigaun and pined for
the comfortable home of her indulgent parents. I used to think of her as a
Nepalese Madame Bovary, beautiful but slowly growing bitter as her grand
expectations of life chafed against her drab reality.
While 65 percent of Nepalese women are illiterate, Manju had a
university degree. She spoke English better than her husband; with me
around, she used it to shame him and exclude him from our conversations.
At 23, Manju already had two children, and was reluctant to have more.
Unlike 90 percent of her contemporaries she had given birth in a hospital,
rather than at home. Her belly bore a six-inch long centipede-like scar, the
result of two rudimentary cesareans. She was reluctant to have any more.
49
Her children, fairer and plumper than most in the village, didn’t work
the fields with the others. Hers never had bare feet, ragged clothes or the
persistently runny noses of many I taught in the nearby secondary school.
As soon as they were old enough Manju insisted they be sent to board at a
private school, with smart uniforms, in Pokhara.
While most village women toiled from dawn until dusk, shouldering
much of the farm work and domestic duties, Manju hired a servant. As a
result, she was ostracized. Nor did her pride allow her to bridge the gap.
She strutted along village paths, drawing herself as high as her tiny frame
allowed. As people gawked she’d thrust out her chin and boast, “They know
me, but I don’t know them.” Although she never admitted it, I sensed her
loneliness.
Her one ally was fellow outcast Calpurna – not wealthy or beautiful like
Manju, but just as bright, articulate and strong-willed. After rejecting her
father’s choices of suitors for years, she was forced into marriage at 26 when
her family threatened to cast her out otherwise. It appeared an unhappy
union, with no sign of children. Fortunately for Calpurna, her husband
often spent months away as a migrant labourer in India. I often wondered
whether they would have been happier with members of their own gender,
but knew the taboo surrounding homosexuality was so great in Nepal that
I didn’t dare raise the subject.
To fill empty days, Calpurna was getting her degree by increments.
Rising before dawn, she trekked to the college downhill to scribble notes
on “The Great Gatsby” and the plays of Oscar Wilde before hiking home to
feed buffalo and cook rice for her elderly mother-in-law. The texts depicted
a decadent world inconceivable in these surroundings – but I could tell the
societal games and rules they portrayed intrigued her.
The pair loved to quiz me about my life in the U.K; career ambitions,
boyfriends and future hopes – not without a hint of jealousy at the freedom
I enjoyed. Despite their progressive ideas and dreams of a “love match”, the
idea that I’d already had a few boyfriends and may choose to live with a man
with before settling down to get married, didn’t sit comfortably with them.
Manju returned the next day. Whatever scene there was I thankfully
missed it. I was at the school, trying to coax responses out of the Class 8
girls. It infuriated me that as soon as they hit puberty they shrank from
playful competitive creatures to silent wallflowers who dissolved into giggles
whenever asked a question. That was when they came to school at all; as
they got older girls were expected to share more of the chores and childcare
until many stopped attending school altogether.
50
That frustration was compounded by the fact that my adult English
classes at the local library, aimed at the village women, had been hijacked
by university boys. Once the young men arrived for class in the evening,
the village women would only peek through the windows, watching and
whispering behind their hands. Even Manju and Calpurna, whose English
was far superior to the young men’s, refused to participate.
I was used to teaching with an audience by this point: at school my “unorthodox” teaching style – games and group-work instead of rote learning
and beatings – meant there were often stray children peering through the
windows whilst their own teachers chatted beneath the trees. But I was selfconscious at the library knowing that the ease with which I taught – and
teased – a roomful of men my own age was already a talking point in the
gossipy village. Although hungry for English conversation, I turned down
the boys’ invitations to hang out at the tea-shop outside class, knowing it
would only invite Monica Lewinsky-like comparisons.
For all their reluctance to speak in front of the men, when the women
were on their own, they told a different story.
***
This I discovered to my delight two weeks after Sabitri’s wedding. I had
been invited to a “women’s party” after dark. I was intrigued, and during
dinner, begged Bikas to let Manju and I attend.
We hiked through the paddy fields in the moonlight to discover at
least a dozen women huddled on the porch behind a neighboring house,
talking excitedly and surreptitiously passing around cigarettes – something
they’d never do in front of their husbands. It was a “first anniversary” party
for a woman who had arrived in Khanigaun a year before with her new
husband.
Among the crowd I spotted two of my male students, hiding under
borrowed shawls, trying to remain inconspicuous. I teased them, rechristening them “Sita” and “Gita,” and asking them in a high-pitched
Nepali about which boys they had crushes on and when they would get
married. But I didn’t really want to blow their cover; like them, I felt like a
spy, hearing secrets I’d never heard before. Gita Madam, one of my fellow
teachers, confessed she’d been pleased when at 16, her parents arranged for
her to marry her school teacher, on whom she’d had a secret crush. Another
teacher, Krisna Madam, revealed hers had been a “love match,” that she’d
51
fled to Khanigaun from another district because her family didn’t approve
of her choice.
Suddenly, Calpurna appeared, dressed in men’s clothing. She was the
lutto or fool of the evening. She began a comic dance, kicking her legs in the
air, and chasing the other women around, mimicking a lecherous drunken
man, prompting squeals of laughter.
This time, I was happy to dance along with them.
It was almost 11 p.m. when Manju dragged me away. I was sorry to go
but understood she didn’t want to try Bikas’ patience again.
Picking my way through the paddy fields on the way home, I glanced up
at the full moon and thought of Sabitri in far-away Ilam.
I whispered a silent prayer that, a year from now, she’d receive the same
welcome from her new sisters.
Angharad James, born and raised in Hong Kong, studied literature
and politics in the UK before working in journalism in Hong Kong. She
earned a JMSC post-graduate diploma in 2006 before returning to the UK
to work at BBC Wales. She later turned to teaching English in a secondary
school. She writes short stories, plays and travel articles.
52
Spring 2004
Murder and Loss
in the City of Glass
At the heart of this story are a father’s shattered hopes and dreams.
Researching and writing it took me to dark places of the human
experience.
By Louise Wong
Dilbag Singh always wakes in the dead of night. He rises early to bathe
and prepare for three hours of prayer and meditation. It’s his fourth visit
to Hong Kong and during this two-month stay, the darkness of these predawn moments chokes him.
For it is in these small hours, during one August morning in 2002, that
41-year-old Gule Ahmar met her end. Her death is what brings Dilbag
Singh here and makes the night even darker. His 19-year-old son is on trial
for her murder.
Late one afternoon, the jury finally begins to deliberate its verdict. Singh
waits, sitting cross-legged outside the courtroom, face buried in his hands.
As he weeps quietly into a handkerchief, he pleads to God for mercy.
He stops only to ask what happened, how he arrived here from so far
away. And then such thoughts overwhelm and silence him. As the moments
pass, the sun creeps across the harbour beyond the courthouse and slips
into the familiar night.
“It was a mess. There was blood everywhere, all over the walls. She’d
been chopped from head to toe,” Senior Inspector Neil Burnett says. This
was during the trial, and he is talking about Gule Ahmar’s remains.
What was left of her was lying face down in Room Two of the Mandarin
Guesthouse on the 13th floor of Block E in Chungking Mansions. As the
first police officer to arrive at the scene, Burnett is describing for the jury
what he saw.
But the three men and four women can see for themselves. One of the
photos in evidence offered a stark image. The victim’s crimson sari is awash
with darkish red blood; the only other distinguishable color is the jet-black
clump of her hair.
53
Chungking Mansions is a seedy place to die. Its grandiose name belies a
jungle of cheap guesthouses. It is on the same street as that grand dame of
plush accommodation, The Peninsula Hotel. Both get their share of curious
tourists, but the Mansions attract adventurers who can put up with urine
stains and drug users in the stairwells.
Its notoriety is legendary and although closed-circuit television gives
the impression someone is watching, crimes large and small occur. This is
where police tracked down Dilbag Singh’s son, 17-year-old Harman Preet.
He was sitting on a bed singing to himself.
Now he is accused of murdering Gule Ahmar, an Indian prostitute and
self-styled madam. A week before she was killed, the matronly Ahmar
brought a willowy Jasvinder Kaur with her from India. Having allegedly
confiscated the younger woman’s passport, the madam forced her to service
men in the makeshift brothel that was her room.
Jasvinder’s first client was a young man she met upon arrival at
Chungking Mansions. He was apparently smitten the moment he saw her
and now he is the prosecution’s star witness against Harman.
Jagjit Singh strikes a tall, slender silhouette as he saunters into the
courtroom. After 18 months in prison, his dark eyes have become hollows,
haunting and haunted. He is a convicted criminal, having pleaded guilty to
assisting in the murder. He led the police on a wild chase to the airport, as
they searched for mysterious Bangladeshi men who resided briefly in the
room next to the murder scene.
The man in the witness box shares history with the family of the accused.
Dilbag Singh paid him a deposit of 110,000 rupees to take his son from
their home in Amritsar to settle in Hong Kong. It’s an arrangement Dilbag
Singh deeply regrets.
His son didn’t give him any trouble growing up and was headed for
university. The company of bad men, he says, changed things. He wishes he
had not witnessed the corruption of his son.
“I told him before the trial, ‘If you are guilty just say so. There’s so much
evidence against you.’ But he refused. As his father, what else can I do?”
***
It’s a hot dry day, and the last Sunday before the verdict. From the Sikh
Temple where he is staying in Wanchai, Dilbag takes two buses to Pik Uk
54
Correctional Institution, where Harman has been held without bail. During
the one-hour journey, Dilbag occasionally breaks into song. Before he sings
a single note, he always smooths his mustache. He finds the beat in his head
and his eyes light up.
The memory of you is troubling me
You come to me day and night
And I cannot sleep
All day I weep
All night I count the stars
Back home in India, numerous television appearances with his musical
group have made Dilbag a well-known performer. Son Harman was to
follow in his footsteps and was to be the “Elvis of Punjab.”
At Pik Uk, displayed in a window in the reception area, is an array of
approved food items visitors can give their incarcerated loved ones. But
Dilbag says his son has no favorite snack, now that he is in prison.
“He wants nothing. He tells me, ‘It’s not needed, Daddy’.”
The father endures a one-hour wait at the prison. After security checks
are completed, he has a 15-minute face-to-face session with his son. As much
as he wants to touch him, a glass partition separates their two worlds.
Harman was born in the early morning while Dilbag worked an
overnight shift as a police dispatcher. After the shift, it was a three-hour bus
ride back to his village before he heard his wife had given birth to a boy. He
has a younger son, but only photos of Harman are kept in his wallet now
because he is the one beyond reach.
People come and go from this world
All that remains is their memory
He quietly sings to himself in Punjabi as the bus approaches the flyover
near Times Square in Causeway Bay. The journey back to the Sikh Temple
is a heavy one.
A blue turban crowns Dilbag’s noble bearded profile. Peering into the
window beside him is a large image of world-renowned tenor Andrea
Bocelli. The bearded singer smiles from a billboard on the side of a building
as the bus shuttles onwards to the temple.
In court, Harman is always accompanied by a Punjabi-speaking prison
warden. Once seated in the prisoner’s dock, his handcuffs are removed. He
wears the same green and white checkered shirt and he tries to tame his
wavy hair.
55
Leaning forward, he follows proceedings carefully and at times nods in
agreement. His large eyes are always alert. At crucial times during evidence,
he nervously presses his lips together repeatedly.
When it is Harman’s turn to testify, he is a confident witness. Articulate
and meticulous about details, he gently reminds the interpreter when she
neglects portions of his cascading speeches. He wants the jury to understand
his version of events.
But Dilbag’s little boy faces a mountain of forensic evidence. It is unusual
for six experts to testify.
An impressions analyst sheds light on bloodied footprints found on a
towel outside Room Two.
A government pathologist describes the multiple wounds that were
inflicted and how the marks they left indicate two particular types of knives
were used.
Blood splatter at the murder scene helps another expert recreate the
sequence of events.
Two DNA experts isolate a mixture of blood matching both Harman
and the deceased. The swabs come from the footprint, a meat cleaver and
a serrated fruit knife found at the scene. The blood comes from walls and a
nearby stairwell. This was a violent death.
The doctor who examined Harman’s cut fingers on the day following the
murder describes the wounds.
An external anal swab from the victim yields the high probability of the
presence of Harman’s semen.
Harman seemed to shudder at the thought when it was his turn to
give evidence. She was 24 years older and 20 kilograms heavier than the
slim teenager. “I can’t even think about anything like that. She was like my
mother. I feel ashamed even talking about it.”
Harman Preet and Jagit Singh, the young man Harman’s father paid to
bring Harman to Hong Kong, testified against each other. Both claimed that
just days before the murder, the other had offered to “solve” the passport
problem of Jasvinder Saur, the young women forced into prostitution after
the victim, Gule Ahmar, confiscated her travel document. Each wanted the
jury to believe their version of how the bloodied footprint outside Room
Two came to be. Jagit pointed the finger at Harman and Harman pointed
back.
56
It is seven o’clock at night and the jurors have taken five hours to
deliberate on five weeks of trial. They have decided Harman is guilty.
With a loud cry, his father runs out of the courtroom and seeks solace
outside. On his knees with his arms outstretched towards the sky, Dilbag
rages at God’s betrayal. He spends another sleepless night at the Sikh
Temple.
He does not comprehend what happens the next morning. The judge
has been talking while his son shakes his head in disbelief.
“You had everything going for you and everything is lost because of
your conduct,” the judge says.
It isn’t until the lawyers explain it later that Dilbag realizes his teenage
son has been sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in prison. He hasn’t slept
or eaten much since.
***
On the last Sunday before Dilbag returns to India, he starts out early to
see Harman. As with many who get long sentences, Harman is staying at a
psychiatric correctional facility in the New Territories to be assessed. Here,
Harman is the only Indian inmate.
There is a row of five windows in the visiting room. Two sheets of glass
and steel grids separate the prisoners from those in the free world.
As the inmates appear on their side of the divide, family members pick
up telephones to speak. Harman and his father repeat the gesture seen so
many times in court throughout the trial. They raise their palms to face
each other. Their hands press together and they kiss on the lips but neither
feels the warmth of the other’s skin.
For the next half hour, Dilbag talks to Harman excitedly, his speech
peppered with English words. “Manslaughter” and “100%” can be heard as
he gestures constantly with his right hand. Harman’s hand motions mirrors
his father’s; he replies in soft tones.
Despite his own doubts, Dilbag promises Harman that he will try all he
can to have him transferred to an Indian prison. The grace of God, he tells
Harman, will see you through.
Their time together ends and both stand to say goodbye in the same
manner they greeted each other. This time it’s harder to stop pressing their
lips against the glass.
57
Once outside in the light of day, Dilbag’s forced composure dissolves.
Between sobs, he shouts angrily at God.
“How will I go home now? What will I tell Harman’s mother? I lost our
precious son. I was there and I watched it all unfold. And I could do nothing
to save my child.”
His words allude to a song he composed about Harman while in Hong
Kong.
Dear God,
This beautiful city of glass is not for me
Because I lost my diamond here
Lost in this city was my heart, my son
Louise Wong is a former news anchor, radio presenter and columnist
who completed her JMSC master’s in 2005. She left CNN in 2007 to start
Lancashire Road, offering editorial and media training services to local
and international clients. She is currently developing a film project in
Australia.
58
Fall 2006
A Son, a Father
and a Terrible Night
When I first followed this crime, I believed Hubert Webb was guilty
and got what he deserved. After talking to his father and researching the
case, I’m now not so sure if justice was served. But what really struck a
chord was the anguish of a father who believes so unconditionally in his
son.
By Tamara de Guzman
The restaurant buzzes with energy. Waiters hustle to keep up with the
Thursday lunch-time rush, carrying sukiyaki and yakitori from one table
to another, yelling out the occasional irrashaimase! A group of women
surrounded by shopping bags sits at a table by the door, murmuring
excitedly. A group of young professionals in well-pressed suits and ties sits
at a table near the center of the room, booming with deep laughter.
In the far corner sits Freddie Webb, in a booth beside high windows,
looking out onto the street. He’s a hard a man to miss – tall, muscular, full
head of hair, and sporting a Calvin Klein T-shirt and Diesel jeans that defy
the sexagenarian stereotype.
He’s come to talk about his latest business venture with his second son
Fritz, a resort planned for one of the Philippines’ most popular beaches.
It’s part of the comparatively routine life he now lives, one far from the
limelight he used to know, as a TV personality, wealthy playboy, renowned
athlete and unexpectedly successful politician. In those days, on TV and in
the newspapers and magazines, he seemed untouchable, beyond reality –
all after starting out in life with nothing.
Today, for the most part, he is retired.
After ordering lunch, he starts talking about the resort. It’s small and
quaint with immense possibilities. His modulated voice would enthrall any
listener. But the level is kept low, as that of a man used to having people
want to hear what he is saying.
59
More than once, random eyes turn towards the booth. They contain
recognition, curiosity and, no doubt, some judgment. Considering all
Freddie Webb is and has been, his almost superhuman persona, it’s easy to
wonder how much of him is genuine – and how much is performance.
But these days there is another complication. In an infamous Philippines
case, Webb’s third son Hubert was convicted of multiple murders and
rape.
Webb talks for some time about the resort. He’s excited, he gestures with
his hands and arms with the flair and panache of a man used to facing a
crowd. He smiles, gently and reassuringly. But his eyes betray the weariness
of the roller-coaster he has been riding since Hubert turned his life upside
down.
***
Fifteen years ago, Hubert and five other men were convicted of breaking
into the Parañaque City home of a young woman named Carmela Vizconde
with the intent of raping her. It is said they were high on drugs. But her
mom Estrellita and baby sister Jennifer were also home, and what would
have been a terrible crime became a murderous rampage. After the rape, all
three women were stabbed and slashed to death.
Hubert pleaded innocent. He claimed he was in the United States with
his father and mother Elizabeth months before the crime. Despite witnesses
and a paper trail backed by immigration and customs documents as well
as the FBI, Hubert was found guilty. He has been an inmate in a Philippine
prison the last 11 years.
Despite the paper trail, many think he was guilty. Charismatic like his
father, and wealthy because of him, Hubert was born blessed. But he became
a drug user and party boy.
But his father rages over what he regards as an unjust verdict and that,
despite the power and pesos he wields, he failed as a father. Every morning
when he wakes up in his bed in an air conditioned room, he remembers
that Hubert lies on a hard mattress next to a fan. When he takes a bath he
wonders when his son will bathe under a shower rather than with a pail.
Every time he takes a bite of the sushi he ordered for lunch he wonders
when his son will sit and eat in a restaurant rather than at the hard wooden
tables of the New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa City.
60
Freddie Webb had a glorious career as a basketball player. He started on
the street courts of a middle-class neighborhood in Pasay City, then played
in the professional leagues. He shot to stardom at the 1968 Mexico and
1972 Munich Olympics. He was handsome and skilled. Men cheered and
ladies swooned whenever Freddie ran onto the courts.
His youngest son, Jason, inherited his father’s finesse for the game. But
after the crime, whenever Jason ran onto the courts, instead of applause
he heard reverberating chants of the surnames of victims, “Vizconde,
Vizconde”.
“When we would go to church, people would look at us like we were
criminals,” Webb recalled.
A man he ran into once expressed sympathy. “I hope your son gets out.
He’s suffered enough because of what he did.”
Indignation. “Wait a minute,” Webb responded. “My son did not do
anything.”
And it is said with such conviction, making Webb seem less than his
larger-than-life image. Smaller, somehow, less like an Olympian, or the star
or the politician he also became. Just a father.
He became a star first as a popular TV and radio personality. He broadcast
a sports and fitness program on the radio and then became a popular sitcom
actor for 14 years. He was a natural at making people laugh.
When he entered politics, his grassroots background and fame helped
him win a seat first as a councilor in the rough neighborhood of his youth,
then a congressman, then a Philippine senator speaking out on behalf of the
poor and downtrodden.
But in Webb’s eyes he ended up a victim of the justice he stood for.
During lunch, Webb smiles broadly at questions about family members.
Seated across from him, it’s hard to believe he’s acting. It’s hard to doubt his
emotions for his own. He has six children in all and eight grandchildren.
“I’ll go crazy if I don’t have my family. I have very few friends; I don’t really
like to go out. Being with my family are some of the greatest moments in
my life.”
Still, in the last 11 years, since the trial, he had to find a life. “They say
after politics you always go into farming. A change of pace perhaps.” He
chuckles. “I now have a mango orchard in Botolan, Zambales. I still have a
weekly radio program called ‘Sports Talk.’ I do sitcoms sometimes.” He goes
61
twice a month to Boracay Island to check on the family resort. “It’s a small
operation, but I’ve learned to take with gratitude whatever comes our way.”
He shrugs. He drives a snazzy black Corvette that despite the limitations of
Manila’s small, congested roads, he petulantly justifies, “It’s always been my
dream to have a car like that!” He likes going to the gym to keep fit, and is
even an endorser for the American Eye Center.
***
The inevitable topic of Hubert comes up. For the first time in two hours
of easy conversation, a pregnant pause hangs over the table. Webb pokes his
fork at a slice of watermelon and stares at it.
“Partly because of my being in politics, my son got caught in the
middle,” he finally said. “There were Indian nationals who were developing
drugs in Las Piñas City, They were caught by the NBI (National Bureau of
Investigation) and were locked up. I accidentally discovered a plan to free
them and I exposed it. The investigation led back to their financier who
has connections high up in the government. They got back at me through
Hubert.”
On June 30, 1991, the bodies of Carmela, Estrellita and Jennifer Vizconde
were discovered in their home in Parañaque City. It was said that Hubert,
along with the five other men, had conspired to rape Carmela and then
murdered them all. Two more served as lookouts. All were sons of rich and
influential families. All were supposedly high on drugs.
The next day, Estrellita’s brother discovered the dead in the living
room.
Hubert and his five accomplices were charged and convicted. Two others
remain at large. In 1993, a film about the case, “The Vizconde Massacre,”
was released.
Webb stops eating. “I’m getting mad again.”
While a senator, his goal was to uplift poor Filipinos by advocating
health care. He pushed legislation for AIDS prevention and protection,
health insurance, herbal medicines, corneal transplants. “A lot of people
said I was a basketball player. They were surprised I knew something.” He
misses the senate, the arguing, making his case, getting his bills through.
“There’s no perfect politician, but I’m proud of what I did.”
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In the eyes of many, Webb was a hero. But fate bows down to no one,
hero or not. His life has taught him to cling to the principle – “Stand by
what you believe in. And be confident that if you don’t get your dues in this
life, you’ll get it in the next.”
The arrest, investigation and trial made for a star-studded and occasionally
savage soap opera. A topic for breakfast, lunch and dinner, on the streets
and in offices. Crime, death, politics and wealthy families. Thousands were
glued to the media, hungry for the next episode. The country was split
down the middle, and opinion among prominent journalists, politicians,
respected celebrities also was divided – with some in Hubert’s camp who
cried foul and some who were not who cheered.
The U.S. State Department, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service and the FBI all provided documentation stating that Hubert was
indeed in the U.S. at the time of the crime. Secretary of State Madeline
Albright signed the documents. FBI legal attaché, Robert Heafner, assigned
to the U.S. Embassy in Manila at the time, said the proof presented would
be sufficient in American courts of law to prove reasonable doubt. However,
a bike owner, a relative, a Filipino singer, an exterminator, the nephew of a
former NBI director, a stranger – all testified and showed proof that Hubert
was there.
Only a few defense witnesses were heard. But none of the paperwork was
admitted into evidence. Judge Amelita Tolentino doubted its authenticity.
She admitted only 10 out 142 pieces of evidence from the defense.
“For the judge that handled it, convicting people that are allegedly
powerful like me is a crowning glory,” Webb said, wryly and bitterly.
He was a congressman when the crime occurred. And he was still
elected senator while the investigation was ongoing – his own reputation
held solid. His son was imprisoned in 1995 as a suspect. But as the case
developed, and when the conviction came five years later, it marked the
end of his political career.
In 1995, after four years of investigations, Jessica Alfaro surfaced. She
was a drug addict who became the prosecution’s star witness.
She gave conflicting testimony. She said she learned about the crime by
reading about it the next day, but that she saw Hubert on top of a boundand-gagged, sobbing Carmela. She said she knew all the accused, but didn’t
recognize one of them until asked to point him out in court. She said she
didn’t know Carmela; she said she had met her before.
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Hubert’s supporters said she got some parts of her story down only after
being coached. There were reasons for her to lie – her brother was a drug
pusher about to go to jail if not for her cooperation. There were reasons she
had kept quiet – the defendants had threatened to kill her.
In the end, she was believed. And she pulled the noose tight around
Hubert’s neck.
There was other evidence that damned Hubert – two housemaids said
they saw him home the night of the crime, looking bothered and restless
in a bloodied T-shirt. Authorities said he could have sneaked into to the
Philippines to commit the crime and then went back to the U S.
***
It was January 2000. It was a live TV special. Trial by media at its finest
five hours. It took five hours and two clerks to read the ruling. It was 180
pages long.
It said reclusion perpetua, reclusion perpetua.
Life imprisonment.
Thundering, racking, ear-deafening applause.
The applause that drowned out Hubert Webb’s sobs.
The applause that drowned out Freddie Webb’s tears.
“I don’t have to explain. I’m not here to convince you. You don’t have
to believe us,” said Webb, picking up a napkin to wipe his mouth. “The
important thing is I know and my God knows the truth. I’m not trying to
convince every Tom, Dick and Harry.”
Webb’s brown eyes drift outside the glass and into the gloomy, graying
sky. “In Hubert’s first two years he wasn’t let out of his cell. He had skin
asthma and it got worse inside jail. I had to get a doctor. When we were in
an empty room, he kept trying to look outside the window.”
“Son, what are you looking at?”
“I never realized the clouds were so beautiful, Dad.”
Does he still feel the same accusing eyes he did before? “I don’t. But I
just hope it’s not there anymore because they forgive us. There is nothing
to forgive.”
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For the last 11 years, Webb has spent four hours once a week with
Hubert, bringing him food, discussing body building and girlfriends inside
a maximum security prison. Trying desperately to ignore time passing by
outside the steel and barbed-wire fences.
“I hope that someday my son will be able to see the outside world.”
The Webbs continue to appeal. But in 2005, the Court of Appeals
reaffirmed his jail sentence. But the father continues to fight.
“It’s sad this happened. But it’s good in a way. Because if you become
a witness to this, you learn to love the little things you have. You learn to
value your family.”
It seems whether or not justice was really served for Carmela, Estrellita,
Jennifer and bereaved father and husband Lauro Vizconde, it isn’t only
Hubert that is in a cell.
Despite the semblance of a life Freddie Webb has tried to create, with
every waking moment he remembers who waits for him on Sunday.
Tamara de Guzman graduated from the JMSC’s Master of Journalism
programme in 2008. She joined publishing group Edipresse Asia and
became Contributing Editor for Hong Kong Tatler and Online Editor for
the Asia Tatler magazines.
65
Spring 2010
Ten Thousand Euros,
A Hundred Thousand Yuan
This article is the fruit of six months of research and reporting I did
in my hometown, Prato, Italy, in 2007. With more than 40,000 Chinese
immigrants working in the city’s textile industry, Prato has one of the
biggest Chinese communities in Europe. However, to most local Italians,
life in that community is still secret. When I began my journey inside the
Chinatown of Prato, I became the first Italian to hear the incredible and
tragic stories of the people there. The complete reportage can be read, in
Italian, at http://andreafenn.com/benvenutiaprato.html
By Andrea Fenn
The Face
“You should have seen my face, when she didn’t come out of that train.”
Liu Xing went up the stairs leading to the platform; the train was just
approaching the station. It was a Tuesday afternoon, or a Wednesday, he
doesn’t remember, of mid-August. The platform was deserted. The train
stopped. A small crowd of passengers passed by, quick and anonymous, and
in a few seconds the platform fell silent again.
Liu looked around, startled: she wasn’t there.
At the end of the platform, vaguely distorted by the heat, stood the
figure of a station officer. Liu rushed to him. He was wearing a blue blazer
bordered with dark green, the colors of Italian trains, before they all went
rusty and decrepit in the summer mugginess.
Liu asked, in broken Italian: “Tleno da Filenze?” (The train from
Florence?)
The station officer looked at him, visibly annoyed, and belched out in
his thickest Tuscan accent: “E un ce n’e’ piu’, di treni, ciccio. Gliera l’ultimo
questo”. (There ain’t no trains no more, dude. This was the last one.)
Liu took out a shredded scrap of paper, with who knows what written on
it. He put it close to the man’s face, pointing at it with a thick dusty finger.
66
“No, no, tleno da Filenze!” (No, no, the train from Florence!)
The station officer pretended to look at the paper, but didn’t, maybe
because it was too hot to spend energy quarreling with a Chinese, so he cut
him short.
“E lo so, lo so. Un ce n’e’ piu’. Tomorrow, tomorrow!” (I know, I know.
There ain’t no more.)
Liu stood there, alone under the fading sun, for another hour or two,
looking at the blurry horizon from where he hoped the train from Florence
would come. At one point, dazzled by the heat, deceived by the refraction of
the metal rails, he almost thought he saw a shiny, brand new train making
its glorious way into the station. But when he squinted, it disappeared. The
mirage remained there, just at the mouth of the station, without moving,
poking fun at him.
Liu remained waiting, distrustful of the train schedule, until at 7 o’clock
he had to walk down the stairs to the bus station. His shift started at 8 that
night and finished at 8 in the morning, and he couldn’t afford to do without
today’s pay.
“You should have seen my face, when I was on the bus back to the
factory.”
Liu Xing’s face is pale yet rugged, as if he had tried to cover his pimples
with a thick layer of white foundation. The wide space between his eyes
makes him expressionless and obtuse.
It is the face typical of a dongbeiren, a Chinese from Northeastern China,
the borderless steppes where the Han race has been adulterated by centuries
of raids by nomadic tribes, Mongolian rulers and Japanese invaders.
In Prato, the industrial Tuscan city where one fourth of the population
is Chinese, dongbeiren are a scorned minority. For years, after immigrants
started flooding Prato in the early 1990s, Chinese used to come only from
the city of Wenzhou, in the southern province of Zhejiang.
After years as low-labor subcontractors for small Italian textile
industries, the Wenzhounese started opening their own factories, directly
supplying the big fashion brands in neighboring Florence. They were so
successful that the once prosperous Italian industries have started closing
down, shuttered by the fierce competition and the much lower prices of
their Chinese counterparts.
Nowadays, the laoban, bosses from Wenzhou, own factories in
basements of buildings with dozens of Chinese workers crammed inside.
67
There, friends and relatives of laoban, and other Wenzhounese who can
at least claim to be fellow countrymen with the owner, have light jobs as
supervisors and accountants. The dongbeiren, instead, lose their sight under
dim lights in front of creaky looms.
Liu is one of those. His Wenzhounese laoban hardly understands him
when he talks, as the dialects the two speak are too distant. But they don’t
have to talk too much anyway. The laoban calls him bianlian, “flatface”, and
throws a new pile of unfinished clothes to sew. There are other eight or ten
flatfaces in the factory, sewing rags together, moving heavy bales and all
kinds of jobs that Chinese immigrants from Wenzhou do not want to do.
The life of dongbeiren is not easy in Prato. They first came to Europe in
the early 2000s, when the big state-owned industries of Northern China
began shutting down or switching to less labor-intensive productions. They
hoped they would find better opportunities in Western factories.
But instead, aside from a job that pays just enough to live, they found
a hostile environment. A dongbeiren in Prato suffers the distrust and the
resentment of the Italians, who see Chinese taking over what once was a
flourishing manufacturing centre for Italians. At the same time, they bear
the disdain of the Wenzhounese, who call them flatfaces and treat them as
the last step of the social ladder.
But Liu didn’t know this before coming, and now it’s impossible for him
to go back.
The Hand
Liu Xing’s hands are big and cracked like the skin of an old potato. With
his hands, he certainly wouldn’t be able to do any of the precision work the
Wenzhounese are good at. Instead, he does everything for which a fast hand
or a fast brain – two qualities he is generally thought to be short of – is not
required.
He and his factory mates normally work 10 to 12 hours a day, but they
can push themselves up to 15 or 16 hours a day. No one forces them to work
that much. They get paid by the hour, so the more they want to earn, the
more they have to work.
“Working 15 hours a day six days a week I can earn up to 1,500 euro,
which is quite a lot of money because the laoban gives you food and a place
to stay,” explains Liu. “So apart from the money for the cigarettes, I can save
all the rest.”
68
He laughs, lighting a Marlboro red, the strongest kind sold in Italian
tobacconists.
The “food” Liu refers to is a bowl of white rice with a sprinkle of meat
and vegetables cooked in soy sauce, and the “place to stay” is often just
the working table, cleared of the tools and transformed into a makeshift
bed. But that does not matter, because Liu and most of his workmates can’t
afford to spend on accommodation and food. What they earn, they have to
save to pay for what amounts to a ransom.
Liu shows me his hand again. There is a deep scar on the palm.
“You see this? They call it the blood seal. Once they have made the seal,
you have made a pact that you cannot break,” he says. “They use a big knife,
like the one they use to cut weed, and dip it in the flesh almost till they
touch the bone.”
The “blood seal” settles the pact that immigrants sign with the Chinese
mafia to arrive in Italy. Mobsters smuggle them in cargo ships, hidden
and squashed inside containers, until they arrive in the ports of Naples or
Marseille. There, a thick envelope casually left on some desk distracts the
custom officers for a little while, just enough for the flesh-and-blood freight
to be safely unloaded on a dark summer night.
Of course, in exchange for the service, immigrants have to pay great
sums as soon as they start working. The amount can vary a lot, from two or
three thousand euros, up to ten or even twenty thousand.
“My first pact with the mafia was of a hundred thousand yuan, ten
thousand euros,” says Liu. “I used my parents as a pledge.”
That means that if he doesn’t pay the debt, something bad could happen
to his parents, who still live in the city of Changchun, in Jilin province.
“I don’t think they are going to kill them or something,” says Liu, smiling.
“But I don’t want to take the risk, of course.” He takes another nervous puff
of his Marlboro.
Like Liu, most dongbeiren sign pacts with the Chinese mafia to get to
Europe.
“If you are a Wenzhounese, and some relatives or friends are already
here working, they can lend you the money so that you don’t have to ask the
mafia,” says Liu. “But we from the north don’t know anybody here, so we
can’t do anything but to ask some mobster for a loan.”
69
If they are hard-working and manage to save all the money they earn in
the factories, they can pay the debt in a year. Some make it in even less, says
Liu. And then they are free.
This is why, to many dongbeiren, the scar on that hand doesn’t hurt that
much, and when they clench their fists carrying a heavy bale of unfinished
clothes and the wound burns as if it is going to crack open again, they
think that this is going to end soon, and soon they will be able to save
for themselves, and not for someone living off them on the other side of
the globe.
The Eyes
In the covered gallery in front of Little Lin’s Supermarket, where Liu
Xing and his mates are spending their day off, chain-smoking cigarettes and
playing cards on the pavement, the afternoon light, reflected on the marble
flooring, comes from all directions.
Liu often rubs his eyes, annoyed by the light.
All around, the walls are covered with hundreds of small posters scribbled
in Chinese. They advertise the most diverse jobs available for immigrants in
Prato: factory workers, restaurant aides, “masseuses”, a word that here like
in China is a not very well concealed euphemism for “prostitute”.
Suddenly, a black Mercedes pulls off on the side of the road, and two
women come out. They are young, well dressed and dour. The younger one
holds an umbrella over their heads to protect them from the sunlight; she
has a stack of leaflets under her arm.
Once in the gallery, they start posting the leaflets on the wall. They don’t
look anyone in the eyes or talk to anyone. The people bivouacking there
hold their breath a few seconds. Silently as they came, the women rush
back to the Mercedes, which leaves with a scream of its tires. A small group
quickly gathers in front of the leaflets, pushing and pulling to be the first to
read. I also take a look: Ironers needed, good pay, married couples preferred.
“Laoban prefer to hire a married couple rather than single workers
because they work harder,” explains Liu. “But even more, because they share
the same bed, so that the laoban can save on space and accommodation.”
For this reason, many immigrants take wives to work with them in the
textile factories of Prato. With someone next to them, they can help each
other and be sustained by the dream of shared emancipation, by the dream
70
that they will pay their debts with the mafia, that they will start earning
money, and that one day they will be the ones owning the factories where
they now work for so little.
And like so many others, Liu tried to bring his wife to Italy. That, of
course, meant having to contract another debt with the mafia.
“After I worked for six months as an ironer, I made enough money to
back another debt for my wife,” he says. “A hundred thousand yuan; ten
thousand euros, again.”
Ten thousand plus ten thousand makes twenty thousand euros, a lot of
money it’s true, but together they can work more, eat from the same bowl
and sleep on the same bed, and saving bit by bit, in one, maximum two
years, they would be free. Maybe soon they would be driving one of those
black Mercedes on the streets of the Chinatown; maybe soon they would go
back to Changchun and buy a house, a house big enough for his parents to
come and live on the second floor.
That’s what Liu must have thought when he signed his second deal
with the mafia. And that’s what he must have been thinking, smiling in
anticipation at the idea of seeing his wife coming out of the train, when he
was going up the stairs of Prato’s central station, on a Tuesday or maybe
a Wednesday, he does not remember, on that damn hot afternoon of an
Italian August.
And instead, you should have seen his face.
“So where is she now?”
Before I even finish speaking, I regret asking this question. The cluster
of people around us, more or less close mates of Liu, lower their heads,
embarrassed.
“I have no idea where she is.”
His eyes are lucid, but his face shows no sign of sentiment.
“Maybe something happened to her during the journey,” says one of his
friends, stepping up and putting a hand on Liu’s shoulder. “I have heard that
some people die suffocated in the containers.”
Maybe, we think. But one thought is going through everybody’s mind
at the moment, a thought so disconcerting that the idea that she had died
choked on a boat can be more consolatory.
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At the same time, can Liu really blame her? Blame her for having
renounced a life of debt, and choosing instead to start a new life without
having to carry the weight of the ten thousand euros she would need to pay
back, a four-figured original sin?
Liu Xing went to Milan, and to Rome, squinting, his eyes ruined by the
bad light of the basement, looking at the stream of Chinese immigrants that
every day get off the trains, hoping to see her.
He gave the little photograph he still has in his wallet to one of his mates,
who asked around in Paris, Marseille and Madrid.
But then he gave up. Because no matter whether the parcel finally
made it to destination, Liu still has to pay for the expedition. Two hundred
thousand yuan, or twenty thousand euros, is quite a big sum – who knows
whether he will ever manage to pay it back?
He gave up. Just like he gave up his dream of paying back his debts, his
dream of a black Mercedes, and of a goddamn house back in Changchun.
A deep silence has fallen among the group of workers, and I regret
having spoiled their day off by digging out these old stories.
At one point, one kind-hearted mate decides to break the spell. “Come
on guys, cheer up,” he says. “Let’s go have some fun!”
Another quickly slips in. “Massage?”
A burst of laughter comes from the group. Everybody understood what
he really meant. Even Liu Xing seems relieved. His eyes stay watery, but
he smiles, while a mate puts an arm over his shoulders and sticks another
cigarette in his mouth.
I finally decide to leave them, let them enjoy their day off. They still have
three or four hours to spare. Their shift starts at eight o’clock, that night.
Andrea Fenn is a freelance journalist, photographer and China expert.
He finished his JMSC master’s in 2010 and began working as a freelancer
for China Daily in Hong Kong. He likes traveling, photographing, seeing the
unusual or the undiscovered and writing about it. When these yearnings
are satisfied, he only needs one more thing to feel totally fulfilled: a cup of
black, hot, unsweetened Italian coffee.
72
Fall 2002
Love, Art and History:
A Silk Road Journey
Zhao Yixiong’s and Geng Yukun’s passion for art, the responsibility
they feel to Chinese history and their remarkable perseverance during 25
years back and forth on the Silk Road touched me greatly. I knew theirs
was a story I had to tell.
By Li Jie
The winter sun in Urumqi on that day in 1989 was early. The slanting
rays slid ineffectually down on an old jeep outside a school gate. The moon
was ebbing away. Street vendors had already set up stoves, and vapors
arising from their steamed bread misted the chilly air. A cleaner swept the
frosted pavement, the sound of his broom echoing in the street.
Zhao Yixiong and Geng Yukun were up early too. Zhao was inflating the
tires of their jeep with a bicycle pump. He didn’t feel cold, though he wore
only a light cotton coat. He was used to winter. Zhao pressed the pump up
and down several times, then stopped for a rest. The tires on the jeep were
hard to fill. His wife Geng was having better luck filling a 40-liter plastic
container with water.
Some middle school students came by. Seeing Zhao laboring hard, they
offered help.
“Where are you going, uncle?” asked a boy who took over the pump for
awhile, then passed it to another student.
“We are driving for the High Pamir,” Zhao said.
The boys stopped and stared at the man in his fifties. They knew access
to the mountain would soon be blocked by the government, as bad weather
was approaching. They doubted his word.
“Are you going to sell your goods?” asked one boy as he helped Geng
settle the water container on the back of the jeep.
“No, we are going to paint pictures,” Zhao said.
A familiar blend of surprise and curiosity washed over the boy’s face.
Zhao was used to the amazed expressions of people when they heard him
73
say that. He and his wife have been traveling to paint for more than a dozen
years – all through sandstorms, scorching temperatures and severe cold.
They look more like weathered farmers, or nomadic handicrafts men, rather
than senior members of the Beijing Art Institution, the first artists in China
to travel along the Silk Road.
Zhao knew the road well. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976),
deprived of the right to draw pictures he wanted, he read history and was
drawn by the road’s storied past. For 17,000 years, the east-west trade route
has inspired stories and storytellers. Many caravans of merchants have
traveled the route, despite the legendary desert demons and scorching heat
and piercing cold.
Long ago, a Chinese merchant spent ten years on the road, and introduced
China’s silk and tea to Central Asia kingdoms; a Chinese monk trod the
route as well, leaving his legend to the book of “The Pilgrimage to the West”.
Following him, came young Marco Polo, the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin,
the western missionaries, the eastern historians, and the Chinese painters.
“When I got there, I found the history book only showed a tiny part
of its glamor,” Zhao told his wife, after his first journey in 1975. The big
Gobi desert, the grand ancient palaces and temples, the holy sculptures,
throbbed at the painter’s heart.
“Silk Road records China’s glorious past. Marco Polo traveled it; the
Japanese studied it, but why not Chinese?” Zhao said to her. Then he
resolved to draw the whole route. His wife, embracing his passion, followed
him.
This time, their 15th trip along the road, they would be traveling by car
by themselves.
***
After spending the morning pumping air and fuel, they began their
journey. They had to arrive at Korla, 300 kilometers south from Urumqi, by
the next day. They left in such a hurry they forgot to buy food.
It was already noon, but the sun wasn’t adding much temperature to the
road. Spitting gravel, their jeep clanged along through the Gobi desert. The
odometer showed 40 miles per hour, but the car was doing its best and slow
was better than never.
Once, four years before, they had plans to drive along the road. “If we
had a car, we could paint pictures where the bus drivers would not go,” Zhao
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had told his wife. All their previous times, they had left the buses to travel
by foot or tractor to the places they wanted to paint.
Someone had promised to donate them a good car, but their journey
was delayed for visa problems (it was hard to get a visa in the 1980s) and the
donor had run out of patience and taken back his favor.
But Zhao and Geng persisted. The ancient road was worth waiting.
But they didn’t just wait. Everyday, on his bicycle, Zhao shuttled between
factories, churches and companies to collect money for the journey. In his
spare time, he learned to drive. Meanwhile, his wife visited the National
Libraries to read documents on the Silk Road. They learned English and
Arabic whenever they had time; for English, programs on television and
radio were their teachers.
When they got the visa in 1989, they had US$10,000 in savings and
donations. After spending half of it on the jeep, they set off with the rest of
their money on their 1,200-mile Silk Road journey.
Having bumped along for four hours on gravel, Zhao was aching and
tired. He looked at his wife. She was pale. “You must be hungry,” he said.
“We still have some peanuts left. Take some. I am fine now.”
“I am all right,” she replied, “that’s the only food we have now.”
A car whistled by. Bang! Something hit the windshield, shattering it
and blurring Zhao’s view of the road. He slammed on the brakes. “What’s
wrong?” Geng cried.
Zhao jumped out and found the windshield cracked into tortoise-shell
pieces, the result of stones kicked up by a passing car. As Zhao pondered
what to do, an army jeep passed by. “Get rid of the broken glass so that you
can see the direction,” the driver shouted, stretching his head out of the
window. “You can restore it in the county ahead.”
Zhao found tools and managed to remove the glass. “But we still have a
long way before arriving there,” Zhao said. Seeing the day draw dark, Geng
began to worry.
By the time they left the Gobi desert and entered the valley, the day was
indeed getting dark. Hills on both sides of the road cast thick shadows. The
stone road became a dirt one. The car ahead raised a dust cloud that settled
into the jeep. Geng coughed. Zhao felt pain in his throat and eyes. He could
not see clearly through the curtain of dust; he had to slow down.
The temperature at night dropped sharply on this section of the road,
which was 4,000 meters above sea level. Normally at this altitude, people
75
had difficulty breathing, or even fainted. But the couple had drawn pictures
at a much higher level before.
Wind whistled into the car, penetrating the couple’s cotton coats. Geng
climbed into the back of the jeep and found heavier clothes, hats and
scarves. They put on all that they had, wearing the coats backwards, so that
the wind could not sneak through the buttonholes. But it didn’t help much.
The farther they went, the colder they felt. Geng wrapped a plastic bag on
her husband’s head to stave off the biting wind.
Dust filled the air, blurring the line between land and sky. After driving
more than ten hours without food, Zhao felt numb. He looked at his
wife, who was offering him the bag of peanuts. The sight of her gave him
strength.
“I am fine, take care of yourself,” he said.
“I am not hungry,” she said. “These peanuts will keep you awake.”
Zhao looked at his wife, and his heart toughened. In addition to the
peanuts, water and dried steam bread comprised their provisions. Zhao
wondered whether he should have subjected his wife to such rigor. But she
told him not to worry.
***
They had known each other since the 1950s, when they were classmates
in the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, the best art institution in China
at that time. Geng was late in registering, so the teacher asked Zhao, the
class monitor, to help her with her lessons. They found their common
attraction in painting. Those days, when almost everyone in the school was
taking part in political activities and movements, they visited museums and
the outskirts of Beijing, to draw pictures.
As a traditional Chinese painter, Geng liked to draw accounts of
ordinary people. Bazaars on the Silk Road were her favorite. She would
stand a whole day sketching Xinjiang Uygur girls selling self-made soymilk,
or quacks touting herbal medicine or a young Pakistani man managing to
kill a chicken without really violating Islamic laws against it. Her husband,
an oil painter, would draw different things. He would set his canvas before
ancient buildings and broken walls and try to record what he thought
showed the flourish and fall of the Silk Road. Yellow was his favorite color.
“It is the essence of the road,” he would say.
They painted differently, but pursued one goal – reflecting truth. To
paint the Flaming Mountain, a famous mountain on the Silk Road in
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Xinjiang, they stayed several days among hills “hot enough to fry an egg”.
The sun burned their skin and almost melted their plastic shoes, but they
didn’t want to leave, afraid of missing any subtle change of the sunlight. One
dawn, the sun dyed half of the sky to blood red; the folds of hills stretching
upwards were like dancing flames.
“Look, the flaming mountain!” Zhao cried joyfully to his wife. The days
and nights of painful waiting ended in reward. They painted one picture
after another. One finished piece of the Flaming Mountain was based on
more than 20 pictures drawn from different angles.
“We want each picture as a work of art, so that all the pieces together
present the whole art of the Silk Road,” Zhao once said.
Their friends said pictures were the couple’s matchmakers, but they
preferred to call them their children. “Bearing children is to extend our
mind and life, and we have made it through the pictures,” Geng said. They
had no children, but their more than 5,000 pieces of work were lauded by
Chinese artists as the most comprehensive artistic record of the Silk Road
in China.
Before the jeep journey, a Japanese collector offered to buy some pictures,
but they declined. “It is the whole collection,” Zhao said. “Each picture has
its own character. Selling any one is as hard as selling a son or daughter.”
When the couple arrived at Korla, it was three o’ clock in the morning.
Zhao slowed the jeep so that its noise would not awaken the residents. He
managed to find a bed for Geng in the local inn, and he slept on the jeep.
A jeep without a window is a home without a door. He had to watch their
“home”.
He patted the thick layer of dust off the clothes, and lay on the six wooden
boxes in the back of the jeep, wrapping himself tightly inside a quilt.
The jeep was like a refrigerator. Zhao was tired, but could not sleep.
He began thinking how to repair the window when the day broke. Once
the car had a new window, it would go faster, he thought. After crossing
over the High Pamir, they would tour Peshawar in Pakistan and study stone
palaces and ancient buildings in the Middle East. And again they would
visit Istanbul in Turkey, the end of the Silk Road.
Thinking of that, he grew excited.
After getting her master’s in 2003, Li Jie was a reporter at Phoenix TV.
In 2006, she returned to Beijing to be a researcher for The Washington
Post. She later worked as a freelancer, helping U.S. television networks
and print media on documentaries and stories. She also has worked for
Forbes magazine on political and financial news.
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Spring 2005
Goalkeeping and
Game Theory
Literary journalism is about more than war, love and death. I wanted
to do something different, to recreate the scene, mood, atmosphere and
the zest of a drama from the athletic field – 30 seconds on the line facing
a penalty kick.
By Vanson Soo
In my sweaty, seasoned blue jersey and black shorts, with my palms in
white gloves close to my hips and my football boots shoulder-width apart
in a ready stance, I stood motionless and focused on the eyes of the man
behind the ball that had been placed on the white-rounded spot.
The man to take the penalty shot, lanky and tanned in a yellow jersey,
stood motionless three yards behind the ball. His eyes focused on me for any
sign of a tendency to lean to one side or another. It was a dreaded moment
for both of us. For a while, neither of us moved. Neither did his teammates,
the men in yellow tops locked in a straight line another few yards out, nor
mine. Spectators writhed in their seats, their eyes moving left and right like
the dial of a grandfather’s clock between the man behind the ball and me,
the goalkeeper on the line.
Goalkeeping is the only role that lured and kept me in the game since
my first taste of football at a tender eight, when I discovered the thrills of
denying shots and frustrating even the most prolific strikers. Casual fans
have this gross misconception that goalkeeping is for the fat, slow and lazy.
On the contrary, the modern game requires goalkeepers to have agility
and lightning-fast reflexes, explosive speed over short distances, and the
mental and physical toughness to charge at unforgiving blades-laden boots
and execute acrobatic moves above the rest for the ball that may lead to
awkward, body-twisting landings. Goalkeeping, in the last line of defence
and first line of attack, is not for the faint-hearted.
For goalkeepers, facing a penalty is another way to prove themselves –
and to be a hero.
But now, standing on the white strip between the two poles on this late
August evening, the anxiety heightened. Warm salted sweat dribbled down
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my forehead to my locked-jaw chin and fell between my feet. I was tempted
to wipe the perspiration welling in my eyes but withdrew the thought to
focus on my opponent’s intention – in which direction would he kick the
ball? Right? Left? Straight? – as much as he concentrated on anticipating my
horizontal commitment at the moment of his kick. The intensity grew in
the mounting silence. The men on the horizon began shoving each other to
sprint for any possible rebound. Any second now and…the ball somehow
glided off the white spot. Shoulders dropped for deep exhales, breaking the
dreadful stance of my team.
***
My team is known as Stanley Milan in Cantonese. The Milan refers to the
famous Italian football club Inter Milan and is symbolized by our vertical,
blue-black striped jerseys, although we sometimes puzzle our opponents by
also wearing the white tops of Spanish giant Valencia. Our team was atop
the Hong Kong district league table after five matches into the new season.
As the goalkeeper and only foreigner on the team, I took great pride in my
five consecutive clean-sheets – no goals conceded in five straight matches –
thanks of course to a lot of great defence by my teammates.
My teammates are local residents whose families have lived for
generations on the southern tip of Hong Kong Island. Many of their
forebears were fishermen, but many now own family-run shops and
restaurants in Stanley, a popular stopover for tourists by day and lovers and
diners at night.
Billy, the right-back defender, was accepted by The University of Hong
Kong but ended up in the family business, which has changed over the
years from eateries to souvenirs and most recently to toys. Wai Yip, the
team captain, runs a few stalls with some teammates that sell China-made
souvenirs, mostly to Westerners.
Not all my teammates work in Stanley. Toa, the muscular centre-back
who lives alone in a little run-down hut with his brown mongrel, works as a
plumber in Aberdeen. The left-back defender, nicknamed Chicken Wings,
is an electrician for a shop in Causeway Bay while his family runs a clothing
shop in Stanley. The right midfielder Superboy, a speed demon on and off
the pitch, drives the number 40 public minibus between Causeway Bay and
Stanley.
And there are also jobless ones like Fai, the athletic striker, who spent
the last two years playing football, basketball and any activities that cost
him nothing.
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Many teammates belong to the Stanley sports association and the
Dragon boat team. They formed half of the Stanley lion-dance troop on
one festive day. After a hard day’s work, many like to hang around the
Stanley waterfront to enjoy the beautiful sunset and chat over beers. The
players, many unmarried and even unattached, will often throw barbeques
on weekends and eves of public holidays and spend the night arguing any
trivial issues that suddenly seem to matter so much. What a life!
I was never part of these activities until I was recruited after a game
three years ago at the Stanley Prison ground between Stanley Milan and the
local Baptist church that I played for occasionally. Stanley Milan won by a
large margin, although I made many saves on that busy night.
“You’re welcome to join us, we need a keeper,’’ one of my future
teammates said after the game.
***
And right now I am the goalkeeper this squad is counting on. Not just
because we are two goals down minutes before half-time, a situation this
squad is unaccustomed to, but because we have been slapped with a highly
controversial penalty from what seemed like a bribed referee.
The short and stern referee is no stranger to our team. He has ruled
blatantly against us previously. His whistles against our squad this match,
especially the one leading to this penalty I am now facing, were so bluntly
and jaw-dropping biased that they seemed to surprise even the opponents.
There were whistles against our seemingly harmless moves, but none against
the ankle-slamming and body-flipping tackles from the opponents.
The scene that night was really chaotic for our squad. The first goal we
conceded, the first this season, was a result of a sloppy back pass between
Billy and Toa that was picked up by their striker, who fired the ball from such
close range that my impulsive leap to my left failed to reach the high goalbound shot. The squad felt confident it could compensate for that mistake,
only to see Toa violently brought down without a whistle by two opponents
who then charged forward for a two-on-one play for another goal.
As I remained beaten to the ground in shock, the squad surrounded the
referee screaming in protest whilst the opponents hopped away in joy. Firm
on his decision, the referee showed the ankle-bruised Toa a yellow card
instead for his threatening words.
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The squad held the ball firm when play resumed, looking forward to the
interval to review the situation when the most unthinkable happened. A
lost possession of the ball led to a long through-pass from the opposite end,
which sent Billy and an opponent racing towards my territory. In a most
dramatic fashion, the opponent pulled and dropped Billy flat on the pitch
and pushed the ball alone towards me. As my squad waved and shouted
in protest, I sped out of the box to narrow the angle of his shot but he did
exactly what every goalkeeper fears in such situations – he lobbed the ball.
The ball was lobbed well and fast over me and as I twisted my body
abruptly around, I saw the ball ending its parabola near the left upright
pole, destined to become our opponents’ third goal, but then Chicken
Wings flew like a torpedo to collide with that ballistic missile as it honed in
on its target.
I watched in awe from close range his entire airborne feat. His flight
originated from a 45-degree takeoff at the edge of the goalkeeper box, the
smaller rectangular area in front of the two poles. His hands were close
by his sides like a cannonball man in the circus just shot into the air. He
timed his leap perfectly to intercept the ball right before the goal line and
altered the path of the ball with an upward jolt from his top left shoulder,
the horizontal part of the shoulder down from the neck. His heroic effort
cleared the ball for a corner-kick, but a loud “Piiiii” from a few feet to my
right pierced my ears. The referee stood firm and pointed at…what? The
penalty box!?
He had ruled that Chicken Wings deflected the ball with his arm, not
allowed in football, rather than his shoulder, and awarded our opponents a
penalty kick – and a chance to go up on us 3-nil.
“You must be kidding!” I howled as I lumbered my six-foot-one frame
in three giant steps towards the five-foot-five referee.
“Are you blind? It was my collar bone!” Chicken Wings yelled and
shoved the referee a few feet back.
“Who paid you? How much?” Billy, who had just arrived at the scene,
shouted.
Soon, it was complete chaos as our entire squad, the opponents and the
linesmen converged in that part of the pitch, filling the air with profanity.
“He’s obviously bribed,” one angry voice thundered.
“Everyone can see what’s going on. Teach him a lesson.” The last four
words were repeated a couple of times and prompted a few advances toward
the referee.
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As it always turns out in football, the opponents somehow managed to
become skillful diplomats and separate the angry men. My squad backed off
and the match resumed. The men took their positions, but their profanity
still sliced the hot summer air.
Now the ball that somehow had moved off the rounded-spot was planted
back in place. This match, which led to a run of bad results before our squad
recovered and ended the season in mid-table, had to resume. I took my spot
and adopted a ready stance again.
Left or right? I can almost hear everyone asking the same question.
Statistics show some interesting facts. For one taking the penalty, he actually
has three options – left, right or centre? – after eliminating vertical concerns.
If he aims for the centre, he can almost guarantee a goal as goalkeepers more
often than not commit themselves either way. The major risk of this strategy
is the goalkeeper may still be able to use his leg to block the shot whilst in
mid-flight sideways. The worst nightmare, however, is when the goalkeeper
stays rooted to the ground and the ball goes embarrassingly straight into his
hands. That scenario is very rare, according to statistics, and chances are the
ball will go either left or right.
For the goalkeeper, statistics show the ball will almost certainly end
up on his right if the penalty-taker is left-footed – he will kick to his left
(goalkeeper’s right) 90 percent of the time. However, the probability is split
almost evenly if the penalty-taker is right-footed.
“So what’s your strategy facing a penalty?” my colleague Raymond Wang
asked me over dinner one day.
***
My strategy was actually very logical, and echoed the famous game
theory of “The Prisoners’ Dilemma” as it was applied in economics by Nobel
Prize winner John Nash and featured in the Hollywood movie, “A Beautiful
Mind”. In The Prisoners’ Dilemma, the question is whether two prisoners
will cooperate to minimize total loss of liberty or will one, trusting the other
to cooperate, betray him so as to go free.
Of course I can never expect the opponent to cooperate in a penalty
kick but what The Prisoners’ Dilemma came to mean to me as a goalkeeper
was the need to betray the opposition by engaging in mind games. As a
kid, I somehow managed to find success at outsmarting others in penalty
situations – by making my moves after foreseeing my opponent’s intentions
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– a method I instantly recognized when I later studied The Prisoners’
Dilemma game theory.
I always pondered: if I knew he was kicking to my right, I will dive right.
But if he knew I knew he was aiming right, he will shoot to my left. Now, if
I actually figured he knew that I knew he was aiming right in the first place
and he will shoot to my left instead, I will dive to my left! However, if he
managed to read my mind on this, then he knew I knew that he knew that
I knew that he will shoot right at the beginning, he will still shoot to my
right! Ha, but if I knew...and I wasted many of my younger days perfecting
my game theory of goalkeeping this way.
“I will fool him to slot the ball to my stronger side,’’ I told Raymond,
providing my more mature, manageable and modern version of the theory:
I will tell him where to shoot.
Goalkeepers can only move along the line before the ball is kicked. I
tend to dive a farther distance to my right. By moving slightly off the centre
to my left and exposing a bigger gap on my right, he is likely to shoot into
the generous space that is still possibly within my reach. And even if he did
otherwise, I have my left well covered.
And that is the strategy I have in mind with this penalty. My squad is
counting on me. I embarked on my horizontal solo dance, hopping equal
distances to the left and right, at first at a slow rhythm, but tilting evidently
more and more to my left as he geared up towards the ball. With one step
away from executing his shot, I deliberately gave him full confidence of my
wayward commitment by making one big hop to my left – but I was almost
ready for a great leap to my right where the ball is definitely targeted.
He did exactly what I expected and the ball headed to my right and I…I
slipped off the spot marked for my take-off!
I lay on my back absorbing the cacophonous atmosphere, down and
out from the suffocating pressure, sensing that our successful run into the
season was cruelly over.
Vanson Soo won a Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) award for
investigative journalism for The Standard while studying for his master’s
at the JMSC. He then became a corporate investigator for a global firm.
He now runs his own sleuth practice to conduct commercial investigations
and gather business intelligence for clients across the Asia-Pacific region.
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Fall 2006
Voyage of Discovery
for the Ni Girls
After living in the U.S. for 10 years, four Chinese girls returned with
their American parents to the country where they were born and to the
orphanage where they once lived.
By Shao Xiaoyi
“Yiwu! Yiwu! We’ve finally arrived at Yiwu!”
As the tour guide announced their arrival in Yiwu, in China’s Zhejiang
Province, the four excited young girls on the bus suddenly calmed down
and anxiously looked through its windows. This was the final destination
on their voyage of discovery. In many poignant ways, it also would be the
most special.
Outwardly, after they left the bus and began taking pictures, they
appeared to be young mainland Chinese tourists. But as soon as they began
speaking to each other, it was clear they were different. It was the words
that came out of their mouths. They spoke English with American accents
– spoke it as if it were their native language, even though ten years before,
they had lived here in Yiwu, in the country of their birth.
They were babies when they were last here, and there were nine of them
who left that day in the arms of their adoptive American parents. Now,
a decade later, four have come back with their parents for their first visit
since. The bus has pulled right up to the gate of Yiwu Orphanage, where the
four spent the first few months of their lives.
Near the gate, a stout elderly woman stood beside a few men who
appeared to be local cadres, members of the Communist Party there to
witness a reunion between the girls and the people who once cared for them.
The woman’s eyes kept following the girls, who turned a little shy when they
realized people were watching and listening to them. Then their parents
and the other adults smiled and shook hands as they were introduced to
each other with the tour guide’s help.
And now the elderly woman, Lou Helian, started walking forward to
greet the girls she had helped care for a decade ago. She had been their
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“nanny,” their caretaker after they had been given up, for one reason or
another, by their birth parents until they could be adopted. Nanny Lou
wore a big smile. She stretched her arms across the years to welcome back
her former babies. The girls, who had taken positions behind their adoptive
parents, now raced toward her. They hugged Lou for a long time, tears
welling in their eyes. Lou hugged them back, bringing them close to her
chest.
The parents and the cadres and everyone else fell silent. The emotional
bonds between Lou and the former infants were still there. The language
barrier that had arisen no longer existed, and their hearts exchanged silent
connections.
The girls were now known as Emily, Neely, Kira and Kiana, but they all
had the same Chinese surname – Ni, which the orphanage had given. As
she looked at their faces, Lou successfully recalled all their original Chinese
first names.
“I am so happy to see that they all have grown up in such good families,”
Lou said to the girls and their parents.
***
One of the girls, Kira, could not stop weeping. She turned to her mother,
Kathy Krupa, who whispered comforting words and held her in her arms.
Neely’s mother, Linda Droeger, a communications consultant from
Colorado, also could not help weeping. “We have been waiting for ten years
for this day,” she said. “I never thought that we could meet the former nanny.
She is like Neely’s Chinese mother. Although Neely could not meet her
birth mother on this trip, she could discover her past and feel she belonged
to it.”
Droeger is single and in her 40s. She had no child before she decided
to adopt. After learning about the possibility of adopting a Chinese child
from a television program, she contacted Chinese Children Adoption
International, a U.S. non-profit agency. After clearing several procedures
and waiting almost a year, Droeger received a photograph of a possible baby
to adopt in 1995. It was Neely.
“She looked like Elvis Presley in the picture – all her hair stuck up, as if
her fingers had touched electricity. But she was beautiful,” Droeger recalled.
“I thought it was a perfect match, and God was the matchmaker. My life was
connected to a place 7,000 miles from my home.”
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Sharon Pitman, Emily’s mother, also from Colorado, also remembered
the moment she received a picture of Emily, the baby she would eventually
adopt. “It was incredible. Her photo looked like the photo of my mother as
a baby. I immediately realized my life was connected to some place far away.
It was destiny!”
After months of waiting, the U.S. parents who wanted to adopt children
through the same agency went to Hangzhou, capital of China’s Zhejiang
Province, where they met the nine toddlers for the first time. Ben Pitman,
Emily’s father, who has two sons from a first marriage, recalled with a smile:
“When I held Emily in my arms, she suddenly cried. I felt hurt because she
was very calm in my wife’s arms.”
Pitman said he was at first wary about adopting a child from another
country because he was worried the child might encounter some racial
barriers back in the U.S. “But now I realize … it does not matter where you
are born and what you look like; it is about culture, values and love. Emily
has changed my whole heart.”
Vicki Guist, Kiana’s mother, who also is from Colorado, has kept her
daughter’s baby photo in her wallet the entire time. “We got a tiny one from
the agency at the beginning, so I developed it into a bigger size, then show
it to everyone we know.”
The American families have tried hard to introduce their children to
Chinese culture. They send them to Chinese language and calligraphy
courses; they talk about China at home. Kira’s mother said they celebrate
every Chinese New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival, and have dragon boat
races with other families who have adopted Chinese girls.
She added that at least twice a month they meet two of the other families
who adopted at the same time. They go to Chinese restaurants and eat with
chopsticks. Every year on the day in November that marks the official
adoption, which they call “Gotcha Day,” the families gather to celebrate.
“One day when we met, we agreed we should bring the girls back on the
10th anniversary,” Kira recalled.
Emily’s mother added, “This year we celebrate the event in China, where
we got our babies. It is a way of collecting our history.”
***
The staff of the Yiwu Orphanage now lead the visitors to a four-story
building and open the door to a meeting room, where tea, fruits and candy
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are offered to welcome the guests. A man walks in, with piles of files and
pictures in his hands.
“Here are the four girls’ archives preserved in our orphanage,” said the
man, an employee of the orphanage. “They record where we found them,
when they got their first vaccines and what they looked like in their first
days.”
The U.S. parents chose their daughters’ archives and began browsing
through them, looking at every picture and trying to make sense of whatever
Chinese words they could understand.
“Wow, this is what I looked like when I was so little,” Neely said, pointing
at a picture taken when she about 100 days old. It showed a small baby with
big eyes in which it was possible to read a lot of different emotions.
Neely’s mother asked me to translate what the archives said about Neely,
word for word. When I translated that Neely was found in the Chi’an County
in Yiwu, Droeger clutched my arm and asked: “Does it say the exact place
where she was found? Does it say in detail?”
“Sorry, it does not have any more details,” I replied.
Droeger’s eyes dimmed with disappointment. She wanted to know more
about Neely’s birthplace.
“I always wish I could somehow communicate with Neely’s birth mother,
telling her that her daughter is being well-loved and well-taken care of,”
Droeger said. “The birth mother must be somewhere, wondering what
happened to her daughter. She might have a huge hole in her heart, having
to live without this wonderful child.”
Droeger said that she had hoped that this trip could solve some mysteries
for her daughter. Who am I? Where did I come from?
On the room’s other side, Kiana, Kira and Emily looked through a
photo album recording the lives of children, mostly girls, adopted from the
orphanage by American parents. Every year, a brochure documenting the
lives of children adopted from the orphanage is sent from the U.S. to help
maintain links.
Many Americans have adopted children from China since China passed
its Law of Adoption in 1992. In 2005, they adopted nearly 6,000 Chinese
orphans, mostly girls, bringing the total to about 50,000 over 12 years.
Unlike most Chinese adoptive parents, who try to prevent children from
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learning about their birth origins, the four American couples hid nothing
from their adoptees.
“We told our daughter that she was adopted from China as soon as she
could talk and began to ask questions such as why don’t I look like you?”
said Kathy Krupa, Kira’s mother. “So, we are coming to seek answers for my
daughter, to give her some reference points about where she begins.”
Ben Pitman said the trip to China would prepare his daughter to handle
an eventual identity crisis, which he expected to come in her teenage
period.
“A return trip can give them a chance to appreciate their culture and
heritage and help them seek roots,” he added.
After resting in the meeting room, the parents were shown around the
orphanage. It was not a big place, but space was well-utilized. Between
a four-story old building called the Children’s Department, where the
orphans were housed, and the Administrative Building, there was a small
park for children to play.
***
Crossing the park, the group walked towards the Children’s Department.
As they entered, they heard babies crying. On the second floor, they found
where the crying came from, a big room with about 30 babies, mostly girls,
in cradles. The smell of urine filled the air. Two middle-aged women in
white gowns tried to comfort them.
Droeger was attracted to one of the few boys, a small baby in blue cottonpadded clothes. He was screaming and trying to climb out of his cradle.
“Can I hold him?” Droeger asked. One of the nannies was happy to nod
her approval because she had so many babies to care for.
As soon as Droeger held the boy in her arms, he stopped crying. He
looked at her and smiled. His was a beautiful face with shining eyes. Maybe
the reason he cried was only to find someone to give him some attention.
Suddenly, I noticed that his right hand had no fingers. Now I knew the
reason why such a beautiful boy had been discarded. He was disabled.
Neely stood beside her mother and said “Hello” to the boy. She took a
doll from her bag and gave it to him.
“Mom, will he be adopted like me? Will he find a family like me?”
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“Oh, these nannies will help him find a loving home,” Droeger replied.
Maybe yes, maybe not, I said to myself. In my heart, I could not help
wonder what the future held for the little boy. He deserved a right to parental
warmth. But could he find someone willing to adopt a disabled baby? These
four girls were lucky to have new families to love them as if they were their
own children. But for every child who found a home, so many were left
behind. What would life be like for children who grow up in orphanages?
So many orphans are daughters in China because the Chinese
traditionally favor boys, especially in rural areas. People believe that a son
will be a better provider for parents in their senior years. As most farmers
still do not have access to the social security network, they have to rely on
a son as their safety net.
Wang Hong, one of the nannies, said some children are lucky to find new
homes fairly quickly while some, mostly the disabled, will have to wait or
spend their whole lives in the orphanage. “I pray every day that some good
families will take these babies; they should have better lives,” she said.
At the visit’s end, the girls’ American parents gave money for a water
heater for the Children’s Department. The four girls gave every nanny and
baby presents. They did not stop waving goodbye to Nanny Lou until she
disappeared from sight.
“It was really a bitter and sweet day,” said Droeger, back on the tour
bus.
Shao Xiaoyi, a native of Zhejiang Province, worked as a reporter for
China Daily before enrolling in the master’s programme at the JMSC in
2006. A year later, she went to work as a reporter for Reuters in its Beijing
bureau.
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Spring 2010
Down and Out
in Delhi
This is a story about the first 12 hours I spent in Delhi in the summer of
2009. I moved there for an internship. It’s about uncertainty in a foreign
land, and learning a little bit about myself. It’s also about the good people
I met along the way, and people I may not have trusted under different
circumstances.
By Ryan Andrews
“What are you, American?” the driver asked as he peered at me
quizzically in the rearview mirror.
“Actually, yeah I am, why do you ask?” I responded somewhat
defensively.
“Oh, I was just thinking that if you were you won’t be staying at this
hotel more than a night,” he said.
I grimaced. I was planning on at least spending three weeks there.
“Why’s that?”
“You’ll see,” he said, half-chuckling. “Who told you about this place, the
Hotel Blue?”
The overt French accent he put on blue let me know that there wasn’t
going to be anything French about it, at least not of the images that an
American might conjure up of France. That being wine, cheese and foie
gras.
“Well, I did a bunch of research on the internet and a friend of a friend
suggested it,” I said.
When I caught his eye I knew exactly what he was thinking. It must have
been more of an enemy than a friend.
I was being truthful. After a few weeks of research and calling a few
contacts, I had gotten the lay of the land. I could get a room with my own
shower for about $20 U.S. a night. There were a couple of snags. There was
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really no way of sussing out which place was legit and which wasn’t. For
every great review there was a horrible review. And there were tons of these
mom-and-pop hotels.
Secondly, I had become accustomed to a certain lifestyle while traveling.
I’m not talking butler service. I’ve camped in the dirt, slept in closets, and
resided in a fraternity house where your feet stuck to the floor. But some
semblance of cleanliness was required. And a vibrating bed if available.
I had analyzed numerous photos and message boards, and the Hotel
Blue fit the bill and was within my budget. It was also in a decent location,
set apart from the backpacking part of town. Really, how bad could it be?
That’s when the gravity of my situation began to become apparent. It
seems as though I had apparently agreed to a month-long internship in
Delhi. I knew no one. I’d never been to India. I was working for free and
would be cash-and-credit poor. My one Indian friend said not to go simply
because it would be so hot. Fun times.
I had stumbled upon the opportunity after an innocuous conversation
with a classmate at Hong Kong University. A professor had a contact at The
Hindu, a large newspaper in Delhi and they were happy to take people for a
month of slave labor. After numerous emails and calls expressing my desire
to contribute to the Indian economy, I got nowhere. I was beginning to
believe this opportunity didn’t exist. I finally got through to the editor.
“Hello, my name is Ryan Andrews from HKU and I’ve been calling
about the possible internship. I’d love to come and see if…”
“When can you be here?” replied a curt voice. That was the last contact
I had with the editor until I walked into the newsroom.
My fate was sealed. It looked like I was on my own.
It had sounded good in theory. I’d traveled all over Asia, albeit usually
with other people. I make friends easily, sometimes too easily. My employer
was willing to let me take a leave of absence. My wife thought it would be
great for me to be gone for a month. It was on the flight to Delhi when I
started wondering why exactly that was. I had also heard that there was a
chance to get quite a few articles published in a short amount of time.
It was for these reasons I found myself crammed into an undersized
sedan with two strangers in the front seat and luggage digging into my rib
cage. It was July and it was so hot my back sweat had somehow already
managed to form a pool in my shoes.
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Just getting to this point had taken its toll. I had decided that the best
way to prepare for an excursion of this magnitude would be to spend the
entire prior day at the Lan Kwai Fong Beer Festival, dulling the pain of the
great unknown if you will. The day in Hong Kong’s nightlife district had
not been kind and now the morning was less so as I scrambled to finish
packing. I pack a huge bag to go to Macau for the weekend. What the hell
do you bring to Delhi for a month?
The flight was horrendous. I spent the entire time slumped over with a
knot in my stomach whose source was up for debate. Nerves? Liters of stale
Carlsberg? Or the kaleidoscope of smells wafting up and down the aisles
of Air India? Sacrifices had to be made if I wasn’t getting paid. Air India
was half the cost of a Cathay Pacific flight. The two shouldn’t be confused.
The plane was a noxious combination of curry, cologne, and perspiration.
They didn’t offer in-flight entertainment, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t see
a show. Male staffers had to separate a female flight attendant and male
passenger after the passenger “accidentally” brushed against her. Getting
some quality writing done suddenly didn’t have the same cachet as it did
24 hours earlier.
I had been forewarned about the Delhi airport and it lived up to its
reputation. It was mass chaos, not the organized kind. People milled about
in one big mosh pit, luggage piled everywhere. That’s all there was. Humanity
and bags. I managed to make it to the money exchange where I made the
first mistake of many over the next month. Knowing from previous travels
that big bills are always a hassle I opted for the smallest currency possible.
Something got lost in translation. I ended up with a ridiculous amount of
paper notes. I might as well have walked away with a sign that said “dumb
American.” I literally had a rubber-band bank in my pocket. It was the only
time I’ve had the bulge of a porn star in my pants.
I was so parched at this point it felt like I had been drinking the sand out
of an hour glass. These were the “The Days of Our Lives”. As inconspicuously
as possible I maneuvered out a small note to purchase a bottle of water from
a vending machine. It was out of order, as was every other machine in the
vicinity. It was a cruel hoax.
I managed to miraculously track down a SIM card for what I later found
out was an exorbitant rate, but it was at least a step in the right direction.
As I turned the corner that’s when I saw the gauntlet. Hundreds of people
holding signs with a hodgepodge of names. Others seemingly milling about
because they had nothing better to do. Miraculously, the aforementioned
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Hotel Blue had provided a driver. As I scanned the exhausted faces I was
most certain I would be left in the lurch but there it was. The sign said,
“Andrews, Hotel Blue.” I scurried over like a moth to a flame.
The driver and I exchanged brief pleasantries and he introduced himself
as Tarun Kohli. He was a tall and lanky Indian guy, about 25, I guessed.
We weaved our way through the crowded terminal to the back parking lot.
On the way I grabbed a bottle of water from a vendor and before paying
glanced at my new lifeline as if to say, “Is this safe to drink?” His look of
bemusement said, “Would I really let you drink it if it wasn’t?” Little did
I know that this wouldn’t be the first or last time he’d look after me in the
coming month.
As we proceeded through the double doors a wave of heat hit me like
I’ve never felt before. It was hard to breathe and the humidity enveloped me.
It was 1 a.m. and the darkness only contributed to my disorientation. Cars
and motorbikes zigzagged in no discernible direction.
Tarun looked at me and shook his head.
“The biggest city in India and our airport looks like a fucking fish
market,” he said. “Delhi’s always Delhi.”
I looked at him slack-jawed and nodded.
It was a refrain that many more people would use to explain away the
absurdities of everyday Delhi life.
We navigated our way to the car where Tarun’s cohort awaited us. We
crammed the luggage into the car and headed to the Hotel Blue.
The ride there was fairly uneventful as we made small talk. The late
hour made it difficult to make out my surroundings. I was still holding out
hope that he had pegged me as a spoiled American. The American part was
correct, but the spoiled wasn’t. Was there a chance he had underestimated
my need for creature comforts? As we approached the Hotel Blue I noticed
a smattering of restaurants and shops in the vicinity. That was a good sign.
“Here we are,” Tarun said as a few people lurked in an alleyway smoking.
A few scraggly dogs emerged from the shadows. His eyes met mine. He
didn’t need to say anything. I was prepared for the worst and I wouldn’t be
disappointed.
A small rectangular sign emitted a bluish hue. His partner insisted
on lugging my suitcases up a dingy and decrepit staircase. Looks can be
deceiving, I thought. They weren’t. The landing at the top had a desk and a
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chair and a three-ring binder. This was the check-in. I glanced to the left.
There was an open door and what I would describe as a closet. A mattress
and a few sheets littered the floor.
“Don’t worry, that’s where he sleeps,” commented Tarun, motioning to
the poor chap who had just carried my luggage and was now attempting to
check me in. “Your room is around the corner.”
It was indeed. We crossed a “terrace” (described in Lonely Planet as
the place you go when you can’t stand your room anymore) and pushed
open a halfway-cracked door. My shoulders sagged and my heart sank. The
bedspread was full of holes. The pillows were stained. There was no fan or
air conditioner and it was 102 F. The floor was filthy. There was nothing
that could be described as a closet in the normal sense. The lock on the
door was broken and the shutters that opened onto the terrace didn’t close.
I was caught so off guard it took a moment to realize there was something
missing. The bathroom that was supposed to be in my room.
“Where is the bathroom?”
“Oh, it’s around the corner,” the check-in guy said. I hadn’t caught his
name up to this point and I figured there was no use learning it now.
Down a narrow hallway was a small vestibule. Inside was a grimy bucket,
a hose, and a dingy toilet. A bare light bulb hung over head. It looked like
somewhere you might torture people with jumper cables.
I took a step back towards the bedroom. My mind was racing. I was
supposed to stay here for a month and start work in a few days. It was 3 a.m.
I knew no one, especially not the two people I was standing here with now.
The streets were deserted. I’d hardly slept in two days and I was sweating
like a stuck pig. I contemplated jumping off the terrace. Screw the bags. It
was all replaceable. Make sure I had the credit card and book the first flight
home.
Tarun saw the wheels turning. He saw the panic and I’m assuming
he’d seen it before. He just shook his head laughing. He had predicted this
exactly.
“Dude, I can’t stay here, bro. What the hell am I supposed to do? I’m
supposed to be here for a month,” I said. “Look at this place! I didn’t sign
up for this!”
“Listen, man. Just stay here one night. Pass out and we’ll figure something
out in the morning. Just go to sleep and I’ll try to come by around 8 a.m.
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and we’ll go find something better. That’s five or six hours from now. That’s
the best I can do,” he said.
I sat on my suitcase and stared at the floor. All I wanted to do was unpack
my stuff and crash out for 24 hours straight. How could I do that in this rat
hole? And I met this guy an hour ago. This didn’t seem like the type of place
where they kept flawless records on who came and went. Who knew he
would come by in the morning? I may never see this guy again. This wasn’t
the Ritz. I got the feeling he didn’t even work at the hotel. I didn’t know
whether to cry, follow his suggestion, or flee. I decided on the universal
language. Begging. I felt like a pussy.
“I can’t stay here one night. I’m sorry, I just can’t. I’m so tired and just
want to sleep somewhere clean with a lock on the door. Please take me
somewhere else, I don’t care how much it is. I’ll figure it out later.”
Tarun put his hands on his hips and shook his head. The last thing he
wanted to do was drive around in the middle of the night looking for a place
for me to crash. Who was I, Joseph looking for an inn?
“Grab your stuff, let’s go,” he said. I couldn’t have been more ecstatic. We
headed to the check-in area and I figured the least I could do was leave a
few hundred rupees for the trouble. I also made sure to make a mental note
of my surroundings because I knew this is one place I’d never be returning
again.
We dragged my bags back down the staircase and into the vehicle we
had departed from less than an hour earlier. It was a bit awkward, but I
didn’t care.
“How did you know I wouldn’t last a night there?” I said.
“Because I’ve never seen anybody stay at that hotel who wasn’t a French
backpacker. Those people can stay anywhere. Once I saw you I knew you
didn’t have a chance,” said Tarun. I didn’t know whether to take that as a
compliment or insult.
He mentioned he was going to take me to a nicer place a bit farther out
of town. He could have said he was going to take me to Nigeria at that point
and I would have agreed. There was something trustworthy about him.
The new digs were a huge improvement. They actually resembled a
hotel. Not a nice hotel, but a hotel. It had a lobby and a fish tank! My room
had a couch, bed, fridge, TV, and bathroom. It was relatively clean. They
had room service. I looked at Tarun and couldn’t thank him enough.
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“Don’t worry about it. Stay as long as you like and we’ll figure out the
payment later. Here’s my card. I run a travel agency. I need to take off, but
call me tomorrow if you need anything. I’ll check in with the front desk
tomorrow and make sure you’re still alive,” he said. I offered him some cash
for the effort, but he refused.
He left and I ordered two Kingfishers. I sucked them down, bolted the
door, and passed out. I awoke about 10 hours later with the light piercing
my eyes. I peeled back the blinds and saw a street scene like no other.
Bikes, cows, cars, taxis, people, and poverty. It was time to attack the day.
I was scared. I washed, threw on some clothes, and headed downstairs. I
was organizing my backpack in the lobby when I glanced at a magazine
on the coffee table. It was a French gossip magazine. My friend was on the
cover. With Britney Spears. They were dating and had just been spotted in
St. Tropez. Delhi’s Delhi. I grabbed my pack and headed out into the great
unknown. I had been here less than 24 hours.
Ryan Andrews lived in New York City before moving to Hong Kong in
2007. He was born and raised in Michigan and earned an undergraduate
degree in journalism at Michigan State University. He has worked in
advertising and finance. In Hong Kong, he worked for Time Out magazine
while completing his master’s degree at the JMSC.
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Fall 2006
The Special One
Studies for an Exam
The woman in this story grew up in a typical Chinese family and
then became a “kaoyan” candidate, someone studying for the national
university graduate-school admission exam. She also was my best friend.
By Juliet Ye
She showed me her schedule. It was short, repetitive and demanding.
6:30: get up, eat
7:00: read in classroom or library
……
12:00: lunch
……
5: 30: dinner
That was it. I asked when she slept. That depended, she replied, on how
well things went according to her schedule.
Once a “celebrity” in the journalism department of Nanjing University,
Elaine Zheng had now graduated. The good old days had passed by like
summer clouds. A new, harder game – getting into graduate school – had
begun, and a reshuffling of priorities was needed.
“What if I were enrolled by Peking University four years ago,” she said
to me, meaning maybe all this studying would now be unnecessary, or at
least not as hard.
Four years ago, Elaine entered Nanjing University, though not with heart
and soul. She had not done herself justice in the undergraduate admission
exam, and the chance to go to her dream university in Beijing had been lost,
narrowly.
She was reluctant to recall that period of time. Pressure, great pressure
from all directions – parents, teachers, classmates, and her ego – split her
in two. On the examination days, she hardly consumed anything, except
some water.
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“Anyway, that was my thinnest time,” she said. “My weight at that time
never went over 90 pounds.”
On that note, her spirits rose a little. She smiled and joked that if anything
was worth cherishing, it was her weight.
So she had gone to Nanjing, but continued to think of that university in
Beijing.
It had been her dream since childhood. When I visited her family in
Fujian, a province in the southern part of China, I was drawn to a big map
on the wall of her bedroom.
It was yellow with age. She told me it was bought and put up on the
first day of her junior high school. In the first class, her headmaster, a slim
but vigorous old lady, invited several graduates then studying in prestigious
universities around the country to give new students a welcoming speech.
Among all the successful stories, she was most impressed by one diligent
country boy from Peking University.
“That’s what I want, I told myself immediately,” she told me.
Her parents, who both work in the Bureau of Cultural Affairs in her
hometown, showed great approval for her ambition. Her 47-year-old
father insisted that she be the first in their neighborhood to go to a famous
university. And she was always an excellent student in eyes of the neighbors,
who were almost all civil-servant colleagues of her parents.
“I am the pride of my parents, and I have to try always being a special
one.”
Elaine’s father was a mostly silent man. He seldom chatted with her
about her friends. He didn’t even often hug his wife and daughter. He liked
reading, and usually spent his weekends fishing with colleagues. A typical
Chinese father – that is how Elaine described him.
On the other hand, Elaine’s mother was quite active. Before her transfer
to the Bureau of Cultural Affairs, she was a Peking Opera actress. She took
night classes for accounting and then learned interior decoration. In Elaine’s
eyes, her mother was a “Superwoman”. Her mother once told Elaine that
she was an outstanding student before she left school to pursue her acting
career, but that her dream at that time was to go to university in Beijing. For
her mother’s generation, Beijing was not only a big city, but the great capital
of their great motherland. Clearly, I thought, I had just found the root of
Elaine’s dream.
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“We talk a lot and quarrel all the time,” Elaine said about her mother.
“She is sort of a control freak.”
I was astonished to hear these words from the girl standing in front of
me, and even more to know that she actually had a better relationship with
her father. But then I thought that sometimes moms and daughters have a
kind of love-hate relationship, maybe because they are sometimes so alike.
Elaine very much resembled her mother. And, in her friends’ eyes, Elaine
too was a “Superwoman.”
I felt that way. She was always the shining star during our university
days.
***
Six months ago, to her friends’ wonder, Elaine decided to apply for a
master’s degree in the journalism department of Peking University. Her
bachelor degree in journalism from Nanjing University would have been
good enough for a decent job.
“I am obsessed with the idea,” she murmured. “Maybe it is a romantic
thing deep in my heart.”
The decision meant that she would become a “kaoyan,” a student studying
for the national graduate-school admission exam, and that suddenly
became a fashion with many on our campus at Nanjing. There were clues
everywhere: in the canteen, the library, and even the washing room. Elaine
said she saw a girl reciting English vocabulary words in the toilet.
“People just rush to it at the beginning, and few can persist to the end,”
Elaine said. “Only 7 out of 100 will be able to pass the exam.”
She would shiver when she said such things, but she also found ways to
cheer herself up. She took the idiom, “He laughs best who laughs best,” and
changed it to “She laughs best who laughs last.” She did not consider herself
a feminist, but she told me, “That sounds better.”
She felt like a devout pilgrim, proceeding in an uneven way towards her
Holy Land. She finished an internship within one month – it was supposed
to last for four months. And she rented a shabby place near campus, to give
her some more time reading English.
“Once I take this road, I can never turn back.”
***
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Later, to prepare even more for the exams, she moved to Beijing. She
shared an apartment of no more than 30 square meters with three other girls
just off the Peking University campus. It was said that those who lived near
the university were more likely to get information leaked “unintentionally”
by professors.
Located at the end of a row of bungalows, the apartment was one of the
hundreds aimed at students like her – the “kaoyan” people. Two shared one
small room and all four used one toilet. It had no kitchen.
One larger room had been partitioned into two, so only one side had
a window while the other featured a wardrobe. The four girls drew lots to
decide who got which. She got a room with a mid-sized window. Looking
out, she got a worm’s-eye view of passers-by. Yes, her apartment was in the
basement.
The room she shared with another girl was dark and dank. A set of bunk
beds and an old desk were the only amenities. Without a balcony, the girls
had to hang dry and wet clothes together. They usually kept the window
closed for both safety and sanity. Gusts of cooking smells from a kitchen
one floor above filled the room.
When asked whether she could have smelled that, she smiled slightly.
“Of course, but I got used to it quickly. It seems every sense of mine except
vision degenerated. I guess it was to make myself more concentrated in
reading.”
A shelter for a dog – that was the impression the room gave visitors. Like
Elaine, the other three girls usually left to study at 6 a.m. and came back at
11 p.m. “Nobody spared any time on cleaning,” she said. “Time on study is
counted by seconds.”
***
On the day of the exam, held at the classroom where Elaine had been
studying, she arrived shortly after 7 a.m. and went directly to her habitual
seat – the one in a corner of the room where she would not be interrupted
by people getting up and down now and then to go to the bathroom.
Gradually, others arrived and she could feel the tension rising. Many
seemed to be giving a last-minute look at some political materials, hoping
that they might run into a point that would appear on the test.
Occasionally, someone would look up and gaze around, but when their
eyes met someone else’s they would look away. The tension kept rising.
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Suddenly, some administrators came in and …it was time….
The test lasted all day. But for Elaine, it was all a concentrated blur – and
then freedom.
“When I finished the last word, I was not sure whether there was a
difference between a period and a full stop,” she said a day later. “But then I
also felt like I had undergone a complete metamorphosis.”
She was always amazed by the process of a caterpillar changing into a
butterfly. Now she understood it by having experienced it herself. Basically
they are the same, the ugly caterpillar and the beautiful butterfly. The
inner part of the two is the same. The past 24 hours would never leave her
memory.
“I never felt as tired as I did yesterday,” she said. “The moment I went
out of the examining room, my legs felt like jelly. I was hoping that someone
could have come and held me tight for a few seconds. Just a few seconds.”
She walked out of the classroom alone. Without checking answers with
other candidates. Without waiting for her roommates. She just wanted to
be alone for a while, or to stay calm until she got back to her small cubicle. I
understood that. She was never the kind of girl who cried in front of others.
The only time I saw her eyes red-rimmed was when her debate team lost the
championship at Nanjing.
Everything seemed to go well until she ran into one of her friends at the
school gate. She broke into tears in front of her without saying anything.
“That was the first time in my life. I am tired, terribly tired.”
The night after the exam, she went to bed earlier, expecting to fall asleep
quickly and soundly. But she found herself cold sober and thinking until
midnight. What am I going to do tomorrow when I wake up? She kept
asking herself that until finally, utterly exhausted, she dropped into sleep.
Only two days before, she had struggled to stay awake and read and
remember as much as possible. Then, and every night before for the last
several months, she had not allowed herself to sleep until three in the
morning. And then, the moment she was in bed, she played “films” in her
mind – movies about math formulas, English words, and political terms
reeled through her eyes, one after another. If they did so in good order, she
took it to be a signal that she had “absorbed” what she had revised during
the day. Sometimes, she would not fall asleep until the day began to break.
“I would get up and pick up my books, going through the materials I
revised in the day time.” She gave a name to this process: re-revise.
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The night before the exam, she forced herself to try and get some sleep.
But once set, the body clock is hard to switch. She closed her eyes, and her
mind began the “re-revising” process automatically. So she opened her eyes.
Why not try counting numbers? One, two, three…a hundred and ten, nine
hundred and ten, nine hundred and eleven…she kept counting into the
thousands and found herself wide awake. Forget it. What are Dad and Mom
doing? Of course, in deep sleep! Or maybe they are up and about, worrying
about the exams tomorrow? Do they have every confidence in me? Oh,
God. What if I fail? Maybe I should have worked in the first place. Oh, God!
I have turned down bunches of good offers. How stupid I was. Would they
still give me offers if I go to them now? Maybe not….
She fell asleep long enough to be awakened by the ringing of her alarm
clock and to be stirred from a good dream, in which she was dressed in
a suit and had an important job in a company. She took that as a good
sign. She had formed a habit during the past several months. A worship of
signals. She believed that people need some “supernatural” power to push
themselves ahead. “You don’t have to really believe it. Just make yourself
believe that you believe it.”
***
Several days after the exam, she telephoned her Mom. They chatted a
little bit about the weather in Beijing, and how things were at home. Neither
said a word about the exam.
Silence. Silence for several seconds.
Her mother broke the ice first. “Come home? It is too cold in Beijing.”
Elaine did not know whether she should “accept the invitation” or stay
until she got the results. And so she said nothing.
“Dear, we can wait for the results together. No matter what it is.”
Elaine could not hold back her tears any longer. She went home the next
day.
It did not take long for Elaine to get the admission letter from Peking
University. She had gotten the highest mark among all the candidates on
the graduate-admissions exam.
She called me yesterday from Beijing. Not much to tell, for there wasn’t
much to do in school, she said. She has more time to do things she wants,
and to read books and watch movies.
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“I now spend more time thinking about what I am going to do in the
coming days,” she said, “and this time I want to make decisions of mine by
myself.”
Juliet Ye graduated from Nanjing University in 2006 and got her
JMSC master’s a year later. She joined the Wall Street Journal Asia in
Hong Kong, where she writes about China’s technology industries. She also
contributes to the Journal’s China Real Time Report. In her spare time, she
enjoys reading, dancing and travelling.
103
Fall 2002
Wondering and Wandering
in the Death Camps
My trip to the death camps was the most compelling experience I had in
Europe. I wrote about it from two perspectives: my walk through the camps
and my unknown family history. Combining two seemingly dissimilar
topics was a method we studied in the Literary Journalism class. I think it
makes both stories stronger.
By Joshua Bains
The quiet little Polish town was a long way from Krakow. On the surface,
it reminded me of ordinary towns I might see back home. Stray dogs, front
yards cluttered with debris, modest homes for average people. But this
was a town with a burden like no other, a place permanently cursed by the
wickedness of what men once did here.
Locals certainly understood why the tourists came, but walking down
the street I sensed a vague enmity from some of the people I passed. My
very foreign presence reminded them of their infamous place in history.
I came to a set of train tracks. Just like the tracks down the street from my
home in southern California. I stepped between the railings and continued
on across splintered railroad ties. For minutes I stared at a point in front
of my feet, absorbed in the journey, focusing on the cadence of my boots
against the ties.
I had set out to explore Europe and myself. As I walked down those
aging tracks, a plea from my mother still rang in my ears. Before I left, she
asked me to look for the place her own mother might have been born. To
find anything that proved she once lived, aside from her ashes, which have
long rested in an urn at a cemetery near Los Angeles.
Given what little we know, I told her it would be an impossible
mission.
Her name was Farla Goldman, and she was born somewhere in England
on April 7, 1908. With her parents, she emigrated from Britain to Montreal
when she was eight years old. She met my grandfather, Russell Brenner, in
New York, and my mom was born in Scarsdale on December 3, 1946.
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My grandfather may have had a falling-out in business back east. Russell
had managed hotels in New York and then decided to start a new life by
settling with his wife and my mom in Altadena, southern California.
He went into real estate. It was a high-profile profession, and that was
fine for my grandmother who enjoyed being social, posing for cameras in
bathing suits, and hosting school functions for my mom’s classes in their
giant backyard in Altadena.
But one thing may have suffered at the expense of Russell’s business,
and that was her religion. Farla was Jewish. My mom still remembers the
menorah, long lost now, that her mother would light once a year and set
atop the piano. She never practiced avidly, possibly to help my grandfather’s
professional image, but her ancestors, somewhere back in England and God
knows where else, were Jewish.
***
Aside from my mother, nothing connects me to Farla in my own life as
strongly as this Jewish heritage. Growing up in California, mom always told
me I was Jewish even though she didn’t know anything about the religion.
What she did know was the holocaust, and as soon as I was old
enough, somewhere around the seventh grade, she started showing me
documentaries she had taped for me years earlier depicting the British
liberation of the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau. Mom
would always remind me that one of my relatives might well have been
killed there, but of course we had no way of knowing.
Farla started getting sick sometime before 1959. Money was thin so
she put off going to the doctor. When she did go, it was found she had
uncontrollable breast cancer. My grandfather took her in and out of hospitals
for two years and spent what money he had to keep her alive. Farla died on
May 6, 1961. My mother was 14 years old.
Russell was terrified of raising his daughter alone. He didn’t know what
to do with her, so he just let her do what she wanted. She would scream at
him. She would yell that she hated him. He would never reprimand her and
rarely spoke of Farla.
At the house in Altadena there was a long front yard. When mom was in
college and dating my dad, she would wait for him by the street where her
father couldn’t see. More than once my dad remembers driving her home
at night, watching her cry in the passenger seat. He would always ask her
what was wrong.
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“I miss my mom,” she would say.
Once they were married, my parents drove to visit Russell at the house in
Altadena. Strangers were ambling around the front yard. Bewildered, mom
jumped out of the car. It was a sale. Almost everything Farla had owned lay
on the ground at her feet getting rummaged by strangers. She rushed around
the grass with my dad, grabbing what was left of her mother’s possessions.
My grandfather didn’t mind her taking them; he was surprised they meant
anything to her.
Russell didn’t think about the past. Partly because of that my mom and I
know very little about our own. Mom still cries sometimes when she thinks
about her mother, how little she knew her, and how much she missed
growing up without her.
My mom has epilepsy. Sometimes she has petit mal seizures and her
whole body freezes. In those moments mom says she senses Farla speaking
to her. She can never make anything out and because she is paralyzed she
can’t say something back. But if she could communicate with her mother I
wonder what she would hear, what she would discover about herself, and
how it would change her life. Today my mom is a solitary woman. She is
very different from the person my grandmother would have raised her to
be.
When I left home to trek alone for the first time in Europe, my mom
wondered what I might learn about where we had come from. As I plodded
across the railroad ties in Poland listening to the sound of my boots against
that storied wood, I knew I had arrived at a place that might provide some
clues to our family’s past.
Looking down, I became engrossed with the image of the train track
stretching relentlessly into the landscape. It was spring and the trees were
green. No sounds, except for birds that flapped through the air and roosted
on swaying branches. Suddenly I saw a dead dog splayed between the rails.
I jumped. The eyes were gone and its jowls hung open with what seemed
a grin. Its belly was shredded; a stench filled my nostrils. I stepped over it.
Flies buzzed against my trousers. I felt strange, and began to imagine the
flies that gorged themselves on the endless cattle cars of flesh brought down
these tracks just 60 years before.
Finally I could see buildings to my left. I turned, and there was
Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. I had only seen it in photographs or on
black and white films my mom and I watched like home movies from a
different dimension.
***
106
It was real. The epic killing place that in some distant way connected
me to my family. After a lifetime of being a faraway witness to its evils and
history I now had the stunning experience of standing beneath its gate; a
macabre portal that ushered in my lost ancestors with the German moniker
arbeit macht frei, urging them to find freedom through endless physical
labor. Usually within three months of brutal torture and deprivation what
they found was the cruelest of deaths.
I walked into the compound preserved for history in this little town of
Oswiecim. The landscape and the buildings felt benign. Restored barracks
were flanked by rows of trees. A stout electric fence line was surrounded by
quiet countryside and distant houses could be seen clearly through the mist
of early morning.
The images my mother had shown me came back instantly: people clad
in ragged striped uniforms crushed together in a single bunk; walking
skeletons staring blankly – almost soulless; bulldozers filling unmarked pits
with bent and crumpled bodies made of skin-wrapped bones with black
eye holes and wilted genitalia; starved remains that on the television screen
looked like rubber, scarcely human.
And then this: A woman who preferred death grabbed the electric fence
before the guards had time to shoot. Her head hangs back, her mouth is
gaping. Electrocution forced her fingers into a permanent contraction
around the wire and the skin is still smoking, soldered to the barbs, keeping
her swaying body hanging lifeless in my mind.
I walked past the fence with arching concrete posts and through the
rows of buildings. I knew that each had a million stories.
At the rear of the camp near the gas chamber and crematorium is the SS
police compound. Inside, a concrete room with closet-sized booths held up
to five prisoners, squeezed together for days at a time. When their legs gave
out, there was no room to fall. This torture was used as a punishment by
the SS guards. Most prisoners who arrived here were killed; they were shot
outside in an alley against the Black Wall, where bullet holes still remain.
Inside this building ran a long hallway covered with hundreds of
photographs. Portraits taken of prisoners when they first arrived in
Auschwitz, not yet beaten, starved and broken, not yet gassed. I saw black
and white mug shots of small children, sons, daughters, wives and husbands
(the elderly were killed on arrival). The portraits covered the bone-white
halls of the building from chest level to ceiling.
107
I stared into their faces and found real people. Some were smiling. People
who seemed just like the ones I passed in the street everyday. Gazes that
felt familiar. There were attractive young women I could imagine taking
to a movie alone, and confident young men I might be proud to name as
friends. There were photographs of glamorous women who reminded me
of my grandmother. There were photographs of people who looked like my
own parents.
For a long time I stood in that hallway. Watching the faces and wondering
who these people were and what stories they had to tell. So many stories
and so many people now locked in frames forever – every single one of
them was killed.
***
Down the tracks from Auschwitz is Birkenau, the largest of all Nazi
concentration camps, also known as Auschwitz II. Here prisoners were
driven off the trains and selected by the camp doctors for work or for
death.
I walked along the road those condemned to die had taken. I stood in the
grove of trees where they waited, unknowingly, to be stripped and herded
into the large, dark concrete chambers and asphyxiated – hundreds at a
time, thousands a day. Their bodies were burned and the ashes thrown into
a pond by the woods where they had stood alive less than thirty minutes
before.
Here was modern history’s greatest death machine, surrounded by
trees, birds and grass. From my vantage point even the ten-foot electric
fence seemed benign. But I knew what happened here. I stood alone under
branches near the rubble of a gas chamber by the pond with drifting ashes.
It seemed the dead were speaking in that place. I stared at the trees, unable
to move. All the suffering of humanity penetrated my heart. I cried.
Headstones marking mass graves are scattered throughout the camp.
At every grave, where thousands are buried, four slabs etched in English,
Hebrew, Polish, and German say:
In memory of the men, women, and children who died in the
Nazi holocaust.
Your lives are not forgotten. May your souls rest in peace.
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I asked a woman volunteer at Auschwitz why she decided to spend her
time giving tours of the death camp. She told me her father had been killed
there. She felt a responsibility to tell others his story, and the stories of three
million other Jews who died behind its gates between 1941 and 1944.
If my grandmother had lived longer, perhaps I too would have a family
tale from Auschwitz. For now, all I can do is search the records to find my
ancestors and never forget those black and white faces in the hallway.
Someday, I may find one who looks like me.
After taking the Literary Journalism class, Joshua Bains attended his
first Passover at a Hong Kong synagogue. The rabbi suggested he go to
Israel, which Bains did after graduating. Over three years, he learned
about Judaism in Yeshivas Bircas HaTorah while covering the Middle
East for the Jerusalem Post and InfoLiveTV. In 2008, with help from the
London rabbinical court, he found his grandmother’s birth records.
109
Spring 2010
The Outer Limits
of Technology
At the heart of this story are three friends. One lost, one never met, and
one that wonders. This story is dedicated to Dave and Kirstin, two of the
three. Wherever you are, I hope you are well.
By Christy Choi
Enter any college dorm and you’re greeted by a symphony of electronic
beeps echoing through the hallways. The beeps signal hundreds of
conversations happening simultaneously across cyberspace. This is how my
generation communicates.
Those of us born in the mid-1980s are at the cusp of the millennial
generation. We are cyborg-like in our inextricable connection with
technology. Our identities were forged at the same time as Facebook,
YouTube and Twitter; LOLspeak and other net lingo are a seamless part of
our vocabulary.
We test the limits of technology daily, speaking to friends across oceans,
time and space. It’s an ongoing joke among friends far away that someone in
Hong Kong is speaking from the future to someone in Tampa, Florida. The
Internet also makes for some unlikely and sometimes strong connections.
Meet Dave, a sophomore at Rutgers University in New Jersey in the U.S.,
a tall, gangly Korean kid in a Bears Volleyball sweatshirt. He lived about
eight to ten hours by car from Duke University in North Carolina, where
I studied. We became friends, despite the distance, and despite the fact we
never met.
Technology made our friendship possible. I came to know him through
all those communication tools and methods available to the 21st Century
child: mobile phones, instant messaging, email, blog posts, etcetera. I made
his acquaintance through a mutual friend, Kirstin, my freshman-year
neighbor and Dave’s Model United Nations buddy.
During my first year of college, the lack of rustling and scraping and
general human noise in my dorm room used to plunge me into homesickness.
110
My favorite form of escape was to walk out my door and into Kirstin’s room.
She and her roommate Katie were great fun, and I could always count on
them to help chase away the blues.
The day I “met” Dave was no different. After class, I dropped my bags off
in my room and made a beeline for the “two Ks”. Kirstin’s bed was closest to
the door, and I could hear her chatting away on the phone before I walked
inside. She sat on her bed, blonde hair tousled, wearing black leggings and
a grey Bears Volleyball sweatshirt she had borrowed from Dave over the
summer.
I’d been hearing about Dave for a while now. Smart, charming, a
dreamer and a pro with the guitar, he’d made an impression on her at the
UN conference. He had a soft spot for blondes and the Queen’s English.
Both were huge anglophiles, art lovers and wonks.
“Hey, Dave,” she says with a wink in my direction. “You should meet
my friend Christy. She’s from Hong Kong and has a British accent, but she’s
Korean like you.”
“Yeah, really.”
“No kidding.”
Kirsten’s words make it clear he didn’t believe her, so she hands me the
phone. I don’t remember what I said.
“Oh, NO WAY!” he replies in a rich, raspy voice. “That’s so hot.”
I like him immediately.
Dave is a hoot. He makes me laugh so hard. You should see some of the
ridiculous faces he pulls in photographs. He tells the best stories too. There’s
one in particular that never fails to crack me up.
It begins in Louisiana, where they make a hot sauce called the “ass-reaper.”
Made of habanero peppers, African oleoresin, Scotch bonnet peppers and
other equally acerbic substances, the “ass-reaper” does a number on your
digestive tract.
The story then jumps to a regular Sunday night at Rutgers. While some
scramble to finish their assignments, the early-risers are heading to bed.
But on this seemingly normal evening, the ass-reaper found its way into the
dorm of one Dave Young.
He tells it best, so I’ll leave this part to an excerpt from his online diary
that week:
111
The night took a fateful turn for the twisted and the disturbed, when I
decided to take up a dare from one of the guys who lives in the dorm.
The dare was to drink a bottle of hot sauce, made specially in
Louisiana, called “ass reaper.” Yes, like the grim reaper, but with your
ass.
Needless to say, I did it.
Soon thereafter, I also ate about 4 pieces of bread, drank 3 cartons of
milk, a couple of bottles of water, a nutrigrain bar. Minutes after that, I
proceeded to hurl in the bathroom three successive times.
Not to get too graphic, but let me tell you, hot sauce isn’t only hot on
the way down.
But I did make a cool $150 from about an hour of sheer misery, thus
begging the question – was it worth it?
Well, purely from a fiscal standpoint, it paid off, no pun intended. I
mean I drank the bottle in about 5 seconds for 150 bucks, which translates
into a rate of $1,800 per min, or $108,000 an hour. On the other hand,
would I do this for a living? That is to say, if someone were willing to
pay me, $108,000, would I be able to drink this stuff for an hour? HELL
NO. Heck, I wouldn’t be able to last the minute to make the $1,800. As a
matter of fact, I’m not sure if I’d even do this once more to make another
buck fifty.
It wasn’t entirely about the money though. I think every once in a
while, the id compels us, by “us” i mean the male gender, to do stupid shit
so that we’ll have something to laugh about and so that we’ll be able to
make fun of each other like a bunch of 6 year olds.
Classic Dave: able to make a make a philosophical treatise out of
anything.
He is in fact a philosophy major, and so I suppose that intensity of thought
comes with the territory. But he really has a talent for philosophizing. All
our conversations seem to end up with some rumination on love, the
purpose of life, and human nature. Kirstin, Dave and I had these three-way
conversations on AIM, our instant messenger of choice.
A favorite topic was the future. Reams of computer code log our hours
of conversations for weeks and months. We were dreamers, the three of us.
Entering college, we all had so much we wanted to do, but we were being
dealt more obstacles than we had imagined.
112
As high-school students, we’re fed this image that college is meant to
be perfect. It’s this place where your mind is constantly stimulated and
where you’re surrounded by people who are passionate about what they do,
and a place where you find your people. It’s where you’re supposed make
that transition into making your impact in the world, whether humble or
grand.
What they don’t print in the admissions brochure is that, while all of the
above are true, the same passionate people can also be myopic, your mind
can be over-stimulated and the same place easily turns itself into a festering
cesspool of knowledge. As for your people, well, they’re not always found so
easily, and those dreams of impact, they can often stay just that – dreams.
So when you find someone that you can relate with, that spurs you on to
achieve your dreams, you hold on, no matter how far away they are.
Dave and Kirstin were my fellow dream-chasers.
Dave thought about working for the UN or going into the judiciary.
Kirstin secretly wanted to be a curator, not a doctor. I wanted to be a marine
biologist and journalist who carried on with her art on the side.
All three of us were incurable romantics. We used to talk about the
people we’d meet and marry, and all the traveling we would do. London,
Paris, Florence. I wanted to own a small apartment in major cities across
the world where my friends and fellow travelers could stay for free. Of
course, they were always welcome. We talked about visiting one another:
Pittsburgh, New Brunswick (or New York, he preferred), and Hong Kong.
We each played devil’s advocate, cheerleader, teacher, guidance counselor,
and surrogate family – scolding, cajoling, and encouraging one another to
get to the root of what we wanted. Laying the foundations for what would
later be our life paths.
Dave became like my surrogate brother in the U.S. He was the person
I went running to when I was upset, when I wanted someone with more
experience than me to tell me where I was going wrong. He was the person
I could trust to make me smile.
But these dreams we spun needed to be grounded in a reality, and so
our conversations became less and less frequent, as we worked to achieve
the ideas we set spinning. We didn’t spend as much time online discussing.
While we supported one another, it was time for action, not talk. Our paths
started to diverge.
113
I started working at the school newspaper, started a life-and-culture
magazine, attended lectures on microeconomics and helped out backstage
at several theatre productions.
Kirstin finally declared an art history major, and spent a great deal
of time memorizing the works of Dutch masters, and waxing lyrical on
theories of postmodernism.
And Dave… well, I don’t know what he’s been up to lately. I imagine
reading up on more theories of ethics to apply in the policy world. Running
around busily, the same as us. But it’s hard to know when you’re caught up
in your own world, and the other person is half a continent away.
November 10, 2004. The air is crisp, with a hint of winter. But the North
Carolina sunshine still lingers and warms the skin. My room is flooded with
it. Lucy, my roommate, and I chose the room because of the big windows.
The light blue tiles of the floor are flickering with the shadows of the leaves
of the big tree outside. It’s peaceful, and the respite is welcome. I’ve been
running around all day from one commitment to another.
Collapsing on the floor, I think to myself: what would be perfect right
now is a phone call with Dave. It’s always relaxing talking to him. We
can talk about everything and anything that’s on our minds, no pressure
whatsoever.
For the first time in weeks, I give him a call, and it goes straight to
voicemail.
“Hi, it’s Dave, please leave a message.”
I leave one.
Later on that night, I’m sitting on Lucy’s bed distracting her with
ridiculous renditions of “Baa baa, black sheep” in mandarin.
“Hey, Luce, I called Dave today, but it went straight to voicemail, and he
hasn’t replied yet. It’s strange. He’s usually so prompt.”
“I’m sure he’s just busy,” she reassures me. “You’ve been busy yourself.”
“Hmmm, I guess so. I’ll give him another call later. I haven’t seen him
online in ages as well.”
I walk over to my computer and check. He’s not online.
“Dave, it’s Christy, I haven’t heard from you in a while. Please call when
you get the chance.”
114
I head to bed.
November 11, 2004 is another beautiful day, but still no word from Dave.
Between classes, I text, then call, then text and leave another message. It is
really unlike him to be unresponsive.
Terrible thoughts go through my head, but I push them out and get on
with the day. But returning to a quiet room mid-afternoon, I can’t ignore
them. I sit down at my desk, and give the mouse a shake. My Dell starts up
with a noisy whirr.
No, nothing is wrong. I reassure myself. You always worry, but your
worries never turn out to be real. He’s probably just lost his phone or
something. Check, he’ll be online right now, saying what an idiot he was for
dropping his phone in beer playing beirut.
I check the AIM buddy list. No, not online. Email. Nothing. Facebook.
There’s that goofy expression, teeth bared, eyes closed and singing to his
guitar. Yes, that goofball, he’s probably just done something ridiculous with
his phone.
Then, on his wall:
“It just isn’t fair. I can’t believe you’re gone.”
“Heaven just got a whole lot cooler buddy. I bet you’re up laughing
with the Big Guy, getting all those questions you had answered.”
“Dave I’m going to miss you so much.”
Tributes and messages from friend after friend. I am shaking. I have no
idea what happened. I don’t know any of his friends aside from Kirstin.
Oh. God.
Maybe Kirstin doesn’t know. We’re so far away.
Numb with shock, I make my way down the hall. Not wanting to bring
her the bad news.
She’s in.
“Kirstin,” I choke back the tears. “Dave’s gone. Did you know?”
“Yes.”
As she says this, her face is like stone. Uncannily like one of those marble
sculptures she studies.
She didn’t tell me.
115
I can’t believe she didn’t tell me. “I knew Dave, too,” I wanted to yell at
her. “We didn’t know one another in the conventional sense of the word, but
I knew him too.” But I was frozen.
I walk away, shocked, then so, so, angry.
Back in my room, I message her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Silence.
People deal with grief in different ways, but to stay silent and ignore it?
The shaking becomes convulsions. Big, fat salty drops fall, and they keep
falling until my eyes feel like husks.
There are still boundaries that technology cannot cross. Things it
cannot do. It will not tell you when something precious has slipped from
your grasp. It cannot hold you and rock you back and forth. It will not
pray with you to ease your heartbreak. Only skin can feel the pressure from
your fingertips as you cling crying and understand your sorrow. Only those
physically present can.
Yet, technology gave me the answers Kirstin was not willing to. I scoured
his diary, looked through his blogrings and messaged a friend he spoke of
often – Ian. He told me this:
Dave died of a heart attack at 20.
On October 4, 2004, his best friend Roy found him in the garage of
their house, slumped over the wheel of a car, the engine turned on. He had
been complaining of heartburn all week, and was on his way to buy PeptoBismol.
Where I’m going I’m not sure
Who knows what the next day brings
Every step can lead to new paths taken
Every smile to a new love found
The things I thought were so damn precious
Don’t matter anymore
I’m gone
I hear that London’s nice this time of year
Maybe I’ll stay for a week or two
Or a month or a year or maybe forever
There’s no reason to ever look back
Don’t worry, I’ll leave a long trail
Of crumbs for you to follow
116
Six years have passed since Dave died, and somehow he still leaves me
crumbs – little reminders of his existence. Songs he wrote pop up on iTunes
and books he recommended demand to be read. Even Facebook reminds
that we haven’t talked in a while – it’s often during times when I could really
use his advice, when I need his support. Those lyrics above are from a song
he wrote. They are strangely relevant.
Writing this piece, I went back to his blog, scoured entries I’d never read
before to remind myself of what happened. Among the lyrics and stories, I
also found his sister’s blog.
She wrote about his funeral, and reading it six years later still makes me
cry. But there’s a part that gives me solace. At the time, all I could do was
send flowers. I sent sunflowers. It seemed a woefully inadequate gesture.
But reading her appreciation of the love they represented made me feel they
had done their job. I felt he wanted me to read it. To let me know they had
helped.
As time passes, the original crumbs are disappearing. The Facebook
posts are now gone. The message from his friend Ian, who told me the
details of his death, deleted. Most of our emails are gone. Joanna hasn’t
written an entry in a while.
But I’m confident Dave’s left me a long trail. We haven’t tested the outer
limits. Our dialogue continues.
Christy Choi graduated from Duke in 2007. She worked at the League
of Conservations Voters (2006) and the Institute for Governance and
Sustainable Development in Washington DC (2007). While pursuing
her master’s at the JMSC, she was a curator at CAIS, a contemporary
art gallery in Hong Kong. In the summer of 2010, she won a reporting
internship at the Phnom Penh Post.
117
Spring 2004
Dreams
of Memories Lost
I’ve dreamed many dreams since I was small, but never so vividly as
during my father’s sick days. Those dreams have kept me close to him,
helped me through each phase, and led me to reconcile his last days. I
dedicate this to my father, who loved me and created the writer in me.
By Mabel Sieh
It was a weird dream I had after I learned the news.
I was ten years old again. A little girl with long hair bundled in two
braids, one on each side. You were young, tall and thin, and always in your
white shirt and grey trousers. The scene was our old flat in Hong Kong
before we moved to Canada. It was on the top floor in a post-war building
with no lift. I hid myself in the antique Chinese wardrobe, peeking through
the crack between wooden doors covered with carvings of cherry blossoms.
I saw the back of you, slowly walking away. You were about to go to work. My
heart was beating fast; I was a watch wound tight by fear. I knew danger was
outside, waiting for you. I did not know what to do. I had to do something.
As you stepped outside, I dashed from the wardrobe and held you tightly.
Hey, what’s the matter? Where were you all morning?
Don’t go outside. Stay home with me, Daddy. Don’t go.
Don’t be silly. I have to work. Go on and play.
There was no way that I could persuade you to stay home. You left.
Without you knowing, I followed. I did not know what to do. I had to do
something.
You were walking up the street. I ran up and dragged you to the other
side. I knew something terrible was around the corner. You dismissed me
and let go of my hands, and walked on by yourself. I stood there, crying
inside. Two men appeared at the corner; one held a long knife. You were
stabbed until you dropped. After the men left, I ran up and held you,
covered in blood, and shouted for help. I knew this was going to happen;
there was nothing I could do.
118
When the news came about my Dad’s condition, it took the family by
surprise. I searched on the Internet for the meaning.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia (a
brain disorder that seriously affects a person’s ability to carry out daily
activities) among older people. It involves the parts of the brain that
control thought, memory, and language. Although scientists are learning
more every day, right now they still do not know what causes AD, and
there is no cure.
At the beginning, I kept looking for information. I wanted to know more.
I imagined if I knew more, I could do something. But this was not true. The
more I looked, the more I was surrounded by feelings of helplessness and
hopelessness.
The television was showing Hong Kong news.
I was sitting next to you. You were sitting in your automatic chair, your
hands clutching its velvet arms, your eyes fixated on the screen. I could not
tell if you were watching.
Before you fell ill, you watched the Hong Kong news every day. When I
visited, you sometimes asked me “odd” questions, like what I thought of the
Hong Kong government. I would get annoyed because I had nothing to say
about the government. After 21 years in Canada, you were still concerned
about what happened in Hong Kong. Which made me wonder – were it not
for us, would you have left Hong Kong?
I was holding your hand, the hand that used to give me warmth and
strength, now passively holding mine. We sat there quietly, watching the
news together. All of a sudden, you turned to look at me. As clear as crystal,
you said,
Mee Bao, Mee Bao, you’ve come. Why did you come all the way from Hong
Kong? It’s so far away!
I could not speak. A stone was sinking slowly to the bottom of my heart,
as I thought of what mom had told me when I arrived, that you were only
able to say one or two words now. My eyes blurred.
And I longed to hear you call my name, every year. You said it in your
own special way – Mee Bao – your version of Cantonese, influenced by
Mom and mixed with your own Mandarin dialect. Hearing my name was
my proof – you were still here, you still remembered – that you still loved
me.
That was the last time I heard you speak my name.
***
119
There is no way we can compare diseases. Is cancer worse than an eating
disorder? Is losing an arm better than losing your memory? To compare
them is meaningless. People with different medical conditions suffer in
their own ways.
And you suffered.
Before, you were an articulate person. You liked to express your
opinions, which could sometimes be strong. I missed your voice, and
its determination. You liked to write. You kept a diary. Since I was little,
I saw you writing in your diary in your study. You had an ink pen. Your
handwriting was beautiful. I never told you I had picked up your habit and
kept my journal.
You liked to eat and cook. You spent a lot of time in the kitchen. Your
breakfast could take a few hours, because you had more than one breakfast.
First, it was milk and bread. Second, it was Chinese congee. Then, a fried
egg sandwich with orange juice. And finally, a homemade mixed-rice soup
called “eight treasures” (my favorite). We always teased you by asking if you
had finished your breakfast yet. Every Chinese New Year, you would make
the most delicious dumplings, homemade from the pastry, and in such
quantity it would take a few weeks and gifts to neighbours to finish them.
When you fell ill, everything was lost.
In the last year, you had no appetite; eating became a major challenge.
In the morning, Mom would cut the bread into the tiniest little pieces, and
add a special powder to turn liquid into solid chunks, so you could swallow
without choking. The feeding would take a few hours, but it was only one
breakfast.
Your study room was idle, your desk empty. I picked up a calendar in the
living room once, and saw my name in your handwriting. And telephone
numbers in Hong Kong. Ancient drawings in a cave they were, a forgotten
language.
You seldom talked. Sometimes I could hear your frustrated sounds
when you tried to find a word to fit your thoughts, or to trace a thought out
of your mouth. The last few years of home visits gave brutal witness of your
deterioration. Each year I heard you say less. From a paragraph to a few
sentences, to a few words, to sounds, to silence.
It was another year before I visited you.
120
I walked into your bedroom. You were lying on your big bed, awake.
It was noisy outside, but your room was quiet. Your eyes were lowered,
as if you were studying the pattern of the bed sheet. Your eyebrows were
thick and dark, like a Chinese ancient sword. I have always liked them and
thought they gave you character.
Daddy, do you want to come out? We are all here.
There was no eye contact, no sign of movement, no proof. The room
remained quiet. What were you thinking? Were you listening? Were you
struggling? Were you feeling sad? Were you wondering why and how it all
happened?
It was the first year you did not want to join the crowd outside, even
though all of us have traveled from afar for the family gathering. It was the
first year I saw you staying in bed most of the time, but not sleeping.
I held your hands in mine. Your big hands once gave me warmth and
strength. They told me you were proud when I shared with you my dream
and chose to come back to Hong Kong alone, and held me tight when I was
in my lowest moments.
I remembered your hands. They were once so big. When I was little,
I often waited for you to come home from work, because you would buy
me chocolates. The different-shaped chocolates at the little grocery by the
corner. There were no fancy packages; the chocolates were in glass bottles.
You would wait for me to choose my favorites from each bottle. I used
one hand to hold yours, and the other to hold my bag of chocolates. With
everything I needed in both hands, I felt satisfied and happy as we walked
up eight floors to home.
You looked at me with your blank eyes, as if you were wondering what
I was muttering about, or wondering who was this person holding your
hands?
I lay down next to you, still holding your hand, and with my finger I
wrote my name on your palm. And I heard a voice in my heart,
I am Mee Bao. Do you remember me…?
The year 2003 was strange; everything ended too quickly.
***
121
The funeral was white and cold. The ground was half-covered with thick
snow. Lying on the coffin were eight wreaths of different flowers and words,
belonging to my mother and the seven children of her and my father. Their
bright, vibrant colors contrasted with the clean, white snow and the big,
blue sky. It was the most unusual color combination I have ever seen, an
original work of art by an unknown artist. My eyes rested on the yellow
roses and the words,
I love you.
I felt tears rolling down my chin and I held onto my mother’s arms
tightly, feeling her deep sadness. When the sermon began, a chilly wind
from nowhere swept across the graveyard, a sharp knife cutting through
our backs. We stood there shivering, feeling the sudden cold reality.
My mother told me she had a dream of my Dad the day after he was
gone.
My Dad was standing by the door of the bedroom, looking at my mother.
My mother woke up and saw him. She was filled with excitement.
Come in, come in quickly. Do you know how much I missed you?
Wearing a white shirt and his favorite grey suit, my father walked in.
Suddenly, my mother found herself standing with my Dad in an empty
white space. Holding her hands, my Dad led her to the middle of the space.
Then they sat down gazing at each other, a young couple in love. Then, my
Dad said,
I am sorry that I have to leave. But I am very sick. I couldn’t help it. Now
that I’m gone, you can take a rest.
With tears in her eyes, my mother nodded. She could not utter a word.
All she could feel was my father’s arms wrapping her in a strong, loving
hug.
Back in Hong Kong, I heard my mother’s voice on the phone. She was
upset. She did not have another dream.
It’s okay, Mom. I haven’t dreamed of him either. I missed him too. Maybe
you will later.
I could understand why she was upset. A dream was everything when
you missed someone. I did not tell her that I had had a dream when I was
back in Hong Kong.
It was a weird dream with all the wrong settings.
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I was visiting a friend in his place in the States, and my Dad was with me.
I said goodbye to my friend and told him that I should take my Dad home.
I helped my Dad get out of a chair, and realized he was not in a wheelchair
anymore, though he still could not speak. I used one hand to hold his; he
leaned towards me. His weight felt comfortable. Slowly, we walked to the
lift. I was glad that I was taking care of my Dad.
In silence, we waited for the lift. It was a still, comforting moment. In
my mind, I knew we were going home together, and I knew he remembered
me.
Mabel Sieh had a master’s degree in education and worked in education
for more than 10 years before getting a postgraduate journalism degree at
JMSC in 2004. She then worked in different media as a writer, producer
and trainer. She now works at the South China Morning Post.
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Spring 2008
On the Trail
of Tigers
The tiger is a powerful but elusive creature, a kind of totemic animal.
I always wanted to see one in the wild, so in April of 2003 I travelled to
Nepal with friends. This story is about that adventure – about looking for
something I never found and discovering something I could not name.
By Sandra Siggins
Imagine if you will, a man who is tall and has long dark hair but is not
particularly handsome. Unshaven, sporting a batik T-shirt, beige hiking
shorts, sandals and a halo of Ray-Bans, he stands in a room in front of 20
six-year-olds. They are whining and complaining.
One brave boy steps forward, looks up imploringly, pulls on the man’s
shorts and begins. “Jason took my…”
The man waves his hand, bends down, and says: “Well, little Dude, I
guess you got a problem.” Then he fixes the glasses onto his nose, strolls out
of the room and onto the wilds of the playground.
Meet Mr. Heutinck.
He had several names. John William and Rambling Will were just two.
When I met him he was teaching grade six – a promotion of sorts from
the purgatory of grade one. He was known as the intrepid adventurer and
entertained us in the staff room with stories of his travels. While cycling in
West Africa, he was kidnapped, bribed, released and later attacked by tsetse
flies; in Nepal he led unsuspecting tourists on near-death trekking trips. He
lived on the edge.
Unlike Rambling Will, my other travelling companion and colleague
was not steeped in the California sun and Grateful Dead. Raised on the cold
Northern coast, Cindy Bayne studied drama and social studies, listened to
folk music and knew the lyrics to every musical ever written.
It was spring, 2003, and our school in Hong Kong had closed because
of an outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus.
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Everyone walked the streets wearing masks and the news talked continually
of pestilence, so we decided to spend Easter traveling. Nepal. Early on, Will
began a campaign to frighten us with tales of having to stitch his own cuts.
I’ll admit it. I was nervous. I took out two insurance policies.
***
We arrived in Kathmandu on April 12. We spent our first night in
Kumari guest house in Durbar Square. It was a short, dark building with
narrow, dank and musty stairwells. We made our way upstairs, collapsed on
opposite beds and examined the room. Will was already out shopping.
The sheets were grey and gritty. “I hope Will got those sleeping bags and
raincoats,” Cindy said, poking the grotty pillow.
“Do you think a person could get nits from these sheets?”
“Probably. How much is the room again?”
“A dollar.”
A restless night – sleep punctuated with bells, cows, horns and barking
dogs. I woke at dawn and wandered down into the square.
I stepped off the curb and joined the swell of humans and animals –
a swarming, teeming, pulsing amoebic mass. Streets were quilted with
rubbish – the dark alleys a public toilet. People gravitated to the center of
the square. Arms stretched up to the back of a wooden chariot where a man
handed out flowers. It was the Nepali New Year and people were preparing
their offerings to the gods. The scene was wordless and powerful.
When I return to the guest house, Cindy is moving about, packing
bags.
We are about to begin a two-day trek to Nagarkot and Bhuktapur and
set off in the hazy mid-morning light, cross a stream of people and catch
rickshaws to the Thamel district where we drop our bags, meet our porter
and guide, and get bird guides and breakfast.
We start our trek in earnest at noon and make our way along a dirt
road. Nagarkot stands at 1,900 metres and is famed for its view of the
Himalayas.
The view – terraced hills of variegated greens – is uninterrupted except
by the pale orange of traditional Nepali huts. The air, though thin, is heavy
with dust.
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We stop at a small tea house, a half-hazard hut made of pani, mata and
gobar – water, clay and cow dung. Will sits outside soaking up the sun with
Cindy. Kudar, our guide, and Pelle, our porter, and I are sitting inside. We
are coated with flies. Kudar tries to teach me a few words.
“Deri deri dhanyhad is thank you,” he says.
I repeat it and it comes out sounding French. Kudar and the tea vendor
laugh.
Kudar turns to me, “We’ll sleep here tonight.”
I grin. “Fine by me. I’m tougher than I look.”
He laughs and I know he’s thinking, the day’s not over, missy. We drink
our tea. Kudar and I are kindred spirits – tea without sugar.
Will enters. “Tougher than you look, huh? Try this then.”
He orders some chyang – Nepali beer.
I take a sip – a watery yeast flavor tinged with lemon. I pass it to Cindy.
Her face crinkles in disgust.
So Will, Kudar and I share the remainder. Powerful stuff, but I soldier
through it because now I have a reputation to maintain. Will continues
because he drank so much in college his friends nicknamed him Swill.
Outside, I spot a girl. She’s small and dressed in rags crusted with dust.
A doko (woven basket) is suspended from her head, half full of greens. She
cradles a hand-held sickle and stares in at us. Goats and cows are tethered
at her feet. Inside, I am surrounded by Nepalese men. We stay in our spots
staring and I think of Beaudelaire – Les Yeux Sont Pauvre. A goat stirs. The
spell is broken and she moves away.
We move out and huff and puff our way to Nagarkot.
***
The following morning we wake early. Sunrise over the Himalayas. The
peaks emerge slowly. It is difficult to distinguish between snow-capped
mountains, mist and cloud – a chiaroscuro, not of black and white but
of white and blue-grey. Cindy, Will and Kudar go off to explore the town
while I stay behind to write. Pelle keeps me company. He is tired, I hope. He
carried 20 kilos uphill yesterday and didn’t even have the courtesy to sweat.
His quiet presence is lovely.
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Later that day, we pack and trek back down the mountain to Bhaktapur
– the city of devotees – where we bid goodbye to Kudar and Pelle and make
our way west to the Bardia region to stay at Racy Shade and trek through
the jungle in search of tigers and other lethal animals.
As we are waiting to enter the nature reserve, a man with wild curly
hair and dark brown skin drives up on a motorcycle, stops and introduces
himself as Gil. He had left Israel three months ago and had been on the road
since. He decided to join our party and followed us to Racy Shade. Will is
grateful, I think, for the male company.
We arrive at the hotel to meet Mahdu, the owner, and Man, our guide,
into the jungle. It is early afternoon and the light is perfect for photos.
Mahdu takes us around the little village which is occupied mostly by Tharu,
indigenous people of the region.
We walk around the perimeter of the village. There is no fence. The
animals of the park have learned of the boundary the hard way. Intrusions
are rare.
A group of small children pass us on the dirt path and I turn round to
capture a photo of them, but they have caught me at it and begin laughing.
Madhu takes us to their home. It is a long structure made of clay and as
many as 14 people live there.
One of the women in the house greets us and we sit on the floor of a
small room. This is the space she shares with her husband and three small
children. She serves us some chang and pickled cabbage in dried leaf bowls,
a familiar routine. We are not the first foreign visitors. Madhu teaches us
how to introduce ourselves.
Her name is Bahini Bhone.
She turns to me, “Didi naam ke ho?” Older sister, what is your name?
I tell her. She repeats it faithfully. Her children move in and huddle in
the corner. She and Madhu converse easily and he translates our questions.
It is growing dark and she brings in an oil lamp. She nurses a baby while
we visit. More children trickle in and sit quietly, staring. The light casts
Caravaggio shadows on the burnt orange wall behind them. It is a scene out
of National Geographic.
One of the children gets restless and begins crying. I move beside the
candle and make shadow puppets on the wall behind. Rabbit, crocodile,
moose…he cannot see them. But Bhone does and is all smiles. It is all I
can do to thank her. My rupees are at the hotel and Madhu assures me she
would not take them anyway.
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***
An encouraging sign – a paw print. Man tells us it is a young female tiger
we have missed by a few hours. We are on our way to another hotel to take
an elephant ride through the jungle. Cindy, Madhu and I are on a 45-yearold female named Laximi Kali and our mahout is named Mungulram. Will
and Gil are on a smaller younger elephant. Not long into our journey the
mahouts spot a rhino. Laximi crashes through the jungle, trampling saplings
and ripping vines. Monkeys screech. The two mahouts drive the mother and
baby into a clearing where we can see them. The black Asian rhino stands
before us, less than 50 feet away. She is nervous; the baby stands behind her
barely visible. It’s uncomfortable and beautiful.
We make our way down the river bank and spot a wild elephant, but it
is not the famous Raja Gaj which stands 11 feet 3 inches and is the largest
Asian elephant alive.
***
Today, we are doing a half-day jungle trek. It is our last chance to see a
tiger in the wild. Man comes to the room, knocks gently and says: “Didi,
tea time. “
To spot tigers, we need to climb trees. “Madhu, are you going higher?”
Gil whispers.
Madhu is clinging to the tree and claims he is stuck.
Gil, Cindy and I are standing at the bottom and Man and Will are already
at the top.
“Get down. I show you,” Gil barks.
Madhu descends and Gil is up at the top in record time. Madhu storms
off. First rule of the jungle: Every man to himself. We looked up at the tree
and decided to find one that was easier to climb.
Six steps into the jungle, one mysterious noise and two frightened
women scurry back to the original tree. Cindy moves her binoculars to her
back and begins to climb. When she is about seven feet from the ground
and reaching for a limb, I hear a snap and Cindy falls face first onto the
ground.
I run over. “Are you okay?”
She has not stirred and remains facedown. Finally, she says, “I’m okay.
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I think.” Man, Will and Gil are suddenly on the ground hovering over her
and asking questions. (I’m calculating the distance between the park and
the nearest hospital.) The guys help her to her feet and nothing is broken
or sprained.
When Madhu finally returns having missed the excitement, he says to
Gil, “I can tell you were in the army. You are very good at climbing trees.”
Gil looks at him, nods and replies: “All this killing, bombing and
shooting. Arghh. Not for me.” He shrugs, “Six months in the army, six
months in prison. For me, it was a bargain.”
We laugh. Cindy is determined and decides to carry on. Madhu tells us
of a place where we can spot tigers near the river bed. Man climbs a tree
nearby – our lookout. The rest of us line up behind a lump of tall grass.
“So we just sit here like a buffet?” Cindy asks.
Madhu ignores the remark, slithers into the undergrowth and begins
napping.
Nothing in the jungle is stirring, not even monkeys. There is little hope
of seeing a tiger. Madhu is grunting in his sleep, as if rooting around for
truffles. We are giggling. When he wakes, he decides it is time for us to
return to the hotel.
***
We stop by the park office to look at the displays. Behind the offices
there is a small cage and a leopard cub runs around wildly inside. The ranger
explains that a village boy found the cub; its mother had probably been
killed. The ranger let it out of its cage and it ran toward me, stopped, and
crouched down as if ready to pounce. I stood very still. Madhu distracted
it and it bounded over to him. He wrestled with it before grabbing it by the
nape and shoving it back into its cage.
It was a poor substitute.
We returned to Racy Shade for an afternoon to ourselves. Cindy, Man
and I drank lemongrass tea in the shade. We peppered him with questions.
Will returned from his short walk and announced that we had been invited
to his friend Hookum’s guest house. At dinner there is talk of old friends,
of tigers and of politics. Hookum, it seems, is an unacknowledged leader –
people turn to him for tuition, school supplies, trips to the hospital, small
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loans. He obliges. Business is slow – due to rumors of Maoists kidnapping
foreign tourists – but he will not allow us to pay for dinner, or leave behind
some rupees to help the villagers. On the road back to Racy Shade, the
silence is long and sharp between us.
The next morning, I hear Man at the door: “Didi, tea time.”
I am packing to return to Kathmandu when Madhu enters with some
news: “You had a visitor last night.”
I cannot think who and continue stuffing my case.
“Bahini Bhone was looking for you – she had killed a chicken and
prepared dinner for you. I told her she was wrong.”
“Wrong. What do you mean?”
“Two years ago, a woman from Canada came here to help people build
houses and work in the fields. She thought…”
“She thought I was someone else then?”
Madhu shuffled his feet. “Yes. I tried to tell her. But she insisted.”
“What did she say?”
“That it didn’t matter.”
I nodded. I knew exactly what she’d meant.
Sandra Siggins has been in Hong Kong for eight years teaching English
and coaching debating. She took the Literary Journalism course in 2008
and earned her master’s degree from the JMSC in 2010.
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Spring 2011
World Trade Center:
Apocalyptic Wonderland
In September of 2001, I was working in New York, running a small
technology team for a global investment bank. My office was at 75 Wall
Street, half a mile from the World Trade Center.
By Colin Reid
It was Tuesday morning in New York and I’d just hung up on a call with
a colleague in London. I left the conference room to find my team – the few
that were in before nine – crowded around Laurence’s cubicle.
“A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center,” she told me.
I joined the crowd peering at her computer monitor. CNN.com showed
a grainy picture of one of the twin towers with a column of dark smoke
rising out of a jagged hole in the building. It didn’t look like much: the short
report said a small plane had hit the tower. We joked to release the tension,
and wondered if this had happened before. Didn’t something crash into the
Empire State Building once? Gradually my team members drifted back to
their own cubes, back to work.
I doubted many people were really working. Like me, they were trawling
the news sites for information – anything to liven up another dull day in
the office.
We didn’t yet know these facts, but at 8.46 a.m., American Airlines Flight
11, a Boeing 767 carrying 76 passengers, 11 crew, and five hijackers had
flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at approximately
500 miles per hour.
Just after 9 o’clock, our web surfing paid off with an update: “There’s been
a second crash – another plane has hit the towers,” Laurence called out.
She held a French passport, but spoke flawless, unaccented English
– a result of her education at an international school in Saudia Arabia.
Everyone who worked with Laurence considered her an extremely capable
programmer, and now she was proving an efficient reporter, too.
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I went over to look at her screen. “This has to be a terrorist attack,” I said.
“There’s no way this is a coincidence.”
It wasn’t. Again, we didn’t know the details yet, but at 9.03 a.m., United
Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 carrying 56 passengers, nine crew, and
five hijackers had flown into the South Tower of the World Trade Center at
approximately 600 miles per hour.
While unknowable horrors were playing out on the highest floors of
New York’s tallest buildings, I had my own concerns. The stock market was
due to open in less than thirty minutes, and trading was sure to be frantic
– in reaction to whatever was happening, the market would plunge in the
opening moments. I had been a team leader for less than a year, and I’d never
handled a real crisis. My team was responsible for some important trading
systems, and I wanted to know what to expect, or if there was anything out
of the ordinary I should be doing to prepare.
I wanted someone to tell me what I was supposed to do.
My manager was on holiday in England. I tried to call him, but I couldn’t
get an international line. No one could place any external calls: the phone
system was swamped. Mobile phones didn’t work either.
The company’s internal phone system was working, so I could call
others within the firm in New York. I decided to call my surrogate boss,
Juan-Carlos. He was the Managing Director for the group of traders who
used my team’s software. He would be across the road in his office at 60 Wall
Street, and he’d know what to do.
Juan-Carlos answered my call. “Hello, Colin.” At least the caller ID was
still working.
“Do you know what’s going on?” I asked. “Is the market going to
open?”
The voice at the other end spoke clearly and calmly. “I don’t know. This
is a terrible day. No one knows what is happening.”
“But is the market going to open?”
He didn’t answer my question. “I can tell you what I am going to do. I am
going to go home to my wife and my family. Go home to your family and
make sure they are safe.”
I didn’t go home. We were safe in the office, and the team had work
to do. So as best we could, we concentrated and got on with writing our
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computer code, checking our emails, writing our specifications, doing
what we normally did. Outside our tenth floor windows, sheets of paper
from World Trade Center offices floated around. It was like a ticker tape
parade where they forgot to shred the paper. It was the only sign of what
was happening a few hundred yards away.
The quiet was broken when the doors from the elevator bank opened
and Richard burst in, breathless and wide-eyed behind his round glasses.
“People are jumping! They are jumping! The towers are on fire and they are
jumping!” As he told us this, Richard’s face held a frozen, nervous smile of
disbelief.
Richard lived in New Jersey and commuted on the PATH train line
which terminated beneath the World Trade Center. From there, it was a
five-minute walk to our office at 75 Wall Street, but that day the last leg of
his commute took half an hour. Like hundreds of others, he’d stopped to
stare at the burning towers and watched as fellow office workers, trapped
by choking smoke and flames, jumped to their deaths from hundred-storyhigh windows.
Richard’s tale brought the horror closer, but the attacks were still not
real to me. I had looked at static photos of the damaged structures on a
computer screen, but I hadn’t seen or heard anything when the planes flew
into the buildings, and I hadn’t seen anyone jump from the towers. It was
just another terrible event happening on the Internet. I wasn’t scared.
Until just before ten o’clock.
There was a flash in the sky outside, then a bang. A short, sharp, very
loud crack – a clap of thunder, without the rumble. An explosion? It came
from the west, towards the towers. For a few seconds, the floor underneath
me moved as the building swayed. This is what an earthquake must feel like,
I thought. But I knew it wasn’t.
I looked out the window, down to Beaver Street. In the middle of the
narrow street I saw a man in a suit, holding a briefcase tight across his chest.
He was running, running towards my building, running as fast as he could
in his office shoes, his one free arm pumping up and down at his side like
a sprinter at the Olympics. His face was a picture of concentrated fear. I
saw the reason for his terror: an enormous cloud of thick grey dust was
billowing down the alley, and he was trying to outrun it. He didn’t. Within
seconds it had enveloped him, filling the gap between the skyscrapers. In
a few more seconds it blanketed my building. Now I couldn’t see the office
across the street – not even its silhouette. I couldn’t see anything outside
any more.
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I tried to make sense of this. Had they blown up the Stock Exchange
building? It was the only conceivable thing: a prime target in downtown
Manhattan, and what else but an explosion could account for the flash, the
noise, the pall of dust? We tried the Internet again: useless. Our phones
were out, the Web was unusable, we couldn’t even see outside.
No one was working now. We stood around, discussing what to do.
Should we stay put? Move to a lower floor? Leave the building? We didn’t
know. I didn’t know. We were in the heart of the financial district in the
world’s most connected city, but we had no idea what was happening
beyond the glass shell of our office building. We were isolated, ignorant,
and clueless.
A few minutes later, there was a long, loud rumble. The building shook
again. I looked at Laurence.
“Shall we go downstairs?” she asked.
I was the boss. I was supposed to know. “Yes.”
***
The stairwell was packed. People on the floors above us had already
decided to head to the safety of ground level. The crowd descended, silently
and slowly, down the concrete steps to the solid security of the street.
As we reached the lowest floors the line slowed, and then stopped. We
stood, waiting, helpless. The message came up the stairs that leaving the
building was impossible: the ash cloud made it difficult to breathe outside.
We left the stairwell on the fourth floor, entering another level of cubes and
conference rooms. I went in search of information.
In a cramped office, I found a crowd of strangers huddled round the tiny
color screen of a portable television. It was here, from a grainy CNN feed,
that I learned what had happened. Both towers of the World Trade Center
had collapsed, creating the dust cloud that was now cloaking our building
and, from the pictures I saw, covering all of lower Manhattan.
Among the hundreds of people milling around the floor, no one knew
any more than this. There were no instructions on what to do, so we did
nothing.
Nitesh, a member of my team, appeared. He had been outside watching
the burning towers when the first collapsed, engulfing him in the dust
cloud. His brown face, his white shirt, his khaki slacks, his black shoes – all
were covered in a ghostly film of ash. The soot had penetrated his nose and
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throat, and he was coughing between breaths. We fetched him water, and
he drank, and coughed, and drank, and coughed. Gradually his hacking
subsided.
He told us he was standing in Chase Manhattan Plaza, halfway between
our office and the towers, when the South Tower collapsed. Seeing the vast
tide of dust rushing towards him, he ran for cover and crouched behind a
wall. It was useless. Soon he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face and
was choking. After a couple of minutes the cloud thinned enough to see, the
air cleared enough to breathe, and he made his way to our office.
***
Around noon, word came that we should leave. The mayor had
instructed everyone in lower Manhattan to evacuate north of Canal Street.
I assumed the news came from the impromptu control room, the office with
the television.
Outside, the dust had settled like snow after a winter storm. Inches
of dark ash blanketed everything: the road, the sidewalk, parked cars,
abandoned coffee carts, post boxes, traffic lights. The streets were empty of
traffic and eerily quiet. Above me was a clear blue sky. It was beautiful. A
peaceful, picture-perfect, apocalyptic wonderland.
I joined the stream of evacuees walking silently north on Water Street.
Most of us wore one of the standard office uniforms – suit and tie or business
casual – but here and there an unlucky pedestrian sported an extra coat of
grey powder, just like Nitesh.
The ash carpet ended near the Brooklyn Bridge. To the north in
Chinatown, just a mile from where the towers had been, it was a normal day.
I turned to look downtown. Where there should have been two columns
reaching into the air there was just a hole in the sky. Beneath it rose a thick,
wide plume of black smoke.
It wasn’t a normal day. I kept walking.
***
I was home within the hour. Four hours after that, New York’s phones
were working again so I joined a conference call for an update from my
firm.
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I learned that downtown was sealed off, that our offices there were
inaccessible, and that we didn’t know when we would be able to return to
them. We would have to fit out a new trading floor for our business to run.
Luckily we had already been working on a move to midtown, and we had
office space there that was under construction.
Some of my more composed colleagues had walked out of the downtown
confusion directly to the midtown office to begin work on the emergency
move. I was impressed and embarrassed; I had spent the afternoon on my
sofa staring slack-jawed at the television news.
We had been due to move the first batch of traders to the new office in
five weeks. Working round the clock, we moved them all in five days.
***
The Stock Exchange was to reopen on Monday, Sept. 17, with two
minutes of silence to honor those killed followed by a rendition of “God
Bless America”. At 9.33 a.m., Wall Street would be open for business.
The ninth floor of our midtown building, empty a week ago, was now
a dealing room. We had installed and tested row upon row of telephones,
computers, keyboards, monitors, specialised trader touch screens, and
Bloomberg terminals. Flat-screen televisions hung every fifteen feet, tuned
to the financial channels. On the back wall, an electronic ticker displayed
the last closing prices of the market indices: the Sept. 10 levels of the Dow,
the NASDAQ 100, the S&P 500.
Half an hour before the market was due to open, the room was noisy
and alive – as a trading floor should be before a big day. No one had traded
in a week, and everyone was keen to get back in the game. Salesmen phoned
their clients and shouted orders at traders (“I want ten thousand at the
open!”), traders shouted back (“I got size on the offer!”), and everyone
bantered (“J-Dog! You still my man?”). Some stared silently at spreadsheets,
calculating how to make maximum profit from the expected, and inevitable,
sharp drop in share prices when the market opened.
I hovered around with other technology staff. We weren’t part of the
floor culture. We knew we didn’t belong, but we needed to be on hand to
deal with any last-minute problems.
As the minutes ticked down to 9.30 a.m., the sales staff finished up their
client calls. The traders eased off their pre-market chatter, and the banter
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slowed. Everyone kept an eye on CNBC’s feed from the Stock Exchange
floor, and at half past the hour, those who weren’t already on their feet stood
up, folded their hands, and looked at the floor.
The quiet was not universal – one salesman was still on a call. He hushed
his voice, cupped his hand over his mouth, and bent under his desk, but the
disapproving glances from others forced him to end his conversation and
join them in honoring the dead with their silence. Now the only noise was
from Park Avenue traffic nine levels below.
I had never experienced silence in a dealing room. Even at midnight
on an empty floor, a phone somewhere will be ringing. But for those two
minutes, every man and woman stood mute, and the phones didn’t ring.
The television screens signaled the end of the quiet. Taking their cue
from the podium of the New York Stock Exchange, live on CNBC, a few
traders began to sing softly:
While the storm clouds gather far across the sea,
Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free
Most didn’t know what to do. Stand quietly? Sing loud, or sing low? In a
room full of patriotic alpha males, not one was taking the lead.
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair,
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer
I didn’t know the words: I wasn’t an American. I stood dumb, thankful
that I didn’t have to make a choice.
God bless America,
Land that I love
A few more joined in, but the singing was still no more than a murmur.
No one wanted to be conspicuous.
Stand beside her, and guide her
Through the night with a light from above
I watched Matt, one of the younger traders. Normally a boisterous fratboy type, he was self-consciously whispering the words to the song, his
voice barely audible.
From the mountains, to the prairies,
To the oceans, white with foam
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He looked around, furtive, wary of showing emotion, hoping not to
stand out.
God bless America, My home sweet home
God bless America, My home sweet home
On a television screen, I saw the ringing of the opening bell at the
Exchange. Our room burst into applause, in a show of relief as much as
patriotism. Now things could get back to normal – everyone knew what
to do next. Phones rang and were answered. Shouts boomed across the
floor. Traders punched their first sales on their keypads. Screens flickered
as prices moved. On the back wall, the large electronic ticker measured the
market’s fall.
***
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 684 points that day. It was the
largest single-day points drop in history, though the 7.2% decline was far
from the worst fall in percentage terms.
The insurance and aviation sectors fared badly. Defense and security
stocks rose. Wall Street had done its job.
Scotsman Colin Reid spent 16 years working in technology for a global
investment bank in London, New York and Hong Kong. In 2010 he left
banking to pursue a master’s in journalism at The University of Hong
Kong. He will figure out what to do with it when he returns to New York
in September 2011.
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Spring 2004
The Flicker
of a Heartbeat
Powerful emotions make for powerful stories. Good writing captures
the elation or grief of the moment and places readers beside you as you tell
a story. This is one of the most difficult articles I have ever written, and I
still feel waves of emotion wash over me when I read it.
By Doug Nairne
Your life can change in the flicker of a heartbeat. One moment you know
where you’re headed. The next you don’t.
I was in a foul mood on the day my life made an abrupt change in
direction. I had just escaped a 14-hour torment on an over-packed flight
from San Francisco to Hong Kong. It was one of those time-bending, transPacific journeys where you leave Monday morning and don’t arrive until
Tuesday night. I was exhausted from jet lag. My body was stiff. My stomach
was sore. I threw my bags on the living room floor, peeled off my clothes
and pulled on a housecoat. I was sprawled on the sofa, rubbing my temples
to ease a wretched headache, when my wife came home.
Treena walked into the room smiling the way she does when she is about
to do something nice. There was a small box cradled in her hands.
“I was going to wait until Valentine’s Day to give you this, but I couldn’t
wait,” she said. The date was Feb. 10 – the gift was four days early.
Feeling less miserable, I sat up and took the box. The attached card had
the traditional Chinese character for “love” embroidered in pink thread on
the front. I ran my fingers over the soft, silky material. My day wasn’t so bad
after all. My headache drained away. The message read:
“For my husband, because he takes such good care of me when I am sick
and because he knows a lot about diagnosing what’s wrong, I thought he
may find this useful. Love, your wife, Treena.”
She had been sick for the week prior to my trip. I was a medic in the
army. But I was still not sure what she was talking about.
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I opened the box. Inside, embraced by puffy, little pink, white, yellow
and blue cotton balls, was a clear Ziploc bag. Inside the bag was a white,
plastic square about the size of a playing card. In the middle was a small
window. Inside the window was the symbol “+”.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Don’t you know?” she replied.
Hmmm. I pondered the plastic in my hands, turning it over, looking
for clues. Then my heart flickered – I was going to be a father. The plastic
square was a pregnancy test. Treena had passed with flying colors.
***
Like many of our friends in their mid-30s, we put off having children
until our careers were on track. But with several couples we know sporting
cute new babies and 40 getting too close for comfort, we had been feeling a
growing sense of urgency about starting a family.
Having been part of the pre-baby festivities, I cannot claim complete
surprise at the news Treena was pregnant. But you can never be fully
prepared for life-changing events. And this was a life-creating event.
I always imagined learning I was going to be a father would be just like
it is on television, with elated hugs, a lot of jumping around, phone calls to
our parents and living happily ever after. Instead, I just sat there. Stunned.
Silent.
Diapers. Screaming fits. Sleepless nights. How are we going to pay the
medical bills? Good thing I was already sitting down. I had to lie down. My
temples were pounding away again.
“Don’t worry, I’m still a bit overwhelmed myself,” Treena said.
Later, Treena let me read a journal entry she kept about her pregnancy.
How should I tell Doug? I remember the episode of “I Love Lucy”
when Lucy finds out she’s pregnant. She tries to imagine telling Ricky,
but she doesn’t know how. In the end, she goes to the Club Tropicana
and makes an anonymous request for a song for “a woman who’s going
to have a baby but doesn’t know how to tell her husband”. Ricky, touched
by the idea, starts singing and circling the tables, trying to find the couple
with the happy news. Then he sees Lucy sitting at a table all by herself,
beaming. It takes him a minute, but when he clues in, suddenly he’s the
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happiest man on Earth, shouting to the audience, “We’re going to have a
baby!” and hugging and kissing his wife.
It took me a bit longer to start singing the praises of fatherhood. But
slowly, just as the baby was growing inside Treena, I began to accept – even
welcome – my fate. Something began to change. After the initial shock wore
off, Treena was happier than I can recall her being for a long time. She
was radiant. It was like looking at the sun. I had to avert my eyes to avoid
being burned. Her joy was contagious and I began to forget about changing
diapers and late-night feeding.
We didn’t tell anyone about the pregnancy at first. You shouldn’t say
anything until after the first trimester, or so the conventional wisdom goes.
About one in every six pregnancies goes wrong, and nobody wants to deal
with the socially awkward situation of people asking about your baby when
you are grieving its loss. We decided to break the news on April 3, our
wedding anniversary.
It’s also supposed to be bad luck to name a baby too early, so I did my
best not to think about what he – or she – would be called.
But our public silence could not suppress our private moments of glee.
We were a couple of kids with the world’s most amazing secret. We were
bursting with bliss and it took all our self-control to keep it inside.
Treena wrote about the experience:
We are going to have a baby. It is really coming true. I feel like I am
about to become the person I’ve waited to be my whole life. Work doesn’t
matter. Going out with friends doesn’t matter. It was all a front until I
could be a mother. Suddenly, we aren’t just a couple. We are a family. We
have a future to think about and a new life.
When we were alone we joked about how our lives are about to change.
I put my head next to Treena’s stomach and said, “Hello, baby.”
In a child’s voice, Treena replied, “Hello, daddy.”
I decided to start reading to the baby. You can never start grooming
them for greatness too soon. It was bound to be a fine-looking offspring,
we decided, if for no other reason than the exotic mix of genetics involved.
Treena’s mother is from the Philippines and her father is from Bangladesh.
My mother’s heritage is Irish and my father’s family is from Wales and
England. Our combined gene pool is an international smorgasbord like no
other.
***
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Two weeks later, we went to see a gynecologist to have an ultrasound
examination. This would be our first look at the baby. Treena was 10 weeks
into the pregnancy, and they say that’s far enough along that you can see the
baby’s heartbeat.
Dr. Sally Ferguson’s office has a bulletin board on the wall, filled with
dozens of pictures of smiling kids. Happy, healthy children that she helped
bring into the world. She’s done this a thousand times before. We were in
good hands.
Treena lay on the examining table. Dr. Ferguson dimmed the lights and
began the procedure. There were two monitors for the ultrasound machine
– one facing Treena and one facing the doctor. Suddenly aware of how
minor a man’s role is in a woman’s pregnancy, I had to stand off to one
side and look over Dr. Ferguson’s shoulder. Looking down at the carpet
I expected to see a well-worn patch where all the other fathers-to-be had
stood before me.
The room was illuminated by the soft, grainy glow of the monochrome
screens. The cooling fans hummed. The doctor placed an ultrasound probe
on Treena’s stomach and the screens came to life.
“Hey, look at that. There it is.” The words leapt from my mouth. My chest
swelled with emotion.
Treena later wrote that she could hear something special at that
moment.
Doug’s voice was filled with awe and wonder and I knew he was
moved to finally meet our little baby. All I could do was look at the screen.
“Hello,” I said silently.
We were bringing a new life into the world and all the magic that such a
gift entails suddenly became clear. Our baby was 1.9 centimeters long and
looked like a peanut curled up in the kidney-shaped womb. Peanut. The
baby – at least for now – was called Peanut.
The doctor repositioned the ultrasound probe and the grainy image on
the screen faded away. She pressed the probe back into Treena’s abdomen
and the picture became clear again. There was Peanut. I smiled to myself
and looked at Treena. In the decade I’ve known her she has never looked so
astonishingly beautiful.
“Hello, Peanut,” I said to myself. Peanut didn’t reply.
The doctor worked the probe over Treena’s stomach as we stared at the
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monitors, captivated by the tiny baby that was going to be part of our lives.
Was that an arm? A leg?
“I should be seeing something in here,” Dr Ferguson said, rolling the
pointer of the mouse across the monitor to a spot over the baby’s chest.
“There should be a flickering of a heartbeat but I can’t see anything.”
Something cold snapped open inside me and began to ooze through
my veins. Dread. I looked at Treena. Tears pooled in her eyes. No. Please,
God...
“No,” Dr. Ferguson said, repositioning the probe again, leaning closer
to the screen to get a better view. Nothing. The image faded out into fuzzy
black and white snow.
She changed probes, using a more sensitive device. The screen cleared
and the picture became focused again. There was Peanut, looking alone and
helpless. There was no flicker.
“No…”
She leaned a bit closer and squinted at the screen.
“No…”
Dr. Ferguson sat back in her chair and took the probe away from Treena’s
abdomen. The two screens froze with a final view of the lifeless womb. The
doctor sat for a moment, looking at the floor, perhaps searching for the
right words to say next. She’s said them before, but it never gets any easier.
“I’m so sorry.”
Treena later wrote in her journal about what happened next:
Doug came over and wrapped his arms around me. I felt tears on my
neck and then I was crying too.
After working in daily newspapers as a reporter and editor for 15 years,
Doug finally went legit and obtained a master’s in journalism degree at the
JMSC in 2004. He left the industry shortly afterward and started a riskmanagement company. On Sept. 19, 2006, Treena gave birth to a healthy
baby girl named Mei-li. We love her dearly.
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Spring 2006
Open Skies,
Closed Doors
“When one door closes, another one opens” is an American saying that
means new opportunities sometimes arise when least expected. This story
is dedicated to a stranger who opened doors for me when I most needed it.
Some characters’ names have been changed to protect their identities. All
denominations are in U.S. dollars.
By Kari Jensen
Two images come to mind when I think back to the month I lived in
China: open skies and closed doors. That June in 2004, I hid in an apartment
on a deserted college campus in Changde, Hunan province, in southeast
China, while trying to negotiate a teaching contract. For more than a year
before, I’d been mostly unemployed and wandering around like a nomad,
from the West Coast of the United States to the Far East.
By the time I arrived in Changde, I had only US$87 in renminbi. I was
desperate for a regular paycheck and a place to settle. Instead, I discovered
my pay would be put on hold during contract negotiations. I did move
into a spacious, two-bedroom apartment included in my job package, but
until the contract was signed and the flat officially mine, I was supposed to
remain unnoticed by both college administrators and the Public Service
Bureau, or PSB, China’s police.
Foreigners are required to register their lodging with the PSB. Because
I hadn’t done so, I was afraid I’d be caught and arrested. My first day in
Changde, I met an American who had been jailed for several days after
he entered a part of China off limits to foreigners. Since he and I were two
of eight “native” English teachers in Changde at that time, it was hard to
stay incognito. Besides, I am blonde and 6-foot-1, tall by American female
standards. In China they describe someone who stands out in a crowd
as a crane in a coop of chickens. I felt more like a vulture: big, ungainly,
searching for remains.
So remain I did, inside the apartment, avoiding others and trying not
to spend my limited money. But the pressure of not knowing what would
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happen next and not being able to find work elsewhere kept me up nights
worrying. Eventually, I made my way outside, walking and gazing up at the
stars, which the Chinese believe foretell fortune and destiny.
Free of a city’s light pollution, the night sky presented an unexpected
starscape. I always sought out the Big Dipper first, since it was the first
formation I had learned as a child. Then I found the Little Dipper and the
North Star. It calmed me to do so and helped me get my bearings.
If I got the job, I’d be only the second foreigner to teach English at the
local vocational college, on the outskirts of Changde, in northeast Hunan.
The modernizing city of 6 million doesn’t merit a mention in tourist guides
like “Lonely Planet,” although it does boast the world’s longest poetry
wall, noted in the “Guinness World Book of Records.” Foreigners come to
Changde mainly to work at its cigarette factory or pass through on their
way to Shaoshan, another Hunan city and the birthplace of Mao Zedong,
father of Communist China.
Everything in Hunan seemed to flow slowly, including the great Yangzi
River, which languished at its northern border, feeding into Dongting Hu,
which gives the southeast province its name: hu (lake) and nan (south), or
south of the lake. The fine-silt riverbeds comprise some of China’s richest
farmland and the flat central plains seem to stretch as wide as Montana
skies.
Like the river, the people were also unhurried, strolling or meandering
their steel bikes along the city’s empty avenues, smiling, yelling “Hallo!”
to me (the one word they knew in English) or squatting at street corners,
waiting for buses, which ran regularly and cost 12 cents, or 18 cents when
the driver switched on the air conditioning on hot days.
Summers are hot and humid in Hunan, while winters are short, cold
and frozen with snow. Yet, most homes and some public buildings have
neither air-conditioning nor central heating. As it is, the city’s electrical grid
cannot support demand. Power outages or “brownouts” are common, and
sometimes last for days.
Chinese value their guanxi (relationships). A common saying is: Zai
jia kau fu mu, chu men kau pengyou, which translates to: “When you’re at
home you rely on family, when you’re away from home you rely on friends.”
Americans, in contrast, are taught to be self-reliant. I felt I had to be. I had
neither friends nor family in Changde, other than Pat Brown, the firstever foreign teacher of English at the college, and he left a few days after I
arrived.
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I had met Pat online while making inquiries into teaching in Changde.
Six-foot-2 and blonde with wire-rimmed glasses, Pat was easy-going and
gregarious; he had just spent a year teaching English to college-age Chinese
women who hung on his words like silk stockings on a line. Before moving,
he had introduced me to three other American teachers, but they soon
departed for the summer as well. He also had helped me look for other
teaching positions, in case I didn’t get his job. But that summer, none were
to be found.
***
Fortunately, Pat put me in touch with Mr. Jin, a Chinese teacher of
English. Mr. Jin had studied in the United States and told me he knew how
it felt to be a foreigner abroad. He had a trustworthy face, with the downturned eyes and mouth of a St. Bernard. You could imagine him, a barrel
of whiskey strapped ‘neath his chin, rescuing you from an avalanche. And
later I would think of him as my savior.
I needed help, even if I was too independent to ask for it. I could stay
and hope to get the job or leave and try to find work elsewhere. I held on
because Pat’s bosses told me I could live in his apartment rent-free while
they sorted out my contract. “Housing included” is a selling point to get
Americans to teach English in China, since salaries are usually not very
high.
It’s realistic to think you won’t spend much money in parts of rural
China. In 2004, the pace, people and prices were reflective of those in the
Deep South of the United States in the 1930s. I planned to spend thriftily,
but then learned that Pat had regularly bought meals for his workmates
and friends. The unexpressed expectation was that I would pick up where
he left off.
But I had only that $87, and to get it I’d maxed out my one low-limit
credit card, withdrawing the money from an ATM machine, before taking
a train from Hong Kong. Besides that, I had a worn $100 bill that I’d found
on a street back home in the U.S. state of Oregon. I thought of it as my lucky
buck, one I didn’t plan on spending because to do so would mean I had
failed. It was also my Hong Kong escape fund, enough to get me back there
and pay for a night in a cheap hotel before I would use my open-ended
airplane ticket back to the United States.
At $438 per month, Pat’s salary had been double that of most Chinese
teachers of English in Changde. In a region where the average income for
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some families was just $300 per year, his average expenditure was $2 per
day. To get set up, I found myself spending $3 per day or more, so I tried to
cut back on food and entertainment.
Mr. Jin noticed my thriftiness the day I asked him to help me buy a
data chip (SIM card) for my cell phone. I had needed an interpreter since
most salespeople spoke little or no English and I knew only a few words of
Chinese. We met downtown on a city block crowded with phone-service
providers. Young women in fitted suits stood out front, insisting that their
shop had the least-expensive plans. When I learned the cheapest SIM card
was $24, I hedged.
“Do you have enough money?” Mr. Jin asked, perceptively.
“I’m okay,” I said, not wanting to say anything, but, at the same time,
wishing I could I tell him, a stranger, that I was worried about my lack of
money and job prospects.
“I have to get back to my apartment,” I said, passing on his suggestion
that we eat lunch. The few times I had eaten at the local smoke-filled, dingy
cafes that served greasy, MSG-laden food, I was ill afterward. Two days later,
necessity forced me to return to the shop with Mr. Jin and buy a SIM card.
It took 20 minutes by bus to get from downtown to the campus, the last
stop on the line. Staff quarters were at the back, away from the road. Since it
was the summer, classes weren’t in session. Most buildings were locked and
others were being demolished. A wrecking ball seemed to keep time with
regular swings.
***
Much of the time, I holed up in the apartment with the air conditioning
running full blast, trying to escape the 100 degrees Fahrenheit heat and the
mosquitoes and the people’s odd way of openly gawking at me. Some would
even point and call out hen gao (very tall) as I walked by. As it was, the
day’s heat exhausted me. It hung on my slight frame like a heavy wool coat,
making me trudge slowly from the apartment to the bus stop or the English
building, at the front of the campus near the road, trips I estimated were at
least a half-mile each.
I rarely saw anyone on those treks back and forth. I never met the people
who lived across the hall in the dilapidated third-story walk-up. While
most staffers’ quarters were Spartan, concrete-floor units with no furniture,
147
central heating or air conditioning, the flat allotted for the college’s foreign
teacher was furnished and had both electric heat and air conditioning. It
was larger than most with a balcony, living room, dining room, kitchen and
bath, all trimmed in woodwork painted gold.
Yet, the workmanship was shoddy. When painters last re-coated the
trim, they splattered varnish on the floor. Since then, a layer of dirt had
adhered to it. Pat had neglected to clean during the year he lived there.
The floors, walls and fixtures were grey-brown with dust. The kitchen was
coated in grease: black, tar-like, and speckled with trapped flies and gnats,
the victims of its tacky kiss.
After college administrators refused my request for a house cleaner, I
bought some paint remover and cleaner so I could scrub at the varnish and
grease myself. School officials did agree to have workers replace the door
in the bathroom and paint some fixtures. The bottom of the old door and
frame had rotted due to water exposure. Over time, moisture had destroyed
the wood, forming caves for small cockroaches to reside.
The first time three workers came to the apartment without an interpreter.
They wore crease-front slacks and silky polo shirts. One sported a hard hat.
They took off their wingtip leather shoes when they came in, as was the
custom, but I had no slippers for them to put on, so they looked around
uncomfortably. It was then that I noticed that the door they had brought
was much larger than the original and had a window. It would not do. I
didn’t want anyone to be able to look in at me when I was seated on the
toilet.
I attempted to explain, using body language. But before I could say
anything, one of them went to the bathroom and starting chopping at
the walls and door frame. Tiles and wood chips were flying haphazardly.
Feeling frantic, I called Mr. Wu, the interpreter provided by the college.
After I explained the situation to him, I handed my cell phone to a worker.
Mr. Wu told them to stop and they went away.
The second time the workers came, there were again three: the guy in
the nice slacks, shirt and hard hat. Another guy, sans hat. And a new guy,
shirtless, his dress slacks rolled up to his knees, presumably in response to
the heat. I was prepared for this visit; I had asked Mr. Wu to write Chinese
directions on Post-It notes, which I stuck on the cupboards, tiles and door
frame.
I found it easier to communicate with the workers in my broken Chinese,
than to talk with college administrators in English, my native language. I
148
had learned that it is not customary for Chinese to be frank. Being indirect
allows them to “save face”.
“Have you heard from school officials about my contract?” I asked Pat’s
former boss, Ms. Huang, during a brief meeting at her office in the English
building. She was as crisp as the pressed jackets and skirts she wore daily,
even in the unbearable heat, and kept her black, shoulder-length hair glossy
and straight.
Ignoring my question, she changed the subject, assuming a rigid posture:
“Your apartment has two bedrooms, air conditioning and a computer.
You’re not comfortable?”
“Yes, I’m comfortable,” I said, feeling stymied. “But we haven’t had power
for three days. I can’t use the computer. The air conditioner doesn’t work.”
“Pat liked the VCR. He bought many movies,” she went on, not looking at
me, shuffling through papers on her desk. “Do you like to watch movies?”
Afterward, I returned to the apartment to find that the workers had
laminated and varnished the old door, but had failed to sand, wash or fill
any nail holes in it beforehand. Without asking, they had poured paint into
one of my porcelain bowls and messily slopped the excess on the floor.
They neither cleaned up their supplies nor took them with them, leaving
the varnish and brush uncovered in the bowl.
That night, I started getting a headache from the paint’s toxic fumes.
I opened the windows, which just let more hot air in. The apartment was
completely without power due to the blackout. Bugs bit me. My candles
burned down and out. I rolled about restlessly in my single bed, and then
decided to go out for a walk.
Down the darkened stairwell, past the employee housing, weaving
through the many buildings that made up the campus, I made my way by
moonlight to the open courtyard at its entrance. I sat on a retaining wall,
fixing my gaze on the moon, which the Chinese say is rounder in the West,
implying that America offers greater opportunities. I questioned whether
that was true.
***
In the morning, back in the apartment, I was feeling a little ill in the
bathroom and did not answer when the workmen knocked on my front
door. They kept on knocking and after a few minutes, Mr. Wu called to ask
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why I hadn’t met the workers. He admonished me for costing the college
money, noting that in my absence the workers still charged for their time.
I listened passively, seated on the toilet, my eyes wandering, taking in the
dirty tile, peeling paint, chipping plaster ceiling and the two-inch hole in the
floor where a drain should have been. I stared at the half-varnished door.
When Mr. Wu paused, I hurriedly explained that I needed the bathroom at
the particular moment the workers came, and hoped he understood.
That evening, I finished varnishing the door and its frame myself. Later
that same night, I cleaned up the debris, hauling it in numerous trips down
the stairs and out to the trash, pausing to look up at the sky as I did so.
The next morning, I told Ms. Huang to stop the workers from making
further repairs. Coincidentally, she said I had to move out. It was against
the rules for me to live there without a contract. It would take one to three
months to finalize the paperwork. I’d have to move to a hotel. Although this
didn’t surprise me, I didn’t know what to do next. So as a last resort, I called
Mr. Jin, who answered immediately.
“I have to move. It doesn’t look as if I’ll get the job,” I said, too embarrassed
to add that I didn’t have much money.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll arrange for you to tutor students.”
“Can you help me find a cheap hotel?” I asked, crossing my fingers.
“You can stay (rent-free) with another teacher. We’ll register you with
the PSB. In the meantime, if you need some money, I can loan you $260
until the parents pay up.”
As we rung off, I was flooded with relief.
Two nights later, I closed the door to the college apartment one last
time, carried my suitcase to the bottom of the stairs and pulled it across the
empty campus. I paused to sit on the retaining wall, gazed up at the sky and
glanced down at my open pocketbook. Aside from my Hong Kong escape
fund, that lucky $100 bill, I had just $3 left.
Kari Jensen taught English in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in 2004
and 2005. Before moving to Asia, she was a reporter for a daily newspaper
in Salem, Oregon. She is a freelance radio and print journalist in Hong
Kong and New York and plans to continue pursuing new opportunities in
Asia.
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Spring 2009
Fight Night
in Phnom Penh
During my internship at the Phnom Penh Post, a colleague told me
editors were always looking for somebody to do local sports stories for the
back page. In a country rife with corruption and murder, reporters had
bigger fish to fry than report boxing matches. So it was that I discovered
the ancient martial art of Kun Khmer – and the emotion it aroused in and
out of the ring.
By Cornelius Rahn
Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on a blazingly hot night in December: it is a
night for fighting, and deep within the dome of the old Olympic Stadium,
the boxing ring area glows like a lava pit. In the dressing room, a muscular
young Frenchman, 24-year-old Hicham Chaïbi, sits on a bench, deep in
thought, staring straight ahead, right through the teammates getting
massages just in front of him. His fight will be the last tonight, and his
opponent will be the toughest.
Vorn Viva, a local legend, awaits.
Chaïbi and three other French fighters have come to Cambodia to
challenge local favorites in Kun Khmer, an ancient form of kickboxing.
It is the first foreign trip of the newly founded French Khmer Boxing
Federation. The team has come to sharpen its skills and forge stronger ties
while increasing awareness of the sport back home, where it is virtually
unknown.
For the boxers it is an honor to come to the cradle of this martial art.
Most switched from other fighting styles only a couple months ago. The
style they now embrace dates to the Khmer Empire a thousand years ago,
when the winner would live and the loser would die. In that era, fighters
studded their elbows with sharpened animal horns that tore deep gashes,
and hoped to be the first to slash their opponents so they would bleed to
death before they could cut them.
Today, the horns are no longer allowed, but elbow charges, knee jerks,
punches and kicks to the head have lost nothing of their raw force. Few
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fighters ever leave the ring without spilling blood, dislodging a joint or
breaking a bone.
In the locker room, a Cambodian coach who has volunteered to house
and train Hicham Chaibi the last three days sees the young Frenchman
staring into the distance and decides to get him moving. “Come over here!”
Chea Nick tells Chaibi, the son of Moroccan immigrants.
Over more than 40 years Chea Nick has seen much pain, evident in the
strange sadness of his eyes and his constant frown. He is devoted to Kun
Khmer. In the 1970s, when he was a kid, he used to accompany his brother,
former Cambodian star boxer Chea Sarack, to watch him fight.
Then, in 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge came to power and shut down all
Khmer boxing. In time, government thugs took Chea Sarack away and his
brother never saw him again. Now Chea Nick trains young Khmer boxers
for their competitions.
“Watch out!” Chea Nick now says to Chaïbi, and suddenly, the coach’s
punches and kicks startle him to alertness. The aging master, a physical
dwarf next to the imposing Chaïbi, now seems a youthful giant, bursting
with speed and agility. Chea Nick wants his pupil ready for his opponent.
He knows how fast Vorn Viva strikes. He used to train Vorn Viva, years ago,
when the fearsome fighter was just a boy.
In seconds, sweat glistens on the young boxer’s forehead.
“You have to make sure they don’t hit you,” Chea Nick says, his face now
softening. “If you get hit once, you often cannot recover. But if you block a
couple of times, you will know what they are doing. And then they will be
scared of you.”
Chaïbi looks at him. It is a look of admiration, with a trace of fear, for
the master. Then he sits back down on the dressing-room bench to find his
stare into the distance.
“The French guys, they think just because they are strong that they can
just punch, punch, kick, kick,” Chaibi says. “When I ask them, ‘How do
you block this?’ they say, ‘I don’t.’ But this is not about strength – it is about
technique.”
He locks his arms, chews his lower lip and looks at the ground next to
his fighter. “If he listens to me, he has a chance to win. If not, he will lose. I
am certain.”
***
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From the ring area, the relentless rhythm of traditional Kun Khmer
music rolls into the dressing room, signaling the start of the night’s first
fight.
Kun Khmer kickboxers dance to a grinding, maddening tune which
pushes them to fight. The flute-like sound of the sralai whirls in rapid, everrepeating circles over the damning beat of the skor yaul drums. And then,
there is the sound of constantly shattering glass – the ching, a small bronze
cymbal, that sends shivers down the spine.
Funeral music.
As the fighters enter the huge hall harboring the brightly lit ring, the
mood among onlookers seems harsh, void of compassion. Around 200 have
come tonight. Most are regulars, and they seem ready to watch people get
hurt.
The high ceiling of the dome reflects the discomforting atmosphere
below. Built for great sporting competitions that never arrived, the Olympic
Stadium instead hosted mass executions by the Communists during
Cambodia’s darkest days.
Before the first fighters enter the ring, the audience grows more restless.
Incessant chatter, hectic negotiations. Dollar bills change hands; bets on
who will stand, and who will fall.
Then, the bell rings, the music starts its unforgiving cycle, and all grow
silent.
The first encounter between the two nations has European champion
Alain Scheaffer facing Chlam Sor, or “White Shark”, in the under-52kg
category. After an uneven match, the Shark chomps down hard in the third
round and wins a technical knockout.
Next up are two women from the under-60kg class. This time, 20-yearold Ielö Page restores French honor by pummeling her opponent Srey
Touch so hard that the referee ends the fight after the first round.
The third fight is a triumph of technique, as French under-63.5kg triple
champion Sofiane Derdega and Cambodian Nuon Sorya deliver an even
struggle with some spectacular dodges. Despite a third-round elbow charge
by Nuon Sorya, which leaves his opponent with a fiercely bleeding cut, the
bout ends without a winner.
Then, finally, it is Chaïbi’s turn.
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Approaching the ring, he knows a tough fight awaits him. That’s what
all the staring has been about. Vorn Viva is already inside the ropes.
Vorn’s muscles reflect the floodlights’ glare as he performs his Kun Khru, a
traditional praying ritual for Khmer boxers.
Vorn Viva is a veteran of many fights that almost always go his way.
Standing in the ring with his rippling copper-skinned muscles and solemn,
seemingly merciless manner, he radiates invincibility.
Even Chaïbi cannot tear his eyes away for too long, but he must
concentrate on his stretches. And he must remember what Chea Nick has
told him:
You have to make sure they don’t hit you.
Then it begins. Diiing!
To the haunting tune of flute, cymbals and drums, the boxers begin to
circle each other as if in a dance, again and again. Like angry wildcats they
circle. Nobody wants to risk the first scratch.
Dum-de-dum-de-dum goes the drum.
Some distance from the crowd stands Chea Nick, who follows every
twitch of the fighters’ muscles.
A calm smile settles across Vorn Viva’s face, the smile of a stone statue in
a museum. Then he waves his right arm, “Come on!”
Chaïbi lunges forward, right knee first. But it’s a miss. In turn, as his
opponent twirls away, he sends his right leg crashing into Chaïbi’s side.
Startled, the young Frenchman reels back.
Vorn Viva uses the surprise to force Chaïbi back into the ropes and kneejerks him again and again. But then, with a diiing, the bell saves Chaibi.
There is a bustle in the audience. People push their way through the
crowd to the bookie, to place new bets. Vorn Viva is now the clear favorite.
As Chaïbi slumps into his corner, sweat streaming down his face, he
looks around. And for a second, his eyes find Chea Nick, who stands by the
ring without saying a word.
The Cambodian has hit him, but not one of the blows has done serious
harm. Chaïbi can start from scratch, but he is now cautioned. Let Vorn Viva
smile and wave all he wants.
Diiing!
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As the music starts grinding again, Chaïbi keeps his distance. His
opponent sends a couple of sharp punches his way, but he blocks them,
one by one, and then another one. Then, out of the blue, the Frenchman
suddenly smashes his elbow into Vorn Viva’s temple.
The veteran blinks in confusion, and lets down his guard. Now! Chaïbi
punches, and punches, and as they approach the ropes, his foot flies right
into Vorn Viva’s face – a mighty strike. The onlookers roar.
The referee separates the two fighters after they spin clinched together
into the ropes, and Viva is saved for the moment. But the stone statue has
been cracked.
***
Chaïbi knows now that he can hurt the Cambodian. And yet he does not
grow reckless. Throughout the rounds that follow, he keeps up his fists and
dodges, and then dodges, and then dodges again, frustrating Vorn Viva’s
assaults time after time.
As the bell rings and the music plays, the gamblers hustle again. But
now, the odds move in Chaïbi’s favor.
In the seconds before the last round, Vorn Viva’s face is no longer that
of the stone warrior. It is human now, full of pain and thought. As he stares
down and then off, it is easy to imagine him wondering what had happened
to the invincibility that was his before this fight began.
Chaïbi, buoyed by his success, bounces up and down on the balls of his
feet in the middle of the ring, waiting for the bell to launch his last attack.
Diiing!
As the opponents go at each other one last time, onlookers cheer at every
hit that Chaïbi lands. Most bets are on the foreigner now.
But Vorn Viva holds steady. He is a human warrior, like his opponent.
The last round turns into a back-and-forth struggle to survive. The
exhausted boxers lock into prolonged clinches, harassing each other with
knee jerks. And before either Vorn Viva or Hicham Chaïbi can land the
decisive hit, the bell rings for the final time.
With that sound, the bone-chilling music stops abruptly, and not a note
lingers. The referee calls both fighters over and takes one hand of each.
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As he raises both to indicate a tie, many spectators’ excitement turns into
disbelief, especially among those who had their money on Chaïbi. Angry
shouting ensues.
Unmoved by the commotion, Chea Nick stands by the ring. “He listened
to me,” the master says. His face is still, his frown still there, but his voice
and his eyes cannot mask his pride.
Cornelius Rahn, who has a bachelor’s degree in European Studies from
the University of Maastricht, graduated from the JMSC in 2009 and began
working as a reporter for Bloomberg News in Germany. He enjoys using
images, sound and text to tell stories. Traveling and mastering languages
are important to him because they allow him to discover what matters to
people around the world.
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Fall 2006
In Botswana, a
Fiery Band of Brothers
My brothers and I were always close, but recently we began pursuing
our own paths – one just got engaged, another lives in London, and I am
now in Hong Kong. I realized again during a trip to Botswana that we will
always be connected.
By Nick Westra
“Are we still going?” I asked my mom over the telephone.
It was the night before my family was due to begin making its way to
Botswana for a two-week safari, and an al-Qaeda threat targeting transAtlantic flights had just been foiled. Even so, the news was expected to
cause chaos on such flights, and my mom and others were scheduled to
fly the next day from the U.S. to London. A British Airways representative,
however, had assured mom that once they arrived in London they should
be able to catch a flight to Johannesburg, in South Africa. I would meet
them there, and we would all make our way to Botswana.
“We’re going,” mom said.
Later, after a series of international conference calls, we all agreed with
mom. She and dad, with my oldest brother and his fiancée, would meet my
other brother in London and fly to Johannesburg. I would meet them there
after a 14-hour flight from Hong Kong, where I was in graduate school.
In Hong Kong, it was now dark and I had an early flight. I threw a last
pair of socks into my suitcase and set my alarm for 6 a.m. In bed, unable to
sleep, I mulled the sudden turn of events. This was not the first time one of
our family vacations had felt terrorism’s shadow.
A planned trip to Kenya was briefly thrown into doubt in 1998 after
the bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. We were
scheduled to fly into Kenya a few days afterward. While the timing was
distressing, we decided to go ahead then too. No one could think of any
reason why we should not go. It is a good thing too because we have
happy memories from that trip and still consider it one of our top family
vacations.
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Reflecting on Kenya, I saw parallels with our upcoming trip. In both
situations, we decided to continue despite an ambiguous but looming threat.
The difference was that with Kenya we had a family discussion around the
kitchen table before deciding to go. This time we made the decision after
conference calls on cell phones.
I dreaded the inconvenience of what was sure to be added airport security,
but I took solace in the solidarity that my family showed in its resolve. And
as I would come to realize over the next two weeks, this epitomized my
relationship with my two older brothers in particular. A close encounter
with a wildfire in northern Botswana brought that into focus.
***
“How you doing back there, buddy?” my oldest brother Christian
shouted at Alexander, sitting one seat behind.
We were in an eight-seat, single-engine propeller plane over the Kalahari
Desert. The hot desert air below had stirred up large pockets of turbulence
that constantly shook us from our seats. In such conditions, our aircraft
seemed to flutter like a child’s paper plane tossed off a roof into a strong
wind.
“You’re doing fine!” Christian shouted over the engine and slapped a
patronizing hand on Alexander’s knee.
Alexander, who was much stronger than Christian, ignored this taunt.
Instead, he focused on the vast landscape outside his window and turned
up the volume on his iPod. He was uncomfortable in this type of plane, but
knew it was the only way to travel from one part of Botswana to another.
We had been in Botswana two days and were flying north to the
Makgadikgati Salt Pans, one of the most remote places on Earth. Despite
being almost as large as Portugal, there are no cities in the Makgadikgati
region. A handful of safari guides and a small population of nomadic people
known as Bushmen represent the only permanent human presence. But we
were not going there to see humans.
We were hoping to watch zebra, wildebeest, elephants, and giraffes make
their annual migration through the area. Every year at this time, water flows
into the many empty pans and basins in the Makgadikgati, drawing the
interest of huge herds of grazers from hundreds of miles away. That was
what we were coming to see.
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But as we began our descent into the Makgadikgati, this idyllic image
was betrayed by the view outside my window. There were no animals in
sight, and the land was dry and covered by small, thorny scrubs. But what
really drew my attention were the scattered patches of fire that dotted the
landscape and the rising plumes of smoke. The fires did not look like a
coordinated slash-and-burn effort common in arid climates; they looked
out-of-control.
No one commented on the hanging acrid smell of smoke as we
disembarked from the plane on to a long, dirt landing strip – probably
because we were relieved to stand on firm ground again. As we stretched
our legs, a dusty 4 X 4 safari vehicle raced toward the air strip and came
to a sharp stop just ten feet away from the plane. A large Italian man
jumped out of the truck’s backseat and ran wide-eyed toward the plane,
shouting, “Il fuoco! Il fuoco!” The fire. The fire. As he brushed past, he did
not acknowledge us. A small British woman was quick on his heels and
carried his bag to the plane.
After the man climbed into the plane, it thundered down the air strip,
and the woman came over and introduced herself. Her name was Kitty and
she would be our guide for a few days. She was covered in soot and had a
fresh bandage wrapped around her left hand.
After we hopped into the safari vehicle and began the 30-kilometer drive
to camp, Kitty turned around. Smiling nervously, she said, “Let me say that
there is a bit of a situation here.”
***
Scattered fires were sweeping through the area. On her way to the landing
strip with the Italian man, flames had started to surround their vehicle and
they nearly had to abandon it. She managed to salvage the truck, however,
by putting it into neutral gear and then physically pushing it out of harm’s
way. She remarked off-handedly that she had likely broken her finger as a
result.
Upon meeting our other guide at camp, an Australian named Kevin,
we heard more about the fires. Botswana lacks the infrastructure for an
organized fire department outside the major cities, he told us, and so only a
handful of volunteers were trying to beat back this collection of fires. Kevin
and Kitty were doing their part. They had been up around the clock the two
previous nights, armed with palm fronds and blankets, trying to snuff out
the flames.
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“We might have to ditch camp soon,” Kevin said ominously over dinner
that night. Kitty nodded, saying nothing.
Despite their efforts and those of other volunteers over the past few days,
the fires had intensified. Kevin was concerned the fires could develop into a
much more severe and synchronized wildfire that would char everything in
its path. The rainy season that was supposed to have just ended did not bring
nearly enough water to the region. The scrub vegetation that dominated the
landscape was dry and hard. It was like kindling wood.
By the time dinner was over, the sky had become illuminated by
thousands of bright stars and scattered eerie red glows on the horizon. The
scent of smoke drifted through the campsite.
My parents and Christian’s fiancée Sophie turned in for the night. Kevin
and Kitty got ready to challenge the fires again.
“I’ll join you guys,” I said to them, not knowing what I was getting myself
into.
“Thanks, but it is pretty tough work out there and you must be tired,”
Kevin replied, shooting a quick glance over to Kitty that seemed to ask,
Why would a tourist want to spend part of their vacation fighting fires?
“I want to go. Actually, we all do.” By saying that, I had just dragged my
brothers into it without consulting them. If I was going, they certainly were
as well.
On that note, my brothers and I set to work procuring necessary
provisions for the night. We included some alcohol – beers, a carafe of
whiskey, and a bottle of Amarula (South African sweet rum branded with
an enormous elephant on its label). We also brought digital cameras so that
we could record everything and support any future stories with evidence.
Kevin grinned as he noticed us walking toward the truck cradling our
supplies, and said, “You guys seem well prepared.”
As our vehicle hurtled along a bumpy desert trail, towards the red lights
on the horizon, I felt anything but prepared. I was wearing a polo shirt, a
pair of khaki pants, and some thin, yellow Moroccan house slippers that
Christian and Sophie had given me last Christmas. Kevin and Kitty, on the
other hand, were both sporting bulky layers of protective flannel shirts and
thick pants. And I had no idea how we would even fight the fires when we
saw them. The only reassuring thought was that my brothers were likely
feeling just as helpless. So rather than worry about what lay ahead, we
shared whiskey and looked into the night sky, laughing at the mess we had
gotten ourselves into.
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“Let’s finish the bottle!” Alexander shouted, grinning widely.
Fifteen minutes out of camp, we had not seen any fires, but had made
substantial progress on the whiskey. Due to a series of random toasts, the
bottle was passed among us more times than we can remember. With very
little whiskey left, we now determined we should finish it before we saw the
fires. There was no reason for our resolve, but it had become part of the pact
my brothers and I had made. Among us, I later realized, support is not so
much spoken as implied.
***
Just as Alexander took care of the last few drops of whiskey a few minutes
later, our truck geared down and began to slow. About a half-kilometer to
our right, a patch of scrubs was engulfed in flames. Kevin turned sharply off
of the marked trail and drove straight for it. When we got within 20 feet, he
shut the engine and everyone jumped out.
“It’s not rocket science. Just beat out the fire with these palm fronds,”
Kitty said as Kevin pulled out a bunch of four-foot long, dark green palm
fronds from the back of the truck and handed them to us. We ran towards
the fire like knights in a jousting competition, determined to save the day
and perhaps earn a bit of glory.
The flames rose to our waists, but had not spread far. Standing before the
fire, we did not hesitate and thrashed down our palm fronds as quickly we
could. Within a few minutes, we had smothered the flames, and Christian
bellowed, as he probably imagined a fireman would, “All clear!”
We each opened a beer to celebrate and hopped back on the truck
and sped away looking for more fires to put out. It did not take bravery
to fight these fires, just patience. We were not up against an inferno as I
had expected and feared, but rather small, isolated fires. Kevin and Kitty
took these seriously, however, because they were collectively devastating
the little vegetation the region is capable of sustaining, and as long as they
persisted amidst the dry conditions, the fires were a major threat.
So for hours, we went through the same routine – looking for flames,
smothering them, then looking for more. We were stopped in our tracks,
however, when we came across one particularly forceful fire that seemed to
represent the blaze that Kevin and Kitty feared.
“Leave it!” Kevin shouted to us from the truck. When we did not respond,
he shouted louder, “It’s too dangerous, just leave it!”
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“No way!” I darted back, running with palm frond toward flames
devouring a sturdy, mature tree that seemed to have just blossomed. In a
desert wracked by drought, the healthy tree seemed something divine, and I
was determined to save it. My brothers were of a similar mind because they
were right alongside, charging head-on toward the biggest fire we had seen
the whole night.
We swiped at the flames with our palm fronds as we had the entire night,
but to little avail. This was no ordinary fire. The flames soared above my
shoulders, emitting searing heat that quickly brought sweat to my forehead.
We had met our match.
“It’s too far gone anyway,” Kevin said as he came closer. “Just let the tree
burn.” He knew we did not have the equipment to fight a fire like this, not
to mention that we had been drinking heavily. We were dehydrated and
had little energy left.
Just as Kevin’s caution seemed to sink in, Alexander suddenly crashed
down a mighty blow on the flames. And then another. Christian followed
suit, and so did I. And there we stood swatting at the fire with unexpected
passion. Some minutes went by, until with one last wallop the fire died.
“Congratulations, guys,” Kevin said, pulling the truck closer to us so we
would not have to walk too far. “But there is lots more work to do, so let’s
get a move on.”
At this point, my brothers and I were lying on the ground, exhausted. At
some point in the night, I had lost my shirt and one of my Moroccan slippers.
And now, I desperately wanted water but knew that we had forgotten to
bring any in our haste to gather the alcohol and cameras. We had just saved
a tree in a desert, however, and my concerns paled in comparison to the
fulfillment I felt.
***
“A toast to volunteer firemen in Botswana!” I said, raising my bottle of
Castle Lager beer. It was two weeks since we fought the fires in Makgadikgati,
and my brothers and I were celebrating our last night in Africa at a hotel bar
in Cape Town, South Africa.
“We helped [some people]!” Alexander replied, smirking. It had become
a running joke for him to say that and he had made a point of bringing it up
nearly every day since that night. But even though he was laughing, it was
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obvious that he was proud of what we did. And he was right too; we had
made a positive difference.
The days that followed our late-night encounter with the fires also
brought some other challenges and excitement. We drove all-terrain
vehicles alongside a herd of zebra, we raced each other in makoros (dugout wooden canoes), and my brothers and I even challenged each other to
bite into a red hot chili pepper. On top of it all, we saw thousands of unique
and majestic animals. For me, however, the trip was defined by that night
we spent fighting fires.
I was proud of what we did that night, and also of how we did it. We
worked together. Individually, it is unlikely that any one of us would have
taken the initiative to help Kevin and Kitty fight the fires, or maintain
the patience to spend hours snuffing out all of the small isolated ones, or
summon the resolve to put out the massive one. But with one another’s
support and our kinship, we achieved more than we could have imagined.
Until he recently moved into the corporate world, Nick Westra worked
as a business reporter at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. In
his spare time, he enjoys travelling, playing basketball, cooking spicy food,
and watching romantic comedies. He graduated from the JMSC in 2007
after completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago.
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Spring 2008
A Dramatic Night
in Tree City, USA
This story is about an accident I survived through the extraordinary
help of friends and strangers. I wrote it in part to publicize vasovagal
syncope, a potentially dangerous health condition. I also wrote it to
encourage anyone facing adversity.
By Bong Miquiabas
Royal Oak, Michigan, a handsome city of 60,000 residents, is a suburb
14 miles north of Detroit, a metropolis not known for beauty. In the early
1970s, as its auto industry faltered, Detroit’s crime rate soared. Detroit was
branded “the murder capital of the world,” suffering 714 homicides in 1974
alone.
By contrast, Royal Oak has, for every year since 1976, been named “Tree
City USA” by the National Arbor Day Foundation. Anyone who enters its
city limits will understand the accolade. A striking bounty of trees envelops
Royal Oak. Apart from oak trees there are beech, maple, elm, hickory,
butternut and black and white ash trees.
The trees were what I first noticed about Royal Oak on April 22, 2006,
the most dramatic night of my life.
I was on my way to the house of my friends, Gary and Yen Ruiz. It was
about nine in the evening when my Honda Civic crossed into Royal Oak.
Peering through a window, Gary saw my car pull up their driveway. He
flung open the garage door to greet me. A warm guy with a perpetual smile,
Gary embraced me and led me through the kitchen and into the dining
room, where Yen and three of their friends – Tony, Bill and Cho – had been
talking.
Yen leapt from her chair to embrace me, too. She introduced me to the
others. The wedding banquet I had attended ran longer than expected, I
said.
“What did you eat?” Yen asked excitedly. I recounted with relish the
multi-course menu at Hong Hua, a Chinese restaurant nearby.
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“I’ve never tried hot and sour soup,” Gary said.
“Well, I highly recommend their hot and sour soup.”
We all sat and talked for two lively hours. Early in the conversation,
Tony had gone to the kitchen to make me a rum and coke. The others also
nursed drinks. We were priming ourselves for a night on the town.
Anticipating our departure, I excused myself to use the washroom.
When I looked into the mirror I noticed my face looked as red as a fire
truck. I splashed water on my face and returned to the group.
Yen, Cho and Tony were near the garage door, putting on their shoes.
Gary and Bill were standing in the kitchen talking. I stood near a dining
room chair listening to Gary and Bill. Suddenly I felt woozy. I leaned on the
chair. My field of vision darkened. The room spun.
***
A voice – a man’s or a woman’s, I can’t recall – counted out loudly, as if to
others. The voice disappeared and was followed by a breathless heave. The
next sound resembled that of a rickety old lawn chair snapping into place.
An engine softly whirred.
Hearing begat feeling. The temperature was cool, fresh, outdoors.
A voice – the same voice? – spoke: “Bong, do you know where you
are?”
The question echoed.
“Bong, you’ve been in an accident,” the voice said. It occurred to me to
answer the question.
“Royal Oak.”
“Good. Are you taking any medications?”
I think I recited my prescriptions.
“You fell and hurt yourself,” an anguished voice said. It was Gary.
Whatever transpired immediately after my fall I learned later from Gary
and the hospital log…
Without warning, I had collapsed face-first onto Gary and Yen’s granite
dining room floor. My face fractured in four places: my right eye socket,
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above my right temple, my foremost right cheekbone and below my right
nostril. The impact caused a concussion.
Gary had called 911. When paramedics arrived I was lying on the floor.
My blood was everywhere. I was stabilized and an ambulance whisked me
to the emergency room at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, three
miles from Gary and Yen’s house. Only 10 minutes had passed between
Gary’s call and my arrival at the ER.
Gary said I went “out like a light switch” before anybody could brace my
fall. One second I was standing, the next I was down.
In the ER, I had become nauseated, a consequence of severe head
trauma. Gary told me that, after I vomited, I said, “Now you can try hot
and sour soup.”
Gary told me he knew then that I’d be okay.
But he said my brain scan looked terrible. My skull was awash in blood,
prompting a diagnosis that I had suffered an aneurysm or seizure. Hours
later, after I awoke for an extended period of time, it became evident that,
fortunately, my mental faculties, such as fluent speech, remained intact. I
was also lucky not to have bitten my tongue, lost teeth or broken my jaw in
the fall.
My first memory after the conversation in the ambulance was one of
sight. I opened my left eye and saw people hovering over me, shoulder-toshoulder, all dressed in white. Without my eyeglasses they looked blurry
but their grim facial expressions were unmistakable. One of them spoke.
“We’ll be taking care of you tonight.”
The woman who spoke had a deep, endearing voice. She said her name
was Ya. She was a nurse in the intensive care unit.
I remember feeling for the necklace I had been wearing. It was a slender
silver rope from which hung a flat jade piece. Silver-colored Chinese
characters were affixed to either side of the piece. One character represented
fortune; the other, longevity. I had bought the necklace six months earlier
in Hong Kong while on vacation from Indiana, where I was then living. The
necklace, like everything else I had been wearing, was gone.
I remember thinking that if I was going to die then at least I would pass
under watchful eyes. But I also remember wanting to look outside to get
my bearings. So far as I could tell, there were no windows in the ICU.
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Growing up in rural Ohio, I always enjoyed being outdoors. My brother
Noel and I used to ride our bikes daily to what we called “the woods,”
pedaling down a newly-paved road to get there. The air smelled of pine.
After we rode home I’d run to my room and sit on the side of my bed to
gaze at the sunset.
***
The next morning, a neurosurgeon named Dr. Cao entered the ICU. Her
handshake was firm yet kind. Upon reviewing my medical chart and the
notes taken from Gary’s conversations with hospital staff, Dr. Cao surmised
that I fainted because of vasovagal syncope – insufficient blood flow to the
brain.
Dr. Cao said that several factors contributed to my fainting. First,
I ate a great deal at the wedding banquet, so much of my blood was in
my stomach. I had also taken alcohol and caffeine – the rum and coke –
a potent combination that dilated my blood vessels while accelerating my
heart rate.
In addition, I hadn’t completely recovered from flu earlier that week
and I was fatigued from driving three hours to Michigan. Fainting seemed
inevitable in retrospect. The trigger was my visit to the washroom after
sitting for hours.
“It was a perfect storm for fainting,” Dr. Cao said. I was relieved to have
an explanation for loved ones.
My parents had been visiting friends outside Chicago. Dad was standing
on the first tee of a golf course when a friend’s mobile phone rang. It was
Noel calling from his home in North Carolina. Noel had been trying all
morning to reach our parents; their phones had been off. Dad never struck
his teed ball.
Noel learned about my accident from Vince, a mutual friend of ours and
Gary’s, whom Gary had called first. The first few times Vince called Noel,
Noel was watching a movie on the downstairs level of his townhouse. Noel’s
mobile phone had been ringing helplessly upstairs. Finally, around two in
the morning, Noel, having fallen asleep, awoke to Vince’s call.
“I was freaking out,” Noel would tell me. Long after the accident, as I
was showing Dad a feature on his mobile phone, we discovered in the inbox
Noel’s urgent text messages, all dated April 23, 2006.
167
When Mom and Dad arrived at the ICU, I was too weak to turn my head.
My parents held my hands. Everything was surreal. My blood pressure at
one point plummeted to 70/19 (normal blood pressure is around 120/80).
“That’s almost dead,” I overheard a nurse gasp after taking the low
reading. So I was surprised to hear soon afterward that my condition had
stabilized such that I could leave the ICU.
As an orderly rolled my bed to a new room, I wondered how I might
heal. Even veteran hospital staff looked startled when they saw me. Mirrors,
balloons and anything that might cast a reflection were kept from me. When
eventually I was able to use the washroom, a nurse always accompanied me
and blocked my view of the mirror. One nurse described the swelling as
“tremendous.”
My future lay in the expert hands of Dr. Clayman, a surgeon with more
than 20 years of experience in Detroit-area hospitals. Dr. Clayman was
a gentleman. He patiently explained how he would remove all the bone
fragments inside my face and install two titanium plates to support my
right cheek and right temple.
I lacked the courage to ask whether I would again see out of my right
eye. It had swollen totally shut after the accident and would endure further
trauma in surgery. Sensing my preoccupation, Dr. Clayman said he would
do his best.
Two days after we met, Dr. Clayman performed my facial surgery. It was
nearly midnight when he scrubbed in. Surgeries are performed 24 hours
a day at William Beaumont. With more than 1,000 beds, it is the largest
inpatient hospital in America. Before surgery, I was among a handful of
patients waiting in a vast holding room. Our beds were parked like airplanes
at a terminal.
Four hours later, Dr. Clayman informed my parents that the surgery
had been successful. He said the bone fragments resembled “crushed egg
shells.”
Both titanium plates were installed without problems. Each measures
two by two by two millimeters. Together they are no heavier than a postage
stamp. Dr. Clayman half-joked that, if I ever feel faint and cannot sit down
in time, I should lean to my right. “Those plates are stronger than bone,”
he said.
168
The first night after surgery was almost unbearable. I was told my face
swelled up more than ever. It felt like my entire head was building slowly,
cruelly, toward an explosion.
It would be weeks before my right eye opened fully. And through my left
eye everything I saw appeared in a rich maroon. A nurse said my head had
been saturated with blood from the head trauma and surgery. My head was
elevated to enable the hemorrhaged blood to drain through a tube trailing
from my neck. It was only at the end of my one-week hospitalization that
the tube, like the red-colored images, became clear.
***
A week after being discharged, I visited Dr. Clayman for a check-up. My
right eye was still heavily swollen. “Looks good,” he said persuasively.
Dr. Clayman wanted to conduct a vision test. It was the moment of
truth.
He pried open my right eyelid, and I widened the hinges of my eyeglasses
as far as possible to see through the right lens. Dr. Clayman asked me to
read the eye chart on the wall. I was able to read at 20/20 strength.
Dr. Clayman shook his head. “Somehow your optic nerve survived the
trauma,” he said. “It’s just a miracle.”
At the end of the check-up I advised Dr. Clayman that the right side
of my face remained numb. I told him I couldn’t blow my right nostril.
Smiling, he extended his little finger on one hand: “You’ll have to go in and
get it.” I burst out laughing. It was the hardest I’d laughed in weeks.
Mom and Noel had sat with me during the check-up and joined me
in thanking Dr. Clayman for everything he and his team had done. He
gallantly deflected our praise. As the three of us walked back to the car,
where Dad had been waiting, I flashed Dad a thumbs-up sign.
We drove to Gary and Yen’s house. When we pulled into their driveway,
we saw my Honda, parked in the same space since the accident. Gary and
Yen were waiting in the dining room. Sometime after entering I asked for
rum and coke. Gary laughed nervously. When Bill arrived, Gary gave Noel
my Honda keys and we drove in a caravan of cars to Hong Hua, the Chinese
restaurant, because I still remembered it fondly. Tony was already there. We
embraced.
169
At dinner I invited Gary to join me in ordering hot and sour soup. Gary
agreed it tasted good. After the meal, my parents, Noel and I said goodbye
to everyone. The day could not have been better.
Noel led me to the Honda. He would be driving us home. After we
turned out of the restaurant lot, Noel looked into the rear-view mirror to
make sure Mom and Dad, driving the other car, had followed us onto the
highway.
They had seen us. Satisfied, Noel asked what music I’d like to hear.
“Anything,” I said. He suggested I rest. I reclined my seat.
The highway felt smooth, and it jutted westward, at that perfect moment,
in a graceful arc. The Midwestern sun, looking something like a melting
orange, was starting to set. I considered shielding my non-swollen eye from
the glare. But then, blinking back tears, I left the sunshine on my face, where
it was meant to be, where I always want it to be.
Bong Miquiabas has lived and worked in Hong Kong since graduating
from the JMSC in 2008. He was formerly a staff writer for Time Out Hong
Kong and now freelances for various publications.
This book is going to take you to remote regions and crowded
cities. It will take you very near Ground Zero in New York City,
on the day two hijacked airliners caused two great skyscrapers to
collapse and killed many people. It will take you to weddings
and funerals and to parties and death museums. It will take you
into courtrooms, barrooms and emergency rooms. You will
meet a model and a murderer and doctors and druggies. It will
take you into a boxing ring, a football match and a rock concert.
It will put you on a white-knuckle plane ride and in a bus about
to fall off a cliff. It will show you how to fight brush fires, search
for tigers, cram for an exam and adapt to cultures where no one
has ever met anyone like you before.
Along the way, you will experience love, joy, hope, grief, pain
and despair, like the characters in the stories, including many of
the authors who chose to write from the first-person point of
view. This book is about emotions and ideas; it is about humans
and their condition; it is about the life around us.
Printed and bound in Hong Kong, China
ISBN 978-988-194-604-1
Published by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre
in association with Hong Kong University Press
9 789881 946041

Global Stories – Literary Journalism

Transcription

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