Coming Home

Several years ago I attended a party on Bainbridge and got chatting to an elderly gentleman who was well-travelled and had lived for many years in the middle east.  He was a fascinating character and I was fixated by his tales (to the point of letting my wine glass run dry!) until he asked me a question that gave me pause for thought and engendered some consternation.  It was an obvious question, but one to which I’d never given any thought: ‘If I’d lived half my life in England and half in the USA and was planning a decade of world travel, where was ‘home’?’  When I spluttered into my wine glass (thankfully re-filled) and said I had no idea, he expressed genuine concern and commented that it was tragic and a real loss to me that I had nowhere I could call home.  I found myself thinking of Dorothy clicking her little red slippers together, but for the life of me I couldn’t understand the gentleman’s concern nor the need to have a place to call home.

I’m still not convinced that one needs to be anchored to a homeland but, since I’ve returned to the country of my birth and childhood, I have a greater appreciation of what makes a place ‘home’.  I’ve come to the conclusion that home is not necessarily where your family resides, nor is it the place where life-changing events took place (which is not to say that memories of ‘home’ are not important); instead, the experience of ‘coming home’ for me is a feeling, I think it’s a whole body version of umami.  Wikipedia describes the sixth taste as having the property of ‘a mild but lasting aftertaste difficult to describe’.   Others state that a food has umami when it has become all that it can be, when it is at its peak of quality and fulfillment.  Can life, like food, achieve the transcendent state of umami?  And is it this feeling that Samwise Gamgee is describing when he talks thus about home to Frodo:

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It'll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they'll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields... and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”

Returning to England in May I can certainly attest to the umami feeling Sam describes when I could once again feast my eyes on flowering horse chestnuts, hawthorns and limes and observe, still, Clydesdales grazing in a field.  But even routine things can stimulate that feeling of familiarity and comfort.  It’s reassuring to bicycle past Martin’s newsagent every morning and see an old man in a flat cap with Yorkie in tow, and stick in hand, tapping his way along to collect the daily paper.  As a school girl I delivered newspapers for Martin’s for many years and in all weather!   And my grandfather would walk to the village store every morning for the paper - it was his big outing for the day when his health deteriorated.  Remarkably, there are still newspaper boys (and girls, although I’ve mainly seen boys) in England.  The job appears not to have changed, but now I occasionally see a lad shunning the bike for the more trendy scooter and sporting ear buds, the music no doubt helping him get through the chore.   I wish podcasts had been available when I was a papergirl and later when I delivered the Christmas post in Oxford.   Postmen (and women) haven’t changed much either, but they now sport a trendy red uniform and seem to take the job pretty seriously.  I remember sorting the Christmas post with some pretty randomly dressed, jovial fellows and I got the impression that it was all a bit of a lark, but maybe that was just because I was working with the Christmas temps! 

I don’t know if it’s a sense of fulfilment, or a giddy adrenaline-induced high I feel when I bicycle at breakneck speed down Headington Hill into the city of dreaming spires, but being on a bike again in England probably gives me the strongest feeling of ‘coming home’.  So much of my youth was spent on a bicycle!  If I wasn’t bicycling to school or doing my paper round, I was slogging uphill in the rain on my bike on a youth hostelling holiday in Wales, or zipping along the A31 to visit my boyfriend in Richmond, or doing the Oxford thing of pedalling like a mad thing down Cowley road trying to make a 9 o’clock lecture.  Reassuringly, a LOT of people still bike in Oxford and the infrastructure for cyclists has improved immensely.  Raleigh is still in operation and I was able to get a fabulous green 8-speed bike off Gumtree, a step up from my old blue 3-speed.  I sincerely hope that in my lifetime personal flying machines don’t supplant terrestrial forms of transport because I’ll feel about the disappearing bicycle the same way my predecessors felt about the loss of the horse drawn cart.

Ah, but it’s reassuring to see that England still values its waterways as a means of transport and, on a fine weekend, the canals are alive with activity.  The river Thames has not changed and, walking beside it with my rambling group, I am transported back to another river and another time.  While studying at Oxford I took many a weekend break to visit my grandmother in the little village of Eckington in Worcestershire and, while there, frequently went on therapeutic walks by the river Avon.  Rivers flood (especially this year!), they can transport a damp Queen on her triumphal Jubilee barge, or Ratty and Mole on a summer jaunt in a boat, but they remain essentially unchanged by these activities.  There is something stoic about English rivers and I think that is why a walk by the river was, and still is, a very grounding activity for me and an activity, like bicycling, that can induce the transcendent umami state and a sensation of ‘coming home’.

I don’t know how long I will stay in England or where fortune will take me next on our round the world adventure.  I don’t know if I will ever reach a place and say ‘Ah, now this feels like home and I will stay here forever’.  Maybe this makes me a tragic case, or maybe I am just responding to the very same genetic urge that gave our predecessors the initiative to leave Africa and colonize the world.  There are travellers and those that stay home;  in Oxford one’s thoughts turn often to Tolkien and I think he sums it all up in his astute observation that ‘Not all those who wander are lost’.

Those Slippery Days of Spring...

In most countries the first balmy days of the year are greeted, if not with rapture, with a satisfied sigh as one anticipates summer and all the good things that season brings.  This is not the case in China.  When the warm spring winds arrive, our normally fresh-air loving neighbours batten down the hatches, seal all leaky windows and doors as best they can, and withdraw glumly into their secured cocoons.  At first this behaviour seems very odd to the foreigner who watched entire families dine on their balcony clad in parkas and red long johns (I KNOW the underwear is red!) during some very chilly days in January. As I said, the Chinese love nothing if not fresh air.  Why the sudden change in attitude toward the elements?

Steve and I discerned the answer on our first balmy spring day a couple of weeks ago.  When descending from the 7^th floor of our apartment building down the polished granite stairs that are standard in all buildings in China, we noticed that our feet were getting steadily wetter and by the 1^st floor we were splashing through veritable puddles.  Had the building cleaner become negligent and failed to mop thoroughly after washing the stairs?  Or were we observing a natural phenomenon that makes the onset of spring in this part of the tropics a nightmare for Chinese and foreigners alike?  Unfortunately, the latter was the case.  Imagine an environment where all buildings are constructed of granite and tile with no insulation in the walls and leaky single pane windows.  Now take these granite and tile structures and cool them for a couple of months to a chilly 9^oC (cool enough to warrant dressing for bed in thermal underwear and a wool hat – remember, there’s no heat in this cold box, and no insulation); then overnight douse these buildings in moisture-laden air of a sultry  21^oC, and you can create a swimming pool of condensation!  You can’t defy the laws of physics!

Fortunately, Steve and I are still spry enough that we are able to remain upright (at least while sober!) as we daily negotiate the plethora of slippery surfaces we encounter nowadays – our apartment floor, the stairs, all the corridors at school (which are exposed to the elements and cleverly constructed of tile) and our very own classrooms.  Gone are the days when we could incorporate ‘run to the board’ activities in the daily teaching agenda.  Indeed, everyone moves in slow motion at this time of year but there are falls and broken limbs in spite of this.  Broken bones are associated with spring in China in the way we associate them with the ski season in the Pacific Northwest.  Indeed, on day one of the ‘slippery season’ we learnt that one teacher and one student in a neighbouring school had succumbed and were both now sporting plaster casts on their arms - and that was just the beginning!

Several weeks into the season, Steve and I have adapted in the manner of seasoned travellers.  We now keep our air conditioner set on ‘dehumidify’ at a comfortable 30^oC and this has reduced the layer of moisture on the apartment floor, although it hasn’t done much to dry the perennially damp bathroom towels and bedding.  Drying laundry has moved from an outdoor occupation to an indoor obsession.  My days are spent rotating washed items onto and off our 2ftX2ft electric radiator and fearing for the elastic in my underwear – surely direct heat can’t be increasing its lifespan?  And, like our Chinese neighbours, we’ve learnt to seal every crevice in our cold box to keep that nasty warm air out!

However, there are some that love this season and the humid climate it brings.  Our feathered friends are not disturbed by slippery surfaces and are in raptures over the newly hatched insect population.  Their joyful song is a balm for the ears.  And the newly planted trees on campus are wriggling their roots into moist soil and preparing to wow us with spring blossoms.  The Chinese are amazing gardeners and really know their soil and local growing conditions.  In early January holes were dug all over campus and allowed to soak up the winter rains prior to being filled just this past week with mature root ball trees trucked in from a local nursery.  These are big trees – probably 10-20 years old and they look extremely healthy.  March 12^th was China’s annual National Tree Planting Day and an entire afternoon was spent by workers and students alike ensuring that the 50-odd holes around campus were suitably filled with vegetation, from mature trees to good-sized bushes – what a fantastic tradition.

I will close with my conclusions on the weather of Guangdong province since weather seems to be an international obsession and my observations may be useful to any blog readers who are considering a trip down here. 

Seasons in Guangdong Province:

July to late October – the sweaty season

November – the perfect month

December – February – the ‘red long john’ season

March – the slippery season

April – June – yet to be experienced, but my guess is warm and damp and filled with tropical colour and butterflies. 

Steve will inform me, no doubt, if my weather guess for late spring is correct.  As many of you know, come May I will be flying north to inspect bluebells and hawthorn hedges in England and will possibly never return for any season in China, especially the ‘slippery season’!

Genuine Fakes, Anyone?

       A few months ago, as we were lazing in the U.S., a news story broke and achieved some international notoriety.  Apparently an American blogger had turned up a fake Apple Store in Kunming, China.  He publicized his discovery by writing of it and posting pictures of the store and its workers on his blog.  The BBC, NPR, and other international news organizations picked up on the story, and shortly the local authorities in Kunming were shocked, shocked to find more than a dozen other fake Apple Stores.  Reportedly, these were all closed down. I found the story fascinating, not because someone had found an ersatz Apple Store in China, but because the media considered it newsworthy.

        This is the land of the genuine fake, be it remembered.  I doubt there is a legitimate product (or an illegitimate one, come to that) available anywhere in the world that does not have a fake twin made in China.  As exhibit A I offer this photo of my neighbor’s flip-flops, parked outside his front door:

        For exhibits B through Z and beyond, I encourage you to enquire of Microsoft, Apple, Calvin Klein, Rolex, Gucci, KFC, or any music or film distributor you care to name.  Or really, just pick any company that has tried to sell anything in China and ask if they have had their products copied without their permission.

        This phenomenon really is the greatest hindrance to innovation and entrepreneurship in this country.  There is absolutely no incentive to tinker and toil in your workshop to produce a better mousetrap, because it is a given that if you do come up with something clever, unique, and useful, there will be a dozen competitors undercutting you with cheap knock-offs before you can say “Intellectual pr-”. And unless you have some serious “guanxi” (connections), good luck in getting the competitors shut down.  The legal system here offers no succor to the wronged entrepreneur without connections.

        So, as I say, the amazing thing to me about the saga of the fake Apple Stores was not that they existed; rather that anyone got excited about their existence.  I would have been far more interested if someone had made a tour of China and found no fake Apple Stores.

One for the Foodies

dedicated to my friend Chris, an unrepentant foodie

God bless you, you’ve finally looked us up!  Our first visitor, what a treat!  Have you eaten yet?  That’s the traditional greeting for a visitor around here, you know—the Cantonese are really proud of their cuisine.  You’re hungry, you say?  Splendid—let’s go get a bite!  Come on with me, we’ll walk on over—It won’t take ten minutes.  Mostly, we eat at the student canteens because it’s convenient, and also because the Fiance Minister decided it’s better for the treasury to do so.  But no sense in slumming it today—this is an occasion, having a guest!

Now we could go down that way to dumpling man.  No idea what his real name is, but we go there once or twice a week.  He’s a jolly guy—an owner and waiter all in one.  He usually wanders around shirtless in flip-flops and shorts, and I like him because he helps me correct my Chinese pronunciation.  He’s got good dumplings, too, but the flies can sometimes be a bit too cordial.  So unless you’re really fond of them, I think I know a better place.  Yes?  Good, let’s press on.  Be careful crossing the street here, and pay no attention to the signal light—purely for decorative purposes.  Just wait till there’s a break in the traffic and step lively.  That’s the ticket, and here we are at restaurant row.  What do you mean, “Where are they?” These are all restaurants along here.  Yes, I know they all look like a bunch of oil-change shops, but that’s just the way they build ‘em.  The insides have all the charm of oil-change shops, too, but the food’s pretty good.

Damned if I know what they serve in most of these places—Chinese food, I expect—but you’ll notice that it’s all written in Chinese, too, so we’re pretty clueless once we walk in.  Usually, we select restaurants that have pictures of their dishes on the walls.  I’ve had an idea for a restaurant chain here in China catering to ex-pats.  I could call it Point ‘n’ Eat, with pictures of everything, since that’s what we foreigners tend to do anyway.  Anyway, let’s go in here—they know us and they’re terribly patient.  “Ni hao, ladies!  A table for san, please!”  That means three.  Making great strides with the language, see?

So, you’ll see you’ve got a little bowl, a little plate, a tea cup, chopsticks and not much else.  Well, right, there’s a roll of toilet paper too, but we’ll get to that later.  Ah, and here’s the lady with our jug of tea.  Now, watch this.  It’s the custom here in Guangdong, and not really anywhere else in China, I’m told.  You half fill your bowl with the tea and put in your tea cup—that’s right, into the bowl.  Now roll it around a bit and take it out, slosh the tea around the bowl, then pour it out over your chopsticks into this plastic tub here in the middle of the table.  The Cantonese think everything’s dirty and dusty, see, so they wash all their utensils at the table—wash it in tea—to make sure it’s done right.  Wouldn’t think of eating without doing that first.  No, we don’t do the little plate—you’ll see why later.  Now, I’ll order, and I promise you a pretty tasty meal.

One of these days I’m going to learn to say “The usual, Gladys,” but since I haven’t got that down yet, I’ve had some friends write the names of a few dishes on this notecard—I just hand that to the waitress and we’re all set.  Now, everything is communal here, see?  They’ll bring out a big bowl of rice and more food than we can possibly eat, and put it all on the lazy-susan here.  Then we dig in and help ourselves.  Put some rice in the bowl and add in the other stuff, then repeat as you finish it off.  Not terribly hygenic, with everybody scooping stuff out with their chopsticks, but I’m afraid that’s how it’s done.  They’ll bring a spoon for the dishes if you ask, but I’m dipped if I can pronounce it right.  Last time I tried, they were gone a while and eventually brought me a spark plug.  So I hope you’re not catchy or anything.

Ah, here’s the first set of dishes, the rice and the chicken.  Now the first thing you’ll notice is—well, actually you’re right, the first thing you’ll notice is that the chicken’s head is right there on the dish with a pretty astonished look on his face.  A friend once told me they do that because Chinese diners like to see “the whole animal.” No, I don’t get it, either.  As if you might think you were being served a macaque or something unless you saw that chicken head.  Funny how the comb and wattles don’t stay red once he’s cooked—go a kind of sepia color, don’t they?  Ah, but I see you’re going kind of sepia yourself.  Here, I’ll take the head away. 

No, what I meant to say is that the chicken hasn’t been disassembled as we’re used to seeing in the west.  This poor fellow has been cut top to bottom into a bunch of quarter-inch slices, bones and all.  You should see the chicken we get at the canteen—some of it looks as if it’s been shoved through a wood-chipper.  But it’s got to be easy to pick up with chopsticks, you see, because we don’t have any knives and forks.  But it also means that you chew your food very carefully and slowly, just like mom always told you to do.   And here’s what you use that little plate for—you spit out the bone fragments onto it.  Yes, yes, you can take them out with your fingers if you wish, but really, even the well-mannered Chinese diners just spit them onto the plate.  Sometimes there isn’t a plate, so people will spit out the bones gristle right onto the table.  When I told a Chinese friend that westerners find that odd, she told me that they use the toilet paper to wipe stuff off their hands, rather than licking their fingers the way we do when we get a tasty sauce on them.  Well, fair enough.  I wonder how KFC got such a foothold here in Asia. 

Ah, but speaking of feet, yes, those are the chicken’s feet there on the platter, too.  I told you:  the whole animal.  No, please, help yourself—you’re the guest here.  I’ve had one, which is my lifetime’s quota of chicken feet.  Taste?  Well, I guess it tasted about like you’d expect a chicken’s foot to taste.

Oh, but now here’s something more like—mutton ribs.  Ironic, no?  We lived two years in Australia, spent a month in New Zealand, and had to come to China for mutton.  Here, just slip on these disposable gloves and tuck in.  You’ll love ‘em.  And now here’s a real treat.  I’m going to steal this recipe and use it next time I have to bring the yams for Thanksgiving.  It’s peeled and cooked sweet potatoes, but instead of butter and brown sugar on them, the cook has drizzled over some caramelized cane sugar.  Magnificent!  You pick up a few with your chopsticks, so, but then make sure you dip them in the bowl of water here to cool down the melted sugar first—give you a nasty burn otherwise.  And say, this is good—a cold salad with cilantro and no, not noodles—those are strips of cooked tofu, actually.  It’s got a delicious dressing of some sort with vinegar, and I’m not sure what else.  And the dumplings, of course.  These have a mutton filling, and on these here are filled with  some sort of chives.  Dip them in this sauce and enjoy.  Yeah, we eat pretty darned well here.

Now here’s the phrase I have to practice.  I asked my Chinese tutor why the waitress never understood when I asked to pay the bill, and it turns out I was actually saying, “I want to buy eggs.”  Who knew?  Ah but as I say, they‘re used to me here.  So here we go—no, no, it’s on me today.  You treat me when I get to your place.  The total for all three of us was just 100 RMB, or just about $15—nothing!  Let’s walk back this way, past my favorite little shop—another place where I’ve established a certain rapport with the inmates.  Did I tell you we went to Taiwan a few weeks ago?  The food was very good there—definitely lived up to its billing.  There was an especially nice beef noodle soup that we found everywhere, and I had a wonderful steak and a shrimp the size of a lobster one night.  But I have to say they haven’t quite figured out the tomato yet.  There was a quote I read a while back that fit pretty well:  “Intelligence is knowing the tomato is a fruit.  Wisdom is knowing not to put them in a fruit salad.”  That’s where the Taiwanese fell down a bit—I bought a stick of what I thought were candied fruits only to find that in addition to the strawberries and plums there were two cherry tomatoes.  And Kathryn did actually get some tomatoes in a fruit salad with yogurt.  But apart from the tomato faux pas, top marks.

Ah, and here’s my shop!  Allow me to present you with a couple of these frosty green beauties.  This, my friend, is Tsingtao, the finest Chinese product I’ve yet come across.  This superb beer is just $0.70 for a 20-ounce bottle—nearly 2/3 of a liter.  And how gorgeous it is on a hot day!  Let’s get on home and have these on the balcony.  I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you stopped by!

There's No Place Like Home

            “There’s no place like home,” said Dorothy plaintively, clicking the heels of her ruby slippers.  And how glad she was to get back:  hugging her family, weeping, and repeating to the last fade-out, “There’s no place like home!”   That quote was much on my mind a few weeks ago, because on June 6^th, Kathryn and I arrived back in the U.S. for the first time since October, 2008.  There have been hugs at our reunions, but no tears, and the dialogue has been somewhat different from Dorothy’s.  Here’s how it has usually gone for us:

Friend:  Hey!  Look at you! (hugs)  Wow, how long has it been?

Us:  Well, about two and two-thirds years since we left.  Yeah, it’s been a while.

Friend:  But you guys look great (pure small talk; not to be taken literally—ed).

Us:  Thanks, you too.

Friend:  So how is it to be home?

Us:  It’s weird as hell, actually.  We’re completely unhinged.  How much time do you have?  Do you want to go get a beer and hear about this? 

Friend:  It’s uh, 8:30.

Us:  So you’re busy.

Friend:  In the morning, yeah.  Maybe a bit early.  But hey, let’s catch up.  You’re back for good now, right?  I gotta run for the ferry or I’d stay and talk.  But it’s great to see you again.  Take care.

           

            Of course, the conversations haven’t played out exactly like that.  When people ask rhetorical questions, they want rhetorical answers, e.g.

Q:  How are you? 

A:  I’m fine, thanks (correct answer).

A:  I’ve three months to live (incorrect answer).

            The correct answer to the question, “How is it to be home?” is “It’s great to be back,” so that’s what Kathryn and I have typically said to our friends.  But in private we have been comparing notes on how it is much more unsettling to be here than either of us had anticipated; how so many things seem, perversely, familiar and alien at the same time; and how, in some instances, we seem disconnected from friends and society and are no longer sure how to behave here.

            But the first thing that struck us both was the quiet.  That’s not surprising, since we were fresh from Hanoi, where a typical, business-as-usual street scene makes an American Superbowl victory celebration cum riot look sedate and orderly by comparison.  Life in Asian cities is so infused and supercharged with noise and chaotic action that after a while one ceases to notice it.  Living there is like drinking triple espressos all day. 

            Consider just the noise aspect of life in Asia, and forget for a moment the visual distractions.  In the first place, it is not noisy on the streets alone; restaurants, bars, and cafés often have concrete walls and tile floors, for ease of cleaning, and there are no curtains or ceiling tiles to absorb sound.  Moreover, people tend to speak loudly and boisterously everywhere, so chatting with your friends when dining out is like trying to converse at a jazz club or at the end of a busy airport runway.  Even in schools, no consideration at all is given to acoustic properties.  I have not yet taught in an Asian classroom with carpeting or any kind of noise-absorbing panels.  Books slap loudly onto wooden desks, hard chairs bang and clatter on tile floors, and it all echoes around in the concrete-and-glass classrooms.  Thus, students are supposed to learn to speak and listen to English in the acoustic equivalent of an auto-repair shop or a public restroom.

            Small wonder, then, that Kathryn and I woke up on June 7^th and blinked at one another with the same thought:  “It’s so quiet!  Where are all the car and motorbike horns? The throngs of neighbors tramping up and down outside, gabbling and laughing?  The trash lady endlessly chanting “Bring out your trash,” and banging on her shovel whenever the spirit moved her?”  All gone!  We probed our ears, both half afraid that we’d gone deaf.  But no, it was simply a sleepy suburban morning, where quiet is the norm.  At first it was wonderful (“We can sleep as late as we want!”), but soon it felt a bit creepy, as if a funeral cortege was on its way and the neighborhood had been told to hush up, and finally it just struck us as dull.  Where are all the people, we wondered.  There are homes all around us—so why weren’t the occupants in view?  Apparently they were just sequestered in their houses or at work; they certainly weren’t out on the streets, which is where we’d grown used to seeing the populace in Hanoi.   So it took a while for our ears to stop ringing and for us to get used to the relative quiet.

            But then we ventured out and started interacting with those around us, and I realized the biggest adjustment would be simply to reacquaint myself with American society as a whole—the American way of life.  I certainly mean no disrespect to the land of my birth when I say that living abroad has caused me to look at it in a new light.  Indeed, being gone so long has allowed me to see why citizens of other countries sometimes regard America with a mixture of wariness, dismay, and disbelief.  I often felt that way myself, while I was away, as I read or heard how my compatriots were keeping themselves busy.  Much of the news from home seemed to be either depressing, insane, or simply too trivial to care about:  continued grim statistics about the economy, the usual assortment of random shootings, and a wrenching national debate about whether or not the President should be allowed to speak to schoolchildren, for example. 

            And this view of my country was fostered not merely by what the media were saying about the US, but by what Americans were saying to and about each other.  We’ve had no TV for the past three years, and bought no newspapers or magazines, so most of our news came from the internet—the websites of news sources we had enjoyed at home.  The thing that made perusal of these sources unpleasant was the ubiquitous comments section at the bottom of each news article.  What amazing hellbroths these sections are, what foul amalgamations of ignorance, vitriol, and crippled grammar!  Reading them from abroad, I concluded American society had descended into pure anarchy. I envisioned shoppers deliberately running their carts into others in the supermarket aisles, cars climbing curbs in pursuit of pedestrians, foul-tempered seniors tearing down lost-puppy posters and kicking over lemonade stands.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I returned and settled in here, to find that many people still make eye contact as we pass on the streets, and that a good number of these strollers actually say “hello” or “good morning” into the bargain.  I witnessed friends and strangers meet during an amble on the beach and exchange not insults or gunfire, but pleasant greetings and a bit of gossip about how long the road repairs would continue, or how so-and-so’s hernia operation went.  It was a total reversal of what the “news” had led me to expect.  So I have had to recalibrate my expectations about social interactions in my own country, and to realize that websites don’t tell the whole story, even when the man on the street is given a platform to sound off in them.

            The economic situation truly is quite dire, however, and I can only imagine what my worldview would be if I had been living here these past few years—pretty gloomy, I suppose.  A job offer for Kathryn was withdrawn soon after our arrival, and I have not been able to find work teaching English at any of Seattle’s language schools, as I had so airily planned to do before we left Hanoi.  But on the bright side, our friends here have been aces, and have made things immeasurably easier by lending us bikes and cars, finding us temporary work, taking us out for meals, and even giving us places to stay, gratis.  As usual, we are humbled by such generosity, and feel unworthy of it, wondering why people are so kind to pestilent blisters like us.  One of life’s unanswerable questions, doubtless.

            We look ahead now to our arrival in China (via Hong Kong) in less than a month.  In all likelihood it will give us another jolt of culture shock as we re-assimilate to that lifestyle after our two-month break.  We do feel more settled now in the Pacific Northwest, but we doubt that we’ll ever live here long-term again.  I think we have already changed too much to allow us to do so, and more changes are in our future, certainly.  Though these are the streets where we lived nearly 20 years, where we raised our children, and where our house still is (albeit rented out to others), the place simply doesn’t feel like our only true Home.  It seems to be the case that “There’s no place that feels like home” anymore.  This may strike some as a sad thought, but it isn’t to us.  We have never been Waltons-type people who crave the traditional family hearth, with everyone sitting in the same places every year round the Thanksgiving dinner table.  If we feel comfortable somewhere, and enjoy our days, and can make some friends, that is close enough to Home for us.  We’ve found that by such criteria, a wider range of locations than we had supposed actually qualifies.  So for the time being we’ll continue this admittedly odd, itinerant existence, with the plan of returning here every few years to take the measure of the change in us since our last visit.  That’s as far ahead as we can plan for now.  I wonder what Dorothy would make of an outlook like that.

Re-entry--A Word from Kathryn

Steve and I didn’t anticipate any major adjustments on returning to the US for a mere two and a half months after just over two and a half years’ absence.  Thus it came as a profound shock to us both when we discovered, after the initial flurry of family hugs had subsided, that we both feel a considerable disconnect with the America of 2011.  Let me hasten to add this is not because the country or its people have changed vastly between October 2008 and June 2011 but, apparently, because Steve and I have.  Many famous men have noted the power of travel to change a person, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck among them; but Steve and I, having only each other as barometers, felt we’d returned in much the same mental and physical shape as when we left, with the addition of a few more grey hairs a few more wrinkles and a lot fewer high-functioning brain cells.  How bizarre, then, to find everything here so foreign!

There is no true analogy to how we feel but it’s a bit like emerging from a really gripping, high adrenaline movie to discover that the real world doesn’t feature constant laser gun battles, car chases and dramatic background music.  And, just as this realization often depresses the moviegoer, so the flatness of the pace of American life we perceived on our return to the West made us both feel a little blue and more than a little disconnected.  Even Steve, an American from birth, didn’t get that sense of ‘coming home’. 

One month after our return, things are a little more familiar.  I no longer rue the fact that I will not see a brilliantly coloured flame tree, or a Brachychiton, in amongst the sea of Douglas Firs.  And I accept the fact that cars stop for me rather than just zipping on by when I loiter by a crosswalk.  But some things are still inexplicable and—dare I say it?—a tad abhorrent.  One thing I can’t get used to is the ‘waste’ I see everywhere.  What I mean by this is not the sight of garbage, of which there is very little in the Pacific Northwest, but the waste of time and energy that I see constantly.  Now, when I pass an acreage of manicured lawn mown to within an inch of its life and a millimetre of its roots, I can’t admire the verdant land because I see just the hours it took to produce this masterpiece, the gallons of fuel the lawnmower consumed and the water that is required to keep it green.  The effort seems just a futile vanity to me when I compare it to our experience in Viet Nam where every available pocket of land is cultivated for food production.  Likewise the scale of the average American house seems unnecessarily large and wasteful.  I know Steve and I have led an aberrant existence in our shoebox residences of the last few years, but the size of some of the houses we’ve visited is at the other end of ridiculous. 

The other feature of American life that we independently noted as being odd and unpleasant is how dead and lifeless the streets are, at least in the Pacific Northwest.  It’s true that Seattle is a bicycling Mecca and we applaud its bicycle friendly streets, but bicycling isn’t often a communal experience.  It can be, of course, witness the STP, Chilly Hilly and similar bicycling events but, on a day to day basis, one doesn’t encounter much community on the streets.  Now that we are car-less, I witness this phenomenon on a daily basis.  Struggling back with groceries along ample sidewalks that would be the envy of Ha Noi pedestrians I rarely encounter a soul.  Occasionally a dog walker strolls by, invariably talking loudly into a cell phone.  Or a runner pounds past me jogging to the beat of his iPod.  But nobody smiles.  Most of the traffic is single occupancy vehicles driven by intense commuters or harried mothers.  I know I was a coward in Ha Noi and rarely rode a Xe Om (motorcycle taxi), but I do miss the drama of the Ha Noi streets and you have to admit it’s a lot less wasteful to carry your wife, two children, two chickens and a pig carcass to market on one motorbike than yourself and laptop to work in a V8 SUV.

One thing, however, has not disappointed and this is the very generous and warm welcome we have received from our many friends since our return.  I honestly didn’t realize we had so many friends and acquaintances in the Pacific Northwest.  True, the Aussies are a lot of fun, and the Vietnamese are warm and hospitable, but our American friends have shown us over and over just how generous the American people are.  I won’t embarrass individuals by enumerating specific acts of generosity.  Suffice to say that we have been the beneficiaries of multiple offers of accommodation and transportation, and have eaten many magnificent meals at friends’ homes.  All we can provide in return is our gratitude, hopelessly inadequate descriptions of our travels, and the assurance that all our friends are welcome to visit us should they find themselves cast upon the shores of a country in which we are currently residing (this will be China for the next 15 months).

Let me end with one final comment on the topic of community.  The thing we enjoyed most about both Melbourne and Ha Noi was the sense of community we felt as we wandered the streets of these cities, despite being both foreigners and strangers.  Melbourne is constantly abuzz with street life in the form of lively street-side cafes, throngs of noisy students of every skin colour, buskers and entertainers, street artists and tourists.  Ha Noi is a city that only rests between the hours of 11pm and 7am and is otherwise alive with heavily laden motorbikes, street vendors, street markets, and constantly laughing and smiling people sitting in front of their home (which usually doubles as their business), or jostling each other on the sidewalks (or in the streets, since the sidewalks are often blocked by the aforementioned businesses).  Bainbridge, Poulsbo and even Seattle seemed lifeless to us, then, when we first arrived.  However, this assessment must be modified now we are on the far side of both the Bainbridge Rotary auction and the quintessentially American holiday of July 4^th.  These two events have shown us America at its best and have made us finally feel a little more ‘at home’.   

 
Why is this?  Why do our fellow Americans seem more alive to us when they are sauntering the aisles of the big market place that is the Rotary auction?  Why does the market place bring out the smiles, jokes and camaraderie that are absent in day to day America?  And what is it about a parade that brings forth laughter, and energizes an audience?  Is there some primordial ‘community’ gene that is activated when we gather in the market place and share smiles at a parade—some communal ‘feel good’ endorphin that is circulated at such gatherings?  We are, after all, a social species.  Is it this ‘communal high’ that we have been missing and that has made us feel lost even though we are ‘back home’?   Have we become addicted to the ‘high’ we receive from being in close proximity to our fellow man?  For anyone who knows Steve this hardly seems possible, but I’ve seen him shift from indifference to a state of animation when removed from the isolation of a big house and thrust into activity and society.  For sure, one extreme form of punishment is compulsory solitude.  Is this the secret, then, to a happier society?  Should we abandon the self-isolation of our iPods, quit hiding in our houses, and organize more community picnics?  This would be such an easy, cheap way to increased happiness; it couldn’t possibly work, could it?

Sweet and Sour

The Sweet

            We have made a field trip, Kathryn and I, in celebration of her successful completion of the CELTA course.  Even before she finished the CELTA, she had lined up a job at the school where I work, so we now have a common employer for the very first time.

            Our trip was an hour’s flight south to the coastal city of Da Nang, the fifth-largest city in Vietnam.  The sky in Hanoi has been a hazy, smoggy grey since our arrival in mid-January, so the fresh, seaside air down south was a welcome change, even though we never saw the sun. 

            During the Vietnam War, Da Nang was home to a major American and South Vietnamese air base, and at one point in the war, according to Wikipedia, this base saw an average of nearly 2,600 daily flights—more than at any other airport in the world at that time.  So it was a very busy place.

            It still is, but today Da Nang is definitely a city on the rise, and is positioning itself as a major tourist destination.  It has plenty of scenic beauty to help it out in this ambition.  The city is fronted by a fine, sweeping bay with sandy beaches, and the waterfront is being developed to take full advantage of it.  Where the city touches the South China Sea there are several large and fairly pricey seafood restaurants, as well as a lot of open space where tourists can relax, and mingle, and soak up the negative ions in fair weather.  Kids play soccer on the beach, and bamboo coracles lie in clusters as reminders that the old fishing methods are still practiced here.

            Down the beach to the south of the city is a long construction zone where massive and extremely swank-looking developments are going up.  They were in various stages of completion when we were there, but it appeared that posh family homes, hotels, condos, and entertainment venues were all included in the mix.  The walls screening the construction were covered with large, glossy pictures showing families frolicking on the beach, svelte golfers strolling down impossibly green fairways, and a couple dressing up for a night on the town.  Da Nang is clearly setting its sights high.  There were also some incongruous signs on lamp posts along the way, one of which informed us that “If everybody plants a tree, there will be 7 billion more trees on earth.”  While I can’t fault the math or the use of the first conditional, I admit the relevance of such statements eludes me.

            Never mind.  We encountered these future playgrounds for people much richer than us during our walk back from the Marble Mountains.  These are a series of marble ridges soaring up sheer from the plains near the sea.  They afford commanding views of the surrounding countryside, so, of course, they were strategic locations during the war.  The mountains (at least the one we climbed) are bristling with pagodas and shrines.  Most amazingly, there are caves near the summits.  We entered one which had a cathedral-sized chamber within, complete with its own pagoda, several shrines, and a massive carved stone Buddha.  Daylight streamed down through fern-fringed holes in the roof of the cavern, and there was a churchlike stillness to the place that compels visitors to speak in whispers.  It looked like something from an Indiana Jones movie, but it was the real thing, and it positively took the breath away.

            But before the Marble Mountains…ah, before that—

The Sour

            Before the Marble Mountains we had the poor judgment to go to Hoi An, which we had heard was a wonderful place.  I will say right here that Lonely Planet and similar guide books have a lot to answer for in the way they publicize unspoilt corners of the world, attract hoardes of tourists to these spots, and thereby spoil them.  I suppose that if I had blundered into Hoi An 20 years ago I would have found it quaint and magical, but today its narrow streets and alleys are so clogged with tour groups, and westerners on bicycles, and the touts they attract that it's just insufferable.  It was to me, anyway; I couldn’t wait to claw my way back out.  Our four hours there convinced me that masses of tourists are only part of what I dislike about "must-see" sights; the other part is the touts.  Together, they are the spilled sugar and the ants that ruin your picnic. 

            You'd like to stand back and admire, say, a 300-year-old Chinese ship captain's home but you aren't allowed to, because you have masses of people jostling you, and surging back and forth in your line of sight, and there is a tout plucking at your sleeve, trying to sell you a guided tour of the rest of the city, or a Vietnam T-shirt, or a boat ride down the river, or cooking lessons, or his little sister for half an hour.  So you sigh and detach him and move on to the next building—200 years old and French—and you repeat the experience. 

            We encountered no actual thievery, but there was a fair bit of what could fairly be called price gouging (we were twice overcharged on the public bus—once while pointing in mute outrage at the official fare, which was posted on the window; the conductor merely laughed at our drole attempt to pay the Vietnamese price for our bus trip—the foreign price was five times higher, and that was that), and aggressive panhandling.  I gave one fellow my last US dollar, ostensibly for a newspaper, but really it was just to make him go away. 

            The price was not the issue:  a buck isn’t a whole lot of money, and even the three dollars we paid for the bus ride didn’t punch a disastrous hole in the holiday budget.  No, what got under the skin was the knowledge that we were being ripped off, and being powerless to do anything about it.  The day before our trip to Hoi An we had had our most expensive meal to date in Vietnam.  It came to about $40 US, and it was a delicious seafood lunch at one of the big beachside restaurants in Da Nang.  I know we were not swindled for this meal, because all the prices were posted out front.  But at tables to our left and right as we ate were quartets of Vietnamese businessmen who were clearly intent on making a day of it.  One party had purchased a case (36 bottles) of imported beer, and the other group had treated themselves to a 1.75-liter bottle of Chivas Regal 12-year-old scotch.  And the food?  There was practically a bucket brigade running from the kitchen out to these two tables, keeping them supplied.  These businessmen were dropping some serious dong on these binges.

            And we in between meanwhile were goggling at our bill and quietly agreeing that it was our one indulgence for the trip.  We earn pretty decent salaries—decent by Vietnamese standards—but these businessmen played in another league altogether.  And here’s the thing:  I know that if they took the bus and went to Hoi An, they would have paid the Vietnamese price, and the touts would have looked right through them as if they weren’t there.  It was merely because we were obviously foreigners who didn’t speak the language very well that we were presumed to be rich tourists and so were fair game for every piratical souvenir monger in Hoi An.  And it was pretty irksome after the 26^th or 27^th encounter, is all I’m saying.  So that was Hoi An for me.  And that's why I will hereafter stick to the third- or fourth-tier attractions; I have a much better time at these.

            There are touts in the capital, to be sure, but they do not have the lamprey-like tenacity that we found in Hoi An.  Typically, those of the species in Hanoi troll the banks of Hoan Kiem Lake, since that’s where most of the foreigners are, and usually if you start shaking your head at them in a resolute manner as they approach, it is enough to dissuade them.  In a moment of weakness I once bought a packet of postcards from one of them at an extortionate price.  But now I carry the packet with me wherever I go and whip it out like a talisman whenever a tout approaches.  “I gave at the office,” it proclaims.  I call it the Tout-be-Gone, and it works well generally, though we recently brandished our Touts-be-Gone at an elfen entrepreneur who instantly responded, “Buy more!” But we declined.

The Sweet Again

            The highlight of our trip was a day out at the ruins of My Son (pronounced, “Me Sun”), a collection of ancient Cham temples some two hours by bus from Da Nang.  Champa, as this civilization in Vietnam was known, was one of the “Indianized Kingdoms” that existed for centuries in Southeast Asia.  Another such Indianized Kingdom is represented by Angkor Wat in Cambodia.  There seems to be a dispute among scholars as to whether these civilizations were colonies founded by Indian merchants throughout SE Asia, or whether they were indiginous civilizations, set up by local kings who then imported Indian religious rituals and architecture.

            Well, whatever its origin, My Son was splendid, and well deserving of its status as a UNESCO World-Heritage site.  It dates from the 4^th to the 14^th centuries, and was an important place for religious ceremonies and burial of royalty and national heroes.  The architecture and decoration are decidedly Hindu in origin, and are completely unlike anything we’ve seen in the pagodas and temples we’ve visited.  Most delightful of all, for us, was that it was remarkably free of crowds during our time there, and we were able to stroll, and pause, and photograph, and consider the relics in peace and quiet.  And it was the quiet that Kathryn and I both found so striking.  It was not until we were out in the stillness of the countryside that we realized how much noise we daily absorb in Hanoi.  Here there was only the gentle rain, a light wind, and birdsong.

            My Son was in the hills, too—another treat for us, since Hanoi is totally flat—and these were clothed in a dense forest.  We thought how splendid it would be to have a naturalist at our disposal, who could take us on a tour of the forest and identify for us the plants and birds.  But on reflection, perhaps not.  During the war, the heavy stone buildings of My Son afforded good cover to the Viet Cong, so US B-52s carpet bombed the site in 1969.  Those beautiful, verdant hills around My Son evidently still contain a lot of unexploded weaponry and landmines which are apt, even now, to go off when disturbed.  During our walk around My Son I noted that the buildings and stelai were pocked by bullet holes, and I counted eight bomb craters, though I’m sure I missed some that had become filled in or overgrown.  Of course, the bombing severely damaged many of the temples.  Building A1, the jewel of the site, evidently stood up too well to the bombardment, so the US dispatched a sapper team to blow it up for good.  In response to this, according to Lonely Planet, Cham-art expert Philippe Sterne wrote a letter of protest to President Nixon, who then issued orders to avoid destroying any more Cham monuments.  It was certainly a place that encouraged introspection, and it was very moving to be able to contemplate the layers of history at the site—the creation, uses, and destruction—at our leisure and in relative tranquility, away from the crowds.

            And then we had one more indulgence in Da Nang on our last full day there:  a sauna and a 90-minute massage for a mere $7.50 apiece.  This time I felt guilty about the low price, so I tipped big.  Kathryn claimed that she found the experience only moderately enjoyable, but I left in a state of gelified relaxation and half in love with my masseuse.  Not only was she very skillful, but she had the most amazing strength in her hands and arms.  I have no doubt she could have disassembled me like a plastic action figure right there on the massage table, and it was perhaps partly in gratitude that she didn’t do so that I was generous with the tip.  So overall, the trip earned a respectable four stars out of five possible.

The Savory

            It doesn’t have anything at all to do with our holiday, but I have been looking for a chance to say something about what we have been eating here since our arrival.  “Very odd things,” pretty much covers it.  Our apartment has two gas rings as its only means of cooking food:  there’s no microwave or conventional oven.  So our repertoire has been much reduced, and we have been eating out a lot.  We have found a few dishes that we are glad to have tried, because now we know not to try them again.  Neither of us has (knowingly) had dog yet, but I am not entirely ruling it out as a possibility.  I have grown partial to beef fried rice as prepared by some cheerful street vendors around the corner, who now hail me with “Chao anh!” (“Hi, brother!”) when I walk past.  Kathryn and I both love Bun Oc, a deliciously spicy soup with noodles, tofu, tomato broth, and snails.  On the comical side, when we go to the supermarket the only canned goods we buy are those with pictures or English on the labels.  Some of these latter items have quite bizarre descriptions of the contents, but we buy them because, well, we know what we are getting, at least.  So on the shelf in the kitchen now is Thai sundry vegetable soup, pickled shrimp and eggplant, vegetarian big meat slice, tamarind and chilli (yum!), vegan anchovies in tomato sauce, and artichoke juice.  This last item is a refreshing beverage that you drink cold on a hot day.  It’s better than it sounds, but then, it would have to be, wouldn’t it?