Asian Women and Food Photography
From the random observation department...today, while perusing my VPN-supported Facebook feed, I realized that nearly every Asian woman I know has at least one oft-updated photo album containing photographs of food. By Asian I mean East Asian but not specifically Chinese. Among Asian-Americans this trend seems to exist but not quite to the same degree. Has anyone else noticed this or am I simply crazy?
Being Alone in a Strange Land
Cafe de Paix, Paris
Roger Ebert may no longer be able to speak, but it is clear he hasn't lost his voice. In this blog post, he writes movingly about being a stranger in a strange land, a theme that I can certainly relate to.
I'm one of those people who likes to travel alone, despite being outgoing and extroverted by nature. This isn't necessarily contradictory- in a way, traveling alone can be more social than traveling with others due to the range of people you're likely to meet. Nothing makes a man more talkative than having to spend twenty-four hours by himself, after all. I still keep in touch with people I met briefly on trips many years ago, even though we're unlikely ever to meet again.
Yet it's the anti-social aspect of solo traveling I find more beguiling. When you're alone, you're not bound by an agenda or influenced by peer pressure. If you're in Athens and don't want to see the Parthenon, no one is going to stop you. You don't have to compromise with anyone. It's liberating.
Most people travel to see things they don't have back home. After all, what's the point of sitting in a cafe all day if you can do it anywhere? Why spend a few hours in a bookstore, go to the movies, or sit in a park?
I understand the conventional wisdom behind sightseeing, but it doesn't do much for me. There are exceptions- I can still remember audibly gasping the first time I saw Angkor Wat- but generally things like museums, temples, churches, castles, and other historical relics leave me cold. This can make me a grouchy and frustrating travel companion, I'm aware.
So when I travel, I normally do the things I do when I have a day off at home- like the things listed above. I like imagining what it's like to live in these distant places- what a normal routine there might be like. In July, I found a little bar in Vientiane, Laos that seemed to have expats as regulars. I sat outside each afternoon with a book and a mug of beer and eavesdropped on their conversations. Nobody said anything noteworthy- their observations were as banal as anyone else's, anywhere. Yet to me, solitary episodes such as these encapsulate what I love about traveling. I was just a guy sitting at that cafe at that moment, among others. Nobody knew a thing about me, nor I them. This was a very comforting feeling.
I used to encounter backpackers quite a lot in Kunming, and invariably they'd ask me what there was to do there. Not wanting to waste their time, I'd give them a perfunctory listing of the city's sites- the ones already written in their Lonely Planet. But to be honest, had I been sincere I'd have said that the best thing to do was to rent a bicycle, pick a direction, and just observe people living their life. Sit in a tea house and watch old men play cards. That kind of thing.
Maybe I'm like this because I've spent a quarter of my life in foreign countries, or maybe it's just a matter of personality. I certainly don't begrudge people who travel differently. Everyone has their own style. But anyway, now that you've read my two cents, check out that Ebert piece. He as usual puts it more eloquently.
(Paris cafe image from this site)
Food Ressentiment
Via Roger Ebert's Twitter feed comes word of a Chandler, Arizona restaurant that specializes in serving unhealthy food to fat people. The gory details:
The burgers are free-all day, every day-at the Heart Attack Grill in Chandler, AZ. The only catch is you have to weigh at least 350 lbs. The fake nurse who weighs you is young, hot, and female. All guests, regardless of weight, are called "patients," and are "admitted" by the "nurses," who dress them in bibs that look like hospital gowns. Strategically placed mirrors behind the counter provide patients with heart-stopping views of fake-nurse crotch.
The menu includes unfiltered cigarettes and milkshakes reputed to have the highest fat content in the world, but burgers are the main attraction. They range from the Single through the Quadruple Bypass, based on the number of patties they contain, with two pieces of cheese for each patty, between buns shiny with lard. If you finish an 8,000-calorie Quadruple Bypass Burger, a fake nurse will push you by wheelchair all the way to your car.
Ebert comments that the 350-pounders who frequent the restaurant need it like a "bullet in the ear". I agree. Further in the article we find the owner complaining that obese people are stigmatized and comparing them to homosexuals, inadvertently promoting the canard that sexual orientation is a lifestyle choice.
The article suggests a cultural angle; namely, the backlash against healthy eating is an expression of dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. Surely, the inclusion of unfiltered cigarettes on the menu would seem to support this viewpoint- it's a wonder the restaurant doesn't also sell guns and Bibles.
But the obvious problem with this movement is the assumption that political correctness is merely a set of beliefs held by a group of people for no particular purpose. This is of course false. People now support healthy eating because it reduces overall health problems and prolongs lives. People support public transportation because it is better for the environment. And so on. These policies may be supported by effete urban liberals but they also make sense on their merits.
Imagine a bar in which the most intoxicated patrons get to drink for free, where alcoholics are lionized and celebrated and encouraged to drink more and more. I think people would find such an idea abhorrent, yet this Heart Attack Grill is functionally identical.
Liberals, Conservatives, and Open-Mindedness
At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen asks his readers whether self-identified conservatives are more 'closed-minded' than self-identified liberals.
To me, the answer is quite plainly yes, and not only because I am a liberal who dislikes conservative values. Once upon a time, the conservative movement actually contained useful ideas about domestic, economic, and foreign policy that provided an intellectual balance to liberalism. This balance no longer exists, in large part due to conservatism's abandonment of intellectualism.
What has happened over the past generation is that the conservative movement has effectively embraced anti-intellectualism as its guiding creed. This began with the election of Ronald Reagan as President and has reached its apotheosis with the rise of Sarah Palin. In the conservative mind, Palin's lack of knowledge and expertise are virtues rather than liabilities. Her very simplicity makes her somehow more authentic.
This dislike of intellectualism has led conservatives to adopt an essentially reductionist set of policy ideas. Economic policy? Cut taxes and everything will be fine. Environmental policy? Drill baby drill. Foreign policy? Perpetual war, uber-patriotism, obsessive veneration of the military, and other fascist trappings. Domestic policy? Guns and God. That's basically about it.
A generation ago, when conservatism still had intellectual integrity, the answer to Cowen's question might have been 'no', or at least 'not necessarily'. Nowadays closed-mindedness isn't just a characteristic of conservatism, it's a principle.
A Tale of Two Weddings
Nothing sums up my experience of being an expat quite like the two weddings I've attended this year.
The first wedding, held in early May, took place in a tiny village in rural south Yunnan Province, not far from the Lao border. All of the food from the wedding came from rice and vegetables grown in the village and pigs and poultry that roamed around prior to meeting their unfortunate end. Each day, guests sat on an outdoor wooden platform constructed specifically for the occasion on small straw stools to eat home-cooked food.
The first wedding had no ceremony; after all, the bride and groom had already been married by a government official some weeks before. Wedding guests wore, for the most part, t-shirts, shorts, and flip flops in the tropical heat.
The second wedding, held last week, began in a Catholic church high in the mountains east of Los Angeles. The ceremony was quite formal, involving a full mass conducted by a priest familiar to the bride's family. The groom and his groomsmen wore traditional black tuxedos, the bride a white gown, and her maids of honor matching pink dresses.
After the wedding, the hundred plus guests decamped to the bride's uncle's house, a palatial lakefront villa with its own dock. In addition to the full bar, wedding guests were treated to a live jazz band and a DJ and were encouraged to dance on an outdoor floor. After dinner, a catered meal with beef, ravioli, and vegetables, guests accompanied the bride and groom to the dock, where a speedboast whisked them off to a private hotel on the other side of the lake.
Both weddings were great fun. But they had nothing in common, except that I attended both. Having a foot in both of these worlds is the delicate balancing act of the China expat. Coming home can be more jarring than going away, simply because we idealize home as our place with our people, as opposed to the foreign environment in which we live.
Yet I've discovered over the past few years that home can feel just as foreign as anywhere else. I noticed this especially this time; people kept commenting that I had a strange accent, certain conversations flew right over my head, and I found it difficult to convey the experience of living in China to nearly all the people polite enough to ask.
I suppose the best way to look at it is that feeling comfortable with multiple cultures is an incredible privilege, one that the vast majority of people around the world do not have. I know full well that when I fly back to China, I will pick up right where I left off, and that makes my bout with culture shock well worth it.
Metric System
I've spent five and a half years of my life living in countries that use the metric system, which isn't such a remarkable accomplishment when you consider that the United States is the only country left in the world that doesn't. I have a lot of strong opinions about why I find our continued use of the imperial system to be absurd, but that's for another post.
Learning a system of measurement, like learning a foreign language, occurs in stages. First, of course, there's the learning process- for example, that an inch is comprised of 2.54 centimeters. This stage is straightforward and even most Americans I'd guess are at least familiar with how to do basic conversions between the imperial and metric systems.
When I moved to Italy and then China, I was still in the "conversion" stage. When someone said, "Oh, it's 34 degrees today", I mentally converted this figure to a more familiar 95 degrees Fahrenheit. When people said "meters", I converted to feet. And so on.
Then comes a second stage, in which you no longer need to convert but have in fact internalized both systems. For example, when someone says meters I can visualize the distance, and when someone says feet I feel equally comfortable.
The third stage, of course, is when you become so familiar with a new system that you're forced to convert back to the old one. For an American, this would mean that when someone says "feet", you have to think in meters and translate back.
In my experience, these stages describe my use of different types of measurements; in other words, my assimilation of different aspects of the metric system occurred at different speeds. Some, in fact, haven't occurred yet at all.
For height and weight, I'm still in the primary stage. I know what 5 ft. 10 "looks like", and when someone says they're 176 centimeters tall, I mentally calculate that figure back into feet and inches. Ditto with weight; I still think in pounds rather than kilograms or the ludicrous Anglo "stones".
For distance, I'm in the secondary stage. When I'm cycling, I know all to well what "20 kilometers left" means. Yet when people say, "San Francisco is about 400 miles north of Los Angeles", I don't need to convert that into km.
In temperature I'm firmly in the third stage. Perhaps this is because I have a little Firefox widget in the bottom right corner of the screen telling me what Kunming's temperature in centigrade is each day (22 degrees and sunny today, for those who want to know). Perhaps because every time I listen to the radio in China (usually in cabs) I take in a weather report. Perhaps because for some reason I've always been curious about the weather. Who knows?
I've lost the ability to conceptualize Fahrenheit. This occasionally results in a situation in which I'm talking to another American who mentions, "Oh, in Vietnam it was really hot- about 90 degrees" and I have to pretend I know exactly what that means. Whenever I go home, I change the temperature gauge in the car to Centigrade. This makes me highly suspect I realize, but being from San Francisco I'm no longer fazed by accusations of unpatriotism.
Go metric!
Out of the Music Loop
Every time I go back to the US, about once a year or so, I realize how much further I'm out of the loop. One way is in money; a lot of my old friends are doing well financially. About a year ago, I went to dinner with three friends from high school, two of whom were attorneys and one a fairly well-paid software developer. When the bill came, the per-person amount left me near-speechless while the others said, "Oh, that's pretty reasonable!"
A second way is in gadgets, a particularly acute issue when you come from the doorstep of Silicon Valley. People can talk for hours about their latest smart phone or little computer toy, and allＩcan do is nod and smile.
Neither of these bother me all that much. But what does get to me is my total ignorance of modern popular music. Recently, my friend Dan posted his Top Ten albums of 2008. I scanned through and identified exactly four of the artists (Billy Bragg, The Roots, Nas, and of course R.E.M). I was aware of none of these albums, and not a single one of these songs.
For some reason, this depresses me. I used to be a huge modern music fan. I remember being able to turn on a local rock radio station and identify every song that came on within the first two or three notes. I once had a subscription to Rolling Stone. I watched MTV. I went to as many concerts as I could afford.
I was even the sort of guy who alphabetized his CDs, something I did painstakingly every time I bought a new one. I completely identified with the John Cusack character in High Fidelity. I became obsessed with musical minutiate, mostly gleaned from reading liner notes of the CDs I bought.
And now I pretty much know nothing about what's happening now. Someone asked me who my favorite current band was, and all I could think of was The White Stripes, who have been around for at least a decade.
I have an Italian friend in Kunming who sometimes DJs at a bar called Halfway House. One night, he started playing songs from my time. Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, Garbage, Beck, Red Hot Chili Peppers, etc. I got up and danced around like an idiot; it was fun. At one point, when he played something I didn't recognize, I shouted, "Dude, play some '90s!"
Later I realized that I've become that guy. You know, the guy who thinks all the music released since he was 21 years old is garbage, and when he goes out all he wants to hear are the classics. The problem is, I'm not really old enough to be that guy. I'm the same age as Dan, who apparently still can speak authoritatively about music released in the past year. Is it possible to be that guy when you're not even 30?
I'm still current with books and movies. But music...nah. And this, friends, is what living in a place as removed as China will do to you after awhile.
Blogging and Formal Writing
Since graduating from college in 2004, the vast majority of writing that I've done--excluding e-mails--has been in this and other blogs. Overall, I've probably written enough words to fill a couple of books, an amazing fact when considering that I've seldom spent more than a half-hour composing any individual entry.
In August of last year, I began work for a consulting company in which my primary capacity is as a writer. While some of this writing is journalistic, most involves factual data analysis for industry reports.
Lately I began wondering whether blogging has made me a better writer, a worse writer, or hasn't changed the quality of my writing at all. The principle virtue of blogging is the sheer habit of writing and the truism that any writer needs to get bad writing "out of his system", to quote Norman Mailer. Truly, when I read things I wrote three or four years ago, I cringe.
Then again, in blogging the stakes are low. If I publish bad information, I might be gently corrected in the comments or by e-mail. Worst case, I'll lose readers; not something I encourage, mind you, but hardly a career-threatening fate.
In professional writing, false or misleading information can result in failure, condemnation, job termination, or even incarceration (in the case of plagiarism).
When writing my blog, I conduct very little research because I don't have to. Most of what I write is opinion commentary. In professional writing, research is absolutely crucial. A failure to research something properly can render paragraphs of good prose utterly meaningless.
In my job, I've had to re-learn research skills that I hadn't used since college. There have been some trying moments, but in general I'm getting a little better. Overall, though, blogging has been good, if for no other reason that I no longer sit and stare at the computer screen when called upon to write something.
2008 Retrospective
I remember a scene in the early 1990s film City Slickers in which Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Bruno Kirby are horseback riding slowly through the desert. They were having a discussion about the best and worst days of their life, but couldn't agree on how to measure it. Daniel Stern's character said that you had to consider the whole day, and its various ups and downs, before deciding. Bruno Kirby's, though, had another idea: the measure of a day is in how it ended. His best day, he said, was the day his father died because by the end of the day he felt a new purpose and direction in his life, as painful as the death of his father had been.
I always favored Kirby's approach, which is why I view 2008 as a pivotal, important year for me despite its share of disappointments and negative experiences. For it was this year that I made the decision to stop studying Chinese and to begin working for my present employer. My decision resulted not from careful, months-long deliberation but rather from being presented with a great opportunity and seizing it.
I could not have gotten my job, though, without the practical experience of writing this blog. In addition to being an outlet for my thoughts and opinions, keeping this site has honed my writing skills, introduced me to new friends, and given me opportunities in the writing field that I would not have gotten otherwise.
I'd like to conclude this post by thanking you, my readers, for stopping by my little corner of cyberspace this year. In particular, I'd like to thank my commenters for their intelligent and interesting contributions. While I may not always agree with what you say, I've learned a lot from you, and I'm proud that 90% of my comments have been constructive and intelligent.
I've put off making cosmetic improvements to the site for long enough, so in 2009 this is on the agenda. Unfortunately, my technological idiocy means I'll have to have someone lend me a hand, but ultimately the site will be more attractive. The crux of the writing won't change, though...it'll still be my mix of personal observation and news analysis of China.
Finally, let me just wish all of you a very happy new year and if you're of the persuasion, drink a lot of water before you go to bed tonight so you won't get a raging New Years Day hangover.
Things That Bore Me
In homage to my friend Andrew, here are some things that bore me:
1. Hearing about Simpsons episodes
2. The board game "Risk"- This should be up my alley, but isn't.
3. Any movie by Wes Anderson or Cameron Crowe- There are other directors I could include, but these two are atop the list.
4. Non-American sports
5. U2, and particularly Bono- Come on. Admit it. They just aren't that good.
6. Charles Dickens- evidently paid by the word
7. People discussing drugs while taking them
8. The Dave Matthews Band- "Hey guys, they have a saxophone player. They must be good!"
9. The gym
10. Portugal- Well, maybe this isn't fair. I was out of money and at the end of my trip. I'm sure it's a nice place (people tell me so) but it was a real letdown after Spain and the food wasn't any good.
11. Auto Racing, and cars in general- "Aww shit Jethro, I just saw a crash!"
12. Complicated video games- I do like original Nintendo
13. Waiting for things to download
14. Turtles- snakes are boring too, but at least there's an element of danger involved.
15. Facebook applications- No, I don't want to challenge you to a movie quiz.