Jazz in the Park
On Saturday I accompanied several of my classmates to Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem to watch the jazz pianist McCoy Tyner perform at the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival. Tyner has had a very long career in jazz and is perhaps best known as a member of John Coltrane's group in the early 1960s. He played solo for nearly an hour. Alas, we were sitting too far away to get a good look at him.
During my walk through Harlem I saw many residents sitting on the stoop or on chairs placed on the sidewalk, chatting. On our way back to Morningside Heights, we walked through an impromptu 'block party' full of loud music, children's games, and barbeques. The festive street life reminded me of what I liked most about Asia.
I also enjoyed meeting some of my future classmates, a truly international bunch. There was a girl from Slovenia, an Indonesian daughter of diplomats who lived in North Korea for three years ('It wasn't that bad!'), an Indian ex-engineer embarking on a career change, a returning Peace Corps volunteer who had the distinction of being evacuated from three different west African countries during her tenure, a black guy from LA fluent in Hebrew and at Columbia to study Arabic, and an Icelandic film student. There was also a biology PhD from Dalian who graciously allowed me to speak Chinese with him despite his superior English.
Later yesterday I took the subway downtown to meet an old friend living in the Bowery, a once-dangerous neighborhood now among the more fashionable places to hang out in all of New York. We toured around some of the bars in SoHo and the East Village before finally ending up in the Meatpacking District, which might more accurately be described as the 'meat market' district. The scene from the Harlem block party seemed a world removed from the beautiful people scene downtown, yet Manhattan's tiny size and efficient subway system made both excursions a breeze.
New York Landing
My plane arrived late in the afternoon at JFK airport and within about an hour I was safely transported to my friend's apartment on the Upper West Side. I came expecting the stifling, humid summer weather New York is famous for but instead was greeted with brilliant sunshine and perfect temperatures. 'Seems like you brought California weather to New York with you!', my friend remarked.
The evening's activity consisted of us traveling by subway to Brooklyn Bridge Park, where throngs of people had assembled to watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on a massive projected screen situated near the East River shore. Most people were watching the movie- I couldn't take my eyes off the view.
(Apologies for the paltry size- still working out a few WordPress issues. But yes that is the Statue of Liberty in the background)
I had a few concerns that I'd find the adjustment from China to New York difficult. I still might. In one important respect, however, I feel right at home. When my friend apologized for how crowded the subway was, I reassured her that I didn't mind. If there's one thing living in China prepares you for, it's dealing with crowds.
New York though has a diversity that no city in China can match, an observation one can make simply from the subway. During a fifteen minute ride I heard people speaking French, Chinese, Japanese, English, and three other languages I couldn't identify. A man with a chin-length beard and dressed as a Hasidic Jew sat fatigued next to a woman whose origins looked distinctly Indian. I don't include this comparison to highlight China's homogeneity but rather to express just how international New York truly is.
Tonight I stepped into a classic diner for dinner. A lady approaching 80 shuffled toward my booth and took my order. 'Anything to drink, sweet hawt?' she drawled, and for a moment I was catapulted into the New York of classic stereotype.
Being Home
Since moving to China in 2004, this is the sixth time that I've come home for a visit. Unlike the previous five occasions, this time I do not have any set plans to return.
In times past, my visits home would follow a fairly predictable emotional arc. I'd spend the first week in a fog-like state caused by jet lag and culture shock. Then there'd be two weeks of seeing friends and family, enjoying familiar restaurants and sights, and stocking up on books and clothes. The final week would then be characterized by a strong longing for going back and resuming my life in China.
This time has been different. Since I'm not going back, I've focused more on establishing a rhythm. Going to a Mexican restaurant or to a movie are no longer special occasions but rather quotidian activities that must, like all things, fit in the budget. Seeing friends has been less urgent than before. Many have pledged to visit me in New York, and those that haven't know they'll see me when I come back to California for Christmas.
In the past I'd occasionally feel alienated from peers here in California, particularly when people would ask me questions about my life in China. I used to worry that I was approaching a stage when I had become too Sinified and would never feel comfortable in my own country again. These worries have completely abated. I now feel that I have the wonderful luxury of being at home in two places.
Of course, I haven't yet shaken the China cobwebs out of my brain. The other day, I found myself wandering down the middle of a suburban road near my house when a driver swerved and lobbed an expletive in my direction. For a brief moment I wondered what the man's problem was until I realized that the sidewalk in the US, unlike in China, is more than just a gentle suggestion.
In Kunming, a friend of mine used to quip: 'China will be pretty nice once it's finished'. A joke, to be sure, but also an accurate observation. The overwhelming feeling one gets in China is that the whole country is a giant construction site. It is difficult to appreciate the pace of change in China until going back to the developed world. In the small suburb near San Francisco where I grew up, long-time residents tell me how much the place has changed. But I can't get over how much everything has remained the same.
The Chinese will often say, occasionally in halting English, that theirs is a developing country. I used to sneer at this comment as it seemed designed to deflect the corruption, despotism, and degradation that I saw as China's real root problems. Today, I feel the distinction between 'developing' and 'developed' is paramount while hand-wringing over political systems and human rights misses the point.
My future home, New York, considers itself the 'center of the world'- it would be hard to imagine anything more developed. More observations to come...
She Turned Me into a Newt! I Got Better…
I've been enjoying watching Republicans twist themselves in pretzel-like shapes in denouncing the proposed mosque to be built near the World Trade Center site. In the Washington Post, Newt Gingrich- for a time the most prominent Republican in the country- argues that we shouldn't allow a mosque....until churches and synagogues are allowed in Saudi Arabia. Quoth the Newt:
Those Islamists and their apologists who argue for "religious toleration" are arrogantly dishonest. They ignore the fact that more than 100 mosques already exist in New York City. Meanwhile, there are no churches or synagogues in all of Saudi Arabia. In fact no Christian or Jew can even enter Mecca.
And they lecture us about tolerance.
First, Gingrich's use of 'Islamists and their apologists' here is what's truly arrogantly dishonest. Come on Newt. You know you wanted to say 'liberals'.
Secondly, and more importantly, I find the comparison with Saudi Arabia here baffling. Conservatives are always saying how exceptional the US is, yet here a one of the movement's prominent voices seems to argue that if the House of Saud refuses to allow religious toleration, then we should by extension follow suit. Whatever happened to the idea of rising above the standards set by countries that we quite rightly think of as backward?
To me, that the mosque has stirred up comparatively little outrage is a sign of the health of the American spirit nine years after 9/11- most people just don't care and simply will carry on living their lives. Only demagogues like Gingrich- representing the vanguard of conservative 'thinking' on religion and politics- are truly out of line here.
Laos
Today is the sixth day of my trip to Laos, a trip that has certainly been a long time coming. I had originally planned to come to Laos in 2005, the year I took my first trip to Southeast Asia. Instead, I got stuck in Thailand. In each subsequent trip to Southeast Asia, as well during the years I lived in neighboring Yunnan Province, I had wanted to come but never got the opportunity.
Finally, I've made it. I can say with certainty that Laos is worth the wait.
First, a little backstory as Laos is still fairly obscure to most Western readers. Laos is a small, landlocked, largely agrarian country on mainland Southeast Asian and was for many years the backwater of French-controlled Indochina. Like its neighbors Cambodia and Vietnam, Laos received its independence in the 1950s from the French but soon thereafter became embroiled in the American war in Indochina. As part of the so-called 'Ho Chi Minh trail', Laos was the recipient of a secret bombing campaign ordered by the Nixon administration intending to disrupt supply routes to North Vietnam. To this day, no country on earth has been bombed as much as Laos, and unexploded ordnance still dots much of the eastern part of the country.
Like Vietnam, Laos came under full Communist rule in the mid 1970s and remains a Communist state today. At many monuments I've seen signs and plaques pointedly referencing Laos' friendship with other socialist states, such as its principal benefactor China.
Today, Laos is perhaps the least developed and poorest country in all of East Asia. There are no skyscrapers, modern highways, railroads, or much modern infrastructure anywhere in the entire country. Much of the population still lives in thatched-roof huts in the countryside, practicing subsistence farming. Lao cities are full of crumbling buildings left over from the French colonial days, and the evidence of Chinese investment remains scant.
The Lao people are gentle and kind- even the panhandlers smile and walk away when you reject their advances. Much of the population seems to siesta for about four or five hours a day, a practice that I've adopted myself.
Luang Prabang, where I sit now, is a beautiful colonial town on the banks of the Mekong and one of the most charming places I've ever been to in all of Asia. The poverty and lack of development perhaps have not stopped this city from having some of the finest restaurants I've been to on the continent, all within a reasonable backpacker's budget. Two days ago I visited a waterfall park full of Lao and foreign people and encountered a mixed group playing bocce ball together.
That, to me, is what makes this place so nice. Laos seems to have adjusted to tourism better than any of its neighbors by far, and the Lao people seem unperterbed by the masses of large, big-nosed pale-skinned foreigners who descend on their country year after year. If anything, they're proud and welcoming. And judging by the beauty of their landscape, there's much to be proud of.
Granted, Laos ranks very low on most human development indeces, and poverty here remains rife. However, there is a certain immeasureable quality to the life here, one that I suspect will entice travelers, such as this one, to wish to come back.
UPDATE: Dylan in China
James Fallows also picks up on the Bob Dylan in China story and now has an interesting rejoinder provided by Zachary Mexico, the former Kunming laowai whose book China Underground I reviewed in this space last July:
I have it on good authority that the Chinese government did not deny Bob Dylan permission to play in China. It was the Taiwanese promoter's outlandish financial requests that made the tour unrealistic.
If there's anyone I know of who would be in position to know this thing, it's Zach, so this could well be the case. If so, I'd like to issue a hearty apology to the culture warriors at Zhongnanhai for my insinuation that they were behind this travesty. Who knows? Maybe Hu Jintao was more of a Beatles guy than a Dylan fan.
The New Year
As I type, a string of firecrackers are going off somewhere on the street below. At various times in the past 48 hours, the streets of Kunming have sounded like a war zone, and the odd plume of smoke and stench of powder merely amplify this impression. This is, unmistakably, Chinese New Year in China.
For all the time I've been in China, this is only the second time I haven't left town for the holiday. During my first two years as a grossly overpaid English teacher living in cold climates, I took the opportunity to leave China for the sunny beaches of Southeast Asia. Last year I hopped on my bicycle and zoomed off the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau for the balmy border town of Hekou. This year, for various reasons, I've decided to stay in Kunming.
What has struck me most about the Spring Festival is how, well, dull it is. The explosives seem more suited to breaking up the dull monotony of the holiday rather than actual expressions of joy. With almost all shops, restaurants, and businesses closed most people have little to do but sit around with the family, eating and watching television.
Yet that alone, in China, surely means something. Watching television with the family may sound tedious, but not when you haven't seen your family for a year or more. A vast number of Chinese live far from their familial homes, and Spring Festival is often the only chance they have to go home. Lest anyone doubt that this is a powerful desire, consider the millions of people traveling in hard-seat class for three days cross-country in an effort to spend just a handful of days at home.
So perhaps Spring Festival isn't dull at all; merely that the action normally played out on China's bustling streets, shops, and factories now occurs inside family homes and apartments.
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The other day I met a guy who announced that he had gotten married just two days earlier. "Just before the new year!", I said, at which point his wife said, "Thank god!". Apparently there was a surge of weddings in the weeks and months preceding the turn of the year, as Chinese superstition holds that marriages begun in the year of the tiger are doomed. For a country of such pragmatic, atheistic people the Chinese propensity for superstition is staggering.
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What will the year of the tiger bring in China's relations with the outside world? Already there are signs that Beijing has taken a more confrontational turn; witness the indignant reaction to President Obama's visit with the Dalai Lama, hints of currency manipulation, and other supposed slights. There are also signs that the Communist Party-engineered police state have ratcheted things up a notch recently with the detention of dissidents and censorship of the Internet.
Rather than a sign of some newfound arrogance on China's part, I'd say a likelier scenario is that any brinkmanship is designed primarily for domestic political purposes. Beijing is surely concerned that rising income inequality, environmental degradation, and other issues might arouse domestic grievances, and uniting the country through an emphasis on foreign policy is one way to diffuse discontent.
Random Fun
According to this quiz I just took- from the addictive sporcle.com- here are the 10 most-searched items on Wikipedia from January to October 2009:
1. Michael Jackson (musician)
2. Barack Obama (politician)
3. Eminem (musician)
4. Lil Wayne (musician)
5. Adolf Hitler (er, politician?)
6. Rihanna (musician)
7. Abraham Lincoln (politician)
8. Lady Gaga (musician)
9. Megan Fox (actress)
10. Martin Luther King (activist)
Odd bedfellows, no?
Further down I don't know whether it's good or bad that the porn star Sasha Gray is slotted between Josef Stalin and Prince. And ranked no. 200? Tiger Woods. Something tells me that's going to change...
Armistice Day/Veterans Day
My grandmother, who is 93, used to refer to Vetarans Day as Armistice Day, its former name. Without any disrespect to our men and women of uniform- of which her late husband was one- I think it would be instructive to remember the origins of the holiday, which dates back to shortly after my grandmother was born. Here's something from the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, another member of that generation, that I would like to share:
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.And all music is.
Amen.
2000s Nostalgia
By my count there are six or so weeks to go until we close the book on the 2000s and embrace the 2010s, something I speculated upon in this recent post. For those of you already feeling nostalgic about the 'aughts, here's a blog dedicated to the various cultural ideas that defined the decade. This list is good if a little American-centric.
(via Andrew Sullivan)