A Tiny Little Poppyseed

It’s warm enough now to keep the back door open, and so I do, all day long.  Even though I’m sitting in my room, working at the computer and I can’t see out.  And even though I only imagine I’m feeling the warm breeze from outside.  Leaving the door open makes me feel I’ve made it home, and  there’s something so childhood about breaking the barrier between outside and in.

Here in the Bay.  Here in the land of perpetual springtime and endless blooming flowers – domesticated front yards that grow wild with nasturtium, bougainvillea, spiky succulents, calla lilies.  Flowers seem to drip and burst out of unwatched cracks in the sidewalks and cement steps everywhere.  This place is teeming with life.  With possibility.  I told Anna that I can imagine losing track of entire years here.  Of drifting into a kind of meditative bliss where all I do is go to music shows and dance performances and storytelling events.  Where all I do is hunker down with audio recordings of children laughing and adults talking about science and metaphors and endangered species.  Where all I do is acquire a long-lost fashion sense and a taste for sriracha sauce and jazz.

I remember thinking when I first moved here, when I first landed, that I couldn’t wait to have that feeling of complete comfort while doing small things like riding the BART train to and from work.  I deeply admired those riding the train who already had that.  I envied them.  I couldn’t wait to just know how to get to the grocery store without having to map it out.  To know where to go for a beer, or coffee, or to fill my bike tires.  And I have that now.  Little things like crossing the BART platform from one train to the next without even checking the sign to make sure I’m boarding the right one, make me feel I’ve made it.  Occasionally I do this entirely without thinking – get off the Pittsburg Bay Point and board Richmond  - without looking, and then spend the next five minutes in a moving train in a quiet panic thinking, Oh Jesus!  Why didn’t I look?  What the hell train am I on?

But it’s always been the right train.  I’ve got it.  The routine has set, and I’m finally riding smooth.

Sometimes on the train I see two people board together, and I spend the majority of my ride betting with myself about whether they know each other, or are total strangers.  I’ve been surprised in both directions.  Sometimes people spend long minutes sitting side by side, apparently ignoring each other entirely, when suddenly one puts his hand on the other’s leg, and she looks quietly at what he’s reading, or they laugh at some inside joke.  Sometimes two board together in a way that I have to imagine they’re a couple.  Best friends.  Sisters.  A small look of tenderness, or one leading the other through the car.  And then they separate, without even a glance or look of recognition, and I have to reevaluate my powers of observation.

I think every once in a while about what Maya said about San Francisco being a place with fewer attachments, where it doesn’t matter as much if you’re a part of a unit.  I wonder, now, after months of personal experience, if I agree.  There’s something deceptive about this perpetual springtime.  Something elusive and dangerous.  Or maybe it’s just the inherent danger in the idea that grown-up life can be postponed.  That now is the time to achieve your artist goals, read the books you want, fill your dance card.  Then grow up.  Then get credit cards.  Then buy a house, get a job, get married.  Then be sensible.  As if “then” is a time.  Ninna told me Tuesday about a friend who froze her eggs at 20.  Just in case.  To get around these barriers of reality.

I gave myself a few minutes to think about what exactly that would mean.  Preplanning for a life that takes longer than you expect.

And speaking of expecting, Hannah is pregnant!  My sister, my baby tiny lovely perfect sister, and Yoni, her love, are pregnant.  For this I am not prepared, and for this I have been planning my whole life.  Hannah forwards a weekly email update from a website that describes the size and development of the baby, and one of the things they do is compare the baby’s size to a food item.  This week it’s about the size of a lemon, last week it was a lime.  The first description we read said the little one was the size of a poppyseed.  One tiny poppyseed, nestled away in the safest place possible.  The little one is growing into the future of our family, the future of this planet, the future of our world, and when I first heard the news, my heart stopped.  A tiny little poppyseed who will learn how to crawl and walk and do the balance beam.  A poppyseed to lead us in song and taste peanut butter for the first time and one day learn how to whistle.

My heart stopped.  Because things are moving forward.  Just when you think you have a handle.  Just when you think it makes sense and you could take this train with your eyes shut, you realize a tiny poppyseed can change everything.  Right now the little one is exercising facial muscles and tiny  fingers.  Right now the little one has a thin layer of skin and silky hair.

And the long sunny days here in California seem a treasure.  This springtime, I’m told, will lead into summer.  I’m still so relieved there’s no snow here – as if it melted before I moved in, and we have yet to get to the winter part.  So I’m working on achieving my artist goals, eating more sriracha and listening to jazz before the snow comes.  So far so good.

Solo

I don’t know anyone here who lives alone.  Living with only one other person is rare, even for couples.  The couples that I know who live together often live with a number of other people too.  Space is precious, and it somehow seems totally normal to have three housemates.  It seems totally normal to split a refrigerator into four sections, and walk through an entryway past six or seven bikes.

I have a door now.  A room.  The room has walls and a small closet and a window that looks out to the west, to the neighbor’s home.  I have a bed now, too, delivered a bit more than a week ago.  I have a desk and one small shelf for books, a hanging mirror and a bedside lamp.

But mostly, just having a door feels big.  I have the option, when I so choose, to be separated from everyone else in the house, although not by much.  There are still padding footsteps in the hallway and clanking plates in the kitchen.

I always liked having a door.  The option to close it and be isolated was a kind of relief.  And I still feel that way, mostly.  I would have thought I’d need more space, more privacy, more quiet more often.  But I’m finding, to my surprise, that I seem to need less and less space.  Less and less privacy.  And I’m getting used to the noise.

The newsroom at work, for instance, is a kind of disaster to sensitive ears.  Three sound booths that are definitely not soundproof, and a wide open space separated only slightly by an incomplete wall, almost a cubicle.  A giant pool table in the middle of the room, two round tables and many desks lining the walls.  There is an unspoken pattern of authority in the seating chart, with editors sitting at the corners, and the rest of us packed into the middle of the room.  Some days it’s so crowded with volunteers, reporters, and guest producers that you take what you can get.  The blue chair that forces good posture.  The wooden chairs that are so low that as you type, your wrists rub against the wood of the tables.

There is constant chatter about everything.  Stories unpacked, lunch menus discussed, deals brokered, time wasted.  There’s chatter until there’s not, and then there are long hours when everyone, absolutely everyone, is just working.  Silently.  Typing, writing, researching, editing, updating.  And then the chatter starts again.  The silence broken by time, by afternoon lulls, by sudden rainstorms that get everyone to finally look up from their computer screens and make some remark about winter in San Francisco.  Editors call to each other from each corner of the room, and the engineers shout from booth to booth.  They hate using headphones, and so they play the show loudly through the speakers, looping sections of tape for long minutes until they get the levels, the breathing, the pacing just right.  I didn’t think I’d last in it.  Didn’t think I’d get anything done.  I hated the noise at first.  I wanted quiet.  I wanted library, respect, separation.

The shift wasn’t conscious.  It wasn’t major.  It wasn’t a decision on my part.  I didn’t say I’d rather be the type of person who can work well in a crowded room, who can shift her focus from scripts to group conversations about family life or chocolate or sweaters, from clipping sound to hearing the difference, from across the room, between two different host intros to the show.

Maya and I joked that this isn’t exactly the most high pressured newsroom in the world.  There’s no, say, cocaine lying around.  There’s no yelling.  No berating.  Just a lot of practice.  Building skills from the very bottom up.  It’s like learning a language by total immersion.  I’ll think I’m catching up.  I’ll think I know something.  Tuesday I sat in a meeting with two editors and one reporter.  I’d been spending time with the story—this huge, important story—for weeks.  I knew the story.  I’d heard hours of tape, transcribed, cut and pasted, laid up audio for days.  But sitting in that meeting, listening to them talk about construction, layout, options for sound and structure, I was absolutely out of my depth.  They were speaking an entirely different language, and I only caught a word or two here and there.  In those moments of clarity, when I was able to keep up, when I was able to see what they were talking about, imagine those sounds, feel the structure, I was overcome.  Emotional.  I became a member of that same place of clarity.  I became privy to a new kind of vision.  Like seeing with my ears.

Coming home after a day like that, exhausted from using my brain in entirely new ways, fried from using new skills of consideration, long hours on public transport—an hour and a half in each direction—and opening myself to new people, one might think the only thing I’d want is to close my door.  But at home now, there are feet padding in the hallway, there are plates clanking in the kitchen.  There are three other women living in my home (although it mostly still feels like I’m living in theirs) and almost every night there is some sort of collective meal—spinach salad with blackened fish, roasted chicken and rice pilaf, orange carrots with a tangerine sauce, squash and tofu and white wine.

I can close my door.  And sometimes I do.  But I don’t want to be so isolated anymore.  I don’t want it to be just me.  I want more for myself, and I’m slowly getting it.  Letting people in.  Allowing myself to change, if slightly.  If only by learning new languages of work, of thought, of friendship.  This weekend: two parties, a weekend-long slumber party and olive picking on Sunday.  In the coming weeks I’m beginning to write a few of my own stories for the radio.  Who knows—maybe sometime soon you’ll hear me speak their language, on the air, from San Francisco.

The Building Blocks

I make my own dinners here, except for Wednesday night when Anna shared her broccoli, carrots, sweet potatoes and rice.  I get myself to work and groceries, photo jobs and parties, except last week when Noa and Jack twice lent me their car.  I never sleep in my own bed.  That’s because I still don’t have a bed.

I sublet for my first five weeks in California, stayed on Andrew’s couch for the next two, and in Noa and Jack’s Special Room in the back of their house for a week and a half after Israel.  Before Andrew’s, I considered myself a light sleeper, and woke the first night every time one of his four roommates came in or out of the living room, used the sink in the kitchen, the fridge, or the bathroom.  By the second or third night, I slept through all manner of doors creaking, jars clanking, lights on and off, and by the second week, I slept through a rainstorm outside, and a leak through the ceiling that drips to the couch.

Andrew’s kitchen is a product of ten years of previous roommates leaving spices and flours, dried beans and vinegars, and is nearly complete, if oddly organized.  He’s incredibly proud of the way the kitchen is, possibly as a microcosm of the function of the house, and once insisted that I leave it exactly the way it was, and not try to use my feminine intuition to order it any differently.  Yes, he said sternly.  The paper napkins belong in the gap between those two cabinets.  Andrew is a cook of sorts, always experimenting with new ideas and recipes, building simple works of culinary delight, and scorning me for not trying hard enough to expand my repertoire.  He bakes when he has time, scones and pies, and he does it well, but didn’t the two weeks while I stayed.  I, on the other hand, made full use of the two measuring spoons and one measuring cup I found, the mixing bowl and wooden spatula, and the copper colored bundt pan buried behind the Pyrexes.  I made three cakes while staying on that couch, and only one kind of dinner (over and over), much to Andrew’s deep disappointment.

Noa and Jack’s house is more contained, more unified, there are more household discussions, roundtables, group dinners.  The three of us passing through their bedroom to the bathroom, the bathroom to the kitchen, the bathroom to the Special Room in the back where I had my very own door or two.  Most days it was the Special Room to the bathroom, the bathroom to the kitchen, the kitchen to the living room, and finally out the front door.  Oftentimes I would come home and see Jack and Noa through the glass windows in the front door, the two of them sitting opposite each other on the small couch, deeply embedded in small stacks of books: poetry, psychology, short stories.  Noa is finally realizing her dream of becoming a true writer, and for this sometimes I would come out to her, back in bed, under the covers, reading Garcia Marquez, doing training for a future putting pen to paper.

I am homeless, in a sense, but until I sign a lease, until I finally find a place to put my six books on a shelf, my computer on a desk, and my sheets on a mattress, I am temporarily embedded in the home lives of dear friends.  Last night, after what can only be described as a euphoric introduction to the hip and almost over-appreciated world of San Francisco performance audio, through Pop-Up Magazine, Maya agreed to let me come back to her house for the night.  This is our third time seeing each other outside of work at the radio, and I should have known her home would look like this.  I should have known her kitchen would be a pale pink-peach, lit by soft white Christmas lights, adorned with beautifully penned simple expressions about vegetables, hanging plants and floral coffee mugs, and Polaroids of unidentified relatives.  I should have known her bedroom would be soft and layered whites with flecks of color: large artworks by friends, film cameras, small postcards from museum gift shops and mementos from home in London.

I want a home badly.  But these last weeks have been almost strictly about rooting friendship.  Establishing what it means for me to be an individual here, away from family.  Away from the confines of where I thought my life was heading.

Last night I realized that I was mindlessly massaging my own shoulder while sitting at a bar with Ashleyanne and Maya.  My muscle wasn’t sore, I didn’t, say, need a massage.  But it must have been some sort of preventative measure.  I’m truly taking care of myself here.  Slowly I’m beginning to see the seams of friendships forming, across dinner tables, audio exchanges, and bike rides through these cities.  But the truth is, I’m doing it for myself.  There’s no handbook, no instruction manual.  I’m taking care of myself.

Maya said last night, as we drifted off to sleep, that I’ll see – people are more independent in San Francisco.  It matters less if you are part of a unit.  The folklore of this city is rich and burdened with decades of hip.  But the reality is, it feels different here.  I want to let go of my former life.  I want to embed myself, jump in with both feet forward.  Maya and I stayed up much too late talking, although it meant we were still awake to see the brightest flash of lightning I’d ever seen, and we got to the point in nighttime conversation where I felt like we’ve been friends for years.  I felt I was agreeing almost too often, like her sentences were mine, the ideas entirely shared.

Now I’m going back, back on the train to the other side of the Bay, back to the couch with dear friends in the house where I sublet at the beginning.  This can only be a great thing, as I have the entire day free to transcribe and edit audio, cook the same comfort meal of which Andrew would disapprove, and possibly even bake a cake.  Tomorrow: the TED conference in the city, and next week, who knows?  Maybe I’ll even find a house.

A Trip to the East

I’ve been distracted from my For a Day blog for a pretty legitimate reason… These last few weeks I’ve been traveling in Israel, and blogging for the Mizel Museum Art & Culture Tour of Israel.  I just posted the final of five columns, and wanted to share it with you.  All five are still up here:  https://mizelmuseum.wordpress.com/.  I’m back in California, and will start writing about my life here any day now…

To the Very End, by Alyssa Kapnik

The trip is nearing its end, and it’s just as densely packed and rich now as it was in the beginning.  We’ve been together as a group for so many hours, packed and unpacked our bags so many times, that it’s begun to feel like we’ll live as nomads forever.

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We begin on Tuesday with a trip to the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, a three story building in a quiet neighborhood.  Curator Sergio Edelsztein greets us in the lobby, and gives a brief overview of the collection – photographs and video art on all three floors.  Video art has been big in Israel for decades,  although it took a dip in popularity in the 80s, and watching a swath of videos from Israeli artists is like looking at history through a kaleidoscope.  Beautiful and varied, with moments of clarity, truth and facts, and great color.

Israeli artist Dana Levy‘s “The Wake” loops in one small, dark room, and we watch, totally captivated.  When we first walked into the room, the film was halfway through, and all we saw were butterflies flitting on the screen.  But the film soon ended – it’s five minutes and three seconds long – and we watched it again, all the way through.  And then again.  The film is beautiful and deeply sad, unexpectedly sad for a film about butterflies with no explicit context or narration.

From the start, we see the delicate focus of the lens, the details and colors in each shot.  Levy’s films often involve science and nature, and “The Wake” was shot in the Invertebrate Zoology department of the Carnegie Natural History Museum in Pittsburgh.  The only words in the entire work are the title, which show only briefly at the beginning, and then echo throughout the length of it.  The film takes place in what feels like a hallway – it’s narrow and dimly lit.  Each wall is covered with cases of stunningly beautiful butterflies, pinned down, behind glass, in perfect lines.   Cases and cases, rows and rows of butterflies.  And slowly, the shots introduce living butterflies as well.  100 living butterflies are released into the room.  Levy keeps us close to individuals.  One, two, three, perched, waiting, absolutely still.  The living butterflies seem hesitant at first, and then, one by one, like children testing their legs, the insects move their wings – stiffly at first, and then fluidly, and lift off the glass and into the room.

It’s almost painful to watch the living butterflies flitting past the dead, and the words “The Wake” continue to haunt the story.  They compound the chilling music, the low, hazy lights and the narrow and confining space of the room.  The living butterflies are free, alive, flying, but they are still trapped in a narrow space.  Butterflies are a symbol for life, rebirth and transformation, and not surprisingly, like much of the art we’ve seen throughout Israel, Levy’s films are unapologetically political.  “The Wake” is a likely a reflection of Israel, but I’m not sure whose wake we’re attending.  That of the Israeli soldiers who’ve passed?  Or are the butterflies the Palestinians?  We watch four or five more short films before we leave the museum, and each one only adds to the growing list of questions we’ve been accumulating here in Israel.  Where should (and do) we stand, as Jews, as grateful and graciously received visitors, as tourists, as beneficiaries of a Jewish State, in relation to the Palestinians?

The question is complex and difficult, and we never feel fully satisfied when the subject arises and then inevitably falls to the back of the agenda again.

After an hour or two of shopping and wandering around the outdoor Carmel Market, eating Turkish salads and witnessing the tourism industry at its most basic, we come together again to meet with author, Eshkol Nevo.

Nevo is named for his grandfather, Levi Eshkol, the third Prime Minister of Israel, and the author is every bit as confident and sophisticated as you might expect the grandson of a great leader to be.  Nevo speaks generously and humbly about his experience as a successful Israeli writer, and reads short passages from his book, Homesick, to both tell stories about his own life, and to give a broad sense of what it means to be Israeli.  The book takes place in the 1990s, but the themes radiate through contemporary Jewish life in Israel, and it turns out that the book is so relevant today that high schools throughout the entire country require students to take an exam about it.

Nevo is sensitive and deeply connected to the fictional characters in his book, which he thinks is absolutely necessary to writing a great novel.  He’s so connected to the six characters in Homesick that he said he once had a terrible feeling that there were important people missing during a birthday celebration for one of his daughters, and it turned out that the people who were missing were the characters from his book.  They’d become a part of him, and separate from him.  Distinctly human and deeply embedded in his life.

Nevo, like most of the artists we’ve met with thus far, is a fascinating representation of modern Israel.  He is attached to the State – could never move away, he said.  But he’s also painfully aware of the inherent difficult issues involved with being a Jew in Israel today.  In his novel he also deals with the question of what it means to be a Palestinian, as homesickness is part of the Palestinian narrative in Israel as well.

What exactly does “home” mean?  A piece of land designated to our forefathers?  Given by God?  The place where we grew up?  A place we’re still seeking and haven’t yet found?  How can we be homesick for a home we don’t know?  And when we think of home, is it where our parents live and lived, or where we go every night after work?  Is home a matter of choice, or circumstance?

Nevo doesn’t answer these questions in our hour together, but as soon as he begins talking, we begin questioning, and as soon as he leaves, we’re left wondering.  There’s no closure, only many more open doors.  Many more reasons to feel homesick for a home that may not exist.

It’s the middle of the afternoon, and we’re rushing now, on our way to view yet another form of artistic expression: the theater.  We’ve got matinee tickets for the Hebrew version of Cabaret, which the Israelis pronounce, “cab-a-rette.”  We barely wait at all before the lobby lights blink and we’re ushered to our seats in the middle of the biggest theater in Israel, the Cameri.  The play, based in Berlin in 1931, is a force of nature, dipping into questions of sexuality, new love, and the cruelty of man as the Nazis rise to power and the Germans begin to turn on the Jews.  It’s especially poignant to watch such a play in the middle of a Jewish city, at the heart of a Jewish state.  I’ve not spent much time in my life in public places surrounded by Jews, and it’s a powerful experience.  After the play, we meet with some of the creative minds behind the theater, including Eli Bijaoui, the young man who translated Cabaret into Hebrew.  His thought was to tell the story of Cabaret, but to add a bit of a twist considering the current state of Jews, and the current status of Israel and the Palestinians.  It’s not the Jews who are being persecuted in Israel right now.  It’s not the Jews who have been marginalized, or moved out of their homes.  Bijaoui’s translation begs the viewer to consider their role in the current situation, and question how the Palestinians are being treated here and now.

Bijaoui’s words hung in the air as we left the theater and went into the warm Tel Aviv night, to move on to our next activity: a reception at the Suzanne Dellal Centre for Dance and Theatre, where we met world-famous dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and viewed his new collection of photographs.

How quickly we adjust to new artists, new venues, new experiences!

Wednesday morning, our last together in Israel, we visit Shenkar College for Engineering and Design, think broadly about the current state of art in Israel, and make small predictions for the future.  This is the second accredited art college in Israel, and it’s growing steadily in reputation and importance.

We move from a brand new institution to a well-established one.  We climb to the top floor of an old warehouse building in Tel Aviv, the studio of Zvi Lachman, esteemed sculptor, print-maker and pastel painter.  He brings out giant pastels, impressionist paintings involving his wife, his mother, and other unnamed women, along with a Van Gogh-inspired self-portrait.  He tells us about his techniques, his history, and what he wants from his works.  He’s always got multiple projects going at the same time, and is often making changes to his paintings, even after he’s added fixative and even after he’s shown them to visitors.  A painting can transform almost entirely from its inception until he finally sets it behind glass.  Lachman is a treat to be around – he’s gentle and unassuming, but confident and sure.  He knows his place is Israeli art.  We listen quietly, and imagine ourselves bringing his works into our homes, even if only through memories.

We’ve visited these last ten days with a large number and wide variety of impressive artists, all of whom play with and manipulate concepts and language, thought and narrative, materials and emotions.  It’s disappointing to realize that after we leave, we’ll go back to the simplicity of our lives, away from this great and growing community of Israeli artists.  We are in a distinctly beautiful and unique world when traveling together here in the Promised Land.  We have tour guides to give context, and artists to lift us up out of the ordinary.  To raise our consciousness beyond history and politics and into the realm of color and imagination.  We’re deeply happy here, knowing what we now know.

Our last dinner is in the beautiful, large home of Israeli art collector Serge Tiroche.  We walk through the main floor of the house, taking in all of the art hanging on the walls, and then to large balcony overlooking the Port of Jaffa.  It’s difficult to believe that we’ll be leaving this all behind, going back to our lives on the other side of the planet.  We understand now the deep importance of supporting a steady stream of Israeli artists, and we want to bring everyone we know back to Israel to see for themselves.  The Israeli art scene is an immense and growing sea of talent and creativity, and we’re grateful to have submerged ourselves, if only for ten days.  We board the plane in Israel feeling that we’ve been a part of something important, here and now, and a we go to the US with a sense of comfort knowing that we’ll be back someday.

A Question of Fear

I’ve been riding my bike a lot more since I arrived in the Bay.  One of my roommates, Kat, came home from San Francisco at two in the morning last week, furious, yelling about how some jerk had tried to steal her bike by smashing her U-lock with a cinder block.  It hadn’t worked, but damaged her bike and made it nearly unridable.  Gavin told me he’s had three bikes stolen in three years living in Berkeley.  But riding a bike is safer, I’ve been told, than walking home alone, especially at night, so I’ve taken to riding my bike nearly everywhere, and then taking great pains to try to lock it up well so it won’t get stolen.

Courtney told me that being on a bike doesn’t mean you won’t get mugged.  She told a story about one guy who was riding his bike, and a car stopped short in front of him, and one stopped right behind, and they held him up there, in the middle of the street.

I’ve never been more afraid of being robbed.  Of being harassed or taken advantage of.  I’ve never been more afraid to leave my apartment door unlocked.  To forget the deadbolt.  To open a window in my room.

The stories have been largely the same.  I’ve been told over and over again that my neighborhood is dangerous.  When I tell people where I live, their reaction is almost entirely predictable: concern.  Blind concern.  No, they’ve never been to my neighborhood.  No, they don’t have experience there.  But they hold and release the same feelings of fear that I’ve already heard dozens of times.

And I often feel afraid, too.  Maybe riding my bike home is safer than walking, but what do I do when I come to a red light, and there are groups of men, young and old, sitting around talking at the street corner?  Do I try to defy the red light and cross anyway, or do I wait, sitting in the dark on my bike?

My fear is born of other peoples’ fear.  I haven’t seen anything strange.  I haven’t witnessed anything scary or dangerous.  In fact, most people walking around my neighborhood are overly friendly, calling out hellos while I zip by on my bike, waving, smiling.  They are strangers offering quick quips, and “have a beautiful day.”  These people, these friendly neighbors, are all black.

I’m not sure how to approach this topic.  Not sure how much to say or hold back.  But my experience of Oakland thus far has been noticeably straddled across a great divide.  The huge majority of people living in this neighborhood are black.  Peppered in with a few other young white people, musicians practicing at the warehouse across the street, and those like my roommates, baristas and waitresses and dancers who largely commute from here to San Francisco for work.  The black families, and the white 20-somethings.  It’s a strange combination.

I’m painting with broad strokes here, I realize, but I’m not writing an academic essay.  Just reflections on two and a half weeks in a new town.  Most of the white people I pass by, those other 20-something artists and hipsters, turn their faces away and ignore me.  Many of the black people I pass go out of their way to say hello.  To be kind and smile and engage.

When people say that my neighborhood is dangerous, is it possible that what they mean to say is that my neighborhood is poor?  That my neighborhood is predominantly black?  I know the crime rates are higher here.  But I don’t feel particularly safe (warranted or not, I’m not sure) in Berkeley—a predominantly white city next to Oakland—either.  These are big questions, but ones that are constantly swirling around my mind.  Ones I can’t seem to go a day without asking.  What is it that ultimately makes us feel safe?  What is it that makes us feel vulnerable?

Racism is alive and well here in Oakland.  In the entire Bay Area.  I can feel it.  I’ve been told it.  It seems so obvious, so bizarrely out in the open, and entirely obscured, almost ignored.  Bikes are susceptible to thieves everywhere in the Bay.  It’s a major problem here.  But the stories about danger in my neighborhood goes well beyond bikes to a feeling of total vulnerability.  As if the walls of one’s house are not enough to keep one safe.  I wonder, with a bit of naiveté, and endless optimism, where that fear really comes from.  And do I have to subscribe to it?  In order to live here, in order to be safe, do I also have to feel constant fear?

My experience here is of great kindness and even generosity.  Of one woman in front of me in line at the post office giving me money to feed my parking meter while a woman behind me in line offered to hold my place.  Strangers giving me directions, talking about the weather, explaining the transportation system.

It’s become imminently clear to me how much of a “small town” Denver really is.  How much more anonymous I feel here, even with my modest and growing circle of new friends.  I feel almost invisible here, in spite of my new routines and the small accomplishments that mean so much: getting across town to a meeting on time.  Finding out that if I turn right on MLK Boulevard, right again at Adeline and an illegal left at Market, I’m on my way home much faster than before.  Lately, I’m getting lost less.

And the less I feel lost, the less I feel afraid.  I’m slowly, slowly, breaking down those barriers.  Slowly, slowly, I understand that this is now my home.  And I realize that my fear is my own.  My safety is my own.  I’ve got no answers yet.  No tricks to seeing through the haze of concern, the projections of danger.  I’ve got only my experiences, and my endless optimism.  In order to live here, I have to believe I’m safe. I’ll still ride my bike, I’ll still lock the doors.  But I have to believe that the world, this city, my street, is a safe place to live.  And I’m lucky to be here.

A Great Shift

At nearly midnight on Tuesday I arrived in the Bay Area.  Andrew picked me up at the airport, we went to see some live music and drink a beer, and I spent the next day unpacking my suitcases at my sublet in Oakland.

I don’t think I really prepared myself properly to move to a new city.  I honestly had no idea how to prepare.  I brought sweaters and scarves, computers and sheets.  Yesterday I spent hours shopping and loaded up on basics: laundry detergent, body lotion, pillows and a loofa for the shower.  I bought a loaf of bread, cooking oil, a box of tea.

This morning, on my way to my first day at the public radio station, KALW, where I’ll be working a few days a week, the reason I moved here, I got lost four times.  Took the wrong turn, the wrong bus, the wrong advice.  I bought the wrong kind of train ticket ($43!) and had to buy another for the day ($7.50!).  I didn’t have exact change to ride the bus, and so ended up begging the bus driver to let me on, and then enduring her frustration and disgust.  It was she who eventually told me I was going the wrong direction, and it was from her that I then had to sheepishly ask for a transfer ticket in order to switch buses to go in the opposite direction.

By the time I got to the area where the radio station was said to be located, and wandered lost around the neighborhood for twenty minutes, I was sure my time in the Bay Area had come to a disastrous and premature end.  I thought about how easy it would be to book a ticket back to Denver, to turn this ship around, choose a new career and end my San Francisco sorrow.

Half of the people from whom I asked directions were foreigners, newcomers, visitors.  Two of them didn’t speak English, two looked on their phones, but that didn’t help.  Two people asked me for directions right after I’d asked others for the same.

I arrived at the radio station flustered and exhausted.  It had taken me two hours to get there; it was already noon, and I’d forgotten to pack a lunch.  I went into the station, which is tucked into the back of a major public high school, and introduced myself.  The staff really is as friendly as I’d heard, and everyone stood up to introduce themselves.  One of the women said, “It’s not usually this crazy here!  We’re a little excited because Ira Glass is here!”

Here?  I said.  Here here?

“Yes!  Here!  In the studio.”

Ira Glass is one of my favorite radio personalities.  The host of NPR’s This American Life, he has become something of a celebrity, and even more so now because he co-wrote and produced a feature film, Sleepwalk with Me.  He’s been touring the country doing radio spots to promote the film, and it just so happened that he was interviewing at KALW the moment I walked in.

Nearly the whole staff sat in one of the production booths, watching Ira on air through a window.  When, on air, he gave a riling speech about donating to NPR, everyone in the room, all six of us, clapped, and some cheered.  He turned around to the group of eager radio underlings and looked directly at us.  He laughed and mentioned how nerdy it was that the group had applauded his pledge break.  After the interview, we rushed back to the newsroom, and I heard a few people say, “Hurry!  Look busy!”  Ira Glass walked through the door, and saw a whole room full of us, nervous and waiting.  He introduced himself and walked among us, shaking every single person’s hand.  He is much more handsome in person than he is in photographs, and I was struck entirely speechless.  I wanted to tell him that he’s inspired me from the very beginning, that he drives me to want to tell better stories, to be an innovator, to work harder.  I wanted to tell him that I can’t wait to move up the ranks in public radio, and finally work with and for him.  All of the gushy feelings rose to the surface, and I barely got my name out to shake his hand.  He looked right at me and said, “You know, I started as a volunteer too.”

I know it’s silly to say it, but I think I had a moment with Ira Glass.  He looked at me longer than I thought he would.  He lingered there, as if one of us should say something more.  But I’d gone mute, and so he moved on, smiling and shaking hands with everyone else.

We all rushed outside to take a picture with him, and I ended up walking next to him for a bit.

The group posed for a photograph, and when he turned toward me again, I said, extremely awkwardly, “It’s really great to meet you.”  He looked at me totally genuinely and said, “It’s really great to meet you too.”

Click to enlarge. That’s Ira in the suit in the middle. I’m in the back with my glasses on…

A perfect ending to an imperfect day.  A perfect beginning to a new adventure.  This was a sign.  This was a gift.  I want to say this is as good as it gets – meeting one of my favorite thinkers – but that’s not true.  This is not nearly as good as it gets.  It gets so much better as I move along in the radio world.  As I move forward, move on, move up.  I spent the rest of the afternoon watching and learning from one of the engineers editing the station’s news show, thinking, “I’ve made it, and this is only the beginning.”  I’m more hopeful than ever.

Two days down.  Infinity to go.

Westward Ho!

I’ve almost finished the tube of toothpaste I bought in Vietnam.  It’s not particularly Vietnamese toothpaste, just Colgate with some Vietnamese language on it.  I bought it for the bizarre inflated price of 20,000 Vietnamese dong.  $1.  I’ve stopped using it, frankly, and moved on to Denver toothpaste.  I have a strange resistance to finishing the Colgate, as if it were a great book, and I could somehow, through my powers of self control, stretch out the ending.  Asia feels so incredibly far away, and I only conjure it up for brief moments during accidental memories, or searches through my thousands of photographs, old blog posts, clothing, shoes, souvenirs collected during my trip.  I loved my trip to Asia, and it almost feels like the experience belongs to my past, not my present, and I keep leaving it behind.  I love a good excuse to think and talk about my trip, and try not to lose those memories by over-remembering.

One gift that keeps on giving: I’ve had continuous summer now for six months, because my summer started early in Cambodia in March, and from what I hear, I’m looking at another two or three months of warmth.  I’m moving to California in 12 days, starting my path to someday working full time for National Public Radio.  I’ll be starting (overjoyed, nervous, hopeful) with KALW in San Francisco, the oldest public radio station in that city—the oldest non-commercial FM signal west of the Mississippi—a day or two after I arrive.  So far I’ve packed nothing, but I imagine I’ll take rain coats and my new leather boots, three pairs of long pants and my bicycle.  I’m not sure what else to bring.  How does one move across the country?  It seems so completely common at this point.  I have ten or twelve Colorado transplant friends already living in the Bay Area, not to mention friends there from Maine, New York, North Carolina, Ohio.  At what point does a person start saying they’re from California?  UA, despite his distinctive New York accent and his love for all things Yankees, declared the other night after dinner that he is a Westerner.  28 years in New York hardly compares to 39 years not in New York.  I was kind of shocked to hear him say it.  Letting go of such a big part of one’s former identity in favor of a new one is quite a revolution.  A slow, thoughtful revolution, perhaps, one that involves new family, marriages, friendships, neighborhood board meetings and mortgages, but a revolution nonetheless.

I’m hesitant to change so much about myself.  I am incredibly proud to be a Coloradan, to the point that I nearly bought cowboy boots yesterday.  I’ve become excessively sentimental about Denver lately, feeling lucky to be caught in traffic if only to have more time to sit still in my home city.  Time to think about the horrible sun reflector that is the copper office building on Colorado Boulevard, the sprinkler rockets that shoot endless streams of water into the street because no one can possibly keep up with every broken sprinkler head in Denver city parks, the growth all around the city, and on the relatively short (and somehow endless) drive to Boulder.  My mom said that when she was growing up, a nighttime drive to Boulder was pitch black.  Almost eerie.  Just the light emanating from their car’s own headlights.  Things change slowly here—most times when I come home, even after months and months away, I’m shocked at how completely the same things are.  Small things change, like the kinds of flowers Mom’s planting in her garden, occasionally there are new stop signs at neighborhood intersections, neighborhood restaurants get a juicer, local grocery stores open a meat market.  Generally things stay the same.  I count on it.

But new buildings are always cropping up, old houses scrapped for McMansions, pitch black roads lined with strange cookie cutter suburbia.  It’s difficult to leave considering the fact that things will change.  I will change.  I’m excited to start my new life in California.  Excited to see Ocean where once I saw Mountains.  Excited to feel fog in the mornings and sun in the afternoon, excited for a new music scene and to make new and rekindle old friendships.  I can’t wait to start my new life.  But somehow, in our fury of modern day living, in our desire to constantly refresh our lives like we refresh websites that won’t respond, the simplicity of home gets muddled.  When does a person start saying they’re from California?

I’m definitely going to finish my Vietnamese toothpaste before I move out West.  I’ve delayed the ending long enough, and am ready to move on.  New adventures.  New hills to climb.  Maybe I’ll even scrap my Denver toothpaste as well, in favor of something entirely new.

The World Away

I’m back in China.  I’ve been transported back to the future: Shanghai.  A land with innumerable refrigerators and washing machines.  A land where I get to stay in my new home away from home, my room away from room, in Sarah’s apartment.  More taxi cabs, more dance music and cocktail hour and yogurt for breakfast.  There are houseplants and a kitchen and a small dog named Dog.  On Sunday, though, I took one last trip.  One last jaunt into the unknown: Beijing.  Five hours on the super modern high speed train, 300 kilometers per hour.

Beijing, Sarah says, has truly accepted its communism.  The cement towering apartment buildings, the occasional splash of bright orange.  The absolutely drab architecture.  I’d exit the subway station, walk out, and think really?  This is where I am?  And almost turn back.  Almost give up.  There’s one woman selling a flip flops piled on sheets on newspaper on the sidewalk, groups of teens walking by in uniforms, eating popcicles.  The neighborhood, I’d think, is missing any bit of charm.  But I decide to give it half an hour.  Just keep walking, maybe I’ll find what I’m looking for.  So I turn left.  And left again.  And I find it.  The Beijing I’ve been imagining.  Street vendors, fruit carts, Taiwanese tea joints and a man grilling sweet potatoes off the back of his bicycle.  I’m relieved to feel like I’m still in Asia.

I stayed in Beijing with an old Colorado friend, Aaron, and it was fun to watch him interact with Beijingers.  He’s a financial reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and here in Beijing he oversees a dozen other reporters, Chinese and otherwise.  He’s lived here for five years, and in Asia for longer, and language is no barrier.  With Aaron around, the city feels foreign, but entirely navigable.  Almost simple.

Walking the streets myself is a different story.  Taking the subway.  Being engulfed in a sea of Chinese commuters.  I spend a few hours in the center of town, walking through the Forbidden City, and then past it, to small, shady streets with countless convenience stores overflowing candies and milk jars onto the sidewalks, a row of city fishermen, old men reading newspapers and playing a Chinese board game I’ve seen old men playing all over East Asia.

I board the Number Five bus, my first city bus in Asia.  I’ve been advised against taking city buses, because the maps and posted schedules don’t have any English.  It’s a huge gamble, and I get lost more than once.  The bus is packed, and I’m the only foreigner on board.  It’s hot, and I can feel the eyes of four or five passengers watching me.  Not uncommon for me.  I get stares nearly everywhere I go here.  Total curiosity in seeing someone who looks different.  But when people stare from mere feet—no, inches—away, it’s impossible to ignore.  I try smiling.  Try acknowledging them, try ignoring them.  Nothing changes, they keep staring.  I’m finally pushed toward the front of the bus, and I’ve got an uninterrupted view of the city coming at me.  It’s tempting to stay on the bus and see where it goes.  It’s tempting to just watch the city pass by block after block.  But I exit instead, and buy a cream puff from a nearby pastry shop.  There’s a quiet-looking alleyway, and I walk in.  I enjoy losing the bustling and busy nonsense of the street.  Too many people, too much bumping and pushing.  Too many pedestrians.  It’s the first alleyway I see, and I’m in.

So far, Asian neighborhoods seem to rest safely on the insides.  Tucked away.  And the only way to find them is by crossing thresholds, going into what looks like private property.  But there’s very little privacy.  These homes don’t even have private bathrooms.  Every alley has its own communal toilets, and the smell is awful.

This neighborhood I’ve come upon is the Russian doll of alleyways.  One layer of homes and maze of alleys tucked inside another.  I walk slowly, trying not to miss anything.  Trying not to let my desire to “arrive” overcome my desire to explore.  If I find myself walking faster, wanting to plan ahead, or wondering what’s next, I have to remind myself that nothing is next.  I have no plan.  I have no agenda.  It’s just this: walking these streets, seeing these faces.

I’m in Beijing.  The trees are larger, the bicycle wheels are smaller.  The sky’s a dull grey color, and everyone seems to be smoking a cigarette.

When I’m traveling or exploring a city here alone, I notice the silences.  Made more obvious by the fact that I don’t converse with anyone.  Not passersby, not strangers or salespeople or shop owners or kids on the street.  The most I get is the occasional brave “Hello!” outburst, followed by laughter, and little to no eye contact.  I usually say hello back, smile big, and walk along, completely aware that they’re using me as a sort of test.  They’ve got a small store of English words, and they’re playing a strange game to see if the words work.  If I’ll turn around.  And I do.  For some reason I am charmed by this small bit of English language.

The other day, I was walking through a quiet residential neighborhood in Saigon, and a group of twenty-something men were working hard loading equipment into the back of a truck.  One of them shouted at me, “I love you!” and his friends laughed.  I smiled and blushed, and barely paused.  I wondered if he knew what he’d said.  He was sending up the ultimate test balloon.  It was, to my memory, the only time anyone has ever spontaneously and anonymously declared their love for me, and I ate it up.  These eruptions of English language break up my otherwise rather introspective solo adventures, and for a few minutes at a time, I feel truly, if briefly, connected to the people around me.

After a few minutes of taking lefts and rights within in the small Beijing neighborhood, I came up to three Chinese men sitting on short stools next to a box of brown eggs.  They were holding a baby and laughing at and with him, passing him back and forth, clapping and tickling to keep the kid’s attention.  When I walked up, one of the men pulled out a fourth stool and pointed to it.  They didn’t ask my name, only where I’m from.  It seemed to exhaust their English vocabulary.  And my Chinese is even more limited.  So we sat.  The man closest to me held the baby near me, introducing me to the child as if I’d know what to say.  I spoke to the baby in English, of course, just like I do with dogs and cats here, as if he might have actually understood what I was saying.   The baby didn’t understand, but smiled at me anyway, a bashful, toothy grin.  Babies here don’t seem to wear diapers, and instead the clothes are manufactured with a big slit in the bottoms, so when the kid has to go, he just does.  Nothing stands between him and the earth.
One of the men finally just put the kid on my lap, and for a second, I was holding a stranger’s baby.  He almost immediately started to cry, and I passed him back, embarrassedly.  The men wanted me to take pictures of the kid.  Wanted me to photograph him sitting, standing, walking.  They wanted me to photograph him with his grandmother, his uncles, another baby who was passing through with another adult.  This baby was a point of so much pride and satisfaction, that total strangers wanted me to have a way to remember him.

After ten minutes of sitting, speechlessly, with the three Chinese men and their baby, I said goodbye.  Took a few more photographs of them, and chose another random alleyway to follow.

I didn’t speak to another human being until hours later when I met Aaron and his girlfriend for dinner.

I passed slowly for hours through the hidden alleyway neighborhood.  The walls are decorated with scant, mostly impermanent graffiti.  A few chalk games of tic-tac-toe on one wall, cartoonish faces on another, and large, sprawling stencils of different phone numbers, which are repeated on walls all over the city.  The phone numbers, Aaron tells me, are likely for illegal immigrants to call to procure false papers.  If a Chinese person is born in the city, Aaron says, then they automatically get identification and the necessary paperwork to continue to live in the city.  But the rural-born Chinese citizens, the people that make up a large and growing part of the labor force here, don’t get the same privileges as the urban-born, and aren’t legally allowed to live in the cities.  If they want to live in Beijing, the rural-born Chinese likely have to live here illegally, which means fewer benefits.  No acknowledgment from the government.  The possibility of being caught and punished for breaking regulations.

The phone numbers are everywhere.

I can see why the government might want to regulate the number of people living in the cities here.  It’s overwhelming.  Old women push you out of the way so they can board the subway before you.  Young men lean on you once on board.  Strangers are everywhere.  Always.  Hovering.  Staring.  Pushing and pulling.  Shouting into their cell phones.  Hocking loogies.  All the time.  There are moments of reprieve, of course.  In the fancier neighborhoods, there are fewer people.  The streets are wider.  The shady boulevards distract you from the constant flow of traffic.  You take a left here, a right there, and you find a quiet area that feels entirely detached from Beijing.  It’s quiet and still and you forget where you are.  You find yourself at the center of the Russian Doll Effect, and there’s only the occasional passing bicycle.  The occasional ferrel cat.  The occasional man stringing up wet laundry to dry.

It’s great to be home with Sarah again in Shanghai.  I’m nearing the end of my three months of adventuring.  Rapidly approaching end time.  And I want to stretch it out as much as possible.  I lay on the couch remembering moments past: Hanoi sidewalks, Laos waterfalls, fruit shakes, mosquito bites and boat rides.  This world is worlds away.  And the world I’ll be entering next week, is a different universe.  I tuck in for one more weekend…

The Good

I like to think I’ve changed.  I’m a little more calloused.  A little more cynical.  A little more savvy.  A little more comfortable with my body.  I like to think that after more than two months of the constancy of new situations, new interactions, new relationships, new food, that I understand the difference between kindness and manipulation.  And yet I find that, to my own peril and with great pride, I still believe that everyone is basically good.

The other night, walking home from one of my favorite street meals in Vietnam, fresh fish hot pot, Rosie and I were practically giddy.  High off of the success of cultural integration.  Of one more pure Vietnam experience: no English menus, no English words.  Just pointing and guessing, hand motioning, smiling, blushing, copying other Vietnamese diners around us.  We were also a bit tipsy off of our two Vietnamese beers.  We were laughing and sharing stories from our three days apart—motorbike adventures and aimless wanderings—sharing theories of Vietnamese social mores, laughing at 1990s pop culture references and strange English translations on signs, t-shirts, advertisements. I was just explaining how I’d walked down the very same street the day before, without her, and found a vibrant, very different neighborhood on the other side of this broad thoroughfare.  A large market, construction projects on either side of the street, young men digging through the pavement, barefoot and bare-chested.  I was about to tell her about the side streets where the noises from the market disappeared.  Where elderly Vietnamese women sat quietly outside their homes, watching me cautiously, thoughtfully.  I would have explained, too, that this small alleyway led into a maze of hidden homes, hanging plants, bird cages and cafes, but at that moment, a motorbike raced by us, and the second rider, sitting behind the driver, grabbed my arm, and ripped my purse off my body.

My purse had been hanging across me, but when the thief grabbed it at such speed, it snapped right off, and the motorbike was gone.  At first I thought it was an accident.  Vietnamese people touch me a lot.  There was the woman and her friend in Hanoi who, when I stopped near her home to take photographs, she walked across the road, spoke words I couldn’t understand, smiled widely at me, touched my belly, ran her flat hand quickly along my figure, explaining something to her friend in Vietnamese.  In general, too, there’s a lot of handshaking, arms around me, pats on my shoulders, my back.  Chao, our Halong Bay tour guide, rested her body against me from time to time, holding me as if we’d been friends forever.  I thought, when the motorbike thief grabbed my arm, that it was some sort of flirtation.  It was a young guy, and I thought, for the split second before I understood, that he just wanted to see what I felt like.  I thought he got my purse by accident.  I shouted after him like he may not have noticed.

I didn’t report the thief to the police.  Thievery is utterly common here.  A cliche.  When you tell people you’ve been robbed, they nod their heads and say, “Motorbike?”  So Rosie and I walked home to our hostel holding hands, shaking, rapid fire going back and forth about what had happened.  It was so fast.  So deliberate.  We listed all of the reasons we were lucky.  We hadn’t gotten hit by a motorbike.  Only my wallet was stolen—credit card and cash—not my passport, camera or iPod.  There was no violence.  No pain.  No emotional damage.  I’m fine.  I stayed up hours after we turned off the light in the room, thinking about all of the things I could have done.  Should have done.  Held on to my purse.  Worn it under my clothes.  Pushed the thief off his motorbike, taught him a lesson.

The thing I felt most frustrated about was that I’d trusted too much.  Given too much credit.  I felt sad that the motorbike thief resorted to a life of crime.  Wondered what he’d do with the money.  How much he needed it.  Where he’d go after the robbery, and how they’d split the cash.

The next day, Rosie and I were scammed by a couple of cyclo—bicycle taxi—drivers, and walked away cursing.  And then Rosie’s phone was stolen right off the table at a cafe by a man with an unnaturally large smile and a Vietnamese-language newspaper.  We came to blame Saigon.  The corrupt police.  The overpopulation.  The expectation of scamming, stealing, manipulation.  It brought a bad taste to our mouths.

We left Saigon for a few days.  We rid ourselves of the city, went as far as we could while still knowing we’d be back.  We went first to the Cu Chi Tunnels, an unbelievably complex and intricate structure of the Viet Cong.  The tunnels are a maze of 250 kilometers of  underground rooms and routes that they expanded upon and perfected to use against the Americans during the war.  Our tour guide was a grandson of a Viet Cong fighter, proud of his family legacy, of his grandfather’s bold and courageous participation in the war.  At Cu Chi, they’ve turned the tunnels into a strange interactive museum of all things Viet Cong Victory.  Demonstrations of how each of the booby traps worked: bamboo spikes with small bits of poison hidden under a swiveling trap door in the ground.  Rolling spikes designed to stick your feet, your armpits, your chest, your bottom.  Animatronic mannequins and a short video at the beginning of the tour showed the VC manufacturing weapons, building tunnels, enjoying the company of their avid assistants and workers, the Cu Chi villagers.

I made the mistake of telling the guide, when he asked my nationality, that I’m American.  For the entire tour, he looked at me every time he said anything about the American army, laughing at my apparent cruelty, my failures, my helplessness in the face of the VC war machine.  We had the opportunity to duck into a Vietnamese-sized hidden entrance to the tunnel, and to climb through the tunnel itself.  The tunnels lead all the way to Saigon, and during the war, opened up inside the American headquarters.  I’m not a real nationalist.  I don’t often feel very American, and if I do, it’s not necessarily a positive experience.  Being an American outside of America is kind of a joke.  We’re stereotypically fat, rude, graceless.  We’re gun-toting, self righteous, and ignorant about the rest of the world.

But I felt very American at the Cu Chi Tunnels.   The VC were ruthless, fierce, and absolutely ingenious.  Vietnam has declared victory against the Americans, and they hold no grudges.  They won, we lost.  End of story.  Things have changed in the last four decades.  The Vietnamese don’t hate Americans, don’t want to kill us.  They seem to want to be like us.  This morning, a middle aged Vietnamese woman came up to me while I wrote and said, “Where you from?”  She said it loud, as if I might not be able to understand her unless she spoke up, and I answered, “America.”  She brought her voice down low, and smiled.  “America.  Oh.”  She touched my shoulder and said, “Freedom.  Your country is freedom.”

Rosie and I went next to the Mekong Delta.  We visited island after island—Coconut Island, Dragon and Unicorn Islands—took a rowboat ride through the jungle, tasted Elephant Fish, saw how rice is processed, rice noodles and rice paper.  We made a host of delightful friends with other foreigners from around the world, stayed up late into the night talking with the owner of our homestay and drinking rice wine out of shot glasses.  We were re-energized.

After I was robbed, Saigon changed colors.  Became something with dark edges and dull greys.  I spent a few days feeling defiant.  I often left the hostel entirely empty handed.  No one could possibly steal from me, because I wouldn’t take anything with me.  But then I’d sit down at a street cart to eat something, and the seller would heap on extra food, add more when I’d eaten most of it, and smile at me with a look of deep admiration, instant relationship, kindness, curiosity.  Any extra smile, any extra bit of kindness reverberates through me.  It happens enough times, and the cynicism washes away.  The anger.  The frustration at being a total stranger.  The alienation and humiliation that come with not knowing.  And then I am elevated.  I feel light.  I conclude that yes, a resounding yes, everyone is basically good.

Today I leave Vietnam, and go back to Shanghai.  It’s hard to imagine not being here anymore.  The street sellers walking their bicycles along, shouting to the shop owners and residents, presumably announcing the opportunity to buy rice flour or melons or eggs or pots and pans.  The weaving motorbikes, the unrelenting heat and the midday rainstorms.  The ballroom dancing in the park.  The 20 cent peeled pomelos, the one dollar motorbike taxi rides from one side of a city to the other.  The opportunity to walk slowly through a place that is undeniably changing every second.  Becoming more modern, more accommodating, more palatable to Western taste.  It’s entirely possible that the Vietnam I see now will never exist again.  This is my gift, my honor, to see a snapshot of history, one mark in the evolution of an ancient culture.  And I treasure it.

Tastes of Vietnam

Less shocks me now, as I near the end of my three months in East Asia. A giant cockroach flying across the bathroom. Lines of ants climbing the wall in a breakfast restaurant. Small piles of frogs slit at the bellies at the morning market. The constant honking of horns. Two men pooping alongside the train tracks at the Saigon station at six in the morning. A little girl pooping on the sidewalk. A woman hiking up her skirt and peeing outside the hospital. Your basic outdoor bowel movements.

I was, however, shocked today to walk by a string of eateries roasting dogs on spits on the sidewalk. The shape of the animal looked familiar, and I humiliated myself in front of a whole group of Vietnamese while trying to confirm that it was, in fact, dog. They laughed at my ignorance, my naivetae, my Western sensibilities. Or maybe they just laughed because I was trying to talk to a group of people without knowing a word of their language. Maybe they laughed because a host of other foreigners has already had the same reaction. I tried not to react so openly. Tried to control my face. I understood intellectually that people eat dog. Someone suggested last week that I might have already eaten it without knowing. But seeing dogs on a spit is just one more thing that makes me feel like a total alien here. Makes me feel more different, more distant. Every living dog I’ve seen since seeing the dog meat seems to have this ridiculous, sad look on its face, and I wonder, would they eat this one? No, this one’s a pet. No, this one’s too skinny. No, this one’s too old. This one’s got cataracts in his eyes, this one’s got some weird skin issues.

But I do wonder. There are chickens wandering around town too, but I don’t wonder if they’ll end up on spits. I know they will. And I’m going to be one of the people eating them. And I’m okay with that. I actually seek it out. Eating chicken gives me a great sense of comfort—it’s something I know well, and understand completely. And food matters a great deal to my sense of self.

Before I left for Asia, I made a deal with myself that I could eat anything I wanted while I’m here. I’d never eaten pork before, nor shellfish, out of a sort of arbitrary respect for keeping kosher. I don’t keep kosher in any other way, but this was one thing I’ve always done in order to stay connected to Judaism, my family, my cultural heritage. I knew it would be incredibly difficult to avoid these categories of food throughout Asia. As Sarah says, they use pork like a spice here—sprinkling dried pork floss on otherwise vegetarian dishes. It’s been odd tasting both of those kinds of meat, and truth be told, I still cringe when I put pork in my mouth, and the texture of most seafood is unsettling.

I truly understand now the concept of “comfort food”. Eating food I know can shift my mood, bring me back into focus, remind me that I do actually have routines at home, and that I like to cook and bake. I lose track of myself here sometimes. I have no personal space, let alone a kitchen, no clear memory of how I’m different at home. I can’t count on anything here, and no one counts on me for anything, which is liberating, and it also gives me this bizarre ghostly feeling. This city would be exactly the same with or without me. I have no place here except to consume as much as I can in a short period of time.

This morning I arrived in Saigon on the overnight train—solo, as Rosie is taking a few days to explore central Vietnam with an Easy Rider motorbike tour—took a taxi to District 1, and right off, I found an Israeli cafe and ate a perfectly predictable carrot muffin. I treasured it. After the muffin, I went out into Saigon, found a sweet hostel tucked away in a small alleyway, parked my giant backpack, and went back into the city for my first real wander. After just twenty minutes of random rights and lefts, going through winding alleyways and narrow streets, I found a bustling, overflowing produce, meat and spice market.

The markets are almost always my favorite parts of each Southeast Asian village, town, city. They all have consistencies: heaps of leafy greens, most of which I don’t recognize; bright purple eggplants; towers of garlic, orange, yellow and white ginger; every kind of fruit you could hope to stuff in your mouth. In Saigon, the individual sellers sit on tables behind their produce, chopping, prepping, cleaning, looking up occasionally, chatting with their usual customers.

I found a woman selling cold desserts, and when I walked over, she pointed at a small plastic stool and told me to sit down. Okay, I said, committing to eating whatever it was she’d put in front of me. She opened a cooler on the floor and picked through the two dozen jars inside, looking for the perfect one. She handed one to me with a small metal spoon, and so I ate. Vietnamese yogurt. Not like any yogurt I’ve ever had before. Creamier, more tart, icy. There is a comfort, too, in eating new foods. The feeling of absolute satisfaction in tasting something you’d never thought of before. You’d never imagined. In knowing that you’ve put something in your mouth that you may never get to taste again. That your palate is improved for having sat down on this small plastic stool.

Later I had slow-cooked chicken with rice and cucumbers. And then an iced Vietnamese coffee flan. And fresh squeezed pomelo juice. And I’m going out again for round two (or two hundred?).

If food helps me to define who I am, then I’m relieved to know that who I am is uncertain. And willing to taste new things. And willing to miss my routine for the prospect of three more weeks of pickled this and roasted that. And pickled this and roasted that mixed with sugar and citrus and spice and cream.

Vietnamese food, of all the food I’ve tasted anywhere in the world, is the most ridiculously creative, variant, wild and surprising. It’s become a huge part of my experience of the country, and of each city individually. I remember streets by what we ate there, and I remember people by what flavors they delivered. I made my first Vietnamese friend, Giang, while eating tofu soup on a plastic stool in Hanoi, and she’s helping to deliver me to even more delicious underlayers, Vietnamese dishes I couldn’t have found on my own. There are benefits to being a ghost, nearly invisible and largely mute. I get the flavors without any of the responsibilities. And I can handle that for a few more weeks.