Wayward

Consider for a moment the optics of this forevermore immortal moment in American history: a tycoon descends in a tower bearing his name, built largely with the calloused hands of foreign labor, motivated to run for president — at least in part — because of a presidential roasting he took in 2011; he takes the stage and laces into the very labor his country exploits, “They’re murderers, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.” That happened.

So did this: an avatar of the “American dream” descends from the tower he built, through hard work and rugged individualism, motivated to be president because he believes the very people he lives with in these towers have done nothing but make the country worse; he was a part of the broken system, but now hindsight and clarity have prodded him to action, and the first order of business is stopping the reactionary, knee-jerk globalist economy that has deprived Americans from the dream life he has; the problem is the crime and cheap labor, which trace back immigration, or something foreign at least.

Both versions contain truthful elements. Of course, there are more versions to this story too. The problem is that the issues are thorny and complex and no one has time for any of that. Like history, the truth works better for us when it’s effaced, a tabla rasa, and we can create our own. We make choices each day about how we explain and express our lives, both personal and societal. Turns out, it’s really hard explain the entire truth. But there are two main reasons for that. First, it makes for a much longer tale, complicated by digressions and twists and asides. Second, and just as important, no one wants to listen to all that.

For example, the social media version of my life says that I’m a single man, healthy and educated, who has devoted his life to quasi-adventure and multi-culturalism. But, in my guts, I’m a man who had trouble traversing the well-worn path to American adulthood and was left with no choice but to leave my country to escape what was sure to become a not-so-slow death. I lived in Indonesia and met wonderful people and found love. I lived in Indonesia alone in a sparsely furnished apartment and watched geckos climb my bedroom walls before I slept.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” opens Joan Didion’s classic essay of the 1960s “The White Room.” This strikes me at once as obvious, confounding, comforting and terrifying. The pedestals upon which our lives and institutions stand are but inventions of mind. “We look for the sermon in the suicide,” Didion continues. “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely…by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” Didion’s insight points directly toward the chaparral of the American experience right now: If we must find a workable narrative to live, what happens when we awake one morning to find that the story we had settled upon was untrue?

For many, this crisis happened the morning they awoke and read the headlines about Trump’s “unlikely” victory. But for many others it happened long before. When Wal-Mart moved onto the outskirts of town and dried up local retail business. When manufacturing work went overseas. When OxyContin came to town, pushed by big pharmaceutical, and left behind a heroin epidemic. And on and on, which, of course, can lead one to seeing Trump’s rise not as unlikely but inevitable. There are, as Didion suggests, multiple versions of this crisis, each one as true as the next to the people whose reality has been scratched out by them. Belief in the “American Dream,” tantamount to Didion’s “shifting phantasmagoria,” is what is at stake, if one was even able to scarcely believe in the “dream” to begin with.

Still, we keep this ephemeral narrative alive because, if nothing else, America is very good at telling itself stories.

It is February now in western Ukraine, and each passing day provides more and more minutes of daylight, a welcome harbinger of an approaching spring that cannot get here quickly enough. When I arrived at my new city of Ternopil in early December, after having spent autumn in the northern city of Chernihiv, a few hours below the Belarussian border, the days were long in darkness. A low-slung sun barely rose above the tree-line and hills beyond the neighborhood in which I live. Gray clouds frosted the sky. The low-watt sun produced no warmth. But the earth’s poles are doing their work, and daylight is advancing its front against darkness. Soon enough, I will find myself standing, shadow-less, under a true high-noon sun. After that, of course, because of my northern latitudinal position, light will reign supreme during the summer months.

I spent last year along the equator in Indonesia. While there was daylight and seasonal ubiquity in a tropical way (what month it is means almost nothing, outside of holidays), there was a natural struggle for balance there too: a rainy season and a dry season. Squeeze-bottle squirts of late-afternoon rain fell when the cumulous clouds bulged pregnant with accumulated vapor. Deluges thumped the sheet-metal roofs and overran the street canals. But most often, it seemed, the water evaporated as quickly as it had fallen, and the land where I lived on Sumatra, despite its tropical geography, remained ever parched from dirt and dust — as though the rain had provided nothing more than a silt deposit. The haze would return the next day. The clouds would refill. Rinse. Repeat.

So I’ve become more attuned to the different ways the earth expresses regularity and symmetry — once one is far enough away from the poles that climate can begin to array itself. But I’ve also seen the ways in which we, humankind, either knowingly or unknowingly alter this symmetry. In Indonesia, I landed in September during the fires of 2015, a full-throttle, man-made ecological disaster that claimed lives and enshrouded Indonesia’s largest islands (Sumatra and Kalimantan), up to Singapore and the Malay peninsula, in a smoke and haze so thick that it could dim the sun. No rain had fallen since well before my arrival and wouldn’t fall until November. When it finally did, many stopped what they were doing to watch.

In Ukraine, the climate alterations travel by word-of-mouth, usually upon my complaints about the cold weather. “Holodnya!” I say. “It’s cold.” But Ukrainians generally just stare at me, or either refute my exclamation. I’ve been told several times about the winters of 20 or 30 years ago. How it barely even snows now. How the temperature never quite bottoms out like it once did. Their tone sometimes toes the line between recollection and nostalgia. Leaving aside the political trench warfare about climate change that seems to occur only in my own country, something is going on. Either you hear about it, or it fills and burns your nostrils.

In both places, I have dedicated large portions of my time to defining words for people. I taught English at a school for kids and teens in Indonesia and teach now at a pedagogic university in Ukraine. I’ve come to discover, through this exercise of telling people what things are and what they mean, that it is sometimes difficult — certainly more difficult that one would reasonably expect. I recall an Indonesian friend of mine asking for the definition of “yet”. And when to use it. And why does it seem to show up anywhere in a sentence. Turns out the definition and usage of that three letter word costs one several words, or several dozen in my case, as I had never really considered it before.

These little lexical gauntlets that are thrown down before me every so often has brought several things into great relief. First, words and their definitions matter. Simple enough. Trite, even. Second, their usage matters. Of course, it does. The third is that in explaining this often requires a bit more navigation and roundabout explanation to square up those first two simple points. How a culture deals with this is through a time-worn accumulation of shared knowledge and reference points. Consider all the words in English there are that name the passageways from one point to another, particularly through either walking or driving a car. To many, a street might be different from a road, a road different from an avenue, and so on.  In other words, one must find a proper balance between definition and usage.

Nearly every day since December I have walked past a very solemn reminder of this importance, and how much this potentially matters. At the end of the neighborhood in which I live sits a grove of thin birch trees. The birches are well-spaced and there is little undergrowth, indicating a mature wood. A busy thoroughfare runs next to it, and traffic rumbles past. At the edge of the grove stands a gravestone marker with a golden Star of David at the top. It is chiseled with three different language translations. The English version reads: “In memory of the holy martyrs Jews that were ruthlessly killed and buried on this side by the Nazi murderers.” Despite the obviously broken translation overall, the use of “side” is what intrigues me most. Is that what is really meant here? It seems an odd place to remember the dead in any sort of general way. The answer matters. If the writer meant “side,” then this could mean the victims on the eastern side of the front. But something tells me that what is meant here is “site.” In that case, beneath this grove of trees lies the remains of Holocaust victims. At some point, I will translate this marker and discover its precise meaning, but for now this ambiguity keeps the importance of language fresh in my mind.

The English language has been my official trade for four years now, in that I have made my meager living, either completely or partially, through my knowledge of it. In some way, I suppose, the way a carpenter uses his hammer and nails, I use my nouns and verbs. My first venture in this trade was, rather counterintuitively, as an adjunct professor in Norfolk, Virginia. While I may have started higher on the food chain, I was a bottom feeder among a school of newly-hatched post-graduates fighting over morsels to survive. So I had the classes and times that no one wanted: 8am classes of freshman composition. I started each semester by asking my students whether composition should be, and remain, required. In my four semesters of teaching those sections I had maybe one or two undeclared English majors in the lot. Unsurprisingly, the answers were highly mixed and trended towards the abolishment of the requirement.

By the end of my two-year stint, I had become convinced that freshman composition was a very important course. Not necessarily because I was a particularly mind-blowing teacher, but because I saw it as a large part of my job for my students to simply agree that it was important by the end of the semester. I had to persuade, while I taught them Aristotelian tenets of persuasion. I told them that they would use this in the future in ways they could not foresee.

And then, in June 2015, one month after my final class, and two months before I was to leave for Indonesia, Donald Trump took an escalator ride.

On a warm afternoon in May 2014, I scrolled through the inbox of my university email and stumbled upon a cold call for ESL teachers looking to pick up some summer work. I had just finished my first year as an adjunct instructor of composition and literature, a position that would never pay the bills in full but gave me the desire to pursue teaching in any capacity possible. I’m usually not one to pay much attention to these types of spam-ish emails, often trashing them before reading. But, for one reason or another, this one I opened and read. The position would be for just two and a half weeks, in mid-August, just before I was due back at university. Money would be tight by then, I thought. I’d always wanted to try my hand in ESL teaching, and so I applied, was hired, taught students from Spain, Russia, France, China and Italy and accompanied them on their trip to New York City. It was their first time to New York City, but it was also mine. In many ways I shared in their excitement, the newness of it all, even though I lived about 7 hours south.

Fast-forward two years: I’ve now taught students in every age range, from six-year-olds to fifty-somethings, from 10 different countries. I’ve lived in three different countries, including Indonesia and Ukraine, crossed the Pacific Ocean twice, the Atlantic once, and I’m only a few time-zones shy of having been completely around the world. I’ve met great people, woke to the Muslim call to prayer (until I got so used to it I slept through). Leaving the U.S. was the best decision I’ve made in a long time, perhaps the best decision of my life. And it all began by hitting reply to a single email.

But it didn’t take long for it to occur to me to ask why are there these opportunities all around the world for someone like me? Many of my own students were already bilingual at least. Many of them had experiences with language that far eclipsed my own. But for some reason, that I was a native English speaker gave them a reason to speak and learn from me. Sure, I have degree in English, a Master’s in writing, but while I delved deeply into my own language and culture, these young students appeared to have taken swaths from here and there. Many spoke one language at home and another in school or in public. And most surprised me by how well they spoke English already.

The answer, of course, is directly related to globalization, which has positioned me in a advantageous place simply because of the language and culture in which I grew up. In a recent English Club meeting here in Chernihiv, one of my colleagues posed a question to the audience as to why they choose to spend their free time on Sundays learning English. The answers varied, but those who appeared to have just started their working lives said that it was, in one way or another, a business decision. The English language is a currency; learning it was a transaction. Dr. Jinhyun Cho, a Korean-English translator and professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, describes it as “market capitalism combin(ing) with academic capitalism” in a neoliberal environment in which everything from government grants to an institution’s ranking and competitiveness are linked to the English language. Underpinning this complex interconnectedness between students, teachers, and institutions is profit and profitability. Profit for the institutions and the ability to increase earning potential for the students.

It seems to me that anytime pure-form education bumps against profits and bottom lines, there must be a pause for reflection and a careful treading forward. Neoliberalism and its offshoot, globalization, which have set the stage in many ways for the goals of our foreign language instruction places, of course, a premium on individual choice and the free movement of goods, services, and people. This notion, prima facie, appears sound and sure: people and goods should be free to move about as they please, free from hard-handed government intrusion, and the culture that underlies these things will be freely moved and traded thusly. However, one look at recent headlines around the world are apt to jar one aback.

The very word “globalization,” leaving aside its nooks and crannies, the complex economic and social ramifications of such a thing, seems to have been doused with kerosene and lit ablaze. Such is the furor the topic can bring about in certain circles. Last year, from halfway around the the world in Indonesia, I watched closely and without disbelief as Donald Trump, that typhoon and buffoon of a tycoon, stormed his way to the front of the Republican race. He now stands at the threshold of the U.S. presidency, one of the most high-stakes positions in the world. It left many, if not most, baffled. But I was not surprised – in fact, I won a bet that he would be the presidential nominee. I say this not in self-aggrandizement, for I would have much preferred to lose that bet, but just that I recognized what it was that he was tapping into. Many Americans have been cartwheeling over themselves in trying to figure out how he could have gotten this far. Boiled down to its elements the answers are related to globalization – what it professes to lead towards, but, more importantly, what it will leave behind in its wake.

In a 2014 article entitled “Fragmented Memory in a Global Age” published in The Modern Language Journal, Professor Anne Freadman frames one problem succinctly. “If globalization truly had achieved—or could achieve—the free flow of people, goods, and ideas around the globe, then culture itself would be globalized, with no specificities impeding infinite mutual understanding. What it has produced, a contrario, is an array of diasporas, more or less precariously implanted in new habitats, more or less isolated, their sense of home dislocated between the near and the far” [2]. What we have seen with things like the U.S. presidential race and the Brexit vote, are the unsavory results of what can happen with perhaps too hasty globalized initiatives. The fact is that we do not change as quickly as our laws or noble ideas would have us. Rapid cross-pollination of disparate cultures leads of course to miscommunication at least or fear and aggression at worst.

In short, we are left to reevaluate, if not redefine, what culture really is. But that is a burdensome task. As it stands, we have attempted to define culture throughout the last two centuries, but no one definition seems to suffice. Psychologist and linguist Helen Spencer-Oatey of the University of Warwick in England compiled a slew of definitions in her 2014 article entitled “What is Culture?” She notes that as long ago 1952 two American anthropologists compiled a list of 164 definitions of culture. To put that in some context, there are 196 countries in the world today. Definitions have shifted from strictly aesthetic (i.e. high culture and low culture), to scientific or evolutionary delineations, finally landing in the anthropological field, in which every society no matter how primitive or advanced fits within a sphere of culture. Spencer-Oatey herself tries her hand at defining culture, stating in 2008 that “(c)ulture is a fuzzy set of basic assumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs, policies, procedures and behavioural conventions that are shared by a group of people, and that influence (but do not determine) each member’s behaviour and his/her interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behaviour” [3].

Working with Spencer-Oatey’s recent definition, several things stand out. Chief among them is her near admission that defining such an abstraction as culture calls to mind a dog chasing its tail – that is, we all know it’s there, and we spin and spin but we just cannot catch up with it to pin it down. Those “fuzzy set(s) of basic assumptions” that touch everything from our deepest moral beliefs to the more arbitrary procedures and laws that we erect to provide order and cohesion that “influence but do not determine” behavior and our interpretations of meanings behind it. Culture is indeed a flexible, if not altogether contorted, topic.

And yet, despite the mental gymnastics it takes to stick the landing on any one definition, teachers of foreign languages in higher education must not leave aside culture in their practice – particularly with the challenges that education in a globalized world presents. We know this already, and our knee-jerk reaction as educators is that we already do. After all we discuss holidays, customs, notable people and places and so forth. This is true, of course, and is displayed in great relief in the new-age textbooks and curricula that often act as travel brochures or guided tours through one topic or another. But, as Helen Spencer-Oatey points out, culture reveals itself in layers, and so we most often concern ourselves with the “hows” and the “whats” of a given culture, but it is rare that we hone in on the “why” questions and attempt to dive into those underlying and pesky meanings [3].

I must pause here and admit quite freely: when I replied to that initial email which morphed into the salvos that have brought me to Ukraine, I hadn’t a clue that I might find myself placed on the flanks of a discussion of globalization. I just wanted to travel and teach some English. Who could possibly have the time to deal with such nebulous things as culture when the more pressing concern is making sure my students understand, let’s say, verb forms? It’s mighty tiring teaching that already. It is easy to become rather myopic as a teacher, focusing so hard as we do on the classroom and the students before us, and the fact that they will go on and out into the world. But what has become evident in my years teaching is that the classroom cannot be viewed hermetically. The charge here is to keep the macroscopic view of the role of a teacher in sight – perhaps not day in and day out, but at least in curriculum preparation, development, and reflection.

It is in this broader view that the connection between language learning and culture can be seen most clearly. How students will interpret what one lesson or another is dependent, of course, on many things, but most crucially from the language and culture of their native country. But globalization presents another hurdle here as well. With the freer movement of people across the globe, adding new dimensions to notions of culture, teachers of English as a second language have to stay in key with not only the needs of the students but how the language fits in with the students’ native cultures and the new circumstances and contexts in which they find themselves.

For Professor Anne Freadman, the divide between language and culture in the classroom is related to the shift in linguistics from a diachronic methodology to a synchronic one, in which communicative method and rule systems were inflated at the expense of a language system’s development over time. In “Fragmented Memory in the Global Age” she writes, “This overriding history (in linguistics) is reinforced in our own discipline by two major moments in the development of language teaching methodologies: The first is language taught as a system of rules, which simply applies a synchronic model, and the second is the development of the communicative method, which favors oral interaction of the face-to-face variety. In both, contemporary usage is the norm. We are left with the present, without any account of its formation” [2]. In our classrooms, with such an emphasis placed on communicative methodologies, lost in the mire are the the very things that tether a language to a culture at all. Thus, as Freadman incisively points out, language and culture are become disparate entities, with whatever cultural studies one soaks up in school deriving from social sciences and, to a degree, literature studies.

What remains starkly evident, as we witness the goings on around the globe vis-a-vis globalism, is that culture, or what one perceives as one’s culture, remains that comforting cloak it has always been, at once warming and sheltering. Despite the rapidity and relative freedom of movement, both physical and informational, and in the face of diasporas and migrations, one’s native culture makes a trusty and necessary travel companion. This should no doubt be so, because the very nature of globalization, in which one is continually positioned in scenarios untraversed, leads to periods of destabilization of both long and short term. The natural reaction to such alien moments is to retreat and cross back into safety – to wrap the cloak back around one’s self.

We must not play fast and loose with this inclination as teachers of foreign language. Teaching language as a system is one thing. Uncovering the cultural roots of a language is quite another. But both are necessary because not only should our students be able to be understood, but they should also understand something about the people to whom they are speaking. The natural way we bridge this gap between what we do understand and what we do not often takes the form of storytelling. Through either invention, recollection, or investigation humans create narratives to solidify experience. And here is the reservoir from which we may draw as foreign language teachers. Freadman points out that narrative has the ability to be engaging, easily exchanged inter-culturally, interpreted in a variety of ways, and critically analyzed [2]. Each one of these skills are a part of the backbone of education, and there is no reason why they should not extend to the foreign language classroom.

A recent study reported in Scientific American magazine supports another key reason why addressing culture and memory through storytelling is important: Reading fosters empathy. The study found that readers of literary fiction, specifically, displayed a remarkable improvement in their ability to “infer and understand other people’s thoughts and emotions” which, in turn, indicates that “reading fiction is a valuable socializing influence” [1]. While this study shows improvement from readers of literary fiction, when taught with specific, contextualized goals in mind, there is no reason to believe that many other forms of narrative can produce similar results. As Professor Freadman states, “Storytelling is fundamental across the discursive arts; who does what to whom and why and where, who the heroes and the villains are, and who the victims, what changed as a result of the events, what was lost and what was gained: These questions stimulate curiosity and drive discovery” [2].

What does this mean for Ukrainian students learning English? By making them aware and consistently yet tacitly reminding them through their studies that their language learning is not occurring in a vacuum, they will begin to make connections and inferences and critically analyze a world beyond their own borders. If they begin to study the narratives and written documents of their target language, then they will not only become more adept in their understanding of important grammatical structures, vocabularies, idioms, and so on, but also they will begin to infer truer meaning of their target language. Take, for example, the highly fraught, electric word of “racism”. In a pure form of systems, a teacher could present a given definition or two of what that word means and then the student would be able to apply it appropriately in every warranted context. But, as we know, even, and perhaps especially, in places like the United States, mountains of dialogue and argument are still being built upon that word. Definitions simply do not cut it. What if instead that teacher presented a recent news article illustrating just how alive and volatile that words remains today? The teacher could work in as many forms of multimedia as possible, ranging from interviews to historical documents that could shed light on such a multifaceted topic. No doubt such a presentation would spur curiosity and open up debate, with the goal being better understanding and realization of the relevance of what is being learned.

Such a shift cannot occur overnight of course. I do not pretend to have answers regarding the details of curriculum and implementation. But I believe down to my marrow that once students have reached the age and level of competency in English that is required at the university level, a shift needs to take place. We must remain mindful and indeed hopeful that our students will live diverse and expansive lives, and to teach them a foreign language, the very tool they will use to reach this globalized, ever-changing world, without setting in motion for them the desire to be at once curious and empathetic, then we are limiting the true power and scope of their potential.

As difficult as it is to wrap my mind around, I have just over a month left in Palembang and Indonesia altogether. It feels as though I have been here for both a much longer and shorter time simultaneously. I can hold those two perspectives in my mind at once. From a strictly linear frame of mind, in which one marks time on the straight line of the calendar, time has moved very fast indeed. That I am one year older and have been out of the United States for 11 months, it feels as though I’ve just gotten here. On the other hand, I have become so comfortable with this new life I have, and so surprised by just how I’ve adapted to this new place, that seems to me that I’ve been here much longer.

There has been no thunderous change in my personality, as far as I can tell. But immersing myself in a culture not my own has revealed to me the latent aspects of my personality that I knew were there all along but couldn’t utilize in any meaningful way back home. My capacity for solitude, as one example, which I certainly made use of in the U.S., has become one of my more valued traits. It really comes in handy during these foreign situations in which I often find myself, and brings to light related sub-traits when I most need them: patience when I know I must relinquish control, and assertiveness when I know I can reasonably improve my situation. These things show themselves in myriad small ways, and it’s often only after I take the necessary action or inaction that I realize how important this is. There’s an Alcoholics Anonymous mantra-like quality to all of it—recognizing the power one has to change in balance with the acceptance of the things one cannot.

A few months ago, I found myself in the very same Jakarta airport terminal I had departed from when I first arrived last September, on another nighttime flight to Palembang. I recalled how out of place I felt, with the eyes of so many people on me wondering, just as I was, what I was doing there. Fast-forward several months to the flight a few months ago, and how much I had changed became readily apparent as I was able to renegotiate my seat on the flight to an exit-row aisle with the airline clerk in  Indonesian, broken Indonesian but Indonesian nonetheless. And I made my way to the same gate and sat in the same seat I had when I first arrived and considered this tiny victory.

In a certain light this is non-sequitor. Of course after months in a country comfort levels and language fluency will improve. How could it not? But it was the circling back to the same terminal, being in precisely the same place at the same time, that amplified all of this. How I reacted to this situation had changed completely because I had changed slightly. If people’s eyes were on me, I didn’t feel them as I had before. If their thoughts were on what I was doing there, mine weren’t. I was simply a man in the world waiting for a plane to get back home.

What must be stressed here is that I did not get to this level of comfort on my own. I’ve had a lot of help along the way from damn-near every Indonesian I’ve come across since my arrival. It is a hospitality that puts my own country to shame in most ways. The city I chose to live in, however, likely plays a large part in that. If I had lived in Jakarta, that behemoth of a developing megapolis, I very much doubt my experience would have been the same. For one, the sight of a foreigner in Jakarta is old hat, and the engulfing population level, which ebbs and flows with an often migrant workforce, leaves little room for quaint niceties. Likely, I would have fallen into a bubble of fellow expats, with shared language and cultural norms, and would have been far more reluctant to stretch out on my own.

And yet, that I am a creature of certain forms of routine has been reinforced here as well. I find myself in Palembang frequenting the same cafes and restaurants again and again, and, while there’s a limiting quality to this, things have opened up in other ways. The cafe nearest to my home is called Liberica, and it has become my rumah kedua, my second home. I imagine I’ve paid the light bill many times over during my stay. Liberica is a popular place, with beer and live music several nights a week. It is in the style of many western coffeehouses, with plush chairs, exposed brick, soft lighting, and a waitstaff sporting hipster-ish haircuts. European league football plays on a flat-screen TV in a continuous loop and top-40 songs pop through the speakers.

I can’t say that I expected to find a place like this here in Palembang because I didn’t know what to expect at all. But its existence does illustrate a potentially troubling global trend that stems from Western culture. In a recent article from The Verge, writer Kyle Chayka diagnoses the what’s occurring in cities all across the globe with what he labels as AirSpace. Technology, Chayka posits, is not only shaping our online world but the physical world as well. Online communities and apps such as Foursquare and AirBnb have influenced people towards a homogenization of taste and aesthetic, one in which it’s very possible to find the same kind of places all over the world. Not surprisingly, these tastes are most often influenced by trends and values from Silicon Valley. High-speed internet, lighting choices, exposed brick and reclaimed wood tables, choice in music, are all placed at a premium in these new modern spaces. Even the word “space” itself has come to take on a new meaning, or at least a new context. It’s become hipsterized. One’s desk has become one’s “work space”, and so on. And the ideal, as Chayka points out, is to find a space while traveling that is at once foreign and familiar. It’s now rather easy to traverse the globe and never leave AirSpace, never sit on a sofa that’s not minimalist, drink a cappuccino that’s not artfully put together by a funky-haired barista, or stand for long outside of industrial-style lighting. This is one by-product of the now charged term “globalization”, but one that is often overlooked. Cultural imperialism by Wi-Fi. Do we really want to travel from city to city and have the experience be diluted such that one place is barely recognizable from another?

While proximity dictates my rather clockwork-like patronage at Liberica, I realize that I’m also splitting the difference between my culture, this AirSpace culture, and Indonesian culture. I’m choosing comfort and relative familiarity over riskier propositions that would likely be more singular, or at least more unpredictable. This division leaves the feeling that a place can be at once authentic and novel, and prosaic and dispensable. Liberica’s food menu is in English and has Western fare. There’s a fairly robust drinking culture in the evenings, in which bir Bintang and Heineken flow from beer towers and are pulled from ice buckets. If you fancy a Corona with a lime, they have it. In these ways Liberica is a sort of Diet Indonesia, or Indonesia Light. There is also the sense of liberalism in the air, thus its name has a twinge of irony. A cross-section of society walks through the doors daily. Liberica’s owners are ethnic Chinese (as many, if not most, of the business owners are), and so naturally that demographic is well represented. But Muslim Indonesians come too. And, on occasion, I’ve seen women in hijab sharing tables and beer with each other. So there’s a permissive quality to the place that I like.

Yet, Liberica has been a springboard into more authentic, singular encounters. I have befriended much of the waitstaff, become somewhat a part of their extended work family. From all of the countless hours I’ve spent on staff at various restaurants and points in my life, I recognize their sense of camaraderie. They joke and jostle with one another and their talk with one another is surprisingly free from restraint. I’ve become privy to much of this and they’ve become teman-teman, my friends. One waiter, Jamil, and I have spent more time together than I have with the others. Jamil is a tall, gangly fellow, with big crooked teeth, a lurching, hunched gait, and a revolving door of terrible hairstyles. His goofy physical presence, however, hasn’t diminished a gregariousness and forwardness of character that my female colleagues can find off-putting, but I simply find hilarious. He is prone to Borat-like bursts of basic English, and his mind rooted in the gutter, always, and he’s on a relentless quest to get us all laid.

“Woman, Phil.” Jamil says, the moment a few walk in, and purses his lips in the vague style of a terribly awkward kiss. “Pushy, Phil. Ya.” By which he means pussy.

“Pushy gratis, Jamil?” I ask. (Free pussy).

He doubles over, laughing. (I think I’m the first person to use this phrase here.) “Noooo, Phil. No pushy gratis, Phil.”

When more ladies enter, Jamil counts them off. “Woman. Woman. Woman, Phil.”

I understand completely why the women I work with find this talk distasteful: it is. But there’s universality to it too that cannot go unnoticed. Much like the construction sites and other restaurants I’ve worked in, women and sports are a quick way to spark conversation.

Jamil and I have gone off on our own from time to time, and he loves to take me to a nightclub called Princess, which is located in a seedy strip of town where what appear to be brothels share walls with mattress shops. Jamil prefers to take me there, after I’m sufficiently lubed up from beer to ride on his motorbike without my heart in my throat, because people know him there and he can get us in for free. I believe he quite likes ushering me around, no doubt in large part because I’ll buy the beers once we’re in.

I suppose it’s important at this point to make it clear that I have not entered these places next to the mattress stores. I’ve thought it over a time or two, but thankfully the better angels of my nature have won out each time. I cannot take being at Princess more than a few hours. The electronic dance music often sounds like what I imagine a constipated robot would sound like, a high-tech buzzsaw of tension and release. It is utterly incompatible with what I refer to as music, but Indonesians (and many people everywhere, I guess) love it.

Why do I go then? An appropriate question. Between Jamil’s level of of English and my level of Indonesian we are forced to communicate in shorthand ways, in which he will speak to me in broken English and I in broken Indonesian. Nevertheless, we are able to communicate pretty effectively, and I’ve gone hours without speaking any English at all, which I did not foresee before my arrival. No doubt, whatever small amount fluency I may have in Indonesian now is due in large part to trying to communicating with Jamil. Plus, he’s a good guy, funny, and looks after me. It doesn’t get much more authentic around here than riding around on a motorbike in the middle of the night, after leaving a club, and winding up at a food stall that serves Indomie (instant noodles) until morning light begins to bleed into the eastern sky.

Perhaps as a consequence of the outside chaos and heat, Palembang seems to have been built and remodeled from the inside out. A home or place of business that is an eyesore from the street often gives way to far more meticulous and pleasant interiors.  The materials and design are more thought out, indicating the value placed on avoiding the sun.

Most people here despise the climate, the ethnic Chinese in particular.  Great strides are taken to keep out of direct sunlight.  Umbrellas see more blue sky than rainfall. This is as much an effort to maintain a light complexion as it is to have shade.  The closer one gets to white, the more attractive one is likely said to be, which is why people are baffled by my desire to get a tan. (From what I can tell, the Korean ideal of beauty sets the standard for much of Asia, which includes skin of a porcelain hue.)   Why would I want to darken my skin when I have naturally what so many people covet?

I was taken aback by this mentality, although the reasons for my surprise are unclear.  I suspect I should have anticipated it.  During my first trip to the supermarket to stock up on supplies, I came across shelves full of soaps and body washes advertising their abilities to “whiten” the skin.  Coming from a culture in which much the skin tone sub-economy (largely the white upper-middle class economy, to be clear) often revolves around becoming tan, the proliferation of such skin whitening agents seemed strange at first.  However, considering the various levels and styles of being “tan”, it began to seem more an more like an antipodal, grass-is-greener equivalent to my own culture.

It’s not so much whether you’re tan or not where I come from – it has more to do with how you came to achieve it.  Broadly speaking, natural sunlight is preferred, with negligible tan lines or none at all.  A farmer’s, or t-shirt, tan connotes working outdoors rather than enjoying it, unless you golf regularly.  All this to say that the tan was a personal choice rather than a compulsory one, and that you actually have the time to spend healthy (or unhealthy) amounts of time in the sun.  It also indicates that you live near large bodies of water, or own a house with a pool, which says that you probably have or come from some money.

Considering the ways we all wear signals of our perceived status is something that I had not spent a lot of time on. Of course, I had been doing it all along, but simply wasn’t aware of it. I remember a moment some years back when I discovered that among the first things I’d look for in a new woman to potentially chat up, before I’d either chicken out or sabotage myself in one way or another, was the ring finger on her left hand. This shock, which came as best as I can recall in my late-20s, stopped me cold as I realized then that I had somehow stumbled into the world of adult dating. I had seen it in the movies and on TV, but hadn’t thought much about about it—what my place would be in such environs, or how I would position myself to succeed there, and so I mostly didn’t.

Here people’s hands also tell a sort of story. The engagement and wedding ring racket is not strong at all (thankfully), but there is usually a small band on one finger or another, usually on the right hand. However the most puzzling and, for my money, disconcerting are the fingernails of the men. Many men with office jobs grow their fingernails to a length that would receive Freddy Kruger’s nod of approval. The pinky finger seems to be the preferred digit, and more ethnic Chinese men sport this look than native Indonesians because they are more likely to have such jobs. The working hypothesis is that it’s to show that they don’t have to do manual labor. I have asked some of my Chinese friends about this trend and they cannot seem to give me a straight answer. Perhaps my observation and off-put curiosity makes them uncomfortable. They prefer not to self-analyze in that way. But they’ll not hesitate to ask me about the relationship between Western men and penis size. The whole conversation spirals into a strange zone indeed. And so I’ve learned quickly to let such sleeping dogs lie.

Nevertheless, a major tacit life goal appears to be to avoid the sun, and social indicators revolve around this. The market for designer pants and jeans is robust. If I knew a way to buy stock in air-conditioners here, I’d phone my non-existent broker (Cliff, he’d be called, I think) straight away.

Palembang is among Indonesia’s oldest cities, the second oldest city in Southeast Asia in fact, dating back to the 7th century. And yet it has been very slow to develop. Sumatra on the whole has remained many steps behind Java where Jakarta is located, which, as one Indonesian friend has put it to me, is “the heart of Indonesia.” If that metaphor is true, Jakarta is in much need of a triple bypass. The traffic, macet, there is so dense, I’ve sat in a cab for over an hour and moved only a few meters. Motorbikes jump the curbs onto the sidewalks and weave in and out of stagnant cars. But, slowly, Indonesia is working towards building its infrastructure.

Which is to say that the hitherto inside-out approach to “city planning” has long ago reached its tipping-point of sustainability and many cities, both large and small, are playing catch-up. As far as Palembang is concerned, this is taking the form of a city light-rail system that is currently under construction in anticipation of the 2018 Asian Games that will be in part held here. How a city like Palembang was selected to hold such games is a mystery to me. There were likely many closed door handshakes and cash-filled envelopes, but maybe not. Nevertheless the main thoroughfares through the city have narrowed as city-wide construction occurs in the middle of the busiest roads. This sends motorists into frenzied jockeying for position and universally known states of frustration, aggravation, and outright aggression: human behavior in traffic is a language known to all.

Whether or not this light-rail is worth all the trouble or not remains to be seen. There is definitely a strong whiff of antipathy about it all, and this attitude I recognize. The short-term hustle to get this rail off the ground so the mayor, governor, and officials in Jakarta can cut the ribbon and glad-hand each other for headlines and the perception of progress likens itself, undeniably on a much smaller scale, to what happens during the aggressive, trigger-happy construction in underdeveloped Olympic host cities. What happens when it’s all over? Will the light-rail system remain a viable option for people here?

It is difficult not to be pessimistic about it. To have a successful public transport system requires the ability to access it with ease. But there are few navigable sidewalks here. People are tethered to their own personal modes of transportation—cars and motorbikes—and the daytime temperatures dissuade most from hoofing it longer than a block or two. The light-rail will stretch from the airport into the city center and a few places beyond, so it’s difficult to see it’s future applicability beyond perhaps an airport shuttle service. Like the opening of a new restaurant, there will likely be a honeymoon burst of patronage and then a leveling off.

This speaks microcosmically to the sense one has of much of urban development in Indonesia. Devoid of the basic necessities of pedestrian travel—sidewalks, traffic-lights, clear and obeyed traffic rules, etc.—expense on such a modern system as a light-rail seems to lack efficacy, like a shot of penicillin to cure a sprained ankle. What’s needed here for growth is far more basic, and yet certainly more difficult and time-consuming and costly to undertake. People need to be able to walk before they can light-rail around.

 

“Wherever you go, there you are.”

– Unknown

I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.

– Simon and Garfunkel

As a nation of free men we will live forever, or die by suicide

– Abraham Lincoln, 1837

Three days before the 2016 New Year, I found myself staying alone in a small, cozy house owned by my co-worker’s uncle on the outskirts of Yogyakarta.  The house faced an open green field, with tree-lines of palms and the faint outline of a mountain off in the distance.  Yogya, (djog-jah) as it’s known, is near the southern coast of Central Java, Indonesia. I had traveled there by overnight train, down from the West Javan mountain city of Bandung. I hadn’t slept. I arrived, two hours before dawn on December 28, bobbing with drowsiness.

The co-worker’s uncle, a painter, was away on holiday in Bali, but had generously offered his place to me for four days before I was to fly to Singapore. When I arrived by taxi to the house, the young Indonesian man who was looking after it while the uncle was away brewed me one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever had. Rather than invigorate me, the coffee warmed my insides like hearth fire. After which I slept very well.

All that sounds rather dreamily nomadic, if not downright pastoral. But the underbelly of the truth is that long-term travel, as opposed to the episodic and packaged nature of tourism, is often a struggle through waiting, boredom, and loneliness. At least the sort of travel I had been doing after I moved to the Indonesian island of Sumatra in September. Despite all the forward physical motion, the promise of a new day in a new place, and the edgy excitement in which you can lose yourself for a while, there are also massive amounts of downtime. You catch back up with yourself: self-consciousness as inescapable as a shadow.

And there I was, sitting alone in the Yogya train station at four, five, six in the morning, reading a book on etymology by Bill Bryson entitled Made in America, and waiting for a sketchy restaurant to open so I could eat a terrible meal. A teenage boy sat down next to me and struck up a conversation so he could “practice his English.” Not an uncommon occurrence, one in which I most often welcome, but I struggled to remain engaged. Sensing my aloofness, he stood and thanked me for talking with him, and I felt guilty. But it had been a long week. I had spent Christmas alone in Bandung, where I ate well and, after much beer, taught a woman of the night how to beat-box over karaoke songs. And I would spend New Year’s Eve alone and without regret in a red-walled house with two cats, oil paintings, and good coffee.

But, of course, it is a great deal harder to be in true solitude these days. Entire industries that appear now to make the world hum along are dedicated to the notions that you are not alone. Or don’t have to be. YouTube has become my most important pipeline to the world. And so one evening, after a cheap dinner of bakso, I searched around aimlessly on YouTube and came upon a debate between writers James Baldwin and William F Buckley. It occurred at Cambridge University, England, in 1965, and the topic concerned whether the American dream came at the expense of the American Negro.

A great many things struck me about this debate.  First the question itself, at once bold and plain-spoken, could not have emanated from within American borders during that time, at least not for public broadcast.  No doubt the question had been brewing in some circles, black and white alike, for quite some time.  But it was put forth on this broadcast, in those antiquated introductory graphics, in such a way that it was merely posited—an honest, complex, and incisive question that required honest, complex, and incisive consideration.  It was, and remains, a question that needed neither flash nor sound effect, alert nor melodrama.  For all of its weight, its burden, and its urgent necessity is there in the interrogative itself, and the highly fraught question was brought forth calmly.  Imagine how such a question might be posed for broadcast today.  Or the knee-jerk and dissolute rhetorical rioting that would result.

This is not to say that one should necessarily remain calm when faced with a society in which a question like this needs to be posed in the first place.  Indeed, 1965 might be seen as a tipping point year after which more militant protests occurred because it was all talk and no action.  The “dream” Dr. King spoke of didn’t square with any reality of ordinary people.  Yet the longform style of Baldwin-Buckley debate, unimpeded by interruption or objection or jockeying for screen time, in many ways illustrates the devolution of public discourse in our current ratings driven, last-word-freak, ad hominem attack forums.

As far as I’m concerned, James Baldwin crushed William Buckley.  A total rout.  This should be so, of course, because Baldwin was on the right side of history.  But from a strictly objective rhetorical point-of-view, he also dominated.  In short, I was awestruck by his oratory on every possible level.  My question thereafter was simple: How is this speech not among the most famous in American history?  And why wasn’t I taught this in school?  Baldwin is that good. His argument: “(O)ne’s response to that question—one’s reaction to that question—has to depend on effect, and in effect, where you find yourself in the world, what your system of reality is.  That is, it depends on assumptions we hold so deeply as to be scarcely aware of them.”

Where I Find Myself in the World:

I find myself, strictly speaking, living outside of the United States for the first time. In Palembang, South Sumatra.  I’m 34, unmarried, no children, and the only things tethering me in any way to my country of origin are the three members of my immediate family, a few friends, and student loan debt.

I sold my car, donated most of my clothes, and cancelled insurance policies.  I fit what was left of my material life to 55 pounds of luggage and two carry-ons.  I own three pairs of shoes, three pairs of pants, seven or eight presentable shirts, four pairs of shorts, and some socks, t-shirts and underwear.  I have a camera and a laptop, gifts from my parents each.  I am fluent only in English.  Apart from two of my co-workers, I can go weeks at a time without seeing another person with white skin.  Thus I find myself in the world alone in many ways.

But I do not feel alone, not really.  Modern life and the culture from which I come, such as it is, works to prevent me from feeling that way.  Internet connection, obviously, has become a tie that binds.  I can contact my family instantaneously if I wish.  I am up to date on the news, relevant and irrelevant.  I find this both comforting and troublesome.

The reasons for its comfort are clear enough.  But the reasons I find this troublesome are far more nebulous.  This is because it has to do with my reasons for wanting to leave America in the first place, each of which are two-sided if I am to tell the truth.  I wanted very much to see more of the world.  I had not travelled any more than a few hundred miles from the front door of my childhood, saving a week in the Virgin Islands.  I envied friends and acquaintances who had studied abroad, or backpacked, or took off after college and were living a peripatetic life.

But it is also true that I was not adapting well to life as an adult in the U.S.  My life was static, and I could see no clear way to change it, short of something drastic.  I had no promising career or romantic prospects.  Many of my friends were becoming mere acquaintances as they settled into their new lives as husbands and fathers, wives and mothers, secure in their careers, with different sets of adult problems: mortgages, 401K’s, desirable school zones, and so on.  I woke up one morning, in a Kafka-esque way, and discovered myself to be a giant bug—a misfit—boomeranging in and out of my parents’ house.  I was drinking too much, working as an adjunct professor by day and a waiter by night.  I often found myself describing specials to young happy couples celebrating one occasion or another—an anniversary, birthday, or promotion.  I saw an alternate version of myself in their faces, a mirage of a life that I would likely never lead.  And so the easy connection to this old life of mine is fraught with bittersweet nostalgia, an unhealthy collection of what-ifs and if-only’s, and the people I have left behind, and the life I have abandoned and run away from.  It won’t leave me alone.

I came to Indonesia, to a city where few foreigners travel, because I wanted to experience life as a minority in every way I could imagine—racially, religiously, and culturally—and in every way I could not.  I wanted to feel staring eyes and understand what it felt like to have one person jab another in the arm over my mere presence, to be pointed out.  I wanted to live in an Islamic country and experience what that means.  If only to turn my gaze back on America with fresh eyes.

I have experienced, and continue to experience, all of that.  But a part of me is beginning to believe that short of finding myself in the remotest places on the planet I cannot live as a true minority.  Demographically and religiously, yes.  Culturally, no.  My native (if I can even use that word) culture, in its ubiquitousness, accessibility, and downright bravado, if not dominance, prevents a lack of preconception from the people here.  It is at once comforting and jarring.  When I walk through the supermarket, searching for soap, I have to be sure to check the label carefully because many of the body washes here have skin-whitening agents in them.  And there it is in plain view: the mass commodification of my complexion.  It is something sought after here, whiteness.  When I say to people I meet that I need to get a tan, that this is the whitest my skin has ever been, despite the sun and the heat, they look at me as though I were crazy.  Point blank they ask, “Why would you do that?”

I find myself with a new component to my racial identity in Indonesia, though it’s only new to me because I had never seen it so clearly.  I have heard of (but never been called in earnest) cracker, honky, whitey, pecker-wood, blue-eyed devil, and the rest.  None of that ever bothered me.  Why should it?  I had to come to Indonesia to be called something I had to wrestle with.  I am bule in the city.  It is a catch-all term for white Westerners.  The literal translation: albino.

A fiction short story I wrote a while back that no one seemed to want to publish.  So, screw it, I’ll put it here.

Turns out people at Disney World give you weird looks if you walk around with a kid with a black eye.  They really look at you weird if you lick your thumb, try to rub it off during the line to the teacups, and the kid goes, “Stop, Dad.  That hurts.”

I can’t prove it, but I know his mother let him get it, or she rubbed makeup under his eye to make me look like an asshole.  Shelley said earlier this morning that Frank had slipped on the pool steps at their fancy hotel and hit his face on the rail.  Bullshit.  She orchestrated the whole thing somehow.  Very least, she’s picturing this scene and smiling to herself poolside over a ten dollar drink with more fruit and frilly stuff in it than alcohol.

“So you’re telling me that Frank just up and slipped.  Out of the blue?” I had asked.  I stood in the doorway of Shelley’s hotel room at The Grand Floridian while she packed Frank’s bag in the kitchenette.  She walked towards me through the marbled vestibule.  Even the light in their hotel room looked expensive.  It made Shelley’s dark hair and skin shine in a way I had never seen.  But that’s what she was after, finding good light to stand in that makes her look better in life.

“No.  He slipped out of the water,” Shelley said.  “Listen, if you don’t want to take him today, William and I can take him to Universal.  You can finish your Epcot drinking tour, or whatever it is you want to do.  We’ll be fine.  We’ll take Francis.”

“Do you have to call him Francis?  Can’t we agree on what to call him at least?  I thought that was settled.”

“That’s his name.”

That’s only technically true.  Five or six years ago, when Shelley was pregnant and we still said we loved each other, we agreed that we’d name the baby after her dead grandfather if it turned out to be a boy.  I say we agreed; she damn near got on one knee and begged.  I tried to explain the multitude of problems with that.  First, a kid could, and probably should, get punched in the face just for going around calling himself Francis.  Second, my last name is Assmussen.  Put that with Francis and you get Francis Assmussen.  The kid should definitely get punched in the face now.  I took enough shit for having my last name, until somewhere in my early teens, and ass jokes didn’t quite have the same pop and everyone moved on to other organs.

“Why can’t we name him Martin?” I had asked her.

“That’s your name,” Shelley said.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing.  I just don’t want my son to have the same name as you, that’s all.”

Right.  One of many things we’d never agree on again.  We stayed together a few months after she gave birth, tentatively agreed on calling Francis Frank, but split up in a hurry after that.  Shelley stayed put in Virginia, and I moved down to Florida, mating charter boats in Islamorada during the days, and staring at a blank page at night with the idea that my name was actually Ernest Hemingway Assmussen.  That I used actually and staring at a blank page right there should be proof enough that my name has nothing to do with Hemingway.  I did manage to get some fishing articles published, and I’m looking at running my own boat soon, but Shelley never saw the value of my dream to be a writer/fisherman in Florida.  And that’s cool.  Life is better to me when there are palm trees around.  She can stay up north and freeze her ass off every winter with that douche bag William X. Haversham III.  With a name like that, they’re perfect for each other.  Whose middle name starts with an X?  Not anybody I’d like to know, that’s for sure.

The problem came when I got a text message from Shelley saying that she and William were taking Frank to Disney World.  I see Frank twice a year – one week in the summer, and over Thanksgiving – and I missed the hell out of him.  So the part that read: “btw going over Thanksgiving weekend, if that’s okay with you” pissed me off to unprecedented heights.  B.T.W.  Her passive-aggression radiated from my cell phone like Chernobyl.  Like, if I’d put my phone back in my pocket, cancer in my balls immediately. Stage 4.  A text message?  Are you kidding me?  I called her back and said that there was no way she was taking that weekend from me.

“We’ve already booked the plane tickets and the hotel,” she said.

This was September, mind you.  That’s how long she had waited to tell me.

“Well, you can un-book them.”

“Martin.  Be reasonable.  Are you really going to take this away from your son?”

I almost smashed my phone on the dock.  This close.

“He’s goddamn five years old.  You really think he’s going to remember any of it?”

“Yes, I do.  He’s very smart.  His teacher at school says he’s one of the smartest she’s had.”

“Because he can finger-paint with more than one color?  Give me a break.”

“Don’t call your son stupid, Martin.  That’s beneath even you.  He’s learning how to write.”

“Suck my ass, Shelley.  I never called him anything.  And don’t you change the subject.  You’re not taking Thanksgiving from me.”

“I’ll make it up to you.  Maybe a week after New Year’s.”

“You’re not taking Thanksgiving from me, Shelley.  It’s bullshit that you waited this long to tell me.  Add to that the kick in the nuts that you’re going to Disney World with Frank and taking my holiday away from me, and the complete disrespect you show by telling me over a text message.”

She shut up a minute after I laid that on her.  I calmed down too, sat down under a neon Corona sign glowing in the marina window.  Shelley and I had to tighten up.

“How can we handle this like adults?” I asked.  “Let’s agree on something.”

“I don’t see why you can’t have a week with him in January, honestly.  Or two weeks in the summer.  Wouldn’t that be more time than normal?  Wouldn’t that be better?  How about Fourth of July, that’s a holiday.”

Hopeless.

“Tell you what,” I said.  “I’ll book a room the same week, and we’ll split off days.  That way you and the X-man can have a few days to yourselves, and I can have a few days with Frank, and everyone wins.”

That’s how I wound up in Disney World with a kid with a black eye the day before Thanksgiving.  A fat woman with her knee in a brace and her head in a visor, and her incongruously wiry husband in a Goofy hat, who appears to have forked over half a lifetime’s worth of his food to his wife, watch me rub Frank’s eye.  They stand on the other side of the rail from us in the bovine line drenched in either water or sweat.  I can’t tell which.  But something about these people – her heft, let’s not mince words – tells me that they’re not up for water rides.  Splash Mountain is definitely not making the cut.  I pull my hand back from Frank’s face and rub his head, paranoid of how my paranoia must look to the battle-faced people in line.

“What’s been your favorite ride so far?” I ask.

“The airplane ride,” Frank says.  “I liked being in the clouds.”

He seems disinterested in the line, or bored.  When I was his age my parents took me to New York for the first time for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  It was rainy and cold and boring.  I asked if we could just go back to the hotel.  My father exhaled relief.  The man was never one for crowds or parades, and I think that’s where I get it from.  I’d rather take a bat to the stomach from a steroid-era Barry Bonds than stand in line with these mouth-breathers all day.  Something in Frank’s similar attitude and reservation wells pride in me.  He’s still too young for the good rides, anyway.

“That’s right,” I say, “it was your first time in an airplane.”

Shelley and I had been meeting each other at South of the Border when it was my time with Frank.  She claimed it was the half way point.  My odometer claimed otherwise, but I didn’t care.  The meeting place was one battle I chose not to fight, the larger point being far more valuable to me.  Plus, when Frank was two, I put a mustache on him and a sombrero that said “Lil Hombre” on it for the return hand off, and the look on Shelley’s face when I said I should report her for smuggling illegals was worth the extra couple hundred miles.  But Frank is getting old enough to fly, and soon he’ll be able to fly down to visit by himself and I can pick him up in Miami.  I’ll potentially go years without seeing Shelley.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.

The teacups suck.  Frank and I spin the cup around a few times, but soon give up, and let the ride do the work for us.  Frank lifts his head as we circle, and when I look up I see that he is watching a plane leave contrails across the sky.  His right eye the color of a bruised sunset.

I agreed going in that Thanksgiving Day would be Shelley and X-man’s.  They wanted to take Frank to the parade in Magic Kingdom.  As we know, I’m off the parade scene.  I had anticipated the massive amounts of downtime and so I’d decided to stay outside of the World, in a motel about fifteen minutes out, in the green outer space of Kissimmee.  My logic revolved around two things: price and sanity.  My decision was made for me though.  Everything close was already booked.  But when I cruised into the parking lot of the motel, flicking a nub of a roach out the window, imagine my surprise to discover that I wasn’t really out in space at all.  Disney World amps the price of everything within a reasonable driving radius, like paying inflated rates on the moon just to be that much closer to Earth.  I don’t know what I expected, but quickly realized my delusion of thrift in a World determined by its own market value.  Should have known, I’m a fisherman for God’s sake.

Thanksgiving morning, I drive over to Epcot.  I keep an eye out for a promising bar along the way, but don’t see one, promising or unpromising.  I’d read about Walt’s vision of family utopia once: that he had been disappointed with the outcome of Disneyland, the unfettered sprawl that had sprouted up around it, entwining his project’s spirit with weedy American undergrowth.  Disney World was Walt’s God project, as close as any one man uninvolved directly in government, despotic ones in particular, would come to creating a World his own.  And in Walt’s World, every county is a dry one, save Epcot.

I think over Shelley’s snarky remark yesterday that she’d take Frank during my Epcot drinking tour.  I almost turn around.  But that was yesterday and I’m already here.  A humorless old man in an orange vest directs me where to park my car, and the asphalt prairie of a lot outside Epcot turns into a kind of overpopulated wasteland as I watch carloads of people practically leap in synch out onto the ground, pumped for communal fun.  Disney World is totally based upon the idea of community.  The word hums through the World like a four-stroke Evinrude in the flats.  It’s embedded in Epcot itself, an anagram for Experimental Prototype Community of Tommorrow.  Epcot never lived out its potential as a utopian city.  The buildings that rise beyond the gates appear as naively innovative as the Jetsons, and I’m actually let down that I have to walk into the park rather than stand on a moving sidewalk.  Airports come closer to Epcot than Epcot.  Beyond that, what makes the World hum inside are the families who visit it, and a dousing of guilt and loneliness comes over me as I walk under the Spaceship Earth dome and into FutureWorld.

I’m going to let someone, somewhere, down.

I decide I’ll tour the world, and walk into Mexico.  A margarita sounds good.  The restaurant is sufficiently ripped-off enough to appear authentically imitative to one who’s never been to Mexico.  I’ve never been, but I know it’s nothing like this, and wonder, had I flown in from Oaxaca, if I’d be offended.  Then again, if I let shit like the decor of a restaurant in Disney World offend me, I’d never leave my pueblo.  Is there even an airport in Oaxaca?

What brings immediate comfort in Mexico are people sitting by themselves at the restaurant bar.  Four of them.  All men.  My broken home, half-assed patriarchs in arms.  The Asian bartender slides a margarita over to me.  I swig the salty, sweet and sour mix, and let out a sigh.

“Nice isn’t it?” says the man next to me in a red golf shirt.

“What?”

“The peace and quiet,” he says.  He sips his tall-boy Tecate.

“Yeah,” I say, “I suppose it is.”

“This is the first moment I’ve had to myself,” he says.  “Been here all week.  My wife and kids call this a vacation.  It isn’t.  I’ve had to make more decisions in four days – I can’t even remember why I decided to do this.”

“To be a good dad,” I say.

He laughs.  “I knew it was something.”

“Where are they now?  Your wife and kids?”

“Magic Kingdom,” he says.  “I told them I forgot the camera at the hotel.”  He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a slim digital camera.  “I had it the whole time.  I just needed a minute.”

I laugh.  “Gotcha.”

“Where are yours?”

“Same place,” I say.  “But I’m not married.  I’m only here for my son.  His mom and her husband have him for the day.  We’re alternating days.”

“Ouch,” he says.  “That must rough.”

“Well, it beats not seeing him.  I’m supposed to have him over Thanksgiving, but his mom decided to plan a trip instead.  So I told her that I was coming too.”

“Good for you.  Now that’s being a good dad.”  He’s sincere, but I don’t allow myself to believe him.  We both drink some more.  He sets his can down and it makes a tinny, hollow sound on the calculatedly worn bar-top.  He looks at his watch.

“Well, that’s my cue,” he says, and gets up off the stool like a boxer going into the last round, beaten down but determined.  “Best of luck, buddy.”

“You too.  It’s a wild world out there.”

“Got that right.”

I’m wrong about the men here.  I examine the left hands of the rest.  Wedding rings, all of them.  This is the halftime of their day, when they get to go in the locker room, take a knee, and regroup to keep from falling apart in the second half and saying something that might lead their wives to book them an early solo flight home.

I pay my tab in Mexico, cross ludicrous borders, and wind up in a pub in England.  There are at least a dozen beers on tap.  Heavy milk stouts, brown ales.  I order a Coors Light bottle, and the bartender, who appears to have spent huge amounts of time and energy cultivating his mustache, looks at me like I’m really foreign, and we’re really in England.

“Best beer in the world on a hot day,” I say.  “I don’t care what country you’re in.”

“Right,” he says, setting the bottle down.  He’s really English.  His name tag reads “English Bob.”

Light dims as though someone has pulled a shade, and when I look outside rain is coming down in sheets.  People slingshot back and forth to take cover, and some make it into the pub before having to spend an obscene amount of money in a gift shop for a dry shirt.  A woman whose face is more geometrically interesting than anything Walt’s architects could dream of materializes from the crowd as quickly as the rain.  A master class in contour and symmetry.  Her blonde hair is damp-darkened, and she walks closer to me to get out of the huffy crowd near the door.  I become aware that I have nearly turned around on my stool, watching her move, and know that I’m breaking an implied rule of Disney: staring too long at someone’s face.  She notices it too, and gives me a half grin that says, “Take a break, buddy.”

“You know, there are too few moments in life where talking about the weather is the best thing to talk about,” I say.

“This isn’t one of them,” she says.

“Come on now.  How often do you get stranded in England during a rainstorm?”

“Almost everyday,” she says.  “But not here.  I was just bringing some lunch to a friend who works in Epcot and got caught.  I work in Magic Kingdom.”

She bobs up and down the way women do when they’re chilly and impatient and looks out the window.  Still raining.

“Oh,” I say.  “what do you do over there?”

“I’m an actress.”

“Should have known,” I say.

She frowns.  For a Disney employee, she doesn’t seem particularly enthusiastic but I understand that any job loses its thrill after a while, and I imagine if you work in a place called the Magic Kingdom, the endless happiness that you’d be forced to exude on the clock must be exhausting.  Especially on Thanksgiving.

“I never thought about that,” I say.  “That some of the people walking around the park in normal clothes might be off-duty employees.”

“They aren’t,” she says.  “I’m supposed to take the underground tunnels, but, like I said, I got caught.”

She’s looking to escape, down into the tunnels for a few final moments to herself before having to perform, to be in the zone, for hours.  She has to be tired of it, and maybe all extremely beautiful women are on some level, when every place they walk into becomes a stage where their looks are a main act.

We don’t talk any more.  She crosses and uncrosses her arms before I see a look of determination come over her, and she goes out before the rain stops, sacrificing any chance she has to stay dry to get away from me.

Friday morning I pick Frank up from the hotel.  I have Shelley bring him down to the lobby to save me from going up to their room and feeling guilty somehow about not being able to afford expensive light.  Frank and Shelley stand near the front desk and he holds an autograph book with Mickey Mouse on the cover.

“Look Dad,” he says, and holds the book up to my face.

“Let’s see.”  I take the book from him and flip through the pages.  Every autograph in it  is either a princess or a peasant girl who ends up a princess.  Big, looping signatures that have been practiced.  Snow White, Jasmine, Belle, Cinderella.  “I see, buddy.  You almost got them all, huh?”

I give the book back to Frank and he walks off towards the automatic door.

“What the hell is that?” I ask Shelley.

“What?”

“All those princess autographs.”

“Yeah, he’s going through a princess phase, I guess.”

“A princess phase?  What does that mean?”

“What are you talking about?”  She shakes her head.

“He’s going through a princess phase?” I ask again.  It’s not that I have anything against princesses, or kids who seek out their autographs, it’s that I don’t know what to make of my son going around trying to get them.

“Would you rather he chase after princes?” Shelley asks.

I can’t answer that.  Child psychology isn’t my strong suit.  I remember my mother telling me that I had wanted to be a witch one year for Halloween.  My father wouldn’t allow it.  She said they got in a terrible argument over it, her reasoning that I really wanted to be a warlock or a wizard but didn’t know the word for it yet.  My father won out.  He simply couldn’t allow his son to put a dress on and walk around a dark neighborhood ringing doorbells saying, “Trick or treat.”  So he went out and bought me a cowboy costume, leather chaps and all.

I had planned to take Frank to MGM, but he wants to go back to the Magic Kingdom and get the rest of the princesses to sign his autograph book.  The World seems more crowded than any other day, and I follow Frank around as he collects signatures.  He finds Mulan and Pocahontas first.  Near Space Mountain, we catch up to Sleeping Beauty, and I recognize her as the woman from yesterday who got caught in the rain at Epcot.

“Sleeping Beauty!  Sleeping Beauty!” Frank yells.  He runs over to her and I drag behind him.  She’s leaning over in a crowd of little girls.  I stand behind Frank, holding up his autograph book, and I see she recognizes me too.

“Better weather today,” I say.

She releases a smile from the can.

“This is my son, Frank.”  He beams her with that black eye of his, and I’ve never wanted to be somewhere else more in my life.

“Hi, Frank,” Sleeping Beauty says.  She takes his autograph book, signs it, and hands it back to him.

“Thank you,” I tell her.  “Good to see you again.”

Frank looks up at me.

“You know Sleeping Beauty, Dad?”

“Well, we sort of – ”

“No, Frank,” Sleeping Beauty interrupts.  “We don’t know each other.”  Her look scalds me enough to feel blistered, and I realize she thinks I’m using Frank to talk to her.  She thinks I’m a creep, and I decide right then that I’ll cut my Disney trip off early.  I’ll save the worst parts of myself from Frank, before I fall apart and say something I’ll regret.  I’ll take him fishing one day next summer, and maybe he’ll think boats are more fun than airplanes.  Maybe we’ll watch the sun go down over the Straits of Florida and he’ll understand the best kind of light is free.

But if he stays in his princess phase, and takes up ballet or cheerleading or fashion design, I’ll be confused and possibly upset for a while, but then I’ll work on helping him get a college scholarship.  Something.

I’m trying to be a good dad.  I just need a minute.

 

 

 

 

As Indonesia’s rainy season ends, another season of apocalyptic slash-and-burn fires looms.

The Indonesian word for rain is hujan (who-jahn).  It’s a lovely sounding word, as many words related to water tend to be economic constructions of phonetic euphony.  I first learned it last October, late in the month, when I looked outside my office window and saw rain for the first time since arriving in Palembang, South Sumatra on September 11.  The shower that day was brief, but torrential, promising, and memorable.

I had gone a month and a half without seeing rain, but it had been months longer for everyone else.  I was a short-timer then.  Everyone in the office stopped what they were doing to watch and listen to it batter the windows and the roof.  We were instantaneously in a better mood.  I asked an Indonesian co-worker what the name for it was, for I hadn’t a reason to learn it yet.  When she told me, the word seemed to take on the strange beauty of a battle cry.  An image of a wild-eyed and bellowing Mel Gibson (the one from Braveheart, not the other wild-eyed bellowing he’s done) flashed in my mind, his face streaked in blue and white warpaint, holding onto the word until breathless:  “Hujan!”

That comparison might be a bit of a stretch.  After all, William Wallace wasn’t sporting the warpaint when he was about to be beheaded and screamed “Freedom!”  But there’s something to it.  There’s a reason it came to me.  The rain that day was a harbinger of an approaching rainy season that could not arrive fast enough.  It was past-due, in fact – a consequence of El-Nino.  The northern islands of the Indonesian archipelago and the neighboring countries on the Malay peninsula had been choking on smoke from peat fires set on palm-oil plantations for months.  The fires were burrowed down so deeply in the carbon-rich, combustable peat that they were impossible to control, emitting smoke so thick it tasted like a scotch distilled by Satan.

Other places were far worse off.  On Kalimantan, schools were closed for weeks.  Children were kept in sealed rooms.  It took too long, but the fires began to gain traction in the Western media.  There were supposed investigations and symbolic-seeming arrests.  Still the land continued to burn.  There were 19 confirmed deaths and hundreds of cases of respiratory sickness.  Yet just when everyone seemed to be at the breaking point, the weather broke instead.  After a few more substantial rainstorms, the air cleared.  The talk and outrage dried up as the weather wetted, and life went on.

But the rainy season comes to an end soon, and Indonesia is primed for another record-setting ecological disaster.

An article published in The Jakarta Post briefly covers a provincial gubernatorial election in Central Kalimantan that took place on January 27 after a six week delay.  Local election officials are quoted as saying the voting went well overall.  The delay, according to the Post article, was due to a Supreme Court verdict that allowed a candidate whose nomination had been annulled in November to re-enter the race.  The reason cited in the article for the disqualification to start with was “paperwork issues,” resulting in a two-candidate race between Sugianto Sabran and Willy M. Yoseph.

This innocuous and indeed democratic sounding local election might appear to be an example of how far Indonesian politics have come in a short amount of time.  After all, the Supreme Court made a ruling on the “paperwork” snafu, and it seems to have gone through the proper channels.  However, Ward Berenschot, researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute for South East Asian and Caribbean Studies, illustrates in his article “Haze of Democracy” just how fraught and important these provincial elections are.

Berenschot travelled to Central Kalimantan in early November to cover the elections, fully expecting the rhetoric to revolve around the forest fires and poisonous smoke.  He discovered instead that no one was talking about it.  The two main candidates, Sugianto and Willy, had direct connections to and reaped benefits from the fires themselves.  Moreover, it was Sugianto’s cutthroat campaign tactics that had mired the other candidate with “paperwork issues” to begin with.  The third candidate, Ujang Iskandar, was also linked to the palm-oil companies responsible for the fires.  Willy Yoseph and Ujang Iskandar had both made their fortunes in the logging industry “before developing symbiotic relationship(s) with the palm-oil companies.”  Sugianto, meanwhile, is an actual palm-oil entrepreneur whose uncle, Abdul Rasyid, is a veritable tycoon, overseeing “a conglomerate spanning logging, shipping, media and very large palm-oil plantations.”

Counterintuitively (or perhaps not), the democratization of local elections has led to the increase of annual forest fires because the elections are now open to the highest bidder.  Of course, the highest bidders are those who control the most resources.  According to Berenschot’s sources, the estimated cost of a gubernatorial election in a place like Central Kalimantan, home to 2.5 million, is upwards of 30 billion rupiah or 7.2 million dollars.  A staggering sum related to the established laws.  “The (election) law stipulates that any candidate must enjoy the support of at least one political party holding a minimum of 15 per cent of the seats in local parliament. This means parties can sell their support.”

This sort of control is unsurprisingly not limited to big business and politics.  The media and by extension the availability of information and public discourse are controlled by politicians as well.  Sugianto’s uncle is but one example.  The party supporting Willy Yoseph, the PDIP, is another.  So, “it’s not easy for (voters) to know about how this relates to forest fires. Central Kalimantan hardly has a public sphere where such issues can be debated.”

Among the critical information up in smoke: The exponential growth of palm-oil plantation concessions (totaling 400-600 hectares per year since 2004, up from 180,000 hectares before that) is a direct function of the transactional politics they rely on for their safety and value promotion.  As Ward Berenschot indicates, politicians need to use their licensing power to create the necessary election budget.  Once the licenses are distributed, companies are formed, which are often flipped to foreign palm-oil companies.  It is a nebulous cycle that is difficult, if not outright impossible, to parse through, which leaves everyone pointing fingers at each other once the fires start to burn.

So is there an answer to all this?  Researchers at the World Resources Institute (WRI) state that “The (Indonesian) government needs to prioritize, like never before, efforts to prevent fires in the first place”  Steps need to be taken to work with “local farmers and local government to address conflicts over land; far more effective law enforcement, including against those who may be politically well-connected or locally powerful; and systematic clarification and mapping of land and resource ownership and responsibilities.”  Moreover, foreign companies will have to remain cognizant of their supply chains.  Meaning companies would have to police themselves, a horrific thought indeed.  Let’s hope (and support) researchers at the University of Bath in England meet their goal of having a viable palm-oil substitute in 3 or 4 years.

Yet all that action will be for naught so long the current local election laws and transactional political processes remain in place.  The men who wield the power here have not just plenty of money at their disposal, but a tight nexus of deeply rooted family and political connections.  Without political transparency and free press, fundamental in any democracy, the lofty promises of significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (a committed target of 29% in a post-2020 government plan) will most likely remain empty.

The real answers, like the fires, are buried deep.