Don't Gel Too Soon

Vietnam, Its Tragedies — and Ours March 2016

Ho Chi Minh - his image is omnipresent — Ho Chi Minh – his image is omnipresent

We’re leaving Vietnam and I’m still astonished that we were here! I keep remembering the history and the battles and pain and rage and guilt of those years. We had a long discussion with our guide on our Mekong River cruise. His father fought for the South Vietnamese, his uncle for the North. His dad spent 8 years in a prison camp after Saigon fell; to this day he doesn’t speak to his Viet Cong brother. So much pain. So much might have been. So powerful to pass signs that say Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon, Tan Son Nhut Airport, Mekong River, China Beach.

People here are definitely not as poor as those in Cambodia – not nearly, although the South is definitely better off than the North, and there’s a sense of forward motion that isn’t as present in Cambodia.

In both countries, it’s been important to think beyond the history so traumatic to them – and to us – and see them for what they are moving toward today. Just look:

Japanese covered bridge — Japanese Covered Bridge Hoi An, Vietnam

IMG_5597 (1) — Cruising on the Mekong River

flower maket row — Mekong River Floating Market

Lots more to come; Internet troubles right now…

Cambodia, the Buddha and the Past

We weren’t supposed to bomb Cambodia, but we did. I remember the day that the revered Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield first learned of Nixon’s “secret” attack on what seemed to be a gentle, somewhat innocent country for which he held considerable affection. He was almost trembling with rage. I know now that his anger arose from what he knew would happen to Cambodia as a result of this assault on a nation so far not actively involved in the conflict.

Here are the tenets of Buddhism described by our guide YuKu; they inspired gentle Cambodia then and still do today: Neutralism, Tolerance, Compassion and Sympathy; Learn to know, Learn to do, Learn to be, Learn to live together. In many ways, our bombing wiped out the capacity to follow them.

In the years before Richard Nixon ordered the bombings in 1970 (there were, to be fair, Viet Cong racing over the Vietnamese border into Cambodia to avoid US and South Vietnamese troops) Buddhism offered a foundation, and the Cambodian economy was growing well. The bombs put an end to that growth and threw the country into the vicious chaos that brought on the killing fields. In thosse terrible years, the Khymer rouge herded most of the people into the countryside to farm. Those who were were well educated were often executed instead. More than 2 million met torture and death.

For me, the visit to the temple and the rest of our day were haunted by my growing awareness of just what our bombs had retarded or destroyed. Not just temples and Buddhas. Not even just the futures of the educated or political. No.

We destroyed lives.

Cambodia has had to build or rebuild much of its infrastructure from roads to hospitals to schools.

We visited a school. And we met Monica.

We all know poor countries have fewer resources to educate their children but the gap between our worst school and this one is pretty big. The kids go to school free but must buy their books, workbooks and supplies. And the teachers? Their documents and supplies are stored in a dusty filing cabinet in the one-room office. Not a computer in sight.

This is a tiny school that lets tours pass through once in a while. I know it’s a tourist resource but there is no way to fake 41 kids singing to you about hygiene and brushing their teeth. Or to imagine the poverty and determination that surrounds their classroom. They lost so many years — maybe chunks of a generation, in fact, and are still far from recovered from those years.

For the village farmers it is the same. The simplicity of their homes and paucity of resources is shattering.

Part of the reason it is so painful to remember those days, whether here in Cambodia or in the US, where US universities exploded and four students died at Kent State at the hands of the National Guard, is that it doesn’t take long to determine that there is a basic sweetness in the Cambodian people that ill-prepared them to face down what landed upon them once the bombs began to fall.

You can see it in the face of our guide here as he sang to us before we left the bus to fly to Vietnam. I know this post is all over the place but I kept rewriting it and there’s so much more to tell you about that I’m just going to leave it as a meditation on a terrible time. Being in Cambodia and even more in Vietnam (that’s next) has awakened all kinds of things in me. Which is what is travel is for. It doesn’t help Monica and her friends though.

Two Days in Thailand: Bangkok and the Beach (Mostly Pictures)

Temple of the Emerald Buddah

These are pictures from Bangkok’s Temple of the Emerald Buddha, where we spent much of Tuesday. So much beauty and mystery here. Above is part of the multiple-building temple. Below are a couple more scenes. It was really really hot and really really crowded as so many people, both the devout and the tourists, gathered to see the painstaking work that created this beautiful place.

A small closeup of the beautiful work that covers all these buildings — executed, I learned, by both men AND women.

One of a series of panels from the Ramayana that wanders through the Temple complex.

I couldn’t resist this adorable little guy, sitting on a small block outside the building where Thailand holds coronations.

Our next day was fun – lounging and picnicking on the beaches of Ko Kut.

I had to include this; you’ll never guess what it is. Part of our adventure was “Caviar in the Surf” which is just what it sounds like. It was really weird – not the event but what it looked like. Droves of our fellow passengers moving together from the beach out into the sea to the tables of caviar — kind of spooky looking from the shore but a great treat for all.

We leave in the morning for Angkor Wat. More from there.

Arriving in Bangkok

That’s sunrise just outside Laem Chabang, Bangkok’s nearest harbor that will take our ship. We’ll have a two-hour drive into town and then explore all day. More to report then.

For now:

leaving singapore — View from Deck 8 as we sailed away from Singapore

Chef preparing #ThomasKeller designed dinner

More when we return from out wanderings this evening.

Exotic Singapore — Caning and the Kindness Movement

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This is just a little bit of what we’ve seen wandering around this confusing city. Its level of exotic mystery is considerable; so too is the sense of an over-governed, highly disciplined universe. These photos are just a peek at the color, variety and mystery popping up all around us. A diverse community of Hindu, Muslim, Chinese, Malay, Indian and Anglo live together sharing four national languages (Malay, Mandarin,Tamil, and English.)

As we made our way in from the airport just past 1AM Thursday, we saw wide avenues and planned parks that seemed stifling within their neighborhoods, so we were delighted to learn how much more there is to this city than that first impression. However.

This is a tough, tough government. Even the tour guides note ruefully “Well yes, but I can’t talk about that.” In other words, if it’s about government rules, or the fines for littering or parking in the wrong place or or or — no comment. And caning transgressors – nope.

I thought it was just me who felt like I’d walked into a scene from Fahrenheit 541 or 1984 but no. Rick agreed that it’s kind of spooky here despite the ethnic variety and history and hodgepodge of design and architecture.

Whether at the gigantic conservatory “Gardens by the Bay” or the Chinatown Heritage Center or Orchard Road – an endless Rodeo Drive crammed with shoppers and women dressed like Donatella Versace – there’s a sense of programmed unreality.

Then there’s the government-sponsored Singapore Kindness Movement. designed to “improve the characters” of the people of Singapore. Kind of weird but OK… Still, on a tour bus the recorded guide’s rhetoric was infused with defense of the rules and policies that govern this place and its behavior. Government rules and monitoring affect attitudes, sense of humor and behavior. I was in Eastern Europe when it was behind the Iron Curtain and it was scary but people laughed about it and spoke with irony and a sense of the absurdity about much of what they faced.

In Singapore, the impact is worse, I think: scary, resigned acceptance and a spooky inhibition that slowly but surely lands upon a visitor.

It’s quite an experience to swing between the visual (and culinary) feast here and these authoritarian undertones.

Our Visit with Singapore’s Dark Side — and Our Own

You can see some of the contrast here: Chinese New Year decorations over Singapore’s old Chinatown neighborhood, itself somewhat disheveled and worn down. Beyond it, the grand skyscrapers of the new, planned, tightly governed environment.

Before the city-state was refurbished and its rigid government emerged, Chinese immigrants came by the thousands to settle among “their own” and build new lives. In a cruel similarity to the sweatshops and tenements that were the lot of the wave of Jewish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century, they lived in impossibly crowded quarters in Chinatown, huge families in one room. Their stories were further colored by the fact that many were kidnapped upon arrival and sold into slavery or made to work for almost nothing. Their average life expectancy: 35.

And that was just the men. Sex trafficking is, sadly, a timeless curse and so it was in Singapore. Women were seized and brought here to serve as sex workers from the beginning of Singapore’s rise. In the streets of the city’s Chinatown, they lived and worked and often, we learned, lost their lives early, through murder or suicide, while still in their teens.

In a peculiar set of contrasts, the tour we took tonight, “Secrets of the Red Lantern,” walked us through two eras of suffering: the Chinatown Heritage Center with its recreated tenement, similar to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and Geylang, one of Singapore’s sanctioned red light districts.

It wasn’t much fun; most of what we learned was sad. Not that there’s much unfamiliar about abused workers and sexually exploited women. Even so, both of us felt left the tour sad and heavy and angry, not only about what we heard, which wasn’t SO different from the western history we know, but that we spent one of our three nights here learning about it. This morning though, I’m glad we went.

This is one of the richest populations in the world, and like most wealthy communities, it was built on the backs of the desperate. Despite its public righteousness, Singapore legalized prostitution and established red light districts to contain it. With labor and with sex, as with so much else, things are as they have always been.

Searched at the Airport But This Is Not About Me

I hadn’t done anything wrong. I hadn’t. But something beeped.

“Which are your belongings?” I was asked. “I need to bring you over here. Please bring them with you. You were a random selection, that’s all.”

I followed the young, blue-shirted woman to a station behind the airport security line where she patted me down — not quite thoroughly, it turned out.

“Please put your hands out in front of you.” As I obliged, she ran a damp pad over each palm – up and back, up and back and then ran the pad through a machine that beeped again, producing a bright red bar on the monitor.

“Oh” she said. “I have to get someone to pat you down. I’m not allowed to do it.” She shouted something to someone and began walking, indicating that I should follow her.

“Is the privacy booth on this side or the other?” she called to a colleague; then followed her directions and led me there. We walked into a smoked glass booth just beyond the X-ray belt. As I entered, she pointed to a table in the corner. “Just put your bag over there. I have your phone and your Fitbit. You need to wait; she’ll be here in a minute.”

Not much beyond that time, in walked a large, gruff young woman with a soup-bowl hair cut. With no greeting or acknowledgment that I might have a name, she began:

“I am going to pat you down. Is there any part of your body that is injured – where it might be painful?

“No” I responded unsteadily. I was scared. Mortified really. Near tears, too, which sucked.

She began a detailed exposition – sounding more than a little like the author of a bad porn novel.

“I will move my hands up and down your legs, inside and out. Up, down.” She demonstrated, her arms extended, running up, then down as she spoke.

“I will feel your arms and down the sides of your body. Then your breasts and under.”

“And the buttocks.”

“And the groin.”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, struggling to speak.

“Face your *unintelligible*”

“What?”

“Face your articles” – she meant the table where my stuff lay – over in the corner of the booth.

“Put your arms out at your sides.”

And she began — telling me each time she was about to move to a new area. Groin last. Of course. As impersonal as it could be, but still pretty dreadful.

Afterward, the young woman who’d first pulled me over turned to me and, as I was gathering my coat and backpack, pointed at the corner of the table “Don’t forget, I put your phone and your Fitbit over there.”

And it was done. They both just walked away. Like nothing had happened.

And I guess nothing had – really, but I was devastated and humiliated and angry as hell and not for me alone.

Through the whole thing, I kept thinking about all the arrest narratives I’d heard or read on-line, particularly since Ferguson, often recounted by Facebook friends — almost all African-American. Of TV producer Charles Belk, photographed sitting on the curb in Beverly Hills with his hands cuffed behind his back. Of Elora Nicole’s son. Of Eric Holder stopped in his own neighborhood when he was a US Attorney.

This only happened to me once. For so many people of color, especially male, this is just another part of what happens to them. More than a few times to many of them. Their experiences are often combined with real fear. That fear echoes daily in their hearts and in the hearts of those who love them.

I had felt so alone, and so violated. I had had to fight to keep tears of humiliation and shame at bay. Though it happened over a week ago, I put off writing about it because I was so freaked out. Even now, as I write, my heart is pounding and I again feel that lump rising in my throat. I’ll never go through security again without fear.

And it only happened to me once.

Can You Hear Me Now? Bruce Springsteen in a New Way

Classy as ever, Bruce and the band posted their Chicago River Tour concert for 2 days of free download. It’s so far beyond amazing that I’m back in mourning that we’ll be out of the country when he comes to SFO. I’d almost recovered but this is a major – if probably brief – relapse.

There’s nobody more capable of evoking super highs, and then tears – as he takes us on a journey with him. This time though, my journey is different: Springsteen was born in 1949; I’m a first-year Baby Boomer, born in 1946. We’re no longer kids, certainly, but still grateful for the music and where it can take us. For me, Bruce is the number-one tour guide. Always will be.

Now this next thing is hard. I listened to this concert a whole new way — my iPhone is paired with me new (hang on) hearing aids! I was so mortified when I learned I needed them and a nervous wreck when I went to be fitted but they’re great. I met a woman in the (where else?) ladies room at a big event yesterday and we were laughing at our worries and how surprised we were at what a difference they make.

Nothing – not the embarrassment or the nervousness or the appalling cost of these little things – none of that – comes close to the feeling of being able to walk around without headphones, sit at my desk without headphones — do almost anything without headphones – and still hear Thunder Road and Meet Me in the City and 31 other LIVE performances.

So hearing aids mean aging and I have to face that. But they also hosted a real party today.

I Have a Hard Birthday in May So

My son sent this to me with a note that said “F*#k 70!”

It’s true, right?

David Bowie: The Man Who Fell to Earth

There’s a prophetic scene in the 1976 David Bowie movie, The Man Who Fell to Earth; he’s in what looks like a control room with dozens and dozens of screens, each showing something different. There he is – with his weird, lens-shaped
irises, clearly watching all of them at the same time.

For years I’ve used that scene to describe kids growing up as our own digital natives. Yesterday I was playing music on my iPad for my 16 month old grandson, and showing him how to do “play” with the arrow and “stop” with the double bars. When I decided it was time to switch gears and got out a book to read with him he took it from me and began pushing on a big red picture of the sun and sliding his finger, looking genuinely bewildered that nothing moved. We’ve all heard an apocryphal version of this story but I now no longer need SNOPES to know it’s real. Digital native indeed.

So the visionary that was David Bowie transcended his amazing music – We Can be Heroes, it seems – and took prophetic risks in many ways in diverse venues. He was beautiful and gifted and unique; despite his music, for me, it was his presence in this film that demonstrated the astonishing breadth of vision.