two brothers

St. Andrew Hills

When I was a child in the 50s, my family and I lived in Billy Dunn. It’s the name of an area in upper Kingston that locals call “Jack’s Hill” after the street that winds up the hill from Barbican Road to a quiet neighborhood of mid-century single family homes. Billy Dunn was once a 300 acre farm on the lower slopes of the St. Andrew Hills before it was subdivided. The main street was called Temple Meads, and branching off from it were side streets with quaint British names: Kinsale Avenue, Cookham Dean, and Pinkney’s Green. Every morning a cowherd took his small herd to the upper pasture at the top of Temple Meads where the road ended in open land, his long corded whip snapping a loud, “hurry up!” to the beasts breaking into a clumsy trot. Because of the cows, driveway entrances had “cattle traps”, iron grates over a shallow pit to discourage the cows from wandering into the property. Though the farm was gone, I remember a ramshackle wooden house on Kinsale Avenue surrounded by an overgrown garden. The name Billy Dunn was written with a flourish on the gate posts.

According to The Daily Gleaner, an owner of Billy Dunn farm was one Col. Henry Kitchener. He was a British Army officer who retired to Jamaica before the First World War. The farm had changed owners over the years so it isn’t known whether Col. Kitchener or his family still owned it by the time the farm was sold to developers. He came from a prominent family. His younger brother was General Herbert Kitchener, the hero of the Boer War. What he did fighting the Boers, as the Dutch-speaking settlers of South Africa were called, might be controversial today. He ruthlessly implemented a scorched earth policy which meant he destroyed people’s homes and property so that the land could not sustain the enemy. The aim undoubtedly was to starve the Boers into surrendering. (Another Empire strikes back.) For defending the British Empire , the General was created Lord Kitchener. He was killed when his ship struck a mine during the Great War. Col. Kitchener thus became the second Lord Kitchener because his brother had no male heirs.

Not long afterwards, in 1916, thousands of miles to the north of Jamaica, the townspeople of Berlin, Ontario, were nervous about growing anti-German sentiment as a result of the war with Germany. Berlin was just “too German” a name and besides, Berliners might be accused of being spies or worse. The people therefore voted to rename their town Kitchener in honor of the hero, the first Lord Kitchener. Although he didn’t bestow his name upon any place in Jamaica, Col. Kitchener is part of Jamaica’s story, and like the sugar planters before him, sought investment opportunities afforded him by his wealth, social class, and rank. His hero-sibling is immortalized in one-half of the twin cities Kitchener-Waterloo. It’s doubtful Lord Kitchener could have imagined the day his family name with its colonial legacy would be bestowed upon a Canadian city to shield German-speaking immigrants fearful of violence in the name of the Empire.

alms, bangkok

สังข์รดน้ำ [Sang Rot Naam] Ceremonial Water-Pouring Sea Shell

Believers wait on the sidewalk for the straggle of monks. Their food offerings are already cooling in their transparent bags knotted with red, green and brown rubber bands. The early morning rush hour deliberates. Then two monks approach. The believers give up their offerings, for sustenance in this life accumulates merit for a better life, next time. Spent, the faithful squat low to the ground palms together as the monks’ prayers murmur over them, falling gently as blessings. Rain falls too.

The clouds break. In a rowhouse in a quiet dead end street, the younger woman slides the gate open and drives out in her car; stops. She gets out. She slides shut the gate and drives off to join commuters stopping and going in the street. Like everyone else, she does not look back.

Deep inside the house she leaves behind, is an older woman. I saw her once, wearing an old-fashioned pasin, her back pressed up against the gatepost, a dark gap in the gate beside her through which she has stumbled, almost accidentally, into the late afternoon. Light’s pilgrim. The children are playing in the street; it is the time between dinner and homework. She stands squinting, uneasy, one foot in front of the other. To walk or to stay? She must decide. A smile hovers about her face, never alights. She sidles, quite unnoticed by the children, back inside her gate, as an invisible hand draws her closer. Once inside, she relaxes. (Exhales.) She shuts herself in.

A small dog barks behind the gate. Every morning she waits for the monk. He arrives at seven, or shortly afterwards, his orange robes a decisive statement against the enigma of the green gate. She can peek through its rusted curlicues, and feel safe. Reaching upwards, she hands him food wrapped in plastic, see-through and warm, making merit over the top. (No one to witness the irony.) He speaks, rapidly; mordent cadences. She replies; her words a similar staccato. Not melody; it is communication. He grunts. Until tomorrow. The full sack hanging over his shoulder, he walks quickly towards the busy road, his bare feet barely feel the stones. A flash of saffron caught the corner of my eye. He does not look up.

Appearances mean nothing. Not for her, public alms-giving. To her, small things like these, are repeated every day, unnoticed. She does not look out upon the dead end street. The children who once played there have now grown up and gone away. By themselves, inchoate blessings accumulate. Faith adds up; is hoarded away. Full of grace, the blessed hide among us.

the snake encounter

Snake with Mop Handle

We had a snake in the house. I came in from the carport and put down the sprayer on the mat, when I saw what looked like shoe string on the floor next to the umbrella stand. It moved. Snake! I panicked and since it wasn’t blocking access to the dining room, I rushed past it to get my cellphone to call Andy at the golf course. I yelled, There’s a snake in the house! My husband said, it came in because you left the door open. Not helpful, I yelled, and hung up. I rushed to grab a broom to deal with the terrible snake, all 8 inches of it. He called me back almost immediately but I ignored him. I had a snake in the house, and he wasn’t helpful.

I beat the snake with the flat side of the broom. It wasn’t having the desired effect because the thing was writhing horribly inspite of the terrible blows I was inflicting on it. So I swept the snake out the door and into the carport. It skimmed along the ground and landed near the gate. I was still trying to beat it to death when the mailman pulled up on his motorcycle. My knight in a red windbreaker. I said, just a minute, and went on beating the snake into submission. At this point I lost all my limited Thai. “Ngu” I blurted. Snake. I eyed it warily. But the snake didn’t move. I stopped hitting the thing and opened the gate to take the mail and sign his mailman’s iPad. Is it poisonous, I wondered out loud in English. He looked at the snake from a safe distance of six feet and shook his head. It’s not poisonous or he didn’t understand me? I couldn’t tell. He hopped back on his motorcycle and I saw him scooting across the street to Khun Sanan who was washing down his driveway. (Didn’t he do that yesterday?)

I presumed that since the snake wasn’t moving it was dead. I left its remains as evidence to show my unhelpful husband when he returned at his leisure from golfing. I went upstairs to water the porch plants. K. Sanan crossed the street and called up to me, are you okay? I said, I killed a snake. I was very composed about the murder. Then more neighbours arrived. Pen and her son came running over from across the street armed with metal sticks, and opened the walk gate. Andy must have called them. Pen said, Where is it? I said, it’s over there; it’s dead. She called up to me, it’s still alive. I rushed downstairs and grabbed my phone. I took a picture of it wrapped around the metal frame of a mop. It was most definitely moving and it was not happy. They carted it away.

Epilogue: I googled Snakes of Thailand. It’s a rat snake and a biter, the writer intoned, but absolutely non-poisonous.

The Man Who Wears the Hat

The man who wears the hat carries a bag on the train. He sits on an empty seat. The train screeches out of the station. He takes a book out of his bag. He opens the book of my lives. He straightens a page corner and starts to read. He reads about others from places near and faraway, strangely familiar memories.  Thoughts jump around ideas, gathering in elegant prose stories of me, of him, of all of us. The man who wears the hat curls a page corner, shuts the book, and puts it in his bag. The train is pulling into a station. He gets up and leaves the train. We move on.

Identity Politics in the Food Universe

Hannah Beech of the NY Times is one of my favourite writers since her days writing for Time magazine. I appreciate her perceptive handling of Asian topics; my favorite is about Buddhist pet funerals in Bangkok. And they’re for real; we had one for Gigi. Then I discovered she’s half-Japanese, which makes sense, because she understands what it’s like to straddle the intersectionality of race and culture. She wrote an article this month about Thai fruit that was both honest and humorous, and how frustrating they are to eat, yet so delicious.

But some POC’s couldn’t handle it, including Pailin Chongchitnant of the Hot Thai Kitchen blog, and a writer on IG @osayiendolyn who objected to Beech comparing rambutan to the coronavirus. Racism. Come on, people. The thing is a hairy fruit not a hirsute individual. They ignored Beech’s next sentence in which she talked about the rewards of persistence; the taste of rambutan is sublime. In the clamour to condemn they forget that people’s preferences for fruit are wholly subjective. Aren’t you being super judgy here?

Even people who haven’t read Beech’s article would agree durian does have “a whiff of skunk.” But, according to Beech’s critics, daring to put that in print depends on who you are. It all comes down to identity politics. According to her critics, Beech isn’t Asian enough, and definitely not Thai, therefore she doesn’t have the right to criticize what’s called the Thai fruit “grapple factor” a term applied by Fuchsia Dunlop, a White British woman who’s an authority on Chinese cuisine but whose comment that Thai fruit is difficult to consume (the spikes, the shells, the seeds, the smells) is outside her areas of expertise. Why, they fume, didn’t Beech quote an Asian fruit critic? Orientalism. Seriously? No one questioned Julia Child’s authority to write about French cooking–was it because it’s White on another White culture?  Admittedly, sixty years ago identity politics wasn’t as closely intertwined with cooking and eating as it is today. Today, you’re wading into perilous waters by the mere act of cooking. You may have gone looking for trouble where there was none, but if you stir up the pot enough, you may find it.

There is a Serbian chef in Houston who runs an acclaimed Vietnamese restaurant. He got into a spat with three Asians who corrected a typo in his spelling of a Vietnamese dish. He should have acknowledged the correction and moved on, but he didn’t. Or perhaps couldn’t. Those who corrected him, he seemed to think, have questioned his credentials in a culinary tradition he wasn’t born into. They weren’t critics yet but he has now made them into critics. Especially his critics. He went oddly off the rails, because he’s now accused of harassment and making threats on social media. It reminded me of the Chef movie when a war of words escalated on Twitter where, it is said, regrettable things can live forever. As one character darkly observed, “It’s out there.” The Serbian chef later attempted to apologize, attributing his behavior both to the coronavirus and to stress. These days no one’s entirely responsible for behaving badly anymore. Culture wars indeed. Sometimes a skirmish. Sometimes something uglier raises its head.

Going Shopping: A True Story

An Egyptian solider visited Thailand recently as part of a delegation to the country. He was tested on arrival but he didn’t know the results right away. However, the Thai government allows diplomats to quarantine voluntarily, unlike the rest of us who are strictly required to quarantine on arrival. Though one must quarantine in place the Egyptian nevertheless visited Rayong, a resort town on the Gulf, where he reportedly escaped quarantine to “go shopping at a department store, ” which he admitted when he was discovered to be positive for the virus.  First time I ever heard that euphemism applied to indiscretions committed at Thailand’s beach resorts.

 

In His Right Mind

He sings a wistful a capella duet with the organist. But he hesitates before the Advent Wreath.  The lector points to two candles, “Father, light these,” as the acolyte hands him the taper. He relaxes, now familiarity enfolds him.  He reads the prayers from a booklet rather than navigate the missal and its elusive bookmarks. He inserts sidebars for the gospel.  Continuing with his homily, he muses that ancient Meso Americans once practiced abortion.  Past and present are not so clearly marked; they run together.  He forgets to finish the Lord’s Prayer. Though he fumbles the ritual he steadies himself with his faith.  

After a Loss

A zebra dove sits in the orchid pot and gives a piping call to its mate. There is no response. Then after a few minutes of calling, it gives up and flies away. The nest is, after all, an empty one.  One day a clue had appeared: a large black feather, white-tipped, on the floor.  Not the parents’; too big. I peered at the nest. Not a parent in sight; the nest was/is empty.  A casual violence had happened when we were out of town one weekend. Now the dove returns, calls, and after a while, it flies away again. 

What is worth reading (and saving) on the internet?

I originally posted this on a discussion board.

I created a website in 1997 on Geocities.com, a free web-hosting site. Some 8 years later, Geocities merged with Yahoo then quietly disappeared from the internet. And so did my website. When I created that website I used a dial-up connection with a 14bps modem. Fifteen years is not even a nanosecond in geologic time but in terms of the internet, it’s akin to the Jurassic Period. Unlike books which have a physical presence, internet websites do not. Are these websites worth saving? If so,  are we missing anything? So much of what is on the internet is ephemeral. And there is so much of it, too. Search engines like Google are like the old card catalogue at the library, instantly drawing up hundreds or perhaps millions of references related to a single search term or phrase. So, will the internet keep expanding like the universe? Is there a limit to how much it can contain or will some websites vanish like some books do when they are no longer read?

I thought of this when I finished reading Marilyn Johnson’s This Book is Overdue (2010) about the challenges of archiving a digital library. It occurred to me that a discussion group falls into the category of ephemera–”transitory written and printed matter not intended to be retained or preserved” (Wikipedia). But wait. Our discussions have been sometimes lively, sometimes contentious, awkward, and self-conscious, but always telling about the reading preferences of the writers. Surely someone will want to know what contemporary readers thought of the Ontario Library Association Evergreen List. Indeed, since our tastes went beyond the list, what those readers thought of contemporary literature. So, should our discussions be saved for posterity and how? In any case, who will be reading us in 15 years?

Tiger Mother isn’t Me

Back in the 1980s when Amy Chua was not yet a Tiger Mother and well before that book was ever a gleam in her eye, there was a proto-Tiger Mother. Her daughter was a figure skater. I googled “Chinese American Figure Skater in 1980s” and up popped Tiffany Chin. She was supposed to win a gold medal at the Olympics–first Chinese American figure skater and all that– but she never fulfilled that promise. A TV news magazine did a profile on her. Tiffany’s mother was present for the entire interview. She told the cameraman to shut off the camera so she could reprimand her daughter. Mrs. Chin wasn’t called a Tiger Mother in those days. She was a Stage Mother, a descendant of that respectable if notorious lineage that included Maria Gurdin (Natalie Wood’s mother) and Rose Hovick (mother of Gypsy Rose Lee).

I don’t deny that such mothers exist but I resist the implication that she is uniquely Chinese. We Chinese women used to be called Dragon Ladies if we were strong…thanks to the Empress Tzu Chi, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and of course Madame Mao.  Their Western counterparts were Catherine the Great (notice she’s Great), Joan of Arc (a saint), and Margaret Thatcher (aka The Iron Lady). Now Chinese women have the Tiger Mother to add to our public identities. These public perceptions are troublesome, unhelpful, and isolate us more deeply inside a cocoon of false expectations.

Edward Said argued that Orientalism was a set of historical, political, social, and economic constructs applied by the West that misrepresent the East in a totalizing way as exotic, barbaric, uncivilized, and brutal.  The tiger therefore is as much a symbol of China and the Far East as a stern looking Uncle Sam is a symbol of America.  These symbols and their connotations are mere constructs, simplifications for things that are far too complex to describe in one word or a picture. These constructs wax and wane with political and social tides,  surfacing prominently now and then. There were the fears during the 1980s that Detroit would be supplanted by Japan. And recently, I saw an article that suggested Americans might have reason to fear China and its half-billion Tiger Mothers–Mao did say women hold up half the sky. Apparently to mollify those fears, the article reported how Chinese mothers are permissive and spoil their children. Seek and you will find.

In a recent interview Chua was described as tiny, dressed in a miniskirt, and she answered her own front door. This image neatly encapsulated the Tiger Lily effect. Regardless of what she does or says, a Chinese woman encounters these Oriental tropes, from ferocious to seductive. It comes down to this: Amy Chua very smartly mined these tropes to write a best-seller. She’s a winner. The rest of us lose.