[wearthegoldhat]

Count Loliberry

Had luscious locks. Though he is most famous for his collection of crocodiles. He has an assistant whose sole job is to keep an ear to the ground on zoos that are rumored to be closing, so CTL can swoop in and make a sensible and judicious purchase of the zoo’s crocodiles. His assistant knows all the tricks.

When a zoo is about to close, often the first thing to go is the parrots. Easy to transfer to another zoo, and not too many visitors come solely for the parrots (as they do for lions, baboons, otters, and pandas). So when the assistant hears of a zoo getting rid of their parrot collection, she knows where to go snooping.

Secondly, board members of zoos often agree to jettison their education program and education center staff when a zoo is entering the muddy waters of financial crisis. This is the first to go, and this is often their mistake, and an almost foolproof predictor that a zoo is not long for this world. This is because a central pillar of zoos is education, and a zoo without an education program is a zoo without its North Star.

CTL often takes his favorite crocodile on walks around the neighborhood. He leashes up his croc and takes it round the block. This serves dual purpose, a crocodile on a leash in a highly residential area, not so different from how others walk their dogs or pigs is highly sensational, and two, his hair is always oiled and combed to a brilliant sheen for such walks. CTL is a little bit vain.

CTL also has an assistant who manages high profile alligator sales. This job is shrouded in secrecy and, shall we say, of doubtful legality. It is rumored that Osama bin Laden was amongst his buyers. It is a little-known and well-liked fact amongst the highest clearance intelligence agents of several national intelligence agencies that when Osama bin Laden was captured and executed, he left behind quite the collection of crocodiles.

Wrote this to warm up to responding to some very stressful emails.

[wearthegoldhat]

good nite fatties 2

Our super custom broke down in the middle of a dirt road leading into the settlement. I got out and spread my jacket under a bush which had berries growing on it that N, from the car, told P to pick for her. We used to eat these when we were little.

Our driver had disappeared without a word. M made her way up the hill to try to catch signal, a trick she learned from hurricane katrina.

In the brush on the far side a child was practicing with his slingshot, aiming his stone at birds in the trees. He stopped to whistle loudly into the air. Shortly thereafter many children came from down the road and up the grass. They came to watch us strange people sitting in the shade by our broken vehicle.

N leaned out the window and asked in lugbara, What will you give us since you are watching us? The way you are watching for free.

They walked past slowly so they could take a look at our model. Look they have left some money there, they said. N laughed. It was the shiny plastic toy tokens we used to represent coins in our model of the charcoal briquette supple chain that we were taking to show community members.

N leaned out the window again: You have improvised umbrellas to shield you from the sun but why don’t you just go home to be away from the sun? And they said, we are still here because we want to watch her. / You are watching melanie? Then give her money because you are watching her for free. / But it’s you people who have money.

They sat up the road a little ways, hiding under the giant leaves they held over their heads, looking and giggling and looking and giggling. We were better than prime time television.

Our colorful model with little pipe cleaner people stood nonplussed under the midday sun, dancing wildly when bodas and NGO land cruisers passed. In the 90 minutes that we sat, the lids on the mini model carbonizers flew off, but the kids found them blended into the dirt of the same color. I felt it was a fair trade for watching us.

In Ofua 3 we parked at a school and walked through the settlement. At one hut we turned off the path. We lowered our heads and stepped into a small, cool space between two houses, under a tarp and bamboo sticks. Our colorful model sat like a table top in the center and we gathered around it in blue plastic chairs or along the ledge that encircled the house. Women gathered and asked us to sit. Ducks and ducklings passed underfoot and children gathered to look at the strange toy and stranger people. Then P picked up the pointer, made of two popsicle sticks and yellow duck tape for an arrow, and began to explain in South Sudanese Arabic what we had come for.

After our last meeting we stood waiting for the driver who had disappeared again. He was picking up a sack of charcoal from the market. P turned to me abruptly and said mel! I laughed bc of the way he said it. Your name is easy to remember, he said. I didn't know how to respond tho bc I could only think of what I had seen earlier.

While he was presenting the model to the community members, whom the chairman had gathered on such short notice, herding us up the hill to the shade of a tree, I could see flies crowding around the open wounds on his skin. During lunch he had dressed the worst of it. P starts the day energetic and outward but halfway through his face takes a pinched, inward look. M gives him advils sometimes, and he is the only one on the compound whom the kitchen prepares hot water for. The rest of us take cold showers.

I led the discussion with him this morning and he had said, I know at this point some of us have hundreds of hopes and thousands of dreams, but I will open a small window - he motioned his arms like he was doing just that - to allow some of them to escape here.

[wearthegoldhat]

good nite fatties

We woke long before the sun and groped about in pitch darkness. For her 27th birthday M got electrocuted in the shower, her hands hurt first and then the tingling and then her entire body. So thankful V and I got put in a room with a furnace instead.

After breakfast we made our way down to the white Nile, flies thick around our heads. Chickens were tiptoeing in a line around the little yellow house like thieves and then scattered about the compound to announce the sun.

We were barely on our way when we came upon a lone male elephant just by the road, pulling leaves from the bush. We stopped to watch him watch us. The sun was rising behind him and he was so nearby. That he was so near, alive, moving moved me deeply. My heart was pounding.

At the gate we found our guide got snatched by an earlier group and we waited and waited for another one and finally A and M introduced a friendly guy in a turquoise shirt as our guide. I took one look and said, let us call him what he is: a random ass guy who is trying to catch a free ride to Kampala. E laughed so hard, but we were more and more convinced my theory was correct as the day continued.

So many giraffes. Water buffalo and gazelle things that looked like variations on reindeer. And a kind of much less elegant-looking gazelle thing. That one is ugly, sorry that is mean, but he looks like he got dropped when he was a baby. She wasn't wrong.

Lunch at the red chilli. Everyone sat on the picnic benches and I wandered back up to the shade and sat on the couch enjoying the view, listening to the world's worth of languages congregate for lunch around us.

Murchison falls is a voluptuous force of nature. Incredible power generated from so many tonnes of Nile being forced thru a narrow space between rocks just before dropping 43 m below. The spray of water quenched us in this heat. I felt so alive (ions? biophilia?), hiking and then standing still before the Nile and her lushness and effortlessness and rage. Our feet were covered in mud that sparkled with minerals. Once it dried it looked like they were smeared in sparkly gold eye shadow. I saw you standing there looking out and you looked so peaceful.

Back in car, after awhile everyone had fallen asleep or fallen introspective, windows down, driving our super custom through the thick forest. I put in my headphones and felt high on waterfall, motion, music, human interaction, and nothing to do after a really productive week.

Masindi has a public library. We drove around masindi in circles, pulling into every single petrol station and finding no petrol.

2 hours outside of Kampala and it’s been such a long miserable time in the car and all I want to do is pee and surgically shorten my spine.

The driver is definitely on some shit. He keeps stopping the car and disappearing every so often and we realized he's disappearing into washrooms at every other petrol station.

The second thing M got for her bday was super sick all of a sudden. As the sun was setting and the day cooling, she was burning up. Then the other vehicle broke down. So we were on the side of the chaotic road at night in a classic Kampala jam with A yelling into the phone at W who was mansplaining to her that he was sending us another car while she was trying to tell him, sure, but we won’t be there cuz we need to move and we’ve figured out our own way.

We ended up stuffing two super customs worth of people and luggage into one super custom, with suitcases tied to the roof and M lying across K’s lap. It was getting to midnight as we rushed to the clinic but we also didn’t want the super custom to overheat, struggling as it did up the hilly bypass. And ofc the driver stopped at another petrol station to use the washroom again. We started betting how long it would be until the next stop. 10 minutes, maybe 15. Once we got to the clinic he asked the staff where the washroom was and disappeared again. You can't make this shit up. There’s the five senses and a sense of urgency isn’t one of them.

I had a hunch that what M had wasn't malaria. The malaria pills have high efficacy, and symptoms of malaria look like the symptoms of many things, like Covid or a severe flu. When I lived in Nairobi I got sick a lot with similar symptoms and every time I got blood drawn for malaria it came up negative. My guess was she got a virus from that day she accidentally drank tap water. She’s been thru the the ringer: hornet stings, shower electrocution, and now a malaria scare. We would find out later that mango juice was the cure.

When we finally got into cycad guest house we were so exhausted V and I skipped dinner, got news that M tested negative, and then knocked out to the sound of a fan and those stupid bugs that sound like smoke alarms that have run out of battery.

[wearthegoldhat]

choich

I want to go to a church again because I miss community and regular rhythms of pausing, remembering, reorienting, asking questions, making meaning, and music together. But church, as I’ve experienced it for the past 30 years in suburbs and urban cores in the developed and developing world, is littered with painful reminders of human smallness and meanness, anxiety, insecurity, structural violence on the human body and soul. For me, it now has one too many reminders of what power can do, of the crucible of patriarchal tradition and gregorian calendar years that birthed this particular incorporation of christianity as it has been given to us today, and to which this christianity—try as I might, and with such sincerity for most of the years of my life, to make it my own—really belongs. The negative space is shouting.

These days when I go to church and try to rest and lean back into the familiar things, the things I find comfort in, I instead find myself flinching so many times throughout the service that I have no choice but to sit stiff and alert.

But today I dream of going to Sunday service. I dream of somewhere small, with creaky wooden floorboards, in which everything has been stripped down down down, and the meaning made clear for our time and place (which is to say I believe the gospel is meant to be native to/belong to any culture and kind of people in any time and place). This is true for the singing, the traditions and rituals (because humans need rituals as regular hooks from which to hang this continuous strand of days; for comfort, remembering, meaning-making, and marking time), and the message or lectio divina or liturgical reading if there is to be one. I've seen this achieved once on a chilly wednesday night in what feels like another lifetime when a friend invited me to service and i sat on an uncomfortable wooden pew listening to a lady speak in simple poetry and recitation and then went up to have ashes spread across my forehead. it still haunts me to this day how simple and lovely it was.

Another thing that happens in this church is people gathering to ask questions (like am I as good as I believe myself to be?), to grapple, to be uncertain together (because how could we possibly be certain? How can we be so certain of what is right and wrong when we climb into cars everyday that kill 40,000 people a year in this country alone which means we've casually agreed to the dollar value of human life; and our various efficiencies, conveniences, and technologies are acquired at the cost of real people whom we cannot afford to acknowledge; and scholars who spend their entire careers thinking about this are still developing better approaches to the ethics of living and dying; and the dichotomy of right and wrong itself is a western fascination (and a mechanism for self-hatred that i'm very fluent in); and the very tools and lenses of our interpretation are so deeply shaped by the default male and this imperial core that we are like fish not realizing we are in water? And how did we get to the point that we insist that God is male which implies the presence of a phallus, deeper voice, facial hair, grip-strength, and propensity for violence? Is this not the height of absurdity?... How have we allowed faith to take such a small and shrunken form? Where is the wonder, the curiosity, the intellectual humility, the process of learning about life which we are living for the first time, and the world which we know less about than the surface of the moon, and a Creator of the Universe who spans the spectrum of knowable and unknowable, intimate and infinite?)

We'd also gather to discuss faith and theology, philosophy, psychology, art, poetry, economics, political theory, and astronomy (because how miserable it is to observe the artifice of a faith that has nothing to do with the world we inhabit or the things we love and feel angry about or our lives as we live them, and even—in a feat of incredible spiritual learned helplessness / religion as self-medication—helps us avoid taking responsibility for our lives or facing up to the reality of the world we live in, because taking stock, examining the stories we believe in / tell ourselves, or taking ownership of healing from wounds we did not inflict or the fixing of this house we've inherited, can be such a painful and uncomfortable thing to do.)

And we gather regularly to get involved in and serve the community. Which is to care for each other and our neighbor, to be honest about who is “each other” and who is “our neighbor,” and to give help and ask for help. This could involve food, gardening, daycare, laundry, financial literacy, mental health delivery, microfinance, art, music, celebration, mourning, fundraising, organizing, advocacy, relationship building, conversing, picnicking, or physical and emotional presence like holding someone’s hand. Whatever is most needed then and whatever skillset we can band together, which requires listening and humility and perhaps a preferential option for the “least of these.” It goes without saying that this would need to be done for the right reasons and with the right intentions, which also requires thoughtfulness, rigor, and rooting out rot.

And if this is what we might call "radical," then I have no patience for church being radical for the sake of being radical. Please, no more shortcuts or delusions of grandeur. Let us be OK with meandering and sitting in the discomfort of not knowing, of love that is the opposite of fear. Lord have mercy.

[wearthegoldhat]

a love letter to amish land

Last weekend, from the train window, I watched as Philly flattened into small towns which flattened further into great green expanses, with the same little farm house and silo tessellated across many bucolic miles. That's when the question "what the hell am i doing?" occurred to me. I texted my sister: why do i do these things???

I had frantically packed (there isn't any other way to pack, is there?) as much of my life as I could into 2 suitcases and my rolltop backpack, herding everything with me as it rained, up and down flights of stairs, in and out of ubers, above my head into luggage compartments, on and off trains, making sure to mind the gap. I had sat in the great echoing chamber of the Philly station, waiting for my platform to be announced, my things anxiously gathered about me.

And now, I live smack in the middle of king street, which is bookended by queen street and prince street, and there is a duke street not far from here. The building is historic, and brick, and named after a past mayor named steinman. There are bars - with names like taproom, pressroom, yorgos, shot & bottle, and tellus - cafes, and shops two floors below. It's like in the movies - my door is tucked narrowly between two mom and pop restaurants. Right across the street is the historic central market, where rows and rows of plump produce, meats, fresh cut flowers, and homemade amish goods are sold 3x a week. There's a tree lined alleyway around the corner, with park benches and narnian street lamps leading up to a 20 foot waterfall fountain, and there's a grand roundabout at the end of the block, circling a formidable statuesque monument (monumental statue?) that marks the center of downtown. The cafes are gorgeously hipster and strangely clean, with brick walls, plant walls, tungsten light fixtures, tasteful furniture, enough furniture, sunlight, outlets, open until 9pm, often with live music. And there are somehow a million of them within walking distance. There's a fire escape from my third floor living room window, and I want climb out onto it and eat pizza by candlelight while I watch the little street below - its foot traffic and frequent modded street racing cars and purring motorcycles - but I haven't been able to jimmy the colonial muntin window open yet. After a week, I'm still trying to understand the rhythms of this new place that I will call home for the next 30 days.

What I remember again, as I remember every time I move by myself to a new city or town, is the kindness of strangers, and how much I rely on that small kindness when I am new and disoriented, pushing against a million little material inconveniences and emotional dislocations. As I eyed old bunches of bananas at bravo supermarket, the old man who wordlessly motioned at the stack of boxes, offering me the first pick of fresh bananas. The uber driver who filled the vacuum created by my anxious reticence with chipper chatter and was concerned about whether I was being dropped off at the right place, and the other uber driver who, once at my door, helped load my arms with all of my bags from my target run, ornamenting me like a drooping christmas tree - I don't want you to have to make two trips, he said.

And then all the people in the office, who I will write about another time. It has been kindness upon kindness, that I glare at suspiciously, searching for the catch, searching for the inevitable, abrupt end of it where reality sulks or waits with a bat to clobber me over the head, but having found no catch or end (yet), realize that maybe it's ok for me to just receive.

[wearthegoldhat]

Today I am thankful to be inside a body that I am in control of. I think of those who do not have control over their bodies. Liquid acidic excrement pouring out of their butts, right after they’ve been cleaned, again. Unable to clean themselves, so ashamed and apologetic that again, liquid acidic excrement has poured out, again. Caretakers and loved ones are on a rotation schedule, giving so much, so burnt out. How can it be that you give everything you have but it is not enough? And to be told by the hospital: I’m sorry but you have become too much for us to handle. The terror of being in a body that is completely failing. What does living mean then? They fight for the day, day after day. Will to live. How does one muster the courage for dignity? How does one remain human?

They play silly games in between cleanings. Smiling weakly, but still smiling. They stuck a post-it on their forehead with a smiley-face drawn in sharpie. They snap photos to remember. To remember what? Life shines through even skin wrapped taut over bone, watery acidic excrement. Life shines through right up until it doesn’t anymore. I don’t know if this is beautiful or sickening. 

[wearthegoldhat]

regression

sometimes i feel a tight ball of anxiety in my chest and only when i sit with it longer does it become tears, because it was actually sadness, and then the tight ball unfolds all its arms and disappears. 

we look at so much data every week, read so many studies. we regress and regress and regress Y on X to understand the world better. i have never regressed a thing before. i have only painted things or listened to how a thing felt, written about what a thing could mean. nowadays there are so many things to regress on other things. we look at the strength of radio transmission signals and whether we can isolate a causal effect on number of genocide cases in rwanda. we look at number of exports plotted against distance to demand, exports means living human bodies during the slave trade. we study corruption-as-equilibrium, because applying economic concepts like cba to human behavior goes a long way in explaining why humans engage in particularism or bribery even when they don’t want to, even as they watch corruption drain the gdp out of their country like lifeblood. we look at distance to mobile money agents, holding constant education and level of urbanization, to see its effect on household per capita consumption. someone said we’re talking about the equivalent of $40 usd though, does that even make a difference? yes, it does when monthly income is $70. 

and did you know money has velocity? 

i am suddenly flying at 30,000 feet, looking below at everything together, connecting the dots between all these things that i saw 3 years ago as they came rushing at me full speed, hitting me in the face. my brain is ravenous, lapping like a thirsty dog. i’m finding answers to so many questions i had. so many things suddenly make more sense, economically, politically, behaviorally. but i don’t want to forget how i felt back then.

prof asked us how we were feeling today. i said, what makes me uncomfortable about data is how we just jump into analyzing it, before taking the time to contextualize it a little bit, the incredible human toll that these numbers often represent. breathing human beings living these data points. thank you for taking the time to ask us how we feel. 

today i read about Li Wenliang and wept. then I went back to regressing hourly wages earned on years of schooling, with women coded as the dummy variable 1 and men coded as the dummy variable 0, because i want to understand the world we live in better, and so far this is the best way humans have figured out how to do that. 

[wearthegoldhat]

Red Scarf

It was afternoon and they were getting ready to leave the apartment. She had a red scarf draping from her shoulders. He reached over and affectionately wrapped the scarf around her head. They say you lose most of your body heat from your neck, he said. So he wrapped it once, then twice, but he didn’t stop. Suddenly he began to pull, tightening, and she gasped, reaching her hands to her neck. Still he didn’t stop, and she tried to say his name, and the word ‘stop.’ Then again she repeated his name, the word ‘stop,’ but the words were now caught at the choke point of her neck, coming out as a whisper, and then not coming out at all. It happened so fast she didn’t have enough time to become scared. Her throat closed upon itself, but her body had roused to neither fight nor flight - they should also add a third f: freeze. He continued to tighten, his arms taut, his face - she would remember years later - strangely stoic. Her hands tried to counter, searching for grip to loosen the scarf. But then just as suddenly as it began, when she felt the pressure squeezing even her eyeballs from their sockets and her mind quieted - he released. He dropped his arms to his sides. She breathed. Oxygen rushed to her brain, and then she ran out the door (she ran for her life!), locking it from outside. He was inside, like a cockroach she had trapped inside a can. He banged on the door. Hey let me out. He called her name. He called her name again. He called her phone. And she let him bang and yell for a little longer, until she was satisfied and she unlocked the door. I do wish she had kept him there, for an additional hour, or maybe for a year (or for the rest of his life so we could observe him there with a handheld eyeglass, measuring his severities and malformations against the latest DSM).

But he stepped out in his shoes, polished that morning. Why did you do that? He asked. She shrugged, bewildered by him, by herself. And they went down the stairs, their cheeks flush with confusion and the excitement of - what was it - play? And something like vertigo, a wild, heady thrill, or fear now because freeze had left and fight and flight had kicked into gear, but by then they were already hand in hand, strolling down the sidewalk. She felt a little dizzy in the fresh air. But she was happy to be outside with him, together. It was hard to get that to happen, especially with how busy he was these days. He had many important responsibilities.

Later on she would ask him, what was that?, wondering how it could be that he had pulled taut the scarf that was now hanging loosely around her neck. I don’t know. I’m sorry, it won’t happen again, he said. She was pleased at how quick he was to apologize, because it was so seldom that he did. But the incident bothered her still afterwards, and she wrote about it in the third person on the notes app of her phone, in flowery prose, like it did not happen to her, but to one of those tortured protagonists in carefully architected stories that mine the human heart, distilling life’s discursive array into tightened English. I’m sorry it happened, he repeated. Don’t write about it, he said, looking over her shoulder at the note she had just typed out and titled: Red Scarf. While she was in the bathroom, he entered the passcode and opened her notes app, deleting it. 

She did not know that this was just one shape in a pattern of strange things, most of them just slight of hand. Something disappearing here, something being remembered differently there, something she thought she placed in the drawer showing up some days later in her bag (or had she placed it in her bag and forgotten?). Sometimes it was things going just a little bit farther than she thought it should. Or something not quite adding up in a way she couldn’t put her finger on. He was always so calm and patient though, reprimanding her mildly for her deficiencies, and nearly free of deficiencies himself. The only other thing might be that evening he showed 2 hours late, already inebriated. They argued round and round in circles, until it was he that slung the phone across the living room and it shattered on the far side in the kitchen against the brown tile floor. But, otherwise he was such a disciplined, generous, sharp-witted, self-deprecating young man with polished shoes, wasn’t he?

Years later, after she had managed to salvage what was left of herself (gosh - why was there so little?) from the relationship, she would remember this moment suddenly. She would open her phone and search for that note. She could hardly believe it happened, like so many other things, and she would want to read that note to assure herself that what she remembered was real. But she would not be able to locate it, though she would search the archives of all her writings in all her accounts. She would always wonder if she had really written it. So many memories he had deleted or cast new for her, methodically with his slender fingers, contorting for a cats cradle of this shape and that, smokescreens from which he could hew her very gut into a new shape, his new shape. Afterwards, she had to go in slowly and mine her life back, mine the memories back from the dead, hold them up to the light one by one, and gasp in (dis)belief at their true shape. 

[wearthegoldhat]

Christmas 2019

Today we sat around the table, same table we eat lunch and discuss business matters at, and prayed together as we do every Wednesday. 

Since it was the last prayer meeting we had as an office in the year 2019, J closed for us. His last sentence is still ringing in my head: “During this season of advent we long for things to be made right again, in our homes, in our countries, in our hearts. You remind us that this longing is good, and right. And will be fulfilled...” here he paused, I thought, as he was searching for the right words. But when he continued we realized he was trying to contain himself because something in his throat had welled up. His voice cracked as he said with absolute confidence, “in You.” 

After we said Amen, none of us looked in his direction, not because we felt awkward that our redoubtable boss’s voice had cracked mid sentence as his eyes reddened (I presume), or because of that uncomfortable feeling you feel after someone has overshared or their very private contents have spilled out at the wrong place and time and you’re not sure how to respond. But because we recognized the sacred had broken through our human dimension and scattered across the mundane office table. Something intimate and holy had touched the ground, like a portal opening, and we looked away out of respect. Someone’s soul was gazing quietly at the face of God, the kind of gaze that is fierce with anticipation because only it knows how it has persevered to keep its eyes open, steady. I realized this was literally Christmas, distilled into the 30 seconds it took for that moment to pass. 

Maybe it’s not his last sentence that keeps playing in my head—it’s actually just the way he said, in You. Afterward it made me feel ashamed of all the fraudulent ways I have practiced Christianity. All the ways that have been insincere, or insecure, or conceited, or overwrought. All the ways Christianity for me has not been about loving God, loving Him so very much because I actually believe that at the heart of the heart, the root of the root, everything that is enough, is in Him, indeed, is Him. 

Last year, the pain was so unbearable, and the silence so silent, and in my desperation I converted from Christianity to Survival. And then in the following months, from Survival to Poetry. While practicing the religion of Poetry, I discovered Christianity there, like it was somehow completely native, but also completely new. I discovered again that it was enough to stake my entire life on, all my questions, brains, relationships, pains, illnesses, longings, dreams, all my stories and lived experiences, both the scratching towards survival and the wide-eyed poetry. It is enough to hold all of that with integrity, without pinching any of it out of shape, and then more—to make meaning of all those weird shapes together. So at the start of this year, slowly by slowly, I began again to believe in the person of Jesus Christ, but like my life depended on it because my life actually depended on it. For me, there is no hope for living if someone is not watching everything happening under the sun, knowing every single way we both wound and are wounded, and knowing all these wrongs intimately, is still infinite enough, in both love and power, to come back to make things right again one day (I can’t even imagine how), and until then, to co-work with us day by day to make a little more good out of all this wretchedness.

I say this in the most sober, unsentimental way possible. 

Merry Christmas :)

(I wrote this and then didn’t have the courage to post it but now I’ve posted it, so happy new year too)

[wearthegoldhat]

A morning in Pleasanton

the first thing I registered in my consciousness when I woke up was the previous night’s dreams weighing down on my chest like a lead apron during a dental x-ray. I sat up to peel anxiety off me by planning a productive day. but while planning, i heard a polite knock on my door, and one by one all my mental illnesses came into the room like sad uninvited relatives, pulling up beige metal folding chairs and taking their seats around me like an AA meeting. We’ll be quiet, they said, just need some company. They took out their knitting, thumb twiddling, library books and bifocals, but i could hear their thick asthmatic breathing and wanted to get up and yell, GET OUT. so i did! and they all looked up at me with such surprise, and then quickly back down to avoid eye contact. 

at least they were polite today. and if they weren’t going to get out, then i was.

straight out of bed, i pulled on my hiking boots bc that’s what i felt excited about wearing today. I finally invested in a pair bc i love to hike but always with the same shoes i run with, and always about to roll my ankles over those rocks. I laced up the beautiful bright red laces that are basically the real reason i bought them, and went downstairs to pour myself some chocolate milk. (for those with asian sensibilities--i’ve never worn them outside before so up until then they still counted as inside shoes). this morning i would do everything the way i wanted to do it. 

i took out a book and read while eating leftovers for breakfast. and then i decided to break my hiking shoes’ going-outside-virginity and took a walk through the neighborhood. i’m trying to break them in before my next big hiking trip, which doesn’t yet exist because nobody has planned it yet. but i imagine it will get planned very soon. hopefully not by me.

i put on my headphones and pulled up Jesus is King, the album Kanye dropped yesterday. i’m super fascinated by Kanye and I wonder if he is just another art major who locked himself in the studio, half crazed from breathing in toxic paints for too many years. his use of the human voice as instrumental to add layers in his music was groundbreaking, influential, and now the norm. and this album is provocative af coming from him. i know built into the dna of the gospel is the innate ability to become native in any time, place, and culture. i wonder if this is a genuine expression of biblical faith, but just in a culture (the echelons of American fame) that is alien to me. 

the neighborhood is so quiet and peaceful. i wonder about all the secret mental illnesses visiting various families on the block, and the strange behaviors peculiar to the manicured and socially hygienic members of the suburbs. once at the park, i stand patiently under the most colorful tree and take slo-mo videos of the leaves falling. i want to catch the right leaf falling at the right angle, but that requires waiting and walking around for a long time under the same tree. i am patient. but i also don’t think falling leaves are all that gratifying. i’m also worried i might look like a crazy person who scares the nice families playing frisbee away. 

i start walking back home and think about writing. how writing and words are essential for human beings, bc we are desperate for what other animals are not desperate for--to be understood for who we are, to make sense of ourselves, and the events of our lives and the world around us. i think about how i am 50% grandiose conceit, and 50% destructive low self-esteem. writing, for me, is about getting attention, putting myself out there to be heard when it’s hard for me to be heard in person. 

but it is also about hope. while it is still dark, i want to keep doing what matters to me, even tho it doesn’t seem to matter at all, and with revolutionary patience, persevere until one day i look up and it is dawn. writing is my way of thinking, and figuring out what it all means so i can do better than just survive it. it is my way of reaching out and holding someone’s hand for awhile.

then i got home and took off my hiking shoes with the beloved red laces, ate more leftovers, and wrote some. i became aware of my shoulders, which were scrunched up so tightly, like almost all the way up to my ears. geezer crisco. 

so ends my morning in Pleasanton, when i did everything the way i wanted to do it. 

[wearthegoldhat]

Familiar Old Soul

I was driving up the 5 with a friend one evening and I felt like Milo in his little car after the phantom tollbooth, completely transported, winding through the most surreal miles of effortless bucolic beauty, hills of brassy grass glowing under gradients of a summer sunset that surely lent California its nickname. It felt especially surreal after a regular work day in the city. And I learned many interesting things about my friend during that drive up.

I will first tell you that my friend is an interestingly small-sized person. In fact, he looks exactly like an otherwise healthy full-grown man, whom someone has resized by clicking the corner of his bounding box and dragging inward while holding down shift. I learned later that this is because he suffered calcium deficiency as a child and his parents didn’t know until it was late, not late enough for Rickets, but late enough for his knees to be weak and the doctor to tell him to stop hiking. He would sooner die than stop hiking though. He just carries a pair of trekking poles with him every time he goes. (He told me he read this description of himself and laughed until his stomach hurt. He also said it was the best part of the whole thing I wrote so if you want you can stop reading now.)

My friend is fascinated with America in a way that helps me remember again how bewildering America is, how her peculiarities must be explained to those who didn’t grow up here. In a weird way, it felt like talking to my father, but a younger version of him, when he was still impressionable and eager, reading John Steinbeck in the library in Warwick as the snow fell outside.

I had to explain to him things like “identity crisis” and “teenage angst,” for these things do not exist the world around. I said things like: America is a country that makes sense of herself through movies, media, ads, and entertainment. Mental health is an epidemic because self-sufficiency is the highest order of the land. Young people begin early on to ask questions about themselves, who they are, where they belong, how are they different or the same as everyone else, and this often ushers in a very troubled brooding period, toxified by the unrealistic ideals modeled by movies, media, ads, and entertainment, the mediums through which Americans make sense of themselves. And they must do this alone, to each his or her own. Teenage angst is a time of deconstructing, testing boundaries, asking questions of every body and every system in sight. Most people grow out of it eventually, but not everybody does (some people are left deconstructing everything for the rest of their adult lives).

He had to explain to me things like how, where he grew up, his family could populate a small town. 200+ people, a network of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, whom he could call for help at 1am and they would not be obliged to, but obliging in coming immediately to help. He explained to me how he wouldn’t mind living with his family forever, how he always wants his mother to be around, how he travels from home to home, staying over, and on hot nights everyone sleeps on the roof together under the stars. He was able to articulate a tremendous happiness and peace of mind knowing his family is there for him. Identity crisis and teenage angst are far from people’s lived experience.

He had to explain to me how he took the train into the city every day for work. How people hang off the sides, which sounds fun until you know how fast those trains move, how people die from falling off all the time. He told me he learned from experience to know how to get on and get off at your stop amidst the massive crowds that you cannot push past. How he learned to just sleep during the ride because he was propped up on all sides by tightly packed human bodies. How the men on his train started to recognize him after awhile, and became his buddies, sharing food, and playing instruments together, saving space for him and pulling him in above the throng (what is friendship, after all, but pulling one person from out of the crowd?)

At the same time, he had to explain to me the kind of shame he feels when he lies to his parents, because sometimes he has to lie to his parents, because the girl he loves is below his socioeconomic standing and they just would not understand. To them there is too much risk that she would take advantage of him. So the only way to love her and to love his parents at the same time is to lie. But when he is in America he is beholden to no one. The way he explained it, it almost seems like he hikes every weekend, summiting literal mountain after literal mountain, merely as a natural implication of the freedom afforded in America. You are free, therefore you hike where you have not hiked before. That’s his version of doing whatever the hell he wants. And so he is caught, somersaulting between the highest amplitudes of difference between the best and worst of both these two cultures.

And then he told me about his friend, who worked for a government agency building roads. They would build crap roads on purpose, so that they would be funded to build them again next year, and the next, again and again, repairing and rebuilding the roads because that makes easy money. (I’ve heard a version of this story several times in the different countries I’ve been to.) But his friend is an honest fellow and this did not sit well with him. He went to the top to speak up: you build bad roads on purpose, you hire based on nepotism. And they told him, why are you complaining? Are we not paying you enough? Are you unhappy with the way we treat you? And they tried to offer him a pay raise. But he would not back down into the resigned corner of the contented whose pockets are lined. So one day on his way home from work they hired some people on the street to take care of him. He was shot dead at 35.

Now my friend says, I tell you this story because I’m interested in this kind of thing too, I want to go back so I can help build better water systems. He is working in water systems for California, and studying to be licensed as an engineer. It is not enough for him to have made it to America, to have made a better life for himself.

He told me, melmo, we are the kind of people that hold on, even when it’s past when everyone else has let go, and we want to return, and want to give, and to not give up. It is not good for us. But it is how we are.

I smiled because I have not known him for long, but he is a familiar old soul.

At the end of our journey we stopped at burger king and I made him order the impossible burger. He’s never eaten beef before. Are you sure it’s not beef? He asked, eyeing the menu suspiciously. It’s meatless meat, I say, shrugging, scientists made it, I add for good measure. I watched as my friend took his first bite of the closest thing to beef he’s ever eaten. This is good, he said, with a very curious expression on his face. I try to understand the moral implications of this moment: me convincing a friend, who has lifelong convictions to abstain from beef, to eat something made to taste as much like beef as possible as a substitute for the actual beef that this country consumes insidious amounts of.

I decided there were no moral implications, so I settled for enjoying the possible layers of irony that I could not comprehend, with my impossible burger and onion rings on the side. 

[wearthegoldhat]

Returning to Family

I am going through a third phase of turning again to my roots to find comfort, hope, meaning, and a narrative to tether my life to. 

The first time I did this was my senior year in high school when I first discovered--through watching other Asian Americans, and there were a precious few to watch--the potentials for art and writing to tell important origin stories. My own singaporean and hongkongese background was exotic to me, and I wrote down tidbits of stories that slipped out here and there from my mom and dad’s dinner time talk, trying to comprehend the distant worlds they grew up in. It was like magic. My dad jumping into ponds to catch catfish with his bare hands or camping overnight in old, abandoned, and possibly haunted villages with his friends. My mom and uncle stealing bananas from street vendors or floating newspaper boats when the nearby canal flooded into their home during monsoon season. 

The second phase was the summer I took a trip back to singapore with my mom after I had graduated from college. I had spent college piecing together my asian american identity amongst so many other asian americans, and a trip back to Singapore was an additional layer of understanding my asianness, and forgiving my parents for the things they did not understand. I witnessed how much my mom was so at home in ways she would never be able to be in america, and how much my story was completely built upon the fullness of the stories of my parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, their friends, and all of their origin stories. It brought a lot of confidence and wholeness to understand the place I came from even if I grew up somewhere else, and to see that it helped to explain the why of things.

This third phase comes at the heels of moving back into my parents’ home after 8 years on my own, and 3.5 years of living as an asian american in east africa where my racial and geopolitical identity was further complicated (was I guilty for being a light skinned muzungu, and having the access of an american accent and passport? Was I guilty of the crimes of the chinese govt building highways with one hand and with the other siphoning out natural resources, or chinese businessmen flooding into nairobi with their crude rags-to-riches mannerisms? which hemisphere’s sins was I implicated in just by being there, the east’s or the west’s or both? questions not to be explored in this post, and possibly not to be answered ever)

In this third phase, I have been getting to know my family, my parents and my siblings again as an adult. The things I am learning are very sobering, and often darker than I want to admit. But they are also endearing, comical, and...whatever we make of it. So I am trying to learn how to do my best to live with hope, integrity, and resilience in this sphere of my life too. The family narratives we cling to have a powerful way of shaping what we believe about ourselves: what we despair of and what we fear will also become our own fatal flaws. They also shape what we hope for and aspire to, what we believe is possible. 

I will do my best to find a combination of being both clear-eyed about the hard-hitting realities, while sifting for what is good, human, humorous, and redemptive. So help me God. 

[wearthegoldhat]

Kyrgyzstan: A Travelogue in Words

Manas International Airport has inadvertently turned into a bird sanctuary. The decibel of bird sounds when, dazed after 22 hours of travel you walk for the first time out into early morning Kyrgyz sunlight, provide a stunning first impression of the deepest part of the lushest forest at sunrise. Then you traverse the barren miles between Kyrgyz towns. So that when leaving you look up again and realize the birds have made a home not between the lush green leaves that were earlier conjured, but between long metal bars stretched across a plain awning. You chuckle to yourself for pity of those architects. Certainly they had not intended nor anticipated this secondary affect of hundreds of birds gathering to fight and sing and build and defecate above the sliding doors in and out of Kyrgyzstan.

Other first impressions: the toilet paper here is just a slightly wider and colorless kin of the crinkly stretchy paper streamers we use in America to celebrate birthdays and bridal showers and such.

Borscht soup has the redness of the reddest heirloom tomato distilled to 15 feet for purity of color. I thought it was full of tomatoes but it is full of cabbage and bits of beef, without any of the tartness of tomatoes. The red remains a mystery, but that is of little concern to me because it tastes very good. (After writing this, I learned the soup is made from beets.)

Lake Issyk Kul is blue-blue. Blue must be said twice because it is not just blue, it is the bluest blue, and the standard against which all blues may be set. And it does not want for size either—8 hours is required to travel its circumference. We could see it from our room. But at the lodge, the hallway we had to walk down to get to our room was so long it began to feel psychological. It was long and dimly lit, with no windows, just rows and rows of doors to each side, and you think you are nearly there but then you are still not. It is inevitable, even after walking up and down it multiple times a day, that you wonder if it ever ends. Walking through it feels a little like you have been plunged into an anxious dream.

An hour’s drive around Lake Issyk Kul towards the Hindu Kush mountains brought us to a little dirt road into the alleged burial grounds of St. Matthew, which turned out to be merely a small cave tunneling through a hill, with a yellowed Bible, a half-assed alphabet etched into the wall, a crumpled picture of Mary, Nestorian symbols of the cross inside an enclave, and a fistful of yellow flowers fastened above the small dark hole of an exit. It was a funny attempt to capitalize on pious tourists and the actual discovery: the divers who discovered remnants of ancient human civilization buried under Lake Issyk Kul, a shard with Armenian/Syrian language which corroborates with a 14th century map indicating an Armenian monastery at a place called “issikol,” where St. Matthew might have been as he traveled towards India, establishing little communities of believers.

Large yellow brown planes, horses and cows nibbling side by side with little nosy clusters of gossiping chickens. Chickens, when they are together in the country, are always gossiping. Cows wander freely along the single paved road, crossing it at will, knowing their right of way—if they are hit the driver is at fault and pays. By nightfall they have all headed home because if they are hit after dark, the driver is no longer at fault and the owner pays for his losses. One lamb is 100 som and one horse is 3,000 som. I’m guessing cows are somewhere in between. The road is pollarded with trees painted white on the bottom, for what I’m not sure, because the trees are all dead and dried. They burn areas of the fields before cultivation, but I am not sure if anything can be coaxed out of these miles of dry grey granules of dirt, with yellowed grass spaced out like the hairs of a balding man. What great faith these men have driving around in tractors, farm tools scattered about. Seasons are a miraculous thing when the dead of winter is really so dead. But even then, Kyrgyzstan’s main problem, it seems, is that nothing is going on. Lake Issyk Kul is a large shock of brilliant turquoise just before the rise of the Tien Shan mountains to snowy peaks, and the beauty of it seems utterly useless, because beauty is completely frivolous and indifferent when industry is what is needed, work for men to put their hands to. And you can see it in some of the men’s faces ruddy with alcohol at noon, nothing to do and no purpose aside from bottles of that great Russian export, hard liquor. A man on a horse corralling his sheep on a barren hillside here, a lone smoke stack there, and a girl sitting on an overturned bucket selling 3 more buckets of soft apples...

Their jaunty hats of embroidered creamy woolen felt seemed at first like costume. I saw them upon the heads of a group of men, old and young, in western dress waiting at the gate in Istanbul. But as our plane descended into Bishkek, the men had grown raucous (I could smell the alcohol on their breaths behind me) and they kept laughing wildly and standing up in the cabin. The stewardesses’ reprimands went from pleading to threatening until they finally sat down. All throughout that week I saw men wearing them neatly upon their heads, amidst the countryside dust and the smog of Bishkek buses. They became to me more beautiful than all of Lake Issyk Kul, because they are symbols of human dignity, handiwork, and identity upon their heads—singular and defiant acts of Kyrgyz expression amidst vast lethargic poverty. Then we were back at Manas International Airport. Missions is messy, he said as they tried to stuff a large Kyrgyz wall hanging amidst other shapely gifts into a suitcase that weighed in just under 20 kg. Earlier he had told me a story about the videographer for a group of missionaries going around Kilimanjaro. What was the hardest part of the journey? They asked him. He had lugged hefty camera equipment all up and down the mountain. After a bit of thought he said, getting all the receipts for reimbursement. So, missions is messy, and this has many meanings. Tetras-ing wall hangings into luggages under the weight limit is one of them, I said.

Later I saw two Kyrgyz infantrymen in smart Soviet-era hats and uniforms. They stopped to stand on the luggage weighing scale, in a jocular mood, perhaps ready to fill their bellies with spirit on a Friday night. I took a picture of them as they looked up at the large round clock of kilograms, laughing. We had just seen some people off, and went back out again to the deafening sound of birds.

Spaciba. I whispered many times under my breath but did not have the courage to say out loud. I started to recognize a few Russian letters. I was using a BeeLine sim card and all the messages from the carrier came in Russian.

Afghanis vacation in Tajik, Tajiks vacation in Kyrgyzstan. That is the order of wealth perhaps. We walked around the plaza, the architecture and use of space, so starkly Soviet-looking, was nothing like I had seen before. Stone monuments rose up everywhere. Lenin stood tall as a mountain, his hand outstretched, ominously pointing the way. We saw banners from the Persian New Year celebrations. We saw bottles of their award-winning white honey. They gifted me two, and a wall-hanging made of wool, before I left.

Back in the other central asian country where they worked, their phone calls were monitored by the government. They had code words for anything that might give their religion away, and while in Kyrgyzstan, they kept stiffening at words like church and missionary spoken out loud so freely between us. He acted out a phone call he once received from his dad who hardly ever called him: he heard his dad ask how is the mission doing? at the same time he heard a beep sound in the background, and he started coughing loudly, frantic to cover that forbidden word, mission. Are you ok? his dad asked. Dad let me call you back later. He hung up abruptly.

He told me about the experience of his Dutch friends. The lady was newly pregnant and earlier that morning she had broken news of it to her family over the phone. In the afternoon her husband stopped at a government office. The officials greeted him and then congratulated him on his wife’s pregnancy. He was obviously taken aback--how could they have known? And then he realized they had tapped his call. The state learned of his wife’s pregnancy at the same time their family learned of the pregnancy. Constant surveillance was a fact of life, as elementary as seasons and the color blue.

We shared immigration stories (immigration offices in developing countries always produce stories). He told me about his friend who went to the immigration office in a North African country. The windows were numbered 1-8. He went to the first one. A man slid open the window. And after an exchange of explanations and papers was done, he said, please proceed to window 2. So he went to window 2 and waited. It slid open to reveal the same man. Hello, he said, as if they had not just spoken moments ago. A twin perhaps? But no. Window after window it was the same man, running all 8 windows of immigration at the immigration office. Seven times he greeted him as if they had never spoken before.

He also told me about kidnappings. A few days after he told me about his own, he shared another one about the pregnant German woman who was kidnapped in a middle eastern country he had worked in. The kidnappers had begun to broadcast a live video of their ransom demands. But the scene quickly spiraled into a chaos that was almost comic. The woman began to shout at her kidnappers, openly mocking and shaming them in her brazen way. The kidnappers could be seen regrouping in a corner, arguing with each other over what to do, how to proceed, maybe they should just let her go? She was pregnant afterall and maybe what they were doing was unethical. He told me he never thought he could feel for kidnappers, but he did then. In that moment, they were just a group of people who were desperate and believed that this was the only way to get their demands met. They were also just a group of people who did not agree with each other and did not have a good plan in place. They eventually released the woman.

Gigi and I sat on the floor of the hotel room (because the floors were heated and nothing else), across the street from the American embassy that rose up like a fortress amidst rubble, before a beautiful alpine backdrop. It did not feel real. We talked and talked late into the night. We held onto each other like sisters who would be separated soon.

I heard many stories and shared a few of my own. After I spoke in front of a conference room of 200 people, a couple approached me. The husband used to be a professor at UPenn and now runs a social enterprise/business as mission in Kyrgyzstan. Her daughter teaches on a Native American reservation in the Southwest. The wife told me that she was very touched by what I had said. I almost laughed and began to apologize for my terrible public speaking. Speaking skills don’t matter as much, she said firmly. What I could tell was the message you shared came from the heart, and that is the more important thing. So then I n my heart I felt comforted, but in my head I said, I am not entirely convinced that is true. Several other schools and organizations also approached me, in an uncomfortably eager attempt (imagine elderly men requesting to sit with you at dinner time to tap the corners of their mouths with a napkin and share the most scintillating mission statements with a side of groveling) to recruit me because I am young and already have 3 years of experience in East Africa. I turned them all down by the end of the week. I left that path 2 years ago and I do not see myself going back. If I do go, I will go another way.

Now that it has been six months since my trip, I can hardly believe I was ever there. There are a few parts of it that I’d rather not recall. But I do have a pair of luxurious woolen slippers, deftly embroidered, with tips that curve sharply upward, that I wear around the house when I want to feel regal, to remind myself of who gifted them to me, and that I did really spend a very strange week gallivanting about Kyrgyzstan.

[wearthegoldhat]

Election Day: Thoughts from a Second-time poll worker, First-gen American citizen, and Ex-Kenyan resident

This past Tuesday, November 6th 2018, I worked as an election official for a precinct at a mega polling place (3 precincts wedged into one polling station) in a mobile home clubhouse on the other side of town. Almost exactly 10 years ago, in the 2008 primary elections, I worked the polls as a high schooler, and I remember that night as we were frantically closing, counting signatures and unused ballots, and packing up our precinct, networks all across America called the election in favor of Obama, and McCain was on TV giving his concessional speech, and then Obama appeared giving his victory speech as we sealed the last boxes and trolleys. Even though I was too young to vote then, I am glad I was able to participate in that incredible moment in American history. But I can only say this in retrospect.   

For most of my politically-sentient life I have had a cool disdain for all things political, referring to politics as “poly-tics, poly as in many and tics as in blood sucking parasites.” In fact, I put this as my political affiliation on Facebook my senior year in high school. I decided to work the polls only because it seemed to be the easiest way for me to finish off my community service hours. My high school friends at the time, an eclectic and diverse group of high school artist misfits, were swept up in the (honestly, intoxicating) energy of Obama and Prop 8 and “Change.” It was the topic of many lunchtime discussions that season, and I was so overwhelmed and disoriented, and felt such a polarizing aggressive divisiveness in the spirit of politics that it frightened me. Where was a small squishy person like me supposed to participate in this boisterous uproar where everyone was so certain and so righteous? I got lost in the in between.

There were no answers at the ultra-conservative fundamentalist predominantly-white, gun-toting, apple-pie-baking, KJV-is-the-only-correct-bible, women-cannot-be-caught-dead-wearing-pants church I went to (and was deeply involved and disillusioned with), and no answers at home with my immigrant parents. I didn’t know how to get involved, or how to get enough level-headed information to inform a political position that made sense to me and the clarity and values I was trying to develop inside myself. And so I found the safest thing was to take a position of cool disdain. 

But I remember also hating the sense of shame and cowardice I felt. I would have loved to go to the city with my friends and yell and march too, but I wanted to do that for something I knew I believed in, and I wasn’t sure what I believed in. It wasn’t that I wasn’t invested in the need for and empowerment of something like “change," but I felt most fluent in change on an interpersonal level, between two people, in one-on-one conversations and relationships, and inherently preferred psychology and spirituality over politics. (I’ll also note that we had a really good AP Gov/Econ teacher and if I had taken that class, things would have been illuminated in a very different way for me; I regret not taking it to this day.) 

It took me living in Kenya for a few years to realize the sheer importance of politics and how much it shapes the arc of history and our everyday lives. I had the opportunity to witness Kenya in the (at turns exciting and at turns costly) throes of working out her relatively new democracy, especially during the volatile 2017 elections and re-elections. And in the routine hum of life, I began to see how much government, law, policy, and politics so powerfully intervenes, eases, upsets, or ruins so many people’s daily lives. In the rawness of living with both eyes wide open in a new country, and in the rawness of life in Kenya, with its lack of first world pretense and its loud extremes where everything is toned up rather than down, I began to make these connections, between politics and the way one lives their life within a system and society. 

I learned from other Kenyans who marched with Boniface Mwangi, who were jailed for protesting outside State House, who showed me books about incredible figures like Thomas Sankara, who told me it is our time to eat, who shared stories of the terror of being a girl child living on the streets when her parents were both killed in the post-election violence of 2007/8. I learned when the price of unga and butter went up in the grocery stores, when police asked for chai or a soda, when I was robbed, when the streets flooded, when the matatu hit someone, when the shops were burnt to the ground, when the power went out again, when people from city council spray painted large X’s on the gates of our school, when I saw the discarded purplish body of a dead man stripped with his arms tied behind his back on the side of the road one morning. I realized that a functional law, government, and election process makes all the difference. 

The stability of a democracy depends heavily on how smoothly power passes from one leader to the next (aka election). International watchdogs from all over the world were posted to observe Kenya’s election in 2017. Many expats left the country for “vacation.” Many people stocked up enough food for 2 weeks in case chaos broke out. Everyone avoided town. Everyone held their breath. And Election Day came and went peacefully. But then the opposition leader spoke, riots broke out, tires burned in the streets, police fired shots in the slums, and then the Supreme Court was involved. In an unprecedented decision, Kenya’s judges ruled that the election process had been corrupted, there were “irregularities,” and then the international watchdogs who had watched so enthusiastically before fell silent as Kenya entered into a second costly round of elections...

America is a far cry from perfect, but I often walk around in wonder at the beautiful political experiment that this country is. A brief scroll through history and the realities of many other countries around the world, makes this very clear to me. In a majority of the world, pedestrians share the sidewalks with motorcyclists and the death rates due to road accidents are many times the rate in America. In a majority of the world, it is normal for people to openly gawk at anyone of a different skin color (on the African continent, it was a daily reality for people on the street to reach out to grab my hair or ask if it was real, and I know the opposite can be said for Kenyan friends who went to China for school or business). Tribalism is alive and well in Africa, it doesn’t even matter skin color; between different tribes, hatred can be spawned, jokes about how this tribe’s people look a certain way and don’t do business with people of that tribe. Then you should hear the crudely censorious and disparaging way Asians talk about other kinds of Asians. And the European continent can be such an unpleasant place (for a non-white) to travel through because of their insular elitist and racial snobbery. And not to mention, across these continents in the last century, genocides all around—the Holocaust, Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, the Rape of Nanking, Darfur... Yes, America’s race problem is a real problem that has sullied and infected the well-being of many people, but on a global perspective, we are pioneering this idea of people from all over the world living together, elbow to elbow. I would argue it has never been done on this scale before, and knowing how inherently racist, tribalist, and insular we all are (human nature has demonstrated this through history, which is often just a long list of humanity’s crimes), America is truly an incredible place. And it is the workings out—still being worked out, we’ve got a long way to go of course!— of our democracy and law that allows it to be so. 

Now that I’ve been back, I was excited to participate in our election process. I took a three hour class, learning the many meticulous procedures that make the election process work in each precinct, how things are set up, first voter procedures, which trolley to put mail-in ballots or provisional ballots in, which bag to place surrendered and voided mail in ballots, what to seal with red tape or a white pull-tite seal and at what time, how to alternate between English-Chinese and English-Spanish ballots, how we have facsimile ballots for Khmer, Korean, and Punjabi. 

From 7am, there was a steady stream of people, many who lived in the surrounding neighborhood of mobile homes. It had a very quaint old town feel. During lunch time I helped a 96 year old woman with her ballot. She came in with her son who himself was an elderly grandpa.  She pointed proudly to a pin on her cardigan, from the first election she voted in, in 1940. She’s been coming out to vote for all those elections, all those years. Another guy openly sneered over how much he didn’t trust the voting process, but voted anyway. Many people freaked out about having to vote provisionally. Many people compliantly showed us ID’s even though they didn’t have to. Someone complained about how loud it was inside the precinct. Someone originally from a different state couldn’t believe how big California’s ballot is. Someone else stole the street indexes from our precinct and the adjacent precinct, and we reported it to the Registrar of Voters because that’s a lot of sensitive information. And then 10 minutes before 8pm when the polls closed, a man hurried in saying he would vote quickly, but his wife was in the car with the kids and would switch places with him once he was done. We told him he didn’t have time and should go and bring his wife in too. He ran out and returned with his wife, a baby carrier in hand, and 3 children. The dad and mom filled their ballots side by side, as the dad rocked the baby in the carrier, and patted the head of another child, and told another child, I told you no questions for just 5 minutes ok, just 5 minutes! And the mother kept threatening the third child who was running laps under the voting booths. It was amazing. We gave them all 2 “I voted” stickers each. 

I also got to know the eclectic group of people working the polls with me that day. Everyone was so personally invested in the voting process, making it accessible to everyone, cheering voters on, and every once in awhile, Phyllis resolutely asserted, I don’t think voting is a right, it is our duty. 

Closing the polls was madness, just as I remembered it being 10 years ago. I went home at 10pm, both totally sick of ballots and humans, and totally proud and thankful to be an American. Good job to everyone who voted! And if you didn’t, it’s OK to just start at the somewhere that you can (quote from Kristen, a fellow poll worker that I had lunch with). That’s how we all started. Your next shot is the presidential election in 2020, and that’s not a bad place to begin.

[wearthegoldhat]

To Misfit

This guy. 

Showed up at my door on the day we were flying out of Kenya, two hours late and in his PJs, like crocs and everything. I don’t know if he even apologized, but I was so happy to see him. He spent money he doesn’t have on fare to come all the way to Westlands. He had lost some weight, which just makes him look taller than he already is.

G has always been a fellow misfit, half Ugandan half Tanzanian, and full of heart and coffee and wordsmithing (he has a blog called le misfit, though he’s left his days as a rapper behind.) The first time we met up he just rambled and rambled his entire life history, especially the embarrassing parts, stories that would make your eyes go wide, and stories that would make you drop your gaze. That’s called honesty and being OK with being a flawed human being. (Don’t we all have stories like that? we just don’t tell them often or at all.) I never saw a guy be so vulnerable before--and not the fake vulnerability that has a secret charm/self-aggrandizement agenda. It was so utterly disarming during a time when I was completely armed.

I would say G came through for me big time; he was the only one with enough integrity and heart to tell me the truth even when it cost him. He sat me down and told me exactly what happened, and exactly how he saw things. He did that several times and I stopped talking to him for almost a year because I thought he was lying. Turns out he was a true friend amongst many counterfeit ones. In the end, you will be able to pick out which ones those are. That was a very very scary time though. I will never forget how he lost sleep over my problems, when he could have left them behind because they were none of his business after all, and he had many problems of his own. But the day before he left Kenya, he did it again, he sat me down and told me everything he could, and then stood by me as I pushed him away or called him again to sort things out, as I stumbled through a very painful months long process of discovering what really happened, slowly picking through what was real and what was not real....

These days he’s grumpy and likes to argue with me about everything. Sometimes conversation with him is just me rolling my eyes the whole time, but he is a true friend and I am thankful that I got to see him briefly, mostly while sitting in traffic on the way to the airport, laughing with Gigi (about a certain idiot, a bullet, and a butt infection), while I downed the rest of a bottle of red wine because no one else wanted to do it and we can’t waste a perfectly good half-bottle of red wine, can we? I’m sorry, I know you don’t drink. Just coffee. 

After 3 years of knowing him, my favorite thing about G is that he tries so hard and cares so much where it matters. He even writes long letters. To friends! And cuts up the paper and folds it into a little envelope shape, and draws pictures on it and everything. Earnestness (can we make a noun version of earnest that feels less like going over multiple closely-spaced speed bumps) in unexpected places is one of my favorite things. I’m not sure if I ever really said thank you, G. There is so little of your kind in this busy, indifferent, self-important world. 

[wearthegoldhat]

Nairobi to Seoul: Capslock

Capslock remembered me. 

When I came into the apartment and saw her, I also felt that she was a stranger, so lazily voluptuous, with thick clean fur, and nearly double the size she was when I last saw her: in a cage on the backseat of a car, driving away, another motif of my life in Nairobi suddenly packed up and leaving me. To her I was just another human being. But when I knelt down, she started sniffing my hand, and after sufficient sniffing, she began pressing her head against my hand, bumping into me as one bumps into a stranger on the street, but over and over until it became something more intimate than a greeting or a bow. It looked like a cat remembering something familiar. I cried then, because I realized how sad I would be if she did not remember me, how much I had hoped she would recognize the hand that fed her and held her all those months in Nairobi.

I remember when we first found Capslock, barely a month old, terrified, and trying to tuck herself into a chip in the brick of the askari (swahili for soldier)’s kiosk. The askaris told us we could take her, she belonged to nobody and would die soon without her mother. We went to Zucchini, our favorite grocery store, and found a cardboard box for holding apples. She fit inside one of the scoops, the size of an apple herself. We brought her home and Gigi asked me, what do you think of keeping her? and I could tell Gigi’s heart had already decided (she has a penchant for rescuing and adopting vulnerable street cats, and has the face of her first one tattooed under her arm). I had never had a furry pet in my entire life, and decided to name her after our wifi password. And so she grew up there in our apartment in Nairobi, tripping between our feet like a puppy, following us around from room to room, climbing over our bellies and shoulders, purring like a freight train, drinking from the toilet bowl, destroying our plants, perching higher and higher on the bookshelf, and eating omena like a good Kenyan cat. Then slowly she grew slick like a teenager, reluctant, recalcitrant, muscular with idgafs. Then our lives in Nairobi ended. And now she is an adult, living in an apartment in Korea, cared for by Gigi’s halmoni. These days she is more like furniture than a puppy, uninterested, indifferent, with a private life of her own. That is, until I picked up the toy, which is best described as confetti on a fishing pole, that we used to spend hours playing with. I started flicking it back and forth, and she suddenly came to life, twitching, waiting, pouncing, hunting. In that way, we entertained each other for a bit, while entertaining our own nostalgia. 

Even if I strongly dislike her anthropomorphized personality (well, cat personalities in general, mostly because they remind me that I get butt-hurt) our shared history is important to us and we maintain some kind of warm nostalgic affection for each other. As fat and indifferent as she is now, she is still Capslock, and my first baby. 

[wearthegoldhat]

And right action is freedom

From past and future also.

For most of us, this is the aim

Never here to be realized;

Who are only undefeated

Because we have gone on trying.

-T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”