Shifting Landscapes

The landscape around me has melted and reformed multiple times in the past weeks, each time shifting hues and acquiring new scents, flavors, characters, textures, and soundtracks.

The first fresh scene to grow up around me was Hanoi, where my tight little taste buds blossomed with street foods, all sugar baked and sweetly glazed, or salty sandwiches or steaming bowls of pho noodles. Easy gray skies rested on unspeakable greens, and silvery smooth darkchocolate water sank into land while the city writhed with traffic and action.

In Hanoi proper, crossing the street is an act of faith. With frantic honking and ceaseless streaming traffic, the only rule is to keep moving and let the motorcycles swerve gracefully around your little walking bundle of flesh. It really is an excellent trust-building activity. I consistently trusted Vietnamese motorcyclists with my life. The traffic also provides a tempting metaphor for our individual journeys through life: it never slows or stops or becomes safe. You just have to step into it with all your senses turned all the way up, and trust the other players in this insane game we call reality.

They appear harmless when still.

The major characters were street vendors, offering a monotone litany of every possible drug, yet throwing a literary temptation in the middle: "Coke? Pills? Marijuana? Books? ..." I guess they figure if you don't like drugs, you'll love books (and visa versa?).

I celebrated my 24th birthday in a funky Chinese junk boat, gliding across the slick rippling waters of Ha Long bay.

Accompanying us on our boat was someone who looked like the Dalai Lama's twin brother, except he had three 3's shaved into the back of his head. I assumed this was a religious symbol and asked its significance. He replied: "It's a beer brand." Enlightening.

Within Ha Long bays massive limestone formations came the most dramatic change in scenery. The caves swallowed you up into their dramatically lit textures, piled up all around like psychedelic melted candle wax. It was pretty epic.

My birthday evening featured two very enthusiastic Vietnamese guys who insisted on giving my brother and I too much tequila. Their English was limited to the phrase: "Vietnamese...good people!" Other than that, we were limited to thumbs ups and other basic gestures. At one point, one of them added: "Go home and tell them...Vietnamese...good people!" I told him I would: so consider yourself updated. It was a strangely poignant way to forge healing for a past of violence that continues to fester in the land today.

My brother and I visited the Military History Museum. While buying a ticket, the ticket lady asked where we were from. "USA," I said. Automatically, I added: "Sorry..." However, I quickly realized that apologizing to the ticket booth people for the Vietnam war seemed slightly inappropriate and strange. Still, I'm very sorry about all war. I'm just not sure who to address the apology to, exactly.

As Hanoi sank back down into the earth, the scenery relaxed into rolling hills, which were coated in different crops sewn together like patchwork: utterly dominated by sunflowers and corn and lazy floppy clouds. Ripe plums dropped slowly like days too full of sweet juices. This was Bardigues, a tiny town in Southern France.

Hay swirled into itself while vegetables roasted and cheese spread and people gathered around the glorious cuisine and whole-grain laughter. Mix in a bit of chilled wine and it created medicine for my rice infested belly.

Then a blast of cool air and the comforting grandfatherly presence of brick buildings signified a brief intermission into the old grays of London...

with the colorful exception of Selah Hennessy and her wardrobe

(which she generously shared with me).

Activities: Walking and baking cookies. Frequenting pubs and thrift stores.

Finally, the East Coast of Malaysia has risen up and reformed around me, nearly identical to how I remembered it. Except now it is Ramadan, and I am teaching rather hungry kids who wake up at 4:30AM to eat and pray before the day of fasting begins. I walk into classrooms sometimes to find the majority of my students sleeping. I sometimes apologize before teaching. I sneak off and chug water quietly in the toilet. I never thought I'd feel guilty about hydration. At first I tried fasting, but I soon remembered that I am not a fantastic person or teacher without food. But more importantly, the act carries no meaning for me. Rituals must be infused with meaning in order to be fulfilling and while Ramadan is rich with significance for the Muslim world, I haven't found my relationship with it yet. Regardless, its ample food for thought, and meanwhile I'm unfurling into the new slower and softer rhythms of Ramadan.

Another fresh landscape emerges, in a familiar place.

Grand Events and Water Falls

Life has recently been heavily studded by a series of seriously grand events.

The first magnificent occasion was the English Talent Show I planned for my school. This event had a rather bizarre line-up...

ranging from the small and scared-looking wiggling of teachers' offspring,

to another showing of that reoccuring AIDS play (bit of a downer),

to the schools' very own 15 year-old boy band blasting electric guitars,


to the "Global WARN-ing" Choral Speaking performance,

to my brother, friends, and my redition of R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly."

This event was well-attended by students, but basically boycotted by the teachers, as stringed instruments (especially electric ones) are slightly haram in the Qu'ran. The planning of the Talent Show doused me with stress and anxiety, especially as it was so disconcerting to find out that many things I consider to be talents (guitar, dancing) are actually significantly sinful.

My brother's visit, a grand event in and of itself, consistently wove into the rest of the celebrations.

No one believed he was my brother, and I was constantly asked about wedding dates and potential children. I tried to combat this strange and incestual conversation by reiterating that he was my "abang" which means older brother in Malay. However, after several days of introducing my "abang" to everyone, I was informed that this word also functions as a pet name that wives call their husbands. I obviously sent out some mixed messages, and am still generally perplexed about how "brother" becomes the equivalent of "sweetheart."

My brother and I engaged in various activities: including dancing, teaching, visiting caves crawling with monkeys, and watching sharks mate. Seeing the sharks was one of the most amazing and terrifying things I've ever witnessed. They were roughly the same size as me and seemed very aggressive about the whole thing. My brother and I were the only ones in the water, and we quickly exited after our brief underwater voyeurism. We also saw monkeys steal, open, and eat Pringles, which was a close second in terms of visual stimulation.

Another remarkable happening was the false wedding of Sarah and Ezra (two of the ETA’s and two of my favourite human beings). This is actually one of the most absurd ceremonies I have ever witnessed.

The couple was dressed up in matching hot pink bridal gear,

paraded around and entertained with silat (fake fighting),


seated in thrones (each with their own fanner person),


and physically positioned into a variety of poses for a non-stop, exhausting photo shoot.

I actually suspect that this is what many Malaysians would love to do to each of us visiting Americans. Dress us up in glittering costumes, coat our faces in piles of make-up, tack on some fake hair, match us up into neat little couples, and then parade us around, taking pictures as if we were shimmering props.

Not that (white) people haven’t been doing variations on that theme to many humans for thousands of years. It must be hard wired into our nature, this desire to transform other beings into your fantasies and then have them act out your stories for you. Sometimes I see this glint in my students’ eyes, and I know they are imagining me as their personal Barbie doll. Its creepy.

Finally, the Earth and English Camp was the culmination of all joyous and stressful celebrations. This camp, planned by several of us Americans was designed to spread environmental love through three-days of activities.

The kids on the bus, and the entire camp before beach clean-up.

First, we divided the kids up into different elemental teams. As any good card-carrying tree-hugger should, I led the Forests. Each student painted themselves as a tree on our team flag. "WE heart FOREST"...

We tried to make picking up trash on the beach into a game, by making it a competition. I'm not sure the kids were convinced...

It was a dead tie between the Rivers and the Oceans.

I spent the majority of the camp, in the toilet washing trash. After cleaning the garbage, I instructed the students to make monsters out of it. They were exceptionally creative and created some magnificent creatures out of styrofoam chunks and old broken flipflops.

Monster trash creation station... where magic happens. This is why I believe in art. You can spend hours explaining the intricacies of litter and trash and facts and figures, but no shift in the brain is guarenteed. But give a kid some trash and tell them to make something useful with it and new pathways are being carved into the mind. Rubbish is solved like a problem, and ultimately transformed. Magic.

Bloody Mary monster???


These creations are some of the best art I've ever seen...After the monsters were made, we organized a "Trash Monster Fashion Show," meaning that the students paraded across stage, striking poses with the monsters formerly known as litter. Murdoch is already making offers to buy the video. We're holding out.



Some of the kids looked a bit like their monsters. Which is cute.


We also did other things, like play games.

Capture the flag.

The best and biggest thing: we put on some music (for a freeze tag game) and as soon as the audible vibrations hit the air...a massive dance party erupted! Dancing is not allowed (except very traditional forms in specific settings), and so, in this room with no Malay authority figures, the muscle fibers of these 130 Muslim kids started twitching in long repressed rhythms. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I cried.

Teaching the kids the wave.

Other grand events are on the verge of erupting: brother and I head to Hanoi soon and this is followed by a brief intermission in Southern France. I will return just in time for Malaysian Independence Day, and then the month of Ramadan will unfold. Finally, the arrival of a crew of four magical maniac revolutionaries has been confirmed for the fall. These glorious creatures will help me wrap up my time at school, and then our adventures will spill onto other SE Asia borders. I’ll keep squishing the events into these funny electronic formats, until 16 December, when my only two feet will land once more on the shores of the USA. God willing.

In the meantime, I'm consciously collecting some more grand events, captured like willing butterflies in generous nets. Sometimes they try to hide, or camouflage themselves into the folds of time. But I'm too clever for that. I'm looking out. I got a good one just yesterday and it went like this.

I watched water fall.

Nothing falls like water.