Udaipur
Udaipur
“Be bewitched by this fairy-tale city,” the guidebook says, “where ocre-shaded hills encircle the whimsical, snow-whit lake palace.”
“Marvel at beautiful Udaipur, then wander beyond into the Aravalli hills.”
“Watermarked by whimsy and splendour, the Venice of the East holds stage as one of India’s truly seductive cities.”
Uncanny.
To escape the touts I dash between two pillars of rock engraved with cartoonish elephants. I am followed by four children who throw stones at a pack of street dogs, and emerge finally onto a ghat bordering a luscious green lake. Only ten days before the lake was nothing more than a crater in the earth, now there is a tide upon the river that blows with the wind, as green as a field of long grass.
The stairs into the water are wide and the stone planks shift when I burden them with my weight. At the edge of the lake, women in orange dress smack large black paddles against wet clothes. A man bathes in his black boxer-briefs, his hands creamy with soap. Stalkes of long grass stick out from the thick green water and a group of young boys play in the lake, tumbling over a black inner-tube. I talk with a gang of young boys, we joke together until an old woman comes and yells at them in Hindi.
“Very funny sir, I see you, very funny sir” a teenage Indian boy says, he looks like an older version of the children, his blue-plaid shirt and whitening pants are nearly identical to the other Indians. He introduces himself as Bari, and the boy has a kind face, but even after the innocuous introductions I still find it difficult to shake off that presumption of suspicion that so encases the traveler into a mind-bubble, equainimous to whatever the locals recommend or suggest.
You go to school? I ask, intending to ask more questions than answer.
Yes, first year sir.
You live in this city?
No, my home, he stuttered it out, East.
We find his village together on a map, of Kashmir, he points to a dot where the railroad intersects. Near there, sir, he says.
Electricity?
Yes.
A moment passes where no expectations seemed to reappear, we comfortably listen to the laughter of the other teenagers struggling for the inner-tube. Bari tells me that everything coming from Bollywood now is vulgar, not Hindu culture.
“You mean language? Language vulgar?”
“No sir, girl. Girl vulgar.” This is true, there has been kissing in two recent Hindi films.
The man bathing had already dried himself off, another group of women have come to gossip near the water. A child swims on the ghat with his black trousers still on. Another boy in white underwear makes an angel in the green water, his back floating upon a Styrofoam case, perhaps found in the garbage disposal just beside the water, where rabid hounds and cows came to feast.
A boat ride to the sacred temples on the lake runs somewhere around sixty USD. If you want to eat dinner or get coffee, you’re looking at least $120. The man running my three dollar motel room is, in his spare time, a factory worker for Versace.
Auspiciously, I come across three young British Indian girls, North London posh, just as I am about to march up a three mile hill ridden with mosquitos and wild monkeys. I find their circumstances so different from mine, so unapologeticly disengaged. Their fathers have organized their entire trips for them; they have hired a driver for four days to whisk them from monument to monument in a fully air-conditioned van, while their tour guide, Bobby, delivers them to each “sacred sight,” taking care of any other amenity for them, from feeding the beggers to where to shit.
“We have been looking so hard for other young people to meet.”
I find this hard to believe, as I am burdened constantly by the amount of white young tourists, the herd that I have come to think alike.
“For instance, at our hotel there is only old people.”
I was going to add rich.
I agree to spend the day with them, perhaps providing some entertainment and American color between their cell phone calls, text messages and replays of Rahman songs from Slumdog Millionaire.
As we visit the Gujurati heavy temples devoted to Hare Krishna, then the five hundred year-old cone-shaped temples devoted to the Brahman[s Lord Shiva, the girls seem genuinely troubled by the street children. As they are approached by gangs of bedraggled urchins, they quickly tell me that they have just come from an expeditious volunteer project with an English-education NGO, and about how good it felt to do volunteer work.
In much of Thailand, temples, welfare offices and generous families are constantly providing food and indecent housing for no cost to the individual, so giving away cash always seems like providing an unearned surplus. How wrong was I to assume that things are the same in Thailand as they are in India, which is supposedly a socialist, non-aligned country. Bobby attempts to put it in perspective.
“What happens to the street children?” the girls ask with glimmers of hope in their eyes.
“Nothing, they just survive or die.”
“The government?”
“Takes their money and hopes they die.”
“The NGOs?” I ask
“NGOs!” Bobby slams his fist on the radiator with such sudden passion that the girls jump out of their seats, and for once, put away their incessant text-messaging. “Corrupt! Corrupt!” Bobby spits out, as if he has repeated it so many times before the words have gained some chant-worthy, sacrosanct magic. “You must not believe they care.” he says.
Shocked, that glimmer lost, one of the girls says at last “Well, our NGO helps them.” As urchins knock on the tinted car window, the young girls holding infants withered from marasmus.
Jaipur
Sixteen hours to Jaipur, sleeper class, I lie on the upper berth of a crowded train, my arm suspended at head level like a crane. I easily grasp onto passing soft drinks, samosas, or the heads of children with sticky fingers. Outside the train, the sunset is straddling the horizon. I see rice fields and farms, a line of trees, electrical towers that look like steel angels in the dark.
AMERICAN HOT AND FRESHSWEET
GOOD TIMES PARTNER
ESCAPE TO ITALY
FINGER LICKING GOOD
Feelin' the love
Spotted on the Amalfi Coast: Jackie & Aristotle Onassis, Sophia Loren, Clark Gable, Vladimir Lenin, Bridgette Bardot, Elizabeth Taylor, Graham Greene, Humphrey Bogart, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Richard Wagner, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra… …and delicious hazelnut flavors.
The first night in Jaipur, the capital of Rajastan, a fuse blows at my five dollar hotel. We move to another room and that fuse blows out. The next day we relocate to another hotel for three dollars a night. It is ridden with ants, spiders, pleas, mosquitos, cockroaches. The mattress is a cot on wooden planks. It reminds me of living in Las Vegas. We wake up with new places to scratch. This is called Budget Travel.
On the street, past midnight, I feed a cow rotis. A man in a white turban and thick mustache takes my hand, says: “Good luck feed cow.”
“Good luck?”
“Yes, because cow is God.”
“Oh, of course.”
“You no feed street children. No good luck. Only feed cow. Cow is God. Not feed children. Feed cow.”
“Because cow—”
“It is God.”
“God.”
I feed God another Roti.
I read Arundhati Roy, writing about India in 2001: “More than 400 million of our people are illiterate and live in absolute poverty, over 600 million lack even basic sanitation and over 200 million have no drinking water.” She tells me there]s no such thing as an authentic Indian. She tells me that every Indian is a minority. She tells me that if you look hard enough, you can find Coca Cola in the Vedas. She seems to greatly dislike Indira Ghandi.
I am very grateful to be traveling around India with a woman, without her many idiosyncrasies would be lost. Everywhere, men follow her, with their eyes, their steps, their hands, and occasionally, with their lips, though none have been reciprocated for their desire. In the Guide it warns that “Indians are known for harassing women in Western style clothing”. This begs the question of what the guide means when it says “harassing.”
It means men asking you for kisses, asking how many people you fuck and whether you use condoms or not. It means obscene stares from the young men around you and being followed by gangs of them while walking home at night. It means always being served last at restaurants. It means that when you order beer the waiter assumes you are only doing it for the men in the room. It means constant whistles, taunts, and arms and hands “accidentally” falling upon different parts of your skin. It means men standing near you with such propinquity as to peak down any portion of your body where the distance between the fabric and your skin might reveal the curve of a breast or thigh.
It also means getting to stand in separate, shorter, faster lines.
My fork is too small...
A Tuk Tuk driver drives drunk. The other drivers hate him; they attempt to run us off the road. He swears at them in English, in Hindi, in Spanish, calls them charlatans. His name is John Travolta. We visit a temple full of monkeys. The Hindu priests call it the Sun Temple, the touts call it the Monkey Temple. On the way are cobras, goats, cattle, monkeys. Again, they attack me:
What they saw
What I saw
Jaipur is a destination with a great observatory, humongous forts, the largest canon in the world, the greatest collection of silver objects, rare and precious stones, a rich cultural history of Kings, epic battles and reformist laws, an old city completely bathed in pink paint, and a gaudy theater house.
At a bar a man named Christopher delivers a jeremiad against Indian employment. He is a well off businessman, frustrated with the “chai culture” of Indian entrepreneurs. “What takes a day in the U.S. takes a week in Mexico, takes a month in Vietnam, takes a year in India.” Apparently he owns manufacturing companies throughout the third world. He tells me the venal labor laws in India disallow him from firing his workers when they do not show up for work, or when they harass his female workers, or when they deliver shipments incredibly late.
Rich, he buys all our drinks.
India is still consistently India. And Jaipur is a city full of Gods, Kings, monkeys, and street children. They work in groups, perhaps. I give rupees whenever I see Mani, a fifteen year old with a baby covered in flies. I like her because she always takes my money and never asks for more. She takes food when I buy it for her. The street children just take the food I buy for them and then toss obscene gestures at me that say in so many words: “fuck you, cheap America!”. Mani gets it, so I always give her money. This is called selfish giving.
All hail the priest of the Micee D's
I spend a five days in Jaipur, revising India with clarity and conscience, July 30th – August 2nd.
Amritsar
Recumbent pilgrims lie scattered on the white marble of the Golden Temple. They look identical: long dark beards, white turbans, aged soles of their feet. Here we are far from the anomic lifestyle of Seattle, the bathetic pathos of Seoul, here people must have touch, must express total equality even in their style of eating, must cover their heads in humbleness not only to an imaginary God, but to each other. In a state of quiescent repose, we face each other as beings of the same universe.
Golden Temple
The gold surface of the temple is grandiose. One wonders who built it, in what conditions, etc. Ostentatious displays of wealth certainly arouse suspicions in any puritanical American. Even the deserts in Amritsar are marked with filigree; delicate real silver tops off my rice pudding and looks like tin foil.
I encroach upon the sacredness of yet another religion, as I turn my back on the temple, deliver a wad of flem backed up in my nasal passages by the pollution of the city. Apparently you’re not supposed to do that.
Free food at the Temple
I rid myself of the tourist monuments like passing difficult excrement. To find myself in a new city, one must survey the perimeter, as a canine around his new home, before he cane take in the pleasure of the streets. As soon as I am released from the injunction to see the tourist sites, I walk in random directions, towards whatever seems exigent or within my proximity—a broken down building, a gathering of Indians around a well-lit street, a strange figure in the dark. Very often I simply float within the crowd, unthinking and unassuming flaneur, imbibing in the aura of the city and its people, retreating from certainty, trusting the void wherever it leads.
We chase the beaucratic fairy around the train station from one ticket counter to another, filling out forms, getting things stamped, carrying our luggage on our backs with the body-heat of the Indians in our nostrils. The bearucratic and taxonomic obsession with getting things right, perhaps instituted by the British, has been popularized among travelers of India by V.S. Naipaul, where, in one short story, his wife faints from exhaustion after running from one passport office to another. The denouement of our confusion and utter exhaustion is only to discover that there is no train left for Jaipur.
Chandigarh
The plains of Punjab
On a train from India’s most dangerous city to its least dangerous, from one of the most slum-ridden cities to the richest city in all of India, I spot the sun embellish the countryside through a cloud’s sharp contours. My feet hang from the side of the train, the gravel in strokes of grey paint below my broken sandals. The train feels like a rollercoaster.
Chandigarh is a city of bigness, with its large streets, double-decked buses and parks, its grandiose shopping centers. Planned by western architects, primarily Le Corbusier, the city feels modernist, bureaucratic, the blocks are renamed sectors; the streets are in a grid.
Rose Garden
Primarily Sikh, Chandigarh is the disputed capital of Punjab and Haryana, but the Sikh name Singh predominates every restaurant sign and motel. As a burly Indian Sikh told me, after realizing that I was already familiar with much of Sikhism, modern Sikhs imbibe in three main pursuits: chicken, beer and gloating. By gloating, he tells me, he means fashion. This explains not only the inescapable shopping centers, but also the underground bars, where, surely enough, everyone is eating chicken.
Chicken, beer and style!
An elderly Sikh invites me to his home, feeds me Tandoori chicken, egg curry and scrambled eggs and tomatoes. He doesn’t speak a word of English, but we drink whisky and speak in our mother tongues and it feels that we understand each other. We watch the wrestler Triple H take down Mysterio. WWF is huge everywhere I go.
Two high school boys meet with me; their questions are typically high school. You have girlfriend? You kiss her? You fuck her? How many girls you do this with? Very common in America? They are obsessed with white women. Very naughty, very sexy they say. I ask them about Indian women. Very naughty, very sexy, they say. The first boy tells me he has proudly slept with seven to eight Indian girls, all of them his friends, though the second boy tells me they are all prostitutes. The second boy has a meeker sex life however, at two to three women. What’s with these ambivalent numbers?
In India, the Indians, are silly.
A drunk Aussie tipping his barstool, as if meaning to appear helplessly inebriated, tells me he “hit the jackpot” in Goa. “I had to ask her guardian” he says. “I told her guardian I was going to sleep with her and maybe stay with her. After the guardian said it was ok, it was so easy!” “Then?” I say. “And then I left.”
He was a fat, white, old fuck.
Nek Chand's Rock Garden
What do you do for fun in Chandigarh? I ask the many within Sector 17.
Shopping, they say.
Delhi
Everyone is Indian. The very cause for surprise is itself a shameful shock. The first Indian I contact, handing him my visa, spends ten minutes reading through my books and pointing to the pictures. No one in the long line of passengers behind me thinks to complain, we wait for him.
I buy a prepaid taxi and a fat tout takes the receipt, walks me to the airport parking lot, asking: This your first time in India? Where you from? How you like India?
And I: I come here once a year. I am from London, Manchester. India is great but has some problems.
He sees a policeman in the parking lot then gives up his game, leads me instead to the long line of taxi-cabs spewing black exhaust.
In the old city the street urchins fill the streets, their skin is far darker than most other Indians, their hair clumped up, their bodies covered in dirt so thick that when they move a cloud of dust follows. All over the streets are dogs and cows, desiccated with humongous sagging udders. The streets are as dynamic as a Wagner opera; I try to balance every new sight, sound, smell and the scorch off the sun into some comprehendible narrative. A street girl has her hand in my right pocket, loquacious women walk by with their bellies and stretch-marks exposed to the sun, I step over an undulating stream of piss coming from a small boy facing a brick wall, smashed cow pies surrounded by swarms of flies on the sidewalk, the tusk of a bull nearly guts the neck of a man dressed for club hopping, riding a motorbike.
An old woman holding a lifeless infant in her arms slaps my wrist and begs for money. A red jewel in her nose, she speaks in Hindi gesturing for food. I stand awkwardly, as if I had come to a best friend]s birthday party but forgot to buy a present. The eyes of the street urchins burn my back, wondering perhaps Where does he keep his money? How cheap is the American? Her begging has drawn too much of a crowd, I say ceallo and keep walking.
Tai ho, meaning, praise, victory, but according to the Indians, its connotate is closer to “it is written”. In the Philippines, the way to accept one’s fate, no matter how miserable, is bahala na, happen what may. It is written. Sleeping on the sidewalk, Tai ho, bahala na, radical acceptance, it is written, it is written.
New Delhi is no better. Thousands of people living in the slums are displaced and bulldozed in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth games, the place looks as fake and its people as displaced and desperate as the poor in Beijing a year before the 2008 Olympics. Squatters in boxed houses are at every intersection, new shantytowns spring up overnight to get turned out in the morning. The slums are terrible labyrinthine eyesores to man and God, the people there live in tremendously difficult conditions—but the slums are a community, they have schools, doctors, and some reasonable sanitation. To bulldoze these eyesores for a sporting event is to ferret out the population, to separate the squatters from a way of life they at least find bearable, to cast them under bridges, to divide and conquer.
Renewed, I take to the streets. Dogs, piss, cows, shit, camels, geckos, touts, urchins, legless beggars, singing street children, dancing street children, cockroaches, fleas, dirt, exhaust, heat, the sun, heat, heat so unbearable, heat so inescapable.
I find refuge in a coffee shop at Connaught place. The air conditioning makes my breathing easier. This is what civilization means—air conditioning!
I meet many Indians, most of them named Raj. Raj I invites me for a drink, just before leaving for Moscow to marry his mail-order bride. Raj II is retired but has traveled the world, asks me about massages in Thailand, but I realize he really means sex massage.
Raj III is in the India Gate Park in the middle of the night playing Cricket alongside hundreds of other players and watchers. He tells me that the nightlife in Delhi only exists in parks; it is a city on the verge of change. He tells me the government is getting rid of the cows, gentrifying everything for the Commonwealth games. There is still no where to go when the sun sets.
Even in the backpacker’s district, no stores are open at night and the disposition of the young men sitting about does not seem pleasant. There are very few bars but there are coffee-shops, where I overhear conversations: “Don’t go to study in the United States, all the professors there are Marxist, they only want to take away political rights” comfortably, sipping a mocha latte, breathing easily from the high air conditioning, as far away from the detriment of the slums as one can get in body and mind.
Buying $6 hotel rooms, sleeping to the sounds of bulls mooing, touts shouting and horns honking, waking up covered in sticky sweat, I navigate the traveler’s district of Pahar Ganj. Touts follow me the moment I step out of the hotel room, offering marijuana, claiming they are trying to practice their English, selling marijuana. To them, a traveler who comes to India without hoping to get as high as possible is an anomaly.
The kids here have no idea how to properly jip a foreigner of their money, even the drivers don’t know where the popular places are, and the kids selling drugs lack any tact. Perhaps there is just too many of them. “Sir, sir! Wear your backpack on your front!” is always a dealer. We learn to ignore them, their bedraggled faces become as tolerable as the hum of a refrigerator.
I eat samosas from street stalls wherever possible, I make friends easily; we travel around the Taj Mahal talking politics and romance. We pull pranks on the touts. We sweat profusely, in the rain, marching in the sun, waiting in lines, on the trains. At night urchins are asleep everywhere, on the gravel, on ladders, on rooftops, on the walls that follow the street. We tread very softly, walking among scattered eggshells, stepping on faces in the dark.
I spend a week in Delhi, with resignation and acceptance. July 16 – 24.
Korea’s Nightlife II
Koreans have a common phrase for their friends on nights out, 눈이 너무 높아요 [your eyes are too high], which means they have high standards. For foreigners this phrase is commonly inversed. Experiencing this reversal on ground level is an unpleasant and disheartening experience: casually one will be having a riotous time in a club or bar, and a group of foreigners, usually white men, will come in and proceed to hump any muscle they can find, or like the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, any entity that seems capable of sustained movement.
This happens mostly in places with younger university areas that are Westernized, but not Westernized for foreigners, such as the area around Hongik University in Seoul, the area around Busan University in Busan, and Rodeo road in Daegu. Some westerners complain that the girls in these clubs are sterile, racist, or even “dead inside.” They’re young college kids raised in a society far more conservative, far more dedicated to family values, than any place in the West right now—why would they want you to hump their leg?! You think the army uniform really makes a difference?
For those who think different, I’ll pass on the advice an Irish guy in Hongdae’s club Coccoon told me: “Go to Itaewon’s club Helios, guaranteed one night stand.”
So the next day, in Helios…….
Helios and other such foreigner bars and clubs in Seoul, which respectively lie in Sinchon and Itaewon, are casually described as “meet packing,” which means people can easily meet each other, but this description is probably more accurate given its insinuated homophone, “meat packing,” as in, a place where one can persuade members of the opposite sex to be their pumping, sweat-glistening myoma for the night. As my gay acquaintance once opined, “an ass is an ass is an ass.”
Even in Korean clubs, the annoyance of the foreigner is outstanding. As I join in circle dances with Koreans, meet others at the bar, or simply stand around imbibing the lights and sounds and people, there always seems to remain one outstanding object in the room: A foreigner, usually white, making a complete ass of themselves, drunk and doing every kind of ridiculous dance they can think of, humping whatever they can find, and when they find nothing, they hump nothing. While this is sometimes entertaining, usually it is simply annoying and incurs a domino-effect of eye-rolling with every Korean in the room.
An old white Afrikaner giggles his body, intersecting his movements with groups of young women. A short black kid from Louisiana humps a Korean girl who has fallen on the ground. A young tall GI tries shakes everyone’s hand, then proceeds to scream angrily at everyone until the bouncer kicks him out. Another GI, shorter and full of muscles, slides his way behind unsuspecting young women, holds one by her stomach and begins thrusting himself at her; the look on her face is appropriate.
At all of these displays I cannot help but think of George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant,” where the young Orwell, a British officer in Burma, feels persuaded to kill a harmless, beautiful creature, simply because the natives expect him to do it as a symbol of power. Are these men also trapped in their own foreignness, and for some reason feel the injunction to make obscene displays of power by always being the center of attention, by claiming their rights over the women, by leaping on-stage without any understanding of what it means to actually dance and enjoy the aura of the club?
One night I meet three fellow expats, perhaps the first I can claim some pleasure in making their acquaintance. Allie, the Korean from Germany studying her “roots,” Ashley, the girl with a thick New York accent locked in constant conversation with her Korean boyfriend, and Lalli, a girl from Tennessee with a doll’s curled blonde hair. All three of them are “hybrids.” all speak Korean, not particularly well, but they speak it and refuse to speak English unless they are provoked to do so. They date Korean, eat Korean, speak Korean, and participate in Korean clubs without immediately looking for the first white person to talk to. I find all of this promising and inspiring; I have found some fellowship to combat the blatant disinterest in Korean culture.
The expats and I spend the night in clubs, never quite the center of attention anywhere we go, yet never off the dance floor. Ashley’s boyfriend and his troop show up, though none of them dance. The things she has to say about her boyfriend are befitting for a young Korean wearing a shirt that reads “COMPTON” in wavy white letters: “He calls me every five minutes, wanting to talk. I have to baby him through everything.” “Why are you with him?” I ask. “He’s hot.” she tells me.
Gwanju
Empty stools as I am sitting at a bar in Gwanju, the capital of radical politics. I meet a quasi-communist getting her masters in German literature. We talk among a group of her friends, my Korean tumbles out of me like falling blocks; I look outside and the sun is already up. I ask directions to the nearest sauna. When I get there, men seem to be having a riotous time in the “Males only” section, I feel them trying to touch my shins, which are poking out of a small warm cavern.
Korea/Nightlife I
The subways in Seoul usually stop running at around midnight, and don’t start again until around 5:30am or 6 o’clock. The large bulk of people out past midnight who don’t have the kind of money to pay for a taxi stick around sleeping on park benches, passed out in the parking spaces near the sidewalk, breathing heavily in a large DVD room designed for quick sex, snoring in a PC room with their neck tilted back and their mouth gaped open. Most clubs that seem weak at around 11pm or even 1am stay strong and exuberent until the sun comes up. To effectively party in Seoul, I must adapt to the night in its entirely. Debauchery will not be half-assed.
In Hongdae, the district around Hongkik University, I venture to the Noise Basement, a club that is so packed even on Sunday nights that dancing becomes a purely relative concept. Here I immediately meet a middle aged woman from Osaka, an older white guy who dances in ridiculous fury, and a black man from London named Alex. In clubs especially, foreigners tend to aggregate. Together we begin to suspect locals of using us as some type of status symbol, though we may intend to use them as some type of sexual object.
Alex begins to disclose his disappointment in much of the Korean nightlife, and immediately I see his reasons manifest in the crowd around us. Every time he begins to talk to a Korean girl, whether she has friends in the club or not, Korean men stare at him with such intensity that he is forced to confront them directly: What are you looking at? He yells once, and they merely shake their head at him.
I decide to test the toleration of these so called “liberal art students” by finding a tall Korean girl in blue hot-pants, woo her with my fancy patter, then hook her with: “I have a friend here who you should meet. He’s here from London (he has a great accent!), he’s about my age but way more muscular.” At that point I take her to Alex. What]s that? Not the person you were expecting? Something wrong about my description? I watch her joyful expression suddenly shift to total confusion and panic when she discovers that he isn’t quite the Beckham-like figure she was perhaps envisioning. I do this with another girl, and Alex seems to play along this time, meeting her with a smile while trying to ignore the grimace of the Korean men around him.
Hongdae, anytime
As I have been told on many occasions, Japanese women seem to be the most typical catalyst for burgeoning gigolos. Indeed, the woman from Osaka reflects anything but the mundane sterility of the Korean girls in the bar, in fact, at her first dance with a Korean girl, she whispers in her ear, tugs playfully at her shirt and spirits her out of the club. I immediately propose a toast to their love, but speak too soon, as the Japanese woman immediately returns with that pissed off look I notice upon myself when fooled by a woman’s hips.
We have a drink anyway, the Japanese women confiding in me that she has been in Seoul for five days, and each night she has gotten close to getting lucky with a girl, but they never want to go all the way. I feel for her, certainly, but am also satisfied that a great drinking buddy has returned to share in the squalor.I, Alex and the Japanese woman watch as the only white guy in the room dances briskly from girl to girl.
Bupeoung
In Bupeoung there is a gigantic underground shopping mall, and a sprawling nightlife jam-packed with Korean youth. Unfortunately, this great district of Incheon once devoted to clubs and wild bars has been almost completely replaced by “night clubs” for young Koreans, which are substantially different from a regular club. Night clubs are really “booking clubs,” usually with a stage of dancers and tables full of alcohol and food.
Here is my extremely biased take on them: They are for the upper-class youth—since it’s expensive as hell to even step foot inside, let alone order any alcohol—who are either extremely shy or who don’t put much effort into actually walking up to someone else and talking to them. Here the waiters combine tables of women and men, so that customers don’t actually have to find a reason to talk to someone, or introduce themselves, or even get up out of their chair. Sadly, Bupeoung has been overrun with night clubs, which makes it nearly impossible to meet locals unless you carry wads of cash and get someone else to do the introductions for you.
I ended up in a bar alone for most of the night, until two Canadians came in. Racially they were completely Asian, later I found they were Chinese, and suddenly the fact that they were joining me in my pathetic loneliness made more sense. They seemed to be having the same problems as me, finding the Bupeoung nightlife sterile, and that Bupeoung had especially disintegrated into a gentrified version of an otherwise seedy nightlife.
Very often as I walk alongside a new white friend, Korean women have time and again jumped out to talk to him only to completely ignore me, the shorter, racially mixed person standing next to him as if I were some impure “Western” wannabe with the same urge for the foreign as them. Their predictable leaps from the sidelines impose a barrage of the same lines: “Where you from?” “What is your name?” “Oh, I love your country!” while I, usually caught in mid-sentence, find myself trying to nudge in from the girl’s backside. These sudden coos have ceased to provide any amusement to me, and when I am so conspicuously ignored because I look more like the girl’s maid than a traveler, I feel the need to take vengeance. Such justice I have served in several ways.
Once, while trying to take a picture of a drunk man passed out on the street with some new friends, Korean girls popped out and began casually ignoring me, apparently fascinated however by the country of origin my friend’s had–the same as mine, the United States. What sweet revenge I imbibed that night! After I had let their performance carry on for some time, I whispered in my friend’s ears, confessing that I had seen certain marks on the lips of these Korean girls as they spoke, and that we should make sudden retreat if ever we hope to return home with our bodies free from inflammations.
Perhaps this was despicable, and is even less excusable since I had very little to drink that night, but—BUT how delicious it felt, how satisfying it was to see the spring in their step turn to fall, how entranced I was to see my white friends make their escape, and I quickly behind, looking back at the girls finally with a devilish smile, one that made them recognize instantly that I had been the incendiary of the terrible fire that would lay their plans for the night to ashes, that their total exclusion of me because of my mixed race, dark skin and refusal to give away my American accent, would doom them to a forgettable fate.
Yoido Church
Yoido Christian Church
This morning I was in high-spirits and took to the Yoido Christian Church, a mega-church about the same size as Christian Central in Las Vegas, but supporting far more members—about 830,000! It is the largest Christian Church in the world.
We went to the one o’clock service, and of course, sat in a traffic jam of unflinching church goers before finally arriving at our destination. The church lies between large financial buildings, in the “Wall Street” district of Seoul. The first thing I begin to ask is: What is a Church doing in a large financial district—the largest church in the world, in fact?
We went primarily to see Mr. Cho, David Yonggi Cho, who is the leader of the church, and according to my twin brother, the only decent reverend who doesn’t merely ask for money or misrepresent factually about every historical person he can think of in the thirty minutes he has at the podium. As Mr. Cho began speaking, I began to wonder what the other preachers must have been like, since this Mr. Cho proceeded to do everything I described above, and then astounded the audience with advertisements for his DVDs. Aside from the usual astounding bullshit one casually hears and claps their hands to at a sermon, he actually claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald had no political agendas when he killed Kennedy, but that he did so because he had a fight with his wife and that Kennedy just “happened to be in the neighborhood.” Really? A guy who was so socialist he moved to Russia, a guy who had attempted to kill political leaders before, really had no political leanings to do what he did? It was really because he wasn’t spiritually fulfilled?
What’s more, Mr. Cho went on to say that the richest people in the world, like Rockefeller, were extremely poor until they started giving “thirty, sometimes forty, sometimes fifty percent of everything they earned to the church!” and then proceeded to tell a story about a poor woman who was an alcoholic and never gave money to the church, and how all her generations of sons and daughters were eternally cursed because of what she did, while some other guy (American!) gave tons of money to the church, and all of his sons and daughters were made into lawyers and doctors and were rich. Indeed, it seemed no great coincidence that this church resides in the “Wall Street” of Seoul, and it was almost too predictable when, as soon as the collection bags were passed around, advertisements for Mr. Cho’s DVDs ran on the giant projection screens while the choir sang to the ads, and men in the aisles with DVDs began to tug at the church-goers.
Keeping in mind not only the history of Mr. Cho, but the history of the Yoido Full Gospel Church, the sermon couldn’t be more of a shock. From it’s somewhat mythical beginnings within the houses of devoted protestants, The church was brought to the level it is today by Cho, via political alignments and religious campaigning. I believe with any church this size, any bullshit will remain unquestioned, which is actually why Mr. Cho has been brought out of retirement so many times: infighting among the other reverands. Mr. Cho’s politics are clearly espoused in his sermon: according to Cho, the previous president of Korea “certainly went to hell,” as will “any professors who become political.”
So why this tendency toward totalitarian epithets in a Christian sermon? Cho obviously aligns with the Grand National Party of Korea, the conservative wing that exerts a near total control over the media. Like the U.S. state and PBS, or Henry Kissinger and ABC, the media in Korea is controlled by someone appointed and approved by the executive branch of the government, an occurrence that does not change with the elected leaders. That explains why the last president was cursed to eternal hellfire. As for the professors? There has been an ongoing controversy in Korea concerning Professors who demand a greater democracy, and who are being fired for speaking out (http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/358604.html). According to contracts signed by professors at Seoul National University, Korea’s top University, professors cannot be political, but must protect education from politics by keeping inactive. Obviously, this only means they must only preach the politics of the state, not their own. Because these professors speak out, they are not only fired, but, according to Mr. Cho, cast into an eternal hellfire by the Almighty.
Speaking as an atheist with five preachers in my close family, one of whom had his own radio program and another who has published twelve books dedicated to Christian leadership, I don’t feel very guilty about saying that going to this church was a genuinely horrendous experience, more horrendous perhaps than any church in the States, though they certainly come close to this atrocity. Perhaps the only redeemable point of interest was when the Korean Christians all simultaneously began speaking in tongues. I’m not sure if I am able to talk about this respectfully, so I won’t even talk about it. You can imagine perhaps what a giant auditorium of cacophonic paroxysms might sound like.
Travel 2009
Here, on my fourth extended excursion, the first joys of travel are removed in such a far off distance that their pleasure seems now remote; they are glanced-at provincial gestures that can never be recovered. The ‘innocent abroad’ typical of American travelers has lost its relevance to me, the irony of it turned now into melancholy and irreversible cynicism.
“Traveling makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” —Flaubert
I no longer trust guidebooks beyond the maps that they contain, I find them loathsome youthless instruction manuals unfit for the effusing of the soul that travel exhibits among strangers. Should I bring my collared shirts for summer? How much will this cost? Where are the bars friendly to foreigners? These questions are not that which spur the endless fascination, the love of being acted upon by others, the indulgence of an omnivorous curiosity, of travel.
The eloping couple makes my companions in this realm. The runaways, the derelicts, the outcasts, the beggars, the pimps, the hos, the Johns and the Tricks, the drugged out hippies, the drunkard staggering, the innocents abroad, the lost, those whose homes have been reappropriated by the rich, those who, as I, find everything resembling “home” torn apart by bulldozers to make new hotels for tourists, new shopping districts for the wealthy, new restaurants with over-salted ethnic delicacies. Those without a home join me, those who are welcome no more, those whose home is theirs, not ours. We aim at them anew, the open windows of their limousines are our spittoons from the overpass.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth century traveling was a grand pre-requisite of cultural capital before young bourgeois students (usually men) took to their studious careers. In some ways not much has changed, but travel is now largely democratic, which is why someone like me can spend three months traveling with a salary of about $13,500 a year. The luxury of travel, however, is never lost to an absence of funds. It is given up instead for the ubiquitous photograph, where the only memory recalled is that supplemented by photographic evidence. Travel is stripped away by walking the common path, by finding excuses to learning the local language, by staying in one’s hostel/hotel and tourist neighborhood, never braving the so-called “diseased slums,” the seedy alleyways and bars, the sites that put one face-to-face with the moral and historical questions that once defined what it means to travel.
Already our experiences are commodified, we are already planning how to exaggerate our stories, how to gain a higher chest among our peers, how to return home and eat ethnic foods while declaring “oh, but I’ve had the real thing before, this is only some cheap American rip-off,” how to pronounce names with adequate emphasis on the “correct” syllables. We are already deciding, to put it simply, how to blog this to the world, hot to omit facts, how to make ourselves seem tolerable, kind, and respectful to traditions that we are glad to merely try on, as if window-shopping. Traveling has become all about us.
“Why do you travel?” We are commonly asked. “Why not go home?” when the road becomes scabrous and our feet turn to welts and bites. What makes us unable to sit and be satisfied? I say it is because our hearts leap about in anxiety at home, because we are frustrated, as the many travelers before us, with the gnawing ennui of the homeland, because we seek, as Joyce, to escape the certainty of those with religion, academia or ideology, because we desire, as D.H. Lawrence and Henry James, to discover a place and peoples with some dignity and realistic grasp of the world, and because we need, as Kerouac, to understand desperation, loss—to go without itinerary, plans or certainty. To travel is to be rid of certainty. As Whitman said, “certainty…falls into niches and corners before the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe.” We travel to do what we can against those who believe they live in the best of all possible worlds, as a servant might in a household that they have never stepped out of.
As with my travel blogs of the last four years, I excuse politeness and toleration for sincerity and suspicion. I make no claims to be a terribly wise traveler, only a terribly honest one. Traveling is an investment of time, money, and means the risk of disease or having to sleep on a park bench. Many travelers, mindful always of this investment, seek to derive the greatest output from their “adventure,” always “discovering” the “fascinating cultures,” the “memorable people” and the many photo opportunities that await them. After their trip, they then proceed to tell these stories with loathsome insincerity, mentioning always their “fascination,” unaware that they are merely reproducing the catalogs and advertisements of commodified travel that we are already too familiar with. I will have nothing to do with this narrative of fascination.
This summer I will be in Korea for one month and India for two months. I can think of no better way to begin than with Whitman:
“Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, Strong and content I travel the open road.”
Reflections on South-East Asia
While filling out a form today, I had forgotten my address and telephone number in the states. The only thing I can conjure now is my passport number. I just realized I’m going to be flying on September 11th – FOR 26 HOURS STRAIGHT! Dangerous! No wonder these tickets were so cheap…
Here’s where I went–not including the month in Korea, since that’s old news by now:
I visited 11 cities, the rest was horrendous bus rides.
I’m in Thailand again, Bangkok. I don’t care to write about the protests and state of emergency here, since none of my Thai friends give a damn about it and I certainly haven’t seen any political action yet.
I’ll take this last blog to reflect and indulge myself on the time spent on the road. And on race.
Racially, I’m half white, and half “other,” as I like to say. The “other” has given me a brown tint in my skin, which has made traveling in South East Asia an especially revealing experience. Here are the stats:
Pro: Walking into tourist sites without having to pay, since I look kind of like a local.
Con: Being spoken to in the local language, and everyone assuming that I understand it and know what’s about to happen to me.
Pro: Getting to know the locals mush easier than the white people can, and not being seen as “a customer” but as a curious traveler.
Con: Feeling racially alienated by every Australian or Danish person I meet. “He can’t be half white” they say. “He’s lieing” they say.
Pro: Especially at night clubs and bars, the locals don’t notice the brown foreigner has walked in who intends to steal their women.
Con: At times, not getting the extra attention and becoming overwhelmed by a sense of loss.
Pro: attempting the guise of the bourgeois local, who all the locals respect and bow to.
Con: Nobody believes I’m American except Americans and the Brits.
To put it simply, being brown allows me to be more tactful in straddling the line between the foreigner and the local, though I can never fully be either one. Let me present my guises, in the interest of full disclosure:
Meet Nico
Nico the Filipino student. He is poor and lost from his traveling group, but boy wouldn’t it be nice if you bought him a drink? He’ll tell you everything about what it’s like living in Manila and how he feels being in a foreign country for the first time (Even in Cambodia, they think the Philippines is a shit country).
I take the guise of Nico when I don’t want to spend too much money someplace, when I’m being solicited, or when I want a woman to buy me a drink just for the hell of it. “Nico” is of course an Eastern European name, so the fun never ends. My most mad misadventures occur as Nico, since being Filipino automatically shoves him into the “exotic underdog” category. And everyone loves an underdog.
Nico took some time to master. At first I was amazed at how fast people pulled out their wallets for me, or just stopped trying to sell me things on the basis that I’m a poor, lost Filipino student. When I was testing Nico, I was found out a couple of times, but even that I could use to my advantage.
Of course I can’t pull of Nico with Americans or British, they know immediately that I’m full of shit. Aussies and just about any other whites don’t believe me when I tell them I’m half white anyway, so they have no problem seeing me as a Flip and ignoring me from that point forward (or using me as a photo prop). In that sense, I have no ethical dilemmas about using Nico. If you think it’s so unbelievable that I’m American, then screw you, I’m taking all your money, and you’ll find my middle finger up in all your photos of the “exotic SE Asians”.
Wildcard
“Wildcard” is just a nickname for a chameleon guise I inhabit when I meet a local family, or am just out during the day-time trying to meet locals and get in to their parties. The role is that of a prodigal son. Wildcard’s mother belongs to whatever race I’m trying to talk to, but being an innocent American, upon his mother’s death, Wildcard has returned to her natural “people” in order to savor the memory of his mother.
I didn’t fully inhabit Wildcard until Vietnam, since there are so many American-Vietnamese people, it’s a very believable story. There my name was Van Nguyen, and I met many a family, shared many a drink and had many a good mad time with the locals. I can’t begin to emphasize the amount of cultural capital this experiment yielded unto me. I learned so much about Vietnamese culture from families forcing me to try every food and meet every girl and fall in love with their country in every possible way. When a family or local gang meets Wildcard, they see it as a chance to instill a sense of national pride in their own wayward son.
Wildcard knows nothing about your language, your culture, your ways–but he wants to come back to his roots, to discover the “truth” behind his history. Won’t you help out this poor American existentialist?
Adrian the American
Following the same pattern as “Wildcard,” Adrian is a full American visiting his long-lost race, but he’s not interested in the culture or returning to roots. He’s interested in aid, investment and research.
Adrian is an American in study–a master of linguistics, economics, financing, urban development, you name it. He’s here to study the land, the culture, get statistics, all that nonsense. Under Adrian the locals suddenly become different people. They suddenly shout “My God–we are so poor!” or they say things like “They all lie, there is free food in every temple!”
Adrian is not here to travel or mess around. He’s not here to shop, go tubing or do anything fun, because this is not a vacation for him. He’s an American with a pen and a pad, trying to get the truth of your urban environment for investors, politicians and study groups. People are honest with Adrian. They don’t want to sell him things, or show off their country, or get help from him in any immediate way. Adrian serves a higher purpose, he can offer some sanity amidst the rock-and-roll tourist capital that submerges everything.
I’ve had amazing conversations with Korean and Japanese investors to prepare for the roll of Adrian. When investment capitol comes into play, suddenly things get serious, and a local says “you know, we make it seem like X, but really, it’s X.” Being brown only adds to the trust that people place in Adrian, since he is racially “one of them.”
I would say I’m most like Adrian. When I talk to locals under a guise, I’m Adrian about 20% of the time, “Wildcard” about 30% and Nico about 50%. Sometimes I’m just me.
It’s a Race!
I’ll be back in Seattle soon, where race is ridiculously politicized and masked in “safe words” and absurd “toleration training” that forces people to treat each other differently based on gender and race–since someone might get offended! As if Seattle isn’t one of the most segregated places in the States.
Race to me is just my body as it was when I was born, and has nothing to do with who I am except that I’m perceived as “not white”. In America this was never a problem, nobody cared, I was called an “island hopper” just as facetiously as I would call others “chinks” or “Nazis.” In Las Vegas, it’s all in good fun.
But of course, the world is not like where I grew up in Vegas and Portland. Especially outside of America, race is the biggest signifier of one’s identity, and even having “a brown tint” can make the difference in the type of bus I ride on, the treatment I get, the people I meet. Because race is class.
I’m repulsed with the way tourists in these countries view race. Because I’m somewhat brown I get alienated immediately, and many tourists, when I tell them I’m American or “half-white,” think I’m a liar, a local just trying to be “cool.” And they laugh. Isn’t it cute this brown local thinks he’s one of us? He even dresses like us! Hahahaha
I have never and will never make attempts to get back to my “roots”–whether they be white or “other.” I end with Badger Clark’s “The Westerner”:
My fathers sleep on the sunrise plains,
And each one sleeps alone.
Their trails may dim to the grass and rains,
For I choose to make my own.
I lay proud claim to their blood and name,
But I lean on no dead kin;
My name is mine for praise or scorn,
And the world began when I was born
And the world is mine to win.
