Beeees! Horrrrible BEEES!

Winston Churchill once wrote that "there is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result." This was possibly said at a time when Britain was being bombed by the Nazis during the Blitz and the old codger was heard to mutter "pip pip! cheer up! Isn't this exhilarating?"

Well, he's welcome to it.

I myself did not find it exhilarating to be shot at, but rather, frightening. As much as I might seem like a daredevil to to others, when I do daring things, I'm actually scared most of the time. Kaivin, a friend and climbing partner, described me as "an adrenaline junkie [who is] basically immune already. It has to be a life or death situation. And then he needs to be screwed by 3 different subjective hazards before his glands even start producing hormone. He's just a hepcat like that." Well thanks buddy, but the truth is fear is one of my leading attributes.

Yesterday's frightened feeling came on the heels of a rather bizarre festival in the town of Yanshui, in Southern Taiwan. Held every year on the 15th day after the Lunar New Year, the "beehive rockets festival" as it is called, is an event which was originally meant to scare away the evil spirits which caused a 20 year-long cholera outbreak 150 years ago. Now we know that fireworks don't cure diarrhea, but rather cause ailments of the ears and respiratory system. Antibiotics and oral rehydration salts are really far mnore effe4ctive tahn bottle rockets as a cure for diarrhea, as science has told us. So why, with this modern knowledge, do the people of Taiwan still perform this archaic tradition? Because it's "exhilarating" as Churchill would have us believe, because they are still a bit superstitious after all, and there is of course the best reason of all--because most people are just extremely stupid. Most are stupid enough to stand directly in front of a wall of tiny missiles for the thrill, as it turns out.

Attending this event was an exercise in vocabulary building because I had to learn a few new words to navigate through the festival. The word for the particular type of incendiary they use on this occasion is "Feng Pao" which translates to "bee firecrackers." Westerners know them as bottle rockets. They are aptly named "bees" because of the high pitched squeal they emit, and also, as I would discover, the sting they deliver.

The word "Feng" has several different meanings though depending on the tone of pronunciation and the context. Over the course of the evening I would see people "yi wo feng" (swarming around pushing and shouting). I would see a lot of "feng yong" (throngs or flocks--like bao Wei 包圍) of people readying themselves to be shot at. I would taste the "feng du" (wasp's poison) of an errant "feng pao" (bee firework) as I got a little too close. I would watch as people "feng qi" (rose in masses, swarming) in response to a street vendor selling "feng gao" (spongcake方糕). I was with two "Feng puo zi" ((瘋婆子）crazy women) who felt it necessary to stand directly in front of the hives for a more direct blast. I observed that the types of people who were lighting these fireworks were mostly "Gong feng" (worker bees (工蜂）) meaning that they were mostly drunken blue collar types with betel nut stains on their teeth. So it was indeed a lesson in language as well as culture.

At one point I hoisted Melissa up on my shoulders so that she could get a better view as one of the hives exploded at a crowd of onlookers. A nearby worker bee looked on with incredulity as I hoisted her with an expression that said to me (in any and all languages) "not a good idea. The first blasts pierced our eardrums and then the barrage began-- one steady stream of rockets aimed straight at the crowd, which, instead of scattering, faced the onslaught and hopped up and down like in an alternative rock video. I held Melissa on my shoulders until it became apparent that we were both on fire. This realization comes slower than you might think, and I like to believe that I handled it very deftly. I quickly squatted to let her down and then began patting my sweatshirt which had small hole which glowed and widened as I attempted to put it out. The next day I would have a welt and after that a large scab would form over a rather painful burn, and that was just the beginning.

People have lost eyes. People have been burned, singed, poked, and engulfed in flames. I have a friend who likes to repeat the comment that "Chinese language has no word for 'logic.'" I'm pretty sure this isn't true. In fact they have many words for mathematical concepts. Nonetheless, all of this has not prepared them for the simple algorithm of drunk people+fireworks being fired into the crowd=mayhem and injury.

I haven't attended the running of the bulls or the tossing of the goats in Spain, not have I been hazed by fraternity members in college, but I would rank this tradition as one of the stupidest and most pointless in the world.

I was expecting some ceremony, some tradition, some culture, some sense of order and I found none. This was scary, just very scary. The fact that the ceremony of the thing and the cultural aspect of the thing have been relegated to indiscernible background noise is to me indicative of a greater and more painful truth-- that the human race is just one huge Darwin Award waiting to happen.

T.S. Eliot's "the Wasteland" describes the end of the world as coming "not with a bang but a whimper." T.S. Eliot was wrong. The end will come with the theme song from Titanic.

Beeees! Horrrrible BEEES! video segment

Ha-Long is 3 days

If you're in North Vietnam, it's virtually impossible to escape a tour of Ha-Long Bay. Everywhere you go, and I mean everywhere, they will try to rope you into one of these tours. And judging by Jack's comment this morning, on the last day of our 3day cruise ("well this doesn't look like what we saw in the brochure")you will have pretty much no idea what you are getting into.

Strangely, almost everywhere you go in Vietnam will involve relinquishing your passport. Sometimes this is used to extort things from you, mostly not. It is to be expected though. So don't be surprised when you are taken on board a strange boat with strange people (most of whom do not speak any English) and carted around to various places all under the coercion of "you'll be able to get your passport back wehen this is all over." It'll all be over in 3 days.

Admittedly the scenery is spectacular.

Let's try a little free-association game. I'll say a word and you tell me the first thing that comes to mind. Ok Ready? Go! First one-- ok, "America." Did you say "fuck yeah?" Apple pie? Democracy? The world's worst liars for politicians? Ok, let's try another one. Alright ready? "Christmas!" Just tell me the first thing that comes to mind now. Santa Claus? Candy Canes? Pine trees? Snow? Ok last one-- "Vietnam!" What do you think--what comes to mind? Napalm? Jungle? Agent Orange? Well think again!

To debunk one of your preconceptions, there are not a lot of people you can talk to who even remember the Vietnam war. Unless you speak Vietnamese, which is probably even harder than Chinese and I'm doing a pretty crumby job of learning even that. It has 7 or 8 tones instead of 4 and is dictated by sounds that English tongues really don't make. So when you go to Vietnam, learn the local word for "passport" before you learn the word for "war." It will be more useful.

So if studying war history is not your priority, what can you spend your time doing?When I say "Vietnam" surely you would not have free-associated "climbing." If you are in the dark about this though, you are overlooking what could definitely be described as a treasure trove of limestone cliffs and karsts, most unclimbed, all of very high quality-- a place ready for adventure and rife with possibility.

Be ready for some drama in getting there, but rest assured you will get some good use out of those rock shoes you brought all the way through the jungle and across the ocean, because Ha Long Bay is a climber's paradise.

Said Nate, "it really is a good place to sit down and write your novel." When you finish, they will give you back your passport.

I teach the novel Brave New World, and often students don't understand some things about it. Notably, the main character Winston Smith is charged with the task of rewriting historical documents in keeping with the constantly changing party ideologies and shifting political alliances depicted in the novel. He literally rewrites history to match what “Big Brother” wants citizens to believe in the present. When students don't understand this concept, I will have to add the Hanoi War Museum and the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum to the ever-expanding list of actual real world examples.

First of all, what we in America call the Vietnam War is called here the "War of Resistance Against the American Imperialists" and "the War Against the US and Saigon Regime" and of course the "War to kill all capitalist pig-dogs and purge the glorious motherland of polluting bourgeoisie petty fascist colonialist parasites (hahaha)." I jest, but only a little bit. Another museum, in Saigon, which I did not visit, details the American war in Vietnam and is called the "war crimes museum." It's clearly a matter of perspective.

We strolled among charming colonial era buildings painted a typically French shade known as "Monte Carlo” yellow to find a very soviet looking construction which housed the mummified body of Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. Despite his request for a simple cremation, in keeping with communist leadership precedent, they preserved the poor guy and now you can visit "Uncle Ho" as he is affectionately known, and admire his wispy Vietnamese beard which has not changed one bit, despite his being totally and completely dead.

A friendly fruit seller accosts us and asks us if we would like to take her picture. If she was upset with us being from the nation that destroyed her homeland and killed 3 million of her friends and relatives, her only reaction was to smile and over-charge us for pineapple slices.

You can visit Ho Chi Minh’s house as well, but don’t expect much. This was one very unhypocritical communist, for the “house” in which the father of modern Vietnam spent a good deal of his life looks as if it could have been built for about 20 dollars in lumber. “If you had a party here, you would have to call it a ‘Hodown’” says Nate. Jack and I agree, although it was hard for me to picture the Vietnamese president engaged in any “fun” of any kind. The pictures in the museum depict a studious man, writing letters in French, Chinese, Vietnamese and English lobbying for Vietnamese freedom. This separated him from his contemporaries in the US who were doing blow with strippers and hiding the truth of their political malfeasance from the American Public. But “Hodown” was a good joke anyway.

Elsewhere in the war museum we see samples of his speeches which preach that “revolutionary ideals must inspire the messes.” And what greater mess than the Vietnam War itself, which was prefaced by centuries and centuries of strife in Vietnam. In fact, the American War in Vietnam is just a funny little footnote in the epic tome of Vietnamese conflict. Pretty much they had been displacing invaders since long before forever, as the war museum indicated. When you first walk in, the pieces in the museum might remind you of Genghis Khan style warfare, chariots and swords and the like.

Departing from the American style “War is Kind” museum tradition, in Vietnam the articles on display were quite visceral. Some big knives in glass cases boasted captions like “this knife killed four enemies.” There was an old French helmet blasted full of holes, it’s wearer having suffered a horrible fate which I couldn’t help but envision. The caption read “steel helmet evidence of the failure of the French.”

Out back they had a huge pile of airplane fuselages burned and destroyed, remnants of the jets that had been successfully shot out of the sky by the NVA. They had turned the detritus into a sort of grotesque sculpture, the whole thing kind of crumpled and melted, like a Salvador Dali clock.

If I were to add museums like this to my list of examples of historical revisionism, I would have to ponder the idea that our government was likely to have fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which began our escalated involvement in the war. Yet today it would seem that we read this as historical fact—that we were indeed attacked while innocently cruising around Vietnam, provoking attack. I would also have to consider the angle from which a story is told. From my angle, I have only heard about what the war meant for America. The war meant the tumultuous 60’s, internal strife in America, a divided nation, lies and political deception, racism and the civil rights movement, noble veterans dishonored by their discredited cause. All of the movies I have seen and books I have read depict these issues. For the Vietnamese, we were just another aggressor, and our war is remembered as such.

Singa-poor is just FINE

I dislike rules. I dislike rules of any kind really, including those rules which regulate grammar, which is why I have been known to praise sentences like the following which I read in a student essay back in 2004:

“If Anne Frank was so innocent, tell me why were they hiding in an attic again for?” It's hard for me to conceal my amusement with a sentence like that.

Like many Americans, my lack of knowledge about Singapore is what characterizes my understanding of Singapore. I know that they don't allow gum or spitting and that they caned a teenager once for spray painting a wall with graffiti. Other than that I don't know much.

The gum thing is true. A cab driver yesterday paused in his lament over the People's Action Party (he called them the “Pay And Pay” party) to warn me that I faced a 500 dollar fine for the gum chewing. It is a myth though, he explained, that farting in public is illegal, which I thought was particularly charitable.

A casual stroll along the river toward an upscale neighborhood called “The Quay” revealed what looked to be a scale model of the Titanic atop three 57 story towers. Clearly all of the rule making had not encouraged the triumph of common sense regarding what was to be considered architecturally and aesthetically pleasing, but the “eyesore” nature of this building nonetheless encouraged closer inspection. We took the MRT system across town (note to Durian lovers-- eating this fragrant fruit in the metro is punishable by a fine of 500 dollars) and walked along a concrete path by the bay. The “esplanade” (this means “to try to explain something while drunk”) was lined with modern art stainless steel irrigating tubes which sprayed a fine mist over the tropical shimmer of the nearby water, making walking in the sun very nearly tolerable. This led to a mall, which wound through a casino, which led to another mall, which led to a series of security check-points requiring that we have shoes (have you seen how hot it is outside?) and passports. We vowed to return later.

When we finally got up to floor 57, which was only accessible to us if we were guests of the hotel or willing to pay 14 dollars for a beer, we were rewarded with a view of the most spit and gum free city I have ever laid eyes on from an expensive penthouse bar. Somehow though in our enjoyment of money, we three educators were noticeably aware of things which we desired—watches, furniture, coats made from the finest endangered species, or perhaps a live lion cub as underwear such as the one worn by actress Julianne Moore in the storefront window. We were cognizant of being watched and being identified as foreign invaders like “projections” in an “inception” dream, or viruses among helper T cells. That and the fact that we couldn't spit from the top made us retreat from the penthouse bar and into the safety of the Hard Rock Cafe, which was pretty much classy enough for me. As we were walking over there, my colleague stepped into a wad of gum which stretched away with comic elasticity from the sole of her shoe. Singapore would have been significantly less amusing without that one wad of gum.

Similarly, in my role as newspaper editor for the daily publication of The Hague International Model United Nations (THIMUN), the best sentences were the result of comical grammatical errors. The only way to ruin them would have been to improve them, which was (unfortunately) my lot in life. “Some of the topics the assembly wilt focus on in the committee included the crisis terror of Nepal and the lack of government, the implementation of resolution to-for-to concerning is real, Cote D'Ivoire, and the peace keeping of Cypress” becomes “some of the topics the assembly will focus on include the formation of a constitution in Nepal, implementation of Resolution 242 concerning Israel, facilitating the implementation of the 2003 peace agreement in Cote D'Ivoire, and the fate of the UN peace-keeping mission in Cyprus.” Sure it's shiny, polished, non-offensive and nondenominational, free of gum and spit, but it clearly lacks personality and that indescribable flair that can only come of free will. In that sense, a sentence like this one is right at home in Singapore.

Eye of the beholder

It was the day of the fashion show and anyone with a sense of the absurd would have been forgiven for thinking that aliens had invaded. But these were not people with any sense of the absurd. They were fashion enthusiasts.

In the lobby of the hotel, scores of women waltzed around proudly crowned with what looked to me to be 8th grade science projects-- a DNA double helix, butterfly wings, Papier mâché flower petals and Adam's Family inspired coifs. I arrived on the scene a bit late owing to the fact that I had a desire to sleep in. I expressed over a text to a friend back in the real world who inquired as to my whereabouts that since I was unimportant to the proceedings, that I got to sleep in. He replied that I was not unimportant, but that I needed to regain control over what he called "the sense of narrative."

But there is no place more appropriate than a fashion show to understand that all sense of narrative is a fleeting illusion. This truth is easily understood when the smell of nail polish so strongly permeates the open air as to seem like a weather system, a heavy fog that obscures all sense of meaning.

The hotel was called the "Shangri-la" but as a name which would reveal the sense of theme intended by the proprietors, it was ineffective at best. The inside of the place looked like something off the set of "water world" with fountains and pools of carp which the non fashion inclined chose to fish out of. I had some inkling that the design of the hotel was intended to convey a sense of fairy tale fantasy though, with it's scarecrows near the facade, and a giant windmill that wound round a path next to plastic sculptures of mushrooms like the ones from "Super Mario Brothers."

Nearby a cafe along the banks of the river which stretched from the mountains of Yilan to the nearby ocean, there stood a group of young women posing for a photo indicating the rudimentary "peace sign" which seems to be the signature of so many poses in Taiwan. They all smiled at the same time and looked right at the camera, the implication of their attempt at narrative (we all became suddenly happy at the same time) seeming anachronistic against the backdrop of the rainy river and the cafe which later proved to be locked and empty, cobwebs in the corners.

I laid down on a few chairs which I had pushed together, and enshrouded in the fog of nail polish, I wafted into sleep. From some very strange dreams, I awoke abruptly. Momentarily, I was not cognizant of where I was. From "where I am I?" my mind wandered to "what am I doing here?" and this question, sadly, was not a query which wakefulness could answer. "I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow" [...]

If you were to ask Melissa though, she would spin a yarn of the youngest nail-work artist ever to win the "most original" prize, of youthful energy stymied by the established order, subversion of the dominant paradigm the sort of which Melissa, the tattoo artist, exhibitionist, perpetually scornful of established social norms would be in support of... err, well, apparently she's no good at doing nails.

The story, told in frustrated tones, went something like this:

Two years ago, Melissa was asked to be a model for the up-and-coming child prodigy nail artist in Tai-Chung, whose mother, like so many scary stage moms, had groomed her to be Taiwan's youngest nail art champion. Melissa was the only "foreigner" model at the competition, which included hundreds of competitors from far away China, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and other south Asian countries where they take their fingernails, very very seriously. To include a foreigner model, and to bill oneself as the youngest ever nail artist in the history of Taiwan was, by Melissa's perception, merely a publicity stunt, albeit one that worked smoothly enough to win the then 10 year old nail artist the prize of most original. But regrettably (again, according to Melissa) this was at the expense of the dignity of her (Melissa's) fingernails which suffered an onslaught of chemicals and ended up looking "awful, just awful" to connoisseurs of such things, who obviously overlooked certain elements of sloppiness and awarded most original to the young girl anyway, much to the outrage of those older and more wizened veterans of the craft.

Those same wizened veterans were busy creating the most elaborate and dare I say "gaudy and pretentious" nails which had ever been glued to human hands. Some of the danglies, bobblies and various accoutrements, were longer and larger than the fingers themselves, and in sum, larger and more clumsy than the hands themselves. Just for fun, I walked up and offered one nail model a beverage in a teacup, just to watch her try to pick it up which she couldn't. She probably would have died of thirst if the contest had lasted longer. One woman had little bowties glued to her fingers. "Cute" would be the word, provided that you would also apply that word to some sort of bird species whose overly elaborate plumage caused other birds to avoid mating with it, suspecting it to be crazy.

I am asked to pose for an array of photos, Melissa standing nearby. I think "of those so close beside me, which are you?" and I smile. Another photo, and another and another, until I have slipped into another time and place, somewhere else entirely. A handshake, another smile. "Wo ting bu dong." Smile. Exchange business cards. Smile. Nod.

Later, in the night-market, we saw a sweatshirt on which the phrase "what the fuck?" was indecorously printed. Now that's my kind of fashion.

Ele-phant shoes

She was an artist, and I liked to pretend I was an artist and we both had little else going on love-wise, so it seemed an acceptable level of risk to declare ourselves married on facebook as an artistic statement, the proposal having stemmed from an offer to be models in a bridal show for a Taiwanese wedding planner. The Mandarin word for “model” sounds like “mah-tuh.”

She told me that a trick she would play on her students when she was trying to get them to quiet down was to ask them to read her lips. “But we don't know how to read lips!” they replied.

“Here, I'll teach you.” (mouths silently the word “hello”).

“Oh! I know! You said 'hello!'”

“Yes, that's right. Now what am I saying?” (mouths silently the words “my name is Melissa”).

“Oh, oh! You said 'my name is Melissa!'”

“Yes, now what am I saying?” (mouths slowly and deliberately the phrase “I love you” taking care to feel each morsel-syllable as it moves across the quiet tongue silently forward to the lips).

(every student goes crazy) “I love you!”

“Noooo Silly! El-e-phant shoe!” (laughter). Not withstanding the fact that elephants don't wear shoes and that it makes no sense to say “elephant shoe” to someone, I wondered if whether I would have the strength and conviction to say “I do” when the time came, if it ever came. Maybe I would just say nothing with “lips [that] began to move, forming soundless words” to quote Salinger out of context.

The Taiwanese wedding planner told me that in a tuxedo I looked like Jude Law. He pronounced it “jew-duh luh.” The cameras flashed and people spoke words we didn't understand, while we spoke words which they probably didn't understand.

I thought of how funny it would be as performance art to declare my marriage on facebook, complete with photographic evidence of bride and wedding gown. But somehow picturing the comments from ex-girlfriends and my mother dissuaded me a little from the committing the hoax, though the message I would convey would be nonetheless important. We always hurt the ones we love.

As a kid I was told repeatedly the story of the boy who cried “wolf.” But somehow I never grasped the moral, thinking that if I cried “wolf” loud enough, that it would have the power of incantation, that it would become true. With lips that continued to move.

Probably he would suffer the loudest would be my father whose amusement at repeating such aphorisms as Mencken's “marriage is an institution. But I'm not ready for an institution” or Oscar Wilde's “the proper basis for a marriage is a mutual misunderstanding” has always been akin to that of a child playing with a favorite toy. By getting married, to my brother I would have effectively died.

We filed languidly between rows of enamored onlookers to the melody of “Ave Maria” or something, and I was convinced momentarily, and the spell lasted throughout the photo shoot that ensued. All because of a song.

I thought of a conversation I had with my mother. She said “so I spent the day with David and Shannon.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Well, they're my adopted Grand-kids, since I know that I'll never have any of my own!” She laughed, but it was a laugh that betrayed a certain earnest longing, which she has been enthusiastically expressing since I hit puberty. I wondered whether I could fake this on facebook too.

It's a funny thing, the way we know each other but don't know each other. This postmodern paradox that we are continually “in touch” with pictures and newsfeeds available at the push of a button, but authentic living has gone to seed on the sacrificial altar of personal advertisement, the facebook page that proclaims what Freud described as the separate “selves” of who we are versus who we want others to think we are.

In a departure from Freudian psychology, Jacques Lacan theorized that our “unconscious” is structured like a language, and that the self of “who am I?” versus the self of “who do I want others to think I am?” could be perceived as the difference between “I love you” and “elephant shoes.”

The Taiwanese wedding planner was proud of how the show went, and was effusive with his praise of his “mah-tuh(s).” He even shared a rather personal tale, telling us that his father had withheld words of praise almost his entire life, but on that night had told his son that he was proud of him. To over-praise an underling, in Taiwanese society, constitutes a loss of face, albeit a useful one.

In looking at the images from that day alone in my bachelor's den, a month after my performance art marriage, I lingered on a few images, momentarily convinced of the magic incantation. I closed the computer's screen on itself and sat down with a book in a dimly lit corner. I felt the apartment start to shake--just a tiny earthquake, one of many.