The Art of Translation by Todd Foley (reprinted by permission from Europa Editions)

City of Fiction by Yu Hua, trans. by Todd Foley

Translator’s Afterword  by Todd Foley

“Here form is content, content is form”

—Samuel Beckett, on Finnegan’s Wake 

The vast distance between English and Chinese makes the question of translating voice and style especially fraught. When a Chinese text is dismantled and rebuilt in English, how should it sound? What are the rules for its reconstruction? For all that has been written on the theory of translation, there is no clear answer, as the gold standard of “faithfulness” proves to always be relative—“faithful” to what? Every translation, as it takes shape from the idiosyncratic relationship between the original text and the translator’s feeling of it (which is, of course, always socially and historically contingent), poses these questions anew. 

City of Fiction presented me with some new questions of style and voice I did not expect from Yu Hua. Following his impeccably executed avant-garde modernism of the 1980s, Yu Hua’s novels of the past three decades have all been characterized by brisk, rollicking narratives that critically examine recent Chinese history up through his contemporary moment. His energetic style is typically full of fecal matter, blood, guts, and misogynistic sexuality, which paradoxically coheres around an incisive and tear-jerking social allegory—which itself is merely the first step toward the more serious philosophical tensions his works explore. City of Fiction, however, is set in the early twentieth century, spanning the end of the Qing dynasty through the unruly Warlord Era that soon followed the establishment of the new republic. The historical setting and lack of a direct connection to the contemporary moment surprised me—how did this novel fit in with the present, and with the rest of Yu Hua’s oeuvre? Moreover, while City of Fiction moves vigorously through plenty of visceral violence and misogyny, it is characterized by a notably repetitive rhetorical style that at times conveys seemingly mundane, extraneous details. The narrative voice also feels quite easy and plainspoken; although it sometimes gestures toward classical and early twentieth-century formulations in accordance with the historical setting, overall it is very accessible and decidedly modern. As the translator, I felt the need to capture these narrative elements—but how and why were they important to the novel? 

Examining the novel’s repetition is one way to get our noses down on the trail of this question. Readers will easily notice, for example, that Xiaomei is always lowering her head, people are always tucking their hands up into their sleeves, and that “small boats with bamboo awnings” are all over the Wanmudang. Rhetorical repetition, like this example from Chapter 4, is also common:

He felt that Xiaomei possessed a delicate grace he had never encountered before…even after such long and arduous travels, she remained tender and spirited.

The next day, this tender and spirited woman fell ill.

Here we see the chain-like structure of narration this repetition creates, presenting the ensuing information by rhetorically hooking back around the previous sentence through the repetition of “tender and spirited.” The consistent repetition throughout the novel constructs the story like links in a chain, hooking back around a previous phrase or image in order to move on to the next. 

This chain-link pattern and rhythm extends from the smallest stylistic expression in words and sentences to the larger structure of the novel as a whole. The central story of Xiaomei and Lin Xiangfu is one of repetitive unions and separations: They begin apart, then come together in their initial meeting; then they separate, reunite, and separate again. Part 2 of the story then repeats this pattern, but from a perspective that focuses on Xiaomei. Mapping their trajectories, one after the other as they are presented in the novel, results in a chain:

Importantly, the novel’s ending leaves the status of the chain’s structure ambiguous: is it a final reunion, or a permanent separation? 

At this point we can see the questions raised by this narrative pattern extend to a deeper level, projecting into both the past and future. The undulating pattern of the chain necessarily implies the basic dynamics of process and change in traditional Chinese philosophy, stretching all the way back to the Book of Changes and most famously expressed in the opening line of the classic 14th-century novel Three Kingdoms: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.” Yet it also leaves open the question of the novel’s connection to what comes next—how is it linked to the ensuing chaos of China’s twentieth century, with the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Cultural Revolution still to come? Furthermore, how is it linked to the present, and can it tell us anything about what lies in store? 

While this stylistic feature of the chain both structures the novel and links it to a broader historical narrative, it may also help us see certain connections with Yu Hua’s other works. The most obvious example might be Chapter 26 (Part 1), in which Gu Tongnian uses his economic advantage to give free rein to his pubescent desires. At first glance, his excessive indulgence in prostitutes at such a young age might seem shocking, tasteless, and a bit out-of-place. But any reader familiar with Yu Hua’s major works—as nearly all Chinese readers are—will immediately recognize similarities with Baldy Li from his 2005-06 novel Brothers. Baldy Li’s pure, animalistic sexual urges are revealed early on during his childhood in the Cultural Revolution, although at that point his only outlet is self-stimulation and a precarious peek into the women’s toilets. Later on, however, by channeling his misogynistic desires through the wild neoliberal opportunism of the post-Mao reform era, he becomes insanely rich and uses his extreme wealth to hold a national beauty pageant for virgins (which in turn sparks a local economy of hymen reconstruction). This linkage between Gu Tongnian and Baldy Li seems to raise important questions: What are the underlying features of these moments of rapid historical transition that create such similar characters? What does their comparison say about shifts in value systems and social structures on the one hand, and the release of capitalist desire on the other? While Baldy Li fully harnesses the mechanisms of capitalism and ends the novel preparing to go off into outer space, Gu Tongnian is instead tricked into being sold off to Australia, his labor to be exploited by Western capitalists. Why do the paths of these two characters diverge so drastically?

Yu Hua’s style of describing characters’ actions may sometimes seem wordy and repetitive in translation, but this too provides important links to his broader literary concerns. Take this example from chapter 56, as the citizens of Xizhen chase the bandits: 

As they ran along shouting, they could tell their shouts were growing fewer and farther between; only then did they realize there were only a few of them left.

In this typical formulation, we are first told of the characters’ physical perception of their surroundings—they hear fewer shouts—and the information is then processed for its human meaning (there are only a few villagers left in the chase). Given the prevailing preferences in standard English writing, this line may easily be edited for efficiency and clarity, pared down to something like, “The villagers’ shouts decreased as fewer and fewer continued the chase.” But the particular link between perception of the physical world and its human significance has long been a central element of Yu Hua’s writing, perhaps most obviously foregrounded in his 1987 story “One Kind of Reality,” in which a child accidentally kills his baby cousin by focusing on random external stimuli instead of the child’s safety. It is the mark of a style that Yu Hua made most explicit in his 1989 essay “Hypocritical Writings”:

...I don’t think human characters should enjoy a privileged position in a work; rivers, sunlight, the leaves of trees, streets, and houses are all equally important. I think people, rivers, sunlight, and the like are all the same—in a piece of writing, all are simply props.  Rivers display their desire through flowing, while houses reveal the existence of their desire by standing in silence. Human characters, along with rivers, sunlight, streets, houses, and all sorts of props combine to create an integrated whole through mutual interaction....      

In City of Fiction, Yu Hua’s subtle stylistic maneuvers consistently prioritize an objective logic of physical reaction that precedes their significance in the human, social realm. What might initially seem like verbose prose (or bad translation!) ends up linking the novel to an important and longstanding feature of Yu Hua’s style of literary representation.    

More anomalous in City of Fiction is Yu Hua’s inclusion of tedious historical details, which occasionally interrupt his characteristically fast-paced narrative. Perhaps the most obvious example is the description of various types of woodworking when Lin Xiangfu goes out to learn from the master craftsmen in Chapter 9. This passage may seem superfluous and repetitive, and in the interest of the translation’s readability, it might have been significantly condensed or eliminated without affecting the overall plot. However, I advocated for its full inclusion because of the important ways it both links the novel to a broader context and points toward a deeper structure of society. First of all, the passage draws a distinction between those who make Western furniture and traditional artisans—rather than forcing the wood into a certain shape or form by hammering nails all over the place, traditional woodworkers are so in tune with the wood and their craft that they rarely even need to use dowels. Implicit here is the Daoist philosophy of Zhuangzi, who recounts wheelwright Bian’s description of his work:

If I chip at a wheel too slowly, the chisel slides and does not grip; if too fast, it jams and catches in the wood. Not too slow, not too fast; I feel it in the hand and respond from the heart, the mouth cannot put it into words, there is a knack in it somewhere which I cannot convey to my son and which my son cannot learn from me. That is how through my seventy years I have grown old chipping at wheels.  

Woodworking, therefore, is not simply a matter of passing down skills, but instead involves a more fundamental understanding in which one’s individual skills are couched; it is from this basis that the passage then presents us with the intricate and expansive network of occupational specializations. This lengthy discussion of woodworking thereby provides a particular window through which to glimpse the impressive extent of the economic, cultural, and even ontological fabric of society that has more or less persisted and developed, almost unconsciously, through millennia of dynastic rule—only to now be completely upended through the historical forces represented by One-Ax Zhang and the bloody chaos he brings. 

Finally, City of Fiction is a story of north and south, and Yu Hua’s lively yet plain-spoken and accessible language is the crucial link that joins them. “Chinese,” of course, is a rather ambiguous linguistic term that generally encompasses one common system of writing and countless spoken dialects, all with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility. While efforts to standardize a modern vernacular were well underway at the time of the novel’s setting, most of the characters would have had little contact with this, and many are illiterate. Yu Hua has noted that the dialogue in the novel was a challenge, because he felt “archaic terms would sound awkward to the reader.” Ultimately, he says, “I decided so long as I didn’t use words that sounded distinctly anachronistic, that was good enough.” Rather than get bogged down with historical accuracy or the difficulty of conveying specific local dialects, Yu Hua instead opts for an unpretentious presentation that can often feel more oral than literary. I have tried to capture this in my translation by embracing grammatical particles and by sometimes using slightly expanded phrasings when more efficient formulations did not strike the right down-to-earth tone.

Yu Hua’s accessible narrative voice belies a story that in many ways centers on the difficulties not only of communication, but of the construction of narrative itself. Lin Xiangfu intuitively identifies Xizhen as Xiaomei’s hometown because of the dialect, even though he can’t understand it. The city of Wencheng , however, remains elusive. The name of this imaginary city, which is also the original title of the novel, poses some challenges for translation: cheng is a standard word for city or town, but wen 文 has various meanings in Chinese, including culture, civilization, writing, arts, refinement, language, and literature. Our understanding of wen in the name of this fictional, symbolic city may easily involve all of these in one respect or another. The translation of Wencheng I have chosen for the title—City of Fiction—emphasizes one aspect in particular, which is the question of narrative writ large. Do we ever find Wencheng, this “city of fiction,” or not? What exactly is this fiction, and what does it mean for the larger story Yu Hua is telling of Chinese modernity?  

In China in Ten Words, Yu Hua recounts his appreciation of Lu Xun’s “lucid and supple writing”: “When confronting reality,” he says of Lu Xun, “[…] his narrative moves with such momentum it’s like a bullet that penetrates the flesh and goes out the other side, an unstoppable force.” Yu Hua’s narrative voice similarly penetrates to the heart of the story, just as Lu Xun’s groundbreaking use of the vernacular did over a hundred years ago. Much like Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (1918), in which the madman uses the modern vernacular to express his perception of the true cannibalistic nature of traditional Confucian society, Yu Hua’s unencumbered language helps reveal the deeper forces that have shaped China’s struggles with modernity. In my translation, I have therefore tried to avoid language that comes with too much allusive or intertextual baggage in English. I hope this translation can facilitate similarly direct access for readers in English to Yu Hua’s singularly incisive depiction of Chinese society. 

In practical reality, “world literature” in English, despite its purported universality, ends up being a genre of works that translate well in accordance with Western literary and aesthetic preferences, which are always culturally, historically, politically, and ideologically situated. How many works of contemporary Mainland Chinese writers, for example, end up on the shelves of American bookstores—even despite Mo Yan’s 2012 Nobel Prize? Given the circumstances, the motivation to conform a translated Chinese text to certain generic standards is quite reasonable, as an effort to facilitate the much-needed representation of Chinese literature in English. In this translation, however, as I’ve detailed above, I’ve made several choices that resist conforming to more standard editorial expectations. My efforts to explain these choices are in the hope that they do not hinder the reading experience, but instead open up more ways to appreciate the superb and dynamic craftsmanship of this great writer.  

Asia In Seattle: Mam's Books

Bookstore pilgrimages are my favorite activities and I never feel I’ve truly visited a place until I’ve explored its bookstores. Yesterday I set off to find one in my own city, set in a neighborhood that once was mine. 

Maynard Avenue begins in what once was Nihonmachi and runs the length of the Chinatown-International District, ending not far from the old Immigration Center that serves as the border between the C-ID and the industrial area that’s now called SoDo. I lived on Maynard for years, in an old brick hotel that had been turned into efficiency apartments and for days on end, never had to leave my neighborhood. It held everything I needed and wanted--except for a bookstore. Although a branch of Kinokuniya Books was only several blocks away, it had gradually become a gift shop where Totoro and Pokemon had crowded out the books. Finding something to read there was like a scavenger hunt and I began to avoid the place to keep attacks of apoplexy at bay.

When a friend told me that a bookstore was opening on Maynard Avenue, one that was focused on Asian American literature, I was afraid to hope. Bookstores have almost vanished from downtown Seattle, a place that once had close to a dozen, and the handful that remained sold used books, with one holdout that was devoted to books on architecture. Even the established bookstores in other neighborhoods had resorted to selling socks and board games to boost their profit margins. What was I going to find in my favorite part of the city?

I walked into the shop and immediately lost my heart. It was filled with light and the walls were lined with bookshelves. In the center, a smiling young man stood behind a small desk and behind him, a beautiful older woman sat on a sofa. There were stools in bright primary colors, a display of packaged snacks behind the little sales desk and a cooler with soft drinks. A counter at the back of the store had a sign above it that offered a menu of coffees and teas.But what gave me a jolt of life that I hadn’t felt in a long time were the books.

They were beautifully displayed and carefully chosen. There were books I’ve read and loved, along with books I’d never seen before. I wandered the perimeter of the shop, reaching out to favorites and delighting in the surprises.

A good bookstore is predicated on surprise and Mam’s Books is full of them. Children’s bilingual board books, picture books that gleamed like jewels, graphic novels, cookbooks, novels and memoirs, all had selections that dazzled and tempted me. Best of all, books I had to hunt for in larger bookstores were here--on tables, faced-out on shelves, gloriously visible.

Sokha Danh had a goal and he’s already achieved it. He wanted a bookstore that would be a community center, with books that speak to the Asian American neighborhood that’s long been ignored by the city that surrounds it. He’s made a magnet for booklovers that’s welcoming and enticing and he makes everyone who walks through his doors feel at home immediately. 

The beautiful lady on the sofa is his mother and her radiant kindness pervades the shop, which her son named after his father. She and Sokha make this place one to return to again and again, for conversations, discoveries, and book buying. 

Mam’s Books is open on Friday evenings and on weekends at 608 Maynard Avenue. Go. I’ll see you there.~Janet Brown

Asia in Seattle: Chinatown Choy Chang 2022

I almost didn’t go to see Mak Fai’s lion dances yesterday. I’d seen them twice before this month and a third time seemed as though it would push them into the ordinary. Then I realized I hadn’t yet seen them by myself this year—and besides the day was gorgeous. It would be a double sin to forgo either.

Another troupe was on the streets and I asked one of the flag bearers what happened to Mak Fai. “They’ll be here,” he told me, “They’re in Renton right now.”

Feeling relieved, I began to wander through my old neighborhood as firecrackers popped in the distance and the gongs grew more exuberant. The corner shop with a sign from perhaps the 1940s, certainly the ‘50s, that said Gift Shop had become a sunny little coffee spot with objects for sale that were both random and pretty and quite clearly gifts. The spiffy little place whose baker is from Singapore had a hefty line waiting in front of it and so did Hood River with its ube cheesecake and other delights. Gan Bei’s bar/diner was still alive but not didn’t open until 4; Sizzling Pot King with its claims to Hunan cookery, backing up the assertion with a dish that held Mao’s name, was take-out only. King Noodle, to my absolute joy, was back to sit-down eating and Jade Garden had its usual cluster of people on the sidewalk, waiting to come inside.

Then I saw the green shirts of Mak Fai, outside their building and hurried to accost them. “I’m so glad you’re here. Somebody said you were performing in Renton.” “Lynnwood. Even farther. We’ll be ready in a little while.”

Feeling like a kid on her birthday, I kept walking, past Pho Ba which has been in place for decades, past the boarded up and closed Sun Bakery, A Piece of Cake, and Yummy House Bakery, which also were still swaddled in plywood but alive. Tai Tung had been the first to take down the boards from their front window, back in the summer of 2020. Harry kept the murals but he wanted the view and the light. Two years later, almost all the other businesses are still shrouded in painted sheets of plywood.

I was in the ID the morning after the second bout of protests had raged through the night before in May of 2020. I’d come to check on my friend Lei Ann’s boutique, Momo. All of her windows were intact, as were every pane on that side of Jackson Street. On the other side was a long string of shattered glass: Bank of America, Dim Sum King, the front window of the Bush Hotel where elderly residents sat to watch the world go by, the post office, an optometrist’s office, crazy destruction with no real pattern to it. Off Jackson Mike’s Noodles had its windows smashed and so did Jade Garden, completing the destruction at that restaurant that had begun on the first night of anger. It was the one spot that seemed to have been targeted because of a misinterpretation of an Instagram post put up by the owners’ son. 

As I was talking to the editor of the International Examiner, several young men came to her and said, “We’re going to cover every window with plywood. They even hit Mike’s.” By the time I left, a group of young Asian kids were hammering plywood on damaged businesses, joined by a crew of city workers only much later in the day. In the following weeks, artists were covering the boards with murals, their cans of paint obscuring the sidewalk. It was a triumph of community that now, if seen without context, seems grim.

But not when the lions came. I followed them for almost three hours, feeling my spirit lighten. 

The founder of the troupe, once known as The Lion Dance King of Kowloon and who began Mak Fai in 1974, wasn’t in evidence. His successor, Royal Tan, was someone I’d watched for over ten years, from his early adolescence to the leadership he inherited. The primary drummer was one I saw when he was very small. Now Jackie To has facial hair and he’s a star. There are small members of the troupe now whom Royal will bring along to stardom and there are more girls performing than I remembered from the past. 

Another troupe began to follow them and when I got close enough to read their shirts, it turned out they’d come up from Portland. Some of the girls disappeared for a while and returned with shopping bags from Daiso. Later Jackie came to the oldest of the troupe and gestured toward the drum. Portland took over the drum and gongs for a while before they all left.  Solidarity among lion dancers.

I had to leave too, but I didn’t go far. I followed the trail of lettuce leaves into Tai Tung where I had a Tsingtao and a plate of scallops and bok choy that I dosed liberally with chili oil. Just as I was ready to leave, the sound of firecrackers exploded, sounding as if they’d been set off in the restaurant. The drum and gongs were rampant and I came out from my booth to see lions in the house, only inches away from me. Harry, whom I adore, had been busy in the kitchen, but there he was, with his fabulous smile. He stood in the doorway of Tai Tung as the lions grappled with the lettuce. Finally they captured it and tossed it into the air. Harry turned back toward all of us in the restaurant, incandescent. “I caught it,” he said.

I’m smiling now as I write this and my spirit has come back to my body. It’s the gift of the lions and the presence of Chinatown. I may not live there anymore but a tiny part of it will always be mine.

Asia in Seattle: Mak Fai Lion Dancers

Yesterday I followed the unmistakable sound of the Mak Fai Lion Dance Troupe to King Street, walking down an alley to save time. Parked on the edge of Hing Hay Park was their pickup truck with the Mak Fai banner, filling the street with drumming and the clash of gongs. Jackets and green teeshirts that identify members of the troupe surrounded two dancing lions and their masked, robed companions. 

The explosive shots of firecrackers were sharp but comforting, and the acrid smell of the little clouds of smoke bit at my throat and made me happy. It had been over two years since I’d last inhaled that odor, or had watched lions come to life and chase bad luck away from Chinatown. I’ve been waiting for this ever since I returned from Tucson last April and now this group of dancers and musicians were feeding my spirit, as they have for many years.

When I still lived in the ID, I’d rush outdoors the minute I heard the beat that belongs exclusively to the Mak Fai troupe. I’ve spent hours following them through the streets of the neighborhood that belongs to them, watching them grow up. I’ve seen the young man who conducted the percussionists with subtle waves of his fingers yesterday as he changed from a serious bespectacled little boy to a rockstar drummer and I’ve witnessed a talented teenager grow into a man who leads the troupe now. I’ve seen the martial artist who came to Seattle from Kowloon many years ago, the man who taught these kids how to be artists and athletes, grow old. He still stands with them as the guiding force behind it all.

The day was bright yet cold but even so the lions moved from one restaurant to the next and the percussionists took their turns to play in the back of the pickup. I followed them for over an hour, standing nearby and absorbing as much of their artistry as I could until hypothermia began to feel like a very real possibility. But as I waited underground for the train, the firecrackers and the clashing music echoed triumphantly down the stairs and through the tunnel, blessing the businesses, the streets, and the people of the C/ID. Once again the Mak Fai troupe had ushered the neighborhood into a new year and a renewal of life, chasing away the Rat, leading in the Ox.~Janet Brown

A Primer to the Future

“It pays to produce a pathogen that could kill a billion people.” This quote from evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace’s Big Farms Make Big Flu (NYU Press 2016) leaps out from Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm like a punch to the gut. We’ve read how Amazon has reaped vast profits from Covid-19 and they are not alone. Every grocery store, delivery service, and entertainment livestream presenter has benefited from the coronavirus. Our suffering is their profit--and this isn’t a new development. Industrial farms, with their “optimization processes,” blithely produce cheap food without regard for the health of those who will eat it, as uncaring as small-scale manufacturers in China who killed babies by adding melamine to infant formula, or others “cutting production by half” through adding ground-up human hair to soy sauce.

The big difference is Chinese people are aware of their country’s lack of food safety, which lags behind Mexico and Turkey. In a Shenzhen mall a restaurant sign assured customers that they use their cooking oil only once and a manager of a coffee shop in that same city once told me “You must be very careful with water, food, anything you put in your mouth.” Supermarkets selling imported food are commonplace. And, Wang tells us, food safety is an issue that threatens the future of the Chinese government.

The rural population of China is 40% of the country’s population and 8% of the world’s total. For millennia, farmers have worked on plots of land that are no larger than two football fields, in “a basic form of poverty alleviation.” They subsist on what they can grow on land they do not own. Displacing them with industrialized agriculture poses another political threat.

So does the migration of young rural residents to China’s cities. The higher wages found there are lessened by the higher cost of living. Migrant workers replicate the conditions they left behind in “urban villages” and the squalor of what they have contrasts cruelly with the metropolitan luxury they see every day.

How China is bringing those migrants home with a new village-based economy is a story that almost defies the Western imagination. It is, Wang says, “as if Amazon decided it suddenly wanted to offer assistance to an Appalachian coal-mining town by helping its citizens start candy businesses and offering them Amazon-backed loans.”

Alibaba is China’s answer to Amazon. Its online shopping site, Taobao, has double the active monthly users of Amazon--and it’s not unique in China. Its fellow-tech giant, Tencent, in 2019 had 1,164 million active monthly users on its social media site, WeChat, buyers and sellers as well as chatterers. Both entities have made cash obsolete in China with Alipay and WeChat Wallet, transmitting transactions over mobile phones.

Wang discovers that no matter how remote a Chinese village may be, although it may lack indoor plumbing, it has 4G and 5G cellular service. In a distant village where Wang asks to buy some of a restaurant’s chili paste, the transaction is only $1.40 US but the proprietor asks that it be paid through WeChat. Chinese tourists complain that when traveling abroad, they have to use cash. 

Taobao has gone to great lengths in making villages computer-literate. They train a few inhabitants to become “brand ambassadors” who then train their neighbors in the ways of e-commerce at a Rural Taobao Service Center housed in a local convenience store. Villagers learn how to shop on Taobao, buy railway tickets without facing the scrum of a train station, and make doctor’s appointments. Eventually they learn how to sell products that come from their farms and from their homes. Wang meets one village millionaire who began making costumes for photography studios and now exports them all over the world, sent via AliExpress and transacted through Alipay. He lives in the first of the Taobao villages, where “more than ten percent of the village households are manufacturing at home for Taobao.com. Begun in 2012, Taobao villages have caught the interest of the World Bank and Alibaba’s Electronic World Trade Platform has outposts in Malaysia, Rwanda, and South Africa.

Perhaps most important, youthful migrants are returning to their villages, lured by e-commerce and supported by loans from Alipay when needed. 

“Shopping is powerful,” Wang points out, “instilling a cruel optimism.” In a self-definition as “a Han Chinese American expat, Harvard educated, a dutiful American citizen,” who identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, Wang admits “online shopping is a meditative act for me.” They see it as “aspirational spending” that lures consumers worldwide. And when the transaction is completed, it’s likely to end up in a Chinese Alipay or WeChat Wallet account. China’s new revolution is financed by global purchases.

Food safety is becoming the norm for Chinese who can afford it, enriching the farmers who produce it. Chickens, butchered and ready to cook, are delivered to affluent households, who can trace the safety of their poultry by scanning a QR code on the chicken's ankle bracelet. This brings up the entire history of the bird’s three-month life and its journey from farm to table via records in a system that rejects any falsification, one record building on the next in a block chain that has been developed by coders. Faith in the producer has been transferred to faith in the code, but as Wang points out, we all put our lives into the hands of  software every day--on planes and trains. 

For this free-range, vegetable-fed chicken, the consumer pays the equivalent of forty US dollars. The farmer receives only fourteen of them, but at least in one case, he will have sold 6000 chickens.

Although Chinese farmers reject the idea of industrial farms, China’s appetite for pork is so vast that the government holds a pork reserve in the same way that the US government maintains one for wheat. A pork shortage could provoke the same sort of rioting that a shortage of bread caused in France just before its revolution. With this in mind, in 2013 China’s WH Group bought America’s Smithfield Foods. The producers of legendary hams are now wholly owned by a Chinese business group which has extended its industrial farms in addition to the traditional family-run variety and has created “an environmental headache for the communities that live around them.” However these communities are far from China.

Within China, the panic instilled by African swine fever that threatened to kill every pig within its range has increased scrutiny upon human error on pig farms. Alibaba’s ET Agricultural Brain is working on using artificial intelligence to raise pigs, their goal one of eventually replacing human “meat machines” with robotic beings of AI.

It’s here that Wang extrapolates into the future, where robots are the workers and humans are paid a monthly stipend to meet living expenses and to shop, thereby enriching those who own it all. Not so impossible--Andrew Yang addressed this in his campaign for president and it’s certain to come up again. But, Wang asks, in this future where is the sense of commitment, where is “the poetry of living”?

Perhaps Shenzhen native Naomi Wu has an answer. Found on Instagram as @reallysexycyborg, Wu disguises her tech expertise under self-designed outfits that could get her arrested in most corners of the world, clothing that generously reveals her implanted balloon breasts. But this is only advertising for an art form whose gallery is Wu’s body. She’s a DIY maker and engineer, a wizard with a 3-D printer, “born human but she is a self-proclaimed cyborg...with cyborg body modifications.” Wu’s dream is to have her own shop in Shenzhen’s largest electronic market where she’ll sell cyborg body parts to women who want only the best arms, the best eyes. As Wu says, in a world of algorithms, “You have to give the computer what it wants.”

In the beginning of this journey into China, Wang meets a farmer who says “the future is a created construct, that in the fields, in the long dark of winter, there is no future, because every day depends on tending to the present moment.” Later when Wang is back in the US, they find a similar, more academic idea. Lee Edelman in his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, claims “most of us end up creating a culture where political action is premised on the illusory figure of ‘the Child’, “trying to live for the child who does not exist.” “Stuck in a cycle of chasing after the future,” we should reject this in favor of existing fully in the present with “a sense of purpose, a sense of being needed.” 

When Wang looks ahead, “I am exhausted trying to conjure a blurry future.” “Without a future,” they decide, “I must give myself over to the present.” 

After wandering with Wang through what could be the world’s future as it’s practiced every day of this present in China, time becomes a foldable artificiality, as we’re all learning through the period dominated by Covid-19. All of us, along with Wang, are presented with “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning.”

Blockchain Chicken Farm is unlike any book most of us have ever read, made up of essays that are part travel literature, part investigative journalism, part an explanation of technological advances and influences, and completely suffused with personal observations and a generous dash of poetry. Influenced by M.F.K. Fisher and Alice B. Toklas, Wang has included fantastical, surreal recipes, projecting into a future that may well be happening now, given the rapid rate of change in China. (Witness the disappearance of Jack Ma and the possible diminishment of the Alibaba empire.). 

Wang is as unclassifiable as these essays, “an artist, a writer, a coder,” it says on the back of their book. Wang, in an interview, rejects the term “writer” as being too narrow, choosing “artist” instead. Initially studying to become a landscape architect, Wang found that to design a space or a park, software was used and began to think of its limitations. Realizing “how software can restrict or shape designs or how you think of the communities that you design for,” they became a software engineer who thinks of “inventing new Chinese characters to bypass automated censorship.” Creative Director for Logic, a magazine that exists in print and online, Wang says their “writing gives people a way to understand or interact in the world.” Most certainly it expands the world for readers in ways they might not expect. As Wang says, when writing about China for Americans, “fantasy and sci-fi are always palpable.”~Janet Brown 

Kratie, 2009, Longed for in Seattle, 2020

"Eight dollars."

"No, ten dollars."

"No, eight."

"How about twelve?"

 This is a familiar dialogue to anyone who has traveled in SE Asia, with one difference--the motorcycle driver was the one who insisted that I pay him eight dollars for our forthcoming trip to the 100 Column Temple area outside of Kratie, while I was the one venturing into twelve dollar territory. At that point we both cracked up, as my traveling companion shook her head and said "I never thought I'd live too see this kind of role reversal."

 Welcome to Kratie, a town that was as close to heaven as I am ever  going to get and a place I dreamed of almost every night when I came home to Bangkok. It was a place where traffic consisted of a very few expensive, well-kept cars along with many motorcycles, bicycles, and pony carts (driven by men who stood upright, like surfers) that hauled freight, not tourists. 

 The Mekong was generously revealed in Kratie. Development lay across the street--the river was bordered by a long pedestrian walkway and a wall wide enough to sit on--even for broad barang bottoms.  At night beer stalls with tables sprang up on the walkway and a small cluster of food vendors at its far end  fed people all day.

 There were hotels that probably were "luxurious" with aircon and hot water--I’ll never know. I was thoroughly happy with the reasonable pleasures of the U Hong II guesthouse--a clean room with a river view, two fans and a cold-water shower with enough water pressure to spray-clean a battleship. An open-air cafe provided great coffee, a baguette and fresh fruit every morning--and a splendid view of a Kratie street waking up.

 It was wonderful to spend time in a place that accepted travelers without disrupting its patterns for them. The Kratie market was for residents--souvenirs had yet to raise their ubiquitous heads, although beautiful fabric could easily have stripped me of every cent I possessed. Yet when I needed a pair of shoes that would let me explore the area in comfort, a woman went to another stall to find my over-sized-38 rubber soles--customer service that stateside department stores would marvel at. My traveling companion found industrial-strength sunscreen at one little stall when the vendor plunged into a large, dusty carton and emerged triumphantly with it in hand.

 Dolphins were the only tourist attraction and I had mixed feelings about viewing them, but drawn by the chance to be on the Mekong, I went. Our driver frequently turned off the boat's engine and let us drift silently down the river, spotting the occasional fin or dolphin back, but the main enchantment was the Daliesque clumps of islands that floated past on a calm pewter ribbon of leisurely  current. I longed to go back in a couple of months, when the rains would bring the Mekong high above its present banks and the tips of trees would be all that could be seen of the sandbar islands that dominated the riverscape when I was there.

 Kratie was dauntingly picturesque, but I found myself trying to take snapshots of silence and tranquility, as well as of the more conventional snapshot subjects. As someone who grew up in very rural Alaska, living without the comforts of 20th century life, I was completely amazed to find myself at home near a river that is light-years from the Kenai or Anchor rivers that I grew up watching and loving, or the Yukon that was my benchmark for great rivers--until I saw the Mekong.

The one flaw in Kratie was all my fault. I’d chosen the hotel that had my traveling companion, Kim scrabbling at the door on our first evening in town, moaning forcefully, "Janet, let me in! Let me in!" I rushed to oblige her, feeling sure that the jovial town drunk who, well on his way to oblivion by four in the afternoon, had been transfixed by Kim's blonde hair, had followed her through the streets when we first arrived, slurring his welcome in Khmer and in English, and had probably now escorted her to the hotel.

 As soon as the door cracked open, Kim rocketed into our room. "Oh my god," she gasped, "the hallway is covered with cockroaches. I couldn't even see the floor."

 The Heng Heng's distinguishing feature was a verandah, open to the hallway, that faced the river and was quite enticing by day. At night it was the portal for every cockroach in town--the place for them to see and be seen obviously--and some of them apparently continued to hang out to prepare for the next night's debauch during the day, because we had noticed a few when we took possession of our room.  We had done our best to be nonchalant about them but learning that the Heng Heng's hallways became the cockroach version of Studio 54 when darkness fell was too much. Kim had discovered the U Hong II before returning to shriek for sanctuary and we moved there the next morning.

 "Why are you going?" the desk clerk at the Heng Heng asked. When Kim, with remarkable restraint, explained why, he chuckled indulgently and said, "Oh the cockroaches like to come and play in the light after dark." We waited for him to conclude with "You know-- those crazy cockroaches," but he seemed too absorbed in endearing cockroach memories to enlarge upon this theme.

 I had forgotten a scarf when I left the Heng Heng and on the morning I was to leave Kratie, I approached the entrance of the hotel to see if the maid had found it. As I drew near the open door, a miasma of stale air and cockroach urine billowed toward me. I covered my face and rapidly retreated. I like to think that the Heng Heng's roach colony now uses it as a red carpet, when they all enter the hotel hallways for yet another night on the town. ~Janet Brown

On a Grey Beach far from Home

When I travel to other countries, I think of how my life would have been if I had spent it in these places. Sitting on a boulder that had been set with others upon mowed, tough beige beach grass, I was positive not only did I know what it would have been. I had lived it.

This was no past life fantasy, it was very real. On my first, and only, morning in Korea, I had found the years, of my childhood, lived in Anchor Point, Alaska.

I had chosen my overnight hotel because it was near “a private beach.” Photos on a website had shown fishermen under a grey sky, standing on grey rocks, poles immersed in a grey sea. This was not the typical Asian beach that I’d done my best to avoid over the years, filled with colorful canvas chairs and revellers. This was serious shoreline and my only worry was that it might turn out to be some distance from the hotel.

But when I went outdoors, there it was, down a slope and stretching in either direction toward points of land, each a mile or so away from where I stood. The tide was out and the sea was a narrow grey ribbon that seemed to have reached the horizon, with white ruffles of breaking waves. The ribbon was bordered by mudflats, then a strip of sand, and finally a rock-studded beach.

There was just enough wind to give my face a thin skim of salt, but not enough to pierce through my insubstantial coat. It carried a smell that I usually only find in my dreams, of saltwater, seaweed, dead things washed up on the sand, which also held  random gloves, socks, and several lonely shoes. Lying in picturesque coils near a cluster of boulders taller than I was a thick rope, triggering my Alaskan upbringing to note that most of it still looked usable--a shame I’d come without a knife.

Any good shells would be where the mudflats met the sea. What I picked up were oyster shells, clam shells, whelks, and broken pieces of delicate, fragile construction. Some of the pebbles gleamed like agates and they went into my purse as well. With each acquisition came a small amount of coarse sand, every grain an eroded rock with the consistency of rock salt, and that made me happy. I wanted to bring away as much of this morning as I could.

The sky had become a streaked mixture of opalescent morning light and clouds that were darkening rapidly. The trees on the shoreline were the indomitable, tenacious, dwarfed ones that battle against salt-filled air and crippling winds all across the Pacific coast. There were no visible houses, only buildings that seemed to be untenanted resorts that were closed for the season. Perched on a tree-covered slope far down the beach was a four-story building that rose like a pagoda above a rock seawall, its exterior painted in varying patterns of red and black lines. It was surrounded by a tall fence that had been set in concrete, rose as high as the third story, and was topped with billows of razor wire. Its final storey had a wall of windows facing the sea and an antenna jutted from the roof, making me wonder if this was a lighthouse.

The coast in this part of the beach was covered with large stones that had been placed just in front of the trees in a way that looked like a protective barrier, Just beyond  them was a white line of plastic bags and battered styrofoam, and then there was the pebble-strewn, pebble-spawned sand. Tiny tidepools lay between rocks frosted with barnacles and dots that were almost microscopic darted in the puddle of trapped seawater.

The sky began to brighten, the distant points gleamed with sunlight, and the blackened clouds began to give way to soft white puffs against patches of pale blue. The mud flats were shrinking and bare poles that had protruded from them were gradually becoming invisible. I quickened my steps, knowing that my time here was almost over, stopping only to scrawl my name with an oyster shell in the wet sand.

And then I saw it, an ombre shade of grey with small spikes partially buried close to my name. I scooped it out and held a perfectly formed, unbroken shell, almost the size of my hand, looking like a drab cousin of the pink conch shells found on Caribbean beaches. I knocked it against my palm. Nothing emerged from it but large grains of sand. I sniffed it and smelled nothing that was dying inside.

It was too big for my purse but I was certain there was room for it in my laptop bag. Clutching it tightly, I walked past dark grey rocks that were layered with parfait streaks of pure white, past slabs of brown that had once been clay, past little dumps of garbage, up the slope toward my adult life, reluctantly leaving my first fifteen years behind me, on a beach I had never seen before. ~Janet Brown

Tourist Where I Used to Live—

I expected nothing from Bangkok on my last trip, while all of the ones before had been weighted with memories and longing. I had already seen how malls were crushing the city, along with a squeaky clean version of gentrification that was doing its best to turn chaos into uniformity. The eradication of markets and street food carts had been well publicized in the two years that I had been gone, and a planned riverside promenade threatened areas that were the original core of the city. I knew where I would be for two days would no longer be the city I’d loved for twenty years, that mad, swirling cornucopia of freewheeling entrepreneurs, hawking everything from food to silk to motorcycle rides twenty-four hours a day.

This stay was the shortest I had ever made, a two-day visit made only to see people I care about. I was staying in a hotel, a standardized European cookie-cutter model that was only differentiated from others of its kind by being set on the banks of the Chao Phraya River, that muddy, crowded, water-hyacinth-clogged heart of the city. The view from my room took in a glittering temple and a “ghost building” still unfinished long after the 1997 financial bloodbath but which was now swaddled in a covering that proclaimed the glories of Coca-Cola.

I tried not to think of the gallons of Coca-Cola I had been offered when I taught English to chemists at the regional bottling plant. Instead I swallowed food from the breakfast buffet, puzzled that the kitchen had managed to come up with inedible fruit in a country where trees laden with bananas and mangoes grew even in parking lots.

I watched pale bodies at play in the nearby swimming pool and wondered when and how I had become a lady tourist in a city where I had lived close to the bone for years. But that time was long passed and I no longer loved Bangkok, I told myself, viva La Turista.

I walked out to the main road beyond the hotel, one that I’d traveled often on my last trip, and there to my great relief and jubilation, was the breakfast I should have had, stretching for blocks on the sidewalk. I crossed to the other side on an overhead footbridge that was draped with pink and fuchsia bougainvillea and gave me a stunning view of TV antennas on rooftops and lines of laundry. My spirit perked up a bit at this Bangkok hallmark view that combined beauty with utility and damned the consequences.  

I beckoned for a motorcycle taxi and rode off to the Skytrain stop with just enough speed to banish the morning’s gloom, thrilled that I hadn’t been forced to wear a helmet and that my fragmentary knowledge of Thai was still serviceable. When I reached the central shopping area where a friend’s bookstore was, the sight of food on the street made me wonder if reports of Bangkok’s death might be exaggerated.

“They all disappear when they hear the police are on the way,” my friend told me. On my walk to his store, I’d seen the face of a woman who had sold baked goods on the same corner for at least ten years and a large orange tomcat was still sleeping in the basket of a motorcycle that he'd been  tethered to for years as his owner cooked nearby. Beyond the sidewalk the street was still filled with unmoving buses, taxis, and motorcycles; later in the day when we went to dinner, my friend and I wandered with no urgency through stationary vehicles to get across the street. The air had the fragrance of fried garlic and auto exhaust and it was making me high, long before I had my first beer.

There was a lot of beer with our dinner and soon after leaving the restaurant, I realized I probably should have visited the restroom. When I got off the Skytrain on the other side of the river, I quickly found a taxi and was soon in my room. It wasn’t until I came out of the bathroom that I realized I’d left my laptop bag in the taxi.

It wasn’t as disastrous as it might have been. My passport, cash, and credit cards were all in my purse, which had made it up to the room with me. The only valuable thing missing was my ipad, which was enough to make me very annoyed with myself.

I went back to the lobby and told one of the receptionists about my stupidity. “Maybe the driver will find it and bring it back here,” I said, “I’ve read about that often in the Bangkok Post, how taxi drivers have returned thousands of baht that they find in their cab.” She smiled sympathetically and wrote down my room number, just in case a miracle happened to occur.

Back in my room, I was preparing to brush my teeth without my newly purchased toothpaste that was traveling around the city on the backseat of a taxi when the phone rang.

“Can you come downstairs,” a voice asked, “the police are here and they have your bag.”

I grabbed 500 baht as a potential reward and went to the lobby. There was an old man who had been my taxi driver, in the company of two brown-clad policemen. One of them handed my bag, asking “Is this yours?” My reply was immediate and enthusiastic, quickly followed by “Thank you! Please take this,” as I tried to hand the money to the taxi driver. He refused it.

“Check and see if everything is still in your bag,” a policeman said. There was my ipad and my newly purchased toothpaste, along with a book I’d bought at my friend’s shop that afternoon. “It’s all there,” I said and again stretched the money toward the cabbie, who once again refused.

“Thank you all,” I said and turned toward the elevator. “No, wait,” a policeman said, “we have to take your picture.”

My heart plummeted. I’d seen those photos in the Bangkok Post, the grateful tourist, the virtuous taxi driver, and the triumphant policemen. I am not photogenic at the best of times and it had been a very long day. Obediently I moved into line, silently cursing and trying to smile.

Before he left with the policemen, the cabbie accepted my 500 baht. I'm sure that we both had the same hope--that he was allowed to keep some of it for himself.

“If you see me in the Bangkok Post, never tell me I was there,” I told my friend the next day. But I knew that somewhere in the Thonburi police files, my image was frozen in time as the clueless tourist who had been rescued by Thai culture, a phenomenon that, as a foreigner, she would never understand. ~Janet Brown

Who's Who in Thailand?

The first Thai female I met after I moved to Bangkok seemed thoroughly male to me, which was an honest mistake on my part. Aey had been introduced to me as a friend’s younger brother and nothing I saw made me question that. Later I found that the person who appeared to be a sweet-faced, willowy young man who wore the global unisex uniform of tee shirt and jeans transformed himself into improbable glamour and feminine desirability five nights a week at a transgender cabaret. Aey’s personal pronoun of choice was she, and she was thrilled when I gave her the Clinique samples I’d brought with me from Seattle to cement my prospective friendships with Thai women.

The man who owned the school where I worked introduced me to a neighborhood restaurant that was surrounded by a garden and furnished with antiques. I went there often; the food had flavor that made Thai restaurants in the states seem like ghostly imitations  and the restaurant was a refuge of comfort in a city that often confused me. It was always filled with women, soft-voiced flowers and their strong-featured, stocky companions who exuded authority. But once in a while I spotted a few men, tall and slender with razorblade cheekbones and expensive haircuts.

 “Who are those gorgeous men?” I asked one night and was told with great amusement that these GQ-model prototypes weren’t biologically male.

 The women who came to this restaurant wore jeans, smoked cigarettes, and drank beer every night, puzzling contrasts to the ones I taught in classrooms and saw in shopping malls. My students and the women I observed in the rest of the city spoke in whispered tones that bats would be hard pressed to hear. They moved in baby steps that made me wonder if their feet would smash to bits if they were forced into a faster pace. They laughed in subdued giggles; even their sneezes were barely audible, emerging in the soft sound I’d heard only from the noses of newborn babies, until I came to Thailand.  

No matter what age they might be, these women were all girls, a different species from the bohemian free spirits of the garden restaurant---in fact the two groups seemed to live in separate centuries. The conventional women were lovely to look at but when I was among them, I began to think of the Stepford Wives. Happy to have found other women who lived in a way I could understand, I stripped off my conservative suit and stockings the minute I got home from work, put on jeans and a tee shirt, and went off for a cigarette and a beer with my new female friends. 

 When I tried to expand that behavior beyond the restaurant’s garden walls, that’s when the trouble began. The neighborhood I lived in was an urban village and its inhabitants turned out to have community standards only slightly less restrictive than the ones in Puritan New England. Nobody actually hissed at me when I walked by brandishing my Marlboro Light but I began to expect that was going to happen each time I walked down the street. 

   Finally the man I worked for broke it all down for me. My free-spirited friends behaved as they did only when they were at the restaurant, which was a gathering place for local lesbians. Outside of that sanctuary, they conformed to traditional Thai codes of female conduct and were so successful that not even their parents suspected they weren’t heterosexual.

 “If any of your students ever saw you smoking and drinking, they’d be so horrified they’d never come to your class again,” he told me, “and around here you’re already the neighborhood scandal.”

 After a week of serious consideration, I moved to another apartment in a distant corner of the city.  Carefully I took on a whole new public identity; studying the behavior of the women in my classes, I toned my voice down to a murmur and slowed my walk to a pace that could have easily been outstripped by any turtle. My room took on the ambiance of a longshoremen’s tavern because that was the only place where I ever lit a cigarette or drank beer, and as my outer behavior gradually became steeped in Thai femininity, I began to feel schizoid.

 At the school where I worked, the other employees were all foreign men, except for Eddy and Elle, a Thai brother and sister team who ran the office. I ended up spending a lot of time with my male colleagues and decided the only code of behavior they observed seemed to have been crafted by Conan the Barbarian. They sprawled on the sofas in the school’s reception area, happily discussing the debauchery of the previous night, the immensity of their hangovers, and their plans to repeat the process as soon as they got off work. The only concession they made to Thai cultural norms were the suits, ties, and ironed shirts they wore for their classroom appearances. When I was with them, stifling in my cotton blazer, pleated skirt, pantyhose, and shoes conservative enough to be worn by England’s Queen Mother, I tried hard not to hate these men who seemed able to do whatever they wanted without public censure.

 But my dress-for-Thai-success clothing and my new code of etiquette worked well enough that I became the most heavily scheduled teacher in the school. My workload erased any attempts I might have made at constructing a social life in a more forgiving community, my social life outside of a classroom consisted of time spent with Conan’s Disciples, and my schizophrenia grew worse. 

When I went off to teach in the morning, I looked like a woman striving to achieve an executive washroom key in a Manhattan office. When I was with the male teachers, I trailed behind them, not out of deference, but because my newly-slowed steps didn’t let me keep up with the group. Once after we had lunch in one of the shopping malls, I almost followed them straight into the men’s restroom.  

 The day that I woke up with my predominant thought echoing Sojourner Truth, silently screaming “Ain’t I a woman,” I knew I was in trouble. Clearly I would never achieve the pinnacle of Thai womanhood, which was beauty, a feature so common in that country that it had become a leading national resource. Aey, my first female friend, could pull off that trick each night of her life, but not me, at least not without heavy cosmetic surgery. 

 Since I shrink from any kind of pain and feel quite attached to my over-sized nose, that option was closed. I would never have the cute little button in the middle of my face that made Thai women look like sweet baby kittens. And although the heat and a steady diet of Thai meals were making me slender beyond my wildest dreams, my body would never have the delicate bones of a twelve-year-old girl. 

 On the other hand, I detested the men I worked with and was tired of trying to fit in with their boorish humor and bad manners. Besides, there was something truly sick about making a valid point in a discussion at our employee meetings while using the soft and childlike tones that I’d assumed as part of my protective coloration. I was well on my way toward bending my head in deference and sidling up in mincing steps each time I approached them.

 It was becoming clear to me that my new life was giving me all of the disadvantages of being female and none of the advantages, apart from my spotless reputation. While I passed for a well-behaved lady in public, in truth I was hybrid, a whole other gender, and an angry one at that.

Although I didn’t know it at first, I wasn’t alone. In Thailand, the two sexes, male and female, come in many variations, and quite a few of those are quickly altered to fit the needs of any given moment.

 There were girls who were born boys, and boys who were born girls, and they all seemed to have switched to their true identities with a civilized lack of drama. Aey wasn’t an anomaly, but neither was his older brother. Somchai was a handsome, well-muscled ex-soldier who, in under an hour, could become a dazzling long-legged, sequin-clad diva any time he decided it might make a nice change for an evening.  One of my students, Arun, who looked like the Thai version of Jimmy Dean, frequently had vicious, screaming fights with his French boyfriend over whether Arun’s visits to his wife and two young sons had been ones in which he’d exercised his conjugal rights. 

 A young man who seemed to have captured the sexual attentions of all the gay foreign men in Bangkok turned out to have a girlfriend stashed away in the background, while a floral designer with whom I shared a house for a while claimed he was gay but lived the bland, ascetic life of a man who was thoroughly asexual.  The exquisite woman who cut and colored my hair in a neighborhood salon had accumulated her grubstake to start the business by fighting in Thai boxing rings back when she was a boy, and a cute guy who approached me in a gay disco told me later in the evening that he had given birth to two children before he finally became the man he always knew he was meant to be.

Places I thought were potential refuges from attention turned out to be hotbeds of sexual scrutiny. I was hit on by men in gay bars and by women at Thai boxing stadiums. And I’m still bemused by what took place on a rainy afternoon at one of the city’s most famous temples, when I took shelter under an overhanging roof and waited for the pelting drops to go away. Suddenly a monk popped up beside me, umbrella in hand, inviting me to come with him and speak English with him until the storm was over. 

  We sat on the floor of his room in the monastery’s living quarters while he showed me a notebook that he’d filled with handwritten song lyrics in English. “I was a musician before I came here. Look,” and he gestured to an inner room which was almost empty except for a large electronic keyboard. We ended up sitting in that room where he played old rock and roll classics, we both sang and smoked cigarettes, and I fell in love with a ouple of kittens who curled up on my lap. 

 This was one of the best afternoons I’d spent in Bangkok but although my new friend asked me to come back often, I never saw him again. My Thai friends, when I told them this story, all looked horrified and said, “That wasn’t a real monk.” Realizing that the last thing I needed in my life was another public scandal, I, in true Buddhist fashion, let this pleasure go.

 It was a profound relief to learn that within the world of straight Thai women, there were many different shades of appropriate behavior. I once got in a conversation with a conservatively dressed young woman in the outside seating area of a Starbucks, where I was having a cigarette with my coffee. She asked if she could use my lighter and I managed to avoid fainting from the shock. 

  “I don’t know many Thai women who smoke cigarettes,” I said and she replied, “Nobody at the bank where I work knows that I do. But I’m not really Thai. My mother is from Cambodia so she’s not as strict as the mothers of my friends. She even knows about this, although nobody else does,” and she pulled up the sleeve of her blouse. On her upper arm was an intricate tattoo. 

 There was, as this woman showed me, a vast difference between the public and private faces of Thai women. The women I’d met early on in the garden restaurant weren’t the only ones who did as they pleased when they were away from scrutiny. One of Elle’s closest friends swore fluently in English and knocked back countless cigarettes and bottles of beer when she was safely inside the room where she lived in sin with her boyfriend. 

  In Bangkok’s most affluent shopping malls I saw young high-society women dressed like designer-clad hookers who’d stepped out of a Helmut Newton photograph. When I went on vacation to a nearby island, I met bargirls who wore bikinis for a living but swam in tee shirts and cut-off jeans when they went to the beach with men who had bought them for a week or two. And I discovered the truth of the words spoken by a languid, elegant flight attendant early in my Bangkok life, “Oh Janet. You’re a foreigner. Nobody expects you to do more than 70 per cent.”

  After I moved into a part of the city where my neighbors were more sophisticated than the community that had cast me out, I was able to find a way to live that didn’t replicate a severe personality disorder. I learned to accept that I would never truly understand what it was to be female in a kingdom where the Queen was honored for being one of the world’s most beautiful women while her fat and dowdy daughter was the best-loved of all the Thai princesses. I concluded that if there was one thing that Anna and the King of Siam got right, it was the moment when Yul Brynner sang, “It is a puzzlement.”

 I wasn’t the only foreigner who was puzzled, Years later I ran into one of the men I’d worked with long ago and we chatted over a friendly beer. 

 “You once told me something I’ve never forgotten,” he remarked as we were finishing our drinks, “You said in Thailand there are two sexes but many genders and I thought that was the craziest thing I ever heard. But you know something? I never forgot it because I found out you were right.” 

I looked at him and smiled. Many years earlier when I was still fresh off the boat, I would have asked him how he had come to discover the truth of my observation. But after living in Bangkok as long as I had, not only did I know that would be rude, I no longer cared. We all had our learning curves in this city and I didn’t need to hear another interminable story of how one man had finally achieved enlightenment. Still it made me happy to know that back in the days when my colleagues had looked through me as though I were nothing more than a dusty windowpane, this guy had actually been paying attention. ~Janet Brown

Asia in Seattle: Turning Smashed Windows into Hope

My sadness is punctual. It comes at around two in the afternoon, and it’s strong enough that I fight back tears. That’s when the grief hits, for all the deaths that have happened in the past three and a half months, for the millions of people who’ve lost their jobs, for the children who come to the closed doors of their schools, picking up food to take home That’s when I take to the streets and walk to the only neighborhood in my part of Seattle that doesn’t feel like a ghost town. 

Within ten minutes I’m in the Chinatown-International District.

As soon as I reach Little Saigon, art begins to brighten my sadness. It seems as though there’s a new mural every day, with fresh vibrant colors and messages of hope, promises for the future. 

After a weekend of rage and destruction, on Sunday morning a young man on King Street told the editor of the International Examiner,”We’re going to board up all the windows.” By Sunday night, almost all the glass in the C-ID and much in Little Saigon, whether it was smashed or still unbroken, had been shielded with plywood. The buildings stared blankly into the streets, but not for long. 

Artists from the neighborhood and beyond came with paint and creativity. They turned the blind windows into an art gallery that extends for blocks. From the edges of Little Saigon to the borders of the C-ID, Jackson, King, Weller, and the avenues explode with images, with the doors and windows of almost every business displaying their own unique character. 

The paintings are an expression of life in our city that’s in suspended animation, and life is what has always characterized the C-ID. It’s a community of people who walk—to shop in the neighborhood grocery stores, to have a meal in one of its throngs of restaurants, to chat and play cards in Hing Hay Park, to go to the doctor, the library, the post office, all located within a matter of a few blocks. Now it’s a refuge, with a vitality that draws me and others to come and nourish our hearts.

I look at the art, I buy peonies from a flower farmer who comes all the way down from Monroe to sell her blossoms on King Street, I pick up food from Tai Tung because I need to absorb the warmth of its owner’s welcome. I feel true joy with each shop that has just reopened and when I pass other old ladies, I smile at them from under my mask. As I walk past the murals, their vitality and hope seep into my sadness, clearing it away and when I come back home, I’m filled with light. ~Janet Brown

Pie along the Mekong

I’d planned for almost twenty years to go to Nakhon Phanom. When I finally reached this small northeastern city, I stared at jagged, irregularly shaped mountains silhouetted against the Laos sky on the other side of the Mekong River and wondered what had taken me so long.

Not on the tourist circuit, Nakhon Phanom is one of the most peaceful places I have ever found in Thailand. My hotel, grandly called the Windsor, was a perfectly preserved example of mid-20th century architecture, timeworn, a bit shabby, but still holding traces of elegance. It had rooms for as little as six dollars; I splurged and took the high-end thirteen dollar option with its long bank of windows facing the street. I planned to stay a while.

The Windsor offered free Nescafe but every morning I was sitting in a sidewalk café called Good Morning Vietnam, watching people take their children to school on motorcycles and listening to caged birds sing from a building across the street. Nakhon Phanom has had a large Vietnamese population throughout its history and the young woman who made my coffee was the daughter of people born in Vietnam. The blue building with its melodic birds hanging from its curved front looked like photos I’ve seen of buildings in Hanoi and that style was found all over this Thai city. 

The ubiquitous concrete shophouses that remain a drab and mottled grey in most of Thailand were painted in bright and imaginative colors here. Every block contained several dashes of brilliant hues, sometimes combined in one building. Color and coffee, both done well—this place was obviously meant for me and I extended my stay for two weeks. And that was before I met Khun Noi and realized there were layers to this city that were even more dazzling than what initially came to my attention.

Opposite the city’s street market were shophouses, most of them open in the front and selling everything from children’s bicycles to mango and sticky rice. In the middle of them was a storefront window with mannequins and one of the mannequins was wearing a dashing pair of lace-up, calf-high, red plaid boots. 

This was a dash of chic that took me by storm. I pushed on the door of the shop; it was unlocked. There I was in a room filled with women’s clothing, alone. “Are you open? Hello?” I called in the direction of the dark room that lay beyond an archway. Nobody answered.

The clothing was all western, much of it vintage, on neatly categorized racks—blouses, skirts, dresses, ballgowns. Sprinkled about on dressmaker forms were confections that looked as though they were meant for tiny ballerinas, short tulle skirts with strapless bodices and a large tulle flower near the right shoulder. Each was a different color—blue, sea green, and pink, of course and each might have fit me when I was ten. And then there were those boots—I wanted them. If not for me, I knew the perfect twelve-year-old who would get them as a present.

As I stood and stared, a grumble emerged from the back room and out came a shirtless man wearing a sarong. His hair was tousled and he obviously had been taking a nap. He shrugged off my apologies and asked me if I liked his clothes. “No,” he told me, “the plaid boots aren’t for sale. I have only one pair; they’re from Japan for cosplay. I bought them at the Cambodian market in Aranyaprathet. It’s where I find everything here.”

“Do women in Nakhon Phanom buy your clothes?” I asked him, and he nodded. Suddenly this quiet city took on a new dimension of sophistication that I would never have guessed from what I saw on the street every day.

Khun Noi spoke no English and my Thai skills are minimal, but he was a man fluent in style and I was besotted with the clothing that he had discovered. He let me roam around the back room where the walls were lined with shelves of shoes; the pride of his collection was a pair of Christian Laboutin six-inch shocking pink platform heels. When I moaned softly, he showed me the pair he had found and kept for himself, black canvas hightops covered in silver spikes with the signature red soles.

I left with nothing but I was haunted by a scarlet chiffon accordion pleated skirt, its double hem rimmed with thick gold thread. It had an elastic waist which I normally detest but in this country meant it could be worn by me. It was twenty-three dollars and Khun Noi wouldn’t budge on the price. He knew I’d be back, and later in the afternoon I was.

This time his girlfriend was there, an exquisite young woman who spoke English and loved the clothes even more than I, since they all would easily fit her. While I saw the shop as a kind of museum, for her it was a walk-in closet. We chattered happily while Khun Noi carefully ironed every pleat of my new skirt; he insisted upon that, and wrapped it in tissue paper before handing it over. 

Khun Noi wasn’t the only one in Nakhon Phanom to scour the market at Arayanprathet for used clothing. The flat streets were dotted with stalls of clothes but after his shop, everything else looked tired and uninspired. I was more attracted to the hardware street, where glass blocks in different patterns were framed as a display and small objects that looked like an array of costume jewelry turned out to be low-tech burglar alarms to hang on a doorknob.

Facing the river were a number of temples, gleaming to match the sparkle of sun on the water. My favorite had a collection of chickens roaming its grounds, co-existing happily with several placid dogs. At night, the buildings were illuminated, glowing golden under a few well-placed spotlights. I sat on a bench under a small cluster of trees to enjoy the sight when I heard something heavy rustling above my head. I left my seat quickly, looking for a monitor lizard, which are huge and sometimes aggressive. Instead I saw the chickens roosting in the branches above, settling in for the night.

 The Mekong is an integral part of the daily life of Nakhon Phanom. The city built a long concrete promenade that ran for miles along the banks of the river; parts of the walkway were shaded by old trees and others were sprinkled with playgrounds for children and exercise equipment for adults. Old villas and an elaborate cathedral anchored one end of the promenade; a large park stretched at the other end. Every night a small boat gave a river tour that drifted down the Thai side of the Mekong, up along Laos, and then back across to Nakhon Phanom. It left at 5 and encompassed a sunset for the grand sum of under two dollars, a Mekong Happy Hour complete with cans of Beer Lao. I was on board almost every evening.

Perhaps the most distinctive thing about this quiet provincial city was that it’s one of the few in Thailand that served slices of apple pie.

A short distance beyond the park at the promenade’s end was a bright blue house with an inviting veranda. The sign announced that this was Ali Blah Blah Bistro and there were usually people sitting at tables on the veranda, chatting and eating. Inside, the bistro was bright and cool, with plush sofas and comfortable chairs and a pastry case that nobody would expect to find anywhere outside of Bangkok—or perhaps Seattle.

This wasn’t too surprising, because the woman who makes the pastry and presides over Ali Blah Blah lived in Seattle for years. Beau Suwannapruke worked at Café Paloma in Pioneer Square. She studied chocolate making in Switzerland and the art of pastry in France. After the birth of her son, Ali, she began to think of bringing him up in her hometown, on the banks of the Mekong. Now they both live in Nakhon Phanom, with Ali Blah Blah Bistro at the roadside edge of the riverside property that belongs to Beau’s family.

Ali Blah Blah is a family enterprise. Beau is the head and heart of the business, but a cousin makes coffee drinks in the afternoon, her mother is often at a corner table shaping tray after tray of crisp, buttery, and addictive cookies, and an aunt takes care of Ali during the day. Other aunts bring feasts of grilled chicken and papaya salad and sticky rice to the veranda and persuade Beau to take a break from the kitchen. Although the pastry is Western, the business itself is very Thai.

Beau often uses food grown in her family’s yard for her desserts but the recent addition of multinational superstores—the Dutch-based Makro, Britain’s Tesco, and Big C from France’s Carrefour—expanded her range of ingredients. Although she buys local fruit at Nakhon Phanom’s street market, a recent acquisition from a superstore led to the creation of Cape gooseberry apple pie.

Pie is a new addition to Thai palates but the flavor combination of sour-sweet is very Thai and Beau found a winning blend with apples and gooseberries. The proof of her success is that other coffee shops are beginning to offer pie by the slice, so Beau is ready to move on to new horizons. Crepes made to order, both sweet and savory; an occasional pasta dish—“Perhaps,” she says, “we’ll become a real bistro.”

Meanwhile her strawberry tarts, her hand-made chocolates, her cakes frosted with the bright, clear flavor of fresh fruit, and her artfully constructed pies continue to attract a growing local clientele and foreign travelers in search of good coffee, an unexpected treat, and a conversation with Beau Suwannapruke. Just one of the many delightful surprises that wait without fanfare in Nakhon Phanom—I’ll stay longer next time.~Janet Brown

Asia In Seattle: Chinatown and Covid-19

The streets of Chinatown were empty on a bright Saturday afternoon in April.  I was the only person on Jackson Street as I walked through the overpass that serves as an informal gate to the community. Years ago a woman launched a campaign to paint its supporting pillars in bright colors that are now tarnished with basic grafifti. Every year Chinatown repaints the columns and within a month they’re defaced once more. Still the spirit behind the obscured colors announces that the Chinatown-International District in Seattle refuses to be erased.

As I drew near Saeteun’s Garage, I began to smile beneath my mask and my steps quickened. There was the Rottweiler who has presided over that part of Jackson Street since he was a puppy. At our first meeting he thought my fur jacket was one of his close relatives and immediately began to nuzzle and nip at it. I’ve loved him ever since and he graciously acknowledges that truth. “He’s a gentle giant,” one of the men standing nearby said as I scratched the top of JuJu’s mammoth head, happy to have been welcomed, if not remembered. 

Chinatown has suffered an onslaught of smashed windows since the Stay Home edict was announced and many businesses have plywood shields set in place as protection. Bahtoh, a place that offers floral arrangements and hairstyling for weddings, has turned their plywood into an art installation with two large paintings--one showing a cluster of green plants arranged near a framed painting that said “I LIVE EACH DAY WITH THE INTENT TO BE______” and the other a defiant manifesto in bright pink cursive script. “Curve dat box dye like its Ms. Rona.” 

The next block was one I used to live on and at the end of that was Momo, a shop that has always been a delightful refuge for me. As I peered in its windows, I saw its owner, Lei Ann Shiramizu, an unflickering, steadfast flame of energy and creativity who became my friend soon after she opened the doors of her “hapa shop,” as she calls her small boutique. 

She let me inside and we bumped elbows, in the absurd gesture that’s the only one allowed to us now. The floor was covered with stacks of bright tissue and joss paper and her display table was half emptied to serve a production line of two, Lei Ann and her husband Tom, who construct “Momo-to-Go” packages that can be picked up, mailed, or delivered. Give Lei Ann a theme and she uses her imagination and flair to fill the package with the beautiful little objects that fill her shop, wrapping it in colorful paper and string that’s adorned with an antique Japanese button or two.

Wrapped gifts from Momo have always been works of art and now they’ve become therapy for anybody lucky enough to receive one. “I’m working ten times as hard,” Lei Ann told me but her vibrant spirit prevails. 

At the end of Chinatown stands a branch of Bartell Drugs, as essential to the neighborhood as Momo, but for more utilitarian reasons. I went in to buy cellophane tape and sticky putty so I can brighten my room with fabric and pictures. I left with those things, a magazine, and a bag of chocolate Easter eggs that were marked down to 25 cents a bag. The man in front of me had a half-rack of Rolling Rock--we all have our needs met at Bartell Drugs, which is like an old-fashioned variety store that sells basic groceries and fills prescriptions too. Its clientele is rough around the edges and a policeman stands guard at the door but more than ever, it’s an essential business.

So is the next place I stopped. Tai Tung has stood in place for 85 years. Its wooden swinging doors are now sheltered behind a more modern entryway but its long counter and its dining room booths are unchanged from its opening just a couple years after the Great Depression. In this current depression, its owner, Harry Chan, stands behind the counter with his incandescent smile, and when I saw him, I knew my world was still in place. “You can wait here. Your food will be ready in ten minutes,” and it was. I left with the noodles I’d longed for during the past six months and with the warmth that comes from a brief chat with Harry. 

Up the street at the Louisa Hotel, which first opened in 1909, had been consumed by a fire on Christmas of 2013 and was recently rebuilt, a bakery had just opened in the jaws of the pandemic. Tempting desserts lured me to its window but what kept me there was a sign saying they had Rojak. “Yes,” the young owner told me, “our cook is from Singapore.” I watched as she put slices of pineapple, jicama, cucumber, and apple in a bowl, sprinkled it with chunks of you tiao or “Chinese doughnut,” and mixed it with a sauce. Susu is open only on Wednesday through Sunday from 11-3 and sells gift cards to be used when happy days are here again. Since it’s in the same building as Chinatown’s first bakery, Mon Hei, which was destroyed in the Christmas fire, it’s carrying on an honorable tradition with a different culinary vocabulary, but it’s suffused with the same indomitable spirit. 

Seattle’s Chinatown-International District has survived rioters who tried to displace its residents, the Spanish Flu of 1918, the incarceration of its Japanese residents during WWII, a long series of economic upheavals that turned it into what more affluent residents called a slum. But it has prevailed. And if we all put on our face masks, bring our money, and walk its streets today in search of good food, it will be here for centuries to come. Don’t let it die.~Janet Brown

Without a Map, Without a Clue

Shenzhen is almost double the size of the city of Los Angeles, with its 792 square miles eclipsing the 472-square-mile metropolitan sprawl of L.A. Its subway system runs for 177 miles, close behind New York’s 228-mile length. And there I was, doing my best to find my way around this place without a map.

When I first went to Beijing, the staff at my guesthouse handed me a bilingual city map when they gave me the key to my room. Unfolded, it could have papered most of a wall and it was beautifully detailed. I still have it somewhere, tattered enough to resemble lace, after three months of constant use while I walked as many streets of China’s capital as I could.

The desk clerk who checked me in at my Shenzhen hotel looked politely puzzled. “Our maps are only in Chinese,” he told me. But he gave me careful directions on where to go to buy coffee and the hotel’s brochure had a rudimentary map that would take me to the nearest subway station.

I was in an area that was easy to map on foot. It was a self-sufficient community, with two huge malls within walking distance, parks, a bus station, banks, a post office, and at least three restaurants on every block. The sidewalks were wide and uncrowded and many of the streets were bordered with banyan trees, their branches reaching out to form green canopies. It was the perfect spot to recover from jet lag and that was where I spent my first few days, having coffee at sidewalk cafe tables and window-shopping on a street that was filled with clothing stores.

I had downloaded what seemed to be the only guidebook to Shenzhen in existence which told me about a place in the central business district called Book City and that I decided would be my first destination. It turned out to be over an hour from my new neighborhood by subway on two different lines but I was overjoyed to find bilingual route maps at every station. Soon my phone was crammed with pictures of subway line maps and I concentrated on every announcement that called out the name of the next stop, trying to memorize the tones.

There was a foreign language bookstore in the mall that was Book City and that language was my very own. I chose a small stack of books and took them to the counter, where the lady behind it spoke to me in perfect English. “I can’t find a guidebook to Shenzhen. Can you help me?” I asked. “We don’t have one,” she said.

“Do you have a map in English?” “No. Only in Chinese.”

“Do you know any place where I can buy a map of Shenzhen in English?” Smiling sweetly, she assured me that there was no such thing anywhere in Book City or anyplace in Shenzhen.

This seemed beyond comprehension to me, but Hong Kong was just over the border. I put my selections on the counter with my credit card on top of the stack. “I’m very sorry, but I can’t take this card. Credit cards need this symbol in China,” and she showed me her own card, with the logo of Union Pay.

I bought one of the books, with cash, and left in a state of miserable confusion. I was in a city that was positioning itself as a center of world trade and commerce that didn’t seem to recognize international banking practices and didn’t acknowledge, let alone help, a tourist market beyond the domestic one. Less ebulliently than when I had begun my expedition, I found my way back to my hotel where at least I knew my credit card was functional.

On the next morning I made my first border crossing and went immediately to my favorite Hong Kong bookstore. Swindon Books has been in Kowloon for almost 100 years, since 1918. It has a substantial travel section and a hefty selection of maps. None of them were for Shenzhen, in any language at all.

Google maps aren’t available in China and the versions I found on yahoo were far from helpful. I began to feel a kind of mental vertigo, floating in a new universe, unanchored by the laws of gravity. Then one day I met a friend in Hong Kong who handed me a map of Shenzhen with place names in English.

I took it home and spread it out on my bed. There were names of subway stops that I had passed but none were near me. As far as I could see, on this map my neighborhood in the Bao'an district simply did not exist. I took it down to the reception desk where the staff confirmed my fears. We were indubitably off the map.

There were eight subway lines in Shenzhen in 2017 and I used six of them almost every day in my two months of living there. I walked in futile attempts to find cohesion between neighborhoods but the concept of flow escaped me. I began to feel that I was in a city that was a follow-the-dots page, with all of the dots still unconnected.

Halfway through my stay, I found a bilingual guide to cultural attractions in Shenzhen with transit directions and miniscule line drawings of maps. Clutching that, I wandered the city like a character out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, making my way from one helpful pedestrian to the next, on a quest. Luckily for me, Shenzhen people are kind.

And now, back in the U.S., my quest continues. Somewhere, somehow, I will find a map of this confusing, seductive city. It’s not impossible. After all, Beijing has been mapped for centuries. ~Janet Brown

Thai or Tiger

Thailand has always had an ambivalent relationship with Tiger Woods, claiming him once he became famous and then becoming deeply offended when he chose not to make his mother’s nationality his own. “Cablinasian” wasn’t a term that charmed Thailand, not when he could have accepted the privilege of being Thai instead.

 He always received a generous amount of attention from the Thai press, even after his refusal to become the Kingdom’s returning son, and eleven years ago both of Bangkok’s English-language papers ran a large AP reprint about Tiger, served up with a generous helping of schadenfreude.

Police To Talk To Tiger About Accident blared the headline in one, Woods In Crash Drama: Wife Smashes Window With Golf Club After Tiger Hits Fire Hydrant And Tree screamed another, and heaven only knows what the less conservative Thai-language press had to say about God’s gift to the sport’s page. Probably quite a bit since the story dealt with some of their favorite subjects, an auto crash, blood, a rescue by a dutiful wife, and rumors of infidelity. Certainly the National Enquirer had fun with what the Florida police dubbed “a traffic crash,” not a “domestic issue.”

Alcohol was not a factor, the police report stated, but provided no reason why the golf star left his $2.4 million dollar home and his blonde trophy wife at 2:25 in the morning, rapidly losing control of his 2009 Cadillac which hit a fire hydrant and then a tree on his neighbor’s property while Tiger briefly lost consciousness somewhere along the way. When the police arrived, Woods was able to say “nothing coherent,” and those close to him kept silence, including the night club hostess with whom he was rumored to be having an affair.

This was the stuff that reporters dream of, all over the world. Did his wife bludgeon him with one of his own golf clubs? Was he fleeing to receive medical attention when he lost consciousness? Or was he simply relaxing with a recreational drug after the thrill of being inducted into Stanford U’s Sports Hall of Fame? God knows that kind of adulation can take it out of a guy, not to mention that he’d just returned from a two-week golf tour of China and Australia where he may or may not have seen the club hostess who was in Melbourne the same time he was. It’s the best kind of mystery. Nobody died and nobody was happy. Who in the world of newsprint and declining circulations could ask for anything more?

 A similar story involving a young Thai actress appeared in that same issue of the Bangkok Post but garnered only a couple of hundred words in that paper’s gossip column. Her auto accident was far more serious, putting the comatose twenty-one-year-old in the hospital with a bleeding brain and a fractured pelvis, while her passenger was unscathed. The former Miss Teen Thailand was on her way home “early last Tuesday,” chatting to her companion as she drove, when suddenly her car veered off the road and hit an electric pole. She was”catapulted through the windshield and on to the road” while the passenger was thrown into the driver’s seat. Obviously seatbelts were not involved in the accident.

 But unlike in Tiger’s case, no mystery was attached to this one. It was the fault of the actress’s director who admitted, “I believe the set of our production may be cursed, as we failed to carry out a buang suang ceremony first.” This is a ritual held before filming begins that drives away bad luck and propitiates any spirits who might be hovering about. When that didn’t take place, bad things began to happen to cast members of the television series.

 One actor broke his nose when he ran into a plank on the set and other cast members had received “cuts and scrapes” in the course of filming. The fact that the severely injured starlet had been working from 10 am until midnight on Monday wasn’t a factor, the director assured the press, since she had enjoyed a full day of rest on Sunday.

 It was too late to hold the ceremony at this point but the director was sure that his promise to have a merit-making ceremony at a temple once the production is wrapped up was sufficient to ward off other expressions of ill will from the spirit world.

 It was easy for him to say—somehow the spirits refrained from punishing him, although he was clearly the true malefactor in this flouting of ritual. Or perhaps the best was yet to come and the starlet was just a prelude to real disaster? Anyone who has seen the classic Thai ghost story, Mae Nak, knows spirits are not easily dissuaded from a course of wholesale distraction and carnage when their delicate sensibilities have been disregarded. Since the disasters had escalated from contusions to a broken nose to a shattered pelvis, it seemed as though the spirits were just warming up and that director needed to find a good ceremony fast.

 Tiger might have wanted to rethink his decision on whether or not to become Thai once he understood how much bad publicity can be averted by giving credit to the world of the spirits. On the other hand, if a jealous wife was involved in his predicament, he might have gotten off easier than his erring counterparts in the Kingdom.

It’s common knowledge that in Thailand, Lorena Bobbitt would have been regarded as a household saint, or worse yet, just one of the crowd of spouses scorned. Had Tiger turned Thai, his wife could well have wielded something much sharper than a golf club and the resulting surgical attachment would have been both painful and humiliating. Perhaps a spot of world-wide bad publicity was a decent trade-off after all, although the world’s top golfer probably didn’t feel the same about the tools of his trade for a while—at least not until after his facial injuries healed. ~Janet Brown

This Strange Autumn

 

I love fall. Its golden crispness and sharp berried scent has always made me happy, even though what follows it is sheer misery for me. The most beautiful autumns are the preface to extreme cold--Fairbanks, Alaska and Beijing both testify to that.

Slack with Bangkok heat ten years ago, I tried to separate what I was feeling for Beijing shortly after leaving it from what I always feel for fall. When I was in China’s capital, a piercing-blue sky soared above a thick plumage of gold leaves that waved above much of the city. The air was invigoratingly brisk and each breath I took made every one of my nerve ends feel sharpened and alive.

Beijing is defined by its trees for me. The tender pale green haze that washes the city in the spring after months of skeletal black branches softened only by snow is almost as lovely as the blaze of color in autumn. I left just as a hint of green began to emerge and returned to streets bathed in light filtered through new leaves. After spending a month in the grey gloom of Kowloon and Chung King Mansion, I walked for hours, ravenous for green, through neighborhoods that were transformed by spring into a place that was almost magical.

 It took me two long bus rides before I found Beijing's Botanical Gardens, and even then I would never have reached them if it weren't for a boy with the troubled complexion of early adolescence. I pointed out where I hoped to go on a bilingual map, as I had with other passersby before he appeared, and he waved in the same expansive gesture I had been provided with earlier.

 With very little optimism, I began to walk away after uttering the only Mandarin phrase I knew, which is thank you. As I headed toward a park that looked verdant enough but not quite what I had expected, suddenly the boy was at my elbow, beckoning forcefully toward a nearby bus stop. He led me to it, pointed out a bus number on a sign that was filled with many of them, waited with me until it came, and then told the conductress where I wanted to go. I still get chills of gratitude when I think about him.

What I found when I reached the gardens was landscape that had hints of wilderness in the hills outside the city. What I was given was kindness that was completely unexpected and undeserved, and is a large part of why I now look through my snapshots and feel a small but persistent yearning for Beijing.~Janet Brown

Snake Soup and Egg Tarts

I am the first to admit, and frequently too, that I travel on my stomach, as I think Napoleon said about his army. I love to wander before I have eaten very much at all and then sample everything in sight.

 I'm especially lucky because my friend Basil is Hong Kong's answer to Calvin Trilling. the sort of man who says "First we'll have a snack" and then feeds you so amply that hibernation is the only possible response. I met Basil one morning to roam through the oldest portion of Hong Kong Island before having tea, and although I knew eating would be part of our expedition, I brought some sweetmeats from a Pakistani foodstall in Chungking Mansions, which I thought would be pleasant to nosh on when we stopped for coffee.

 I had eaten a small scone when I had my wake-up jolt of caffeine and on my way to the subway, I ate one of the little Pakistani cakes, which-- as another Hong Kong devotee once said about moon cakes--was "like eating a truck." It settled firmly into my stomach and when Basil asked me if I were hungry, I quite honestly said no.

 Basil however had not yet had breakfast so off we went in search of sustenance, stopping at a bakery where I gasped with pleasure at the sight of the spiced flatbread I ate every morning in Beijing. "Yes, it's from the North," Basil said as he bought that for me and nothing for himself.

 I thought it would be rude to eat when Basil was the one who was hungry but the flatbread was irresistible so I nibbled away at it as we looked at shops that sold bird's nests and shark fin and dragonfruit and--oh my god the tea shop...

 It sold dried roses, violets, jasmine and unidentifiable blossoms, each in its own jar and each retaining its original appearance, waiting to be steeped. Labels in English told me what each one would cure or ameliorate--one jar of leaves promised to banish irascibility and I knew I should probably buy some.

 "Have you ever had coffee with tea?" Basil asked me, and took me to the "pork chop place" where he finally had breakfast and I had a creamy, aromatic glass of mingled tea and coffee and a little condensed milk with what was left of my flatbread. Feeling comfortably replete, I followed Basil up a hillside, down some stairs, and into an open place with a few chairs and tables, a glass case in front with lizards and snakes inside, and a long wall of drawers, each one, I knew from having seen some wonderful photographs in Lost & Found Hong Kong, holding at least one snake. Basil spoke to a lady of more than middle years, she disappeared and returned with a bowl that she placed in front of me. "Snake soup," Basil told me.

 My appetite was lurking somewhere in the very back of my consciousness but the minute that I tasted the soup, the sheer comfort of it made me know I wasn't going to move before every spoonful was gone. It was a thick, clear broth, gently aromatic with ginger,  full of thin slivers of snake meat and what tasted like julienned woodear mushrooms. It had the same soothing quality as the traditional post-Thanksgiving turkey soup and it serves the same function of keeping a body warm in the cold season. Unlike in Thailand, snake is not a gender-specific, guys-only dish--both men and women enjoy its warming properties in Hong Kong where it is a winter staple.

 Then of course we met other friends to have tea--but high tea with smoked salmon sandwiches, lemon curd tartlets and artisanal chocolate that has spoiled me for any other kind forever. I returned to my room that night with the strong desire to have my stomach bronzed, because it would never receive that sort of nourishment again in one day--at least not until the next time that I had the chance to wander through Hong Kong with Basil.

 On my own I'm a bit more Spartan and the next day when I explored Kowloon's Nathan Road, I fed my eyes, not my stomach--until I passed a spot with a row of beautiful, golden, gleaming egg tarts, which Basil had addicted me to in my previous visit. I bought one which was so warm and flaky and creamy and melting that the minute I finished the last crumb, I retraced my steps quickly and apprehensively because I had bought the next to the last tart. But a whole new row waited for me-- I bought one more and succumbed to the pure joy of eating my way through Hong Kong. ~Janet Brown

Postcard from Another Life

On Sunday, all the guys behind the windows of the currency exchange booths at Chungking Mansions perk right up. Their smiles are brilliant and their eyes sweep across the crowd that passes them. It's the day off for Filipina maids and they throng CKM's ground floor, shopping, wandering, going to the exchange booths to send money home.

These are women who turn wherever they may be into a festival. They move across the grim, fluorescent-lit ugliness of CKM like flowers, laughing and chattering and lovely. Even the ones who are not conventionally pretty are beautiful on Sunday. They fill the nearby green space of Kowloon Park and bring to it the joy of an instant picnic and they transform Chungking Mansions into a town square as they move in and take it over for a day. They are delightful and the currency exchange guys aren't the only ones to think so. When I see them, I think of sunlight and mangoes and music; I remember that Carabao, my favorite Thai band, developed their chops in the Philippines and that the girls who are passing in front of me are close relatives of the people I love and miss in Bangkok.

The next day they were gone. It was life as usual in Chungking Mansions and the morning seemed a little more Monday than it should be. I got in the elevator to go back to my room after having coffee and the sounds of drums flooded it long before I reached the fourth floor. Music entered with the man waiting at that stop, and I got off.

Down a dark and squalid-looking hallway was an open door leading to a room filled with metal folding chairs and people of all colors seated on them. I would have thought it was an AA meeting except for the drums and singing and African music that came out into the hallway and made it a joyful spot.

This is the reason I stay in Chungking Mansions--the surprises, the music, the occasional blaze of loveliness and light. ~Janet Brown

Another Country, Another Bookstore, Another Train

As the night train to the Laos border pulled away from Bangkok's art deco station, I sipped my beer and looked at the man sitting across from me. He was elaborating on the subject of Thai girls and I was feeling grateful that our beds would be made up soon so he would have to move. I hoped he didn't talk in his sleep because I already knew far more about him than I ever needed to know.

The next morning there he was, clearly fancying himself as an Old Asia Hand after three years in Thailand, telling everyone within earshot where they should stay and how they should barter and where they could get a free refill on their cup of morning coffee. I listened carefully, making mental notes of neighborhoods and restaurants to avoid while I was in Laos' capitol city. The Ancient Mariner was someone I never wanted to have to listen to again.

I didn't need to worry. He was a man who knew where all the cheapest places in Vientiane were to be found and I was willing to pay for comfort--a financial incompatibility lay between us like a very welcome moat. He was dead set on his 250 baht guesthouse and I decided upon my hotel choice, without making my selection public, minutes before disembarking at the border.

t was on the river or where the river would have been if it hadn't dwindled to the size of a large brook--all of it close to the Thai side. It was disconcerting to see the Mekong so diminished from what I had seen in Cambodia a few months before, and I hoped its lack of majesty was because of the season and not the dams in China. The rainy season had ended only two months before and wouldn't resume for another six--by then people would probably be wading from Thailand into Laos, with no need for the Friendship Bridge.

I walked away from the long line of hotels and restaurants on a road that soon became dust and flowering bushes and trees. A little mini-mart flanked by a Christmas tree on one side of its doorway and a spirit house on the other had phone cards for sale. When the proprietress and I couldn't get my phone to work after inserting the card in what we thought was the proper fashion, she called for her teenage son who restored functionality without even a flicker of impatience.

A man emerged from a nearby house and walked beside me, asking where I was from and if I spoke Spanish. "Where did you learn Spanish?" I asked him, in ESL classroom mode. "Cuba," he said and the balance of power shifted in a heartbeat. He smiled and walked on, clearly savoring his moment of surprise and status, while I struggled to put my dropped jaw back in place.

The next morning I went out in search of a place called That Dam Bookstore, which was in the vicinity of a towering stupa called That Dam. Although the wordplay was what drew me there, the name had been changed to Kosila Books, a well-kept place crowded with bookshelves and paperbacks in a multiplicity of languages. The owner was Sam, and he was a man who was an honest-to-god book person. His English was fluent and his patience for questioning foreigners apparently inexhaustible. It was a browser's spot, with many surprises and I went away with an Iris Murdoch and Alan Rabinowitz's book on conservation adventures in Thailand.

Monument Books was my next destination--it turned out to be a pretty store,smaller and more enticing than the one in Phnom Penh, and as I wandered through it, two copies of Tone Deaf faced out on a display stopped me cold. "Oh, it's my book!" I said happily to the clerk hovering nearby, who responded with a look of total incomprehension. "I wrote this book," I told her in Thai. She and two of her colleagues smiled at me the way they might at a street person they hoped was harmless, and wandered off to a safe distance. Relegated swiftly from happy author to shunned leper, I went back out into the blazing sunlit street.

In the riverfront street of my hotel was the Ventiane Book Center, with an open front and every piece of merchandise swathed either in cellophane or dust or both. The clerk swabbed at the cards I bought with a feather duster and I energetically polished my hands with a clean handkerchief I'd fortunately brought with me. I sneezed, she nodded, I left with no reason that I could see to ever go back.

Wandering on, I smelled the unmistakable fragrance of fresh, strong coffee and turned in that direction. There stretched before me was a congregation of sidewalk cafes, looking very French (or so I imagined.) On that street, I sat and luxuriated in the gift of quiet, time, and coffee, real coffee, ground from whole beans, aromatic and delicious in a way that Starbucks will never master.

Temples are the punctuation mark of Vientiane and they are beautiful, silent places with trees and flowers. I found my way of being in that city was to eat, see a temple, wander, and then repeat. It was a better prescription than Xanax and Valium put together for a frazzled refugee from Bangkok, at least it was back in 2009.

Perhaps someday I’ll be able to see how much has changed since then. God, I do hope the coffee is still the same.

~Janet Brown

Other Homes, Other Laundries

 

When I think of my homes in the world, I differentiate them by how I do my laundry in each one.

In my current home in Tucson, doing laundry is quite pleasant. The machines are near the back door of the house, are clean and rapid, and involve only a couple of trips down a small staircase from my room to the ground floor. It’s as easy as taking a shower.

 In Seattle where I used to live in a century-plus-vintage apartment building, laundry was a matter of necessity coupled with a generous helping of squalor .In a basement room that felt like the ideal spot for a murder there were two washers and two dryers. In my bedroom near one of the windows was a long pole for clothes that shouldn't cook in the dryer. The only barrier I had to achieving clean clothing was having enough quarters for the machines, and my bank was only five blocks away. In this home, doing laundry was something never took for granted. At one stage in my life, I did my laundry in two plastic tubs, by hand, in my Bangkok bathroom, and occasionally had to gather it from the ground below when storms swept in, blowing my clothes from my balcony. Having a security guard ask me "Is  this your skirt?' in a language not my own isn’t one of the high points in my memory. For me, sharing a laundry with 49 other residents in my Seattle building was no problem at all.

 When I reached my Hong Kong home, the first order of business was buying a dozen plastic coat hangers, because my tiny Chungking Mansions domicile never had more than three hanging from pegs in the wall. Every four days, I carried a bag of laundry to a woman on the ground floor; if she received it in the morning, I could pick it up in the afternoon. And I did my best to get it soon after 2 pm, because if I hurried and put the laundered clothes on hangers, layering them on the four wall pegs, the humidity worked for me and I didn’t have to pay for expensive ironing. The most difficult part of this enterprise was being sure that I didn’t lose my laundry ticket, and having my day split in half by the need to return for that afternoon pick-up. I could of course have taken the local way out, washing my clothes by hand and hanging them out the window, but the thought of marinating them in the stagnant Kowloon air that smelled like wet mops made my laundry bill worthwhile. It was around $32 US per month and that was a price I was willing and able to pay.

 In my Bangkok apartment, laundry was a matter of charm and bemusement. Often the building's laundress had as shaky a command of Thai as I do myself, although the Lao lady and I always understood each other and the Myanmar refugee became much more fluent than I as the years passed. What was sometimes an insurmountable gap was our differing concepts of time and urgency. I always spent more money on clothing than I planned because most of my clothes were being held hostage somewhere in laundry limbo. But when they did come back to me, each garment was on its own hanger, beautifully ironed and presentable, delivered to my door. I usually paid around $38 US at the end of the month, plus the cost of the beer I used for self-medication when I realized that once again I needed to buy more clothes, since god knows when my laundry was going to reappear.

 All of this was still infinitely preferable to having laundry done when I was on the road. Punctual it always was, but what would return to me was always a matter of conjecture and sometimes consternation. Ironed? Unironed? Wadded into a clean ball? Would it come back before my check-out time? These were the questions that haunted me in a strange bed at 4 am. Suddenly the varying laundry methods of my different homes across the globe seemed comforting and luxurious, making me realize that familiarity breeds content. ~Janet Brown

Blue Velvet, Cholera, and Wisps of Genocide

 It was still standing, back in 2015, waiting for the Rat Pack to fill its torn white naugahyde banquettes, kick the potted plants off the stage, and croon into a microphone.

 In 1968 you could get an ultra-modern room there for 16.00 US. It had a swimming pool and a tourist shopping arcade. At 13.26 meters, the pool was the largest in Bangkok then. In 2006 it was photographed, still elegant, as was the hotel when I first walked in, although it needed a lot of TLC at that point as it approached its half-century mark.

 Lady Liberty still lifted her lamp by the golden door (okay it wasn’t golden but oh well). The lobby was big enough to double as a ballroom with gigantic portholes in the wall that separated the restrooms from the reception area. The staircase was early industrial chic, imposing and metal among the profusion of wood that trims its surroundings.

 The coffee shop/dining room was cavernous and the tables and chairs were solid hardwood, weighty in classic 1960s style. Banquettes large enough to easily hold a dozen people swept in horseshoe shapes against the wall. It was the sort of room that made me want to order a martini and a pack of Lucky Strikes. Rumor had it that the Khmer Rouge filled it during the 80s when they came to do business in Bangkok. It seemed as though that was probably true as I sat there with a good friend, drinking Heineken that had a faint aftertaste of Scotch. We both could taste it, a ghostly flavor but very distinct.

 The waiter shooed us off before 10 pm in a kindly fashion and I approached the reception clerk, asking how much it would be to stay here. A room was over 20 USD a night and hovered around 540 US for a month. I said that was too much and she asked me if I would like to look at one of the rooms.

 My friend and I crowded into the world's tiniest elevator with a staff member who might have been called a bellboy back in more elegant times. The elevator could just barely contain the three of us but managed to take us to the fifth floor.

 The room we were shown was huge--quite possibly the size of the condo I was staying in during my temporary return to Bangkol. There was a deep bathtub and a lot of wooden drawers and doors on one wall. They looked fragile and I gasped when my friend tried to open one, without success but also without breaking it. A big window looked out toward the lights of Pradiphat Road and a bottle of Mekong waited with two glasses beside the double bed.

 It was a room with history and I wanted to stay there when I next returned to Bangkok. It was in one of my favorite parts of the city, Saphan Kwai , a place where a shop still sold both the International New York Times as well as  the Bangkok Post, where Abu Ibrahim still flourished under the hospitable ownership of a man from Bombay, where good food and fresh flowers were always for sale on the street. Next year, I thought, but I couldn’t wait that long.

 I don't know why I have to set up little dares for myself, but I always have. "Dare you to walk on the underpinninngs of that bridge." "Dare you to have that extra shot of Scotch." "Dare you to live in Thailand." For a girl/woman/old broad who is bookish and unathletic to the extreme, this weird penchant for self-challenges seems completely out of character, even to me.

 The Liberty Garden Hotel became one of those little dares. When I’d been there to have a drink with my friend Don, we both were intrigued by its aura of decay and past elegance. Its neighborhood is vibrant and has remained unchanged over the past twenty years, which is unusual in present-day, rapidly transforming Bangkok. That's why I decided I needed a night at the Liberty.

 When Don and I had looked at one of the rooms, at night after two beers it seemed romantically decrepit. Don pointed out the wifi password painted on the wall of the hallway---Ninja1234. It was all very noir and charming so I went back a couple of days later to reserve and prepay for a room.

 I should have asked to look at it in daylight. Certainly the outer courtyard and the hotel lobby both looked vastly different when not softened by nightfall and a little tinge of disquiet began to color thoughts of this excursion. But I had dared myself, with a small caveat--"If there are bedbugs, you can always get a taxi back to your condo by the river."

 So a few days later there i was, back in the Liberty's miniscule elevator with the bellboy. The gaping hole in the wood veneer of its wall seemed less atmospheric and more creepy than it had when I had been in the elevator with both the bellboy and Don the week before. I entered a room and immediately was hit with the odor of musty bedding.

The window was large, overlooking the swimming pool and when I walked over to take a look, I wished it didn’t. The pool was missing many tiles and had a diseased and blackened appearance in those spots where it wasn't blue. It was completely vacant and that didn’t surprise me at all. It looked as though it might be a dandy place to pick up a spot of cholera.

 After the bellboy left, I peeled back the bottom sheet to examine the mattress. It was so mottled with spots that it was impossible to see if any of them had been left by bedbugs. The pillows looked ancient, but the bed linens were clean. I went to the windows; both were old casement models that opened outward and both were open. I could close only one of them.

 "The window won't close. I want another room," I told the desk clerk. She looked at me blankly. "The window won't close. There will be mosquitoes."

 "We have no mosquitoes," she said and I tried not to sneer. "My room is right above the swimming pool. Of course there will be mosquitoes."

 She shrugged and beckoned for the bellboy. Together we went back up to the sixth floor where he tugged the window shut. He left in an eloquent silence and I sat on one of the heavy wooden chairs, looking at where I would spend the night. The floor was clean, when I went into the bathroom, it was clean. I'd stayed in places before that were as old as this room. But only in this room did I feel that it was very hard for me to breathe.

 I picked up the bag I'd filled with everything I needed for a night’s stay and walked into the hall. I left the key at the reception desk, saying, "I'm going out." Then I walked back to the skytrain and began my return  back to the sanitized world of the condo development at Chapter One, Modern Dutch.

 Some dares aren't meant to be taken and there was something in that room, in that hotel, that wasn't good for me. I decided to chalk it up to the stale odor that greeted me when I walked in and the knowledge that the glow of the swimming pool at night would be much more Blue Velvet than I care to look at, not to the miasma of evil left behind by Pol Pot, Ta Mok, and their buddies. ~Janet Brown