anthromuse

Fun in the Tanzanian Sun: Bovine Edition

2011-01-31T18:31:00.000-08:00

Todos Santos, Mexico

2010-08-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

Andrew and I are in Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico. I'm not the sun worshipper I once was, except in the yogic sense. But I still appreciate that Todos Santos is everything you could hope for in a beach getaway -- piles of mangos, fragrant and sticky sweet, gold-speckled beaches, and tacos stuffed with buttery fish and shrimp. There's a special bonus in our version of paradise: Mario, from Mexico city but a longtime resident of Todos Santos, can serve you piles of just caught yellow tail for your sashimi dinner and then teach you how to surf before lunch the next day. Any teacher who can coax me to standing on a surfboard in less than 20 minutes has a special gift (photographic evidence to follow). The goddess of small things is busy here in Baja!

Dr.

2010-07-24T09:37:00.000-07:00

Against all odds, I became Dr. Huang a few months ago. Not the kind of doctor that can help with your migraines and back pain, but the kind that can wax quixotic about the human condition -- its joy and suffering, its sameness and difference.

I don't write much anthropology these days, and I'm sure I've lost all of my credentials as a blogger. Still, I'm not saying goodbye. I'm putting my toe back in the water because I miss writing about the small things, like the way a steamy dumpling can be pure happiness.

In August, I'll be on vacation in Mexico and will be on high alert for the gifts imparted by the goddess of small things.

Paused.

2009-09-20T20:16:00.001-07:00

Oops, it's been more than 6 weeks since I last blogged. Here's why: I'm meeting with the professors on my dissertation committee next week. I wish I could say that I spend my free moments cooking gourmet meals or training for another race. Instead, I've been sucked into the world that is the Huffington Post. It turns out that I have an opinion on Michelle Obama's wide belt. Politics aside, the answer is "Hit...so stylish!"

I don't know when I'll be back, but don't give up on me. I promise this break is for a noble cause. Or at least one that will save you from repeated posts about writer's block.

Kitty Love

2009-08-05T19:13:00.001-07:00

My sister described this perfectly: Jamieson wants to get close, very close, to his fuzzy new friends, but hasn't figured out the best way how. I leave the life lesson to you.

Emergency Anthropology

2009-08-04T07:55:00.000-07:00

There aren't that many jobs out there for an aid worker/anthropologist. So many thanks to Michael Kleinman for letting me make the argument for Emergency Anthropology on his fun, high-traffic blog. Michael is the humanitarian relief blogger for change.org. (Aid, fun? In the right hands, yes.) Click here and bookmark!

yes we did

2009-07-30T09:15:00.000-07:00

I ran my first marathon.

Katharine reminded me that just a few years back I called marathoners certifiable. The very same Katharine who I convinced to run 26.2 miles with me this past Sunday (her fourth marathon) and who at one point put out her hand to pull me along (my jog was threatening to peter into a walk). That's friendship: I call you crazy and then rope you into my craziness and then make you cheerlead so that I can finish the craziness. I heart Katharine.

I wasn't sure I was going to start the race much less finish it. A few weeks ago, I hurt my foot during a run. So my recent training consisted of hours on the elliptical listening to romance audiobooks. Not exactly what Hal Higdon had in mind. But even if I had been in better shape, I'm pretty sure I would have nudged close to my physical limit. At mile 13 I was high on endorphins. At mile 16 I finally understood the meaning of low-blood sugar. At mile 22 I was counting my breaths between bouts of cursing my goal-oriented self.

When we stopped for burritos after the race, I had to use the handicap grab bar to lower myself onto the toilet. I'm still limping and downing ibuprofen like there's no tomorrow.

So, what did I learn from this arbitrary test of physical endurance?

1. I have amazing friends. Greg picked me up at 5 am to take me to the starting line. Ryan R drove the devoted crew around the city and handed me a shot of Gu at a critical point. Ashley was in command of logistics and, with her usual sunshine, raised the crowd's cheer quotient. Ryan E took a break from bar exam prep to give us high-fives. Summer held up a poster while executing Laker-worthy high kicks. As Ryan wrote in his account of completing an Ironman (2.4 mi swim, 112 mi bike, 26.2 mi run), "There’s a special place in heaven for those who cheer on marathon runners. And Summer is the mayor of this area of heaven." Rebecca, Meredith and Ellie joined us for a mile or two at just the right moment, i.e. when it was my turn to entertain Kath with stories but could no longer simultaneously jog and talk. And Evan, dear Evan, ran alongside me in jeans and a sweater around miles 25 & 26, when I could only grunt in response to the much-needed enthusiasm. Kath's parents, Brian and June, hosted a celebration BBQ afterwards. Thank you!!

2. It's more 'mind over mind' than 'mind over matter.' It was painful when I hit the dreaded wall (twice), but much worse were the moments that I allowed myself to ask...what if? What if I walked a bit? What if I hadn't told my thousand best friends about my plan to run? What if I'd bowed out due to injury? I had to continually bring my mind back to the moment, to the task at hand. This is more than the New Agey power of positive thinking, though sometimes you need a booster of that too. To finish a marathon you need to cultivate mental discipline, a skill I find more difficult and valuable than its physical counterpart.

3. Well, I wouldn't be me if there weren't some meaning-of-life lesson too. The Buddhist version of 'death and taxes' is that we cannot escape old age, sickness and death. And, no matter how far our medical technology advances, there will always be pain. In Buddhism, you learn through practice and observation that we also always have a choice towards it.

The Buddha once asked a student, "If a person is struck by an arrow is it painful?" The student replied, "It is." The Buddha then asked, "If the person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful?" The student replied again, "It is." The Buddha then explained, "In life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. This second arrow is optional."

To face pain with grace takes a lot of practice. I'm not encouraging people to seek it out; we're surrounded by enough material as it is. For me, though, it's helpful to have a physical activity as training grounds for bypassing that second arrow. It's also key to have amazing friends along the way (see #1).

Have I signed up for the next marathon? No, my body is still feeling exactly how high-impact running is. I told Katharine that I miss cross-training and that we should consider a Half Ironman. She says that even she's not that crazy. We'll see about that.

saving muslim women, again

2009-07-27T08:02:00.000-07:00

I have an aid-related pet peeve – when someone justifies an argument and/or intervention by making a gesture toward “saving” disempowered Muslim women. This trope has a long history: offenders include French colonials in Algeria and former First Lady Laura Bush before the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Like any humanitarian aid worker (and most others), I think there are compelling reasons to help vulnerable populations. But we also have a responsibility to carefully consider the how and why. We should be particularly vigilant when humanitarian and military goals become intertwined.

This is all a way of saying that my peeve-o-meter hit zone red when I saw Thomas Friedman’s recent column on education in Afghanistan. After saying that he’s not sure the Afghan war makes sense anymore in strategic terms, he finds the silver lining:

But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral — as if they were their first dolls — it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away.” Not yet.

Friedman is writing about the opening of a school built by Greg Mortenson of “Three Cups of Tea” fame and the US State Department. The opening was attended by Admiral Mike Mullen, the US chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff. It’s a harmonious image of the military, non-governmental organizations and diplomatic forces joining hand-in-hand to empower Afghan girls. Friedman’s image of a commanding officer giving gifts to crouching, clutching Afghan girls feeds the old trope: Western might saves oppressed women from corrupt anti-moderns and religious extremists. He goes one step further to argue that the school reminds us of the essence of the “war on terrorism.”

It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.

Let me be clear that I support the education of Afghan children and I admire Mortenson’s work. But that sentiment is exactly what enables the sleight of hand: the Hallmark moment makes us feel good about conflating humanitarian, military and moral missions. Rory Stewart, a professor at Harvard, argues that this conflation prevents us from proposing more minimalist and realistic goals in each realm. Is it really for the West to create the space for an Islamic progressive movement? Friedman argues this was one of the aims of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. But, if anything, the wars have reduced the legitimacy and sway of Muslim moderates. Pakistan recently announced its opposition to a surge in Afghanistan because it would push extremists into its own territory. During my fieldwork in Xinjiang, China, many Uyghurs cited the Iraq war as evidence of American hatred of Islam. In my view, they were sad and angry in near equal measure.

It’s a mistake to think that the outcome could have been different if the development budget were a little bigger or the military intelligence a lot better. Regardless, US security interests are not coterminous with the concerns of Muslim progressives, humanitarian organizations or Afghan girls. To treat them as such will lead, at the very best, to disappointment on all sides. Stewart writes:

Indeed, at times it seems that all these activities – building a state, defeating the Taliban, defeating al-Qaida and eliminating poverty – are the same activity. The new US army and marine corps counter-insurgency doctrine sounds like a World Bank policy document, replete with commitments to the rule of law, economic development, governance, state-building and human rights. In Obama’s words, ‘security and humanitarian concerns are all part of one project.’

This policy rests on misleading ideas about moral obligation, our capacity, the strength of our adversaries, the threat posed by Afghanistan, the relations between our different objectives, and the value of a state. Even if the invasion was justified, that does not justify all our subsequent actions. If 9/11 had been planned in training camps in Iraq, we might have felt the war in Iraq was more justified, but our actions would have been no less of a disaster for Iraqis or for ourselves. The power of the US and its allies, and our commitment, knowledge and will, are limited.

To Friedman’s credit, his following piece acknowledges that we have limited time, money, soldiers and aid workers. But he doesn’t yet see that at issue is not only the limit to our will and resources, but to our wisdom as well.

land of lincoln

2009-07-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

My dad and I just toured the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois. The multimedia shows are impressive. Lincoln's ghost, gangly yet regal, appears in three dimensions on a stage set with library shelves and presidential artifacts. The floor shakes during civil war battles and John Wilkes Booth's deadly shot. But, thankfully, the special effects aren't a crude attempt to remake history as blockbuster entertainment.

If any man deserves hagiography, it is probably Lincoln. Yet, one of the two productions takes special care to give voice to his critics, and not only the pro-slavery ones. We hear the indomitable Frederick Douglass call Lincoln out for being less than an abolitionist (the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in Confederate territory). We hear, too, those who questioned whether unity was worth the human toll (by the end of the Civil War, more than 600,000 soldiers had died). The side-by-side photo comparison of Lincoln in 1861 vs. 1865 is striking. Apparently, a sculptor who saw a cast of Lincoln's late-war face insisted that it must have been done postmortem.

As we were driving toward downtown Springfield, my 82-year-old uncle grumbled in Chinese, "There are so many blacks around now." My mom glanced at me to see if I was going to pick a fight. I stared out the window. I considered 'What Would Lincoln Do?': "When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a 'drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.'" I love my uncle dearly but he does not have a sweet tooth to speak of. My mom stepped up and teased, "We have a black president and you're still saying things like that?"

I imagine that every person at the museum today reflected on our current president while walking through the exhibit on slavery and emancipation. In 1860, there were 4 million slaves in America: 1 out of every 7 people. For me, the photograph of the whip-scarred back and the replica of the slave auction block were not the hardest to see. I had more difficulty looking at various documents declaring ownership - reward posters and receipts of sale. Yet, here we are, 150 years later.

Obama invoked the Land of Lincoln in his recent speech at the NAACP convention.

And because ordinary people did such extraordinary things, because they made the civil rights movement their own, even though there may not be a plaque or their names might not be in the history books -- because of their efforts I made a little trip to Springfield, Illinois, a couple years ago -- where Lincoln once lived, and race riots once raged -- and began the journey that has led me to be here tonight as the 44th President of the United States of America.

Because of them I stand here tonight, on the shoulders of giants.

dignity.

2009-07-17T14:09:00.000-07:00

In January, I blogged about a Sri Lankan journalist who knew he would be killed one day for revealing the atrocities of the long civil war in his homeland. He wrote a letter to be published after his assassination - a letter, as Steve Coll from the New Yorker wrote, "[that] is like nothing else you will read today, that I promise." I was reminded of it while reading about the recent execution of Natalya Estemirova.

Ms. Estemirova was a fearless human rights investigator in Chechnya.

She wandered the ruined republic wearing a skirt, blouse and heels, lipstick on, carrying her purse and presenting a straight face, perhaps warmed by a slight smile, to masked gunmen and victims alike. She could seem as proper as a chief librarian, ready to add to her archive, both on paper and in the mind, which revealed the Chechen wars for what they really were. How did she dare?

This was Chechnya, after all, a world of violence so sinister it can be difficult to describe in a newspaper. Thugs dominate this land. Experience has taught them that fear will reliably bend opponents to heel. Who was she to chase them? Why could she not be convinced to quit?

The answer is now written, though everyone who knew her knew it long ago: only death would stop her. All her friends could do was trust her to dodge it, as she had, somehow, for years...

She was, improbably, a one-woman parallel government, providing services the real government was unwilling to offer. She found the incarcerated. She hunted for hidden graves. She built cases against perpetrators, even when she found, as she often did, that they wore government uniforms.

I wonder if Ms. Estemirova left a letter for her loved ones and for her people. Regardless, her legacy is clear: political strongmen have no armor for hard facts and the dignity she embodied. (Thus, they must attack, even knowing the opposition's ammunition is unlimited, intangible.) There is nothing passe about speaking truth to power. We can't all be heroines but we all need them.

across the divide

2009-07-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

The New York Times published a great interview with Justice Ginsburg in which she talks about the impact of having women (currently, a woman) on the Supreme Court.

The interviewer asks Ginsburg about a hypothetical Supreme Court that is majority female:

Q: Do you think that some of the discrimination cases might turn out differently?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: I think for the most part, yes. I would suspect that, because the women will relate to their own experiences.

Q: That’s one area in which outcomes might actually differ?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes. I think the presence of women on the bench made it possible for the courts to appreciate earlier than they might otherwise that sexual harassment belongs under Title VII [as a violation of civil rights law].

Later in the interview, Justice Ginsburg talks about how Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote an opinion that discussed the problem of stereotyping women as responsible for the domestic sphere. If women, and not men, are in charge of the home, then employers will view them as less valuable:

Q: ... I wonder if one of the measures of your success on the court is that a male justice would write an opinion like this?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: That opinion was such a delightful surprise. When my husband read it, he asked, did I write that opinion? I was very fond of my old chief. I have a sense that it was in part his life experience. When his daughter Janet was divorced, I think the chief felt some kind of responsibility to be kind of a father figure to those girls. So he became more sensitive to things that he might not have noticed.

It is hard to imagine a world in which life experience didn't affect judgments, in both narrow and broad senses. The question is, what experiences expand our willingness and ability to imagine other ways of being-in-the-world? Or, better yet, how might we become more expansive people? We can always look back and say, let's not empathize, but there's wisdom in knowing what's beyond the comfort our own sedimented worlds.

on history and humility

2009-07-09T14:21:00.000-07:00

A fun coincidence related to my previous post on history: the leading story on Salon is a review of a book, "Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History," by Oxford historian Margaret MacMillen.

The most important lesson to be gained from history, she writes, is simply "humility ... Knowing that classical Chinese civilization valued scholars above soldiers or that the Roman family was very different from the nuclear one of the modern West suggests other values and other ways of organizing society."

To recognizes this is not, she maintains, merely "relativism," but rather the awareness that the threats, incentives and tactics that work on us won't necessarily persuade people in other cultures and situations. Americans, who often have so little understanding of what it's like not to live in an affluent democratic superpower, are especially prone to mistakes in this department, as our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have amply shown.

Cultural and historical particularity is why the dreams of scientific planners and rational bureaucrats never come to pass. (As the eulogies note, Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War, was the "ultimate rationalist.") Persuasion is an art that requires empathy of the highest order. As MacMillen suggests, it is not fundamentally a humanist question (what if that were my mother, my child?), though we might very well want to ask that one too. It is a question of worldview (what if that were my people with that historical experience?).

Clearly, I'm preoccupied with empathy. My next post will be on Chief Justice Rehnquist's unplanned empathy workout.

Uyghurs in the news, Part 2

2009-07-08T22:20:00.000-07:00

I was able to speak to a friend in Urumqi today. He says that his neighborhood is quiet. Children are playing outside. He is grateful that order has been restored, though some of his friends are still afraid to leave their apartments.

No one is very surprised that the government is back in control. Last year when I was in Sichuan after the earthquake, the other aid workers were stunned by its capacity. They had read about China's rise, but still couldn't believe their eyes. Cell phone towers up in no time (and free calls); seas of blue tents for shelter. When our logistics team tried to make an emergency purchase of tents near Beijing, the company said, "Sorry, the government has already claimed them."

Whether you're a fan or critic, or hopefully something in between, this is a fact of contemporary China. The Christian Science Monitor provides an apt quote from Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch, "The Chinese have time, power, resources – everything is on their side." Barring some major change in global political and economic structure, the government will continue to use its advantages.

In my previous post, I said that the most unfortunate blind spot is historical. The past is always in the present, but which past? To many Han Chinese, Xinjiang has been a part of China since the eponymous Han dynasty (202 BCE - 220 CE). Many Uyghurs point to periods of independence as recent as the second East Turkestan Republic (1949-9) and as far back as the 9th century Uyghur state. Though the myth of a fully objective history is exactly that, too often people on both sides see in the past only what they want to. (If you are interested in reading more, a good place to start is James Millward's history of the region.)

All individuals and groups struggle with the question of how to relate to difference - which kinds are threatening, which kinds are the basis for solidarity. A systematic and open-minded reading of history can tell us how those lines have been drawn and, more importantly, how they have shifted over time. It is the shifting that is the most instructive. When that which is solid melts, if only a little, you begin to see that there are other possibilites. Other ways of relating to your personal and communal past, and thus to your present and future. I know this doesn't constitute a policy platform, but it's an important message that bears repeating. Incidentally, it applies just as much to the East/West as to the Uyghur/Han divide.

Uyghurs in the news

2009-07-07T15:35:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to those of you who emailed me to check in. I'm pretty distraught. Of course, our main thoughts should be with the people there, but I'm grateful that you sent notes.

Unfortunately, I don't have any inside information on what's happening. Right after the first protests, a close friend in Urumqi called me via Skype, knowing that access would be cut off any minute. He just had enough time to assure me that he's okay. Cell phone service is erratic. A foreign journalist told me that landlines are still working, but I haven't been able to get through. Just a whole lot of busy signals.

My friend Nicole suggested following melissakchan's twitter. Melissa, a correspondent for Al-Jazeera, tweets:

The city is now under martial law.

A Han Chinese man with a stick just tore open our car door to beat our producer. Averted just in time.

There is no right or wrong anymore. Just vigilantes, Han and Uighur. Mostly men but some women and even children.

As with any conflict, the situation is complex. I won't go through all of the aspects - cultural, linguistic, ethnic, religious, social, economic...You get the idea. And, as with any majority/minority issue, there are stereotypes and misunderstanding on both sides. (If you are interested in the fuller story, I am still looking for volunteers to read my dissertation draft.) In my view, the most unfortunate blind spot is historical. A mark of modernity seems to be that our gaze is so fixed on the future that we don't have time to look systematically at the past. More on how this distorts views after I get some sleep.

I am particularly worried about the people being detained. That can be a labyrinth of Kafkaesque proportions.

up and down, down and up

2009-07-02T23:27:00.001-07:00

My nephew Jamieson and I were distressed by the news today: unemployment climbs to 9.5%, stocks fall. Despite the downturn, we're hoping he will still be able to attend college. You've got to plan ahead.

Seriously, sometimes I wonder if Jamieson gets it more than we do (though his laptop is not Internet-ready, its predictions are beating those of Goldman Sachs and leading economists). You can be fully absorbed in solving the pressing problems of today or fully anxious about your future retirement, but when push comes to shove, nothing compares to a hug from your mommy and a popsicle on a hot day.

Amen for that.

gmail knows best

2009-06-30T17:20:00.001-07:00

I'm writing a chapter that is due in 24 hours, so I've been glued to my black box for an unhealthy period of time. My favorite distraction is, of course, gmail. Since I barely get any email (hint, hint), I've started to pay undue attention to the sponsored and suggested links at the top of my inbox. It's a little scary to think of complex algorithms parsing my email for words and phrases that reveal my consumption and other habits.

A review of the most recent links:

"Neuro-Leadership - http://www.raoleadership.com/ - Exceptional leaders tap into their amygdala and frontal lobe" Why me? The text is mysterious enough to make you want to click. Apparently, I can learn how to exercise the underdeveloped parts of my brain to become a better 'feeler' and herd leader.

"What's Wrong With a Messy Desk?" (a non-ad link to an article on about.com) would be more on target if I were working at a desk.

And, finally, a winner - "Journeys: Chicago's New Wave of Microbrews" - an article I read two days ago, since the New York Times is my #2 form of procrastination.

In sum, please come visit me so we can visit the hip breweries! I will introduce you to city and suburban delights. At the very least, email me with news or cute photos of your pet. Or your sister's pet. You get the idea.

MJ

2009-06-29T07:25:00.000-07:00

Everyone has an MJ story. Mine begins on roller skates and ends with Islamic revivalists in northwestern China. As millions join in a fit of nostalgia, they remember that Michael (Mikaeel) Jackson knew no boundaries. I didn't know until I met MJ fans in Xinjiang. I'm afraid this is a persistent theme in my life: I travel far and wide to learn lessons easily grasped from the comforts of home. (Every week or so my mom points triumphantly at the latest segment on the Travel Channel, "See, I've been all around the world!")

Scene 1: It's another scorching summer day in the Chicago suburbs. My sister and I scurry to the basement to escape the heat. We put on our roller skates and pop Thriller into the cassette player. It's been played so many times that the ribbon has thinned in spots that we know by heart. As we skate around the washer/dryer, water heater and other household detritus, we belt out songs in our best Jackson falsettos. We decide to choreograph an MJ concert. We will recruit our friends and neighbors. The zombie moves will be all the more riveting - on skates! The crowning performance, skinned knees and all, is a favorite childhood memory.

Scene 2: I am chatting with my best friend in Urumchi, the captial of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China. It has the distinction of being the city farthest from any ocean (and, incidentally, the farthest from my home). My friend's neighbor, Ziwide, pops by to help roll little pasta ears. After telling me about the latest in Islamic cinema, Ziwide launches into a hagiographic account of Michael Jackson's life and conversion. The man, she gushes, is evidence that Truth reaches across racial, economic and cultural lines. Honestly, it is the first I hear of MJ's Islamic inclinations.

Scene 3: I am now in a remote village in southern Xinjiang. A brother of a friend is taking me on a motorbike ride to see the local mud-brick factory and water mill. He used to be a trader in the city but prefers life in the country. As we take in the bucolic scene, complete with donkey carts and cotton fields, he asks me about the great Michael Jackson. Can I confirm the reports of his conversion that have caused so much excitement here?

My citizenship was the source of more than a few awkward social interactions in Muslim China. Unlike many Americans, Uyghurs were not confused about the lack of relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Like it or not, I fielded accusations about George W's fact-starved foreign policy. But, more often than I would have ever imagined, the questions would wane and the questioner's face would soften. Whether awe-struck or quizzical, he or she would utter his name with a sense of the magical that, lucky for me and I think for all of us, transcends borders.

pre-nostalgia

2009-05-06T21:04:00.000-07:00

Ever since I decided to leave San Francisco, everything has been tinged with pre-nostalgia. On Saturdays I go the Noe Valley Farmers Market with my sister, brother-in-law and nephew. When we started going, Baby Jamieson was but a wrinkled peapod in a soft brown sling. Now, sporting checkered Vans and an orange vest, he walks a good chunk of the way there.

How does one mark time? There is T.S. Eliot's classic line, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." (As I write, I am listening to the Prufrock-inspired song by the Crash Test Dummies.)

Yesterday, I taught my last class of the semester, which was also my last class at Berkeley. As you can imagine, floods of pre-nostalgia. I've been rereading Eliot for sentimental reasons, but Eliot himself was far from sentimental. His meditations on time, language, beginnings and ends are lyrical yet unflinching, "precise but not pedantic." My favorite bit of late, which I read to my class, is from Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

I hope I didn't depress my bright-eyed students with all the talk of remembrance and return. They are at the wave's peak, whereas I am betwixt and between - preparing to leave the comforting rhythms of the university semester and the delights of my nephew's magical growth, but poignantly pre-nostalgic too.

and yet the spirit

2009-04-13T19:04:00.000-07:00

As I was in the final yards of yesterday's arm-wrenching (and joyful) stint as a dog walker, a woman stopped me with a shriek, "Nikki McClure!" Both the pit bull and I jumped. She pointed at my chest.

Yes, I was wearing a shirt made from one of Nikki McClure's papercut designs! Was I just fantasizing about a move to New York? This was a to-live-for San Francisco moment: a stranger gushes about a shared affection for a socially-conscious graphic designer. It would be pure science-fiction in the City.

She said that her son had on the same t-shirt the night before and, lo and behold, she had on a Nikki pin. Do you have her calendar? Yes, ma'am. Right then, she nudged the back of the pin and a hand brushed my palm and 'here's a gift' rolled off her tongue. Gushing and gifting in a thirty second encounter.

Earlier in the day I was in a long line at the post office and the woman next to me grumbled, "I was just in Florida visiting my mom and the New Yorker in me is acting up." All of this following on my glorious run across the Golden Gate Bridge that would make even a New Yorker's heart sing.

Yet, yet, I'm still craving more than perfect sunshine and perfect strangers (!). More than an adventure, I'm looking for a challenge.

for the love of silence

2009-04-08T13:43:00.000-07:00

Have we lost the skill of being in silence? In The End of Solitude, William Deresiewicz argues that the fear of being alone defines our mode of self:

The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.

We strive to be known - not even for a particular virtue, but for the sake of being known (see, for example, Nicole Kidman's icy character in To Die For, directed by Gus Van Sant).

What happens when you're in a place, fully, invisible except to oneself? Over the past months, I've gone to three silent meditation retreats to taste the stillness. It has been easier than expected. Ironically enough, without all the distractions, you are more connected. Not only in the Whitmanesque sense, but in the postmodern spirit: the solidity of ego and self softens. You feel the possibilities of calm connectedness. In psychology speak, you start to know the difference between codependence and interdependence.

After my last retreat, I went straight from bucolic bliss to Grand Central Station. I sipped a cup of soup and soaked in the frenetic New York vibe. I have a newfound love of silence, but it is still the extremes of experience that draw me. A less-than-fine balance, perhaps, but I'll keep seeking.

Next stop, New York?

this contemplative life

2009-03-06T21:09:00.000-08:00

I've been contemplating more than musing, largely because the lives of a few of my friends have been moving downward with the market. If you've talked with me for more than twenty minutes, you know that my object of contemplation is the relationship between experience and meaning. There is an undeniably earnest aspect to this quest. I get ironic detachment (who could afford not to under Bush's reign of error?), but part of getting it is sensing its limits.

I've read a lot about David Foster Wallace since his death last year. The latest is a masterful piece in the New Yorker. I learned that Wallace's third and unfinished novel is about a group of IRS employees in Illinois and the possibility of transcendence via boredom.

He left a note about the novel's central idea: “Bliss — a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

For the postmodern and Prozac generation, Wallace was the right messenger for mindfulness. He understood that mindfulness isn't only a tool to keep your cool during terrible traffic, but a way to hold the contradictions of life, to make fun of and revel in the mundane. At some point in paying attention, you start to realize that every experience is equal opportunity: it can be momentous and meaningful or empty and pointless. And that's true not only for you, but for everyone. Irony and absurdity are not lost (contra Judith Warner's lament); they are subsumed. To wit, the setting of Wallace's unfinished novel is IRS POST 047, not Walden Pond.

As Wallace noted at a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, true freedom “means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

Time to read less about Wallace, and more of him.

to aspiring humanitarian aid workers...

2009-02-21T08:04:00.000-08:00

Chris Blattman is an accomplished cook, a good friend of mine and a professor of political science and economics at Yale. He writes a fun blog on international affairs and development. Apparently, he gets a lot of questions from idealistic twenty-somethings who want to go abroad to save the world. I can relate. So he asked me to write a few paragraphs on how I started with Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).

The week before my interview with MSF, I reread my notes from a class on critiques of development and humanitarian aid. My interviewer, a no-nonsense Liberian woman and former refugee named Hawah, ignored my academic and policy credentials. I never had the chance to wax on about how I would avoid the pitfalls of the disaster relief industry and the dangers of neocolonialism. Instead, she honed in on my sparse management skills. Had I ever led a group of people in accomplishing a concrete task? I knew vice-president of the debate team wasn't going to cut it. She wanted to help me. Maybe I had managed a restaurant...or a car wash? Thankfully, Hawah gave me the benefit of the doubt. I had worked for a non-governmental organization in Pakistan. I passed the accounting exam. I smiled a lot.

I started working with MSF in 2002 as a country administrator for two HIV/AIDS treatment programs in Kenya. Most recently, I took a break from my doctoral program in cultural anthropology to serve as a field coordinator in China after the May 2008 earthquake. I now know how to manage a team in an emergency setting. I understand better the balance between critique and action in the field.

If you're interested in humanitarian aid, it's best to start by cultivating a few relevant skills. That sounds basic, but I know from experience that backpacking in Nepal and completing a Masters in Public Administration alone don't pass muster. For non-medical volunteers, there are two main areas of entry-level work: logistics and finance/human resources management. To build experience, you could help coordinate an international supply chain or organize safaris for travelers. You could work with a diverse HR pool or manage a big, busy office. Idealism, relevant coursework, adventure travel and volunteer stints are important because they indicate that your heart is the in the right place and that you're not going to quit because the toilets don't flush. But to start out you also need a set of transferable skills.

Most aid workers, medical and non-medical, manage multicultural teams. The bulk of the work is about organizing staff and supplies in complex situations. It's rewarding, but it's not glamorous. Hawah was wise to ask about my car wash credentials. Since I'm now an idealistic thirty-something, I hope I'm qualified to dispense a tiny bit of advice: start in the field even if your goal is to work in policy or research. You'll see the challenges of development and aid from a perspective that will continue to be valuable in work and in that other journey too.

jinbao international

2009-02-18T17:58:00.001-08:00

Jinbao has gone international! I had to wait until I was 30 to see Barcelona, but he is enjoying the city's charms at eleven months. He reports that Spanish slides are just as delightful as American ones.

Jinbao is young enough to effortlessly inhabit what Zen Buddhist's call Beginner's Mind, "an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions." I am trying to have Beginner's Mind when staring at my computer screen. If today's dissertation writing is any indication, I better start at the park with my world-traveling teacher in tow.

30+

2009-02-12T00:28:00.000-08:00

I'm not usually into birthday celebrations, but this year the stars aligned. My friends organized a weekend in Tahoe and it happened to fall just a few days before my 31st. It was a good excuse to indulge. A nation of spendthrifts does not a stimulus make, right?

The weekend began propitiously. When Summer and I were buying gondola tickets, the Northstar saleswoman asked if we were young adults, i.e. 13 to 22 years old. "We feel young!" Summer enthused before confessing that we're both over 30. The ten of us feted friendship with food, wine, hot tubbing, brownies, games and even a little snowshoeing and skiing.

People keep telling me that your thirties are your best years, in part because you give up on trying to be the best. You accept yourself in a way unimaginable in your frenetic and soul-searching twenties, but are not yet anxious about senescence as you will be in your forties. To use a writing analogy, you find your "voice."

I do feel on the cusp of something. The near future feels pregnant with possibility, if not progeny. I'm ready for an adventure.

in the midst

2009-02-04T09:55:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine who is working in frigid Beijing wrote to ask me about my Superbowl Sunday half marathon. He admitted that he's been aching for the climatic glory of San Francisco, but I rubbed it in anyway:

The half marathon was stunning. Picture perfect, San Francisco-style - dozens of surfers dotting Ocean Beach, funny marathon outfits (a Franciscan monk!), the dull, yet seductive, browns of the grasses sweeping across the sand dunes, and the bright new grassy roof of the Academy of Sciences. I continue on happily with my ten-minute miles. Slow, steady, joyful.

The race was my third half marathon and Katharine and I are now gearing up for a full. This from a girl who used to need a nap after a two mile jog. Besides the endorphins and good company, what brings me back to running races? My friends in Xinjiang have trouble understanding the appeal. Their recap: you pay someone a bunch of money for the honor of putting one foot in front of the other for 13+ miles on roads that you could jog on anyway? And you're not even hoping to win? Yes, yes (sheepishly).

So, why? I'm not raising money for charity, though I benefit from the impressive cheer of the People in Purple. I'm not in it to prove that I'm a good athlete (in fact, my finishing times have so far proved that I'm average on a good day). I'm not even trying to improve on that mediocre personal record. I do take pride in certain things I do, but jogging is not near the top of the list. What then?

I'm a people watcher, by profession and disposition. I like watching grandma power walk, dad push the baby stroller, svelte yogi sway with her iPod and 6'5" athlete stop to high-five aforementioned grandma. But it's always more than just watching. Katharine and I saw the first woman speeding toward the finish line. My already pounding heart quickened when the crowd cheered as she crossed it. (Note: we were just past mile 6.) I felt a similar surge when a runner double backed to join a friend in need of encouragement.

It's so easy to get caught up in our own projects at home, work and school. We rarely gather with strangers to complete a hard task that offers no political or economic return. The sense of accomplishment is just what you and the few fans you dragged out of bed on Sunday morning make of it. Meaning is created out of the repetition of the most basic of movements, over and over. Gaits and speeds vary, but we are all doing the same simple thing and proud of each other for it. A banal transcendence, if such a thing is possible.

Plus, there's the t-shirt that represents your (dubious) bragging rights. You'd be amazed at what people will do for a "free" t-shirt.

good night moon

2009-01-30T22:52:00.000-08:00

Last night I was walking to the BART station in Berkeley and noticed the moon hiding coyly behind Venus. I stopped. I've been thinking about art-in-life but somehow missed this.

Q: How did I miss this for so many nights?
A: I've been sitting in front of my computer for lots of hours (but, thankfully, not with writer's block!).

Q: Does the above sounds familiar?
A: If yes, breathe deeply, close the cover and go say good night to the moon.

One more reason to love teaching - it gets me out of the apartment/neighborhood cafe to drink in the sensational realm. A friend once remarked that I notice the butterflies. Best compliment, ever. And not only because I love Nabokov. When I get that glazed over look, I try to remember the butterflies.

*Thanks to Harold Davis for this beautiful photo. No, that's not the view from the Berkeley BART station.

disjuncture & desire

2009-01-28T08:24:00.000-08:00

This morning two friends forwarded me two very different articles. I read them, back to back. One was a letter by a very eloquent journalist in Sri Lanka who knew that one day he would be killed for exposing corruption and abuse. The other exposed the woeful tales of no-longer-spoiled banker girlfriends who need to vent "free from the scrutiny of feminists." It was a strange experience of disjuncture, a kind of shock therapy.

For 15 years Lasantha Wickramatunga ran a newspaper, the Sunday Leader, on the principle of speaking truth to power. He wrote a letter to be published after his murder by government-inspired assassins. It begins:

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honor to belong to all those categories and now especially the last...

Why then do we do it? I often wonder that. After all, I too am a husband, and the father of three wonderful children. I too have responsibilities and obligations that transcend my profession, be it the law or journalism. Is it worth the risk? Many people tell me it is not. Friends tell me to revert to the bar, and goodness knows it offers a better and safer livelihood. Others, including political leaders on both sides, have at various times sought to induce me to take to politics, going so far as to offer me ministries of my choice. Diplomats, recognizing the risk journalists face in Sri Lanka, have offered me safe passage and the right of residence in their countries. Whatever else I may have been stuck for, I have not been stuck for choice.

But there is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.

In hopes of a little comic relief after shedding more than a few tears, I moved on to the trials and travails of Dating A Banker in these hard times. I clicked through to the blog:

Thanks to the recession, I now have a completely devoted BF, which is exactly what I wanted. So I should be happy, right? Wrong. I’m bored and can’t stop thinking about my perpetually unattainable Euro ex-boyfriend who is recession proof courtesy of an offshore trust account. To be honest, I’m only with my BF because I just don’t have the heart to change my facebook status from “in a relationship” to “I ain’t saying I’m a gold digger, but I ain’t messin’ with no broke banker.”

We don't need to be reminded that people live in completely different worlds, including those that live a lot closer than Sri Lankans and New Yorkers. But strangely enough, after the tears-to-disbelief shock wore off, it struck me that the Sunday Leader and Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA) are both engaged in unpopular truth-telling. The Sri Lankan government doesn't like to hear about the consequences of greed and shallowness. Ditto for bankers.

I don't, by the way, consider the women of DABA in need of a safe haven from feminists. What could be more "feminist" than being confident in your beauty and reminding guys in power of the fragility of their wealth and glamor? Extra points for doing so with panache and humor, if not compassion ("Next time you are stressing over some finance guy remember that he is just a math club nerd with cash..."). Safe haven from romantics and contemplatives, perhaps, but not feminists en masse.

I hesitate to juxtapose these two articles, since they ultimately speak to such disparate circumstances. But part of what I found fascinating and unsettling, my own truth be told, is that despite their distance, I connected to both. I spend most of my time trying to engage in works of conscience, though so pale in comparison to Wickramatunga's endeavors. Yet, as I confessed in a previous post, I have a weakness for Sex and the City. I'm not above wanting a pair of calf-hugging boots and a gourmet meal once in a while.

Desires are complex. Sometimes I'm tempted to squeeze them all into a single framework of what I want out of life. But then I remind myself that I'm here to muse about the human condition, contradictions and all.

the way we read

2009-01-21T17:22:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the first day of Obama's presidency and, less notably, my first day of class. I'm teaching a writing-intensive course on the anthropology of gender. In hopes of imparting some of my passion for words, I read the first few paragraphs of Kakutani's piece on Obama and books to my students:

In college, as he was getting involved in protests against the apartheid government in South Africa, Barack Obama noticed, he has written, “that people had begun to listen to my opinions.” Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power “to transform”: “with the right words everything could change - South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world.”

Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.

Obama notwithstanding, we are far removed from the days of "you are what you read." One of my friends can't remember the last time he read an entire book, cover to cover. Kakutani notes that George W. Bush competed with Karl Rove to race through as many books as possible (in 2006, Rove 110 - Bush 95). A motto for the twittering generation might be "you are the way you read."

It's obvious that writing involves diverse practices - from email to screenplays, from Facebook updates to term papers. But reading, too, requires and enables different dispositions. The great thing about this country is that you can be on either end of the Bush ("I race Rove...and lose") - Obama ("ardent love of reading") spectrum and aspire to be the president of the United States. All are created equal, yes, but some are just sexier than others.

january?

2009-01-17T17:33:00.000-08:00

I took this photo at Fort Funston yesterday afternoon. It was bright (obviously) and nearly 70 degrees. Pods of dolphins frolicked close to shore. Bikini-clad humans played fetch with sun-drunk dogs. Did I mention that it's January?

In my previous post, I said that San Francisco's pasts and patterns are increasingly woven into my story of self. So, too, are its sensuous joys.

must-see milk

2009-01-15T05:30:00.000-08:00

We know our world, to no small degree, through films. I live on Castro Street, just a few blocks from the San Francisco district of the same name. When I get on Muni, I glance at the plaque telling me I am in Harvey Milk Plaza. The name always struck me as familiar, but I couldn't attach a face to the name. Milk was killed the year I was born so it's not surprising that he took the shape of a vague sense-memory, rather than a piece of a fuller narrative.

That changed when Sean Penn and Gus Van Sant revealed Milk to me and a few hundred other people packed into the resplendent Castro Theatre. We know the faces of history - not through the generous renderings of painters, but through actors in generous make-up. Though I love a good old-fashioned book, I am a proponent of history via biopic if Van Sant is setting the standard.

Milk, according to the movie, came to San Francisco after his fortieth birthday, the beginning of his transition from slick businessman to bearded renegade to activist politician. In the process, the "Mayor of Castro Street" crystallized an amorphous political energy into a voice and force for gay rights. In 1977, he became the first openly gay politician elected to public office in California. Less than a year after taking his seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Milk was assassinated by Dan White of "Twinkie defense" infamy.

Film, as a medium, can hardly help being ethnographic. The businessman from across the street wipes his hand after shaking Milk's. This moment, in a sense, conveys more about the experience of discrimination than news clips about the effort to prevent gays from teaching in public schools (a campaign with eerie echoes in this last election). But Van Sant takes us a step beyond the rich and poignant details of Milk's life and times. His use of montage, flashback and visual textures brings into relief the many ways in which memory and history are elusive.

Time is not a series of moments stitched together by an evenhanded seamstress; time becomes meaningful through our actions and reflections. The same is true of place. Lately, San Francisco feels more like a part of me - its pasts and patterns woven into my story of self. Milk is no longer a plaque for my glazed, hurried glances; he is a neighbor, reminding me of the intertwined possibilities of art and politics.

the year in crisis

2009-01-07T12:10:00.000-08:00

One of the first reports I read by MSF/Doctors Without Borders was this annual accounting of the top ten humanitarian crises. 2008 offered plenty of schadenfreude-worthy moments, like CEOs being pressured into giving up their multimillion bonuses and heckled for private jet excesses. It also gave us a new feeling of Main Street solidarity; it may have been possible to perversely delight in the downfall of billionaires, but not in Joe the Plumber's depleted retirement funds. But beyond the global financial meltdown, there were other crises that deserve our collective attention and compassion: war in Eastern Congo, unmet needs in post-cyclone Myanmar, and continuing conflict in Somalia and Sudan.

People want decent lives and that includes everything from the absence of gunfire to clean water to a sense of security in old age. Reading about these crises can make one appreciate the relative abundance, if not fulfillment, that most of us still experience. But to me the basic point is not about feeling appreciative or even being moved to donate or volunteer (though these are good things). It's about staying curious about others and the challenges they face. That's a disposition that's useful in all endeavors, whether you're a parent, partner, teacher, investment banker and/or aid worker. I promise your capacity for empathy and compassion is more like a muscle that gets stronger when exercised than a well that dries up from overuse. But don't take my word for it - give it a try in the new year.

remembering home

2009-01-04T22:24:00.001-08:00

I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.
-Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago where lawns and nails are manicured regularly and prospective home buyers ponder such challenging questions as, two car garage or three? Our answer was three but that didn't stop my pubescent self from admiring other homes. There is one right on the corner when you turn into our subdivision that has castle-like turrets, complete with a fairytale glow around Christmas. Happiness, it turns out, is determined less by what you have than by what those around you have. Two psychologists from Harvard found, for example, that people would rather make $50,000 when others are earning $25,000 than make $100,000 when others are earning $200,000. (In my cash-challenged student state, I confess to finding some comfort in knowing that my friends now have to think twice about eating out too.)

Remembering, as Marker reminds us, is always a rewriting. So when I come home to Wheaton, my memories of childhood say more about where I've been than about the town itself. Suburban bliss or frustration à la American Beauty? After living in Pakistan and Kenya and then reading a lot of Marxist critique, the orderly lawns and lives grated on my nerves. The mall triggered my philosophical gag reflex. I sincerely, if misguidedly, began to see my childhood as a process of bourgeois mystification. SAT prep classes and pom pom camp were making me part of the bourgeois machine reproducing wealth and normalcy. The mystifying aspect was that it all seemed so good and innocent. I reflected on this invidious process while jogging around the neighborhood in my $120 Asics and thinking about my latest graduate seminar on alienation. (Don't worry, the irony is not lost on me.)

But, perhaps inevitably, I am no anti-capitalist revolutionary. I enjoy a frothy latte, a well-appointed gym and an occasional beach vacation - things familiar to the average suburban dweller. Though I love San Francisco, I see the appeal of a lawn, abundant parking and dog-poop-free sidewalks. On my jog yesterday, I passed a dad throwing a Frisbee with his three sons and a brother and sister riding their bikes around a cul-de-sac. I can appreciate how the order and repetition provide comfort. There is a safe kind of diversity: all the houses in my subdivision are slight variations of a half dozen or so model homes.

In the two weeks that I've been in Wheaton, my childhood hometown has reappeared before me. It's a quiet place with excellent public schools and a normalcy that is pregnant with the possibility of suburban rapture. SAT prep classes were a necessary drag, but plenty of fun was had between bowling alleys and football games. My friends and I went to Chicago for the Blues Fest loaded with blankets and coolers, but always caught the last train home. My parents would greet me with a late-night snack before I stumbled to bed. In this remembering, growing up was a fine balance between nurturing and freedom.

I'm not denying the existence of suburban dysfunction. (I will never understand the proliferation of cookie-cutter strip malls.) My family was different enough that I never felt it was all about keeping up with the Joneses. We covered an old minivan with philosophical musings like, "Wherever you go, there you are." And, yes, I drove that minivan to pom pom practice. From a San Franciscan or New Yorker perspective, that may very well be a narrow type of diversity, of acceptance. But the suburbs are not all about tragedy, conformity and repressed desires. The view of a sophisticated cosmopolitan can be, of course, just as narrow.

I'm not planning to move back anytime soon, but there is some liberation in this particular remembering of home. Now, when I jog by the glowing castle turrets, I feel neither envy nor disdain, but warmth.

beginning (again)

2009-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

To the special few who read this wayward blog -

2009 is here! I was writing a long post about memory, home and childhood, but it didn't strike the right tone for my first post of the year. There will be changes in the year to come, including more frequent posting and more consistent themes. Your input is both welcome and necessary!

Many thanks to those of you who have taken the time to comment on my mental meanderings. And special thanks to Stephanie who gave me the best compliment that a self-professed bookworm could ever hope for - she claims that I write deep things but am still really fun and normal in person. A perfect tag line for a future match.com profile?

I'm excited to see what the new year brings.

- Your favorite (and only) musing anthropologist

joy squared

2008-12-22T16:37:00.001-08:00

Jinbao, our golden treasure, was enthralled by this toy we found at the park. The only thing better than joy is joy amplified by an unexpected treasure.

warmth

2008-12-21T11:02:00.000-08:00

Warmth is a Dutch apple pancake fresh from the oven, smothered with Devonshire cream, whipped together by an older sister who used to tickle torture you and curl your hair for school dances and now feeds you pancake and crispy potatoes between glances at her nine-month-old baby on a rainy day that would otherwise chill your heart more than your bones.

now. i mean it.

2008-12-15T21:44:00.000-08:00

I am currently reading - not Sartre, not Foucault - but Fiore. Who is Neil Fiore, Ph.D.? He is the man who will enable me to finish my dissertation by May. Therefore, he is more important to me than any French guy and/or philosopher could ever be.

Neil Fiore is the author of The Now Habit.

Katharine recommended this book as the most productive way to put off writing my dissertation. She was right. Fiore has special credentials when it comes to my seemingly intractable case. He was a counselor for groups of procrastinating doctoral candidates at, get this, UC Berkeley. Over time, he discovered an interesting difference between those who finished writing in a reasonable amount of time (two years or less) and those who didn't.

Fiore found that, surprisingly, "intelligence and emotional problems were not the characteristics that distinguished the two groups. The real difference seemed to be that those who took three to thirteen years to finish their dissertations suffered more" (p. 81). Long-term procrastinators, of which doctoral students are prime specimens, see themselves as working all the time, deprived, guilty, with their 'real' lives on hold.

When did Fiore implant a web cam in my brain?

I'm not usually tempted to apply pop psychology to my life, but I'm ready to implement his suggestions, including writing for a quality 25 or so hours per week and playing, cooking & exercising the rest of the time. Planned fun is mandatory.

Fiore also persuasively argues that procrastination does not stem from laziness, but from perfectionism. When I was triathlon training, I complained to a friend that I felt guilty about being lazy and not writing enough. She laughed - how could I call myself lazy when I was waking up at 5:30 a.m. for two-hour workouts? Her question gave me pause. Fiore points out that, strangely enough, procrastination is (short-sighted) rational behavior for perfectionists: we get the reward of putting off work on something that can't possibly be good enough and, when forced to do the project at the last minute, can tell ourselves that it isn't a true representation of our work.

I don't want to reveal all of the tricks up Fiore's sleeve and deprive him of whatever profit he makes from the $10.17 you pay, but here is a final nugget, the epigraphs from Chapter 5:

Serenity Prayer: Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
- Reinhold Niebuhr

Stress Prayer: Grant me the stubbornness to struggle against things I cannot change; the inertia to avoid work on my own behaviors and attitudes which I can change; and the foolishness to ignore the differences between external events beyond my control and my own controllable reactions. But, most of all, grant me a contempt for my own human imperfection and the limits of human control.

Blogging, by the way, is not procrastination. It's warming up.

coffee & community

2008-12-11T16:38:00.000-08:00

Today I was sipping a latte with Tyson at Coffee Bar in the Mission, feeling rebellious with my ThinkPad. Macs and fixed-gear bikes are de rigueur in this neighborhood and, as usual, I'm behind the times. But mandatory hipster factor aside, I was entranced by Coffee Bar's high ceilings, ample counter and table space and sleek silvery design. The good coffee and divine treats from Patisserie Philippe didn't hurt either.

I'm not sure what it's a commentary on, but I've done more participant observation in cafes than in China. I feel at home, even among strangers. I recognize the characters and my place among them. At any given cafe in these parts, there's the artist or writer with leather-bound Moleskine notebook, contemplating beauty and the foam art gracing her cappuccino. There's the hyper-connected techie moving seamlessly between texting, emailing, chatting and talking via iPhone and MacBook. There's the barista in black, patiently or not-so-patiently taking an order for a decaf double shot soy no-whip mocha. There's the procrastinating student, flipping through piles of books between clicking on her gmail window.

Then, there's the regular. I am too much of a wanderer to be the regular, but I look on enviously when I hear a customer greeted by name and, "The usual?" I crave the fine balance of making a connection over coffee while still being able to work without serious social distraction. I'm not alone. There is a move toward "the new localism" to recreate a sense of face-to-face community. My guess is that San Francisco scores pretty high, with its coffee shop culture and farmers markets and well-defined neighborhoods. In Noe Valley, we have Bernie, whose tag line is "a local girl's coffee shop."

According to the rumor page of the Noe Valley Voice, Bernie is as local as it gets:

So who's Bernie? She's "local girl" Bernadette Melvin, the new owner and chief percolator.

"People keep asking me; 'Is this going to a Peet's? Is this going to be corporate?'" Melvin laughs. "And I tell them this is going to be as local as you can get. I grew up in Noe Valley. My mom lives here, my uncle lives here, and my cousins all go to St. Philip's. I even went to James Lick!"

James Lick is the middle school right across the street from me. But here I am still traveling from cafe to cafe, yet to make my way into Noe's new localist coterie. Next year I'll be off again, to another state or another country. Is it nonetheless worth seeking regular status?

I think yes.

joy

2008-12-02T23:03:00.001-08:00

Little Jamieson, my nephew, is almost nine months old! His solid little self loves melting into the air above.

all that is solid melts into air

2008-12-02T10:22:00.001-08:00

While cruising the Mediterranean in October, I befriended a Brazilian crew member, Evandro, who told me that one of his favorite books is Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. I'm not sure I can adequately convey the craziness of this meeting.

The cruise ship was a Vegas hotel on water. It had nearly 3,000 guests and 1,200 employees, as well as an ice skating rink, climbing wall, casino, theater, bars, night club and so on. Marshall Berman is a professor of political science at City College of New York. Evandro, a former high school history teacher with a masters in social memory, was working at the ship's 24/7 cafe. I was being a dutiful and spoiled daughter.

We started talking because I was at the cafe reading a translation of the brilliant Brazilian novel, Dom Casmurro, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Evandro launched into a mini-lecture about how the lead female character represents the emerging modern woman in Brazil and how Machado reveals her contradictions and society's ambivalence. I almost dropped my cup of tea.

So we talked about books. And we talked about my despair in the face of gluttonous consumerism and his calm curiosity. He played the anthropologist and I the disillusioned laborer. (There was no shortage of irony on this oceanic adventure.) I apologized for America's hubris and he replied, "Hey, don't worry, I want to go to America."

Fast forward. I finally read Berman's masterpiece on modern experience and am beginning to understand Evandro's hope in the face of his particularly surreal environs. Berman urges us to embrace the dynamism and possibility of modernity: "If we think of modernism as a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world, we will realize that no mode of modernism can ever be definitive....I have argued that modern life and art and thought have the capacity for perpetual self-critique and self-renewal."*

Berman argues that in the twentieth century, visions of modernity became flattened, constrained, closed off: Both/And gave way to Either/Or. Where, after all, was the dynamism in the hypnotizing lights and coma-inducing meals of the super-sized cruise ship? But Evandro still saw the possibilities. Not only in the higher salary and chance to see cities around the world, but also within the confines of the ship itself. Where I saw a Vegas hotel, he saw a miniature United Nations, just with tropical cocktails. The cruise both showcased inequality and excessive consumption and provided opportunity for self-transformation and Track II diplomacy. In our brief encounter, I realized that I'm often too heavy on critique, too light on renewal. (To paraphrase my friend Jody, "Welcome to graduate school!")

Yesterday, Evandro emailed me to say that he's back home. During the ship's week-long sail across the Atlantic, he concluded, "I liked this experience! But it's enough for me!"

*Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Penguin, 1988), pp. 6, 9.

giving thanks

2008-11-27T02:04:00.001-08:00

If you've seen me since last Friday, you already know that I'm effusing love after another week of silent meditation. Among other things, it gave me a wide open space in which to be thankful. One of my meditation teachers gave a talk about what he's thankful for - from infancy up to last week. I will spare you the details of my own lengthy list, but, dear friends, this one's for you.

2008 has not been an easy year for me - a deep bow to you who listened to me ramble and philosophize and complain about writer's block. Many thanks to you who picked me up (literally, as I am car-less, and figuratively) and reintroduced me to being social in San Francisco. Infinite gratitude to you who love me despite the truth, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

Finally, Sarah Palin, thank you for inspiring me to think more deeply about feminism and politics and for providing this Thanksgiving treat.

president obama

2008-11-04T20:50:00.002-08:00

Yesterday, rain. Today, sunshine.

patterns

2008-11-03T16:31:00.004-08:00

It is a chilly afternoon in San Francisco. On the asphalt playground across the street, raindrops puddle and stream in predictable patterns like tide pools bereft of color and life. The schoolchildren are inside or have gone home. My second story view is short of panoptic, but it’s more than reasonable for a perpetual student. From the left pane of my bay window, I can crane my neck to see Twin Peaks, fog draping over its mellow curves. The steep Castro hill rises directly in front of me, while the art deco columns on James Lick Middle School salute me from the right. I live above a Laundromat. Heat rises from tumbling clothes and takes the chill out of the hardwood floors, still shiny despite months of neglect. I am surrounded by books.

In his memoirs, Nabokov recalls a friend of his father, a general, who shows him a trick with matches; fifteen years later, the same man, disguised as a peasant during wartime, turns to Nabokov’s father and asks for a light. On the motif of matches, he writes: “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.” The same can be said of other genres, including ethnography. Telling stories, whether about oneself or others, demands greater attention to pattern than to detail. In turn, this requires a constant awareness of scope and distance. Like Icarus, writers fly a precarious path between sun and sea.

Watching the rain, I feel even more distant from those I write about – the Uyghurs in northwestern China. I want the rain to bring me back to a particular memory, but the memory refuses to speak. I am stuck asking myself, over and over, if there, like here, there is fog when it rains.

que es la veritat?

2008-10-19T11:59:00.019-07:00

I was able to suspend philsophical questioning during this vacation - until I walked up the stairs of Gaudi's fantastic creation, La Familia Sagrada. My eyes immediately gravitated to the Catalan version of the ever-troubling question, "What is truth?" Gaudi (1852-1926) was a modernist architect whose buildings look like a mix of Alice in Wonderland fancifulness and Catholic gravitas.

La Sagrada Familia, rising above an unremarkable neighborhood in Barcelona, is still under construction. Architects and artists are keeping Gaudi's vision alive, with futuristic stairways and stained glass windows that are simple and striking.

Okay, confession. I have not, in fact, been able to suspend philosophical meanderings for all that long. How could I, surrounded by places built for transcendence? How could I, surrounded by news that Obama will be our next president?

In my sun-drunk state, I've been ruminating on the politics of memory, progress and God. Maybe there is something to appreciate about America's foreshortened memory? Or is it our wide-eyed hope, so to speak? Either way, less than fifty years after the end of de jure segregation, we are going to elect a black president. Though calls for progress often mask other agendas, I'm a believer again if all goes as predicted on November 4th.

There are missteps, like George W. Bush's Reign of Erro r, but the overall trend is up. A universal truth? The jury is out until the next big hurdle is cleared. No, not Hillary in the White House with Bill as the First Gentleman. Bigger.

I'll let you imagine. We're about to set sail.

dream dates

2008-09-16T14:11:00.002-07:00

Katharine and Ryan got married and I got dressed up for the first time in a long time. Thank you, ladies, for reminding me yet again that non only do "Hot Chicks Vote Democrat" (see previous post), but they also dance up a storm before and after deep discussion of life, family, work and research.

feminism is... *

2008-09-16T02:07:00.006-07:00

You probably don't recall my dismay at seeing a t-shirt (pink, of course) proclaiming "feminists wear high heels." That was over six years ago. Now, America's Next Top Model meets gender politics is reaching new levels of...interesting. At the recent McCain-Palin rally, women proudly wore (pink) buttons with the bold message that "Hot Chicks Vote Republican." As William Kristol pointed out in a recent op-ed, don't go to a feminist comp lit class to gauge the pulse of America's post-feminism. Go to book clubs, Wal-Marts and megachurches.

It strikes me that I don't have any trouble going to a distant location and empathizing with all the people I encounter. Everyone from fashionistas in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China to religious hardliners on the Nigeria-Niger border. I will try and try, ask and ask. But show me a Mission hipster who scorns those who don't know that a "New Orleans" is cold-brewed coffee or a megachurch pastor who believes that the Iraq war is a mission from God and I will cringe. My mind shuts down temporarily. I will try my hardest to understand those faraway others, but my own fellow citizens remain mired in mystery.

Feminism isn't a core set of beliefs about work or money or childcare. It is a messy flow of aspirations that stems from the idea that women are not subordinate to men. But I don't know what equality or equity or mutual respect looks like in any particular situation. High heels may or may not be in the picture. Maybe there is something to the "Guns, God, Lipstick" slogan of one Palin supporter. Maybe not. But why should I deride her while justifying the secret pleasure I take in Sex and the City's mantra of Blahniks, Love, Lipstick? Neither trinity deserves much worship, but they are both odd appeals to our desire for solidarity, for something, to answer the pesky question of what matters in life. Whatever it is, you can't buy it at Wal-Mart, but you can't buy it at Macy's either

full moon, full belly

2008-09-15T00:47:00.005-07:00

Today is the Mid-Autumn Festival, when Chinese people all over the world gaze at the full moon and devour decadent moon cakes to celebrate the end of the summer harvest (yes, I just looked that up on Wikipedia). My sister, my nephew Jinbao and I went to Chinatown to enjoy music and crafts, courtesy of Sunday Streets, a pilot program modeled after one in Bogotá, Colombia. The goal is to get people outdoors and moving. Vehicle traffic is blocked while hula hoops and yoga instruction are provided. How can I ever leave this place? The absolute highlight of the day was when the San Francisco Chinese Folk Music Band took a break and an elderly couple stood up to fill the silence with...karaoke. A stout grandmother even took the stage to sing a Beijing opera-like bitty, complete with trills and shrieks. (Jinbao was startled. We reassured him that karaoke obsession is a recessive gene.)

After six hours of sitting in front of the screen, I decided that the celebration wasn't over quite yet. I baked some fish and cooked a little black quinoa. I opened a bottle of rosé and a bag of nonpareils and feasted while watching Il Postino. I laughed, I cried. If an achingly beautiful film - shot on an Sicilian island and complete with poetry and a tragic ending - fails to touch you, give up now. Luckily, I'm not a lost cause yet.

free loneliness!

2008-09-12T23:26:00.009-07:00

I dislike books with protagonists who are writers. There are exceptions, like Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety, a lyrical story about the relationship between two English professors and their wives. (In that case, the protagonist was many things before being a writer.) You are supposed to write about what you know, so it's no wonder that writers like to write about writers, i.e. themselves.

Now, I understand.

I envy the journalists and 9 to 5 writers out there. I once read an article about how John Grisham woke up an hour early every morning and just wrote those novels before going to do his lawyer thing. Alas, I am not such a creature.

My ability to write is determined by a mess of forces I am only beginning to comprehend. Amounts of sleep (more), social activity (less) and administrative tasks (less) are important. Physical activity and meditation are somewhat important. Serenity, very important. Which brings me to my discovery of piles and piles of loneliness. Welcome to the world of writing.

Even though collecting my data was an intensely social endeavor, writing it up is intensely not. I need hours of time to concentrate. When I have them, I still struggle. Between wanting to make social engagements and engaging in quasi-human interaction (i.e. email & Facebook), I stare at the screen and try to get back into the quiet space where the words flow. Where my own emotions are a placid ocean and I can discern shimmering patterns of life and meaning that aren't all about me. I get the sense that my dissertation committee isn't going to sign off on a memoir about my personal difficulties and subsequent emotional growth.

I'll be grandiose for a moment and say that writing is like no other activity. Language is what makes us human so if that's your craft, you're doing something that cuts to the core of humanness. And that, plus all the solitude, has a way of amplifying what is already there. To summarize: my loneliness feels a lot more lonely these days.

free happiness!

2008-08-24T23:18:00.011-07:00

I'm in the writing zone. It took a half marathon and a week of silent meditation (the Middle Way still eludes me), but I'm finally here. My friend Rebecca called this afternoon and asked if I might be interested in volunteering with her at the Democratic National Convention. I said no. No hesitation. It's not that I've become apathetic, despite the disappointment of the last time around. I just need to focus if I want to get this beast done.

Still, between long sessions with my significant other (i.e. my ancient Dell), I take breaks. I usually squeeze in two per day: one to exercise and the other to play with my nephew. As one of the meditation teachers said, hanging out with kids is free happiness! And, for me, exercise is a good though short-lived substitute for the inner calm I'm supposed to be cultivating. Sometimes it all just comes together. Today, for example, I walked and jogged my way up to the top of Twin Peaks. The bay was sparkling and clear, but the fog was rolling in with gusty howls. I faced the fog. I took a few cleansing breaths and recalled the calm of Spirit Rock. As I headed down the other side of the peak, I saw two monks below, maroon robes fluttering like oversize prayer flags. I bowed.

any given saturday

2008-06-28T13:23:00.005-07:00

I am sitting in my new "office" a.k.a. the San Francisco Public Library, Noe Valley Branch. My time in China convinced me that it's time to get serious and treat writing my dissertation like any other job, so that I can move on and get a real job. For the next nine months, between the rigors of farmers market shopping and triathlon training, you can find me in the back corner of my newly-renovated, well-lit neighborhood library.

Every geek has a special relationship with libraries. (I know that's no longer true - you can graduate from college without stepping foot in the library - but humor me.) When I walk into a library, the stillness quiets my chattering mind. My senses recall the first libraries of my prolonged academic journey. The slanted light through vertical blinds moving across the atlases and encyclopedias. The smell of aged paper and the rustle of shuffling feet. The sheer sense of wonder at what is captured on such a simple medium - histories, discoveries, frivolities and more. And, always for me, a profound sense of inadequacy; I will never be able to read even a small fraction of the books worth reading, broadly or narrowly defined.

Even in the tiny two-room Noe Valley library, which has neither silence (especially when Boswick the clown is performing downstairs) nor all that many books (though stocked with Oprah's magazine), I feel as close to religious as I ever do. At the moment, there are more people on computers than reading and flipping pages. But the power of the colorful, plastic-sheathed objects persists. From my seat I can see two books by Ha Jin, five volumes of Proust and Amanda Quick's steamy Wicked Widow. All just added to my epic 'to read' list.

If all goes as planned, mine will be out there someday in the recesses of some library. Writing is harder than going to China to help earthquake victims. There is no immediate satisfaction, only doubt that what one writes will resonate with and perhaps change another human being, however slightly.

one month after the quake

2008-06-13T23:32:00.002-07:00

Here is a press release about MSF's activities in the past month, undergarments included.

on suffering

2008-06-08T21:53:00.005-07:00

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
- Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen

The hills of Sichuan leading to the Tibetan plateau are lush, now scarred by chunks of mountain that fell during the earthquake. On the way to the five villages of Longmenshan Town, we saw boulders placed oddly on the cracked road, like dice shaken and rolled from the heavens. Somehow that sight is more disturbing than felled buildings, which despite their concrete foundations seem temporary, small monuments of human persistence.

In the first days after the earthquake, the roads to Longmenshan were blocked by crashing earth. Helicopters delivered relief goods to the people high in the hills. But soon the military came and cleared a new road, packing the earth with machinery of steel and flesh. Forward and back, back and forward.

One day last week we were there after heavy rains and the driver didn't want to go on a road with a few switchbacks. So three of us - a psychologist, her translator and I - began to walk. We soon met people of the village; many were sorting through rubble or cooking lunch in improvised kitchens under plastic sheeting. We met a woman who lost two of her grandchildren in the earthquake. She had run to the school right away, but they were not outside waiting for her. She heard cries. Later, she was told that the bodies couldn't be recovered. No, she doesn't want to talk about it. But she does not stop talking.

I believe that humans need to tell stories. Not necessarily epic or mythological, though they often are. To make sense of our lives we need something that ties together yesterday, today and tomorrow. It may be survival or salvation or love. But what happens when that delicate thread snaps?

The psychologists tell me that the people of Longmenshan will be okay. They endured suffering before this. They have food and shelter. They have family and neighbors to support them. Perhaps the thread is frayed, not broken. But there are still those who cannot yet bear the sorrow. I hope for their stories to become solid again - if not whole, for that is difficult in the best of times, then at least plausible.

beyond briefs

2008-06-06T08:07:00.004-07:00

I didn't mean to give the impression that we're only in the urgent business of briefs. A nice photo essay of MSF's other work just went up here.

Today I had a 'wish I had my camera' moment. Next to a row of still white tents, there were a few folding chairs on newly bulldozed land. A grandfather was smoking a pipe, stroking his wiry white beard. His gaze was fixed on the hills behind us; I imagined him meditating on the swaths of rock exposed by landslide. To his right, a pigtailed granddaughter rocked on a folding chair, trying to catch his eye. In my mind, he was mourning the past - the once verdant slopes, now bare and shifting - while she hoped for a little distraction to bring him back to the present.

Such moments are a sufficient gift.

big tragedy, small tragedy

2008-06-03T06:05:00.005-07:00

Enough time has passed that I feel okay mentioning one small personal tragedy. Ashley put me in touch with Robert Siegel of NPR's All Things Considered. The man with the voice. He called me and my heart fluttered. I was torn between teenage fawning and professional admiration, heavy on the former. I gathered myself and described our project.

He said he would probably stop by our office the following morning. Fast forward. I was ensconced in my room doing the accounting. After an hour or two, I went to the office and saw two NPR cards on the table. One of the other volunteers casually mentioned, "Yeah, some reporters stopped by, they were really nice. Before leaving, one asked about you."

I know I misuse the word "trauma" a lot, but it was the first thing that flashed in my mind. Robert Siegel stopped by, asked about me and my so-called friends didn't call me!?! Granted, none of them are American and only one had ever heard of NPR. I took a deep breath and cursed myself: I missed a chat and handshake with Robert Siegel to do MSF's books.

Enough whinging. Take a listen.

cracked earth

2008-06-01T00:29:00.005-07:00

This a photo from an assessment done on May 22nd in an area north of Pengzhou City, where we are living now. Our current mental health project is in Longmenshan Town just at the base of this road. When I drove by the turn-off two days ago, there was a long line of supply and military trucks waiting. Gary, our logistics assistant, said that just past this turn it is single-lane access only. I haven't posted pictures yet, partly because I forgot my card reader and finally just had time to buy a new one. But also because as much as I love photography, I am uncomfortable with "disaster tourism" and the particular circulation of affect and media during catstrophes, natural or otherwise. When I was looking into NGOs, I saw MSF's annual report on the "Top 10 Most Underreported Humanitarian Stories." Not quite love at first sight, but close.

yay for technology

2008-05-25T20:10:00.004-07:00

This is a pouty face, saying "Cindy A-yi, come home soon!" Right now I'm on the phone via skype with my sister, posting photos of JinBao that I downloaded from her flickr account. Yay!

trembling earth

2008-05-25T01:32:00.004-07:00

After I posted on unnatural disaster, I laid down for a quick nap before our evening meeting. The earth trembled slightly, like it often has since the earthquake. But then I heard an unusual rattling and the building began to shake, not violently, but enough to make me jump out of bed and run down the stairs barefoot. I waved at the rest of my team across the pond in the hotel garden.

Yesterday one of our translators said that he still feels the ground shaking even when it's not, a form of "earthquake syndrome." And there are still tents pitched on random patches of ground in Chengdu, where the damage was minimal. It's difficult to imagine the trauma of fearing the earth, the once solid ground beneath one's feet. I imagine people will be grappling with the trauma long after compassion fatigue sets in and we move on to the next crisis or, perhaps in this case, the crisis as framed by the Olympian spectacle to come.

unnatural disaster

2008-05-25T00:36:00.004-07:00

I just graded a paper on Hurricane Katrina titled "Unnatural Disaster: Production of the Gender Order of Social Vulnerability in the Gulf Coast." It's a brilliant piece about how the distribution of the effects of natural disasters is far from natural. Take, for instance, the scandal over the shoddy construction of certain schools in China's quake-affected areas, starkly demonstrated by a photo in today's New York Times. It's not surprising that elite schools fared better than those with poorer students.

To answer your first question: yes, I'm still grading papers, which my students dutifully turned in on Monday via email. It's settling down a little, but the multitasking is still pretty exhausting. Once in awhile I fantasize about long bike rides near the coast or into the Marin Headlands, but for the most part I'm busy doing everything from getting new staff settled in to paying the bills. Last night, two mental health officers arrived from Indonesia, so our psychological support program will be expanding soon. One of our psychologists told me about a man in his sixties who lost his child in the earthquake and said, simply, "Losing a child at this age, what else is there to live for?"

Even though not much is truly natural, I cannot let go of the idea that there is something fundamentally human, that we find meaning through our connections with others, our family, however constructed. I'm here because I'm still an idealist, one who believes that those connections can be forged anew, with those both experience near and experience far.

a quiet moment

2008-05-20T21:18:00.003-07:00

"Everyone from the MSF team left for the morning, so I finally have a quiet moment. It's not easy transitioning from my life of leisure to 20 hour working days."

Five minutes after I wrote that, I received a few calls and the moment was gone. Now, 24 hours later, I'm seizing the moment to say...send me encouraging emails! Thank you to those who have already done so, and sorry I haven't had time to respond in detail. It's been a crash course in medical response to earthquakes and in spoken Mandarin. I won't give the general update, which can you find on the MSF website.

Two things I will write more about in the near future. First, I had my own IDP camp experience, a very minor exercise in empathy. We were staying on the 11th floor of a hotel in the center of town and we had to evacuate because CCTV broadcast a warning of a 6-7.0 earthquake. Thanks to the kind folks at Handicap International, we had tents to sleep in, but I was cold and achy in the morning. I never imagined I'd be pitching a tent right next to Chengdu's Chanel store.

Second, and far more important, the local response. I'm organizing volunteers and local staff for MSF activities here and it's overwhelming in a way that I've never experienced before in China. I made three phone calls to find translators and received more than fifty responses. It's more than the individual stories, which are deeply touching; it's the opportunity to rearticulate community in (very) late socialism. (Funny, the minute I leave I begin to work through my dissertation ideas!)

So I've been thinking a lot about what exactly it is that is revealed in crisis. Is it simply the best and worst in people? I don't think so. Even if there is nothing to lay bare in any of us, such moments are decisive.

safe in sichuan

2008-05-17T17:28:00.002-07:00

Just a quick update. I arrived in Chengdu last night on a nearly empty plane. I was an hour late, but the volunteer driver from the area was there waiting. Twenty minutes after arriving at the hotel, there was a strong aftershock. The three MSF employees from Beijing and I first went to the bathroom and then said we should go outside, down from the eleventh floor. The Dutch logistician (who has seen it all, I'm sure) laughed at us. Then, it started to storm and my new friend joked that it was my "Sichuan baptism." Today we're probably moving to a hotel at the edge of the city to get closer to the affected areas. Okay, time to work!

being without borders

2008-05-16T13:43:00.003-07:00

I'm at SFO right now, about to get on a flight to Beijing and then Chengdu. I will be a field administrator for some of the earthquake relief efforts coordinated by Doctors without Borders/Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF). I'm sleep-deprived (though not nearly as much as I will be in the next month), excited and anxious. I've worked in two other emergency contexts (Nigeria and Sudan), but this will be the first time that I'm "on the ground" just a week later.

Departures are always mixed, never more so than when one has just started to feel at home. Lately the measure of things has been the weight of my nephew. While I go around in circles, he grows like a well-nourished fern, up and out, with a force that I can only marvel at. I'm happy to go and do what little I can, but it's only because I can already anticipate my return to a sweet double-chinned treasure.

my first tri

2008-05-09T16:56:00.006-07:00

Last Sunday I raced in my first triathlon! The Napa Sprint course is a .5 mile swim, 15 mile bike and 4 mile run near Lake Berryessa. I didn't impress anyone on the swim (someone doing the breaststroke passed me...really) and I didn't set any records (but do check out the guy I passed at the end of the bike). And I'm not sure why all of my run photos make me look like I'm speed walking, at best. But there's nothing quite like the feeling of a half dozen tri club friends cheering you on as you cross the finish line. As I've said before, it's the endorphins, it's the escape from mind to body. But it's also something that in a more romantic moment, I'll call a fine mix of individualism and solidarity. You push yourself in the spirit of the race, with people at your heels and people cheering you on. There's no one counting on you to make a basket or block a corner kick. It's you, out there, because you want to be, nothing else at stake. At the same time, there is your training buddy giving you a high-five at mile two and passing you a cold beverage at the picnic afterwards. I think I'm finally learning the pleasures of gradual gratification.

the sweetness

2008-04-12T16:05:00.005-07:00

For the past month, I've been living with my parents in a big one-bedroom across the street from my sister, brother-in-law and JingBao. It's strange to be reunited with my family after thirteen years out and about the world on my own. Between the excitement of JingBao's bodily functions and trips to Costco for mom's batch cooking, I tried keep my normal schedule of teaching, tri training and social activity. It hasn't been easy.

There are peculiar regressive moments that only make sense within a particular family history, like when my mom calls us to the dinner table with her three-alarm fire voice. Or when I was talking about a sweet coming-out film called Shelter and my dad blurted out "Alien!" and I knew exactly how his neurons had fired from gay romance to Steven Spielberg mini-series. My sister and I laughed our almost-to-tears laughter because somehow all of it - the nagging, the exasperated glances & the unbearably sweet moments (see above) - made perfect sense. Big Jamieson was a sport throughout, decoding our half-English, half-Chinese banter and bickering with patience and humor.

Ninety percent of our (re)bonding occurred over and around meals. Mom was in charge of Chinese dishes - lion's head meatballs, fried rice noodles with beef and broccoli, red braised pork - dripping with oily goodness. Dad grilled steaks, baked an impressive number of potatoes of all colors and made rack of lamb (twice by popular demand). Little Jamieson enjoyed via breast milk; Emmy claims that he smelled like tender mutton for two days. All the home cooking and special chicken broth worked their magic: in just one month, JingBao gained 3.5 pounds, though he wasn't the only one making progress on the scale.

I'm driving my parents, the happy grandparents, to the airport tomorrow morning. They will be back in June for his 100 day celebration; until then, the four of us will struggle on - a little less crowded, a lot less nourished. Thanks mom & dad.

i called, you answered.

2008-04-06T16:39:00.003-07:00

Remember my recent call to friends? Take me out, show me a good time? Well, they answered. This photo was taken at an illustrious Santa Barbara dance club (think: Billy Jean meets Jay-Z meets Manic Monday). As always, Summer amped up the hotness dance factor and we sweat until the wee hours of the morning. I was transported back to a time when relationships were simpler -- a tight circle of girlfriends dancing with boys lurking at the edges.

Many thanks to my lovely ladies! Even if life is a little more complicated now, there will always be time for a dance party.

introducing...Jamieson Steel Leadbetter

2008-03-12T01:36:00.005-07:00

My sister and her husband gave birth (au naturale) on March 11th to Jamieson Steel Leadbetter, 8 lb 4 oz. At the time of birth, 12:49 p.m., I was on my way back from New Orleans, nervously floating somewhere above the Rockies. I will spare you the effusive adjectives and simply say, this is love. My dad gave him the nickname, JinBao, which means "golden treasure" or "superduper treasure" or "the best treasure you can imagine in your most fantastic dreams."

Must sleep to prepare for the spoiling of the new star of this humble blog.

Signing off,
Aunt Cinbao

my wig

2008-02-22T01:21:00.005-08:00

Ash put this photo up on Facebook not so long ago, and it reminded me of fun times. Indeed, this is a not-so-subtle plea to friends to take me out and show me a good time (wig is optional). And, a not-so-subtle hint for all my girlfriends to move their butts back to the Bay Area! I miss you.

the wall

2008-02-20T23:41:00.005-08:00

This is my seventh week of triathlon training and I'm addicted. I'm planning to do the Napa sprint tri on May 4th and then the San Jose Olympic distance on June 8th. For me, it's not about the competition, though I do need people at my heels to motivate. Escape? Therapy? In part. But besides the endorphins, the best part of training is getting to know my body in a different way. Full circle: I started this blog because I think so much about gender and the body.

We all have complicated relationships with our bodies; the body is at once the vehicle through which one experiences the world and an inextricable part of oneself. As a perpetual student, however, I tend to privilege the life of the mind. My body gets in the way of staying up another hour to read or aches to move when I need to sit down and concentrate. There are many moments (hours?) during triathlon training that my mind is in the service of my body. And the experience is no less complex, no less rich, than when the opposite is true.

As the popularity of yoga, alternative medicine and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar reveals, even Americans aren't satisfied with filling the needs of the body and mind separately. But based on my recent experience, I'm not interested in having it all, all of the time. I don't want that perfect unity or calm. Yes, I do my fair share of vinyasa flow and mindfulness meditation, but there's a big chunk of me that enjoys the intensity of an all-nighter with Sartre or the 13th mile.

the stories we tell...ourselves

2008-02-18T10:52:00.005-08:00

In warming up for dissertation writing, I've been thinking a lot about stories, especially the ones we tell ourselves. And how these stories are shaped by thousands of sensations, thoughts and stimuli around us. On one hand, I'm fascinated by narrative theories (click here for a good summary); on the other hand, I'm not yet ready to theorize about my experiences in China. Just as something is created when we tell and retell, something is also lost.

When I talk about my time in Xinjiang, funny bits rise to the surface. Like the weight of boiled eggs forced into my hand when leaving my friend Patima's house. Two boiled eggs: why can't that be the measure of things? Or, on that same day, when Patima's cousin told me about meeting her husband via a wrong number. She was so angry that he, a strange man, was talking to her that he became convinced of her virtue and pursued her. When I met her, she was eight months pregnant and I couldn't keep my eyes off of her overalled belly. Or, the time a lonely woman took me to the bazaar and told me to buy her a pair of red high heels and the smell of leather nauseated me.

Why these moments, why these sense-memories? For all the confusion, the question of why is fundamental to being human, perhaps even what makes us human. We hesitate; we speed furiously. In turn, we exclude and include; we excavate the past and project into the future. It would be easier if we were revealing meaning like peeling away the scales of an artichoke, exposing a tender bud. Instead, we create, producing new patterns even as we reflect existing ones. I start to think of all experience as a process of doubling, but then I return to the memory of the weight of eggs in my hand and call it a day.

back to the bay

2008-02-06T15:53:00.000-08:00

I'm back in the Bay Area. The reverse culture shock hit me a bit later than expected. Yes, Berkeley and San Francisco are most definitely un-Urumqi and un-Kashgar. But the most difficult thing to adjust to is the different rhythm of life and expectation. Friends expected me to call very often and, if I didn't, they would berate me and make sure I had all the socializing and food I needed to be happy. Here, we're all busy and wrapped up in our own thing. It's not just "time=money" here and not there (quite the opposite, in fact), but that people make different assumptions about what is done with free time, however little there is.

I moved to Noe Valley, right down the street from my sister and her husband. It's a great neighborhood, though the commute isn't easy for a car-less gal like me. I do like reading and sleeping on BART - the triathlon training is exhausting!

Now that I'm back there will be few exciting photos and observations. I'm planning to use this as a forum to make myself write on a semi-regular basis about whatever (hopefully at least tangentially related to my dissertation). Oh, I'm teaching a class on gender and anthropology - apparently I do well with a captive audience!

And...Happy Chinese New Year!

post-pomegranate cindy

2007-11-05T00:52:00.001-08:00

eat a pomegranate

2007-11-03T19:48:00.000-07:00

It's pomegranate season in Kashgar! A glass of freshly crushed juice a mere 25 cents, a whole sphere of sweetness with bite for even less.

Once, when I was in the depths of existential despair (a Ph.D. program in anthropology will do that to you), I called my mom.

"What can I do in the face of all the suffering in the world? I'm exhausted from worrying about meaning, death and my professor's pinched mouth when I say something about Hegel."

She replied, "I'm eating a pomegranate now. You should go eat a pomegranate."

Since then I've had a special relationship with the fruit, which manages to feel both sensuous and contemplative. First, it's a bright red ball packed with tiny seeds. You don't have to be a cultural wizard to understand why it's the Chinese symbol for fertility. But contemplation? Set aside thirty or so minutes and eat an entire pom, one seed at a time. In my case, forget about the Merleau-Ponty you're supposed to be reading, and instead indulge in what arises when you pluck a seed, place it on your tongue, roll it around, and crush it against the roof of your mouth. Repeat.

If you get greedy with a pomegranate and grab a cluster of seeds, you'll likely be greeted with a bitter papery membrane. Patience is required.

I'll be home in seven weeks, just as the pomegranate season winds down.

stone city, does the beauty ever stop?

2007-10-15T17:57:00.002-07:00

No. Definitely no. The world can be a cruel and lonely place, but the beauty is always there. Stone City, a fort originally built more than 1400 years ago, stands at the edge of the Pamir plateau, near the borders with Pakistan and Tajikistan.

I know there are those out there who find pleasure and challenge in the infinite lines of glassy buildings or the latest Gehry creation, but I will always seek elsewhere. Those monuments are speaking back to our finitude, while the mountains and oceans are reminders of it. As is this haggard stone city, once upon a time a kingdom's seat and a Qing dynasty outpost.

If you stand atop the former turrets at sunrise and watch the light find amplitude on the Pamir peaks, you will feel the power of jagged rock, the capacity for destruction, the relentless beauty born of a lack of desire to please.

Yes, I still miss the mountains!

motorcycles + mountains =

2007-10-11T08:32:00.000-07:00

adventure, plus

2007-10-10T00:45:00.000-07:00

I'm back, again! I couldn't resist the calm beauty of the mountains. These are the hands of my 11 year old mountain guide. He was picking wild onion for me to chew on.

and, what exactly is it that you're doing?

2007-10-10T00:41:00.000-07:00

Since I have less than 3 months left, I think it's time that I address the question: "So, what is it that you're doing there in Xinjiang?" Besides trips to Thailand and Kazakhstan and the mountains, you mean?

Short answer: I chat with people over tea and enormous amounts of food.

Cliff's notes: I study how women's lives are shaped by and are shaping the process of development, and how they understand the rapid changes in their surroundings.

Long answer: My adviser once told me that all contemporary anthropology is the study of modernity. I would say, the study of modernity and meaning. My primary interest is how people create meaning in their lives through narrating them. I ask simple questions, "What was your neighborhood like when you were young?"...and from there I try to grasp the moments they view as pivotal and dense with meaning. I also observe everyday conversations because those little snippets accrue and shape individual narratives of self and community. Along the way, I've learned a lot about the challenges women face. They are similar to what I chat about with my girlfriends - expenses, children, gossip, work, infidelities. There are differences, too, but they are more a question of situation rather than kind. Here, women worry about how to pay the steep fine for having a child outside the birth plan, where to buy the latest cloth from Pakistan.

I speak with women of different ages and socioeconomic positions, but my goal isn't to identify the "average" outlook of people with X, Y, Z characteristics; rather, I am looking for patterns in how individuals interpret the significant changes in their lives. If you're interested, I'll pay you a fair chunk of change to read my dissertation in draft form.

...yes, I speak with men too. I know it's old school to write about women rather than gender, and of course lots of my material deals precisely with the relations between men and women. But with limited time and energy I decided to focus on women's stories (see my very first post). The big challenge will be writing my dissertation - how to represent everything from the complex to the mundane - in an engaging, compassionate work of prose about a place that most people know little about? I feel a headache coming on... back to editing photos from my second mountain adventure.

muztagh ata, father of ice

2007-10-02T03:26:00.000-07:00

our mountain hostess

2007-10-02T03:01:00.001-07:00

the mountains, a mountain

2007-10-02T02:14:00.000-07:00

The winter cold snap arrived about five days ago; snow poured lusciously over the Pamir peaks. Sand mountains (too enormous to be dunes) slid seamlessly into an oozing mixture of sand and water. On my previous two trips, I was mesmerized by Karakul, an alpine lake surrounded on three sides by mountains, including Congur and Muztagh Ata. This time: the burnt yellows of the grass, grazing yaks and camels, and the light. That is what my amateurish foray into photography taught me -- the way reality is shaped by form, design, tricks and plays of perception, as well as content.

We drove to a Kyrgyz village where we dropped our stuff off and started on a hike to the base camp of Muztagh Ata, a 7,600+ meter peak. Only three of the fifteen Kyrgyz families were still there; the rest had moved their yurts down to the lake to prepare for winter. As in Thailand, layers of browns, blues and greens, but the quality was austerity rather than lushness. Base camp was a strewn mess of beer bottles, torn sacks and the metal frame of an enormous yurt, stripped bare because the end of the climbing season arrived with the biting cold. We continued up to the left of the mountain towards a glacier that begins at 5100 meters. It was steep, rocky, bare. I took the lead and just plodded along, one foot in front of the other. Air and quiet. A landscape of loneliness. After another hour of hiking past base camp, I reached the glacier, an impressive expanse of ice, with deep crevasses and waves of water, frozen and silent. The others trickled in and we admired the play of light on ice. Then, the driver called me over to hear the faint sound of glacial edges softening. Sun and ice in tension. I was exhausted and giddy on thin air; suddenly, the sense of isolation was too much and I wanted to hurry down. Once again, ice to rock to burnt siennas to the warmth of the hut and hot black tea.

We had noodles with fried yak and vegetables for dinner; later in the evening I talked to an old Kyrgyz man who remembers when the Soviets liberated this area from the Nationalists, more than fifty years ago. He was a cadre in the Communist Party but said, it's all about money these days, and laughed a resigned laugh. In the morning, he gave me a "present," a white felt Kyrgyz hat, and said I could give him money, or not, up to me. Then, we were off, back down the mountain, to thick air and heavy dust.

my dad, the naturalist

2007-09-10T03:46:00.000-07:00

Before going to Thailand, I took a short trek around Yunnan with my dad. We saw the pretty pagoda in Kunming (previous post) and the historic (i.e. recently rebuilt for tourists) city of Lijiang. Then, we hiked four hours to the Wenhai Ecolodge, a project supported by The Nature Conservancy. The second day we continued hiking above the old tea trading route between Yunnan and Tibet and stopped by the house of a local Yi family.

The main thing I (re)learned from this trip is that I have a wise father. After mocking him for bringing along fancy Made-in-Denmark hiking poles, I desperately grabbed onto the one he lent me as we made our way down to Wenhai Lake in the steady rain.

Now that I'm back in the desert, I miss the eerie fog and moist beauty of Yunnan.

a pretty pagoda (in kunming, china)

2007-09-10T03:41:00.001-07:00

everyone needs an uncle bob

2007-07-27T10:48:00.001-07:00

So, the reason we went to the Id Kah twice is that Uncle Bob was bewitched by the adorable neighborhood kids. And, who wouldn't be?

id kah @ night

2007-07-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

My Uncle Bob came to visit this week...it's always exciting to watch others discover Kashgar. I was pretty exhausted after a few days in the village, but still managed to join him for two evenings hanging out by the Id Kah mosque. The mosque was built in 1442 and, according to Wikipedia and chinatravelguide.com, is the largest mosque in China. More importantly, it's still the heart of the Uyghur part of town. They've recently added tourist shopping areas and an enormous TV. But, as you can see above, it's no historic curiosity - crowds come every day to gather and pray.

p.s. i'm reading.

2007-07-12T11:43:00.000-07:00

A quick note to say "many thanks!" to those of you who have posted comments (or, "kup rehmet" in Uyghur). Unfortunately, since I can only view this website through an anonymous server, I'm not able to respond directly to your comments, since that would no longer be anonymous. While all blogspots are blocked, blogger.com isn't, which is why I can log in to edit the blog. Fascinating, I know. Trust me, it's just the beginning.

finally, the bathroom

2007-07-10T08:43:00.001-07:00

I realize these photos aren't inherently interesting, but I want to give you a sense of my place of rest for the next six months. Plus, I'm proud that I managed to transform a concrete block into a comfy space. I can even 'fix' toilets. I'm almost ready to enter the world-after-studenthood.

after

2007-07-10T08:23:00.001-07:00

before

2007-07-10T08:20:00.001-07:00

2007-07-08T05:39:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to believe until it happened. And it happened. I am now living in Kashgar Teacher College's foreign student apartment block. My friends have been taking me to the bazaar for three days straight, and you know it's not because I love shopping. The apartment had nothing except a scorpion and cockroach problem (!!). I will post before and after photos. The toilet still doesn't work, but I installed a hose that runs from the sink. I bought a fridge, stove, cabinet, etc etc. The place is many times more expensive than the palace in Urumqi. It's hot and I don't have a shower.

But, in spite of it all, I love it here. It's not just that I went to buy a mattress and there was a guy, right there, beating wisps of cotton with a long wooden stick. It's not that people sit around a big table to have a yummy mix of ice, sugar and yogurt. Also not that you can buy an enormous delicious watermelon for 50 cents. Not that I saw a boy chasing his runaway calf the other day. It's that something else.

kazakhs and their cars

2007-06-28T08:21:00.001-07:00

I saw more Porsches and Land Rovers in a week in Almaty than I saw in four years in the Bay Area. Kazakhstan has a booming oil economy and the new wealth literally screams and screeches on the streets of Almaty. We passed an old government building and Gaisha (a hip young Kazakh photographer) said it's where the youth gather to show off their cars (and legs).

the naughty girl in Daniel & Zhanara's former bathroom

2007-06-28T08:13:00.001-07:00

The owner of this apartment claims that this tile was installed during the Soviet era. The moral: people will always find ways to be naughty. Amen for that.

almaty lovin'

2007-06-28T07:38:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from a week in Almaty, former capital of Kazakhstan, where I crashed with Zhanara and Daniel. Before I delve into the culinary delights of Almaty (sashimi, Kazakh candy, French toast a la Daniel), I must gush about my hosts extraordinaire. They are working on a project that combines art and anthropology to document the lives of artists in Almaty, www.artpologist.net . Daniel will sketch the daily activities of artists in their cramped studios and homes (don't think Borat-land, the cost of living in Almaty is higher than in Los Angeles), while Zhanara takes ethnographic notes. Their friend, Aminatou, will shoot video and record sound clips. I hope to attend the exhibit of their installation in August. It will travel to the Bay Area in the fall...expect a barrage of emails from me when the time comes!

I was exhausted after a thirty hour bus ride from Urumqi, which included seven hours waiting at the border for bureaucratic stuff to happen. I read The Kite Runner during the interlude; a sweet Kazakh guy offered me candies and gently told me to stop weeping. If you've read the book, you'll understand. Anyway, you can imagine my relief and joy when Zhanara and Daniel welcomed me to their home with fresh salsa and homemade borscht. The spoiling didn't stop. Despite their busy schedules (Zhanara is in the midst of her PhD research in anthropology; Daniel is busy making art), they manage to be quite the cooking duo. When I woke up the next morning, Daniel was preparing gourmet grilled cheese with tomato and sausage. Zhanara made bish-barmaq, noodles with boiled beef and horse meat, potatoes and onions. We enjoyed shashlik (marinated meat on skewers) and Kazakh beer. I ate handfuls of Kazakh candy by Rahat; imagine a Kit Kat with better quality chocolate and a mushy, creamy inside. It was sinful.

You can see many more photos from my (eating) trip, here.

It wasn't all decadence: I also raided their English-language book collection and did three interviews, two with Uyghurs born in Kazakhstan and one with a Kazakh who moved from Urumqi to Almaty. We also hung out with young artists and talked shop. Their work on redevelopment and space got me excited about moving to Kashgar. I've been so busy collecting women's stories that I haven't been attentive enough to experiences of rapidly transforming space. That will be a major component of my research in Kashgar; unlike the Uyghur parts of Urumqi, Kashgar city is in the midst of a concrete face-lift.

I'm taking the train to Kashgar on Monday. Thanks to Zhanara, Daniel and their friends, I'm well-rested and inspired about the next phase of my research!

my favorite Uyghur food!

2007-06-12T16:37:00.000-07:00

Before coming to Urumqi I was worried that the speed and anonymity of urban life would make it difficult to be "adopted" into a Uyghur family. Quite the opposite has been true. People constantly invite me over for epic meals and dozens of cups of tea. One family in particular has embraced me completely, so much so that the matriarch, Gulbahar, has endeavored to teach me how to cook. I used to take photos and wash a few vegetables, but that doesn't cut it anymore. I get to knead dough and make noodles. Last Sunday we made qoldama, a delicious sauce with carrots, peas, lamb, potato, and the tiny ear-shaped noodles pictured above. You take a little piece of dough, roll it with your thumb and then flick it with your other fingers to get the curl just right. Or, in my case, just passable, which was victory enough for the two of us.

the urumqi blues

2007-06-12T16:08:00.000-07:00

I've been here for exactly four months and am experiencing what my classmate David calls the "Urumqi blues." The sun is out (half of the time), my research fascinating and my Uyghur improving...yet, I still miss home. I've mentioned before that Urumqi is the city farthest from any ocean, right? In the entire world. And I love the ocean. Once in a while, there will be a lilting breeze that reminds me of the California coast, but then I inhale some of the desert dust and return to reality.

So Dr. David (doctor to the wearied foreigner, that is) prescribed a trip to Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan. I'm leaving on Monday! It will involve a 24-hour bus ride, but will hopefully provide some much-needed rest. My usual routine is a few hours of Uyghur class in the morning and then an interview and hanging out with friends. I try to fit in some exercise and by then it's midnight and I'm ready to collapse into bed. My main problem is that I'm so eager to soak everything up that it's hard to take a real break. People's stories never cease to impress and amaze me.

I've included two photos here. The first is of my gym, newly-renovated. It's nicer than any gym I've belonged to in the US and empty most of the time. Posted here for any of you who think that I'm suffering in this distant city. Second, when I went to the Kazakh consulate yesterday, I saw the "Urumqi National New & High Tech Industrial Development Zone" office building. Yes, high tech development has reached Xinjiang...there was an eerie quiet in the area, but that won't last for long.

a village home: the life of space

2007-05-10T08:47:00.000-07:00

the simpler life

2007-05-10T08:25:00.000-07:00

I visited my friend's parents who live in a village outside of Kashgar. According to them, farming life has stayed pretty much the same, though the road was paved after economic reforms began. They were intrigued by my so-called career path and shocked that any single person could spend 21 years in school. All that education and I can't even identify an apricot tree...or build a fire in a wood stove...or milk a cow. They promised to teach me all this and more during my next visit. I spent much of the time bonding with the cows in anticipation of closer encounters.

faster than a chinese soldier

2007-05-10T07:53:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from my trip to southern Xinjiang and plan to spend the next few days writing up my thoughts and editing photos. First, one amusing story. There is a new Olympic-size pool in Kashgar, a city near the Chinese-Pakistan border. After two weeks of sitting on buses and napping in the afternoon, I needed a little activity. "Swimming Pool of the Masses" proved to be just that - a chaotic swirl of people enjoying the week-long May 1st holiday. I attempted to swim length-wise laps until an 'accidental' entanglement that could easily have been interpreted as opportunistic groping. When I stopped to reconsider my route, a Chinese soldier from Sichuan struck up a conversation with me:

"Um, are you a professional swimmer? I've been watching your free-style technique. I need a teacher."

I laughed. I took two swimming classes at Berkeley but was always the panting graduate student in the slow lane. We chatted for a bit and then he challenged me to a 40 meter race.

I'm proud to say that my amateurish attempts at triathlon training are yielding something. Despite a several second crash with another patron, I finished a solid ten meters ahead of the sweet-faced soldier. Not too bad for a musing anthropologist.

a village holiday

2007-04-22T12:05:00.000-07:00

Dear the faithful few,

I get about four visitors a day, so I know you're out there! Unfortunately, my time has not yet come. Josh's TV program was a huge success, but my question, admittedly lame (How did you learn Uyghur so well?), didn't make it on the air. My friend called me to say that I looked quite charming in the audience, so perhaps I gained a few anonymous admirers.

I'm sorry I don't have more time to write about the wedding I went to (photos below). It started in a small village surrounded by dusty mountains and little houses for drying grapes...continued during a car ride from bumpy roads to a Xinjiang superhighway...and ended in a disco with an unbearable light show. I spent so much time in grad school learning that modernization and development aren't linear processes that the whole event was pretty surreal.

Tomorrow I leave for a three week foray into southern Xinjiang. Yes, Wedding #5 is in my near future. I might not post for a bit, but promise to make it worthwhile when I do.

Good night, Cindy

wedding #4 (from dowry to disco)

2007-04-19T11:17:00.000-07:00

i might be famous...in xinjiang

2007-04-17T00:40:00.000-07:00

My friend Josh will be famous, and thanks to him, I might be too! Josh was invited to appear on the Oprah of Xinjiang, a.k.a. "Voice of Heart". To give you a sense: I attended a wedding in a fairly remote village last weekend and a farmer said she knew something for sure, since she heard it on "Voice of Heart". Josh was funny and in good spirits despite the searing camera lights. During the Q&A session, I asked a question in Uyghur! If it doesn't get edited out (they filmed more than two hours for a half hour segment), I'll try to post it.

Correction: Josh is actually already famous in Xinjiang. He appeared in a shampoo commercial with a very popular Uyghur singer named Erkin. Perhaps one day a company here will need a "Korean" actress; as I once said in my glamour-seeking days, "Keep your dreams big."

the stuff of life

2007-04-03T08:30:00.003-07:00

As my friend Kate recently noted in her blog, life in China doesn't require material deprivation. Walk into an Urumchi mall and you will be greeted by glossy images of Olay and Shiseido models. I still see the occasional donkey cart winding through campus, but truth be told, I'm a provincial rube by Urumchi standards. I did come across one exception...or so I thought.

During my first weeks here, I obsessively searched for spices but came up short. Uyghur food is delicious, but my one complaint is that it uses a limited range of spices. Plus, I'm trying to create one vegetarian dish that my roomies drool over. (Uyghurs love meat. They describe themselves as "gushxor," i.e. "meat-loving". I wasn't surprised to learn that there is no equivalent word for "vegetable-loving". It was coined just for me!) One by one, I found the flavors that conjure up memories of meals from home: cumin (common in Uyghur food), cloves, cinnamon, bay leaf and so on. But I was soon stymied. Even the fancy French supermarket doesn't carry spices like oregano, basil and rosemary.

Well, today, I went to my usual place for fresh yogurt. For the first time, I saw an old lady sitting in front of the shop; she was heavyset, with wisps of white hair peeking out from her pale headscarf. She was holding a tray with dried mint and something else I didn't recognize. Most other shoppers didn't know what it was either; when asked, she would simply reply, "You put it in the pot and it makes the food delicious." When someone was intrigued enough to buy, she would gruffly take their money and retrieve change from the top of her boot. I, too, was intrigued.

I walked up and greeted her...

"What did you say?"
"Asalam alaykum"

She turned to her friend with an amused grin and loudly barked, "Hey, she said asalam alaykum (a traditional Muslim greeting)." I'm still getting used to people talking about me as if I'm not there and/or can't understand. It was especially amusing to the small crowd gathered around the popular yogurt stand since she was partly-deaf and I'm partly-dumb (in Uyghur, that is).

She was selling basil! So there it is: every time I think "if only I had...", I will remember the unlikely angel next to the yogurt stand. It's all here, even in the so-called far reaches of northwest China. As with life and my research, the journey is the destination.

P.S. In a moment of desperation, I asked Josh to bring a bevy of spices from the U.S. I owe him. Nevertheless, the search continues.

wedding #3

2007-03-31T09:27:00.001-07:00

There's a feature article on Uyghur food in the April 2007 issue of Gourmet (if you look at the slideshow you'll see why photography is just my hobby). The reporter arrives in Kashgar and is almost immediately invited to a wedding! Weddings here aren't executed in quite the same way as in the U.S., where discussions over who will sit next to Aunt Bea can consume hours of precious time.

A case in point: last week I crashed a blockbuster wedding with 400+ guests. There were famous musicians, dancers and professors from Germany in attendance. I, separated by at least three degrees from the happy couple, was greeted warmly and escorted to the next open seat on the ladies' side of the banquet hall. I held tightly to the wedding invitation, just in case. I smiled dumbly at the woman next to me when she asked me how I knew the couple. I nervously hid behind my bulky camera.

Of course, it was all in my head (which, to be fair, has recently been subjected to a fair amount of wedding etiquette, American-style). It was a casual and joyful event with an eclectic program: traditional music, performing relatives and my favorite, whirling-dervish dancing.

two stamps of approval

2007-03-28T22:22:00.000-07:00

Yay, this blog is back in China! Josh had warned me that the filters/filterers can be fickle.

I'm especially glad because this morning, after a sleepless night with Uyghur conjugations floating in my head, I had my best experience to date! (Don't worry, I didn't pick up another taxi driver.) I was at my front door ready to walk up the six flights of stairs and crawl into bed when I heard someone call out something in Uyghur...to me? I looked over my shoulder and saw two elderly Uyghur men with long beards and weary coats. I glanced around but didn't see anyone else. They pointed south and then shrugged their shoulders and eyebrows in the universal code for, "We're lost!" Turns out walking through campus was a shortcut gone wrong. I was able to guide them through labyrinthine paths to the outside world. We chatted about their hometown Kashgar; they never asked about my ethnicity or why I would study Uyghur. We just talked. When we parted ways I received the traditional goodbye: right hand over the heart and several bows.

There are many good reasons why identity, language ethnicity and nationality are hot topics here. Nevertheless, it was so nice to just be, to talk about the weather and the inanities of urban non-planning. (Speaking of, after a week or so of sunshine, Urumchi traded in snow for rain.) Yet again, an unexpected encounter saved me from drowning in Uyghur flashcards and dissertation doubts.