Weblog
Sunday, 08 January 2012
-
Korea, New York
Quick! Tell me! Where was this photo taken?
Wrong! Not South Korea. This photo was taken in Flushing, Queens.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, I had already read everywhere that LA had the largest population of Koreans in the US. "It really is like a bit of Seoul in American," one friend had told me, "Nothing but Korean stores and businesses as far as the eye can see."
Imagine my surprise and disappointment then that when I finally saw Koreatown in Los Angeles I saw nothing of the beautiful, highly-compact shops and scenery of Korea. The LA Koreatown area, instead, was just a bunch of ugly Los Angeles architecture with some Korean letters on it. Los Angeles is really such an ugly urban landscape... especially when you compare it with the design aesthetic of Korean buildings.
Somebody should have told me to go to Flushing, Queens in New York City. If you want to go to Korea but don't have 1500 bucks to spend on a trans-Pacific plane ticket... getcher self over to Queens! This seriously is like a bit of Sinchon district or a back street around Gwangbukhung station. Oh there is a good bit of American graffiti and far more trash than any self-respecting neighborhood in Korea would allow... but on the whole this area is virtually indistinguishable from Anytown, Korea.
Yup, that's still Flushing... located over 10,000 miles away from Seoul.
Hubby, baby and I flew to New York for Thanksgiving. We spent the first night at my aunt's wonderful house in Larchmont, but due to the baby's incessant crying- a noise that had apparently reverberated throughout the entire wooden mansion until three o'clock in the morning- we were soon banished to a nice hotel in Queens. This pleased my husband no end. Always sensitive to cold (winter in Outer Mongolia had been hellish for him), he spent his first night outside of Los Angeles shivering under the feather comforters in my aunt's attic guestroom. Between the cold and the crying baby my husband was miserable, hiding all day in the guestroom and refusing even to come downstairs to eat. I couldn't blame him really... being trapped with a bunch of strange in-laws who don't speak your language can be daunting. My husband is Korean, and when I traveled with him to visit his mother and sisters in the village of Chung-Nam I found myself similerly isolated. I couldn't really speak to his relatives. I absolutely HATED the thin little floor mats that passed for beds in that house. I was pregnant at the time and I despised the food they thoughtfully placed in front of me (gelatinous, raw grey squid with tiny black eyes, forty different kinds of pickled cabbage and not a single piece of palatable nourishment among the forty different dishes on display) and almost cried when my older sister-in-law denied me coffee because she insisted the 90% artificial-milk-and-sweetener concoction that is instant coffee in Korea would harm my baby.
One year later the tables were turned. My husband hated the guestroom and shivered all day under the beautiful linen down comforters my aunt has in her house. He couldn't bring himself to go downstairs and eat because the food was too Western for him. It was all bread and cheese and bagels... not a single scrap of odorous pickled cabbage to be found on the premises. When I gave him the news that we would be spending the next two nights in a hotel, he practically sprang out of bed, packed the bags and was tapping his foot by the front door before I had even brushed my teeth. No worries though, I had had a similer reaction when my husband (a year earlier) announced that we would be leaving Chung-Nam a day early.
That picture is still Flushing, Queens my friends.... not Korea, despite all appearances to the contrary. Note the lovely bare elm tree in the background.... so much more homey and pleasantly reminiscent of childhood to me than the constant palm trees outlining the baked concrete jungle of Los Angeles.
After taking the train into New York and then out to Queens my husband was starting to visibly relax. As soon as we came out of the subway station at Flushing it was dusk. The air was full of good cheer and twinkling christmas lined the windows despite the fact that Thanksgiving was barely cold in its grave, so to speak. The scene was so beautiful. It rivaled any Seoul shopping district during the holidays... and that is saying something. The Koreans are renowned around Asia for having exquisite taste when it comes to cosmopolitan beauty. I was dumbstruck by how gorgeous- and how Korean!- Flushing looked in the dark. When my husband's cousin picked us up to take us out to dinner my husband was starting to smile again. He laughed through dinner (at a Korean restaurant, of course), devoured two small dishes of kimchi and insisted that I have a taste too before we left.
Once dinner was done and our stomachs happily full of barbacued meat and various bits of vinegary vegetable matter, we all checked into a Ramada Inn. The room was very comfortable. The beds were white with thick, good-quality coverlets. The TV had one of those amazing high-def flatscreens which pleased my husband no end. He likes to fall asleep with the TV on and the guestroom in Larchmont had had no television. "Good, good..." he sighed, reclining in bed as "Indiana Jones" played on TV and I nursed the baby.
The best part for me, however, was the next morning. After a bunch of crying and carrying-on by the baby around 6:00am (he's teething) there was a refreshing episode of good behavior. I changed the baby's clothes so that he was able to wear his cars-and-trucks pajamas that his great-grandfather had given him. I nursed the baby, gave him some formula, played with him a bit and finally there was a blessed lowering of infant eyelids. It was the universal harbinger of an oncoming nap so I carefully put the baby on the bed. My husband laid down beside the baby and soon he too was asleep. Free at last, I donned my clothes and stepped out into the crisp morning air of Queens. Oh bliss! It was a beautiful late November day. The trees were all bare and- as I peaked into the side streets that laid off of the main boulevard in Flushing- I could see neat houses and lawns that looked so much like the Massachusetts suburb where I had spent my girlhood years. On the main street were cafes and shops and markets. There was one car dealership where all the cars inside had big, shiny red bows the size of file cabinets attached to their hoods. Several young car salesmen were huddled outside, smoking cigarettes and looking hopefully at me. "Let the lady inside!" one said, "She wants to buy a car!"
"No, sorry," I said, smiling apologetically, "I'm just out to get coffee."
The salesmen quietly let me pass. Life must be so rough when you work on commission.... but I had no time to feel pity. I was about to indulge in an interruption-free peppermint mocha at Starbucks for the first time in months! As I went the coffee shop the smell was more wonderful than I had imagined before. Look! There were young professionals typing on laptops while sipping coffee! There were industrious yet cheerful baristas in black linen aprons filling cups full of heavy, sweet milk, syrup and caramel. There were people talking on phones, reading books, writing in notepads, studying texts (probably students from CUNY-Queens) and- bliss of bliss- reading newspapers. When was the last time I had read a good, old-fashioned paper newspaper... something wrapped in a dew-spotted blue tubular bag and left on your doorstep. Something where you had to shake the bottom of the bag to get out the paper, which the unfurled in your hand or (if you were slightly more clumsly) spilled its guts- inserts, adverts and all- on the kitchen floor. Something that was papery, slightly chilly and smelled of fresh print- REAL print! The stuff that turned your fingertips slightly grey. When had I last read something like that? Pleasures like that really can't be overestimated... especially when they're experienced over coffee.
Or Boba tea, like the kind seen in the above picture. Boba tea is also pretty awesome, on the same level as coffee.
But getting back to the story at hand, as I relaxed in the Starbucks in Flushing with a peppermint mocha in one hand and a dog-eared copy of the New York Times front page in the other, I resolved that one day I would move to this place. Here, where a young student couple argued in Chinese two tables down from me, a Korean man tapped idly on an iPad while sipping something hot that came with a lid and a young woman right beside me was furiously scribbling something from what looked like a college-level biochemistry textbook.... here was where I wanted to live. It had all the pleasures of Korea with none of the dangers of nuclear attack from the North. Here in New York I would not have to worry about earthquakes or war or droughts or sleazy marijuana venders. Here in Queens was where I wanted to live. That was the spell of the coffee and the newspaper... a little bubble of bliss suspended in time before my cell phone beeped telling me that my husband was up, the baby was awake and I needed to get back to the hotel quickly if I expected to be on time to meet my cousins-in-law for lunch.
Thursday, 01 December 2011
-
Rain and Ruminations
Oh gloomy, gloomy Los Angeles... full of grey clouds and buckets of ever-lasting rain that just pour ceaselessly from above. Rain in the sky, rain flowing in oddly-large rivers along the edges of each road, rain dripping from the fronds of every palm tree.... the rain is everlasting.
"I like the rain," I heard one teacher say to another in the surgical technology office. "It's nice." The other teacher didn't agree. People move to Los Angeles for specific reasons... and rain usually has nothing to do with it. In fact, Angelinos seem oddly incapable of dealing with ANY weather that deviates from the sunny norm of the city.
"I'm going to be late for class," one student's voice said over the phone today as the surgical technology directer silently fumed at his desk, "It's raining out."
"'It's raining out?!!'" the director repeated, "Not, 'there's bad traffic,' or 'there was a medical emergency' or even 'the rain caused my car to hydroplane crash into an oncoming vehicle' but just 'it's raining out.' That's a sufficient excuse? Jeez, it's ridiculous how people panic over a little precipitation in this city."
It's true though... the already-bad LA traffic increases three-fold on rainy days as people skip waiting for the bus and basically eat the high gas prices in order to use their own vehicles. Wait times for public transportation, cabs or carpooling friends are increased greatly. "It's raining," my classmate tells me after I call her for the second time to ask why she's not at my house yet, "There's a lot of traffic. I'm barely moving now."
And yet nobody really complains. Despite the transportation difficulties we all know how joyous rain is.. and we all feel a secret relief even as we wait in traffic because we know that the buckets and buckets of rain pouring from the sky means that life in general, life at the most basic levels, can continue onwards for now. It's like getting a paycheck from the earth. After a rainstorm we're good for another couple of weeks or so and we don't have to dive into our savings again.
In the nursing home where I work at the windows are surprisingly small. This is a disappointing architectural decision in my opinion because you would not believe what a drag a windowless space can be. You get depressed without even quite knowing why... and if there's anything a rehabilitation center needs it's less unnecessarily-depressing features. Still, because of the small windows with thick, drawn curtains it came as a surprise to me when I wandered up to the front of the office and saw the rain pouring, making circle ringlets on the be-puddled concrete patio outside.
A resident was sitting by the windows in his wheelchair, watching the rain quietly. An LVN, leaving after completing her night shift (I'm assuming) walked out of the office in her street clothes.
"Red shoes," the resident said.
"What?" The LVN asked, turning towards him as she buttoned her coat.
"You're wearing red shoes," the resident repeated, "They're very attractive."
"Oh, thank you," the LVN said. She opened her umbrella and stepped out the door into the rain.
"Red shoes..." the resident continued to himself after she left, "Red shoes, red coat, red umbrella... very beautiful. Very becoming."
I mulled over the old man's words. The LVN in question was a rather portly woman in her fifties. She certainly wasn't the stuff of romantic fantasy. The resident was in his eighties. Perhaps he was remembering when he was a middle-aged man and the fifty-somethings of today were pretty, teasing twenty-somethings- young flirtatious women of yesteryear who laughed amongst themselves while older, more stoic men looked away with their heads full of yearning. To some men, maybe, a twenty-something remains a twenty-something even when she is a fifty-something and the mother of twenty-somethings herself.
The resident continued to sit quietly by the window. I asked him if he wanted a paper.
"No, I can't read anymore really," he said, "And the only news I'm interested in right now is about Robert Wagner."
"Robert Wagner?"
"Used to be a good friend of mine," the resident said, "And I know he didn't kill Nathalie Wood. Couldn't have. Man wouldn't have hurt a fly. He loved that girl. She, Nathalie, was spoiled as anything but that wasn't her fault. She was beautiful and beautiful girls get spoiled. Just the law of nature. She probably just went walking on that boat, fell, hit her head and fell into the water. If Robert had been in there, he woulda dived in after her to save her. He adored her. He never would have hurt her, never. Don't know why people are saying he did."
"Did you know a lot of celebrities?" I asked.
"Yeah, sure," the resident replied, "I was a photographer, you know. Met a lot of celebrities. Knew Carol Lombard. Met Audrey Hepborn. Now she was skinny. So thin. Like that, just the skinniest girl I ever met, but beautiful."
"Did you know Marilyn Monroe?" I asked
"Marilyn? Oh, she was a mystery," the resident said, "She was killed by the mafia, you know. They tried to cover it up, but that was how she died. By suppositories. The media covered it up but the mafia killed her. With suppositories. They shoved thirty suppositories right up her rectum."
I looked over at the nurse by the front desk. She shook her head. The resident sighed. "Roll me outside," he said, "I want to breathe the fresh air."
I rolled him out onto the patio where the air was surprisingly cold. The resident didn't seem to mind it though. "This is better," he said, "This is where the fresh air is." He sat there for ten minutes or so while I shivered. The rain was pouring gallons upon gallons, flooding the patio, sidewalk and street outside. The palm tree fronds were bent downwards, small streams of water running off their tips. The grassy areas between the sidewalks and the streets had obviously reached their absorption limits. Water stood in ankle-deep puddles and streamed off into the gutters where roiling, trouser-soaking rivers rolled past. The rain was pounding at such a rate that nurses were literally stopping by the doors while they made their rounds, goggling at the water and saying, "Whoo! Just look at the rain! Unbelievable."
The rain was still pouring, but at a lesser rate, by the time I was finished with my clinical rounds for the day. It was 3:00 in the afternoon exactly. I was with my friend "Anastasia" and we were looking for someplace to huddle while we waited for Anastasia's husband to pick us up. We ran into a small "Liquor" store on Santa Monica Boulevard.
For those who don't live in Los Angeles, "Liquor" stores in this city don't just sell liquor. "Liquor" stores are really just convenience stores that started out as mere alcohol venders and ended up selling all the conveniences of modern life because they were the only retail establishments willing to do business deep within the "bad" parts of town- the parts of town where CVS and Walgreens wouldn't go.
Anyway, to continue onwards, Anastasia and I went into the store. We saw the familiar sights of shelves and freezers full of pre-processed foods. We also saw- bizarrely- three well-upholstered parlor chairs gathered around a large space heater like they would a fireplace. In these parlor chairs sat a few older men and women. They looked like regulars... and the entire atmosphere of convenience-store-cum-cozy-living-room seemed both sweet and strange to me. Anastasia looked like she was thinking the same thing as we both left the store to stand under the outside awning.
The rain is beautiful. The way people huddle together- both inside and outside- during a rainstorm is beautiful. Seeing a familiar car turn the corner onto the street where you're waiting is INCREDIBLY beautiful too... especially when you're cold, wet and tired.
Saturday, 23 July 2011
-
Geeks and Gothic Lolitas
July 1st through the 4th was when the biggest anime convention in North America took place at the LA convention center. Newspapers splashed the event across their "Living" sections, talking about how fantastic the people-watching would be due to the amount of "cosplayers" (anime fans who wear elaborate costumes made to mimic their favorite anime characters) and overall energetic fanfare of the celebration.
I had only ever been to two anime conventions in my life before the 2011 LA con. The first convention had been in Baltimore where I had gone with a few friends- friends who had introduced me to the genre of anime in the first place. As we stood in line for "Otakon 2004" tickets I noticed that a few people were dressed really "wild" with multi-colored streaks in their hair and heavily-applied theatre make-up.
"Cosplayers," my friend, who was not named Randy, said to me.
His girlfriend, who was not named Trisha, let out a sigh. "They get worse every year."
"Cosplayers?" I asked.
Randy looked around with an expression of unhappy resignation. "Cosplayers are anime fans who like to dress up like characters from the anime series... usually as little school girls or cat women or things like that."
"What's wrong with that?" I asked.
"Well... " Randy said, "It's just that.. well, anime always gotten a bad reputation in the United States because people associate animated content with children's shows and anime is NOT for children!"
"MOST anime is not for children," Trisha amended.
"Yeah, most anime is not for children," Randy went on, "Some is but, I mean, imagine putting 'Evangelion' on Saturday morning TV? What a horrible shock that would be for kids!"
"'Mommy....'" Trisha quavered, imitating the voice of a seven-year-old staring saucer-eyed at the TV screen as an insane Asuka tears apart the giant, menacing Angels that have come to Earth to bring about the Apocalypse.
"Yeah, right, exactly," Randy went on, "And people who dress up in these ridiculous costumes are just enforcing the idea that adult anime fans are really just immature individuals who like kids shows. They're helping to trivialize what's really a serious area of film study."
I myself was secretly captivated by the cosplayers. I thought that the girls dressed in tiny, pleated schoolgirl skirts and the boys dressed in elaborate mecha costumes were absurdly fun to look at. I looked enviously at the costumes on display in the vender room. Would Randy and Trisha disdain me too much if I were to indulge myself in maybe ONE "Sailor Moon" outfit (despite the fact that I've never seen "Sailor Moon" and never would see "Sailor Moon" since it looked far too stupid) or at least a nean red sparkly wig stretching down past my knees?
But even Randy and Trisha knew that an anime convention had plenty of room for fun, mockery and deliberate satire. Our favorite moments of the convention were when we attended fan parodies of famous anime series. Most of the parodies were usually fan-dubbed or fan-manipulated images from the original series. "Nescaflowne," for example, was a fan parody of the famous anime series "Escaflowne." In "Nescaflowne" two male main characters were made to seem romantically involved with each other due to the ingenious re-editing of "Escafowne" footage... something that made Trisha and I laugh uproarously. In "Evangelion: Redeath," a parody of "Evangelion," a character named Gendo (the epitome of severe-to-the-point-of-evil paternal power) was turned into a smooth-talking pimp... something that paralyzed me with laughter (seriously, I couldn't breathe) and became a classic in its own right at American anime conventions. "Look! It's Pimp Gendo!" One girl laughed when a Gendo cosplayer with a pimp hat and cane posed with a gaggle of women in schoolgirl costumes. I laughed both because it was funny and because I knew- with delight- EXACTLY what the cosplayer was referencing.
You see, this is why anime conventions, comic book conventions, movie conventions, collectible conventions, He-Man, She-Ra, Transformers, Dr. Who, Star Trek, Star Wars and so on exist. For the other 360-odd days in a year we go about our business, carefully tailoring our conversations so that they are understandable to the people around us. For instance, if my boss said something about how his children always seem to be wanting something and I said "Yeah, always 'I-WANNIT! I-WANNIT!' hahahaha!" ... he would look at me strangely. The word "I-WANNIT!" (technically words, but pronounced as a single word) was my little sister's first word. She was fifteen months old when she mastered "I-WANNIT!" and this firm yet adorable demand on her part has become family legend. If I cracked a "I-WANNIT!" joke in front of my mother, she'd laugh. If I cracked the same joke in front of my boss, he'd be understandably confused. He's never met my sister and he knows next to nothing about my family. So I temper my conversation to topics that I know (or am at least reasonably sure) he knows about. It's something that all of us need to do when we interact with other people in our society.
Yet once we nerds reach the convention hall that requirement to temper our conversation to the knowledge of others is dropped. We assume that, through the presence of the convention badge, every single person in the rented hotel banquet hall or convention center possesses the same mind as we do. When we make a reference to an anime show ("Strenght of mind is going on a ten-hour 'Serial Experiments Lain' marathon and retaining your sanity"), we know we'll get a laugh because everybody else in the room will have watched it too (or at least TRIED to have watched it in the case of "Serial Experiments Lain"... a notoriously dark and weird form of unwatchable, avant-garde anime). If we make fun of a parody of an anime parody ("Operation Hot Yaoi Action is a go!" from "Nescaflowne," a fan parody of "Escaflowne") we know we'll get a laugh because our convention comrades will have watched it too. Hell, we could just reference what Joe in the poorly-constructed "Sailor Moon" cosplay outfit mumbled drunkly during the costume contest at Otakon 2007... and people would get it! Geeks of a feather gathered together at one convention are more of one mind than a hive full of bees.
Of course geeks can be very poisonous towards each other as well. There are cliques within cliques after all. My college friends were snooty of cosplayers, believing that sexy school girl outfits, blazing-red hair and steampunk petticoats merely cheapened the good name of anime fandom. Webcartoonist Randy K. Milholland, creator of the famous "Something Positive" webcartoon, is famous for despising what he calls "catgirls"... middle-school age girls who wear cat ears for no real reason at comic book conventions, cheerfully spout off phrases in bad Japanese and revere treacly shojo manga comic series. Other fans sometimes shout abuse about the series "Megatokyo" because it's not "real" manga due to the fact that it's written by an American writer, the extraordinarily talented Fred Gallagher. The fact that Mr. Gallagher lived in Japan for many years, speaks fluent Japanese and has a spookily-accurate grasp of Japanese Otaku culture does not matter. He is not Japanese so "Megatokyo" is not "real" manga. During a "Megatokyo" panel one anime fan yelled "Your comic sucks!" to Mr. Gallagher right in front of his wife and three-year-old son. While the other fans hissed at the heckler I could see no remorse in the obese, unshaven anime fan's face. "I don't fucking care," he yelled back at the other fans, "What are you gonna do to me, huh?" He then wandered off before security could escort him out of the room, pausing only to ogle a slim young woman barely dressed in a bit of camouflage body floss and covered in fake blood.
"Nice," he said to her, "That's from 'Bikini Samurai,' right?"
The woman ignored him. Sure, she and everyone else knew what he meant because we were all anime fans bound together through our mutual love of Japanese animation.... but that didn't mean we would excuse bad manners.
Nevertheless, as the room quieted down and the q&a got back on track, I couldn't help but ruminate a bit on the nature of time change and anime conventions. Anime is a young person's game.... and at the age of thirty I realized that I had grown a bit too big for the game. Certainly five years ago I would be in the thick of the zeitgeist, squeezed into a Gothic Lolita gown and exchanging oh-so-esoteric quips with the rest of my geekdom brethren... but now I had slipped. I had not touched on anime for the last three years ago and now the kids were all referencing shows that I had no idea about. The storylines had gotten even more convoluted, the graphics slicker, the CGI more jaw-dropping and I had missed it all.
Sunday, 16 January 2011
-
Libido and Language
J. Maartan Troost, in his excellent-but-not-as-excellent-as-"The-Sex-Lives-of-Cannibals" book "Lost on Planet China," describes having a lunch at a restaurant in Shanghai where his experience was disrupted by the annoying nattering of another Western man. This man, whom Troost overhears, had been trying to impress a Chinese woman sitting at his table with a list of extremely uninteresting facts.
As I waited, I noticed an Englishman sitting with an attractive Chinese woman at a nearby table.
'Would you like a drink?' he asked her. 'Rum and Coke? Do you know where rum comes from? The West Indies. Scotch? Scotland. Vodka comes from Russia...'
And on and on he went,
'... in France, people drink wine. Wine also comes from Italy. Slivovice comes from Serbia....'
What a dork. Here he was in a restaurant in China with an actual Chinese person who could speak English- though this might have been a fanciful presumption; she hadn't uttered a word- but still, presumably, a person who could unlock the mysteries of the Middle Kingdom, and he'd decided to educate her about Europe[.]
Troost describes himself inwardly seething with extreme annoyance towards this Western man, this monolingual moron still trying to prove his superiority- or even relevancy- while navigating China. The annoyance Troost describes was very familier to me. It was the sort of annoyance that one foreignor often feels towards another while traveling in Asia. "Oh for God's sake, is that how I'm coming off?" we tend to think when running into a compatriate. We suddenly feel shame by association. Automatically, we find ourselves directing a great deal of mental wrath towards the other foreignor. "Wear something better than ragged cargo shorts," We think, "Stop talking so loudly and would it kill you to hit the gym? I know our star is waning but do you have to be so obvious about it?"
There was also an exhibition detailing Buddhist influence in China, and as I peered at the display, I listened to an American man explain its contents to the Chinese woman beside him.
'And what is this? This is the bodhisattva. He received enlightenment under a tree. I have a leaf from the actual tree. It's in Sri Lanka. Remember? I showed it to you. And now,' he said, pointing to a statue. 'You know what this is? Yes? We've discussed this before.'
Troost's description of The Mating Dance of the North American Buffoon rang particularly true to me. Though I do not personally lurk from cafe to cafe with my ears flapping (or at least I forgive myself on the occasions that I do) my attention is sometimes irresistably drawn to whatever conversation is occuring whenever I hear a flat American twang rise up among the murmer of conversation. Based on these sporadic observations I have to say that the flirtation game of your average American male in Asia always seems to involve a lot of fact-recitation. I can understand how dating can be daunting for American men while they are in China or Korea. Socialization in a foreign country is basically a string of exhausting exercises in culture clash. Going out into Beijing, Shanghai or Seoul at night involves massive sensory overload as you try to navigate passageways between utterly enormous, flashing neon sky-scrapers that (I do not exaggerate) make Times Square look quaint and Las Vegas merely tired. Most importantly, the women are intimidatingly beautiful with clothes, poise and bodies that make them look like they could get modeling jobs in any fashion magazine.... and they are often multi-lingual. Most American men (though not all, I grant you) find it basically impossible to build a relationship with a foreign woman unless she speaks English well.. and yet if your girlfriend is able to speak English as well as her own first language then you cannot help but be uncomfortably aware that her intellectual gifts are far higher than yours.
What is it about Shanghai that elicits this need in the Western male to inform, to enlighten, the locals?
So imagine now that you are an American man sitting at a coffeeshop with a woman who is more beautiful than even the bitchiest queen bee in the US. Moreover this woman is now tapping out texts on a smart phone that has more memory and a better internet connection than your college computer. She is talking to you in very serviceable English while you yourself are wincingly aware that you could barely order your cappucino earlier without her help. You are aware that by any scale or measure she is waaaay out of your league... and is probably only deigning to have a coffee with you because being an American man still has some (rapidly dwindling) cachet in China. Nevertheless coffee is the only thing that you're going to have with her unless you find some way to prove your worth so she can forget that you are basically an unskilled ESL teacher in cargo shorts who hasn't hit the gym in a while.
And in panic, you start to spew out facts. "Look! I'm smart too!" you deperately plead as your mouth flaps idiotically with such pearls of knowledge as "Armani is Italian and so are Ferrari cars. Bratwurst comes from Germany..." etc. etc.
'... Italy is known for art. Germany for music. England for literature...'
Truly, a nitwit. I paid the bill, and as I walked past them, I noticed that he'd become a little more expansive in his sharing of knowledge.
'... Suits are single-breasted or double-breasted....'
And this was interesting how?
'... there are two countries famous for silk, Thailand and China....'
And you don't think she knows that, Romeo?
I thought about Troost's encounter with the conversationally clumsy Englishman while in a coffee shop- "French Cafe"- in Ulaanbaatar a few months ago. This coffee shop is a beautiful place founded by a French expatriate where you could get the best chocolatines in Mongolia. Even better, as is the case with most expatriate cafes in Ulaanbaatar, you get the pleasure of reading back issues of the New Yorker. The pleasure is not entirely unalloyed since the New Yorker often sandwiches bits of unneccessary pretension between essays of genuine interest. Should you really lament the decline of "alternative opera" in New York in the same issue that has a ten-page examination of South African poverty?
Still, in my opinion, The New Yorker continues to provide some of the best writing to be found in the US today. As I sank into a literary and chocolate-mocha haze I noticed an American man sitting across from me. He was deep in conversation with a polite and attractive Mongolian woman. To be fair, this fellow was not as bad as the Romeos Troost describes in his book- the American man appeared to know at least a fair amount of Mongolian and was conversational in the language- but there were definitely some parallels. The man spoke with a sort of arrogance that was probably unconscious on his part but nevertheless noticeable by others. Also, perhaps worst, was the fact that his fact-recitation-based flirtation involved "facts" that were patently not true. Unlike "Thailand and China are famous for silk," which is true enough in a generalized sort of way, this young man spoke about how maps in China "show Mongolia to be another part of China."
"Really?" His date asked.
"Yeah,"
No, not really. Any image search for "world map" on Baidu.com (the currently most popular search engine in China) shows Outer Mongolia to be clearly outlined and labeled as its own independent nation. Possibly the young man was confusing Outer Mongolia (of which Ulaanbaatar is the capital) and Inner Mongolia (which is indeed a province of Northern China... as any map in any part of the world will show ) .. but nevertheless the speaking of this dubious fact was rewarded with a wide-eyed "Really?" from the girl sitting across from him (though I rather got the impression that she didn't really believe her male companion... as a university-educated woman living Ulaanbaatar she had probably been to Beijing several times already, knew a fair bit of Mandarin Chinese and most likely knew more about Chinese culture than he did) and a sense of gratification from reciting a fact that - while not true- was still undeniably juicy.
Of course any person who has ever observed some form of heterosexual flirtation with a shade of accuracy knows that sex and all its various attending behaviors have their basis in power relations. In fact the well-known sex advice columnist Dan Savage goes further, saying that ALL sexual relations have power play at their roots.With only some very specific exceptions heterosexual men overwhelmingly prefer relationships with women where they hold the upper hand in the most important capacities. Because the current cultural measure of success around the globe necessitates that men have large brains instead of large muscles, dating a girl who is intellectually superior can be daunting. If the girl holds the upper hand in brain power then there is an emasculating reversal of roles.
But then again I am perhaps over-simplifying gender relations. After all, humankind has been trying to de-mystify the flirtation game for millenia. Also, concentrating on the neuroticisms of the men here is ignoring the other side of the conversation: what the women want. Often women want the same thing men want and thus play along. We respond to such clunky assertions like "China thinks Mongolia is still a part of China" with wide-eyed "Really?"s instead of more honest "That's bullshit"s. We vigorously agree that Terry Goodkind is the best author ever and that watching basketball has its charms. We nod with attentive interest during conversations where we learn that vodka comes from Russia, that Sarah Palin is hot even if she is kinda dumb and that people in Asia can be totally, totally racist sometimes, y'know? "Oh, yeah, totally," we reply, knowing that a more well-informed answer can kill our chances of getting this guy into bed (or, more precisely, cultivating the guy's desire to get us into bed.)
Troost in Lost on Planet China does not mention seeing the Chinese women with the Englishman again. We do not know if she decided to stick with this nervously-nattering man or instead go to dinner with a guy she was more impressed with.. or at least could speak more comfortably with. What was her threshold for flustered idiocy? Perhaps the Western man had not even touched it let alone breached it. Or perhaps he had breached it to the point that she resolved to never allow a foreignor to buy her a glass of wine again. After all, according to the conversation that Troost observed, the woman never had a chance to answer the only question her date had asked her: "Would you like a drink?"
She wanted that drink man, she really, really did.
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
-
Stop-cleats and Stirrups
About four years ago, while enjoying one of those lovely respites during my Peace Corps experience where I was able to leave the desert for six days or so and rest in the modern city of Ulaanbaatar, I decided to watch the Russell Crow movie "Master and Commander." The Peace Corps office, I should mention was a wonderful place full of bookshelves and televisions where desperate volunteers would plunder the remains of departed PCVs (mostly old books, cast-off clothes, and scratched DVDs that other volunteers couldn't take back home due to a lack of suitcase space or interest) for anything that might help them pass the time during the monotony of their countryside volunteer experiences. Those volunteers who were lucky enough to have a bit of shore leave before sailing back towards the tiring dusty seas of the steppes would often spend the entire time at the Peace Corps office, watching DVDs in the volunteer lounge with blissful expressions. Videos are sheer decadence if you have gone months without them and viewing "Master and Commander" in the lounge that sunny afternoon was quite pleasurable for me despite my having already watched the film several times. I reveled in the fine production values, the naturalistic acting and the English English ENGLISH dialogue that washed around my poor, Mongolian-soaked brain like warm bathwater.
I was deeply engrossed, watching two Napoleonic-era battleships splinter the hell out of each other in the sea fog at the beginning of the film, when my friend Jordan (nothisrealname, of course) walked into the lounge.
"What are you watching?" he asked.
"'Master and Commander,'" I replied, "It's a movie based on those nineteenth century naval warfare novels by Patrick O'Brian.
Jordan looked at the screen. Russell Crow, as a very stoic Jack Aubrey, commanded "Get down!" and a cannonball crashed through the ship's rigging. "Are you at the end?" Jordan asked me.
"No, the beginning," I said, "You can watch if you want."
"Whoa, it's the beginning of the story and they're already in a fight?" Jordan asked, "I guess the movie's not like the book."
"Have you read the book?" I asked.
"Oh, ... well, yeah, I tried," Jordan said, "I tried but the story just wouldn't start! It was all full of 'First they shivered their timbers and then they did this and this and...' well, nothing was happening and I just couldn't get through it."
I should pause the recollection right here to mention that Jordan was not some dim jock or dense halfwit who could not get through a novel unless it had the title "Sports Illustrated" across the top. He had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania before joining Peace Corps and after his service was over he managed to obtain a full ride to the prestigious IU graduate business program at the Kelley school. He has recently returned to Mongolia to found a real estate brokerage... Mongolian property having suddenly become red-hot (well, orange-hot) with the recent Chinese economic boom. In short, Jordan was not the sort of person to throw aside a book just because it had big words in it. Even now, as he confessed his lack of patience with Patrick O'Brian's prose, I could see that Jordan had just grabbed (to my annoyance since I had wanted to borrow it) a paperback copy of Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi" from the informal Peace Corps lending library. When Jordan grabbed paperbacks they tended to never be seen again... not because he was dishonest but because even by the standards of Peace Corps Mongolia Jordan had been assigned to a very remote area. Stationed at Uliastai, a mountainous region that regularly saw temperatures of forty degrees below zero during the winter, Jordan and his fellow site PCVs tended to collect books assiduously during the cold times. Thick tomes would be read, reread and reread again and finally burnt for fuel when every last drop of interest had been squeezed from them.
Jordan's unapologetic lack of patience with Patrick O'Brian's prose in the novel "Master and Commander" took me back to the time when I first tried to read the book. After having heard from all sides that O'Brian was a literary revelation I had finally cracked open the first book of the famed "Aubrey/Maturin" series and, after a beautifully engrossing first chapter, was dismayed to find myself drowning in a sea of farcically indecipherable Napoleonic technobabble. My mother said my mind would adapt quickly to the massive amounts of verbal cordage and man-o-war shipping jargon that O'Brian regularly threw at his readers. This is a sentiment echoed by most of O'Brian's fans and is even listed on the wikipedia entry for "Aubrey/Maturin"
"In addition to the period language, O'Brian is adept at using naval jargon with little or no translation for the 'lubberly' reader. The combination of the historical-voice narration and naval terms may seem daunting at first to some readers, but most note that after a short while a 'total immersion' effect results."
This is a complete and utter delusion on the part of Patrick O'Brian fans. The reader does not "adapt" to the prose in the Aubrey-Maturin series but rather the reverse. Mr. O'Brian, by the time he has started on his second volume "Post-Captain," has cut down the jargon to a more easily-digestable amount. The frustratingly inscrutable sailing hooey no longer lasts for pages but instead is restrained to a paragraph or two as an realistic embellishment to the excellent narrative. Don't believe me? I challenge any and all Aubrey/Maturin fans whose brains have been lulled by such wonderful installments like "HMS Surprise," "Desolation Island" or "The Far Side of the World" to return to "Master and Commander." Try to chew through chapters two through five and try-TRY- to argue that the writing on display is comparable in quality to O'Brian's later works! Try! Unless you are truly masochistic you will not be able to do it.
Patrick O'Brian's prose is extraordinarily realistic when it comes to truly recreating the atmosphere of multiple societies during the early nineteenth century. He was once quoted as saying "Obviously, I have lived very much out of the world: I know little of present-day Dublin or London or Paris, even less of post-modernity, post-structuralism, hard rock or rap, and I cannot write with much conviction about the contemporary scene." This I can well believe. I was well on my way into the second when I started encountering massively rough descriptive breakers such as:
"And then these futtock-plates at the rim here hold the dead-eyes for the topmast shrouds- the top gives a wide base so that the shrouds have a purchase: the top is a little over ten foot wide."
Patrick O'Brian has page after page of such descriptions and he writes with the lightness of a philatelist with Asperger's syndrome.... nattering on about the differences between gravure and off-set lithography while unaware that his dinner companions' interest wandered off fifteen minutes ago. The second chapter of "Master and Commander" is particularly shameless in its descriptive self-indulgence. Witness this paragraph:
"'Hitch on the runners,' said Jack. 'No, farther out. Half way to the second quarter. Surge the hawser and lower away.' The yard came down on deck and the carpenter hurried off for his tools. 'Mr. Watt,' said Jack to the bosun. 'Just rig me the brace-pendants, will you?' The bosun opened his mouth, shut it again and bent slowly to his work: anywhere outside of Bedlam brace-pendants were rigged after the horses, after the stirrups, after the yard-tackle pendants (or a thimble for a tackle-hook, if preferred): and none of them, ever, until the stop-cleat, the narrow part for them all to rest upon, had been worked on the sawn-off end and provided with a collar to prevent them from drawing in towards the middle."
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, that wacky Jack Aubrey, asking his ship's carpenter to rig the brace-pendants without taking the other necessary precautions to make sure his horses, stirrups, yard-tackle pendants and stop-cleats are all in position! He's not even bothering to spare a thimble for his tackle-hook.... though in this context I'm pretty sure that a "thimble" refers to something else besides the finger-cap used during embroidery. Also I am eighty percent sure that there are no actual horses suspended in the rigging, neighing piteously as their hooves swing forty feet above deck while sailors clamber up the masts around the animals.... no, that would be too interesting.
The fun doesn't stop there! No wait, keep reading and watch for the delightful comedy of Dr. Maturin clinging desperately to the ship's rigging while listening to a good, hard seaman (*snicker, snicker*... but alas that joke starts to lose its glitter after the eighth or eight-times-ten-to-the-eighth time Patrick O'Brian uses it in an entirely innocent manner) natter on about all the points of sailing, masts, ropes, trestletrees, etc. At first it appears that Mr. O'Brian is cutting the lubberly reader a break, allowing the mild comedy of Maturin's height sickness to act as a mental lubricant to the dry description, but after an obscenely long description concerning mast dimension....
"'Ten-inch, sir,' said Mowett proudly. 'And the preventer-stay is seven. Then comes the forecourse yard, but perhaps I had best finish the masts before I go on to the yards. You see the foretop, the same kind of thing as we are on now? It lies on the trestletrees and crosstrees about five parts of the way up the foremast: and so the remaining length of lower mast runs double with the topmast, just as these two do here. The topmast, do you see, is that second length going upwards, the thinner piece that rises above the top. We sway it up from below and fix it to the lower mast, rather like a marine clapping a bayonet on to his musket: it comes up through the trestletrees, and when it is high enough, so that the hole in the bottom of it is clear, we ram a fid through, banging it home with top-maul, which is this hammer you were asking about, and we sing out "Launch ho!" and....' the explanation ran eagerly on."
.... the reader realizes that he's being suckered. Any able-bodied writer could tell you that that last bit of sentence, "the explanation ran eagerly on," could have very easily been transplanted to the beginning of the paragraph, allowing the scene to run more efficiently. Instead O'Brian uses Maturin's polite questions as weak excuses to throw more entirely unnecessary jargon at our heads. Maturin's meek, height-disoriented reception of these utterly tedious words is very weak tea indeed if we lubbers are expected to use its tepid comedy to wash down the rest of the verbal spaghetti tangled up on the page. In other words, Maturin's reactions are like the authorial equivalent of an off-shore tax shelter ("Y'see, it LOOKS like I'm making an obscene amount of money and refusing to pay taxes on it, but actually my bank account is technically not in the US so y'all have no right to lob 'pay-what's-due-like-a-good-citizen' bombs at me" "Y'see, it LOOKS like I'm flinging an obscene amount of boring, unnecessary words at the reader in a self-indulgent way so that my insatiable lust for Napoleonic-era naval warfare trivia can be temporarily (but not permanently-oh no, never permanently) satisfied but actually I've thrown you poor sods a few sentences of something that could be construed as mildly amusing so y'all have no right to lob 'this-slows-down-the-story-and-is-entirely-unnecessary' bombs at me,") and the neophyte reader (and even the seasoned-but-has-not-reread-"Master and Commander"-recently reader) is left to twist in the wind.
I could site further examples but I'll stop here for several reasons: I've made my point, I run the risk of boring the readers of this blog by continually talking about how boring another writer and furthermore Patrick O'Brian is (especially in later installments) such a masterful writer that I cannot really justifiably flog him anymore for his few literary missteps that were made at the very beginning of the "Aubrey/Maturin" series. Of course it wasn't like Mr. O'Brian was young and green when he started the "Aubrey/Maturin" series (he was fifty-four when the first book was published) so I will allow myself to make just one condescending comparison between him and someone else before ending this blog entry.
About eighteen years ago or so my little sister became very enamored with horses. She took horseback riding lessons religiously and decorated her room with posters, statues and books featuring horse imagery. This phase lasted a surprisingly long time and even now I'd bet money that- as a UC Berkeley PhD candidate in linguistics- my sister still secretly stashes a few copies of "Saddle Club" in her room for when she occasionally tires of more high-minded pursuits. At the age of eight, however, my sister was even more enthusiastic. She wrote stories too, stories which would always feature a young adolescent protagonist with a horse. The stories would inevitably get bogged down two pages in with hilariously uninteresting descriptions of how said protagonist would train the horse, get the horse comfortable with saddles, bridles, stirrups, etc. .... things that only an eight-year-old girl who loves horses would love. Of course this entire scenario loses its adorability once you replace my sister with a middle-aged British man with more than a passing hatred for all things modern and a disturbingly thorough knowledge for early nineteenth-century ocean-going warfare. So I will now close this blog entry with a thank you to Mr. Patrick O'Brian for quickly outgrowing the early, annoying stages of his "Master and Commander" literary style and moving on to regularly writing beautiful passages like this:
"'The carrier has brought you an ape.'
'What sort of an ape?' asked Stephen.
'A damned ill-conditioned sort of an ape. It had a can of ale at every pot-house on the road, and is reeling drunk. It has been offering itself to Babbington.'"
Now, that is genuinely funny! But if you are of a more delicate type of temperament then I will simply offer this paragraph as a small taste of what you find in 95% of all of Patrick O'Brian's novels.
"An hour later they were in the narrows, with the town and its evil smells sunk in the haze behind them and the brilliant open water out in front. The Sophie's bowsprit was pointing almost exactly at the white blaze in the horizon that showed the coming of the sun, and the breeze was turning northerly, freshening as it veered."
Aaah. But that sort of heady stuff only really starts after page 200 or so in "Master and Commander"... when Patrick O'Brian (and NOT the reader) adapted his prose to the needs of good authorship and cut the rest of us a break. So please, Patrick O'Brian fans, the next time a befuddled newcomer to the Aubrey/Maturin series comes up to you with a wrinkled brow and says "I heard these books were awesome but I just can't get through all this damned jargon," do not wave aside his objections with an airy, patronizing "Oh, you'll get used to it".... as if all the new reader has to look forward to is sixteen more volumes of "'More like a cro'jack than a mainyard,'" and should just shut up and pretend that reading such passages is the height of literary pleasure. Instead, say "Yeah, the first half of the first book has a lot of crap but I assure you that the rest of the books are GREAT!"
Because that is the truth.
phoebester
-
- Name: Phoebe
- Gender: Female
- Member Since: 2/12/2009
Connect
Archives
About Me
-
I write and draw cartoons. Appreciate them, damn you!
Subscriptions
Pulse
Recommended
-
comment from marzish
-
comment from Ms_Lola_Mae
-
comment from the_rocking_of_socks
-
comment from haltija
Chatboard (4)