I have had tremendous trouble living in New York. I don’t really know why.
Maybe I can’t live here. I’ve certainly not been able to find a life here.
But.
I love, love, love coming home to this city.
It’s the only place I want to come home to.
Oy, as they say, vey.
A tale in three parts.
Back in November, when my coming-to-back-to America was still new, I went to the Swampscott Public Library with my mom. She was going to return some books, and I was going to borrow some – the disease of anti-accumulation, nomadic ways were still coursing through my blood. The American “buy, don’t borrow” ethic had not yet been reintroduced.
Here’s what happened:
From the bright, chilly November afternoon we step inside the fluorescent dimness of the library. Behind the desk, two middle-aged checkout managers (I’m sure they’re not actual librarians) sit, gossiping. My mom turns into the room on the right, where the pulp and other fiction lives. I go in the other direction, to nonfiction. I am looking for a reference book about travel in Mongolia, a “how to start a home business,” and…well, when I’m in a bookstore, I just like to browse around, to let books surprise and delight me.
Standing on the threshold of the reference room, I’m disoriented by wave of nostalgia, of musty stacks, of card catalogues. Worse, like a flashback to a fumbling, pre-adolescent first kiss, I recall that there’s a code-like numbering system at work here. The Dewey Decimal System, used by libraries to organize nonfiction books, represent what navigating the internet would be like using only IP addresses. Looking for a book at Amazon? Visit 159.34.122.1 (or 159.34.122.2, or 3, or…) Bob’s BBQ Shack? 221.54.342.6. Easy, right?
As I search in vain for the giant, well-lit sign that will show me to the business section, a spunky librarian approaches and chirps, “Can I help you find something?”
No! I don’t want to explain what I’m looking for. I want to browse, to engage in a leisurely stroll through the aisles, to happen upon the right book, plus a half-dozen others. I want to run my eyes along the crisp spines of the books, drinking in their titles, guessing their cover art from the font and spine design, scan for familiar names or compelling titles.
Around me, retirees are checking email on old Dells with flesh-colored CRT monitors. Another librarian plods behind a wooden cart of books to be re-shelved. When I was in the third grade, I volunteered as a re-shelver in my elementary school library. My skill at filing away words based on a system of numbers was a source of great pride at the time.
“I’m looking for the business books?” I sputter, so flummoxed that I add the question mark. Thirty years on, my brain is trying to dig up old Dewey. But he lies hidden beneath layers of real life. It’s been at least 15 years since I’ve even been in a library.
“Oh, those are downstairs,” she explains, leading me to what looked like a fire door tucked into a corner. I peek through the wire-mesh reinforced window. A sad little stairwell, the kind you would find in an elementary school in the 70’s, leads to the basement.
——
Two months later, I spent $43 on books at Amazon.com – mostly in the used/discounted section. At least one of my purchases was an impulse buy – my version of a candy bar (“Everything Bad is Good for You,” by Steven Johnson). The rest were in some way related to Papua New Guinea. I swear.
——————–
Just before I left for PNG, I spent part of the afternoon in one of my favorite places, the Barnes & Noble on Union Square in New York.
I went to do some research – to pull books off the shelf, sit in one of the reading chairs lined up by the floor-to-ceiling windows, and read. I did more than that, of course. I couldn’t resist pausing by the tables at the front of the store, browsing the latest fiction and non-fiction. I wandered the travel section – a terrible habit that has had life-changing consequences for me. I finally sat, with a stack of travel lit and diver porn (glossy, photo-heavy fish-ID books). As I worked my way through the pile, the sun dipped below the NYU buildings on Union Square West. At least three homeless people (who come in to get warm and sleep), were evicted by impatient but kind B&N staff. I’m lost in my world, in a sea of books, with my people around me – fellow NYers who are also using this place as their library. Not many leave with books they intend to buy, but a few do. I didn’t.
Along the deep window ledges, stacks of books left by the B&N readers sit, waiting to be re-shelved – alphabetically, within clearly labeled sections.
Holy crap, what a week this has been.
It all started Tuesday. That’s when I embarked on my new part-time consulting gig with She Writes, an online network that helps writers connect with each other and gain access to professional services and guidance. So far it’s been terribly exciting and overwhelming. Another startup web company, full of ideas and promise, determined to get it right, collaborating with idea-a-minute founder Kamy Wicoff and our CTO consultant on how to get it all done, funding, design, social media, marketing….this scrambles my brain as well as any drug. It’s so nice to be back in a “let’s do it!” culture, instead of “that sounds good. but let’s check to hear what these 12 people think first.”
While I was getting buried under the nor’easter of She Writes on Tuesday, little did I know that another storm – let’s call this one a tropical monsoon – was sitting in my inbox (and on Facebook). Everyone I know at Matador Network was trying to get in touch with me. “URGENT! Do you want to go on a press trip to dive Papua New Guinea?” they asked. Um, WHAT? Is the pope Catholic? Does a bear shit in the woods? Does a manta ray eat plankton? Suddenly I had about a day to come up with a compelling story idea or two. Good thing I wasn’t busy or anything. (I’m not officially in yet – fingers crossed!)
And the editor of another publication wanted a revised story pitch. And another story of mine was published on Matador Trips. And I met a terrific fellow travel writer at a mediabistro networking event.
It’s as if just stepping onto the island of Manhattan makes things start to happen.
Last night I related all this craziness to my amazing friend Andrea DiCastro McGough (over lots of drinks and a little dinner). She quite astutely pointed out that all this chaos, my triple life as freelance writer and online product consultant and member of a family that requires lots of attention at the moment, not to mention my lack of fixed address, is simply a different face to my Range Life. Maybe it’s not so much about stamps in my passport, but about always trying something new, or at least different.
Is that a metaphysical range life? Or am I soothing my nerves at the prospect of staying put for a while?
I just had lunch with a good friend who is in the middle of trying to raise money for her startup business. Her description of the fundraising process sounded exactly like a freelance writer trying to get published. In fact, she used the term “authorpreneur” in describing one aspect of her business. That’s me!
What both she and I are trying to do is to get someone else – in her case, an investor; in my case, an editor – to take a risk on our story.
Luckily, we both have connections and networks from our past lives that can help us get in front of the right people. But what then? In her case, her story doesn’t have the sexiness of a 19-year-old boy-genius geek with hot new technology that will change the world, man. (In fact, there are no boys at all in her story.) She’ll have to find a different hook.
We talked about how most people are followers, even if they imagine themselves to be leaders. In her case, she’s trying to get few *real* risk-takers on board, after which (she hopes!) it will become easier to get the ones who imagine themselves as risk-takers to follow. In short, she’s looking for her big break.
To be successful, both of us need to be very well prepared, create a measure of luck for ourselves, and above all, be tenacious as hell. It’s not easy to get a relative stranger to take a risk on you.
My article on diving Malaysian Borneo is up on Matador Networks. Enjoy.
Writing this piece was at once cathartic (the first draft exceeded 3000 words!) and nostalgic. I just celebrated my one-year anniversary of becoming a divemaster (Nov 30) and starting work at Scuba Junkie (December 10, I think). Last year at this time I was a newbie DM sharing a shitty little room with Rob, a sweet guy who helped me build up my confidence as a DM. Thanks, Rob!
Just a few weeks later I was a badass DM, guiding freshly-minted divers at Sipadan on Xmas day wearing a Santa hat.
Pulling together the info for this piece and the others I’ve been working on has only reinforced a lesson I learned from James Sturz during a travel writing course I took at MediaBistro a few years back: Great writing is about details. You must write travel pieces immediately, or you’ll forget all the important colorful stuff. You’ll lose immediacy. It’s better to know what story you will write *before* you go somewhere, so you know what details to take down. Etc. Etc.
I’ve discovered that I’m not delighted with what I write from my pitiful notes and memory. It isn’t bad, but it’s not as great as I want it to be.
All this makes me want to go back out into the world again.
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to this weekend’s snowstorm. If it’s going to be freezing cold, we might as well have snow!
I was away for 17 months, and I’ve been back in the US for about 2 1/2. My settling back in has been unsettled. I’ve had many moments of joy, mostly around seeing friends & family. I’ve caught myself being seduced by my old New York lifestyle, checking Craigslist for full-time jobs and the price of one-bedroom apartments. But these moments are mere punctuations in the stream of blandness that is the fixed life. I ache for hikes in Russia and Mongolia, or for diving in Malaysia and Indonesia.
I still feel like an alien in my own country. And not in a good way.
I spent 17 months backpacking, which by definition means I didn’t buy very much stuff. I worried over every purchase, assessing weight, multi-utility, absolute need and my ever-shrinking savings account.
Ten weeks into my return to the US, the holiday season is in full swing. This year’s storyline is a pitched battled between the continuing financial crisis and the sellers of iPads, Snuggies and (this still kills me) Lexuses. Incessant advertisements insist that we must buy these things – to prove our love, to show Christmas spirit, because everyone else is doing it. The heathen consumer-fest of the December holidays in America is a cliché, but for me this year it’s so much more stark and repulsive.
To combat the fixed-life, holiday blues, I’m trying to write more, send out more story pitches, and take every action I can to continue my range life.
Stay tuned.
My 8-year-old nephew Griffin failed at growing the biggest sweet potato in the world. Earlier this year, he dug a little garden in his back yard and planted an old potato that had started to sprout. A budding scientist, he explained his project to me when I visited him after my return from abroad. “I think I’m going to dig it up on October 3rd,” he said, with the furrowed brow and compulsive seriousness of an 8-year-old budding scientist. “I think that will be the right time.”
And so he did. On the cloudless autumn morning of October 3rd, his spade unearthed a potato that had become the nucleus of an impressively complex network of roots. It was not, however, by any stretch, the biggest sweet potato in the world. “I’m a failure,” he wailed. And he was right. Sort of.
Since I’ve been back I’ve been thinking a lot about failure. I suppose it’s just me wrestling with a way to sum up my recent Range Living, and with what to do next. Not to mention the fact that of the first three meals I tried to cook, all ended in disaster (think: flaming chicken).
In a strict constructionist view, I failed at what I set out to do when I left New York in April of 2009. The evidence is clear: I’m no longer away, and I’m not sure that I’ll be leaving again anytime soon. Yes, there are things I would have done differently. But to me, half the fun – of life, of travel – is having things not quite work out as planned. It’s how you learn…so you can do things differently next time. Or do different things.
I’ve always been kinda obsessed with hero-worship in American culture. In the public sphere, chance-takers are presented as rebel-heroes after they have leaped *and* landed, when they are confident and smiling. It’s only once they’ve sat down to sushi with an interviewer that we hear about their ramen-eating days. Or months. Or years. Looking back from the point of success, though, it all seems inevitable. A person’s personal story reads like a novel, preordained from page one. In hindsight, we can divine the future from the tea leaves quite easily.
But what about all the chance-takers who never succeed (so to speak)?
Griffin’s shoulders drooped. He kicked the treasonous soil, pouting. He carried the offending potato to the edge of the woods and hacked it up with a spade. “I’m a failure!” he repeated, wallowing in self-pity that bordered on the adolescent.
I tried to explain to him that many famous leaps in science came about as a result of a failure (or a screw-up). He didn’t want to hear about it at that moment, but I hope he was still listening.
So Griff, here it is again: It’s important to embrace failure – indeed, to view it as a success.
I arrived in Orlando, Florida, in a state.
I was stressed – about the cost of the trip, about what day the shuttle would launch and therefore what how to manage my hotel, car and flights. It was too much. I decided I would stay only until Wednesday; if the launch was delayed again, I wouldn’t be here to see it.
I was cranky – I had slept just 3 hours the night before and my taxi driver got lost on the way to the Westchester airport…at 6 am we were driving around the Bronx, or Yonkers, or *somewhere*, trying to find the way. We made it.
I was frazzled – When I went to pick up my rental car in Orlando, the $43/day rate that I had seen online the night before was suddenly $80/day. EIGHTY DOLLARS. I freaked out. The rental dude took pity on me and give me the car for $60/day. SIXTY DOLLARS. Good god.
I hopped in the car, my eyeballs like sandpaper, and drove towards Kennedy Space Center in order to pick up my passes and such for the launch.
I was a few miles away when I spotted it. In the distance, across the marsh flats, Space Shuttle Discovery was just sitting there on the launch pad. And that was it. I was an excited little kid. Any crazy idea about leaving before the launch flew right out of my head. I’m here for the long haul.
As you know by now, the launch has been delayed every day since Monday. First there were some mechanical problems. Now it’s the weather – rainy and windy. I’m going crazy with anticipation, getting psyched up every day only to be let down again. If I’m losing my mind, I can’t even imagine what the crew is going through!
In the meantime, I’m amusing myself by meeting Floridians here in Cocoa Beach. On Tuesday evening I went to The Surf for dinner. Like the Sea Aire Motel, where I’m staying, The Surf is a local institution. In its prime, before the Marriotts and resorts and their respective restaurants moved in, The Surf was the place where journalists covering shuttle launches ate their steak or seafood. “They all would come here,” said Alden, the Cocoa Beach native who befriended me at the bar. “Even Walter Cronkite!”
Alden, who works on the NASA shuttle contract for Boeing, is anticipating losing his job after the last launch. It being election night, we and others at the bar drank wine and discussed the horrific Florida economy, the coming NASA-related job losses, the Tea Party, and other depressing subjects. Everyone, however, remains upbeat and tirelessly friendly.
Indeed, since I arrived I’ve gotten sucked in to a number of 90-minute conversations that should have been 2 minutes of small talk. I’m doing more nodding and smiling than I did in SE Asia. There are a lot of old folks down here (many of them, as we all know, ex-New Yorkers), they’re all..friendly. They all seem to need someone to ramble to.
On the other hand, I’ve also met some nice fellow shuttle-launchers. There was a cute scene yesterday afternoon, when I met my neighbors in the motel. I ran into a few of them outside the room, and we started chatting about where we planned to watch the launch. I explained I have VIP tickets, and they were all suitably impressed. From then on, whenever anyone new would join the group, one woman would introduce me: “This is Christina. She has VIP tickets!”
So that’s me, the VIP in room 3.
Anyway, fingers crossed that the launch happens tomorrow. Florida is amusing, but if it’s too cold to go to the beach…get me outta here!
Oh, how I missed those golden stars on red badges fastened to army-green uniforms! It’s been quite a few months since my adventures in socialist China, the single country of the dozens I’ve visited that I never ever intend to visit again, at least not on my own dime. So here I am, in another notoriously rude, ruthlessly money-grubbing socialist Asian country with an infamously high rate of theft (not violent theft – mugging and so on – but simple stuff like purse-snatching, stealing your wallet and camera while you’re asleep on the bus, and so on).
Hello Saigon! Or…Ho Chi Minh City, as it’s now called. (An aside: I understand the need to name stuff after national heroes. In fact, on the flight here I just thinking about the absurd number of American airports named for recent American presidents: Reagan International and JFK and (for god’s sake!) Bush International. But no Jefferson, no Lincoln, no Roosevelt (Teddy or Frankie). It’s like the sports stadium-naming virus has spread.)
As I was saying, I get it. But name a soccer (erm) football stadium after him. The airport. A highway. But to name a city after him – especially with a name that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, like Washington, combined with needed clarity lent by the word “City” at the end…it’s a mess. Ho Chi Minh City. Jeezis. No wonder people write HCMC, and still call it Saigon. This city clearly needs a brand manager.
Speaking of airports, the HCMC airport (code: SGN) is shiny and new and covered with advertising billboards that all say “Welcome to Ho Chi Minh City. For advertising, please call…” Like any sensible airport, there are duty-free shops in the international arrivals hall…but they were all closed at 6 pm when I landed. They’re trying with this whole capitalism thing, but they don’t quite have it right.
I grabbed my bag and went in search of the bus into the city, but evidently the buses stop running at 6 pm as well. Not wanting to shell out the cash for a taxi into the city, I walked up to the first white person I saw, a late-30s-ish guy, and asked if he wanted to share. His name is Martin, a native Londoner now working as an investment banker in (you guessed it) Hong Kong. He was on his way to meet his British-born Chinese wife, who was in HCMC for business, at the Sofitel (“we’ve got slightly different budgets,” I laughed).
As it turned out, he wasn’t as boring as a Hong Kong investment banker should be. He’s a former TV journalist, he’s got the first book of a series of teenage detective novels at various agents in New York and elsewhere, and he’s funny as hell. It was the most fun I’ve had in a cab since Pat Guiney, with whom I was in a drunken and oddly vicious argument on the way home from the Stoned Crow, called me a c**t. (He apologized the next day, after PC reminded him of the incident.)
After I dropped Martin in the flush part of town, I instructed our oddly belligerent taxi driver to take me to Bui Vien, the Khao San Road of Saigon. (Saigon, dammit!) It took about 5 minutes to find a $6 dorm bed in the Remember Inn, a friendly place in a side alley, attached to a BBQ joint. The dorm is situated on the first floor, which is like the 13th floor from the film “Being John Malkovich,” or maybe a scene from Alice in Wonderland, in that I have to stoop through the door and carry on stooping as I walk through half the 20ftx20ft room to my bed. By the door the ceiling is about 5.5 feet from the floor, then rises to about 6 feet off the floor – which means I can stand on the side of my room where the bed is, but I can’t have sunglasses on my head because they scrape the ceiling. There are 5 beds in the room, each about 8-12 inches from each other. Thank god there’s only one other tenant – a Korean college student who sleeps all day and picks at his nails a lot.
On my first full day in the city, I was charmed into agreeing to a tour of the city aboard a cyclo – basically a seat on wheels in front of a bike, in this case pedaled by a 50ish Vietnamese man named Nzhia (“Nia”). He had been driving a cyclo for 18 years, he said, since job prospects for those who are not communist party members are scarce. Not that he’s a physicist or engineer or something: he’s a rice farmer who learned English from American GIs during the war, and continues to study at his home, a village about 12 km from Saigon. He tells horrible war stories of violence, including how he got nicked above the right eye by a stray bullet, with an incongruous twinkle in his eye and smile on his face.
He also told me more modern horror stories – of how the top 7 generals just received 7 brand-new Rolls Royces, in a sign of communist corruption; how those who want to go to church can’t, for fear of the ubiquitous midnight knock on the door; of how the communists are stealing valuable forests from the poor and selling the timber off to the Chinese; etc.
But a lot of this is spiel that he clearly has been refining for 18 years. His tour is a series of epigrams that he repeats throughout the day. Describing corruption: “Small officer, small money. Big officer, big money.” Pointing out what the different goods sold on the street we just turned onto: “Different street, different thing.” On free speech in modern Vietnam: “People have mouths for eating, not mouths for speaking.” He showed me the hotel where Bill Clinton stayed when he visited after leaving office (the New World Hotel). He showed me the three different hotels where the officers, journalists and GIs stayed during the war (“then at night the lieutenant would go to a bar and shoot the soldier in the foot. ‘That girl mine. This girl yours!’ Ha ha.”
The tour was nice and all – actually, I recommend it – but the best part was crossing the street. In Saigon, as Nzhia said, “there are 8 million people and 8 million motorbikes.” And as we would make a turn or cross an intersection, at least 4 million of those bikes would be tearing down the road at us, full speed, as we gently pedaled across. I couldn’t look – for the first 30 minutes or so I was certain we would die, but then I figured, he’s been doing this for 18 years and isn’t dead. So go with it.
So yes, I like Saigon. It’s not terribly cosmopolitan, the only good food I can find (luckily!) is the cheap food-stall stuff, Saigon brand beer gives me an instant hangover headache – before I’ve even finished the bottle, and all westerners are constantly harassed to buy trinkets (“you buy something!” demand the pre-adolescent girls who wave cheap hand fans in your face as you try to drink your morning coffee). But I like it.
I am *so* glad to be out of China. Malaysia is…*friendly*. Polite. Happy. Full of tasty food. In such an atmosphere it’s easy to overlook things like mosquito attacks and sudden, unexplained interruptions of internet service – things I would have railed against in China.
I would love wrap up my feelings about China (something more sophisticated than “I hated it”) into a clever Chinese box, but I don’t think that’s possible. My ignorance of Chinese history robs me of proper context. I have no idea what it’s like to grow up and live in a communist society, so my powers of empathy are limited. And there’s no way to overstate the handicap of the language barrier – few people could speak English, no one could understand my sorry attempts at Mandarin, and most importantly, I couldn’t read signs. All these factors make contemporary China impenetrable to me.
All I can do, as the ever-insightful Henry points out, is report on what I observe from my demanding-critical-skeptical-tightwad-ignorant-western point of view.
I went to China expecting philosophy, ancient architecture, modern hyper-development, great food, and plenty of unexpected stuff.
What I found, I think, is…meanness. Most people were completely uninterested in me. This sounds rather self-centered; what I mean is that people didn’t even try to understand – what I was trying to say, to find, to do. People weren’t curious. With a few notable exceptions, few people went out of their way to be helpful. Tour operators didn’t give a shit if I was happy with what I paid for. I can’t remember anyone ever saying “good morning.”
But this lack of cheerfulness extended beyond my tourist-haze. On the streets, no one smiles. You rarely saw anyone (including Chinese people) strolling, enjoying themselves. I don’t remember many random acts of kindness. In fact, people would barrel right over you on the street, cars and motorbikes would run red lights and almost hit you in the crosswalk. Like Russia and Eastern Europe, communist “collectivism” paradoxically seems to have bred a people who will shove old ladies out of the way to get what’s on offer first.
It’s like they’re hoarding time.
People didn’t even take the time to enjoy simple pleasures such as food – most of the time people shoveled it into their mouths, or slurped it up, as quickly as possible.
No one seemed happy.
That’s why Guilin, full of vacationing families and strolling couples, was such a pleasant surprise. All of a sudden, Chinese people seemed human.
Indeed, the change here in Malaysia further highlights the meanness of China. People smile. There’s gentle music playing in the shops. There’s *street life* – markets, parks, restaurants, bustle. Other than in Kashgar, I can’t remember much street life in China – everyone was too busy rushing around their Levitt-cities.
Malaysia is more human.
I’m sitting in a cafe in Melaka (aka Malacca), on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. The wicker chair ain’t too comfortable, but the fans in the high ceilings keep the air moving and the mosquitoes at bay. Chilled-out lounge music is playing on the stereo. On the rough, peeling walls hang a haphazard collection of random B&W photos, art posters and a few paintings. There are just the right number of knickknacks strewn about the bar and tables. Earlier the server came around and offered each guest a fried banana that his friend had brought him in a bag. In fact, I just looked up, caught his eye, and he smiled at me. For no reason.
This place does not, could not exist in China. Outside of hostels, there are no public venues where people linger in China. Even the thousands of malls lack seating.
So the question is: do I love this cafe because it’s what I’m used to, or because it’s just good?
Back to Henry’s observations for a sec: I think he’s wrong that Eastern non-individualist culture precludes having an ideology. AFAIK, Chinese people had ideology/philosophy for most of their history – from religions to communism. The fact that they don’t seem to have one in the post-Deng era is troubling. If you go back and read the quoted dude in the NYT article, you’ll see that even *he* was taken aback when he couldn’t say what China stands for. He struggled, but he came up with an answer, because he knew that you gotta stand for something.
His struggle – and my search – to come up with a guiding ideology outside of economic power and development is telling.
I didn’t look very hard – and couldn’t, given the language barrier – but I don’t know that there is any funk in China. One billion people and no funk (art, personality, etc.). Now that’s troubling.
—–
Sorry – Just two more quick things about China.
First…maybe this is another indication of lack of funk, but everyone dresses in the same drab, ugly manner. The men wear cheap collared shirts tucked in to pleated (pleated!) trousers hiked up and fixed in place by a simple leather belt. On their feet they wear thin white socks and black or brown loafers. It’s *so* ugly. Awful.
Second…a little rant about Chinglish. People think it’s funny, and it can be. The menu translations are hilarious. But when you see Chinglish on sign on a train, in a bus station, in a hotel (fire escape instructions!), or even on a billboard, to me it shows that they just don’t give a shit. It’s inexcusable in the age of the internet, even the one behind the Great Firewall. I mean, even spellcheck would help matters. So yeah – I don’t think Chinglish is funny. I think it’s one more example of Chinese insularity and fundamental lack of interest in anyone but themselves.
OK – no more ranting about China – I’m tapped. From now on, it’s hot, sticky, friendly Malaysia.
Taking The Fork 