Wednesday, January 2, 2013

What Happens in Asia

There was the bustling moment as we climbed onto the train, trying not to fall into the gap, squeezing our backpacks through the narrow doorway, me banging my ukulele against things. We found seats, but there was nowhere to put our luggage. We pulled it close, trying to make sure people could still move comfortably up and down the aisle. This was our first train ride; we were excited. The train was simple, but comfortable, and relatively quiet.

We started moving. A woman walked the length of the train with a basket of snacks for sale. The car was mostly empty. A few seats up and on the other side of the car sat several monks in bright orange robes, chatting amicably with one another. One of them had a tattoo on his arm. Directly across from us was a boy, late teens, stretched out across several seats, with his feet propped up on a handrail. He napped sometimes, woke up. At one point, he took out a wallet. Then another wallet. He looked through them, and put them back in his pockets. Then he fell asleep again.

One of the monks got up and poked him, waking him up, and saying something angrily in Thai. He sat back down. Later, the woman selling snacks came back. The monk got up and poked the boy again, said something. The boy looked embarrassed and awkward. He bought a bottle of water from the snack lady and gave it to the angry monk. The monk went back to his seat and to chatting with the other monks.

Months later I realized where the boy’s propped-up feet were pointing.

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We were heading downstream for the very last time. A few children we knew stood on the shore looking sad and confused. I felt like I should be about to cry, and maybe I was. A man from our village was also catching this boat. He was bringing a dog, which he picked up using a pole which was attached to a rope which was tied around the dog’s neck. He tossed her into the back of the boat by the engine and got in next to her.

We pushed off from the shore out onto the swollen river, under a gray sky. I wanted to be quiet; I didn’t trust myself to speak. For about two minutes I quietly thought about how I’d never see the village or the children ever again. Then the woman in the back of the boat, the driver’s wife, started shouting in Lao. The boat slowed. Twenty feet off the stern, in the water, was the dog, swimming across the flooded river towards the shore. She didn’t seem likely to make it. It was the rainy season, and the current was tremendous. I wondered what she thought she was going to do when she got there, with that big piece of wood tied around her neck and no one to feed her. I guess she thought it was better than the alternative.
 
The driver turned the boat back, and steered it close to the dog. When the dog came close to the boat, the owner reached out and grabbed the pole and scooped her dripping out of the water. We headed back downriver, and the driver stopped at the next village. The owner got out of the boat with the dog, and, splashing through the shallow water by the shore, carried her, soggy and hopeless, toward the front of the boat. Her rear feet didn’t touch the ground, but she moved them like she was trying to walk. It looked like she was riding an invisible bicycle.
 
The owner now tried to sit on one of the chairs in the front of the boat, with the wet dog, but there were a couple of white people sitting in the seats, probably tourists, and I suppose they didn’t approve of the idea. He carried the dog back again, her feet still pedaling uselessly. They both got into the boat next to the noisy engine. This time, I’m sure he was watching her more closely. I don’t think she was a pet.

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Between the trees I caught a glimpse of a truck going by. Hundreds of large rubber balls, pink, blue, and green were stacked in the back of the truck, eight or ten feet high, held down with netting. I suspected that somewhere there would soon be some happy Vietnamese kids.

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The bus stopped in a busy gravel parking lot. The night was humid and heavy, full of cigarette smoke, voices, bus horns honking imminent departures. I had been sitting like a sardine, bolt upright in the back of a small bus with my legs dangling into the stairway, with no footrest, for six hours. My feet felt like melons. I needed to pee.

I walked through the restaurant, brightly lit and full of midnight diners. I gave my coin to the man sitting at the table with the metal box. He smiled joyfully and said, Hello! People were looking at me. No one was white.

I walked down the ramp, towards the women’s room. All but one of the twelve stalls were occupied. I soon learned why: a neat pile of human feces was standing on the floor a foot away from the squat-toilet. So close. A shame, really. I wondered how they could have missed when the toilet itself took up fifty percent of the space in the stall. I considered waiting for another stall, then realized I didn’t care. I was careful to avoid the shit. I squatted, urine splattered all over my feet, as usual. I faced backwards, toward the wall, because that way it splashed less. I dipped water from the bucket to flush. I didn’t rinse around the toilet. I was in a hurry, and it seemed like a losing battle, anyway.

I got back on the bus and nightmared through the next six hours as the driver whipped us violently through the mountains across the island of Sumatra. In the early hours of the morning, we arrived in Maninjau. A new acquaintance of ours, a German boy, had his wallet lost or stolen as he got off the bus. Kristian and I waited while he and another recently acquired acquaintance, an Indonesian guy who lived in Maninjau, tried to chase the bus down on a moped.

In the pre-dawn dark, we crossed the street and piled our backpacks on an old wooden table that was standing on the sidewalk. Nothing was open, and no one was in sight. I was hungry, and ate some cookies. Dawn slowly broke over Lake Maninjau. I was slowly surprised as the steep green mountains materialized out of the dark, bits of drifting clouds clinging to them. A little girl came out of a house across the street, smiled, waved, and said, “Hello, how are you?” I said, “fine, thank you.” We practiced counting to ten in English. Pointing at her head, she wordlessly asked me if I had a head scarf. I shook my head no.

It got lighter, and soon two young Indonesians, brother and sister, walked up to us and introduced themselves with nervous smiles. They were there visiting their grandmother for the Ramadan holiday. They spoke English and told us about their studies. While we waited for the German guy to come back, we played ukulele and they taught us words in Indonesian. They let us use the bathroom at their grandmother's house. We waited for a couple hours, but the German kid never came back, and we wanted to find a place to stay. While we’d been hanging out with the brother and sister, an old man had opened his small shop behind us. We left a message with him for the German kid. We ended up seeing him later that day. He’d never gotten his wallet back.
 
We walked several kilometers down the shore, looking for a guesthouse. They were all full because of Ramadan. Several people stopped us and asked to take pictures with us. Indonesians always like to take multiple pictures. I guess they’re worried some wouldn’t turn out. A whole family came to take photos with us. They spoke in English and the parents introduced their teenage daughters. Eventually we found a bungalow by the lake. It had no electricity, but the food was cheap and delicious. The owner said we could use the dugout canoe if we wanted. The water quietly licked the shore. Right in front of the bungalow, an old man sat out on the dock of one of the fish farms for hours, trying to catch fish from the nets with a fishing pole, but they kept fumbling out of his hands and splashing back in. The water was a mirror, reflecting the mountains and the clouds. At night it reflected the stars and the lights from the fish farms. I hadn’t forgotten, but I didn’t mind the bus or the shit. I loved Sumatra.

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The interior of each city block contains a whole world, a maze of miniature apartments, convenience stores, and restaurants piled on and around each other, occupying every conceivable cubic meter. Only pedestrians and the most precise moped drivers can navigate the labyrinthine alleys of Saigon.

The mundane is a forceful presence here. Two feet to the left and two feet to the right are the apartment windows and open doors that press large and close like theater screens. It’s impossible not to look into the apartments, narrow but deep, extending back into the dense living tissue of the block.

A dog barks. A family sits cross-legged around a table, eating dinner. A moped is parked in one living room. On the walls are sometimes small shrines, framed pictures of Buddha. A girl lies stretched out on the floor, watching TV. Some families have couches, but no one sits in them.

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“Buy a book. Here.” An eight-year-old with a heavy basket of assorted books comes up to the table where the three of us are drinking beer. She waves a book at us. “No thanks,” we all say. Marcel smiles and shakes his head. We look very deliberately down at the table, or pick up our beer and stare out towards the Mekong. We look anywhere but at the girl, who stands only a tiny head above the level of our table. “Here. This one.” “We don’t need a book.” “This?” She holds up a bracelet of wooden beads. “No, thanks, we already have some.” Kristian shows her his wrists, loaded with bracelets. “But this one is different.” There is a touch of desperation in her voice.

More of them have materialized around us. A Canadian father and his teenage son are sitting at the next table. They come here every day for pizza. They know the kids. The kids don’t try to sell them books anymore. They give one of them a piece of pizza.

A few more try to sell us books. We don’t buy; but for some reason, they don’t leave. The son at the next table is playing a game with one of them—rock, paper, scissors. Somehow, all of these kids with their old clothes, their heavy baskets of books, their relentless attempts to sell, they all speak English. You can even joke with them. Kristian tells them they should stop selling books and go to school. They all insist that they do, they do go to school, but only in the morning. The kids don’t leave, but they don’t try to sell us books. Kristian goes back to speaking German with our Swiss friend, Marcel. I don’t understand German, and focus on trying to find out where the kids live. One of them speaks enough English to tell me what her favorite class in schools is—math. She lives outside the city with her sister. Her parents are “angels.”

An adult somewhere in the pizza restaurant gives the kids a stern look, says a few words in Khmer and they guiltily wander away from our tables. It seems like the adult knows the children, but I can’t figure out what the relationship is. The booksellers will come back a couple beers later, play some more rock, paper, scissors, be shooed away again. The father at the next table says they stay out every night until ten or eleven o’clock, walking up and down the street, trying to sell books. I wonder when they have time to do their homework.
 
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We entered the tunnel through the old city wall, pressed against the bricks to avoid the traffic. We were busy conversing. On the other side of the wall, on the bridge that crossed the old city’s moat, I stopped talking, and said, “Look!”

A man was pushing a cart with ranks of fish tanks stacked five tanks high. There was water in them, and fish, all different types and colors, and they sloshed back and forth as he pushed the cart over the bumpy bridge.

“I’ve seen a few things on wheels, but wow.” A moment of surprise, and deep appreciation. I managed to get the camera out and take a few fuzzy pictures in the fading light. Eventually, one of us said, “What were we talking about?”
 
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For the party, the villagers slaughtered a young cow. Afterwards, somehow, our family acquired some of the leftover meat. They cooked it up for dinner that night. I didn’t eat it, but I know from the photographs. I was upstairs under the mosquito net, asleep, in a rice-whisky-induced oblivion.

The next day, there were bones above the hearth—a cow jaw, cow leg bones. They were there the following day as well, and for several days after that. They became dark from the smoke, and the bits of flesh clinging to the cow’s jaw dried into a deep red-brown. One day they were gone.