Thank You, Mr. Bean

Mr. Bean tries to sink the Titanic, but the Titanic won't sink. He scrubs his pits with a teddy bear, then stands. The suds cover his naughty bits. He grabs a towel, which wraps like pants around his thighs, and heads through the door, boat in one hand, animal in the other.

He's in a car now, and, for safety, he checks his nostrils in the rearview and eyes the pebbles beyond his left-side passenger window. A man with evil dipping eyebrows emerges from a truck three times the size of Mr. Bean's car and dashes a sardonic smile our hero's way.

Mr. Bean is not to be daunted by the problem emerging before his eyes. He parks his car with the bumper parallel to the curb. A nice policewoman with a sharply angled nose waves the tip left and right. Silly Mr. Bean.

Mr. Bean sulks around. Aha! His face lights up. But wait—a gray sedan swoops in on Mr. Bean's new parking spot. Mr. Bean's lips move in a formation that looks like the word "Fuck." Malaysia! Oh my!

He sulks some more. And now... what's this? He's kissing the ground in unbridled, don't-give-a-toss-about-his-immune-system glee. A parking spot, at last!

He stalks into a gray building and climbs into a lush theatre seat to enjoy the big-picture flick. It's the tale-end of the film, and a giant boat is sinking. He missed the whole darn thing. His head drops in exasperation as he realizes the moral of his own story (?).

"The End" expands across the screen. Ah, what a tale. Thank you, Mr. Bean.


Editorial note: Mr. Bean is a popular cartoon in Malaysia, or at least on the train that runs to and from destinations north of Kuala Lumpur on the west coast. The television played five episodes, at least, with the sound muted and no subtitles on my trip from the farm to the city. This post is a recounting of one of those riveting Mr. Bean episodes—a tribute, if you will. I learned so much about life from that little cartoon man.

Portrait of the Morning

The air vibrates with a loud buzz, like a giant mosquito is circling my head, searching for a landing spot the way police helicopters search for runners back home. There's a banana flower arching into its life-giving trunk, its laden upper stem spiked with small green fruits, the top uppermost section sprayed with the first rays of morning light. A pink and mauve pineapple, bursting with teenage hope, lifts its proud head between the matured leaves of the plant, the stalks a green mane falling away from the center in reverential duty.

I take a sip from the mug warming my palms and savor a mouthful of nes-lo*, easy on the lo, with a sprinkling of masala spice.**

The petai tree waves its thin fern arms slowly above the dense shaded mass, dancing back and forth to a silent morning rave. Wood cracks between my feet, sending vibrations with a loud snap up my calves. Rocks click softly down the weathered brown slope.

An eggplant climbs undetectably, cautiously out of its maternal flower, purpling beneath the gaze of the long bean tentacles that dangle, sultrily, from the thin metal rafts above. A bird, too far away to be carefully seen, alights on a branch, singing gustily into the coming day.

A butterfly, black with green-centered wings, large and gliding in its traversing, flits past.

The long, thin leaves of an overgrown weed ache into the center of the path. A fly with a red head and a wingspan the length of a thumb's nail pauses near a drop of dew. Three more join it, making a v-formation reminiscent of birds or fighter-jets. Warriors of the forest.

Popo and Pupu, my two favorite dogs of the bunch of seven, roll over each other down the rocky driveway, barking and growling into each other's oversized triangle ears.

The flies lift off and disappear into the morning air, the only give-away of their presence the loud, persistent buzz of their flapping external engines.


*A mix of Nescafé instant coffee (Malaysia's second caffeine staple after a creamy black tea drink called teh tarik) and Milo, a malted chocolate beverage made from powder.
**Masala spices are used in Indian masala tea.

Forlorn Lovers

I imagine Finola is madly in love with me. It's the only way I can keep from responding to her stares with derisive inner dialogue or sadness. And anyhow, it's more fun this way.

I glance to the left of her earlobe, off into the coming evening, repeatedly. She thinks I'm looking at her and gazes longingly into my face. Her heart drops with disappointment to find I am not searching for tenderness in her eyes. I sweep a strand of hair, slowly, behind my ear, running my fingertips down my neck. She wishes I would do the same to her. I spoon rice to my mouth. She fantasizes about my moving lips. Poor Finola. Love-struck so quickly, and to such little avail.

She's an interesting character, Finola. Spent her whole life in alternative communities where she consumed nothing but raw, organic veggies and worked for no pay, simply subsisting off of that which the community afforded her. She wouldn't eat a processed-sugar-filled candy bar if her life depended on it. She'll glare that I-love-pork smile right off your face. She's hippie and she knows it.

Yes, Finola has never so much as pointed her toe anywhere but left—suckled The Revolution instead of breast milk; stood with the support of Free Will instead of table legs; sucked home-grown carrots instead of lollipops. And she thinks herself superior for it, a fact she's not shy about displaying.

There's something about me, too, that seems to invite her judgment. She's a fan of scoffing just loudly enough so I can hear, and that smile on her face always has a mocking curl to it. I try to engage her in some friendly chatter, dialogue about the shape of change, joke about yankin' weeds, but she only gives me that downward glance and a tight-lipped grimace.

Well, but that's love, ain't it?

I sing softly about forlorn lovers now as we scrub organic four-angle bean remnants from silver pans with homemade rice enzyme cleaner, our bodies bent over the sinks, laboring side by side.

But CAN You Sing with all the Voices?

I'm wandering the farm's weed-tossed walkways, singing "Colors of the Wind"* at the guava trees. I'm confident, without a trace of malu.** I know, I know, it seems amazing—I myself wouldn't have believed it possible a few days ago—but I am no hero, friends. I am just a woman, a woman who had a simple dream: To sing a corny Disney song about nature unabashedly into the wind.

I'll be honest: It was no easy task getting here. It took a few days of reconciling with Finola's perennially skeptical gaze and Khian Ee's probing tongue. It took a few days of remembering that I don't care to take life or people's opinions of me too seriously. It's been a long journey, a journey replete with sneaky humming cut mid-melody and silent longing stares into the weeds. Sometimes, when I've thought myself alone, I've even sung the song full out, rerouting the melody only upon discovery by my detective-eyed friends in order to obscure the song's true origins.

This morning, though, while clearing a bed of its irreverent, fruitless green, I felt my outer skin begin to peel away like a rolinia rotting in the sun. I yanked a deep root from the ground and let Tegan and Sara bubble from my lips. I turned and the rhythm picked up pace. I did a little internal jig. Today was the day, I knew. Today was the day I'd fulfill my life's purpose and become a Disney character. Today was the day I'd sing with all the voices of the mountains.

We finished our task and I left Matt (Ben)*** humming quietly beside Finola. They tramped away from the patch, and I drifted into the wind in the opposite direction.

I took a minute to savor the final moment before my world was to be revolutionized, looking pensively into the mess of vine-climbers and moldy tree stumps.

And then it began.

A grave question started to rise in my mind, slow at first, then faster and faster until it was clamoring against my skull with the urgency of a thousand impatient revolutionaries. I steeled my nerves and prepared to make history. "How HIIIIIIIGH does the sycamore growww?" God. I already knew the farm's colonizing retort. I sang louder.

"If you CUT it down, then you'll NEver knoOOWWWW. AND YOU'LL NEVER HEAR THE WOLF CRY TO THE BLUE-CORN MOOOON FOR WHETHERRR"

Damn, it felt good, siding with Nature. I turned to see Finola sitting in the distance, a cigarette on her lips and a hand draped lazily across her knee. Her face seemed turned deliberately away from me. She was definitely judging me.

But it was too late. I was on a high-speed train to Fantasyland: Malaysia Edition, and I couldn't have stopped for anything, even if I had wanted. My destiny had taken over.

"YOU THINK THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO ARE PEOPLE..."

Finola turned her body slightly further away.

"ARE THE PEOPLE WHO LOOK AND THINK LIKE YOUUUU!"

I followed the path, which happened to curve closer to my best friend's perch. My volume dropped. "But if you walk the footsteps of a strangerrrrr..."

I could have imagined it, but I swear I saw her lips moving in time with my own. She took another drag from her hand-rolled cigarette, shifting her arm to the other knee.

EPILOGUE: "Come run the hidden pine trails of the fooooreeest. Come taste the sun-sweet berries of the eaaaaaaaarth. Come rooooll in all the riches all aroooound uuus! And for once, never wonder what they're woooorth."


*Note: This post is in no way an endorsement of the Pocahontas cartoon's historical inaccuracies or tendencies to cultural appropriation/misrepresentation.
**"Malu" means, roughly, "shy" or "shyness" in Bahasa Malaysia.
***See post titled "Goat Manure."

Goat Manure

"A bad one," Finola says. Khian Ee's finger still lingers in the direction of Tesco. "In every town, they build." Finola responds with a troubled sigh.

I pick up her English-Irish hybrid accent in my inner dialogue (a subconscious internalization of the American inferiority-complex narrative? of pop culture romanticizations of the linguistic motherland and its reservoir of native whiteness? or childish delight in stumbling laughing over nasally-elongated vowels?). She has long blonde hair tangled by the wind whipping through Khian Ee's ancient white van.

We whip up, bump up, up, left and right down a road through the Titiwangsa mountains on our return to GreenWish Veggie Garden. I feel refreshed, recharged by mental food in the form of Time and Fortune 500 articles and by world news and worldy facebook news afforded by my one and a half hours in a real cafe with real cafe. I spent most of that time reading in relative solitude, but, when I had just finished pouring over the word-bites of journalistic narrative, Matt had slipped into the chair beside me at the cafe table. He had his own cup emblazoned with the logo "espresso yourself" warming his already-tropically-warmed fingers. A fellow coffee lover, his drink unsweetened and un-iced.

Matt's name is actually Ben, but with that perfectly curly hair and those gray-green eyes, he's Matt in my head. (I pray that I don't slip up and call Matt by his given name—by me, I mean—out loud.) He sits now, quiet as is the general standard for us volunteers, in the front passenger seat. Finola sits beside me, her mocking blue eyes oscillating between Khian Ee's waved hair and the adolescent mat rempits* dotting the roadside.

For the past three days, I have been working like I've never worked before: chopping the hell out of big-ass weeds, pulling unwanteds from the soil, learning too much about soil to ever call it dirt, laying down heavy mulch, pretending my arms are fat with muscle like Arnold, silently groaning because they're not, still insisting that yes, I can load and push that wheelbarrow, planting fruit and rice and corn crops, harvesting banana and papaya and guava, learning a shit-ton about compost (which, incidentally, involves a ton of shit**), learning a wheelbarrow-full of things about organic farming (which, incidentally, involves... okay, I won't), feeling every muscle in my body, sweating out every pound of my body weight, eating so fucking well, and not cussing out loud even though I'm on vacation because I'm working alongside a Malaysian Buddhist pacifist who preaches harmony over lunches of noodles and uncooked vegetables.

I've had moments here, up in the isolated reaches of Malaysian mountainside—where, it's rumored, tigers roam the rainforest—in which I've thought, "My god, this is America," or, "Holy fuckin' shit—Amurrica!" A ridiculous notion, I know. But even as the ninety-degree rain washes the ninety-degree sweat from my body, the dirt in my eyebrow feels like a piece of history I've only just now turned to face. Pastoral America, image of my country's past and countries past, the claim to everything holy and dirty about our godforsaken land of the free. Slavery, poverty, abundance, liberty and pursuits of happiness or hell, the mythos of ladders and achievements of hate—everything built from the literary majesty of the countryside. The soiled hoe that built our backbone, our real and imagined lifeline, in sickness and in health. The farm—the place my father's father and his mother and their fathers and mothers in turn sweated out a life, the place where their envious eyes looked to close relatives who owned rather than labored, in turn watching my grandfather's sweat in fanned disdain. The plantation, the farm, the garden. The growth of those United States.

I feel American as hell, and I baffle my host and fellow volunteers when I walk to the field with a baseball cap on my head, dropping words like "wassup" alongside "confounding." They don't know what to make of this Amurrican gurl. I can tell I'm confounding their stereotypes. Then we go to an Indian restaurant and I realize that even my claim to Amurrica's mainstream images has become complicated as I dip my fingers into the rice and scoop it to my mouth. The volunteers try not to stare.

"You eat well with your hands," says Khian Ee. I can tell he thinks it's gross, and he spoons his curry delicately to his lips.

This, when an hour before he was digging his own hands into goat manure.


*"Mat rempit" technically means "illegal motorbike street racer," but Malaysians use the term colloquially to refer to anyone who does dangerous things on a bike.
**The recipe the farm uses actually requires only 10% goat manure.  But when you're makin' lots of compost...

"Best": Reflections from an ETA, Speech (Fulbright Malaysia 50th Anniversary Gala, June 21, 2013)

I am really uncool.

I know, all my friends in the audience are thinking, “No, Sara, you're the coolest.”  Thanks, you guys, but no, I’m really the furthest thing from cool.  I do things like spend hours reorganizing my book shelf by subject, and then by author, and then by the date I first read each book and by how profoundly it changed my life because I find that fun.  There are days when I would rather read a twenty-page dissertation on the nuances of one sentence by one author than go out with friends.  When I went to Thailand, I bought a cowboy hat.  You know, like the hats they wear in old country western movies from America.  One of those.  But not just any cowboy hat.  This hat has a chin strap, so I don’t lose it, and it says Thailand in big, bold letters on the front.  Yeah, I’m really uncool.

My students think I’m the coolest, though.  I would love to attribute this to the idea that I am a genius at being a teacher, that I have incredible acumen when it comes to leading choral speaking(1), or to the idea that my whiteboard-writing capabilities are just awe-inspiring.  But although I hope these things hold some truth, I know that my kids think I’m the coolest largely because I’m different.  I don’t teach the curriculum.  I encourage my students to get up from their desks.  I give them high-fives.  And perhaps most obvious upon first seeing me, I am… pretty tall for a woman in Southeast Asia.  I’m different, and they know it.

I’m going to take a minute now to talk about difference.

Before I came to Malaysia, I thought I was the most open-minded person.  I took pride in my mental liberality.  I didn’t really know open-mindedness as a global citizen, though.

Let me just quickly put this into terms that everyone can relate to.  Food.  To put it in terms of food, you don’t really know open-mindedness until, as an American, you take that first bite of pedas(2) fried rice and find yourself crunching on those ubiquitous, salty dried anchovies for the first time.  For context, coming from America, eating dried anchovies is an entirely new experience for most of us.  For even more context, in America, I never ate seafood.  Not even the deep-fried-covered-in-sauce-it-doesn’t-even-look-or-taste-like-fish-anymore kind of seafood.  So that first bite of spice-surrounded, dried anchovy was more than a surprise for me.

The second time I had dried anchovies, I was more prepared.  I was with a teacher from my school who has asked me to call her kakak(3).  She had cooked the spicy dish I was about to taste.  And that’s when it hit me—you don’t really know open-mindedness until someone hands you a plate chock-full of anchovies and says, with an eager gleam in her eye, “Eat.”  You don’t know open-mindedness until you really, honestly try to savor that foreign taste because the excitement in kakak’s face says she would be so, so happy if you loved it.  You don’t know open-mindedness until you chomp the head from the dried body and lick the salt from the backside of your teeth and… savor the textures of the stories that kakak is telling you as she stands before you, as she describes her mother’s crinkled, smiling face and her mother’s expertise at cooking exactly. this. dish.  Her own face crinkles as she smiles into the memory of family gatherings, as she speaks about connections with family over teh tarik(4) and anchovy-topped fried rice.  Kakak tells of the first time she cooked this recipe for her now deceased husband.  When she mentions him, her voice gains a soft lilt.  Her eyes glance to the sky.

You don’t know another person or their culture until you really look at them, really listen to them.  You don’t see the role that something new to you plays in another person’s life until you open yourself to it.  I most likely would not have learned about the central role that traditional Malaysian dishes play in kakak’s life, in her memories, in her ability to gather her family together if I hadn’t fully opened myself to the new experience of tasting those dishes.

Open-mindedness.

Fulbright has opened my mind in ways that weren’t even conceivable to me before I arrived in this country.

When we first moved to our placements in Malaysia, us ETAs found ourselves in environments that were simply different for us, interacting with people who knew nothing about us and very little about our culture.  When you are in this kind of space, reference points for who you are don’t carry the same weight as they do in your home country.  There is no shared context to fall back on in your interactions.  You have to really invest, really work to see all the new things around you.  You have to do this so you can understand.  You have to do this so you can be understood.

I think that this is a perfect example of a space where genuine, deep learning can happen.  The kind of learning that can profoundly impact your consciousness if only simply because it’s all new.  And when you learn something completely new, you can look back on how you perceived the world before that moment and say, “That is not all.”

There are multiple ways of knowing the world, of seeing the world, and this, this is what cultural exchange is about.  This is what Fulbright has, in part, been about.

As Fulbright ETAs, we are constantly having to think about what impact we’re having on our students, about what role we play in the educational system and larger social context here in Malaysia.

I think we have a special opportunity here.  When we carry the lessons we ourselves learn about learning—about opening our own minds and genuinely, deeply learning—when we carry these lessons from outside the walls of the classroom to the space of the desk and the whiteboard, we are able to teach more than English speaking skills.  We are able to create conditions for the kind of learning that you don’t invest in only for the output of a grade—and not only because we can’t give grades.  We are able to have the kind of exchange that encourages students and teachers alike to really look at each other, to really listen to each other.  The kind of exchange that fosters global consciousness and true open-mindedness.

A quote from the American librarian and museum director John Cotton Dana seems relevant here.  Dana said, “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.”

ETAs talk about our experiences with each other a lot—and, trust me, we are learning.  We are all in the process of learning, whether that learning be about Malaysian culture, about becoming better teachers, about becoming better globally-aware human beings, or simply about ourselves.

Fulbright has done this for us, and we are only halfway through our grant.

So to take a lesson from my students, I’m going to sum this all up with a word that they are fond of.  For us ETAs, Fulbright Malaysia has been, quite simply:

Best.

Mano, who served as executive director of MACEE in the '70s and as the emcee at the gala,
myself, and my lovely roommate Shannon, who dispelled any beginnings of butterflies
I had with warmth and hilarity.  Thanks, Shan.  <3

**Not pictured but also awesome at encouragement: Owen Cortner, speech master.

(1)  Choral speaking is an art form unique to Malaysia intended to help students develop standardized English pronunciation skills.  Watching choral speaking is an extreme cultural experience in itself.  FMI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5pcEGltSIs

(2)  "Pedas" translates to "spicy" in English.  Everything here is pedas.

(3)  "Kakak" translates to "big sister" in English.

(4)  Teh tarik (which translates to "pulled tea") is a traditional Malaysian drink made with sweetened condensed milk and black tea.  The liquid is "pulled" or poured repeatedly from one cup to another until a froth, not unlike that found on a latte, forms on the top.  It is delicious and incredibly sweet and probably the root of many ETA cavities and cavities-to-be.

How Did I Get Here?

There were tears at the surface of my eyeballs and my bottom lip was dropped like I was ready to catch an early, still-flapping breakfast.  People flowing backwards, down the causeway away from the lines and colors that my eyes were trained on ahead, stared, smiles dancing on their lips.  I must have looked like a small child, my feet skipping over the randomly sunken and raised sandstone blocks, head slowly bobbing right and left and right, or else like one whose mind has slipped down the slopes of an obstacle-filled life or up the ladder of drug-induced nirvana.

"Wow, you look so happy."  A man who looked about my age stopped directly in front of me.  Perhaps I didn't look as crazed as I thought, or perhaps he was looking for the adrenaline rush or dehumanizing amusement that might be induced by an encounter with sanity's shadowy side.  He seemed sensible enough, though, and I was, in fact, blissfully saturated in wonderment.  Angkor Wat.  Angkor Wat.  No photo had done it justice.  No guidebook could capture the abstract crux of a moment like this.  Some people wait a lifetime.  Oh, I couldn't believe it was happening to me.

Even Kelly Clarkson's ponderous lyrics on the stupefaction that living a distant dream can induce, though, even these words cannot accurately describe how the outlines of my body vibrated at the edges of my soul that morning.  The pink streaks had nearly faded into the gray-blue of a morning sky considering, but not yet anticipating, a release of rain onto the sun-warmed ancient wisdom of the temple stones.  The triplicate gopura towers ahead projected the foreboding power of backlit masterpieces, the edges of their pyramidal levels like upturned lotus-petals praising the universe.

I knew nothing, yet, of the subtle histories embedded in the laterite and sandstone ahead.  I was like an ignorant baby, emerging from a watery world, here both the moat and my tear-submerged eyes, to fresh glories, to shadowy crevices full with exploration's call.  I did not yet know anything of the ancient stones saturated with histories and knowledges of feet past, or anything of the bas reliefs clear and deep with antique narrative.  My admiration was a romantic one, not classically-induced by study and systems of historical knowledge, but prompted by the overwhelmingness of the textured moment before me, prompted by the sensation that precedes conceptual classification, the thing that drives people in the first place to memorialize in the annals of history.

I am aware that overwhelmingness is, by many standards, a nothing word, a superlative that, by its very definition, does not describe anything tangible.  It floats beyond the intellectual analogues of language.  It is a greatness, a largeness, a fullness.  I choose this word intentionally.  That is precisely what this moment was for me.  It was neither the stones, nor the moat, nor the beauty of a sunrise.  It was neither my feeling of awe, nor was it these things combined.  It was something behind all that, a deeper something that all those things combined manifested, but could not fully capture as separately-conceived, component parts—the grandeur of the whole.  Fullness.  Overwhelmingness.

Now, I am not megalomaniacal enough to claim that I experienced something akin to spiritual enlightenment merely by making contact with this place, but encountering Angkor Wat was, in a levelheaded assessment of the experience, momentous for me, not in a hyperbolic way, but in a very real, deeply felt way.  Of course, the temple complex itself is an overwhelming achievement of physical manifestation of spiritual awe.  The affective reality of honor for divinity and spiritual truth is embedded in the architecture of the place, manifested in the careful carvings, exemplified in the positioning of the entrance at the west, where the quincunx towers sit just before the rising of the sun.

I realize this, too, is largely an empty description.  But how can one describe the deepness of a moment, the overwhelmingness of a place, in prose without broad conceptual sentences about affective realities?  It is not simply the factual largeness of the towers that represent the Hindu Mount Meru or the attention to detail the carvings manifest or the eternal longness of the galleries.  It is affective.  The place vibrates with spiritual reverence.  And even as words fail to fully capture it, you would have to be dissociated from your own surroundings to miss it, or numbed to the unique spiritual achievements of this place by commonplace exposure or else by the demands and frills of modern society.

Enough with the abstract meanderings.  I was floored.  I was floored, too, by the realization of where I was geographically in the world and conceptually in my life.  Travel.  I had dreamt of loping through the world with an eye to curiosity my whole life and here I was, walking through a place uncountable souls had passed through in a location thousands of miles from the places I had dreamt in.  The beauty and enormity of that realization was overwhelming, too.  What I felt was respect.  Gratitude.  Incredulity.  The reality of the privileges I am receiving.  Humility.

Yes, what I felt was deep, enduring humility.  Among a million other things, I felt humbled by this and the successive moment and the one after that and the one after that.  Thousands of moments, thousands of breaths, one right after the other, pulling me along the present of an awe-inspiring reality.

The Talking Heads come to mind now.  Darkly appropriate considering the many statues lining the galleries whose own craniums have been stolen from their bodies.

And you may find yourself living in another part of the world.  And you may ask yourself, well, 

how did I get here?

Remembering Anne Bryan

There are plenty of people who knew Anne Bryan better than I did, some of whom are good friends.  I hadn't spoken to Anne for a long stretch of time.  We didn't hang out too often when she attended Scripps.  But I still feel the news of her loss in my gut.  Twenty four and vibrant and alive.  Young, in years and soul.  Anne was a light.  I remember her as someone who was always ready to share a laugh, always ready to genuinely engage with people, to share her joy.  One time, when I was at the Mudd hole waiting for my order to be filled, I saw Anne at a table on the right side of the soda machine.  I was up to my ears in a paper, I don't remember about what.  She called out to me, waved me over.  We hadn't hung out too much at this point, and I was still a shy little social wall fly, but she reached out to me anyway.  No hesitation.  I don't know what we talked about, but I left feeling light, refreshed.

I remember dinners at Mudd with friends.  Anne was a vegetarian.  That feels right somehow.  She seemed to live from a place of compassion.

I remember a conversation we had about something we had learned in class.  We conflicted on some point, and she said something about human pain.  I had been talking about conceptual social politics, and it was jarring to me.  It took me a long while to see the relevance, but I see it now.  She was talking from the heart, thinking from the heart.  A rare thing to behold in academic spaces, which are often hostile to that kind of thought, to putting the heart and human compassion first.  But it is a sacred thing, something we all can learn from. The heart matters.  People matter.  Interpersonal contact matters.  Anne was saying something about this.

I remember Anne as someone who always looked me in the eyes when we spoke, who seemed to really want to hear what I was going to say, to really want to know how I would respond to her, to really want to know how I was.  She was genuine in a way a lot of people don't know how to be.

And she was hilarious!  Quirky in her humor.  Always ready to express herself, she never seemed self-conscious in her jokes, in her words.  She seemed honest.

Yes, she was honest.  I helped her with a paper once, informally, I think, when she wanted an outsider's perspective.  She was so forthcoming about her thoughts, and was so sincerely invested in developing them.  In remembering that conversation, I see no ego-tint in it.  She wasn't trying to prove anything.  She wanted the paper to be good.  That was all.

I remember that Russian accent everyone has been mentioning.  So lighthearted.  So quirky.  So hilarious.

I remember a conversation about killer squirrels.  Those damn conspiring Scripps squirrels, simultaneously sneaky and bold.

I remember some crack about jungle juice.  What was it, exactly?  We had been talking about the college party scene.  We were wee freshwomen.

I remember joining Anne and other friends outside, laying in the sunlight on the Scripps lawn, talking about nothing, laughing about everything.

I remember Anne Bryan.  Anne Bryan, I remember you.  I remember you as a beautiful human soul, whose unique sense of humor filled the world with laughter.  I remember you as someone who never hesitated to share your joy with others.  I remember you as inquisitive and bright.  I remember you as a warm, youthful presence who I know will be sorely missed for longer than anyone can tell.  I remember you.

Rest in peace, Anne.

Word Sketch, April 15: Snippets from the Butterfly Garden (The Weekend of April 13, 2013)

1

Movement and death and fathers. The theme arises again and again and again. A butterfly flits past. It is the father image, D has told me. It is the father. She sees her father in the winged beauty. "Life is a bitch," says the French, melancholic existentialist with a dripping "Rock'n'Roll" tattoo heart on his chest. "C'est la vie," reads his arm, and he tells us of the moment he awoke to dreams of his father and rushed to the parlor to make permanent his acceptance, to solidify his words before he had to leave that home on the next boat to his next home. Another backpacker with thick softball-player arms speaks of dancing with her father. Luther Vandross drifts up in the back of my mind. She misses him. She misses him. Movement and death and fathers.

2
We walk through a butterfly garden. Colorful wings flit around, spots in the corner of my eye. I focus on one, stop, breathe, keep my legs still beneath me and my breath focused on the black mottled with white spots, the antennae that are the only body part moving, swaying like it feels a breeze I cannot sense.

1
Our French friend tells us of his archival project, his compilation of stories and images and thoughts on his father's life. It echoes my own. I see the mirror arise and feel his words within my chest. I hear his words like a wire through a complex, multi-layered garden of images and sensations and concepts, his side and mine separated by a thin bubble wall, and the wire pierces through to my heart and ear which are, here, inseparable, which are, here, one. I see him from across the water of experience and feel him, this stranger aching in a shared room. He takes my number and email. "Maybe I can come visit you. We will cook and speak of our fathers. We can share our books." I simply nod. I simply feel the want to nod. I feel back deep within and the surface sensation is a nod. Eye contact and a nod. For a split second, we see each other.

2
I walk. Another at my toes, now. I bend down. It is black, with a surface whose texture looks like velvet. I do not dare to touch its delicate wings. A green flush runs its upper edge, spots of blue, small and delicate, emerging after concentrated attention, after a slow sweep of the eyes takes in its full wingspan. It is the length of my hand, middle finger to bottom curve of palm. A red and gray depth is visible along the right edge of its bumpy caterpillar body, and I can see it is dead, crushed beneath the toes of some imprecise foot that did not follow through but pulled away, quick, when the owner had seen its error, or perhaps instead by the full, tiny foot of a quick-legged toddler. An ant approaches, slowly, breaking away from the mess of others navigating the floor. It places its front legs on those of the butterfly, and I watch its antennae reach up, wave back and forth. Its body curls back. A fifteen-second interaction, and then it is off, away, back into the crowd of others where I lose sight of its individual lines, seeing only the mass of crawling bodies. The butterfly's antennae stay, still.

1
I remember aged young in the front yard of my father's house, a butterfly landing on his arm.

2
A Malaysian Mottled Emigrant, thick-veined and powdery green, flies past my right ear.  I stop and breathe, watching as it careens through the hot, tropical air.

Word Sketch, April 15: Portrait of a Traveler, An Impressionistic View (The Weekend of April 13, 2013)

"I don't mean to butt in with my two sense but it sounds like it's all in your head.  I work with athletes, and one of my areas of interest is performance anxiety.  They're usually not looking at you, and if they are, it's because you're good and they want to be like you."

She was an anxious soul, clamoring to stay on the surface, in the space of human connection.  She sought and sought and sought, displaying herself with word pictures that she felt strongly portrayed who she was or who she wanted herself to be.  She was in her words, in her attachment to who she wanted others to see her as.  And so she returned, again and again, to stories and impressions that she wanted to leave, trying to draw our eyes there again and again until we fully saw that image in her mind and acknowledged such with words, too.  She wanted us to see her goodness and tell her it was goodness.  Then she wanted us to see her liveliness and warmth and tell her it was warmth.  Then she wanted us to feel the richness of her life and affirm to her that it was, in fact, richness, not the emptiness of a constantly shifting life that she fears, deep down, her world has become--that she fears, more, that others perceive.  She fears that others can see the thing she's fleeing from, can see the thing she thinks others are free from, others who judge, who see, who smile but harbor inner animals who grin slyly.  She thinks others are elsewhere and so she requires them to see her elsewhere, too.

"My father taught me to dance.  He was a great dancer, but I wasn't interested enough.  I wish I had been more interested.  I wish I had learned more from him."

Two years of moving.  She breaks down the time scheme for us.  Three months here, playing pirate.  Four months there, walking through landmines.  One month there, becoming the pilgram.  A week home.  Ten days home.  Two months home, but not home, rolling away from home.  Three months here, with us, with her, with a them who lingers in the distance.  She reaches for our eyes and our ears. She is still reaching, reaches toward us, through us, to the mirage she always watches.  It is ahead, she is ahead, always ahead.

Dancing, dancing, her eyes alight.  It bubbles through the surface—father is dead.  Two years, father is dead.

Moving, moving, she demonstrates the incorrect salsa step, her eyes dance as she tells of herself, her body moving alongside her father's, correct, in place.  Correct, in line, feet moving in line.  In lines she can see and comprehend, now.  Moving in sync with a sensical order to the world.

J reminds me that sometimes people say the thing they most need to hear; they clothe it in advice, but it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit, there is no context and it doesn't fit.  She wants to hear herself say the things she wants to be true for herself.  Performance anxiety.  She wants to be seen, but she is afraid of being seen.  She wants to live as though no one is watching, but she wants to get good at life so everyone will watch.  She wants the paradox to resolve.  She wants life to resolve.

She moves, away from us, scanning and asking and looking, her stride solid, shoulders bent forward heavy.  She does not know what is next, she says.  She steps past us and I watch her walk away.

Word Sketch, April 1: From the Indonesian Borneo Rainforest—They Move and I Move Too (Spring Break, March 27-28)

It is dark beneath the green, beside the green, above the green-spattered creamy brown. The river is the color of canned Nescafé, cream superseding the dark of grinds. My feet sink satisfyingly into the mud, wrapped against the leeches and the earth by polka dot low-top Vans whose lines of circles seem a foil to the entropic leech mottle in the ground. My thick navy Dickies tuck into black socks, a makeshift tent against sneaky little vampires. Still, two break through the fortifications, and I drip red down my leg.

Light here, here, soft and sweet against my skin, gentle as it pushes open my eyes. The air breathes like a cloud, full of clean, warm water. My ears buzz with the call of sakatas. The sound is piercing but begins to flow and fade after a few minutes of trekking.

I bite into the pale green tube our guide pulls from the center of the broadleaf evergreen, the name of which I hear repeated, but which won't stick in my mind. It is light and aqueous, like the white tip of celery but more homogenous in texture—no vertical strings to crunch through—and crisp like a green bean. It refreshes the mouth, reminding me of something Americans would pay too much for in an overly air-conditioned health foods shop. I peel back the outermost layer to find it is structured like a newspaper rolled for swatting, layer upon layer, tighter at the bottom, hollow at the top. An edible straw growing in the rainforest. A food of the orangutans.

The guide (age 36, married 7 years ago, a wife and children aged 2 and 6 at home, living in the rainforest 10 days at a time) stops, reverses, unsheathes his machete, swings his right arm toward a hanging, brown-trunked vine. "Root water." He remembers my request to learn about edible elements of the rainforest. He demonstrates. I let the liquid drip onto my tongue. It is light and sweet, like the sun, like the air, like the food of the orangutan.

We come upon the first half of our group staring at a nest positioned halfway up a tree. The lowest one yet. This time the orangutan is preparing for sleep, and she is alone. No child to feed or watch. Her elasticity does not show, now. There is no moving orange to follow far below on the rainforest floor, neck strained back in an impossible C. There are no vibrations to feel when I place my hands against the trunk that reaches to where she is. She is barely visible by the time I arrive, and she is immobile.

The next morning we see her counterpart, a mother and two small replicas swinging from branch to branch. I lean into the trees despite our guide's warnings against getting too close. "Very danger. She might throw things." I can't resist wanting to feel again the movements of the orangutan. I remember yesterday morning. I remember the chase through the thick underbrush after another mother and her child both made eye contact, then turned to live away from our gaze.  I remember that first increase of the pulse, the thrill of the morning air, the heart and eyes and everything reaching up to touch the fascinating creature above. I feel this now, too.  I interlock my hands to support my leaning head. She sups on leaves and unseen fruit. Her child swings, and swings, and swings. Orange and elastic.

The orangutans. They are like us, except that the function of their bodies as a medium for feeling and navigating the world has not been disrupted by conscious self-aestheticization. People of the forest. They use their limbs fully and without thought. This, this is clear. They are naught but shadows against the sun, blended into the tree branches and leaves, until they move in this pre-conscious way. Their movement is what draws the eye, makes visible their orange tint and hairy bodies.  They feel.  They feel like long-lost cousins.  Contact being made for the first time.  Images coming to life from my fourth-grade books.  They move and I move too, following, watching, climbing, trekking, straining to see.

The mother and child are closer to the sun than we are. We stare up from the shadows.

The dappled light begins to wane, now. We turn, heading back through the mottle of the forest floor.

Word Sketch, March 21: A Horn Honks in the Distance

In my right hand are two plastic-wrapped pieces of roti naan, heated from frozen in vegetable oil and spread thinly with palm-oil free, sugar-free, nothing-but-nuts-and-salt peanut butter, a rarity in these parts and a delicacy whose value I can't but acknowledge.  This is the last bit of my dinner, the follow-up to an egg-vegetable-garlic scramble that I pulled together from the remainders of last week's grocery trip; in an effort to conserve money and clean out the fridge before my upcoming trip to Indonesia, I've landed on creativity and breakfast for dinner.  I walk with speed but full alertness, circumventing the holes in the sidewalk that drop precipitously to the dark, murky waters of the open sewage system, sidestepping the occasional metal cover that my sandals, I know, won't quite grip, pausing just before the tree whose roots hide a red ants nest to wait for passing and parking traffic to settle, pinpointing the men I know cat-call and picking a jalan jalan path that considers both road danger and personal dignity.  I feel eyes peeling from my body as I slip through a crowded patch.  Young Chinese** teenagers pull at each other, wide-eyed.  One nearly collides with me, and I hear the giggles bubble from behind as the sounds of evening call to prayer begin to rise in front.  It's a soothing, gentle sound, the call to prayer, and it calms the jostling air around me.  I scan to the left—a blind corner and a thin sidewalk.  There is less traffic, though.  Safer than the following turn, constant host of cars that bear down, and down, and down.  I make the call, but pause between two parked cars for a brief moment.  I see a headlight.  I know the speed with which people often park here.  I know the road logic, now.  I am small; I am not to be looked for; I am to do the looking, all.  I wait between the fender and the bumper.  The two protect me; none can park here.

I'm right.  She speeds into the open spot.

The sky blinks white light.  The whole sky.  It just blinks, quickly, like a wink.  The flash startles me, but in a pleasant way.  No clear bolts tonight, just a dissolved energy and a saturated atmosphere, then nothing.  Blackness polluted by soft yellow street lights, sharp rising lampu-lampu restoran.  Two turns more and I am inside.

I watch from the corner of my eye as the woman with fat red caterpillars on her slippers (they sit where the strap makes a Y whose stem is grounded in the sole of the shoe) watches me.  Her eyes are burning my side as I try to write, and I turn to look her in the eyes.  "Hello," I say.  She has an asymmetrical haircut—a bob with a chunk on the front of the right side, about one-quarter of her total haircut, that is two inches longer than the rest, cut diagonally so that the longest strand curves to meet her chin.  The hair is a dyed auburn red, like an old, oxidized penny.  She blinks away an embarrassed gleam and a quick smile runs over her lips before she drops her eyes to the blinking screen in her hand.

I turn back to my writing of memories from earlier in the day:

I have successfully taught my action song kids the difference between a half step and a whole step, and they seem to understand both conceptually and in practice.  After practice, we make a team huddle, their first, it seems.  I can feel the energy purify.  Joy, simple and unfiltered.  They fall into giggles afterward.   "Again, again!"  During our goodbyes, they insist on salaaming me, making me hold my high-five until they have done so.  One person yells, "I love you, Miss Sara!," and they're off, all shouting confessions of love, without a trace of a giggle.  It feels pure, too.  Their eyes are clear and happy.  They leave.

My choral speakers, the third that shows up, are sitting in a circle when I return from the bathroom.  They're practicing.  I hear them before I see them, and my heart lights up.  They sound wonderful.  I watch, now; I do not think to interrupt.  It's perfect, this moment, as I watch them lead each other, collaborate, seamlessly fill in solos for those absent, point to each other to take over bits that need taken over.  Fluid, seamless, no need for a director.  Beautiful.

The medical assistant emerges from behind a light-brown door and nods in my direction. "Sara Lynn." I walk through and lay down and grit my teeth for the wound cleaning. I focus my mind on the texture of the day and let the pain just be pain, a sensation I do not own. The doctor asks about my travel plans and teaches me how to take care of the wound, myself. I note his words carefully.

I exit the room, nodding to the woman who now nods in return. She rises, brushing past me as I walk to the next door and reach for the knob. This one connects to the outside world. I scan, right, left, and step, one foot after the other into the night. A horn honks in the distance.


*Note: My word sketches are brief portraits from daily life, brief attempts at describing the textures of my day-to-day in Malaysia/abroad.
**Society in Malaysia is incredibly racialized, and ethnic background is deeply tied to religious culture, which in turn (and in combination with other cultural markers) heavily dictates how people interact with one another, dress, speak, and even eat.  It also influences where people live and play, and most people here conceptualize themselves and one another in very explicit ethnic/religious terms.  Sociologically fascinating.  FMI, send me an email.  :)

Zen and the Art of Motorbike-Injury Maintenance

There was the road.  There was the green car.  There was the wordless realization that there was not enough time to stop and the thought, "Well this is happening."  There was the sound of metal colliding with metal.

My nose was bleeding profusely.  I stood up and walked to a patch of grass next to the Shell station, told myself to breathe and not to panic and to lay down right away, noted my motorbike sideways in the street behind me and my papers and bags strewn... everywhere, took my helmet and glasses off, and laid down and let my first aid training go into high gear.  I called for my canvas bag, used it as a compress.  I yelled for my phone, told the English-speaking man by my ear who to call.  I was grateful for their help.  They moved me inside.  I told them—carefully, move more slowly.  I knew I shouldn't move too much before I was in the hands of professionals.  I told myself I wasn't allowed to sleep, conversed, let myself laugh, made sure I was speaking okay and recalling okay.  I was grateful when the English-speaking man asked me the series Malaysians always ask upon meeting me: "What is your name?  Why are you here?  What school do you teach at?  Where do you live?  How long have you been here, and how long will you stay?  Are you single or married?  What do you eat?  Isn't Malaysian food too spicy for you?"  My recall was fine.  All my memorized answers were there, and I played a bit, varied them a bit.  I insisted on speaking BM to the others nearby.  I remembered my vocabulary.  I knew I was in shock, but I was doing okay.


****

I'm told that the car was a gray Honda, and that I flipped multiple times.  I'm told that my helmet and my thick, cushy Swiss Army backpack saved me.

Fauzi was the Muslim man who helped me—a neighbor of one of the English teachers at SK Tanjong Gading who was excited to find out who I was. "I'm going to tell Ezadin that I was the one who assisted you!"  A sweet man who helped me hold my nose compress in place as I cleaned my stomach wound, despite his obvious hesitation to do so.  I thanked him profusely and watched him mutter a soft prayer to God.  I told him that, if he needed, he could turn his head as I cleaned off the blood.  The soft-spoken, shy woman to my right handed me tissues dipped in warm water and directed the others to get me ice when I asked.

I wrapped my stomach in gauze and washed my hands in the basin, keeping my head on my backpack-turned-pillow.  I switched out gauze for my bag and held my new nose compress in place.  I asked for a mirror.  I wanted to wipe the blood from my face to minimize my mentors' worry—they had been nervous about me being on a bike from the start, as last year's ETA had been in an accident, too.  I asked the folks assisting me if they thought my nose was broken.  A crooked nose?  I couldn't help it.  I told them I wanted to make sure I didn't have a concussion.  They agreed that that was a good idea.

"Ambulances sometimes take hours to arrive in Malaysia," Fauzi informed me.  I was lucky, then.  My ambulance arrived before my mentors did.


****

Friday, March 8, 11:05 am.

Taste of palm oil residue in my mouth, slick around my lips.  I wipe and wipe but it doesn't come off.  My hands stay dry from the heat and my lips stay slick.  My mouth feels smooth, coated, and I can still taste the dull strange underbite of the cold vanilla-with-chocolate-stripe ice cream I just consumed.  Today is relatively cool, and the fans in the meeting hall circulate the sweet, light breeze already caressing my back.  I listen to local celebrity Azamuddin, Islamic lecturer galore, clearly accomplished performer with his own show on TV 3 (Saturdays at 6 pm), fabulously engaging speaker (students and teachers [!] alike are engaged), clearly intelligent comparative religion scholar and Islam expert speak on religious tolerance (and point to me as an example of a non-Muslim we all respect), prayer, his show, and various other things—all attended to carefully by the students, all in BM, some of which I understand, some of which Liza translates for me in my right ear, some of which passes over my head, incomprehensible.  Deep breath in, life is full and good.  My mouth feels smooth and tastes like my own again.  I unsuccessfully wipe the palm oil from my lips one more time, then rise and salaam everyone quietly before slipping to my motorbike and off to my home, Pangsapuri Intan near Econsave in Muar Town, to finish packing up my camping gear for the weekend and head to the bus station via taxi.  KL next, Cameron Highlands by nightfall.  Weekend with lovely friend Julia, here I come.

And as I walk away, I hear the words "orang putih" come from my new friend up front.  A palm-oil-laced burp rises to my lips.


****

At 3:30 pm, I check my watch.  The face is completely smashed, but the hands are still ticking.  The letters "didas" are all in place; the "A," which lodged itself on the opposite side of my watch eight days ago, when it fell maybe a foot from my arm to my desk, is the only letter missing.  My laughter is filling the air before I remember that I'm on a bed in the ER, surrounded by people wrapped in bandages and hooked to machines.  I check myself.  There is a momentary break in time where I feel the full sensation of my body, what feels like every cell moving and living.  I feel my aliveness.  I feel the tenderness in my head, the blood pooling on my nose, the sting rising from my side.

I know that 3:30 pm can't be right, though.  My fifteen ringgit watch may be holding up okay, but I can feel time passing around me.  I know it hasn't been three hours and forty minutes since I was hit.  I ask the doctor.  It's two hours, fifteen minutes ahead.  I watch the second hand tick on.


****

"Stick at it--fresh resolve with every breath cycle, tiny units of time.  Observe each breath with care and precision, taking it one split second on top of another, with fresh resolve piled one on top of the other.  In this way, continuous and unbroken awareness will eventually result.

Mindfulness of breathing is a present-time awareness.  When you are doing it properly, you are aware only of what is occurring in the present.  You don't look back and you don't look forward.  You forget about the last breath, and you don't anticipate the next one."


****

Time in Malaysia moves slowly everywhere but on the road.  Everyone rushing to get to the same nowhere on the road, to the same imagined spot beyond the vehicle just ahead.  Everyone rushing to get to the destination that never comes; the next time they are on the road, they are chasing it again.  It runs incessantly further and further away, and people respond by picking up time, hurtling it along in a metal box or atop a plastic frame, moving at speeds the human body was not built to handle.

There is something about the metal engine that must dehumanize time, that must strip it of its function as a lubricant between people and how they relate to one another.  I watch drivers honk incessantly, angry at the slow-moving vehicles around them.  I watch cars cut motorbikes off and motorbikes nearly mow over pedestrians.  I watch some of the sweetest, gentlest friends I've made turn into irritated bulls behind the wheel.

I didn't see, but I'm told that the driver of the gray Honda watched from a distance as I limped to the side of the road, then got in his car and drove away.


****

Sunday, March 10, 9:45 pm.

I am breathing.  I feel the air transition from not-me to part-of-me via the tip of my nose.  I feel it expand my chest.  I feel it deflate my chest.  I feel my oneness with my environment.  I feel the interconnectivity of everything, everything that breathes, everything that exists.   I lose myself to the breath and time stops.  I roll forward like I sometimes do when practicing, but the sting in my side straightens me back up.  I am breathing.


****

"The essence of our experience is change.  Change is incessant.  Moment by moment life flows by and it is never the same.  Perpetual alteration is the essence of the perceptual universe.  A thought springs up in your head and half a second later, it is gone.  In comes another one, and that is gone too.  A sound strikes your ears and then silence.  Open your eyes and the world pours in, blink and it is gone.  People come into your life and they leave again.  Friends go, relatives die.  Your fortunes go up and they go down.  Sometimes you win and just as often you lose.  It is incessant: change, change, change.  No two moments ever the same."

I am thinking of time and change and how perspectives shift when we break the clock.  The system we've devised for dividing and measuring time, an intangible, uncapturable concept if ever there was one, is actually a failing system from the vantage point of Romantics and those invested in the psychoemotional landscapes of our lives.  It doesn't quite work as a system for describing lived experiences of time.  It abstracts things.  It says, "This thing took this many increments of this designated measurement of this chosen atom's radiation periodicity"—which, of course, means nothing to most people in this world.  It removes the present-tense sensations of the world in an effort to standardize our conceptualization of how one experience relates to another.  It says, "This thing took this many increments of time which is more or less than this other thing that took this other many increments of time."  And that, in turn, usually invites value judgments.  This thing SHOULD have only taken this many increments of time because this other thing is more valuable and thus should take more of the time available.

And so we regulate our lives according to some ticking machine whose mechanics are based on a system that is far abstracted from most of our daily lives.

Of course, this system is necessary, and it benefits the function of our world.  It makes things smoother, and it has the potential to minimize human frustration and maximize human engagement in the world when managed properly.

But in moments like those that surround a motorbike accident, the clock does not always do time justice.  Moments like those force you to be in the present.  To really be in the present.  You cannot obsess over a moving second hand.  Nor do you really need to.  You feel the passage of time.  You feel time as a living, breathing entity with complex psychoemotional realities.  You are fully present.  You are there, cleaning your body, checking your head, thinking of loved ones.  I was there, and I am here, remembering how important it is to be genuine and loving with everyone.  Remembering how important real connection is, and remembering how little substantial, lasting meaning the petty, surface stuff—which can become all when we let the clock do all of our regulating for us—really is.

Still, I insisted on the traffic investigations officers getting it right in their report.  The accident did not happen at 12:40 pm, like they argued it did.  It happened at 11:50 am, five minutes after I last looked at my watch, one minute before I had Fauzi call Hasliza, two minutes before he called Jenny.  I know exactly when it happened.  I know exactly when my watch jumped forward by two hours and fifteen minutes.  I know exactly when time moved differently.

And I know—I should probably still get a new watch.









(Quotes taken from "Mindfulness in Plain English" by Venerable H. Gunaratana Mahathera, a book that I picked up for free at the gorgeous Kek Lok Si Temple, the largest temple in Southeast Asia.  Photos to come.)