"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?

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.)

Building Houses of Mirrors, Or, Why do we Write?

Publicly, I mean.  I know, I’ve been offline for awhile.  I posted some all-revealing piece about the intersections between my love life (death) and life-journeying/real-journeying aspirations, then abandoned the interwebs like a biawak fleeing a homo sapien (this actually happens, regularly, in my neighborhood—some people have sewage rats, we have sewage dinosaurs).  (No, seriously.  See photo below.)  Not because I don’t love my folks or want people to know what’s going on in my crazy, adventure-filled, happy-making, lesson-learning, indescribably beautiful, challenging, growth-inducing life abroad (it has been, by the way, all of those things and more), but because I finally let myself clasp onto a question that has floated beneath the surface of my writing endeavors for years.  It’s a question I’ve faced full-frontal a few times, but the rawness it requires has caused me to turn away, again and again, bashful.  I don’t know, perhaps the concentrated confidence it requires—the ability to sit diligently beneath a fluorescent light and withstand methodical dissection—perhaps that confidence has itself required a space and slowness of time that I just haven’t been able to give.   It requires not taking yourself too seriously but, actually, yeah, taking yourself seriously.

In any case, it requires a presence of mind that I haven’t given it, and it requires this presence because it is not an easy question—the question being, of course, perennially—“Why do we write?”

Really, this question can be asked countless ways.  Why do we sing?  Why do we dedicate ourselves to a career?  Why do we have children?  Why do we make friends?  Why do we seek love?  Why do we live?

Woah, woah there.  Existential crossing ahead.

Really, though, that’s what it boils down to for me.  “Why do we write?” is simply another way to ask why we live the way we do, why we produce, why we move.  Writing for pleasure, journaling, creating lists, whatever you want to classify as “personal” is easier.  Writing for the self can be therapeutic, can be therapeutic, can be therapeutic.  It can provide records for future selves.  It can help organize our daily lives.  It can simply serve as a psychological release.

But is that all?  Those descriptions work for both personal writing and the public.  What is it, though, that connects those two?  Why do we ever make the personal public?  We have bloggers who write like the internet is their journal.  Others blog like the internet is a daily hours log that they keep for employers or auditors.  Then we have literary folk who make the distinction more concrete, some of whom write public works that look like mere echoes of their private diaries, if there is any resemblance at all.  Why?  Why does anyone do this?  Why does anyone put ANY part of their writing into a public space, for eyes, many probably unknown, to, in an uncontrolled environment, interact with the text?  To pull it apart and judge, or to scan it and dismiss, or to skim it and smile, or to dig deep and reconfigure, or to wander word to word and repurpose syllable by syllable, or to copy and paste (in the digital age, it’s difficult to imagine writers, especially newcomers to the game and those lesser known, not worrying about plagiarism—unless you are a fabulously accomplished Buddhist or are otherwise so skilled at the art of letting go that you can even let go of your art in this way—in which case, congrats and also thanks for reading this long tangent, you patient Buddhist, you).

The point being, I have refrained from posting because, well, I was trying to figure out why I should post.  I needed some reason beyond wanting to catalogue my day-to-day for people back home—which is absolutely a noble pursuit, but is an endeavor that, for me, is best fitted to text messages and emails and personal phone calls and postcards.  And so I suppose this piece indicates that I have figured it out.

To a certain extent, I have.  But my answer to this question continues to build and change, and I know it will continue to do so as long as I continue to write.

In any case, I am now at a place where I can reasonably say that I’m reasonably ready to post at—well, unreasonably irregular intervals, most likely.  (Just bein' real.)

Regardless, the hopefully-literary/semi-literary updates and/or my fireside-chat creative nonfiction pieces (whaddup literary geeks) will begin to roll out.  And so I suppose this post is an elaborate way of saying, first, “Hi, how are you?” (because what kind of person starts a one-sided conversation without first asking how everyone is?), and, second, that I’m still alive and engaged and loving and writing and that my posts with fun run-ons (<3 Virginia Woolf <3 Faulkner <3) will start to emerge from the woodwork/facebook statuses soon enough.

Until then—peace, love, and freaking biawaks.

Biawaks (in English, "monitor lizards") live in the sewers outside my and Shannon's house.  Yes, they are this big.  Yes, they are carnivorous.  Yes, I am afraid of being eaten.