The Year in Review: 2007

I don't and have never faithfully kept a journal, besides, I suppose, this blog, but I have always been a fairly regular correspondent, and so nowadays I regard my email archives as my closest approximation to record-keeping. Thus, along those lines, I present here excerpts from emails, along with pictures, that each, in some way, represent something significant about that month. Here we have 2007.

January
1.29.07

This morning, I taught my students to ask "what can I do you for?" And last week I taught them to start conversations with "What's cookin', good-lookin'?" I am a bad English teacher. And, this month, I am a bad friend, co-worker, and even random stranger on the street; my culture shock has manifested itself recently in irrational rage at everyone and everything. I got into a shouting match on the street the other day with a public van driver who was trying to overcharge me...by a nickel. I should have just paid and gotten out of there, but I hate being taken advantage of all the time, and so I decided to go for the "terrible person" option of fighting about it. Luckily for me, Indonesia is, for the most part, a highly non-confrontational culture and, faced with a red-faced foreigner, competent in the language and actual prices, and willing to actually, gasp!, yell, the driver decided to just let it be. I gave the nickel to one of the many beggars who had gathered to watch the fight and walked home, still shaking with fury.

Public vans awaiting passengers

February
2.6.07

I'm wasted in the classroom here, and not even the fun drunk kind of wasted. One of the questions on our reading test today was, "How does Indonesia's population grow?" I first stifled a giggle at the dirty jokes I could make, and then invented some answers for them: a. rapidly, b. slowly, c. not at all, d. with silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row. And then I turned around and had to face an entire classroom of wide, confused, eyes, all wondering what weird thing Miss Hannah was doing now. Apparently nursery rhymes were never in their curriculum.

Some of my students at their morning ceremony

March
3.9.07

I went out with a group of friends this morning--when Indonesians say "let's hang out on Saturday, they mean, "Saturday morning at 8 AM"--and actually had a great time. This is rare. Generally, I don't understand what's going on because people are mixing Javanese into their Indonesian, and then I'm frustrated and bored and just want to go home, or the people have to speak pure Indonesian for me, and then they're frustrated and bored and just want to go home. For some reason, though, this morning's trip worked. One of the girls speaks Indonesian very clearly--she is Javanese, but doesn't have a strong accent--and one of the boys is from Jakarta, so doesn't speak Javanese at all, and speaks a remarkably clear and lovely version of Indonesian. We explored the old 18th-century administration building, which was full of bats and smelled of urine, and then went to the restaurant one of the girls owns. (She's 19, a college student, and owns her own restaurant. And her name is--get this--Liquid! Apparently, her mother suffered from dehydration during her pregnancy. In any case, she's amazing!) Then the boy gave me a ride home on his motorcycle--note to self, riding with girls is far less scary than riding with boys--and told me about his job working for the counter-terrorism police unit in Semarang. And maybe I'm just shallow, but hey, that's a pretty kickass job. That, plus the motorcycle, plus the clear accent, means I love him. That's how low my standards are nowadays.

Lawang Sewu, the building we visited. Do not disturb the bats.

April
4.25.07

I finally, less than a month before I am due to leave, got the uniform I was promised in September and, frankly, I'm no longer upset that I wasn't given it before. When I first showed up at school wearing it, half the teachers politely told me I looked beautiful and the other half giggled behind their hands. It's strangely boxy and the skirt is far too tight, forcing me to take tiny ladylike steps all over the place and to struggle climbing up onto the school bus every morning without entirely exposing myself to the middle schoolers. I look like a stewardess, and, what's more, a stewardess with a really poor sense of color: I have two versions of the uniform, a yellow one which my twelfth graders told me makes me look like a banana, and a pinkish version which is almost exactly the same color as my skin, creating a rather eerie the-emperor-has-no-clothes-or-maybe-just-no-body effect. The school principal suggested that I could take the uniforms back to America as a souvenir. Thanks, but no thanks.

My male colleagues don't seem to mind that I look like a stewardess/banana

May
5.22.07

I'm leaving in a few days, and so I'm feeling that end-of-an-experience, all-bets-are-off urge to do something wild and crazy. Last time I felt this urge I got a bikini wax, hence I was hoping, this time, to do something less painful. So the SLO and I hit up the local mall, where we took crazy pictures in a photobooth, complete with Asian teenage girl poses and cutesy captions, and then caused a scene by asking a pirated DVD shop to test out the film "1 Night in Paris" on their big-screen TV. (We just didn't believe that could honestly be the content of the DVD. It was. Talk about awkward.) Then we wandered through the mall and ended up asking if we could sit on the giant animatronic rhino and elephant that little children ride around the mall. (It's as weird as it sounds. Trust me.) The guy running the ride looked at us like we were insane, but foreigners get away with everything around here, including acting like four year olds, because, hey, maybe that's just what they all do in America.

Not much to say, it's all here in the beauty of the flowers.

June
6.17.07

The Duke and I spent a good portion of our time in Vietnam talking about what it would be like when we got back to America: we would blend in! We would speak the language! There would be no cats! The streets would be made of cheese! And then we landed in San Francisco and hopped on public transportation over to Oakland, only to look around, while waiting for the train, and realize that we were the only white people on the platform. Furthermore, we were the only non-Asians on the platform. And that no one else was speaking English. Oh well. At least there are no cats!

The Duke celebrating catless America

July
7.6.07

In my self-appointed role as social coordinator, I'm emailing you to tell you the plans for the next little while:

Tomorrow I'm going to a barbecue in Provo, to which you're invited. Saturday we'll be hitting up the Payson Scottish festival, mostly for the caber toss. Saturday night is as yet unplanned, but maybe we could find you some rocky mountain oysters? Sunday I think I'll probably be going to church in SLC to see the definitely-not-a-farewell farewell of a boy from my old ward in Belmont. If you're coming to bad movie night that night, can I get a ride back down with you? Monday will be hiking in American Fork canyon, and I think there might also be a bad movie night on Monday night too--I know, two in a row! Then next Saturday is Llama Fest, ca. 4 pm, and Melyngoch's farewell and post-party are Sunday at 11 am and 3pm, and then I think we might go to Annie's later that night for games. Oh, and a trip to a dinosaur museum will definitely also happen sometime. Please come.

I look strangely excited, for someone about to taste bull balls.

August
8.27.07

I went to dinner with my dad at the Indonesian restaurant around the corner, where I spoke Indonesian to the server and was told that there was a "smell of Java" about me. So apparently my Javanese accent is strong, strong enough to be obvious in a short conversation where I ask for the check and then apologize for not speaking Indonesian earlier. (Well, either that or I haven't showered since May. But I'm pretty sure the server meant it metaphorically.) In any case, I'm sure the server got a kick out of it: imagine a Chinese exchange student with a Brooklyn accent. I'd guess it's kind of like that.

San Francisco in August

September
9.25.07

And then, just when I was thinking, could this event be any more Berkeley, I overheard a nine year old say to her mother, "Is that goat cheese? I love goat cheese!" I'm sure that's a sign of apocalypse somewhere, tucked away in one of the more unreadable sections of Revelation or Isaiah: "And lo, when a babe, yea, even a suckling child, doth lust after the milk of a kid, then shall ye know that ye live in a foodie culture. Oh, and that the Second Coming is soon, the earth will be utterly wasted, etc, etc, I think you guys know the drill by now." Of course, one can hardly blame her: goat cheese is delicious.

A September parade: how Berkeley can you be?

October
10.24.07

I was sitting in my department lounge yesterday doing some reading, and two undergraduates were sitting near me talking. One of them said something about Cal's starting quarterback, and the other replied with, "he's Mormon, you know." There's this long pause following that, where they're both clearly thinking what to say next, and it's clearly going to be about Mormons, so I'm waiting, with interest, to hear what it will be. Having overheard several conversations recently about "there's no way I'm voting for that Mormon dude, because polygamy is just sick and wrong," I'm slightly nervous as to what kind of ignorance or soft bigotry I might encounter. Finally, the guy break the silence and says, "Mormons are really nice." The girl jumps in enthusiastically: "I know! I was just about to say that!" And then they have a long conversation about how all the Mormons they've known are so super nice and friendly and blah blah blah. It wasn't what I was expecting, but I'm not complaining: after all the Mormons-are-a-crazy-creepy-cult perspectives in the media lately, it's nice to hear some good press.

Two fun October activities: dressing up for the opera and learning to use the color effects in iPhoto. Purple, appropriately enough.

November
11.13.07

Someone left a bunch of fliers in one of my classes advertising jobs as a student lab assistant for, and this is the good part, the Pavement Research Center. With huge exclamation marks, the flier declared that assistants would learn to take asphalt samples and, best of all, learn to drive a forklift!!!! Great resume builder!!!!! So then of course we all had a good laugh at the idea of having forklift driving on your resume--just imagine the "skills" line: "proficient at Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, and driving a forklift." And then, abruptly, we fell silent, as we realized that someone with who can drive a forklift is probably more employable than someone with a higher degree in linguistics. Remind me again why I'm doing this?



Nice to know my degree is equivalent in uselessness to an MFA from Bennington

December
12.10.07

I spent the night at the church building the other night, totally by accident. I was just there doing homework, and chatting with people, and then all of a sudden (I swear time just flies when you're cramming for finals) it was 10 PM and dark out and pouring rain and I had to walk home alone. So I figured, hey, there's some blankets and couches here, I'll just stay. And the kitchen is fully stocked with food around finals time so I ate breakfast there and all. And I let myself get distracted from homework to play the piano and sit by the fire practicing my Braille on the books from the library downstairs. It was like a sleepover, minus the pajamas and giggling and talking about boys, and, well, other people, and it was AWESOME.

How I spent much of December: studying phonetics.

Who's on Romney's Side, Who?

Now that Mitt has won a few states, I feel slightly less guilty about doing a little bit of gentle (I hope) teasing, in the form of a parody I wrote back in September. (Caution: some references may be so four months ago.)

(To the tune of "Who's on the Lord's Side, Who")

1. The Christian Right declares,
"Mormons are not like us,
With special underwear
And their strange married Jesus.

They believe they will be gods;
they have an extra book
They're all a bunch of frauds
Not worth a second look."

Chorus:
Who'll vote for Romney, who?
Iowa's the place to show,
From the primaries we'll know:
Who'll vote for Romney, who?

2. The godless Dems eschew
Those who put trust in Him
Especially if their views
Change on a weekly whim.

They say he flops and flips
On abortion and the gays.
His centrist mindset slips;
He takes up right-wing ways.

Chorus

3. The liberal media laughs
(NYT's loud and shrill)
At his embarrassing gaffes:
"Small varmints, if you will."

From his favorite sci-fi read,
To his tasteless Mormon jokes
And Castro's lines gloried,
Sometimes the guv just chokes.

Chorus

4. In college he sold stock
And spent two years in France
Then entered--it's no shock--
the world of high finance.

The average Joe cannot
connect with our dear Mitt
From a squash court to a yacht,
He's got a rich man's kit.

Chorus

5. The Lord's own people choose
The Lord's own candidate.
We love his Mo values
There's no need for debate.

With cash and checks and coin,
With one heart and one mind,
We're girding up our loins
5 million strong combined.

Final Chorus:
We'll vote for Romney, we.
Utah to Mitt will go
From Primary we've known:
We'll vote for Romney, that's who!

Listening to "Listening to Otis Redding At Home During Christmas" At Home During Christmas

Because my aunt Marie misses my blog, and because, well, I miss my blog, I bring you, in the triumphal return of Purple Petra to blogging action, the highlights of my last month.

(Yes, I'm too lazy to do anything but make a list. So sue me: it's winter break, and therefore I don't have to use paragraphs.)

• I've been on a baking/cooking spree lately, which is strange for me, the girl who's content to eat saltines for dinner every day for the rest of her life, but, for all its strangeness, not entirely unwelcome. I made cinnamon rolls during finals week, a form of procrastination that impressed and delighted all my classmates at our end-of-semester party; for my mom's primary party I made sugar cookies; and I tried square bishops--the term is my own, derived from a long, silly, and suggestive free-association game with Klement and The Duke--for Christmas Eve dessert, when we then all joked that the preponderance of butter in Mormon cooking--seriously, folks, a cup and a half?--comes from the fact that we don't believe that resurrected bodies have blood, and so we therefore don't have to take care of our arteries. More recently, after returning to Berkeley, I've tried out a recipe for koshari, an Egyptian favorite, and didn't utterly fail, unlike the last time, baked chocolate chip cookies, made naan from scratch, and Googled recipes for old Indonesian favorites like rujak and rendang. I know this may not sound like much, but, seriously, seeing as how I cooked something more than pasta maybe five times throughout my four years as an undergrad, I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself, even if I do spend the whole time humming, "I'm making a lasagna...for one!"

• I didn't do much Boston-related; in fact, I only left my dull suburban town once, for a trip into Cambridge to see Eraserhead with one of my best friends from high school and her sister's boyfriend. Now, ordinarily I wouldn't mention this, fun as it was, it's just that her sister's boyfriend is famous. Well, to me. I felt incredibly hip, watching a cult film and hanging out with one of these guys. [Claps] Yeah!
  

• My family's only Christmas tradition is that we have no Christmas traditions: last year we were in Austria and so bought no presents, the year before Klement was in the hospital and I was in charge of being Santa, which means that everyone got books and only books, and the year before that we were in India, where my mom hired a guy with a camel to bring our presents to the door.

In any case, this year's Christmas variation was that we would each buy presents for ourselves, wrap them, and label them as if they had come from someone else. That way, there would still be surprises on Christmas morning, only the surprise would be what you had given, not what you had gotten. It was a plan brilliantly conceived but poorly executed; Mom and Dad followed through but the kids did not, meaning that on Christmas morning my mom had a huge stack of presents while Klement, the youngest of the family and still only 15, had--guess--one. Oops. On the plus side, we were all utterly surprised and delighted at the presents that "we" had gotten Mom.

• Klement's present, however, was a good one--a Wii, which then provided endless amounts of entertainment for the rest of us over the break, both in actually playing the games and in making suggestive jokes about the name. Wii. Tee-hee. I quickly fell in love with the boxing game, and spent several evenings utterly embarrassing The Duke with the girly flailing that passed, for me, as boxing, and, of course, with the exultant victory rapping I insisted on doing every time I won, charming little spontaneous ditties like Eins zwei drei fier/Everybody start the cheer/This little German dude/had best admit that he is screwed. That's right: I can video game box and rhyme. Just call me Mohammed Awii.

• After Christmas, we spent a week skiing and seeing family in Utah. I love skiing, don't get me wrong, but the overall suffering:pleasure ratio was a bit too high on many of our days. It's hard to enjoy the thrill of speeding down the mountain, frankly, when it's 5 degrees out. I did, however, learn that swearing, somehow, takes the edge off the cold, particularly when on the ski lift, meaning that anybody who happened to be passing below my mom and I on the ski lift would have heard us practicing all the swear words we knew, which, since we are Mormon, isn't many.
  

• Having finished up seeing family and friends in Utah, I flew down to southern California to see yet more family. I didn't do much of note there, just ate at their favorite restaurants, played several of my uncle's four hundred or so board games, listened to music, read the LA times, enjoying the full-page movie ads, attended one of my uncle's philosophy graduate seminars, watched reality TV with my aunt, and, oh, went down to Tijuana for a day, where my cousin and I walked around in the rain, studiously avoiding eye contact with the men standing outside strip joints, ate enchiladas and hot cakes and churros and cactus, laughed at the sign which directed the way towards the border crossing from the U.S. side, which said, in huge letters, WEST PARKING LOTS, accompanied by an arrow, and then, in smaller letters below that, And Mexico, and generally alternated between enjoying and pitying Tijuana's seedy border-town feel. It was, suffice to say, an awesome trip.
  

So, with a few exceptions and/or lapses of memory, that's basically the last month. And I've still got a week before classes start, which is kind of unbelievable but not unappreciated, since I do so enjoy a lull before a storm. Though, hopefully, even with the start of classes, I'll still find time to blog, if not for my own sake, for Aunt Marie's.

Here Comes Santa Claus

I finished my last paper of the semester mid-afternoon on Saturday, bringing my grand total of pages written over the course of this semester close to 160, single spaced of course, meaning that if all those pages had been on the same topic, I basically just wrote a book in four months. I mean, granted, it's a book no one wants to read--heck, I don't even want to read it--but, still, pondering that number of pages makes me feel just the tiniest bit proud. If only quantity and quality were the same thing.

Having emailed my paper to my professor, I gathered my books and left the public library, where I had been sitting on the floor for the last hour or so, having decided that shivering on a cold tile floor was, for some strange reason, more comfortable than sitting at a desk. As I walked towards the library door, I began to think about what I would do with my newfound Christmas break freedom: bake Christmas cookies! Decorate a Christmas tree! Shop for Christmas presents! Dress up like a Christmas gypsy! With schoolwork out of the way, I could finally think about the season.

The first thing I saw when I opened the library door was a guy dressed as Santa Claus. And behind him, a girl dressed as Santa Claus. And behind her, a whole group of people dressed as Santa Claus. As I rounded the corner into downtown, I realized everyone was dressed like Santa Claus: milling around on the main drag of downtown were about, oh, five hundred people dressed as Santa, pouring out of the metro station, flitting in and out of bars, and standing in the middle of the road. It was a Santa invasion, and it felt like the universe had conspired to show me not just a good time, but a wonderful time: the most wonderful time of the year.

I walked up to one of those imitation Santas and asked him what was going on; "SantaCon!" he said, slightly drunkenly and with his mouth full of pizza. I wish I could say that that explained everything for me, as that would imply I'm somewhat hip to counterculture--or pop culture, or flash mob culture, or maybe just culture, period--but of course I had to ask some more questions, learning that this was a group of people, dressed in cheap Santa costumes--including a Hanukkah Santa (all in blue and stars of David and carrying a Menorah), a bikini Santa, and a Santa Claus that was definitely not just kissing Mommy--that was moving across the East Bay, basically getting progressively noisier and drunker. There may have been some lists, and some double-checking of said lists, but I doubt it; this group was mostly into drunken singing, or, at the very least, drunken shouting "Santa loves you!"

I love Santa too, and that was pretty much the best welcome to the Christmas holiday ever, even if I did have to wonder whether the bikini Santa was a man or a woman. (Man. Mostly.) I must have been nice to deserve this sight, and, trust me, there won't be any crying or pouting this year, not from me.

Grad Students Who Know

with apologies to Julie B. Beck

Grad Students Who Know Write Papers

Grad students who know write papers. While there are those in the world who decry the old values of "publish or perish," in the culture of graduate school good students still believe in writing papers, preferably as many as possible. The wisest advisers teach that first year graduate students should not postpone writing papers, and that the requirement for righteous graduate students to multiply and replenish the library remains in force. There is academic power and influence in writing.

Grad Students Who Know Honor Academic Obligations and Commitments

Grad students who know honor their academic obligations and commitments. I have visited some of the most prestigious universities on earth, where grad students fulfill all their responsibilities, despite walking for miles or using sketchy public transportation. They drag themselves onto campus no matter how little sleep they got the night before or how unfinished their course projects are. These grad students know they are going to classes and seminars, where free food might be offered. They know if they are not going to class, they are not impressing their professorial colleagues, and, also, they might go hungry.

Grad Students Who Know are Studiers

Grad students who know are studiers. This is their special assignment and role within the plan of a university. To study means to observe, analyze, contemplate, or learn about. Another word for studying is procrastinating. Procrastinating includes blogging, talking to friends, and, sometimes, in times of greatest stress, washing clothes and dishes, scrubbing floors and toilets, and keeping an orderly apartment. Studying grad students are knowledgeable, but all their education will avail them nothing if they do not have the skills to procrastinate. Grad students should be the best procrastinators in the world.

Grad Students Who Know Do Less

Grad students who know do less. During the last few weeks of the semester, they permit less of what will not bear good fruit academically. They allow less media in their homes, less distraction, less social activity, less leisure reading, and less time devoted to the basics of hygiene, nutrition, and exercise. Grad students who know are willing to live on less so they can spend more time with their homework: more time thinking, more time reading, more time writing, more time talking to their adviser. These grad students choose carefully, and do not try to choose having a life outside of academia. Their goal is to get their PhDs, so one day they can prepare a rising generation of grad students who will take their pet theories into the entire field. That is influence; that is power.

It is my sincere hope that we all, in these last days of the semester, can strive to become graduate students who know, and I testify that the dean will reward us for doing so.

In the Bleak Midwinter

I dashed around the corner to my local grocery store for some sustenance items, which here means "hot chocolate and cookies to keep me awake and happy during an all-night paper-writing spree." While paying, I briefly chatted with the man behind the counter, who commented on how delicious hot chocolate is, especially on a cold December night. I agreed with him, and noticed that the door to his store, which is usually wide open and welcoming, was closed tonight, presumably to keep out the cold, right? We complained about the weather for a few minutes together, discussing how much we were looking forward to curling up with a warm blanket and, in my case at least, cup of hot chocolate. I handed over my cash, saying "stay warm!" in lieu of "goodbye," and headed home, shivering the whole way.

The problem? It's 55 degrees out. We are so spoiled.

Fork It Over

As I was walking home from school yesterday evening, I thought I heard a homeless man ask for a spare.

I turned, and, taking out the headphones which were blasting an audiobook of "The Portrait of a Lady," asked, "A spare what?" I had just been to the laundromat for quarters, so I actually had change to give, but what if he wanted, I don't know, a spare tire? A spare cigarette? A spare bedroom?

He shook his head. "Not a spare, a spoon. Do you have a spoon?"

Who carries a spoon around with them? I thought to myself. "No, sorry, I don't," I said. "But I do have a fork."

He considered for a moment and said, "Okay, that will do. Can I have your fork?"

I pulled it out of my backpack, handed it to him, and turned to go.

"Wait!" he said. "This is a nice metal fork. I can't take this."

I told him it was no problem, but he insisted. "I live in a hospital, and if I come home with this they'll think I've stolen it."

Oh. So I stopped and waited while he ate the last few ice cream bites of his root beer float and told me all about how the neighborhood has really gone downhill. When he was done he thanked me nicely, handed back the fork, and ambled off to who-knows-where.

And that, friends, is why I like living in a city.

Let One Interpret

I never know how I get involved in these things. One minute I'm sitting in Indonesian class, nodding yes, yes, yes, Ibu Professor, I am listening, and I do understand you, and the next minute I'm doing simultaneous interpretation of a traditional Javanese shadow puppet show (or wayang) for an audience of about 500 people.

I think I should be more careful when I nod.

This wayang show was mostly a performance of the university's gamelan group, but, to make gamelan music sound ever so slightly less intolerable to a Western audience, they had invited a dalang to put on a wayang show. (The translation for dalang that Indonesians tend to prefer is "shadow master"; that sounds more like a badly-translated Japanese video game villain than a mild-mannered Javanese artist, so we'll stick with the Javanese word, okay?) That way, the show would not simply be two hours of random banging. It would be two hours of random banging AND PUPPETS!!! That distinction is key.

(I should note, here, that gamelan is an intricate and ancient art form that is certainly not just random banging. Even if it does sound like it.)

In any case, those running the event realized that wayang isn't any fun to watch if you don't understand it, so they called up my professor to ask if she would translate. She agreed, and then instantly assigned three of her students, myself included, to do it instead. Because, really, what are grad students for, if not doing the unpleasant parts of a professor's job?

I've done simultaneous interpretation before, but never quite like this. The dalang and his shadow screen were up on stage, along with the gamelan players, while I and my classmates knelt at the side of the stage, with a laptop, typing, in English, what the dalang was saying, as he was saying it. The laptop was then connected to a projector, and everything we typed was displayed on a screen hanging on the back of the wall. Yes, that's right--everything. I've never seen my typos so, um, huge before.


The dalang was kind enough to give us a script in advance, so we had a rough idea of what was going on, but, of course, true to both Indonesia and the art of wayang, he started deviating from the script about five minutes into the performance and never went back. Also true to Indonesia, he refused to stick to only Indonesian; even though he knew none of his translators spoke Javanese, every. single. conversation started in Javanese, at least for the first two sentences. That means at the beginning of every. single. conversation the translators looked like idiots and the audience was confused. And every time he did it, at least when I was translating, he looked over at me, made eye contact, smiled, and started in on (to me) gibberish.

I forgive him his little bilingual jokes, though, because he put on such a good performance. I've seen plenty of wayang, and, frankly, once I get over the initial "hey, this is cool and foreign!" factor, I get bored. That happens, of course, when you don't understand what's going on. With this wayang being in Indonesian, though, I actually understood not only the plot, but also the jokes. And, it turns out, wayang can be funny. Maybe I was just punchy from the stress of simultaneous interpretation, but at one point I laughed so hard I cried. (Okay, fine, at several points. I just don't want to have to admit to laughing at the fart jokes. Though, come on, farting puppets? Hilarious!) The performance was made even better, if I may say so myself, by the interaction between the translators and the dalang--whenever he spoke English, we typed commentary on what he was saying. As one character recounted what you'd need to get to America, my classmate typed a bullet point outline on the projector screen. "First, you need to get a passport." ($$) "And be sure to apply six months in advance, since getting a passport takes time." (Time=$$) "Then, you need a visa." ($$) "Then you'll need a plane ticket." ($$) During another segment, a long fight scene, I "translated" the dalang's fighting noises: Bam! Pow! Biff! Ka-zow! Holy fighting puppets, Harjuna Sasrabahu!


Now, of course, we weren't perfect; I did need the occasional whispered vocabulary item from my professor, and at one point I missed the line in which a character said the name of the gamelan song that was about to happen, and was then highly confused as to why all the musicians on stage were suddenly hissing "Golden Rain! Golden Rain!" at me. I think, though, that I have a decent excuse for the occasional mistake: three and a half hours of kneeling on a hardwood floor concentrating with all your might is no cakewalk, people. The performance was supposed to be two hours, closer to the attention span of an American audience, but, again, true to the Indonesian idea of time ("jam karet"), the dalang had other ideas; a real Javanese wayang performance begins around sundown and runs until sunrise the next morning, so, frankly, we were lucky to leave before midnight. In fact, I feel lucky in general: lucky to have seen such a performance, lucky to have translated it, lucky, even, to speak Indonesian.

But I'm still going to be more careful about nodding in class.

The Mormon Boys

An updated folk song*

Chorus:
Come girls, come, and listen to my noise,
Don't you marry the Mormon boys.
For if you do, your fortune it will be
Jello molds and babies are all you'll see.

When they come a-courting, this is what they'll wear:
A white shirt and tie and side-parted hair.
And when they come a courtin', I'll tell you what they'll say:
"Come on, Sister, we can't go out until we pray."

They will lead you out of the singles ward,
And marry you in the eyes of the Lord.
And before that wedding you can only embrace,
For that's the way of the Mormon race.

Your reception'll be in the cultural hall,
And temple pictures will hang on your wall.
You'll put Enrichment-made crafts on your door,
And worry all day 'bout the cleanness of your floor.

Root beer is root beer any way you mix it,
A Mormon's a Mormon any way you fix it.
When other good folks have all gone to bed,
The Mormon's awake reading scriptures instead!





*This parody is loosely based on the versions found here, here, here, and here.

Fascinating Bloggerhood

Thanks to the magic of Big Brother-like spy technology--or, okay, maybe just the magic of the internet--I can tell how people get to my blog. Most of you come redirected from the sites of my friends, and a few of you, most likely my lovely mother or her sisters, the auntourage, either type in the web address directly or simply Google key words like purple petra indonesia islands sea some untidy spot my daughter please someone help me find her blog until the site you want appears.

(You may think I'm exaggerating, but you haven't seen the site records.)

In the spirit of the same good fun that causes me to tease my own female relatives--who, by the way, should know that I love them and that they're encouraged to read, anytime, no matter how they get here--let's take a look at some of the other Google searches that have gotten people here.

First, there are the pronunciation requests:

pronunciation oregano
pronounce hover
mispronunciation

People: if you had read the post, you would know that I am not the one to ask. Go find someone who doesn't have intuitions like mine.

Then, there are the creeps:

mom sex
lyndonville teacher nude photos
naked middle schoolers picture
indonesian porn

I have got to stop making suggestive jokes on the internet. I know these people are going to be disappointed when they get to my site, and, frankly, I'm glad. Anyone looking for those things deserves to be disappointed.

(With the possible exception of the first item of the list, but then only if you are a mom looking for sex, hopefully with your lawfully wedded husband; all others, get thee to a nunnery, or possibly just ancient Greece--the point is, anywhere but here.)

The third group are the people I really worry for:

stalking with a baseball bat
he was persistent so I gave him my phone numebr
what if stalker ignores the police
my stalker knows everything about me
songs to make your stalker leave you alone

I looked up the source locations of these Google hits, and they're not all from the same person, which means I have to give five different people the advice people gave me: ask for help, not just from Google, and from the police if necessary. Especially you asking about the baseball bat. Unless, of course, you were asking for instructions, in which case, don't mind me, I'll just be off in the next room dialing 911.

Those are the main groups. Then there are the random hits:

thomas barrett forever and ever again
I'm still proud to recommend my cousin, by the way.

did the egyptians really set booby traps?
In my case, yes, but I'd rather not be reminded of the number of times I got felt up by strangers in Egypt.

jakarta's prettiest blogger
Um, I'm flattered and all, but that search leading to my site is bad news for Jakarta's bloggers, as I fit only one of those categories.

flight to singapore overweight
I don't think my constant access to peanut butter M&Ms has affected me that much yet.

picture of an untidy person
Boy, Google is all about defamation of character, it seems. Though, unfortunately, I have to concede that this one is absolutely true. Even though I just tidied my room--or, rather, "spot"--on Saturday, the piles of books and papers have surreptitiously multiplied in my sleep. I can't think of any other explanation for the random pile of syntax books by my bed. Mea maxima culpa.

site: purplepetra.blogspot.com gay
This one shocked me when I first saw it: What?! I thought. I may have short hair, but, really people, how many times must we have this...and then I remembered that that hit was me, checking to see if I had told a certain joke before. Oops. Nevermind.

And, finally:
happy birthday petra
I don't care if my birthday was three and a half months ago: thanks!

Laid For Your Faith

My ward recently, as all good singles wards must, held a chastity lesson. This was no ordinary chastity lesson, either--it was a special two-hour, everybody-all-together, question-and-answer chastity extravaganza.

(I told my dad this and he laughed out loud. "I hope they make a big deal out of it," he said, "as that's the closest you're going to get." I'd like to think that was a plural you.)

The lesson, in contrast to many of my more awkward chastity lectures at BYU (I remember, as a freshman, leaning over to my friends sitting next to me and wondering what on earth "Levi loving" was, and why my bishop was so against it), was intelligent, articulate, and refreshingly specific, though, frankly, I could have used a little less repetition of the word "probe" in close proximity to the word "genitals." But, you know, maybe that's just me.

As we were setting up the chairs for the lesson, the first counselor in the bishopric told us to pass out hymnbooks for our opening hymn. "Will we sing a special chastity song?" my friend joked.

The counselor considered for a moment: "If you can write a chastity hymn before the meeting starts, we'll sing it."

My mind instantly started racing with possibilities, but, unfortunately, the chairs were set up and the meeting began before I could figure out how to force lines like "As I have loved you, love one another, but try to avoid probing one another's genitals," and "God is love, but we mean agape and not eros, so, please, keep your hands off each other" into the tunes they were meant for.

Had I been given another ten minutes, though, we could have begun our chastity lesson appropriately:

Onward single Mormons,
Chaste and true and pure.
Bear the cross of virtue;
Abstinence endure.
Sex oral and otherwise,
Petting heavy and light
All these things we do without
In our celibate plight.

Chorus:
Onward single Mormons,
Chaste and true and pure.
Bear the cross of virtue;
Abstinence endure.

It's probably just as well, though, as I already had my hands full during the meeting trying to explain the proceedings to the Indonesian investigator I've been translating/explicating for; justifying an entire church meeting dedicated to the details of celibacy was so hard--"Um, you know we don't usually talk about "passionate kissing" in church, right?"--that I can't imagine what I would have done with an entire hymn dedicated to those same details.

Oh, and our real opening hymn? "How Firm a Foundation." I'm a terrible person, I know, but I snickered.

Not Living, Just Killing Time

Got too much time on your hands?

So do these people. But it makes for good listening.

You could visit my favorite corner of the Bloggernacle.

I haven't ever fully understood an article by Chomsky either. But this is a good way to waste 30 seconds.

One of my favorite writers has a blog. I'm trying hard not to hyperventilate.

Read a book by email. I'm still not sure how I feel about this one.

Find out why I've been crying constantly since early last week.

No, no, wait, I'm not crying. It's just been raining on my face.

Or, of course, we could all get back to work.

Poor Performance or Plain Incompetence?

These are some actual sentences I produced yesterday.

First, the first thing out of my mouth when my friend picked up the phone:

I should take which direction to the airport?

That shouldn't be a wh-in situ question if I'm not echoing something previously said, and how can I be echoing something previously said if the conversation is just starting? I broke pragmatics with this one.

Second, referring to my worry about going up a hill in the wrong direction:

I'm just scared I'll drive it up the wrong way.

Um, that's a verb plus a prepositional phrase, not a verb-particle. I broke syntax with this one.

Third, and this one is so shockingly against all the rules of English grammar that it needs no context:

What should I drive past a?

A hideous, and egregiously wrong, blend of "What should I drive past?" and "I should drive past a what?" I think I just broke the English language with this one.

A Night At the Opera

One of the more obvious advantages to being a grad student, apart from the poverty-level income and institutionalized servitude, is the flexible schedule; working yourself into a blurry, caffeine-fueled, jargon-filled haze can be done at any time of the day or night. (Who am I kidding? Night. Night before it's due.) This means that when a friend emails mid-afternoon and says something along the lines of, hey, I'm free tonight, let's go to the opera, you can think, well, I was going to sit here in this chair all day transcribing Sundanese...so, sure, why don't I go into the city and buy some opera tickets? And then, in the space of an hour, you can throw on a fancy dress, pack up your laptop, hop on the train, and move the whole analyzing-Sundanese-front-vowels operation to another chair, this one in the San Francisco Public Library, to wait for the opera to start.

My friend Steve is the opera fanatic; I'm the one with a student ID card. Last Thursday, it was a match made in heaven: I wandered into the San Francisco opera house shortly after he emailed and wandered out with two tickets to that night's performance of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), in the 9th row of the orchestra section, for $25 each, thus saving us--well, him--$125 a ticket.

I was quite excited about the evening, partially because I got to wear my fancy black cleavage-baring dress, partially because I do love me a Stevening, and partially because I have always wanted to go to the opera. And, really, if you have to start someplace with opera, where better than Die Zauberflöte? This was especially true for me, since I spent a large portion of my childhood falling asleep to "Mozart's Magic Fantasy," a version of The Magic Flute adapted for children, which means that I entered the opera house with a knowledge of the plot, a love for the music, and a strange subconscious expectation that all the songs would be in English. (Childhood habits die hard, apparently.)

Not, of course, that a cursory knowledge of the plot helped me anyway--I spent about the first half of the opera thinking, huh? before I realized that it wasn't my fault: The Magic Flute is, as far as I can tell from reading about it later, trippy. Maybe it was partially the fault of the performance, which emphasized the bright and happy fairy tale aspects to the piece, at the expense of the moralistic good-and-evil tone that it acquires in the second half; while Papageno's comedy bits were spot on, by which I mean brilliant, and had the audience--at an opera!--laughing out loud--at an opera!--this tendency to laughter whenever Papageno was on stage made the meaning behind the tragic arias of the young lovers, and Sarastro's preachy bass solos slightly, well, risible.

This may be a pity, perhaps, if you go to the opera for your moral education. For the rest of us, though, and you may decide I'm a total Philistine for saying this, the entertainment and musical value of such a piece matters far more. The tragic arias, particularly Pamina's solo "Ach, ich fühl's, es ist verschwunden," were beautiful, and Sarastro's bass rumbled appropriately in songs like "O Isis und Osiris," accompanied by a chorus dressed in shiny golden robes and purple plastic wigs, like ancient Egypt as envisioned by the costume director for Star Trek. That may sound strange, and I know it does, but it was strangely beautiful, all that gold and purplish-blue floating about on stage. Also strangely beautiful were the gilded boat floating high above the stage and carrying the three young boys whose light young voices acted as a sort of chorus ex machina, preventing characters from suicide and despair; the enormous pyramid in the center of the stage, whose between-scene transformations set the stage, quite literally, for varying aspects of the plot and music; and the host of enchanted hybrid animals who appeared as Tamino played his magic flute, the crocoguin, and the giraffestich, and the whole pride of upright lions, prancing and swaying their way across the stage to the rhythm of the music. Strange, yes, but it was beautiful, all of it, and magical indeed.

And not strange at all, of course, was the beauty of the Queen of the Night's famous aria "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen." I know my love for this song probably marks me as shallow and inexperienced, but I will freely admit to being the sort of opera neophyte that is utterly blown away by a human voice singing notes that high. If the stage design was the magic, this aria is the flute; even while watching Erika Miklosa's diaphragm move during the coloratura passage, I could hardly believe it was her singing that. And during every single one of the many minutes since Thursday I've devoted to watching YouTube videos of the piece, I've thought the same thing: incredible. Simply incredible. I get chills every time.

Whatever else I could say about the performance--the acting was good, the pace maybe could have used a little work, the singer playing Pamina was upstaged in nearly every scene--let me end with this: I sat through the entire three hours without once being bored. Sure, the little grad student voice inside my head was whispering the whole time, "Sundanese! Sundanese! Why aren't you transcribing?" and the little Bruce Willis fan voice inside my head was whispering, "Why isn't she blue, à la The Fifth Element?" and the little linguistics grad student voice inside my head was whispering, most insistently of all, "Listen to those people mangle their palatal fricatives! Palatal, people, palatal! Not post-alveolar! Aaaargh!" but, really, what are a Protestant work ethic, a love for action movies, and a trained ear for fricatives when compared to Mozart? Nothing. The performance may not have been perfect in every way, but the opera is, and, in the end, my evening was. Thank goodness for a flexible schedule.

It Just Never Got Old!

There's one major aspect of Vietnam I didn't mention--its currency, which is colorful, inflated, covered in pictures of Ho Chi Minh, and, in an endless source of amusement to English speakers, called the dong. Yes, that's right: it's basically the world's greatest innuen-dough.

Ah, dong jokes. Who can resist? The Duke and I certainly couldn't. And so, I present a list to satisfy the giggling pre-teen in all of us:

Actual Phrases Innocently Uttered By Petra or The Duke While In Vietnam

And now all I've got is a handful of wet dong.
These Vietnamese only like me for my dong.
Well, I wanted to, but I only had a little dong.
I can get so much dong in Vietnam!
I need to pull my dong out of the slot.
Do you think they exchange dong here?
My dong is prettier than yours.
Try slipping him some dong.
Can you see my dong hanging out of my pocket?
I wonder if they'll give me dong if I give them dollars.
And then they'll be all like, "Welcome to Vietnam, may I take your dong?"
I just can't seem to hold on to my dong!
Man, I can't believe how inflated the dong is.
Can I have some dong?
I wonder if they'll take my dong.
Well, don't just stand there with your dong in your hands!
Wanna see my dong?

A Cu Chi Tunnel Flip Book

The Duke tries out a Viet Cong tunnel:

Ta-da!

Vietnam

As our bus reached the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, the once and sometimes-present Saigon, the first thing I noticed as I pulled my eyes away from the novel I was reading was a lingerie shop. And then another. And then another. And then another. The entire street was lingerie shops, window after window of colorful silk negliges. And then the bus rounded a corner and we drove down an entire street of shoe shops, and then a street of pho joints. As the bus passed a major intersection, I glanced around and saw, in the window of a bookstore, Bill Clinton’s My Life prominently displayed, and, next door to that shop, a giant red-and-white life-size cutout of Colonel Sanders in front a store labeled Ga Ran Kentucky. Now, I’m sorry, maybe I’m unclear on the concept, but this is the communism we feared so much? We fought a war to prevent the spread of this? This is no bear in the woods; it’s a bear selling goods.


To find a hotel, The Duke and I wound through narrow back alleys full of women cooking, children watching TV, and dogs scratching themselves, feeling completely lost and overwhelmed, and surprised at every turn by a building where we least expected it—there is no sense to a map of HCMC; it’s just roads from here to there and back again, tangled and tossed in a 20-year development frenzy. We landed on the doorstop of the small $5/night hotel room that Lonely Planet had recommended, an establishment run by a shirtless old man, certainly old enough to have fought in the war, who, upon seeing our U.S. passports, grinned, gave us the thumbs up, and said, “U.S. OK!” We smiled back and told him Vietnam was pretty OK too.


Then, after dropping off our backpacks in our tiny un-air-conditioned room, The Duke and I decided to visit Dam Sen Park, an amusement park on the edge of the city. (I only wish there were a precedent for filling my resume with things like “Can arrive in a foreign city, without any ability in the local language, and right away not only find a hotel but also, relying only on a three-year-old photocopied guidebook and incomprehensible signs, find the right bus to take to get to a park 45 minutes outside of town.” Because, really, I’m far prouder of that than of most of my other resume-worthy accomplishments.) We thought, from the guidebook’s description, that Dam Sen was going to be a Central Park type of thing, but no—turns out it’s the Vietnamese Six Flags, complete with a Ferris wheel, roller coaster, and blaring pop music. So we spent our first evening in Vietnam crawling through ice igloos, palaces, and life-size houses in the ice exhibition and looking at giant dragons and peacocks made out of hedges, China dishes, CDs, and vials of oil. Asia is so gloriously weird sometimes.


In a way, though, this evening was a good introduction to modern Vietnam: capitalism wins. Marx and Lenin and Mao and Uncle Ho can spout all the theory they want, but if Dam Sen Park, or indeed all of HCMC, teaches us anything, it’s that everyone really just wants to ride bumper cars and listen to Britney Spears.


Which is not to say, of course, that communism has no presence in Vietnam. At our visit to the Reunification Palace, The Duke and I were treated to a documentary of the American war in which, while displaying photographs of the North Vietnamese army, healthy and smiling, the narrator intoned things like, “To the American President: Sir, were you ever aware that when America wasn’t even on the map, Vietnam had over 1000 years of gloriously resisting imperialist invaders?” And, of course, much of our tourist activity was centered around the war fought over communism. We visited the War Remnants Museum, a very well-maintained museum with a well-maintained collection of, well, war remnants, where we posed awkwardly with partially exploded American bombs, American helicopters, and American B-52s (really awkwardly—I mean, do you point and grin, standing next to a machine that used to bomb the countryside?) and cried in front of the walls and walls and walls of photographs of American atrocities in Vietnam, from My Lai to Agent Orange (I use “we” loosely here—The Duke was a bit more stoic than I).


The highlight of the trip was also a war site: Cu Chi tunnels, a network of underground tunnels used by guerilla fighters during the war. Our tour guide took us down into the tunnels, and it took only a few seconds for me to want out: they’re about three feet tall and two feet wide, poorly ventilated, and totally dark. I couldn’t believe anyone actually lived down there, but they did, in hideaways connected by these tunnels that allowed them to set booby traps for the American soldiers patrolling the jungle. “And speaking of American soldiers,” our tour guide said cheerfully, after parading us past a set of murals showing GIs mangled by booby traps, “up ahead is the shooting range!”


The Duke and I looked at each other: a shooting range? At a major war site? We couldn’t resist, though, and I coughed up the money—a good $20, no less—for The Duke to shoot an M16 at a former Viet Cong guerilla hideout. Plenty of American 18-year-olds have done that, sure, but most of them didn’t pay for the experience.


And, speaking of which, I’ve never been to a place where I’ve felt so awkward about being American. Plenty of people hate us, but I can usually dismiss, or least downplay, those sentiments as semi-irrational: “No, Ahmed the Egyptian, the Jews are not a majority in America. No, Coca Cola spelled backwards does not say “No Mohammed No Mecca.” Yes, September 11 really did happen.” But in Vietnam, if people hate Americans, they have reason: thirty-odd years ago, we were at war. Thirty-odd years ago, The Duke wouldn’t have been the only American youth walking down the streets of Saigon in camo pants (an awkward choice, I know, but he had no other pants), and he wouldn’t have just been looking for a motorbike taxi. Thirty-odd years ago, the amputated, disfigured, and mentally retarded beggars we saw on the streets might have had their limbs and faculties intact. Thirty-odd years ago, Vietnam might have found peace.


All this makes it very strange that I didn’t sense any anti-American sentiment in the city. Everyone I talked to about the war—and I talked to everyone about the war—said they had put it behind them, that the country was pushing forward. When I asked if they hated Americans and thought the war was our fault, the answer was consistent: the government may have been evil and war-mongering, but that doesn’t mean the people were. Suspicious that people were giving me positive answers because I was so obviously a dollar-holding tourist, I asked a friend who lived in Vietnam whether had encountered anti-American feeling. The Vietnamese, he told me, have been well educated as to the protests happening in the States during the war, and most seem to have a firm grasp on the distinction between a people and its government—meaning, Lyndon Johnson probably shouldn’t a plan, but Petra and The Duke? Come on in! I had expected our trip to be, basically, the Tragedy Tour 2007, and finding such optimism amazed me.


And that’s partially why I capital-letters LOVED Vietnam. Or, to be specific, Ho Chi Minh City. Everything else I saw was cool--miles and miles and miles of rice paddies, enough to feed all of China if allowed; a floating market in the Mekong Delta; the tranquility of the Mekong, from a boat poled by a woman in a conical hat—but I’m an urban girl at heart, and maybe that’s why Saigon could steal it. Most cities I know only glow one color—the golden yellow of street lamps, or the white of houses—but Ho Chi Minh City sparkles in Technicolor, its maze of roads illuminated by signs in green, blue, purple, hot pink, any color you can think of. It feels young and energetic and bustling with activities and possibilities, and everywhere you look there are people buying, selling, talking, shouting, walking riding, standing, sitting, playing badminton, playing dominoes, avoiding the giant bundles of power cords hanging off each building and low over the street. It was hard for me to sleep during our few days there; I was on a HCMC high and I wanted, instead, to stand out on the balcony of my hotel room and watch and listen to the city all night, seeing the sparkle of neon signs and hearing the dull roar of the city’s crazy motorbike traffic—HCMC has, it is claimed, nearly one motorbike for every two of its 7 million or so residents, and at every intersection, you’d think that ratio is 1:1.


Cambodia was cool, and I’d like to go back some day, but Vietnam? I’d live there. In fact, if this whole grad school thing doesn’t work out, I’m planning on it. After all, I’d never lack for KFC.

Cambodia

Writing about travel is always fraught with difficulties: listing sights seen and people visited without simply writing a mind-numbing catalogue of been-there-done-that; describing the charms, or lack thereof, of a foreign city without sounding like a all-hopped-up-on-backpacking Lonely Planet writer; summing up an entire neighborhood/city/region/country/what-have-you accurately and succinctly; conveying the mind-expanding, psyche-influencing, life-changing aspects of travel and pretending you know something about the place you traveled to without, in the process, sounding like a pretentious git. Though, seeing as how I started the previous sentence by using the phrase “fraught with difficulties,” I probably shouldn’t even worry about that last objective.

Lonely Planet told us that, to find transportation from Siem Reap’s airport into the town itself, we’d have to find the motorcycle stand and pay about a dollar. I assumed, conditioned by Indonesia, that this would be a casual affair, a group of otherwise-unemployed men with motorbikes milling around and competing for my attention and dollar. Not so in hypertouristed Siem Reap: there was a booth, and a sign, and a queue, a strictly regimented system designed, apparently, to get me and my backpack perched on the back of a motorbike, without a helmet, breaking the speed limit. This wasn’t just lawlessness: it was official lawlessness.

That wasn’t the end of our transportation joys. After Indonesia, packages balanced on motorbikes rarely surprise me, but I must admit that the sight of a full-grown hog strapped across the back did take me aback for a second, as did the sight of an oxcart competing with cars for space in the downtown streets of Phnom Penh, an illustration of the clash between tradition and modernity as neat as anything postcolonial literature has produced.

I was a tiny bit worried about how The Duke and I would like the Angkor temples; since I had just spent a year in Indonesia, and he had just spent three years in India, we were both feeling a tiny bit templed-out; generally, there’s only so many wall carvings of Shiva you can see before you getting the urge to do some Destroying of your own. Plus, it was the beginning of June, so you—or, at least I—could barely walk three steps without suddenly looking like I had gone for a swim, and one of my eyes was swollen shut, which is not exactly an ideal condition for viewing ruins.

But I shouldn’t have worried. The Duke and I spent two full days in the complex, being shuttled from temple to temple by motorbike, and still didn’t see one-third of what we could have. We loved what we saw, though: Angkor Thom, the erstwhile capital city whose walls cars and motorbikes must still pass through; Neak Pean, a temple in the middle of a lake; Bayon, where huge slightly-smiling stone faces watch tourists examine intricate wall carvings; Ta Prohm, the prototypical jungle-overgrown ancient temple, whose air of ruined majesty had me muttering, under my breath, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”; and, of course, Angkor Wat itself, the temple which was, more than all the others, intricately structured, beautifully styled, and practically perfect in every way—except, of course, the way that had steps so steep I was forced to crawl. All in all, definitely worth the trip, no matter how many temples you’ve seen before.










And then it was on to Phnom Penh, on a rickety, smoke-belching bus, though green rice paddies and flat, flat land. The Duke and I bought and read books about the Khmer Rouge to prepare for the next phase of our trip, but nothing can really prepare you. We visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a high school turned prison/concentration camp turned museum, where we walked into cramped, tiny cells, past cruel torture devices, and through room after room of photographs of the 17,000 prisoners kept there in the four years of its operation. (You want to know how brutal the Khmer Rouge was? Four prisoners survived.) From there, we went to the infamous Killing Fields, which were, well, just what they sound like—a place for killing. Nothing I can write can really express the horror of such a place—the unexcavated human bones in the dirt, the central monument made of a pile of human skulls 17 stories tall, the sign posted on a tree informing us that babies were once beat against it, and all of this in a tranquil grove—and my eyes were and are filled with tears thinking about it—yet another time I couldn’t see properly in Cambodia—so we’ll move on.

And that moving on, indeed, is partially what Cambodia felt like: it’s a land of contrasts, traditional and modern, horrifying and awe-inspiring, and the speed at which one is forced to move from one to the other should give one whiplash. Phnom Penh, especially, feels like that—once “The Pearl of Asia,” it still retains a slight cosmopolitan European feel, the sort of place where one can stop into the Foreign Correspondents Club, order a lime rickey, and sit on the terrace overlooking the Mekong feeling like a character in a Graham Greene novel, and yet it’s also covered in a thick overlay of Southeast Asia—motorbikes everywhere, people squatted on the side of the road eating noodles, and a layer of dust and grime on the now-ramshackle Parisian-style buildings. And as the mind is catapulted from the roaring colonial 20s to the busy, noisy 21st century, one must pass through the dark ages of 1975-1979, in which Phnom Penh was totally evacuated--2-3 million people forced into work camps in the countryside--and roughly 2 out of every 7 Cambodians either died of malnutrition and overwork or were killed by the Khmer Rouge. I don’t know how a people can recover from such a tragedy, but Cambodians are doing it gracefully, with kind smiles on their faces. Life, I suppose, must go on.



And so it does. On our last day in Cambodia, while touring the Royal Palace, The Duke and I were approached by a group of Buddhist monks, dressed in the traditional orange robes. They hung around us for a moment or two, gathering up their nerve to speak with us, and when we smiled one of them broke the silence. “Excuse me,” he said, “can you help us?” And he held out a sheet of paper covered in statistics problems, his homework from the local university. And so we sat down with them, right there on the steps of the Silver Pagoda, puzzling over the difference between mean, mode, and median. When we were done, we bought them a Coca-Cola and got a blessing in return. And, as we rode the bus out Phnom Penh the next morning, The Duke and I were both thinking about Cambodia. How could we make sense of this place, of the simultaneous nobility and degradation of the human condition on view on every block, of the mind-boggling, sense-whirling contradictions? What could we think about it? What could we say about it? Had we seen Birth or Death?


I don’t know. And, after all this time, I still don’t know. And I’m certainly no expert, so how should I presume? But The Duke summed it up best: at the Vietnamese border, he turned to me and said, “Cambodia is a country you just want to hug.” On that point, at least, I couldn’t agree more.