Destructive Provender

Here, Fishy, Fishy

Entering the water as a predator reminds you that our bodies are engineered for land. Even at that, they are engineered rather poorly. We dominate the biosphere’s hierarchy not so much because of what we can do physically, but because of how we have learned to do it. This capacity for learning – our abnormal amount of grey matter – lets us tame plants in neat little rows, shoot holes wild animals with explosively-charged pieces of metal, and drain the oceans of fish. The common denominator for each of these feats is the use of tools. As a species, we are really good at building things – shovels, guns, nets – to augment our weak but flexible bodies.

One of our first and most versatile tools is the spear: essentially a sharp piece of something attached to a long, rigid something else. For thousands of years this combination of long and sharp has advanced our reach and enhanced our force.  Our pre-human ancestors used spears to fell mastodons. The Chinese perfected the art of using the spear as a weapon against other humans. Many groups of indigenous equatorial coast-dwellers still catch dinner every day with a spear in the water. 

I built my spear with a rusty three-inch nail I pulled out of my bungalow’s wall, a four-foot piece of gnarled tree branch and a roll of duct tape. With enough tape wrapped around the end, the tetanus-inflicting point smoothly tapers to the shaft, and I have an authentic, hand-made fish sticker.

With this five-minute hack job and a mask and snorkel, I enter the ocean for the first time not as a spectator but an active member of the ecosystem, if still an alien one.

Sunset Beach faces west, a short stretch of sand between two rocky promenades in a bend along the north shore of Ko Kraden, about ten miles of the west coast of Thailand, in the Andaman Sea. The sand is white and the water is a luscious shade of turquoise for roughly the first 300 feet. During low tide, a maze of sharp orange rocks covered in slimy plant matter emerge around the beach’s left corner, as you gaze out to sea. But when the tide comes in, these drowned stones become a feeding ground for thousands of brightly colored tropical fish ranging in size from little inch long clownfish to the (relatively) elephantine parrotfish, at almost two psychedelically colored feet from teeth to tail. With a water level wavering between three to six feet deep, it’s a perfect proving ground for the hungry amateur.

One of the difficulties with spear fishing is that fish are very good swimmers. While I pride myself on a certain natural aptitude for swimming, my bulky, jointed body doesn’t stand a chance in an agility contest with anything living here. If they sense an attack they can dart, weave, double-back or dive with the immediacy of an electrical pulse. And they are very good at sensing attacks. With protruding spherical eyes, fish have a near 360 degree field of vision. Water acts as a natural sound amplifier, carrying waves 4.3 times faster than the air, but even if it didn’t, a fish’s entire body acts as a microphone, (it’s roughly the same density as the water they’re swimming in – sound passes right through their body, vibrating the tiny, dense bones of the inner ear). And while humans can see and hear in the water, we certainly cannot smell. Fish detect chemical change by passing water over the tiny nostril-like holes on the front of their face, called nares; this “smelling” is one of the ways they search for food.

These attributes, carefully selected over millions of years of evolution, make fish very wary of foreigners. When my pale, gangly body floats by with a snorkel and nothing else, I look like a very ugly immigrant – one that couldn’t do much damage even if I tried – and the communal reaction is one of rather benign disinterest. The only time my presence warrants a reaction is when I make a move to try and reach out to touch a fish. However, when I enter the water with a rusty nail duct taped to a long piece of wood, and use this article as a forward appendage, a palpable sense of anxiety permeates through the shallows. The alien object with the sharp point instantly raises alarms in the aquatic community, and my presence is a planetary mass in their tiny satellite orbits. You can measure where the fish will be based on where I am. They circle in orbits just outside the reach of my stick, and constantly have one eye trained on me. Some curious ones will turn to stare straight at me, before deciding the best course of action is to dart under a rock. They are very good at keeping these immovable solid objects between themselves and the nail. I am constantly registering with frustration that the group of fish I was stalking – the ones that seemed to disappear thirty seconds ago – have been hanging out around my feet. As I’m rather encumbered by my mass, by the time I turn around they are already gone again. I will never out maneuver these guys. I have to outsmart them.

Which is how I’ve come to categorize three distinct techniques in the amateur spear hunter’s quiver.

1. The One Handed Bum Rush: This is perhaps the least nuanced method, and the one I tried first, and most often. Holding the spear forward, with one arm partially extended, I locate a group of medium-sized fish, preferably densely packed and near a rock. The best way to rush is to wait for an incoming wave and to glide forward on it. This not only offers more propulsion than a human body could ever self-generate, it also looks much less conspicuous. Instead of a flapping noisy, attention calling motion, I simply let the wave push my stationary body until I get within range. At that point all pretense of secrecy is abandoned and I lash out with maximum effort at the middle of the group, hoping to pin one unlucky guy against the rock during their scattershot escape.

2. The Two-Handed Concealed Guidance System: This is a more stalker-ish, predatory attack. The spear is held in the dominant right hand, which is extended as far back as possible, so that the spear point isn’t very far in front of my body, while left hand loosely holds the forward end of the stick. In theory, this protects the nail from view, making me a less menacing object as a whole. It also, with my arm fully cocked back, provides a great deal more torque, so that the subsequent spear thrust has much more force. Furthermore, the guiding left hand directs the spear so that it’s not so much a blind plunge as a quick sniper shot. Instead of blitzkrieging the fish before they know what’s happening, the key here is to try to be as inconspicuous as possible, until I am right on top of them and ready to unleash targeted death.

3. The Cast Away: Adapted from Tom Hanks, this involves changing the game a little bit. Instead of being a water-borne predator, I use my considerable evolutionary advantage to amphibianize the battle. Instead of swimming through the shallows, I stand with my head bent forward. My feet are on solid ground (sand) and my mask-protected eyes are just below the surface – I transform into a satellite observer, looking down instead of across. Most importantly, I hold my spear completely out of the water, concealing all danger from the suspicious aquatic eyes. The key to this technique is rigid stillness. Walking around, kicking up dust and looking very unnatural, will just scare my prey away. Instead, I anchor down, and become just another part of the landscape. Eventually, the fish’s wariness will turn to curiosity and they will come check out these new pale, hairy rocks sticking out of the water. When that time comes, I strike downwards, splashing through the surface and hopefully not spearing my toes in the process.

There are major problems with each choice, (the first is too obvious, the second rips my palm apart and the third makes such a big splash when entering the water that everything is scared away) and I am sorry to report that in two hours of hunting, I went away trophy-less my first day.

It’s another matter completely to debate the morality of this practice – something I did at length, although I can assure the reader that I had every intent of eating my catch – and the discussion is a good one to have. But it’s impossible to debate the excitement, the plain old fun, of trying to catch a fish with nothing but a stick and your own wiles.  I never managed to do it, but I’m not going to stop trying.

Bargaining

I was sitting on a tiny plastic stool on a busy corner of Dam market, just off the main drag in the coastal city of Nha Trang. As the stall’s owner moved to hand me another plate of food, I waved my hands. “Oh, no, thank you; very full,” I said, patting my stomach.

We had just polished off four rounds of what I can only describe as squid omelet: A couple hunks of nautical head-piece and tentacles chopped up and fried on a hot griddle. A thin mixture of egg and bean sprout join the picture, twirling on the searing black metal for thirty seconds before two quick flips and the tiny omelet lands next to its twin on a plastic plate.

This is served with a small garden of greens – lettuces and mints and basils and cilantros, as well as a fiery chili-garlic dipping sauce. Delicious, cheap, very alien street food.

We moved to pay, asking “How much?”

She points to both of us, “Foty Touszand Vietnamdong.”

A dollar each for four squid omelets, a steal in any country. We reach into our wallets. Zane pulls out a twenty K note, and she takes his half of the bill with a smile, two hands outstretched. I fumble through my wallet, a collection of huge, 500,000 notes and nearly worthless, pulpy 1 and 2 thousands. I find a ten, and hand it over, ready to count up a bunch of twos and make up the difference.

“Its fine,” she smiles, holds up the total 30,000 dong, and goes back to tending her sizzling squid.

In that singular nonchalant instant, she revealed to us that we had, for lack of any other term, been had. Willingly. “She just admitted to having us,” I vocalized with incredulity.

Bargaining has become the defining facet of my day-to-day life. To feel like you aren’t getting ripped off at every turn you need to engage in a seriously long back and forth to reach a deal that can even be considered legitimate. And even then, you know the locals are getting it at half the price.

In Vietnam, the going wisdom among tourists is that the first price a local quotes a foreigner is generally about 5 times the going rate. With that figure in mind and a (very necessary) smile on my face – after all, the whole back and forth is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of humor – I can pretty reliably get what I think is a fair price.

The thing is, when it comes to food, it’s an entirely different story. Generally there is no upmarking the price when it comes to street stalls. I don’t know if it’s because the motherly pot-stirrers have some inner desire to see everyone well fed, but the plastic stool on the sidewalk is, above all things, fair. You wait your turn; everyone gets the same thing and the price is an acknowledged standard. It’s comforting to know that in a country with such a rich tradition of food, as long as I don’t develop a new penchant for buying lacquered antiques on the street, I should be OK money-wise.

But for now this maker of delicious seafood omelets has thrown all of that in doubt. 

Ko Phi Phi wont let me be.

I don’t consider it an exaggeration to call Koh Phi Phi the most beautiful place I’ve ever visited. Brutal limestone cliffs covered by a luscious green blanket erupt 200 feet out of the turquoise sea to scratch at the vast blue sky. These cliffs guard stretches of gleaming silver sand where stunningly clear water slowly licks back and forth throughout the day. In the shallows, you can count grains of white sand through the crystal liquid; further out the surface protects a rainbow world – reefs living and eating and dying in a Technicolor whorl of motion. 

Some philosophers consider beauty as an aesthetic term. It can be taken to be considered as a matter of form. If a form is complete and whole – if an observer feels the essence of the thing in itself follows an expected pattern, contour, shape – it can bring a soothing mental effect. We don’t have to imagine any of the missing pieces, because there they are, right in front of us. Obviously, this means that there are a lot of beautiful things. Art is often beautiful, a mother and newborn can be beautiful and much of the earth is very beautiful. But of course there are shades to everything. Our lives are not split into two categories: the beautiful and the everything else. And so, in terms of degrees of beauty, the island of Koh Phi Phi takes the cake from this observer’s standpoint. It is beyond soothing to visually take in the landscape. It couldn’t be more complete.

But thinking about it this way, I wonder: Is the only reason I think this place is so beautiful because it supplies so many criteria I have been taught to think of as “beautiful”? There was one embarrassing moment in the beginning where I caught myself thinking, “This is almost like in the postcards.” My inner disaffected youthful criticism could still point out the flaws. And I can only assume that most other people could go through a similar mental exercise. Because here’s the thing: most other parts of Koh Phi Phi can be pretty gross.

Thailand is the most visited destination in Asia, and while the country’s Tourism Authority does not supply exact figures, it is widely acknowledged that Koh Phi Phi is one of the most heavily trafficked destinations. And that once the island’s iconic Maya Bay was cast in the title role of the 2000 Leonardo DiCaprio film, The Beach, what was once a sparse and rugged island has been radically transformed into a highly charged commercial engine, throwing a manic energy atop a soporifically enchanting landscape.

90% of menus have pizza on them; hillsides once covered by untamed jungle are being stripped, the I-beams of a soon-to-open hotel stand naked and sheer. In the town center, mother and child teams build and sell “buckets” to young shirtless men along a neon parade route of beachside bars. (A bucket is an electrifying combination of liquor, soda and Thai Red Bull – itself banned in several countries – stirred together with ice and served in a small plastic bucket. About six shots, and some speed to go with it, ready to drink through one of seven straws. It is the most popular drink in Southern Thailand.)

And none of this is necessarily a bad thing. The residents of Koh Phi Phi are certainly better off financially now that a flourishing tourist industry has found a home there. But it makes it weird to visit. There is a rather extreme dissonance found within the experience.

All around, you are surrounded by one of the most visually stunning places in the world, while the smells, sounds and claustrophobic mangle of the small society you are now part of are enough to keep you locked in a hotel room for the night. It may just be a richer experience.

All my new friends aren’t in themselves the problem. Like every problem, its true source is a personal one. The issue is that going out and partying with an enormous group of young westerners is undeniably fun.  After months of near total sobriety, I was suddenly surrounded by a gyrating, strobe-lit amoeba, filled from the inside out by some unstoppable desire to act like a complete moron. I blame the buckets. 

So here we have, on one hand the foggy memories of belligerence from last night (and the night before, and the night before that), and on the other, a snorkeling trip through a silent world of blue clarity followed by lunch on an wide arc of spotless white sand. Ping-ponging between the serene and the obscene. It takes an emotional – and, eventually, physical – toll. It is, quite frankly, absurd.

I seek solace in the water. After months of traveling I am finally surrounded by ocean, day in, day out.  When the powers of the tropics get to be too much – the heat, the blinding sun, the sweat, the crowds – then it’s time to find the water. To maybe strap on a mask and paddle through the shallows, to follow the solar rays filtered through the lolling surface. It really is crystalline. It’s shallow enough that there’s no room to tread, I have to swim horizontally, staring directly down at this beautiful fluid flux of light. Streams like liquid electricity dance through the water, refracted through the unhurried turbulence of the surface.  The phenomenon of it all is doubled, because the wave movement that births this show is also moving me, and so my motion and sight are linked. I feel the liquid sun. Nothing else.

Or when the beach is crowded, to walk into the lazy water and lie, face up, in the ankle-deep shallows on a silver bed of sand. I lower my head under the empty, clear liquid. The melee of European language is put on hold and the still, heavy stasis of the ocean fills my head with silence from the inside out. The rectangle of cliffs and sky above my head is an empty world.

Absurdity is the new beauty.  

Spice Orgasm

As I ran my tongue over the glistening, bloated interior of my lips I felt the blisters beginning to bubble.

“Uuughhh…” I let out a moan that’s half pain, half pleasure, before diving back in for more: filling my thin metal soup spoon with the red liquid and slurping, mixing air and broth and inhaling the spice. It constricts in my throat before seeping, boiling, in rivulets across my esophagus. My throat relaxes and another mouthful of heat percolates down into my stomach, and the process starts again.

This is the end of  a bowl of noodles at the restaurant simply named “Noodel Soup.” Madam Puii, the proprietor, sets up shop in front of the gas station convenience store every evening to offer a small make-your-choice selection of noodle soups. You choose the noodle size, the meat of choice, and she delivers you a new level of euphoria.

You get high from this soup. A slow, surging wave of power that multiplies on itself – a mitosis charged though each successive spoonful of broth, each slurp of those noodles dragging with them across your lips a confetti of black pepper, onion, sweet chili and fried garlic.

By the time you realize you’re on fire, it’s too late. Are those tears running down your cheeks from the heat or from the pleasure? Where is the sweetness coming from? Why is your mouth singing? Now you are crying, snorting, laughing. Is it a chemical hook or a metaphysical one?

It doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is that you don’t stop slurping the soup. You can barely make out your utensils through the fog of water in your eyes. Your lips went numb long ago, so when you manage to get the chopsticks up there you fumble around like a blind man until your tongue can take charge.

Before you realize it, the utensils have been dropped onto the wet wood table and the plastic bowl is in both hands and that peppery smell is now in your sinuses and the world gets a little darker as your vision clouds behind the circular rim of your destiny. The red tide of flavor lies cradled halfway up the sides as gravity guides it, slowly and precipitously, into your half-open mouth. You can’t stop for air, if you do the spice will choke you, a cough will erupt and you will lose the nectar. Your only choice is to keep going, power through it, until this liquefied crack has passed the portal and now you can’t move your lips, they are swollen.

There is no more talking, but there doesn’t need to be. For now, I am flying. 

Future

“Yes, this is where the really rich live, these houses are super expensive,” Ian explained from the passenger seat as the cab driver twisted his taxi up the mountain through a series of paperclip bends in the road. “They’re probably multi-million now.”

From the backseat I mused on this nugget of real estate information. Instinctively, my assumptions turned around a temporal dial. This is valuable land now, with a booming Hong Kong defying the global economic downturn, a growing tourist trade and the city’s new rank as the global leader in international finance, property values in the rarified mountain air at the top of the island must still be climbing.

But Ian isn’t talking about time. The “now” he is referring to is a spatial one. Here. As we climb the plots become larger, wider, fatter. They spread out across two flat dimensions, houses stilted against the steep rocks with a confidence impossible to find in the jungle of cement closer to the island’s coast. The higher we go, the more bloated they become.

Hong Kong is the most vertical city in the world. The average worker commutes to the 14^th floor on a daily basis. There are more buildings over 300 feet tall here than anywhere in the world. More than 7500 skyscrapers illuminate the city at night, many squeezed into the 1.3 km of flat land cushioning the island’s steep hill from the harbor waves. It is one of the most densely populated places on earth: one sq. mile holds an average of 16,500 people. In the vertical city height is democratic. It is the common factor bonding individual geography. It’s the two dimensional measure that separates the haves from the have-nots in this future city.

Up here, en route to The Peak, along the surreal inclined highway that twists its way through a megalopolis’s beating heart, the status of altitude is a given. The view north is one of the most spectacular affirmations of human potential. ­­­Directed towards Kowloon, and onward to Mainland China, the island proclaims itself, an illuminated testament of status and economic might. That view is available to anyone, thanks to a observation deck (and gleaming aerial shopping center) linked by tram to central Hong Kong; but to get here you must play along, joining the breathing, sweating, shouting masses crammed into the single public viewing space. We can all look down on the city, we just have to do it together.

As the car flexes against the asphalt, turning in and up and moaning against the road’s pitch, apartment windows stream by, glass windows that look directly onto a twisting mountain turnpike, everything following each other up. Up from the water, up from the street, climbing the hill to look down.

Hong Kong Island rises 552 feet from the South China Sea. Its first settlers spread themselves out across the coves and inlets scattered across the harbor, ­­and when the British colonized the Fragrant Harbor they established Victoria City as a free port of Her Majesty’s Empire.  Now the beating heart of the city is the strip of flat land between the base of Mt. Victoria and the northern coast. Here the titanic steel and glass testaments to human potential project their grandeur over the water to the mainland. Impossibly bright signage streams out through the night air as colorful LEDs flash like psychedelic nightdresses down the tall figures. Some flashy, some embossed with minimalist glamour, others a garish command to acknowledge sheer size. Amidst this commercial jungle the freckled incandescence of block-like apartments soar to near-equal heights. Everyone lives on the 26^th or 47^th or 13^th floor. The elevator is the common residential denominator.

This is the future. When space is limited, we have to grow up instead of out. Hong Kong has been practicing for years. The prevalence of vertical thinking extends beyond solitary buildings. Motion across the city is directed by constant shifts in elevation as well. Gleaming labyrinths of air-conditioned chrome coat underground pedestrian malls linked one to another along moving sidewalks that parallel the avenues overhead. Above the car-choked pavement, sky bridges direct a maze of second floor foot traffic between the ubiquitous mega-buildings as escalators, elevators and twisting staircases establish continuity between levels. As you walk from one point to another, you move and plan in three dimensions. Every citizen and visitor is concerned with the vertical. No one is limited to the starting plane. 

It’s not as though the city has run out of land faster than anywhere else, although, as an amoeboid collection of islands and inlets, it’s bound to run into the constrains of natural scarcity eventually. Instead, the current climate is one of imposed scarcity. Only 25% of Hong Kong is developed, with 40% of the remaining land reserved for public green space. The government owns the deed to every parcel of land in the territory, merely leasing plots to private users, and is very deliberate in how and when these are parceled out. This helps to drive up property values, to what have been called exaggerated prices, and generates a substantial corresponding tax base; it also ensures that any new building will take full advantage of its two dimensional height by asserting itself strongly in the third.

From an aesthetic standpoint, the constant and (it seems) inevitable rise of skyscrapers has created a tangle of contained ideologies all screaming for attention. Some search for it through design, others through signage, some through height. In the past fifteen years, the title of tallest building in the world has shifted three times; while Hong Kong has never held the title, two of the top fifteen now look at each other across the harbor, the precipitously named International Finance Center on the Island and International Commerce Center on the peninsula of reclaimed land jutting from Kowloon.

Their beauty, their grandiose illumination of the night sky, it’s shocking, inspiring, and all directed at a single purpose – the distribution of information. The buildings are messages, broadcasting through the air, sending meaning across the water. SAMSUNG, Sharp, HSBC: mega corporations shoot their names through the night sky in a flamboyant display of color. Others, like the IFC, try to force themselves into their observers’ minds, to subjugate via an enormous flashing steel phallus. The most impressive buildings rely on swag, and the Bank of China Tower is the O.G. of the Honk Kong skyline.

All of this is to say that nothing is understated. The universal presence of immense height, constant vertical motion, shock and awe aerial advertising, claustrophobic encounters at every turn – this city is a different animal. When two-dimensional personal space is diminished we catch a glimpse of the future.

In Hong Kong that future is recorded, all the time, every day. CCTV follows every taxi, watches every crosswalk, monitors the entrance in every building. All that video – where does it go? Is there a database of human behavior stored somewhere in an underground bunker in Hong Kong? A place where the movements of an 8 million person metropolis is analyzed bit by bit, turning citizens into discrete packets that can be coded, manipulated, fed into the algorithm of information distribution.

Hong Kong is a beautiful city; it is pristine in a way that 8 million people never should be. Part of the reason behind this is fear – citizen manipulation. There are no cigarette butts on the street because it carries a $5000 fine (Hong Kong Dollars). No one spits for the same reason. In a city run by money, every action has a price. But every coin has two sides. And with a prodigious surplus, the administration of Hong Kong can do things like build accessible public toilets across the entire city, do away with museum admission costs, and make transportation clean, efficient and cheap.

There is a palpable tension between the quality of life and the obvious (semi-) authoritarian rule by elite. Keep the people happy ($6000 checks for every citizen sound nice?) and you can do whatever you want. Meticulous planning is possible when a rarified bunch wields the real power – the ones that can afford to live in two dimensions. 

Bang-Kok your Bang-Cock

24 hours in and Bangkok was starting. Wet retching into a plastic bag over the side of the bed in the pale peach colored light – smoggy morning sunshine filtered through the ribbed curtains in a Chinatown hotel room.

A week later, having seen a Thai boxing match, five star dinner, new years eve explode, Thai lesbians and stage five clingers, we need to get the fuck out of this city. I am spent, drained, overloaded with sense.

This throbbing concrete center of Thai life is a city of smells, visceral and immediate, clinging to your gut: In the back alley markets of Chinatown, the funky foot-puke scent of fresh durian drifts between overhead tarps. Crushed chilies pop like sparklers in a bright wok, glossy with oil. Pale acid-exhaust sputters from the ancient motorized machines that cough their way along the asphalt veins of the metropolis. From a deep Styrofoam box lined with ice comes the briny tang of fresh seafood still flopping, crawling, blinking, biting and tentacling their way over each other. Cold, gleaming, Freon-laced air blasts out of a shopping mall’s sterile glass abyss. It’s a mélange, a kaleidoscopic reminder of the absolutely rich texture of Thai life.

In this eight-million person mecca the choices open up. I’m simultaneously proud and ashamed of myself. I remember how to live in a city. Three out of 7 nights I haven’t gone to sleep till the sun has come up. Whoop! Good for me, right? But why is that my gut notion? What am I doing? You want to experience a culture so you stay out buying beer until all the locals are drinking their coffees on the way to work.

But goddamn it feels good to live a global life – even if just for a week. Shots at the club; a city’s worth of girls and the games that come with them. How many more 48-hour days can I blend together into a phase-in, phase-out cycle of recovery and destruction? This trip has been about moving beyond the desires I thought I wanted. Now that they’re prostrate in front of me I am grabbing them by the hips without reserve. Is it the case that I can’t handle a city? Is the rural resonance I’ve been reveling in a reminder of something deeper and truer?

I have no clue what it means. I feel like I’m losing it (me) in Bangkok. No purpose anymore – no direction. No next. No goal. I feel floating. The past week has been so unlike anything I’ve done since leaving America. Withdrawn into comfort but I’m tumbling though emptiness. Soft beds and nice blankets and harsh corners in every nook of my mind. It’s no longer an issue of using up time – pacing deeds across a line. That ended when we got here. This is what I was waiting for. Before this it was the road leading up to a new year, to Bangkok, to Thailand, the door to the south. Now we are here. This is what I was waiting for. Now there are infinite possibilities but none really hold clout. Is this the apex or the valley?

It’s the city of squalor and it keeps sucking us down the drain for more money, more time, more hangovers, more problems. But it’s been beautiful. We met up with old friends – more energy and life and goofy excited smiles and conversational shakeups than we’ve had all trip. We need this. This is, I feel, a turning point. The spot where I stop thinking about what next. Because now I don’t care. It’s improv from here on out. Starting now.

Because it turns out we need to fly out of Thailand and back in for the coveted 30-day visa. This global-cosmopolitan youth dream I’ve been living the past week will continue. On to Hong Kong. It’s time to up the ante for Asian megalopolises. I am a young man in the world.

In a place with infinite possibilities, where do you turn? Mentally you only have one choice – to scrutinize yourself. It becomes so easy to turn inward as you live a ravenous outside existence. Where you go, who you see, what you eat – with unlimited choice you can tumble your way across a landscape of glamour, dirt and spice. It’s a deep, perfumed breath of life – a Technicolor shock to the system. This is worldly. This is global. This is fun. This is a city. 

Ethical Dilemmas in Laos

We arrived in Luang Prabang at night, after a liver-bludgeoning bus ride that included four separate breakdowns. We were hungry, tired and not at all in the mood to bargain hunt in a new town, at night, hiking through dark alleys that funneled the cold mountain air into assaulting wind tunnels.

We found Chanthanome by accident, stumbling across a group discussion in the middle of a crowded intersection between a small crowd of tourists and a guesthouse employee. We had already been rejected from three places with no vacancy and agreed without hesitation to follow this guy through the twisting grid of brick alleys to the brightly lit but thoroughly barren looking mini-hotel.

Chan was waiting for us when we stepped through the threshold. At first glance I took him to be the owner’s son, working for the family during the off hours from school. He is short even by Laotian standards, topping off somewhere in the 4’10” range. He has a wispy little cat-hair moustache, like the smear of dirt my parents asked me to start shaving when I was thirteen. In high school we called them spic-staches, after the look favored by the large population of teenage Latin Americans we sat next to in class.

But Chan is the manager of the hotel. After he gives us our room key, he gives us The Speech before we can unload our packs. I’m barely listening, foggy thoughts about fish curry keep popping into my head as I stare at the tiny man with the huge smile. His eyes have a indefinite crinkled look, his facial muscles seem permanently flexed into a grin.

As manager, it’s Chan’s job to make sure the hotel makes money. The guy from the intersection who led us here seemed to do a fine job of recruiting, but I can see from how many pairs of shoes were piled up outside the doorway that there aren’t many people staying here this weekend. As of now there are two.

But Chan really wants to make more money, this much is obvious. The problem is that he is too sheepish and nice to ruthlessly go after it. His guesthouse is hidden in a tiny corner of the busiest, most commercial section of town – down a side street and through an easy-to-miss alley. To boost his presence he asks his guests to help. More than that, he simply tells everyone who steps through the door how awesome the establishment is. You can get anything here; it’s a great value. But we’ve already paid for a night in a double room. We aren’t the ones who need convincing. But lacking the sack to stand on the street and confront the strangers, he rewards himself by delivering his sales pitch to people who no longer care.

For five full minutes he pins us to the wall with daggers of sound. It’s impossible to interrupt. He has the kind of smile you’d like to see on a nephew, an entirely innocent broadcast of earnestness. He also has a voracious appetite for head nods, and peppers his speech with these jittery affirmative motions. Every time he finishes a particularly consequential point, he carries himself to the next valuable premise with a quick vertical jerk. They come like rapid fire

“We have HBO” Check!

“Hot water in every room” Bam!

“Free WiFi.” Noted.

We’re saved by the phone ringing, and as soon as he answers we make a bolt for the door and escape back into the night to try and find dinner. Asking Chan for a recommendation is out of the question. Maybe this wasn’t the best choice. We were desperate for a place to rest, no questions asked, and we managed to stumble into an empty building home to an Asian hobbit with whose entire conversational capacity seems to be shaking his head through run-on sentences until he runs out of breath.

But now that we’re here, we pass in front of him at his desk two or three times every day. After the second day I begin to notice a change. The smile isn’t set in stone. When I walk through the lobby unannounced he still flashes the beautiful grin, but there is a hesitation, a moment of readying when his eyes tell a different story. He is sad. I can’t bring myself to ask why; I just want to escape to breakfast.

But Chan maintains an indelible appetite for conversation. Like clockwork, he pokes his head out from behind the computer screen in a shadowy corner to ask our plans. Characteristically we don’t have plans for tomorrow. We don’t even have plans for tonight.

No matter! He knows so many things to do. He reverts to checklist mode, falling into the same unassailable verbal onslaught: We could rent motorbikes and go see the waterfall. We could get a tuk-tuk driver to bring us to the rope swing. If we’re thinking about leaving Luang Prabang, he’s got that covered too. “I can get you bus ticket cheaper than travel agent,” he practically screams at us. His smile never wavers. He’s too unfalteringly earnest and fearlessly helpful. And he wants to get that cash. I see these two sides of the coin every time we talk. The one small bit of bad manages to taint the small mental portrait I’ve been painting. 

“We were thinking of taking a trip to a more rural area, further north.” We had planned on trying to squeeze in a concentrated blast of wildery northern Laos. On the list were Phongsali, Luang Nam Tha and Bokeo districts. The only thing that stopped us the thought of another soul crushing bus ride – at least 9 hours each way.

“I think you should go to Udomaxi Province.” He points to it on the map, it hugs Luang Prabang province to the north and east. “That’s where I am from. It’s very beautiful.” He’s building up a head of steam, getting excited; he starts doing the little-kid-jumping-from-foot-to-foot thing. “You can see many villages and lots of forest,” he starts. “And waterfalls. You can go to my village. My village is very beautiful, and you walk, maybe hour walk. See beautiful waterfall. No tourists go there.”

I admit that it sounds pretty cool, and close by, another plus. He watches me working out the details; he nods the entire time. His excitement is palpable enough to make my own abstracted expectations feel morose by comparison. “Maybe we will try and find it tomorrow,” I let on.

But when I ask him to point out on my map where this village is, his grin begins to break new ground, lips stretched taught as his teeth begin to show.

“You cannot find by yourself. You need a guide, and then they show you places that – maybe harder to find places….Maybe I can be your guide.” The whole time he’s talking his voice drops lower and slower until he’s almost whispering the last part, the offer, the final pitch.

It’s too much for me to take and I’m walking out the door even as I let him know, “Sorry I just don’t think we have enough money to hire a guide for two whole days.” It’s a lie, of course. I could pay a Laotian to motorbike with me for a few hours each way, but after three days of testosterone-lacking sales offers from this man, I’ve started to get angry with him. I’m nauseous on my own pity.

We never end up making it to the north, not for lack of motivation but for lack of time. We are scheduled to meet a friend in Bangkok and the travel time for the trip south is over 36 hours, we can’t waste any more time on busses. So we end up staying with Chan for four nights.

On the morning of our checkout I poke my head into the lobby to ask for the bag of laundry I had dropped off the day before. “I’m packing,” I explain. “Are those clothes from yesterday all set?”

He begins opening doors and putting his head inside, looking at plastic bags and dripping them to the ground. He’s slamming drawers shut and getting frantic. Watching him watch me watch him flail is beyond awkward. I retreat to the room. “Just knock when you find it,” I let him know.

He doesn’t find it.

Another guest took my laundry. By the time I woke up to ask for it, he was already halfway to Vang Vieng. Chan tells me that on my upcoming bus trip south to the capital, I can meet him at the local bus station. Here’s his number. Just coordinate and tell your bus driver and make the trade off. Smiles the whole way.

This is obviously absurd.

I let him know – plumbing the reserved assertiveness, the background static of frustration that I’ve tried so hard to put aside the past few days – that if he doesn’t get my clothes back to me by the time we have to leave in the evening, then I’m not paying for the room. “You can’t just be losing people’s clothes like that,” I announce to the world as I shut the door to my room. They were expensive, I try to convince myself. Maybe $50.  It’s only fair.

Then the possibilities really start to pile on top of each other. What a cool way to get out of paying a hotel bill. Has anyone perfected this con? Steal your own laundry and complain it’s lost. Or better yet, just throw away a couple pairs of underwear and a t-shirt. No biggie.

But even in non-fantasy world, a small part of me hopes that the clothes don’t turn up. Chan is confident he can get the bag sent back on another north-bound bus later that day, and by the time I leave for the night bus every thing will be set. If he’s wrong though, if I leave missing half my wardrobe the interaction will get weird, fast.

By 7 p.m. the clothes still aren’t here. I sit down with Chan and offer to pay him half. Here’s $30. I even get him to admit to the fairness, but he insists on accompanying us to the bus station. If the clothes are there, we can pay him the rest before getting on the bus, if not, “…then half is OK,” he mutters before turning away. He wants that money, and I cant decipher his true motivations for coming to the station. Does he want to help that badly, or is this possibly all some kind of swindle? Who is conning whom? Do we trust him or dishonor his efforts by refusing? Neither seems a wise choice.

So before we can say anything he’s hopping in the back of the tuk-tuk and the next ten minutes are the most painfully awkward.  Forced to sit next to him, I take the time to try and get to know Chan a little deeper. It turns out that he’s older than I thought. Older than me.

“I’m 28,” he announces proudly. “Look small but old. I have baby.”

“Wow, that’s awesome. Congratulations.”

“How old are you?”

“We’re both 23.”

“Ooh, so young,” now that he’s established his patriarchal role in the human triangle, he takes on a more lecturing tone, not asking for answers so much as demanding them.

“Was that your baby in the hotel lobby,” Zane asks.

“No that’s my boss’s wife and baby. Mine are not here, they are in Udomaxi province, my home.” He misses his daughter, for the first time we’ve spoken, he fails to keep up his steady close-mouthed grin. “I don’t get to see her much,” he concludes.

An awkward moment stretches the length of the entire road. As we turn on to the makeshift driveway that leads to the bus station he sparks up again. “Will you have babies later?”

ME: “ I hope so. Need to find the right girl first, you know?”

“Yes! You will. Maybe you find on this trip.” More silence. Then, “Are you working on this trip?”

“No, I quit my job at home to travel.”

“Oh, so you just travel around for a long time. Just spending money.”

“Yes, it’s expensive, but then we go home and find new job.”

“You have such a good life. You see many wonderful things. My life is not so fun.”

Now he’s smiling again, but there’s no mirth in his face. It’s a sad smile, an awkward smile. I look at Zane and he looks out the window. It’s impossible to meet Chan’s eyes for a long moment.

“But you have a kid, a little girl,” I tell him, breaking through the void. “That’s a wonderful thing.”

“Yes. I send her and my wife all my money so they can live while I work here”

“Do you get to visit often?”

“Sometimes, if I have enough money. If I can’t make money, I have to stay here and I don’t get to see them.” The conversation can’t go on. I can’t tolerate the awkwardness. The guilt and the pity and the newfound admiration keep my mouth glued shut. What can I say to this man? As we roll into the station he drives the final nail into the coffin. “Your lives – much better than mine.”

At the station we wait together in a line. Zane and I stand by the bus. The driver keeps tapping his toe. He wants everybody on – Now! – even though he cant depart for another 15 minutes. Chan keeps telling us that the laundry will be here any minute; he smiles, trying to be reassuring. What do we do if it doesn’t show up in time? “Thanks for trying, peace out, too bad you aren’t getting that other $30, guess you wont see your daughter this month.” I didn’t sign up for these ethical dilemmas.

Chan is acting weird too. He feels deeper that his smile can give him. It is a mask for the people he works with. But with his own people he is a loner, he’s trying to scrape by and he’s worried.  He is hobbit like in his stature and timidity. He has a niche and doesn’t feel comfortable outside it. At the bus station he has a hard time joking with the stoic Laotian men squatting and smoking cigarettes, still as statues. Chan is on the balls of his feet the entire time, pacing, nervous to get my bag of clothes back, but also clearly falling prey to his inner social demons. Compared to the bubbly, talkative man with the irremovable smile in the back alley hotel, I feel like I’m with a different man, smaller, more broken, more heartfelt.

Pics

I’ve added some photos to older posts. My ipod and computer aren’t talking to each other nicely, so i have to go through some backdoor mediation to get cooperation. It’s a pain and requires really good wireless internet. At this moment it is accessible.