world voices

I apologize, dear readers, for the two-day hiatus. I should have at least thanked you all sooner for your many, many suggestions as to how I could get down to North Carolina without spending my life savings, but alas, after searching high and low and finding out about airlines I didn't even know existed until this week...I have chosen to stay in New York for the weekend.

Part of the reason I've made this decision is that I have tickets to two of the closing events of the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival -- featuring Salman Rushdie, Kurt Andersen, Zadie Smith (I just love that burly British accent of hers), and the economist Amartya Sen -- and thought it would be a shame to miss them.

It is a wonderful feeling to be in the same room as some of the most thoughtful people in the world, and people who are sharing ideas, bantering, and oftentimes in a language that is not their own. I loved the literary festival in Hong Kong, but to be in New York and share air with Salman Rushdie and his posh British twang, I just can't explain it.

I've already been to two events as part of this festival: a conversational interview with Orhan Pamuk and Margaret Atwood, as well as a collaboration the next day by many famous authors, on the fest's theme, "Faith and Reason." Among the speakers included: Chinua Achebe (*Things Fall Apart*), Zadie Smith (*White Teeth*), Toni Morrison (*Beloved*), Salman Rushdie (*The Satanic Verses*), Martin Amis (*Time's Arrow*), E.L. Doctorow and others. Some of the authors read from their own works on the clash of faith and reason, and other's prepared speeches.

Doctorow read from his fantastic essay, "Why We Are Infidels", which was reprinted in The Nation several years ago, and ventures to explain why the mere existence of religious choice in America has condemned its citizens to a spiritual abyss, where we are, indeed, infidels. I excerpted the first few sentences here, but click here for the full essay:

"We have lately been called infidels. Yet we are perhaps the most prayerful nation in the world. Both Tocqueville and Dickens when they came over here to have a look at us were astonished at how much God there was in American society. True, the infidel is not necessarily a nonbeliever; he may also be a believer of the wrong stripe. But I think, given the variety of religious practices in our country, including that of Islam, that the term infidel as it has lately been applied to us probably does not refer to any particular religion we may as a nation subscribe to but to the fact that we subscribe, within our population of 290 million, to all of them..."

Doctorow briefly addresses cults, secularity and fundamentalism, and all in just 355 words. "Not just on other shores are we considered a nation of infidels," he concludes. And it's true. When we think about the conflict between Islam and "the West", we should also consider the war we have right here at home, between those of us who believe there should be only one spiritual path and those of us who cherish our freedom of choice, and choose nothing.

"Domestic" Trouble

My fellow urban dwellers, I thought I was exempt from the American OIL ADDICTION, but I was wrong. Here's one way it's affecting everyday people like you and me: the price of domestic airline tickets.

Let me set the scene for you -- my boyfriend is in North America right now, training for his Danish job with an American company whose worldwide headquarters are located in the quiet town of Cary, North Carolina, also the staging point for, and location of Martha Stewart's new community of styled KB Homes. (For those of you wondering, no, this is not a shameless plug, just a VERY strange coincidence.)

I would like to go visit him there this weekend, but it's a logistical nightmare. Cary's near Raleigh, and Raleigh's near, well, nothing. Trying to get down there for 24 hours was causing me a great deal of anxiety; no bus company, train option or airline company was offering me any way to resolve the limited time or finance problems that I have. After a long conversation with my beau, running through options of his coming to New York, my going by some other form of transportation, meeting halfway in Washington -- we decided it wasn't worth the hassle to try and defeat the evil airfare problem.


I became interested in other things that this amount of money can [and cannot] do for you. Did you know that one can fly to any number of perfectly lovely European destinations (and in some cases, get a night or two in a nice, 4-star hotel) for the same amount of money that it would take for a 1 hour and 40 minute plane ride to North Carolina? Well, for the price of a domestic American Airlines Eagle (1) direct flight from New York City to Raleigh, North Carolina ($832+tax), one can:

* Buy TWO 30G Video iPods ($299 a piece) and ONE Nano ($149). Of course, I won't be doing this because I am mad at Apple about the sudden death of my iPod (click-wheel, 1 1/2 year-old, B&W 40G).

* Take 9 1/2 people, at $86.25 per ticket, to see the new Broadway play starring Mark Ruffalo, called "Awake & Sing!". I *could* do this, but I just read an article today about Broadway's booming business and decided they don't need my ticket purchase anytime soon.

* Plan an $800 funeral. Morbid, I know, but this is actually one of the TOP hits when you type "$800" into a Google search. go figure.

* Fly to and from Copenhagen, one and a half-times.

I'll admit, long distance relationships are no picnic, but who would have thought that the closer we were geographically, the harder it would be to meet up?

Why this woman quit her blog.

uh oh. This is a very compelling case for me to NOT have a blog. shoot.

New York's daily rags crack me up

Two notable, and arguably, um, inappropriate front pages of today. Well, I guess we had it coming.



Also worth noting, on page 23 of the Daily News:

"POLES PULL PLAN FOR MUSICAL AT DEATH CAMP -- Warsaw -- After protests by Jewish groups, Polish authorities said yesterday they had withdrawn permission for the musical 'Jesus Christ Superstar' to be performed at a former Nazi concentration camp. The musical had been set to premiere in July on the anniversary of the liberation of Majdanek, the Nazi concentration camp near Lublin, Poland. But Poland's culture ministry and the camp's management said the performance by a local Polish theater group was cancelled."

WHAT?? What were they THINKING?? I'm not Jewish, but even *I* know better. (Although, thanks Becca, for your comment last post about non-Jews from New York!) Thank goodness someone came to their senses. I love the news.

Happy weekend, all!

Beaver Food

Oh, MAN do I miss the Brearley Caf.


Things to note:

- We never called it, "the Hot Station," but I like the sound of that. Note: we could return to the Hot Station as many times, for as many helpings, as our little uniformed hearts desired! What a wonderful, wonderful place to become a woman.
- "All menus for this week are made with Passover considerations." amazing. Matzoh in two recipes, and potato latkas! yum!
- "Chef's Choice." I don't know what that means now (seven years after graduating), but oh, isn't it just too exciting to think about?? (Maybe some of you readers out there still associated with Brearley can tell us what tomorrow's Chef's Choice is!) When I was there, Friday was leftover day, and that was FINE. BY. ME. yes'm.

I think I was Jewish in another life.

(Shout out to GHF Club, which convened for the first time last night over thin-crust pizza and Yuengling. yay!)

Blogs hype people. Blogs hurt people.

Recently, my friend Lisa had to change the location of her wonderful blog because she was being hunted, well, electronically hunted, by the people in the small town in Alaska where she'd been writing from. I guess when you are an immigrant to a small town that claims only 1200 residents, you have to be a bit careful about what you write publicly. She was worried about gossip, and perpetuating a feeling of "us" verses "them", so the new blog has fallen entirely under the radar. I even searched for it myself under her full name, the name of the town she lives in, and other personal search criteria, but with 5 bazillion blogs on the blogspot.com server, I didn't come up with much.

I think this might be the only instance in which one wishes that their blog WON'T be found. (I'm so paranoid about exposing her that I am omitting any identifying details, since I could be the leak!) To the contrary, I wish mine to be spread around like a fire in the dry, wild Californian forests! (Sorry Californian buddies. Maybe once I come visit the West Coast [for the first time ever] and glimpse all the glorious redwoods, I'll be less quick to use such an analogy.)

There's something a little wicked, and a little illicit, about reading someone's blog when you know it's not intended for you. For the millions of people on Blogger, TypePad and other blog-hosting sites, I don't think more than a handful expect to get a reading audience of people who aren't already in their cell phones, or email address books. We start blogs for different reasons, and those who don't have them or read them would call bloggers, narcissists. And maybe that's true to a certain extent. But there was nothing in Lisa's blog that was meant to offend or hurt anyone in the community. In one post, she expressed disappointment because her conservative town decided not to bring "Brokeback Mountain" to the local big screen. "Too controversial," I think they said (I don't remember exactly, because before she changed the location of her entire blog, Lisa was forced to pull this entry off the website). In some ways, I wish that Lisa's blog would have fostered a kind of open-minded discourse instead of a defensiveness, or worse, that evil thing in which we've all partaken: gossip.

I feel for Lisa, and the only comparable experience I can imagine is if I'd taken up blogging during my four years in college, where the community amounted to the 2200 or so students at Williams. I could *never* have gotten away with it -- the relationship between the college and town was a tenuous one, and I wouldn't say it was always peachy amongst the student body itself -- and if I wanted to write, I would have had to edit myself a great deal. I'm not big on confrontation, you see.

Anyway, I don't think I've written anything terribly controversial on my blog -- with the exception, maybe, of my criticisms of Duane Reade and Nick Kristof -- and that's probably why I've not gotten the hundreds of thousands of unique hits and links that would make my blog push past the 1 million mark in Technorati's ranking system...

Well, what else "sells"? Sex, controversy, celebrities. Well, my blog doesn't have any of those. Although, Suri Cruise? What's with the use of all the letters in her surname also in her given name? ugh. Celebrity births make me feel weird inside.

Google Zeitgeist

GOOGLE (n., vb.) - Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results, and an option to find similar pages.

ZEITGEIST - (Etymology: German, from Zeit + Geist spirit) the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era

This is the Google Zeitgeist for the week ending March 13, showing the "Top Ten gaining search queries" (not sure what a "gaining search query" is, but you can feel free to enlighten me) published by Google:

1. dana reeve
2. spacecraft










3. pi
4. NCAA
5. sopranos
6. teri hatcher
7. wafah dufour
8. sebastian telfair
9. world baseball classic
10. barry bonds

I learned three new things from reading this list in Advertising Age's first little "Fact Pack" included with our weekly dose of the magazine: the meaning of "zeitgeist", Bin Laden's pop star niece's stage name, and why the heck Sebastian Telfair is a big deal. I think this list is further proof that Google can call itself -- with some hubris, no doubt -- the cultural thermometer of our time. Think about how much it must change, week-to-week...what would it be today? Moses Paltrow-Martin, Julia Roberts, Broadway and scientology?

I also think it's interesting that all of these search terms seem to have to do with entertainment, rather than academic, political or work-related queries. Celebrities, entertainment, sports, media, pop culture have all been pervasive in the internet market, and I think that must be what's bringing about the dot.com revolution. That, and user-generated content like the many individual pages on myspace.com, Friendster and of course, blogs like this one. It's really fun to be riding on the rising wave of blogs at the moment, as media analysts put more and more emphasis on people who want to have some ownership over their interaction with the internet.

"homesick": Becky's first solo show

As many of you know, Becky was my best friend throughout college. There were periods where we couldn't appear without each other in public without being asked where the other one was. ah, Williams.

Anyway, Becky has her own artist's website designed by her sister, Ginny, and to which I link in my blog's "Links" list. For directions to the store/gallery, click here.

If you are in the New York City area, I would highly recommend, it's going to be great.

But *I* invented Smell-o-Vision!

In the fifth grade, our room teacher, Ms. Judith Berger, asked us to invent something. I can't say I remember the exact assignment, but I do remember putting together a contact-paper-laminated, comprehensive report on my invention: Smell-O-Vision.

I was inspired by the sight of sizzling bacon on The Cosby Show (and I remember, as many of you will, how Dr. Huxtable's wife, Claire, would never let him eat high cholesterol food!). It looked so darn good (particularly when Theo was allowed to gobble it up under the watchful eye of Claire and Cliff's long face) and I wished I could smell it, too. Wouldn't it be great to smell the burgers and fries at the Max ("Saved By the Bell") or whatever italian dish Tony was cooking on "Who's the Boss?". Smell-A-Vision was a revolution, at least to 10-year-old me.

Well, it seems the Japanese have beaten me to it. Smell-A-Vision is coming to a theater near, um, the Japanese. Scenes from Colin Farrell's "The New World", will be accompanied by corresponding smells released by odor machines located in the back rows of the theater. It does seem odd, though, doesn't it? I can't imagine that America smelled all-that-good during the time of Pocahontas and John Smith's fateful [fictional?] meeting. Of course I wrote about this potential pitfall in my Smell-A-Vision report ("...while we would not want to *smell* a documentary about landfills, selective Smell-A-Vision would not do,"), but it seems as though the only fragrances released with be aromatherapeutic ones, and only during scenes that evoke intense emotion, or when the characters are sharing ze love.

The original report is from the BBC, as you'll see, but I found it on the Fishbowl LA blog just this afternoon. Absolutely AMAZING. Leave it to the Japanese. First the boyfriend pillow, then the lap pillow for men, and now, now Smell-A-Colonial-Movie.

I boycott technology.

By writing this post, I am effectively falling into the inevitable trap of complaining via blog, but I'm on the verge of giving up on computers and technology altogether, and going back to the following:

* hand-written letters, telegrams, postcards and "just because cards" to replace email

* typewriters, if necessary, if I need to write something over 500 words

* rotary telephones, because at least you know they're not going to run out of batteries

* analog wristwatches (exclusively), even though I love the Swatch watch I got as a gift upon my departure from Hong Kong

* and finally, CD players. no more MP3 or AIG or whatever sound files you can think of. Good old CDs. And if that doesn't work out, I WILL find my walkman.

Which brings me to my point: my click-wheel, black and white, almost antique-by-now iPod decided to ERASE ITS ENTIRE 37 GIGS worth of music overnight, plugged into the same computer it's always plugged into, charging for the same amount of hours it always does, locked into the same dock, using the same firewire cable. No more music. none. gone. AND, to top it off, neither my iBook at home nor my G4 iMac at work recognizes the iPod anymore. When I plug it in, using any number of ports (USB, Firewire, you name it), *this* encouraging message pops up:

"You have inserted a disk containing no volumes that Mac OSX can read. To continue with disk inserted, click Ignore."

That's it. No offer of help from the computer, nothing. When I try to restore the thing on the computer, it still can't be found. I am pretty much ready to give up altogether, on all things created and released after 1997. The frustration, money and hours I spend on my Apple products at the Tekserve computer repair place [though they're VERY good there] just don't seem worth it to me anymore. I think I'm finished.

I guess this also means I have to give up the blog, too, and resort to more traditional means of publication. Wish me luck. Maybe I'll post another one of my clips to make myself feel better, or resort to retail therapy.

That's it. I'm sorry for the rant, but it had to be done. I just give up on the modern age. I'm not cut out for all of this.

It's my Mother's birthday!

Even though I'm quite sure my mother, Sally Eng Yee, doesn't want me posting details of her age on my blog, I'm going to, and you'll see why. Regardez...

Does this woman look half-a-century old to you? (She turns 49 today.) Here she's pictured at with my brother and some bamboo. I took the photo in Macau, a special economic region located just forty-five minutes' ferry ride from Hong Kong, when my family was visiting for Christmas 2004.

I won't comment on the brother, but suffice it to say he adds a little silliness to our lives.

Everyone -- friends and strangers alike -- should email my mother to wish her a Happy Birthday! She checks her email twice a day, once in the very early morning (we're talking 6am here, folks) and once in the afternoon, so you may sneak it in under the wire. This is my interactive blog experience experiment. I'm having dinner with her on Thursday, so we'll see if she mentions anything unusual about her email inflow!

Happy birthday Mom!

(Speaking of birthdays, does anyone ELSE think that Gwyneth Paltrow naming her newborn Moses, is just really weird?)

how Cambodia changed my view of what "help" means.

There's an awfully interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor today about separating the personal from the professional as a journalist. The article focused mostly on Western reporters traveling to Africa and finding that comparatively small salaries in their home countries could change the lives of people in regions torn by civil unrest, ravaged by disease and natural disaster. Interestingly enough, the article highlighted points of view that differ from the traditional, purist journalistic mantra of 'staying uninvolved'. In fact, an ethics group leader at a journalism training institute is quoted in the article as saying that a journalist might even factor tips, donations, etc. into his/her budget:

"After discussing the issue with editors, reporters should 'begin with the premise that, in addition to paying your translators, you should expect to leave money, food, or other items behind for people you encounter.' If recipients are included in a reporter's story, however, the donation should be mentioned in the article - for transparency's sake.

"A major reason for this standard: 'If you operate under real strict boundaries that you absolutely can't help anyone, you create this crisis of conscience that will drive good reporters from the business,' she says, adding, 'I don't think you have to separate being human from being a reporter.'"[1]

It's weird. While I agree with the ethics teacher's sentiments about being both a human and a reporter, I had the reverse reaction to a piece that Nicholas Kristof wrote for the New York Times website some months ago, when he went to Cambodia and bought the freedom of two girl prostitutes. As a reader, I remember feeling like he'd abused some privileged position as a reporter. It was sentimental journalism, not news, and not even the kind of progress report on modern Cambodia that I believe he was there for in the first place. To Kristof's credit, he questioned his own journalistic ethics in the piece itself, and paid for the girls out of his own pocket. Nonetheless, I felt like his pity was misplaced, and therefore his money. (Click here for full list of Kristof's Cambodia articles, available only with Times Select access. boo.)

I've been to Cambodia. I've seen the girl prostitutes -- hair straight as pins, eyes heavy with liner, flashy clothes hugging curveless bodies -- and while I have never encountered the "helping" problem as a "journalist", giving the girls anything but my friendship felt inappropriate. During my stay in the country's capital Phnom Penh, however, one of my traveling partners took up with a teenaged prostitute called Malyna, who he had resolved by the end of the trip to marry and whisk back to his native Australia.

There was little in this plan that I could commend. Malyna was a prostitute by choice. She was not proud of it, and for some time told us that she worked at a karaoke bar instead of a taxi girl spot. But we found out that she made a great deal of money hanging out around billiards tables at a bar called Heart of Darkness, and most of it she sent home to her family in Sihanoukville anyway, where it was their main income. Malyna was self-sufficient in Cambodia, at the top of her game, competent and confident. She knew how to save money, where to eat, who to talk to, who would protect her. To remove her from this context -- what she knew as home, and where she knew what she was worth -- would only be doing harm. But my friend persisted with his fantasy of "saving her" and upon leaving Cambodia, he made a promise to Malyna that he'd be back for her. I never knew what became of either of them.

It must sound insensitive and isolationist of me to believe that perhaps Kristof, and my friend, should have left well enough alone. But I think my point is not that we shouldn't offer help, but we should do it in productive ways that wean these countries off of dependency. I don't work at an NGO and don't have much experience with policy other than what I read in the papers and on the internet, but I know there are other ways to "help". As the Christian Science Monitor's article rightly points out towards the end, contributions on the part of reporters, or on the part of laypeople traveling through, will not solve any long-term problems, and may often invite jealousy from peers not lucky enough to fall into the cast net of charity.

All that said, I'd probably feel differently if I were confronted with an assignment in a third world country, trying to extract information from sources who were in need of something other than my friendship.


** More from The Nation's on Kristof's Brothel Problem

Photo of boy at Tonle Sap from www.toddadams.net

søren K

On Sunday, Martin and I walked to Assistens Kierkegaarden, a beautifully landscaped park and cemetery just west of the city center, where Hans Christian Andersen, Niels Bohr and Søren Kierkegaard were all buried, interred, buried, respectively. It was an overcast, muddy day...perfect for roaming the grounds, dodging bare branches and noticing the relative silence inside the park's tall brick walls. People rode their bikes, pushed their baby carriages, and Martin translated several signs for me that read something like, "This part of the park is an active cemetery, so please sunbathe on the other side of that wall." You didn't much get the sense that it was a morbid place so much as a peaceful respite from the neighborhood around it.

I wanted to remark on the city's reverence for a certain philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, whose work I read throughout college in my Religious Studies major. His surname, coincidentally, is the same as the name of the park -- Assistens Kierkegaarden -- making the literal translation of his name Søren "Graveyard".


It's really no wonder, then, that the posh ground-floor restaurant named for him in the Royal Danish Library is called, simply,





...søren k.








I've included, for my fellow religion majors, a picture of his family plot, in that very kierkegaarden. (Ten points to anyone who recalls Professor Mark C. Taylor stealing dirt from his gravesite?)

I suppose I included this post because I found it remarkable how one man has been memorialized in so many different ways, though, as the story goes, he never got to realize any of his own academic fame; his work was only published post-mortem. It's led me to think a lot about unrealized potential, thought, and art.

signs of Denmark

They say Europe is more sexually liberated than America. Models are pictured with bared breasts in haute fashion magazines, porn is played on network television (but only late at night, when the kiddies are asleep) and the people don't feel like sex and love are taboo subjects in regular conversation. But this, this is something else:

Translated, it means:
"MILK
it's nice"

Sure beats, "Milk, does a body good," don't you think?

I also like this sign, which made me laugh when Martin translated it for me:
It means, "Thai and Chinese Market. everything for sushi."

There is humor everywhere, if you just look for it. More substance soon. Sorry about the longish three day hiatus. Not getting much time at the computer these days.