Monday, January 5, 2015

Photos uploaded?

If you're on Facebook you can definitely now find photos on my Facebook page. If I'm feeling ambitious, I might try to upload some videos in a day or two.

If you're not on Facebook, I've tried to upload photos to an album on Picasa. But Google seems to be trying to get more Facebook-y, which is making it harder to figure out simple things like how to share a link to some photos. But I think you can see the photos if you follow this link:

https://plus.google.com/photos/101362065746989398132/albums/6100765352429377601

Let me know if you try that and it doesn't work.

It's now nearly three in the morning and I have to teach tomorrow. I was supposed to be sleeping and getting over jet lag. Oh well...

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Winding Down

I'm in Singapore's airport, about to start the long journey home. I really enjoy spending time in airports. They're in-between places where everyone is simply killing time. The habits and demands of ordinary life are mostly suspended, and so there's that much less to distinguish how I might choose to pass the time from how a Saudi businessman or a Korean housewife might. We all amble about a little aimlessly, read, chat, hear the same Muzak, eat from the same limited selection of eateries and browse and shop in the same limited selection of outlets. Nowhere else in the world do I ever spend any time looking at luxury goods. My friend Eddie has become a devotee of wristwatches. This evening I spent fifteen minutes looking at $1000+ wristwatches. They're very beautiful objects. 

Airports are also great places for winding down, and so this makes a good place to continue the wind-down that's been going on for three days. Since last I wrote, I took a longer-than-hoped-for bus ride from Hpa-an to Yangon, followed by a very long taxi ride in from the bus station, which left me with only a few hours to have a last look at that city, which got far too little of my time. The bus station is way out near the airport, and traffic in Yangon is terrible. Unlike Mandalay, which is choking on motorbike fumes, Yangon is all cars--and apparently the number of cars on the road has quadrupled in the last four years--which clog things up quite badly. I never got a definitive answer to why motorcycles are banned in Yangon--I doubt a definitive answer is possible considering the political situation--but one rumour has it that a feisty motorbike rider gave the finger to a car carrying one of the generals, who then insisted that the damned things should vanish. 

I had time for two brief stops, while also wandering the lively and endlessly fascinating streets of the city. The first stop was the Bogyoke Aung San Market, the country's biggest market, and packed with everything from women's underwear to objets d'art for the tourist market. And then I swung by Yangon's synagogue. Settled primarily by Iraqi merchants in the late 19th century, at its peak the Yangon Jewish community had 3000 members. That number has now shrunk to 20, who still maintain the colonial-style building in better nick than most of the structures in Yangon. The only Burmese Jew I saw was an old man speaking through one of those throat microphones that serve as the most effective anti-smoking ads I've ever seen. He looked Indian, and would have been an inconspicuous member of that large minority if it weren't for the kippah on his head. Inside the synagogue, a number of placards present the history of Burmese Jews--apparently Burmese president U Nu was the first foreign head of state to visit newly independent Israel--and insist that the Jewish community has friendly relations with the larger Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian communities in Yangon. 

And then I rounded out my time in Myanmar in true colonial fashion with a few cocktails at the Strand Hotel while reading through the Penguin Essays of George Orwell. I really love Orwell. I admire the clarity both of his prose and of his political vision, and I admire his flexibility, with an essay here assessing the political situation in Europe, an essay there on contemporary poetry, and another offering a perceptive analysis of the crude comical penny postcards sold at stationers' shops. But I also owe a debt of gratitude to Orwell that extends beyond the quality of individual essays. I read Animal Farm when I was about twelve, and I don't think I'd exaggerate if I said that I discovered literature through this book. That is, I discovered a book could be about something, that it could have a purpose higher than just entertainment. Orwell taught me that books can matter. A year or two later I read Nineteen Eighty-Four, which, in retrospect, was a seminal moment in turning me in the direction of philosophy. My life of the mind began with Orwell. 

By the following afternoon I was in Singapore. It's hard to imagine a greater contrast with grubby Myanmar than the pristine streets of the Lion City, and my time in Myanmar helped me appreciate all the more the achievement of keeping Singapore clean: I've now seen what a humid, tropical climate can do to buildings. They must have to scrub every bit of concrete in this city obsessively in order to keep the mould off. But I guess every city has its own particular challenges with upkeep. Every summer, for instance, the streets of Toronto are blocked off with road maintenance crews, as the extremes of hot and cold tear the asphalt to shreds. Chicago has the same climate, but it's broke and Americans don't believe in public spending, so the Chicago roads are riddled with potholes. So I guess Chicago helps me appreciate the achievement of Toronto's road maintenance crews just as Yangon helps me appreciate the achievement of Singapore's cleaning crews. 

And this left me with a day and a half--including a New Years celebration--with Mei Pin.  We went out earlier in the evening to Marina Bay, which is a hub of civic activity. This was where the fireworks would go off to welcome in 2015, which is also Singapore's 50th anniversary year. Preparations for "SG50" are everywhere and Singaporeans seem to be justly proud of what they've achieved in the last fifty years. Far from the stereotype of the authoritarian state where you risk severe corporal punishment just for littering, Singapore feels like a lively, open, and warm city--and there's even a bit of litter here and there. They've also worked wonders in turning themselves into a prosperous city-state with full employment. An island state with occasionally rocky relations with its neighbours, it faces a raft of challenges and meets them with great ingenuity. For instance, they've developed a state-of-the-art system for converting waste water back into potable water, reducing their dependence on Malaysia for fresh water imports. 

It was also weird being outside on New Year's Eve. I don't think I've ever seen in the new year in a warm country, so I'm used to huddling inside with a selected group of friends. But the festive atmosphere of New Years goes well with warm weather, and it was really nice mixing with the happy crowds in Marina Bay. And then we were back in Mei Pin's luxurious apartment with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot before midnight. 

Today we returned to Marina Bay to visit Gardens By The Bay, a massive botanical garden, which includes the world's largest greenhouse as well as Cloud Forest, a magnificent towering structure that replicates a tropical mountain ecosystem. It also came with a great audio guide, which made me wish more botanical gardens had that sort of thing. I really like plants, but I understand them far less than I'd like. It was nice to be able to really learn a thing or two rather than just admire the flora. And, unlike at a zoo, I didn't have to agonize over how unhappy the plants looked. So far as I could tell, they seemed mostly content. Whatever that means. 

But above all, it was just really nice to spend time with Mei Pin. We didn't stop talking the whole time we were together, and it still felt like we left far too many stones unturned. I didn't plan the trip to Myanmar so that I could find an excuse to visit such a dear friend, but I'm hugely grateful that Singapore isn't so far from Myanmar. 

An especially after several weeks on the road, it was hugely edifying to see someone I know and love. Backpacking can be a lonely business, in the same way that being friendless in a city is far lonelier than being genuinely alone. In fact, I quite enjoy aloneness, and I think one reason that travel appeals to me is that it feeds the introvert in me, who often gets suppressed in the course of my normal social existence. A month without a single social obligation to anyone that matters to me? The bliss! The freedom! But at the same time, I don't spend this month alone, but rather in the constant company of other backpackers, with whom it's very easy to form acquaintanceships but very rare to form genuine friendships. In my month here, I think I've met one person that I'd bother to pursue a friendship with if we lived in the same place. And even there, since we don't, I won't. 

And backpacker acquaintanceships can get dreary after a while. The same stale conversations about where you've been, what were the "best" experiences you've had, whether such-and-such a place is worth visiting, and how many days are needed to "do" it. I think "to do" is the most abused verb in the backpacker lexicon. People talk not just about "doing" particular towns, but even regions or countries: now that I've "done" Southeast Asia, I think I'll try to "do" South America next. This talk of "doing" is nakedly consumerist, and transmits a mentality that's been so fashioned by consumerism that entire nations become goods to be guzzled down and the wrappers discarded. My friend Reihan once slyly noted that, for all the left talks about American cultural imperialism, they don't acknowledge the equally hegemonic force of American counter-cultural imperialism. From Berlin to Bangalore, people express their revolt against global capitalism and Americanism by means of hip hop, ripped blue jeans, and the language of Noam Chomsky. Likewise, much as modern backpacking is a descendent of the hippie trails that led to Kashmir and Kathmandu, its dropout ethos has been transposed to the key of mainstream consumerism. 

I don't want to paint all backpackers with the same brush--not without taking a long, hard look in the mirror first. Like any group of people, they're a diverse bunch, and some of them are truly lovely: the sorts of people who think it's worthwhile to live with no more than they can carry on their backs for months on end, endure hardship, discomfort, and hassles so that they can visit corners of the Earth where people live differently from in their own tend to be curious, open-minded, and free-spirited. But, as with any general tendency of character, the upsides come with downsides (actors are capable of astonishing freedom and honesty of self-expression but also astonishing levels of self-obsession). And the downside to the backpacker's freedom of spirit is irresponsibility of spirit, even arrogance. A white person on the streets of Yangon has none of the responsibilities to others, is constrained by none of the conformity or social mores or the sense of shame, that a white person on the streets of Chicago is (and here it might be worth noting that the backpackers of Europe and North America are unrepresentatively white). Some people are primarily drawn to backpacking, I think, because it provides an opportunity to chuck the world, to concern themselves with no one but themselves, and have the added arrogance to think themselves better than the stuffed shirts back home for having done so. In Mawlamyine I overheard a guy boasting about how he needs to get off the antibiotics before New Years so that he can get "fucking drunk": talk about first world problems in the third world. Another woman I met spent hours (literally hours--I left the conversation to have a shower and eat dinner at a nearby restaurant and when I returned the conversation in the guest house common space hadn't shifted, and she was still the one holding forth) complaining about how high the prices are in Myanmar and how everyone's always trying to cheat you and are discriminating against you (yes, she used that wording) because you're white. To spend several weeks in this desperately poor country and to come away feeling like you're the victim requires a level of self-absorption that truly boggles the imagination. (Fascinating how quickly professedly left-wing people can start sounding like tax-dodging plutocrats when they find the shoe on the other foot.) Like I said, many backpackers--a healthy majority, I'd say--are lively, curious, and unusually gifted at looking outside themselves. But on the road you're also liable to encounter some of the most egomaniacal plonkers you could hope to meet outside a Goldman Sachs boardroom. 

One of the surprises of this trip was the discovery that Myanmar has already become a major backpacker destination: this country that had a near-non-existent tourism industry five years ago has now become an only slightly eccentric branch of the well-trodden Southeast Asian backpacker circuit. And one of the frustrations of the trip was that my short time here kept me very much on this backpacker circuit, and I feel I never got more than a very superficial view of the country. I've remarked in pretty much every blog post how picturesque and photogenic Myanmar is, and, as I noted after my time at Inle Lake, this is symptomatic of the problem: pictures show us the surface of things. And Myanmar has a very beautiful surface, which hides a very perplexing and troubled core that I've barely glimpsed. 

I recently read an excellent book called Finding George Orwell in Burma, where the author, Emma Larkin, also remarks on the difficulty of seeing inside the country. She travels around the country, retracing Orwell's steps and reflecting on how his time in the Imperial Police in Burma shaped his outlook, while also reflecting on how contemporary Burma (the book was published before 2010) has fulfilled so many of the dark prophecies of Orwell's dystopian novels. Despite speaking Burmese and spending so much more time there, Larkin remarks frequently on the difficulty of getting to know people, getting their true minds on the state of things, when they never know who's an informant and what Military Intelligence knows. Myanmar may be an unusually difficult country to get to know, but that makes the tourist experience of it feel that much more hollow. 

(Because I love jokes, I'll take an aside to tell you the two Burmese jokes in Larkin's book that made me laugh. In the first, a poor fisherman living across Inya Lake from General Ne Win's palatial mansion catches a large fish and rushes home in delight. He thinks he might fry it up with tomatoes and onions but then realizes he has no tomatoes and onions. Okay, might as well just fry it on the pan, then. But the fisherman has no oil. Roast it in the oven? But no, the fisherman has no fuel for the fire. Realizing there's nothing he can do with the still-flapping fish, he disconsolately returns to the lake and throws it back in. As it falls toward the water, the fish cries out, "Long live General Ne Win!")

(Second joke: a man makes a long, arduous overland journey on foot and crosses into Thailand to find a dentist. The Thai dentist who sees him is amazed at the lengths he's gone for dental treatment. "Don't you have any dentists in Myanmar?" he asks. "Oh, we have many fine dentists," the man replies. "The trouble is, we're not allowed to open our mouths.")

For all I'd be able to discern, Myanmar could be a happy, decent, and fair country, with a blossoming little tourist industry to welcome in foreign visitors whose hard currency will help them on their happy way. Far less than Iran--and in Iran I had the added benefit of spending a lot of time with locals who could speak good English--you wouldn't guess from the surface that this is still an authoritarian state, and is only starting to emerge from one of the most brutal dictatorships of the second half of the twentieth century. I think maybe I have a mistaken impression of what an authoritarian state looks life, since my education in the optics of authoritarianism came mostly from Cold War films that depicted an eternally grey Moscow where everyone sleepwalks about with faces gloomy with despair (but then I suppose Russians wear faces of gloomy despair regardless of their form of government). It's easy to forget that, outside of certain periods of emergency, people just get on with life. Even in Stalin's Russia, only a small minority (overwhelmingly represented by an intelligentsia who could write eloquently of their experiences) actually languished the the gulag or Lubyanka prison. Most people put up with shortages, moaned a little, and did their best to get by with what they had. So too here: what should I expect Myanmar to look like? Especially as a tourist, the people I'm going to meet are ordinary folk trying to make ends meet in the only system they're allowed to know, not the brave dissidents who risk arrest or worse for trying to change that system. 

Culturally too, Myanmar remains strangely opaque. The best example of this opacity is its Buddhism--and it's hard to begin talking about Myanmar culture without talking about Buddhism. If I knew nothing of Buddhism before I came to this country, my experience here wouldn't give me the slightest attraction to the religion. If anything, the Buddhism I encountered here was faintly repellent, with its superstitious investment of tremendous wealth in totally useless merit-making activities (it's not as if a new pagoda gets erected even to serve an internal need, like the fact that this community doesn't have one yet) and its gaudy bigger-is-better aesthetic that results in 500 foot long reclining Buddhas whose aesthetic merits rest almost exclusively in their size rather than in the expressive possibilities of the sculpture itself. But none of this should serve as an indictment of Buddhism, or even of Burmese Buddhism, any more than a brief view of hysterical pilgrims at Mecca should serve as an indictment of Islam (if you want more substantial reasons for finding Islam distasteful, try reading the Qur'an). The point is rather that Buddhism in Myanmar, like so much of the rest of the country, remains opaque to me: my time here hasn't let me see deeply enough to see the profound wisdom of a religion that has won me over with the very same texts and teachings--and even chants and prostrations--as are practiced here. 

One thing I have been struck by, which I doubt that a more extended acquaintance would dislodge, is the exceptional gentleness of the people here. Even in crowded places, I never get jostled, hardly anyone has tried to overcharge or cheat me--and when they have, they've been fairly unambitious about it--and the people smile easily and frequently. And even though the music videos and comic films on the bus rides tend to be quite violent, the violence itself is laughably contrived, as if the choreographers only knew of violence as a vague rumour of what deranged people apparently do sometimes (by contrast, Hollywood films could make one imagine that America is so awash with violence that only the most gruesomely realistic portrayal could pass the giggle test). At the risk of stereotyping, I might say that the people are like the landscape (and I suppose that's true to some extent everywhere): warm, gentle, and radiantly beautiful. It's hard to believe that this is a nation that's spent the past half century having its face ground into the dirt by a military boot heel, even less that this is a nation that could produce nearly half a million military boot wearers. 

Saying that such-and-such is "a place of contradictions" is one of the most worn cliches of travel writing, and unlike some more respectable cliches, it didn't have any meaning to start with. If all that expression means is that the people in a place exhibit tendencies that aren't always compatible with one another, all it says is that it's a place of more than rudimentary complexity. What would be really fascinating is the place that doesn't contain contradictions. 

All of which is to say that I won't conclude by saying that Myanmar is a land of contradictions, but I will conclude by remarking on one contradiction. After all, I think the temptation to the "place of contradictions" cliche is that it sets the writer up to present some contradictory tendencies, which can be a succinct way of drawing attention to the distinctive complexities of a distinctive place. And in this respect, my contradiction of choice is the frequent sight of Burmese monks taking selfies with their smartphones. Buddhist monks are emblems of the struggle to overcome the ego, and the selfie emblematizes the lurid egotism of the age of social media. Part of the fascination of visiting Myanmar just now is to witness this tradition-bound and isolated country stepping out into the global village--and meeting the likes of me. Meditation and chanting the suttas don't make one immune to the fascinations of Facebook, but the availability of bomber jackets doesn't make one chuck out the longyis that still outnumber blue jeans as the male lower garment of choice. 

If all goes as planned, I'll be home by early evening on Friday. I have to be ready to teach on Monday, so prep will take priority over sorting through photos, but hopefully I'll have photos posted before the weekend's over. I'll post them to Facebook, but I'll also post a link here to a Picasa album for those who don't have a Facebook account--unlike the seeming majority of Burmese monks.