Life in Laos

Maury and classmates

I returned home Thursday from an eleven-day visit to Laos.

The ostensible reason for the visit was to celebrate my great-niece's (Maury's) fifth birthday, along with her mother and her grandparents.  Maury's mother took a job in Luang Prabang a few months ago, working for a non-profit organization that helps publicize and market locally woven fabrics.  Maury therefore began school in Laos for the first time this fall.  She's making a fine adjustment.

Maury's Big Five birthday was, as I say, the ostensible reason for my visit.  The underlying reason, of course, was that I never turn down an excuse to travel somewhere.  As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Maury's father and I visited Laos together seven years ago.  I loved it, and was eager for this wonderful pretext for a return visit.

Getting there isn't necessarily half the fun.  It's a 13-hour flight from Seattle to Seoul, and another eight hours from Seoul to Bangkok.  After arrival in Bangkok at 11 p.m., it was a relief to get a short night's sleep at the airport hotel, before continuing for another two hours to Luang Prabang.  Coming home simply reversed that process, with the addition of an eight-hour layover in Bangkok, and a 13-hour layover in Seoul.  I was exhausted on arrival home, of course -- but in pretty good shape and on adrenaline when I arrived in Laos.

We stayed at a beautiful, small hotel overlooking the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers.  The view of the small boats passing by from my balcony was always entertaining, as were the views from the outdoor café across the street where the hotel served our breakfast.  The weather was tropically warm, but quite moderate in the early morning and late evening.  Conditions were well nigh idyllic.

The "ancient" section of Luang Prabang is a long peninsula between the two temporarily parallel rivers.  Only four streets run the length of the peninsula, interrupted at one point by Mt. Phousi, a sacred hill with a famous shrine on the summit.  The old city contains about 34 "wats," or temples, but is largely given over otherwise to the needs of tourists.  The commercialism is there, but is always tasteful and never really blatant -- largely, no doubt, because the city is protected as a UNESCO-designated cultural site.  UNESCO imposes strict rules on how each building is used and how, if it all, it can be modified.  Local officials seem somewhat concerned that their city is being held back as a museum, but with tourism the major source of income, their protests are muted.

The entire old city is easily walkable from one end to the other.  When we went beyond this peninsular core, we traveled by tuk tuk -- small trucks used as taxis.  Aside from tuk tuks, virtually all the motorized traffic is by motor scooter.

We hung out with Maury and her mother, and attended birthday parties for Maury at her school and at a hotel outside the central area.  We spent a lot of time walking, drinking in riverside watering holes and eating in riverside cafés, and visiting temples.  Photographic opportunities were everywhere.  We made a couple of excursions out of town -- to the Pak Ou caves, two hours up the Mekong by small water taxi; and the Kuang Si waterfall, about an hour ride by tuk tuk.

I spent only eight nights in Luang Prabang, which is a short visit for such a long journey -- but felt as though I'd been there long enough to have a good acquaintance with the city.  The Lao seem to be a happy people.  The service everywhere was relaxed and friendly -- friendly even beyond the friendliness normally dictated by good customer relationships.

I left Luang Prabang (or LP, as now I familiarly call it) feeling relaxed and pleased with my visit.  I'm quite sure I'll be back.

Expelled from paradise

Tobias Wolff teaches English and creative writing at Stanford University.  I first learned of his writing when I was sent his fictionalized childhood memoir, This Boy's Life, as part of a subscription to works by Stanford faculty.  I liked it, having as yet no inkling that it would ultimately be made into a movie, a star vehicle for a young Leonardo DiCaprio.

In This Boy's Life, Wolff tells of Toby's unhappy and somewhat delinquent childhood in a small town in the North Cascades.  Desperate to escape the narrowness of his life and the cruelty of his stepfather, he falsifies his school grades and invents a new, straight-A, Eagle Scout persona, a persona that expressed his dreams if not his reality ("It was a truth known only to me, but I believed in it more than I believed in the facts arrayed against it."), hoping to transfer to a top East Coast school.  He ends up accepted by the highly selective Hill School in Pennsylvania.  He loves the school, performs abysmally, and, in an epilogue, discloses that he flunks out his senior year.

I did not do well at Hill.  How could I?  I knew nothing.  My ignorance was so profound that entire class periods would pass without my understanding anything that was said.  ...  While the boys around me nodded off during Chapel I prayed like a Moslem, prayed that I would somehow pull myself up again so I could stay in this place that I secretly and deeply loved.

A nice indictment of the secondary education offered by many small town schools.

Failure and dashed hopes at such a young age leave scars.  In Wolff's novel Old School, a bright Seattle native, attending a school similar to the Hill School, desperately seeks admission to the world of the literary elite by winning a prize for his school's best short story.  The annual prize winner enjoys a private meeting with a famous author -- in this term, Hemingway.  The boy suffers from writer's block, he procrastinates, he panics, and he eventually copies a story written by a student in another school's literary journal.  The plagiarism is discovered.  The boy is expelled, devastated.

This year, I glanced at a list of suggested summer readings published by the Archdiocese of Seattle.  Among the usual lives of saints and works of piety, I was surprised to see Wolff's first book of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs.  Curious, I decided to give it a read. 

Wonderful stories.  Wolff's writing is spare, and the morals of his stories are complex.  The reader is sugar-fed nothing.  He reads the often sad, sometimes amusing, always surprising lives of his protagonists, and ends each story feeling stunned, left to draw his own conclusions.  If any quality unites all the stories in this collection, I'd have to say that it is a frightening sense of how isolated each person's life really is, how little he "connects" with those around him.  Wolff's characters meet, talk, befriend each other, perhaps even marry.  But they have no real understanding of or empathy -- or often even sympathy -- for each other. 

In "Maiden Voyage," for example, a couple is sent on a cruise by their children, in celebration of their golden anniversary.  They "love" each other, each in his own fashion, but lack any awareness of each other's interior lives.  The story ends at a festive costume party, in which the ship's social director points to their marriage as an example for all to emulate.  The couple move (he reluctantly) onto the dance floor, to begin the romantic dance for the others to follow:

Nora moved close to him, pressed her cheek to his. ...  His unpatched [pirate's] eye ached.  Howard turned slowly around to escape Stella's grin, and above it, the winking of her tiara in the moving red light.

End of story.

In the eponymous Garden, a professor who has played it safe during her entire career and, as a result, has accomplished little, is invited by a former friend to apply for a position at a much better school.  She learns, during the interview process, that she has been invited to travel across the country and submit to the interrogation of the faculty merely because state law requires that one woman be so invited for each new position.  Everyone, including her one-time friend, has already agreed on hiring a better qualified applicant. 

Devastated, she stands in front of an audience of faculty and students, delivering a "class" in the final part of the bogus ritual. On the spur of the moment, she deviates from her expected analysis of the Marshall Plan.  Instead, the audience hears her extemporaneous description of bloodthirsty Iroquois torture techniques, and the supposed speech delivered by two Christian missionaries while dying under that torture:

"Mend your lives," she said.  "You have deceived yourselves in the pride of your hearts and the strengths of your arms.  Though you soar aloft like the eagle, though your nest is set among the stars, thence I will bring you down, says the Lord.  Turn from power to love. Be kind.  Do justice.  Walk humbly.

The faculty moderators and her former friend -- representing a school that stands for none of the virtues urged by the dying missionaries upon their heathen tormentors -- are horrified, and try to stop her from continuing.  "But Mary had more to say, much more."  She turns off her hearing aid so she won't be distracted by their cries.

But the story I liked best -- and the one that once more hearkens back to Wolff's unfortunate experience at the Hill School -- is "Smokers."

The unnamed narrator is a freshman boy from a small town in Oregon (a town not really near Portland, but that's how he describes it:  "In those days I naively assumed everyone had heard of Portland.") who's about to start prep school at Choate on a scholarship.  Being on scholarship means -- in the era in which the story takes place -- that he begins prep school with at least one social strike against him.  But he is canny and has prepared well, mastering in advance the clothes, the slang, and the body language that will allow him to fit in.  His ultimate ambition is unremarkable:

I wanted to know boys whose fathers ran banks and held cabinet office and wrote books.  I wanted to be their friend and go home with them on vacation and someday marry one of their sisters.

He meets Eugene on the train ride from New York to Connecticut, an odd-appearing boy who is wearing an alpine hat with a feather.  He quickly decides that Eugene -- himself another scholarship lad -- has none of the upper class qualities that he is seeking in new friends.  He rebuffs Eugene's too eager attempts at friendship.

As the year progresses, the narrator's roommate quits school, leaving him alone in a single room.  Eugene, on the other hand, is randomly assigned to Talbot Nevin, Jr., of Talbot Nevin, Sr., fame -- the father having been one of the school's great benefactors and a race car hobbyist who travels in celebrity circles.  Our hero virtually drools, and eagerly attempts to win Talbot's friendship without becoming entangled in Eugene's somewhat feckless life.

Talbot shows only vague and detached interest in his overtures, however.  In fact, Talbot seems vague and detached in his associations with all of the other students.  But the three boys form a certain casual friendship among themselves, with Talbot drawing his two admirers into his own attitude of reflexive contempt for school rules and requirements.  Talbot invites Eugene home for Christmas, inspiring jealousy and longing on the narrator's part.  But Christmas turns out to be no more a success for Eugene than it was for the narrator while visiting some unpleasant relatives in Baltimore.

Smoking was strictly forbidden at Choate, but -- inspired by Talbot -- all three boys smoke whenever they can, enjoying the danger as much as the nicotine.  But the narrator is cautious:

Because I was not rich my dissatisfaction could not assume a really combative form.  I paddled around on the surface, dabbling in revolt by way of the stories I wrote for ... the school literary journal.

Heeding Talbot's plea, he helps the celebrity kid pass English by staying up nights writing essays for him.  Talbot is pleased with the grades, but not enthusiastically grateful.  When the narrator finally stops helping him, Talbot's not bothered -- he already has received enough good grades on "his" earlier essays to win a C+, which is just fine with him.

Meanwhile, Eugene -- although socially gauche and often ridiculed -- isn't disliked, and has obtained a certain amount of social success through his strength on the swimming team.  Still blissfully unaware of the narrator's disdain, Eugene suggests that they room together the following year, but accepts gracefully the narrator's polite refusal.  All seems to be going well for all three boys.

And  then lightning strikes.  Eugene is caught in the act of smoking, and a search of his room reveals a wealth of Talbot's cigarette butts and other evidence of nicotine use.  Talbot, his roommate, escapes suspicion -- he is "one of us," apparently.  The narrator is even further from the circle of suspicion; his transgressions, like his entire life, have been cautious and calculated.  And so Eugene -- friendly, open, uncalculating -- and slightly bizarre -- is forced to face the music alone. 

A cab is called.  Luggage is brought out of the dorm.  

Then the headmaster and the dean came out of the house with Eugene behind them.  Eugene was wearing his hat.  He shook hands with both of them and then with Big John.  Suddenly he bent over and put his hands up to his face.  The dean reached out and touched his arm.  They stood like that for a long time, the four of them, Eugene's shoulders bucking and heaving. ... When I looked out the window again the cab was gone.  The headmaster and the dean were standing in the shadows, but I could see Big John clearly.  ... [S]omething he said made the headmaster laugh, not really a laugh, more like a giggle.  The only thing I heard was the word "feathers."

Eugene now gone, Talbot asks the narrator to room with him.  The narrator thinks briefly of turning Talbot in for having been the far more active smoker, but that doesn't seem to make much sense.  Besides, the narrator would himself be implicated, as well. 

If you wanted to get technical about it, he [Eugene] was guilty as charged a hundred times over.  It wasn't as if some great injustice had been done.

Once more, Wolff ruminates on the act of expulsion from prep school.  Once more he describes a likable, somewhat naïve transgressor -- technically guilty, but an innocent at heart -- whose life may have been destroyed by a heartless institution whose own ethics, snobberies and inability to make wise and careful judgments about its students calls its own integrity into question.

Instrument of peace

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is discord, harmony;

Where there is error, truth;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

And where there is sadness, joy.

What do Jorge Mario Bergoglio and I have in common?  How about a connection with St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast day falls tomorrow, October 4?  I chose "Francis" as my name at Confirmation, and Jorge chose "Francis" as his name upon assuming the papacy.

Great minds think alike.

Unlike many of the saints canonized by the church, St. Francis wasn't a martyr.  He wasn't a great theologian -- a "Doctor of the Church."  He wasn't a Pope, or a diplomat, or a political figure.  He did found a religious order, but its members didn't reside in secluded monasteries, as monks to that date had done; they wandered about the world, sharing the poverty of the people to whom they preached. 

Francis was blessed with a facility with language, and he was one of the earliest writers to use an Italian dialect -- rather than Latin -- in serious writing. 

I've always believed that St. Francis wrote the familiar "Prayer of St. Francis," a portion of which is quoted above.   I learned only today that no recorded copy of the prayer dates back before 1912, when it probably was composed, in French, for a small religious publication.  But if Francis didn't write it, it certainly was written in his spirit.  He would have approved.

"The Prayer of St. Francis" sets forth goals for us all -- not just for Christians.  It describes what it means to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.  The world in 2014 is a good time to re-read and consider how we might apply these aspirations to our own lives. 

But then, any year would be such a year.

Empathy with Shelob

These are bad days for us arachnophobes.  Wherever I venture past my front door, I'm forced to contend with the increasingly gigantic webs of garden spiders.  One web totally blocked the rear door leading to my back deck.  Another was suspended across the walkway from my front porch.  A third spanned my driveway, barring access to my garbage can.

We are told that these same spiders have been around for months.  But only now, as summer ends and fall begins, have they grown large enough to create a serious nuisance.  Only now do I jump as I spot them squatting complacently in the center of their webs, awaiting their prey.  Only now have I begun cringing away from imaginary or not-so-imaginary webs lying in my path each time I leave the house.

But as the word arachnophobia suggests, I merely have an unreasonable and instinctive fear of spiders; I don't hate the eight-legged beasts.  In fact, I rather admire them.  I admire them to the point that I'm loath to disturb their webs, despite the inconvenience those webs present, and the shivers they perhaps induce.

The webs are miracles of engineering, created by small creatures with simple nervous systems, unable to see farther than a few inches in front of their faces (had they faces), and capable (we presume) of acting only by instinct.  They laboriously excrete and send out into the wind silken strands that stick to surrounding branches, often several feet away, and then begin the laborious process of producing their Halloweenish orb webs.  The webs require a lot of protein as building material, and the process of building the webs consumes a lot of energy.  When the web is broken and cannot be quickly repaired, the spider is apt to eat the remaining remnants -- to restore its stock of protein -- before beginning once again.

The spider can live for a surprisingly long time without food, but sooner or later, if the hunting has not been good, she'll die of starvation.  Typical garden spiders -- the ones that concern me at this time of year -- live only one season, and die with the first frost.  Their lives, if not cut short by accident or predation, consist of hatching, spinning, mating ("externally") and then consuming their mate as a post-coital snack, extracting the juices from whatever prey fortuitously brushes up against their web, and then, in the end, dying of hypothermia.

A spider's life, as Thomas Hobbes might have put it, is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

So I anthropomorphize the little buggers.  They work harder that I do, or than anyone I know does.  They patiently rebuild their webs over and over, as each web is destroyed by acts of God or of men, a patience that famously inspired Robert Bruce of Scotland.  They have no aspirations.  They ask only to live long enough to produce little spiders -- who in turn will have no greater aspirations of their own -- and then die.  Not for them a quiet cup of coffee, while enjoying their garden.  Not for them the love of happy grandchildren.  Not for them a seeking for the good, the true, and the beautiful.  Not for them moments in which to philosophize on the meaning of it all.

It's a hell of a life, a spider's life.  I don't envy them.  And their lives resemble all too closely the lives led by all too many of our fellow humans.  I empathize with spiders, even as a loathe them.

I wouldn't kick a starving peasant out of my path, would I?  Hence the bizarre spectacle I make of myself as I leave the house or take out the garbage -- tip-toeing about, ducking and weaving, trying insofar as possible not to disturb the giant webs that obstruct me.  Avoiding -- except when totally necessary -- the easy option of brushing the web aside with a stick, opening a lane of travel for my own convenience.

Bless you, you ugly little devils.  The quickly-approaching first frost will soon end your sad lives. Enjoy these last sunny days while you can.

Midnight at the Pera Palace

When I first saw the Pera Palace, nearly twenty years ago, you had to have a rather specific reason for being in that section of Istanbul, like getting a lamp rewired or calling on a transgender prostitute. 

So begins Charles King's recent history, Midnight at the Pera Palace.  It is an enticing opening sentence, because family members and I first saw the Pera Palace exactly twenty years ago last month.  We were seeking neither rewiring nor prostitution, transgendered or otherwise. We were seeking the hotel in which Agatha Christie is reputed to have written her masterpiece, Murder on the Orient Express. 

We had drinks at the hotel bar, and wandered around the premises.  I recall feeling slightly disappointed with the overall appearance of the hotel.  If I'd been as good a writer as Mr. King, I would have written in my journal that the hotel

was squat and square, wrapped in dirty, green-plastered marble.  Its faded fin-de-siècle grandeur was out of place amid the seedy mid-rises that had grown up pell-mell in the 1970s and 1980s.  Inside, the red-velvet chairs in the Orient Bar were always empty.

I do remember the bar as being empty and dark -- not dark in a mysterious and thrilling way, but in an abandoned, what's-the-use sort of way.

But King uses the Pera Palace -- much revitalized by new owners in the past twenty years, he notes -- as the central point around which revolves his history of Istanbul from the dying years of the Ottoman Empire to the post-War era.  From the hotel, he expands his narrative to the history of Istanbul, the dramatic transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the Turkish Republic, Turkey's difficulty in dealing with its minorities, the emigration of Russians into Istanbul, Turkey's complicated relationship with the Great Powers in both world wars, and the surprising (to me) role of Istanbul in the migration of Europe's Jews to the British Palestine mandate during and after World War II.

The book covers a lot of ground, but it does so by discussing the lives of those who suffered through the period, as well as those who shaped it and who benefitted from it.  And the narrative always returns to the role of the Pera Palace -- a writer's device that at times seems a bit gimmicky, but one which, in general, successfully centers the story, causing complex events to cohere in an understandable manner.

Some of the history -- such as Turkey's treatment of its Armenian and Greek minorities -- I was aware of, to some extent.  But the book provides an excellent and balanced treatment of Kemel Ataturk's program to change the cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire -- with its carefully balanced treatment of the many religions and ethnic groups that it encompassed -- into a nationalistic Turkish state.  This program, to some degree, merely reflected the Empire's loss of all its territories outside Anatolia and the European area around Istanbul -- but Kemel made a virtue of necessity, creating a more cohesive "modern" state, one that was more homogeneous ethnically and completely secular religiously.

He did so, of course, by disrupting or ending the lives of Greeks and other ethnic groups that had lived on "Turkish" soil for centuries.  He paints vivid pictures of the destruction of the Greek community in Smyrna (today's Izmir), and of the disruptive ethnic exchange by which Salonica (today's Thessaloniki), at the time a highly cosmopolitan city in what is now northern Greece, sent its "Greek-ified" Turks back to Turkey (especially to Istanbul), and accepted Greeks from Turkey in exchange. 

King reveals -- a revelation that was certainly a surprise to me -- Istanbul's bohemian lifestyle in the wake of World War I and the subsequent Allied occupation.  I would never have pictured a vibrant jazz club scene in the Istanbul of the 1920s -- a phenomenon that demonstrated the contrast between the modern, "Greek," "European" portions of the city north of the Golden Horn -- the area where we read about student demonstrations today, and where the Pera Palace and other large hotels are located -- and the "Turkish" area south of the Golden Horn where student backpacker hostels, the Hagia Sophia, Topkapi, and most of the other mosques that give Istanbul its iconic skyline are located.

Before Kemel's revolution, Turks living outside Istanbul were essentially Old World peasants.  Kemel, despite his destruction of much that was admirable in Ottoman society, brought these people into the modern world and gave them a self-respect and sense of unity and national pride they had never before experienced.  King quotes the chant that began each day of class in post-revolution schools -- a chant analogous to our own Pledge of Allegiance:

I am honest.  I am hardworking.  My code is to protect those younger than me, respect my elders, and love my homeland and my nation more than myself.  My quest is to rise higher and go farther.  May my whole life be a gift to Turkishness.

A little collectivist for our tastes, perhaps, but admirable and perhaps preferable to the rather meaningless Pledge our own students recite.

Istanbul was an important conduit for Jewish refugees from Hitler's holocaust on their way to Palestine.  The maddening paperwork required by national bureaucracies allowed all too few to complete the journey, but the way was made easier by the work of the Vatican's Apostolic Delegate to Turkey and Greece, stationed in Istanbul -- an Italian named Angelo Roncalli (later known as John XXIII).  Msgr. Roncalli showed a far greater sense of compassion for the Jewish refugees, and urgency for their rescue, than that shown by Vatican officialdom, not hesitating to go beyond his instructions and beyond official Vatican policy in securing information about Jews trapped in Nazi-dominated states, and finding ways to effect their escape. 

 Midnight at the Pera Palace is a highly readable history that ably covers a large amount of material.  It focuses on the ways in which political, diplomatic, and military forces affected the lives of ordinary people, without failing to explain and investigate the nature and causes of those forces.  It reads almost too well to be a scholarly work, but the text is supported by voluminous footnotes at the end of the book, and by pages of bibliography.

An inspiring survey of an often ignored part of the modern world.