guthrie's stars

My paternal grandfather’s first wife, Chong Len Feng, was born in Jamaica, to a Chinese father and an Afro-Jamaican mother. Soon after her birth, she was sent back to China to be raised Chinese, before an arranged marriage to my grandfather brought her to Borneo Island in the 1920s. As far as I know, I’m the first member of my family to return to Jamaica since Len Feng left.  Although the primary reason I came was for a relaxing, warm winter escape, Jamaica and the Caribbean has long been a place of fascination to me. There are the common cultural touchstones: ‘Cool Runnings’, an obsession with Bob Marley in high school, and discovering a love of Jamaican beef patties at DC’s various Jamaican restaurants (like Aussie meat pies, only flakier!).  But even earlier than these interactions, my relationship with the region was formed through my dad’s love of the West Indies’ cricket team. Growing up a cricket obsessed boy in the 90s, I recall one Monday morning, when one of my class...

"Dinner with the Commissioner" and "Black Town/White Town," parts 2 and 3 in an occasional series from "Flatnose: The Axis of Evil Tour" There is a dialogue that I have with locals here on a daily basis. "Your country?," they ask, sometimes gently, sometimes more demandingly. "Australia," I respond, occasionally throwing a list of famous Australian cricket players at them in order to convince them that I am, despite my appearance, Australian. "But you look like…"—and then they pause—"Japanese!" Increasingly, I meet other trans-national floaters such as myself from other countries. A Vietnamese Frenchman working in China, a German of Indian descent studying in Washington, a Korean Kazakh on her way to Liberia (she had the hardest jumble of ethnic-national-residency for me to process). So I can understand, especially in a place where we such folk are rare, how confusing it can be. "Dinner with the Commissione...

Spa life in Rishikesh, part 1 in an occasional series from "Flatnose: On the Road" "I'm in Rishikesh, Dad! They call it the 'yoga capital of India!,'" exclaimed the girl sitting next to me at our internet cafe. Forty years after the Beatles came to this traditionally holy town on the Ganges for their famous studies with the Maharishi, Rishikesh is now a full-blown "spiritual tourism" center. Avoiding the cow dung and ignoring the begging of the town's many religious mendicants, one soon realizes that almost all the stores around Swarg Ashram and Laxan Jhula cater to foreigners. Even the ashrams, Hindu traditional communities, seem filled with backpackers as much as local pilgrims, who have been using the town as a staging point for pilgrimages to Hinduism's holiest sites just north in the Himalayan ranges. Ayurvedic massage and reiki, rafting and trekking, yoga and meditation: the town's billboards are a backpacker's vision laid...

I’m about to leave Chengdu to go traveling for almost three months, but in some ways, I’ve already long since left town. These weeks of planning and research are supposed to be the easy part, where I get all of my ducks in a row, my couches and hostels and tickets booked in advance, my visa papers in order, all ready to process. Instead, I’m going in with only the barest of bookings made, three out of four visas still unprocessed (I have the one required first, however) and my plans only loosely routed out. Planning everything out from one’s living room can be daunting. And in a way: it seems to miss the point of backpacking, the room for spontaneity and—rare in today’s society--adventure. This will be very much a go-with-the-flow journey, and whether it leads me to spiritual clarity and memorable new international friendships or to sweaty lines and bureaucratic hoops of frustration or robbery, street side curry-induced illness, minor tragedy or simply traveler aimlessness is uncertain...

Originally posted in  April, 2006 My guise is up as soon as I reach into my pocket. It’s just too Lonely Planet-perfect to resist: the smoky coals, the roasting satay ayam, the Malay man’s skillful fanning wrist. As I gingerly ease the camera out into the open, two young girls behind the stall shriek and take cover, suddenly self-conscious of the foreigner in their midst. After purchasing five satay sticks for one ringgit, I quickly wander off to explore another part of the bustling Friday night market where, as long as I don’t attempt any verbal communication, my Chinese blood can temporarily bleed into the crowd, passing me off as simply another local. I linger with unnecessary caution at Sri Lalang’s main intersection, a crossing traveled more commonly by motorbike than by car. Helmet-less mothers, sometimes with as many as three child passengers: two toddlers up front against the handles and the oldest clutching on from behind, chug by dutifully. Most of the storefronts have cl...

- April, 2006 Some cultural trade-offs are harder to accept than others. Take squat toilets for instance, which I used to hate with a passion. I loathed them as I do snakes. “How dare you pass yourself off as worthy of my sanctified toosh and it’s business!,” I might have sneered, if I hadn’t been so concerned with steering so far clear of them. Those two white tiles for traction, and that miserable little hole in place of where I expected not only a bowl, but also a comfortable seat and a cover to boot. During one particular trip home to my mother’s town of Sri Lalang, I reacted as any stubborn eight-year-old might: I just refused to use them. Full stop. Now that only gets you so far. Before long, my parents tired of taking me out on exclusive journeys to the local shopping centre and its modern plumbing facilities. Thus began the famous conflict between Mark’s will and his lower intestine. An epic battle of attrition that lasted well into the fourth day -- most likely pushed over the...

- April, 2006 I recently purchased a book from the Sabah State Museum entitled With the Wild Men of Borneo by a missionary named Elizabeth Mershon. It begins thusly: "Borneo! What does the name suggest in your minds? The first thing probably is the 'wild man from Borneo.'...All I knew about the country was that it was where the wild men lived, and I always imagined that they spent most of their time running around the island cutting off people's heads. Before you finish reading what I am going to tell you about distant Borneo and its people, I hope you will have learned that the 'wild man from Borneo' is not such a bad fellow after all." That was written in 1922. I have just gotten back from a helter skelter two-day trek through the island's northern interior from west coast to east coast, Kota Kinabalu to Sandakan. And I can gladly report back that, 84 years on, and with a world which remains largely oblivious to its existence, the people of Borneo a...

- April 2006 I am the son of a Malaysian Hakka metallurgist who stepped through the cracks of a bipolar world, from the humble poverty of his kampong home and into the opportunity and upward mobility afforded by the progressive politics and anti-colonial sentiment of 1970s Australasia. In turn, he is the son of a fatherless farmer, who escaped the abject poverty of early 20th Century China and—as a teenager—entered into a binding three-year term as an indentured laborer for the British, tapping rubber at a plantation in North Borneo in exchange for a boat ride to a better life. I knew this man as “Gong-gong,” or grandfather, in my occasional face-to-face encounters with him as a child. Taking month-long breaks from the school holiday centres my working parents would drop me off at during those dry, hot Australian summers, my brother and I would whinge and whine our way through the grime and humidity of the Third World, my parents winning brief respite by shoving KFC or Cornetto ice cre...

-March 2006 Dear friends, Tomorrow I depart for a three-week break from work, traveling around my parents' original haunts of Malaysia and Singapore with my father. I was there last in 2000, on transit while emigrating from Australia to the United States, where I've since acquired a college degree and less patience on the road. Upon explaining my planned absence to a colleague, she admitted that when I mentioned Malaysia, all she could think of was the evil President character from “Zoolander.” I told her that’s fine, because when she dyed her hair blonde, all I could think was: STUPID-ASS BIMBO. Actually, I didn’t. She’s a lovely girl, and besides, I’m far too polite. Following a 17 hour jaunt across the Pacific, we’ll land in Narita and Singapore in transit, before reaching the state of Sabah in Borneo Island just in time for Qingming. I’ll spend about 10 days catching up with family and no doubt impressing them with the six or so phrases of Mandarin I can remember. Then I’ll...

First published March 17, 2006. I: REPRESENTATION: I throw my hockey bag into the boot, then climb into the front passenger seat of Mum’s Holden Commodore. We drive out of the leafy grounds of Bunbury Cathedral Grammar School, past bushland coloured by eucalyptus trees and kangaroo paw plants and out onto Old Coast Road. In its entirety, the highway extends from Perth all the way south to Walpole, near the bottom of Western Australia. On this occasion, it’s use will be limited to the quiet 20 minute drive from high school back to my home town of Australind. Originally a failed English colony designed to combine qualities of both Australia and India, it was in my time a place of smaller adventure and scope. It is here that Dad had first taken the tricycle wheels off of my bike, here where I would hunt down tennis balls struck over the backyard fence in father-son cricket tussles which employed gumboots for wickets and firewood for bats. As Mum chats loosely in my direction about my brot...