On Cricket, Music and the Chinese of Jamaica

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 classmates gushed about his trip that weekend to the Perth cricket stadium to watch a match between Australia and the West Indies (often shortened to the ‘Windies’). Apparently, the crowd had come up with some racist chants, calling the Windies players ‘coons’ or the ‘N word’--you know, classic, ignorant Australian racism, the kind that usually targeted Aborigines, but could easily be broadened to include other dark-skinned people. No stranger to Aussie racism myself, I developed a certain empathy and sense of solidarity with Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, two great West Indian fast bowlers, as they scared the crap out of my beloved Aussie batting lineup with their barrage of bouncers (in which the ball is bounced toward a players’ head).

While watching the matches, dad would regale me with stories about the great West Indian team of the 70s and 80s, captained by Clive Lloyd and a fast bowling lineup of Joel Garner, Michael Holding and Malcolm Marshall. Even as a young boy, he imbued me with a sense of post-colonial retribution: of powerful Black athletes beating the descendants of their former British slave masters. Later on, I discovered a great documentary called ‘Fire in Babylon’ about this very dynamic, and was moved to tears by Michael Holding speaking out during recent global Black Lives Matter conversations about the racism he has encountered. While my grandfather’s own experience as a coolie for the British cannot be compared to the chattel slavery which brought West Africans to the Caribbean and North America, I felt a certain bond, growing up the one Chinese kid in a racist town in rural Western Australia. One of the first generations to come of age in a post-colonial but still White-dominated world in which being Black and Brown was associated with negative images, I could hear in every flash of Brian Lara’s elegant blade a whispered “fuck you” at the White power structure.

Alas, as with the broader tale of post-colonial development, the journey to racial equity and liberation is not a straight one. In more recent years, the West Indies team has been a shadow of its former self, maddeningly inconsistent and lacking resilience. I commiserated with a few older Jamaican men regarding this sorry state of affairs during my visit. After touring the Greenwood Great House (formerly owned  by a family that owned over 84,000 acres of land and 2,000 enslaved people), I was pleased to discover that Bob, the man who sold me my ticket–a Black Jamaican–is in fact its owner. I mentioned to him that I was reading “Beyond the Boundary”, a classic cricket memoir by the great Trinidadian writer CLR James. It turns out that Bob had met CLR years ago, when the great man had given a speech in London to a group of West Indians. Bob lived in London for many years, but returned to Jamaica after getting fed up with the racism he encountered living as a Black man there. However, when I asked him if it was satisfying to own a house that once belonged to one of the richest slave-owners in Jamaica, Bob was remarkably level-headed regarding post-colonial race relations.

“I don’t hold a grudge toward the White man,” he said. “We (Black Jamaicans) have our own political problems to sort out.” (Or something like that, I can’t quite remember the details.) He went on to describe the ongoing struggles of Jamaica, among them government corruption, gang violence, and a populace that he thought were more interested in rum bars than a serious reckoning with the country’s history and the project of societal uplift. He also praised the Chinese ability to build a north-south highway across the island, which the French had apparently tried and failed to do, claiming it was impossible.  

In fact, visiting Jamaica in 2022, I was amazed at the accomplishments of that great West Indian cricket team of the 70s and 80s in the first place. For such a famously recognizable country–the global superstardom of Bob Marley, Usain Bolt’s indelible victory pose--Jamaica is surprisingly small and under-developed. Compared to the resources of the English or Australian cricket team, their excellence was a David versus Goliath-like achievement. A few days after my chat with Bob, I discovered more reasons for the team’s recent struggles. According to a retired PE teacher who was, by his own account, the best batsman in his high school team, cricket is no longer the most popular sport in Jamaica, having been replaced by soccer.

But if cricket as a global Jamaican export is in current decline, there is another one that remains as vital as ever: its music. And while in Jamaica, I learned that Chinese there played a seminal role in the country’s music industry, primarily as producers, such as Leslie Kong, who produced Bob Marley’s first single. As a boy who dreamed of being–or at least seeing–Australia’s first Chinese cricket player wear the famous baggy green cap (I’m still dreaming of the day), I was overjoyed to see Chinese succeed in the creative industries, beyond grocery stores and other more practical professions. We diasporic Chinese are known globally for many things–industriousness, poor quality plastic goods, chow mein, math…some of these stereotypes are more helpful than others. But being cool or sexy, like a musician or professional athlete? That has typically been the domain of White or Black folks, but not us. Which is why I love the singer Tessanne Chin so much. 

When I moved to America in 11th grade, I felt immediately that I had to choose between either acting White or Black (Abercrombie versus Ecko), and that the default was White. Asian kids don’t get called out for being good at violin or English essay competitions–in fact, it’s encouraged and rewarded. However, you were called a “kigga” or a “chigga" if you acted Black. It’s why the rapper MC Jin was so easy to make fun of, and why Eddie Huang can feel so cringey, even if quietly revolutionary. While looking for jobs as an English teacher in China, I encountered job listings that stated “No Blacks allowed”, and a culture that carried all of the same negative stereotypes about Black people as I had grown up with in the west. In more recent years, I have seen White commentators kvetch about China ‘colonizing’ Africa. In all of these cases, Yellow and Black races appeared in competition, like our enslaved or indentured ancestors, fighting our own battles for recognition as equals while spinning around a still-White axis.  

It was within this harsh context that I first encountered recordings of Tessanne’s performances on ‘The Voice’, which she won in 2013. When I initially saw her perform and speak, I was struck not only by the mastery, soul and power of her singing, but by her Jamaican-ness, her Blackness, or, as she puts it: her ‘Caribbean swag.’ Although I’ve seen many talented Asian singers, Tessanne was the first one with swag. (While Sean Paul is also of Chinese-Jamaican heritage, Tessanne is an unmistakably Chinese-looking Jamaican singer.) Her father is of Chinese heritage, her mother of African and English heritage, in itself a refreshing genesis (versus the far more common White/Black male-Asian female couple). I love the way the entire nation and Caribbean diaspora rallied around her during her stint on an American singing competition.        

When asked in a 2013 interview with hip-hop legend Sway about dark-skinned Jamaicans bleaching their skin, Tessanne said: “It’s so important for all of us to look at each other and say: ‘Whatever God give you is good enough.’ Work with it. Look at the content of someone’s character.” 

In 2022 America, her statement feels retrograde, a throwback to a post-racial MLK/Obama vision when the tenor of race discussions leans Malcolm. Yet what I find most meaningful is the way Tessanne disrupts dominant narratives in which Black and Yellow are in tension, struggling against one another or striving separately to advance in a White-led world. During my trip, I found that Jamaica’s dominant narrative is one of black liberation–of slave rebellions, Garvey’s black nationalism, Rastafari, and African cultural fusion. But I also glimpsed a quieter, subtler, but perhaps equally radical vision. That of a majority Black nation that is as multicultural as its national motto–”Out of many, one people”--would suggest. A Black melting pot with Chinese, Indian, Lebanese, and White seasoning, one that will continue to play an outsized role in decolonizing and re-envisioning what our 21st century will celebrate.

"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 Commissioner" - Jodhpur, Rajasthan

When Arvind, my Couchsurfing host in Jodhpur, a city of 1.2 million located in the western state of Rajasthan, found out that I was invited to dinner with the Kiran Soni Gupta, he was amazed. He'd seen her name mentioned in local newspapers. At the time, I had no idea that she was the District Commissioner of Jodhpur, maybe the equivalent to being mayor of a city. At the time, she was just an interesting profile on Couchsurfing, who sounded like she was involved in good work regarding women's empowerment and poverty relief.

At first, we weren't sure if he should come along to dinner. I offered to call, but he rejected the idea firmly. But after his brother-in-law, who worked with her, vouched for her character, he decided to come and meet her, planning to then excuse himself from dinner. Excitedly, we washed and changed into our best clothes, before riding out by motorcycle to her house.

"Commissioner's House, Regency Road," she had told me, when I asked how to get to her place. "Everybody knows it."

The guards opened the gate, revealing a lush, shaded residency, redolent of Indian civil service opulence. It was grand by Western standards, positively other-worldly compared to regular Indian housing. We were seated in the waiting room, filled with Kiran's own artwork, images of her with George Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank, Amartya Sen and other notable figures in international poverty relief, and a collection of degrees and awards. One of Kiran's personal servants brought out two glasses of water. After taking them off of the platter, the servant stood there awkwardly, bent half over, motionless. His pose resembled that of a crooked flamingo, if flamingos held silver platters. It took us a moment to realize that he would wait in that very position until we returned the glasses to the platter.

We knew that the Commissioner herself was coming when another servant returned to place three cell phones on a sofa. He lined them up precisely; parallel to each other, with one separated from the other two, before leaving the room. Arvind and I looked at each other incredulously, and I fought back a grin at the absurd pomposity of their service. In an earlier time, they probably would have worn penguin suits and bow ties, but in this day and age they were more casually dressed in long-sleeved shirts and trousers.

Soon enough, Kiran herself arrived, along with her 11-year-old son, Vishnu. Despite our initial apprehension, we found her to be incredibly inviting, convincing Arvind to stay for dinner despite his polite protestations. Dinner was suitably immense, with over a dozen different dishes that varied from local Indian to Chinese to Western, from vegetable Manchurians (Indian-Chinese-style veggie meatballs) to penne pasta to daal and chapatti. Kiran was warm and genuine, happy to speak at length about her accomplishments but also asking—and actually considering—our own careers and concerns. Her school-age daughter and son sat with us most of the time, though her husband, District Commissioner of Jaipur, a neighboring city, was not around.

We discussed her decision to return back to India after completing her graduate program at Harvard, while most of her peers choose to take on better-paying jobs in America.

"There's no other job in which I know I can make such a difference in people's lives," she explained. Such a line, so clichéd in the hands of ordinary public servants, sounded so genuine coming from this radiant woman. She also talked of the difficulties involved in getting villagers in Rajasthan—regarded as socially backward by other Indians—to let their girls leave the village to carry on their education.

Remarkably, she hosts and meets Couchsurfers often, despite her busy schedule. Even when away on business, she makes an effort to have some of her servants show guests around town. And beyond us foreigners, she regularly hosts local citizens, such as my own host, Arvind, explaining that "her door is open to everyone." And while elected officials regularly make such claims, I got the feeling that Kiran actually meant it.

On the way home, Arvind was grinning from ear to ear.

"This is the first time I've seen someone from the government like that," he gushed, explaining that all his previous encounters with public servants have been negative.

They normally treat you as if you're below their "dignity," he said.

"If India had more people in government like Kiran, even just 10 percent, this country would be so much better," he gushed.

--

"Black Town/White Town" - Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu

Arriving in Pondicherry, a former French colonial possession on the east coast of Tamil Nadu, the heart of India's south, brought difficult questions to mind. It is split, historically, into "White Town" and "Black Town," where the French and the locals respectively stayed, and the schism remains stark today. What they now call the French district, is a charming seaside village of neat, elegantly maintained cathedrals, hotels and homes in delicate pastel hues, all built in an architectural style unmistakably French. Its quietude and beauty immediately felt a world away in the Tamil part, split off by Canal Street, which is as loud, crowded and dirty as any Indian town, where beggars constantly hound and a combination of open sewers and piles of rubbish combine to form a smell quite undesirably memorable.

To be in a town in India where you actually want to linger on the street, rather than get to where you're going as quickly as possible, is a rare treat. And so we lingered, taking pictures of glorious overgrown flowers and gliding in zig zag patterns through the French town on our rented bicycles.

But in talking to Judy, who is Chinese-Canadian, about why we enjoyed the French district so much, dark post-colonial thoughts of race and inferiority were difficult to stymie. Were we merely worshipping our former oppressors in preferring their tranquility, their fresh pain au chocolat, or their language, still spoken on its streets? If so, were we acknowledging in some way that French, and with it Western culture, is better than Indian culture? And so that colonialism was in part justified, that India was better under the British, that we yellow and brown people of the Orient are still only playing catch-up to the White man?!

Such a train of increasingly-extreme concerns pored forth, as we sat in the main park of the French town with local Tamils, in a suddenly uneasy leisure. Our multi-cultural Obama-era educations taught us that black is beautiful, and my Caucasian friends often downplay their ethnic heritage as "boring." Yet my time in China and India has exposed, through its white skin-bleaching beauty products and fair-skinned Bollywood and Hong Kong superstars, a distinctly colonial-aping worldview, where if White isn't necessarily superior, it's certainly looked upon with a chip-on-the-shoulder and an ever-present acknowledgement of greatness.

I was reminded of a time walking through Sichuan university, when Ai Yan, a local friend, pointed out the foreign (mostly Western exchange student) dorms, which are significantly better kept and equipped than the ones for Chinese. When I asked why foreigners necessarily got better accommodation, her response was simply:

"Of course they do. They're foreigners."

Later, Judy argued that this wasn't necessarily the case, and that it's a matter of what one is acculturated to like. That being products of Western upbringing, it was natural for us to find the French district and its European heritage more to our liking, though not necessarily superior to India. I wanted to agree with her, looking out across the rocky shore as a homeless woman slept beneath a bronze Gandhi statue. We travelers must constantly check our conclusions: genetics and race as inherent causes should not be tied to culture and history, in considering the differences between two countries. Surely, if anything, the post-colonial era has taught us that much.

But in traveling these stretches of East and South Asia, in observing the relationship between global trade, nationalism and racial identity, I feel like these complex questions of moral righteousness and economic power are easier to rationalize and deconstruct from the Ivory and Corporate Tower, than when living within, or merely passing through, its gross divisions in India.

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 out, or as my guesthouse neighbor Mary aptly put it, a budget "spa life" getaway from the stresses of travel in India.

But like many of India's most popular tourist locations I've visited so far, it sometimes feels like I'm in Tel Aviv, not some sacred Indian site. Hebrew letters are pasted onto the keyboards and spoken by seemingly all the foreigners around us, Israeli food is served everywhere. Upon entering the backpacker-geared "Little Buddha" cafe in town--decked out tastefully with a thatch roof and mattresses with cushions as seating--my travel partner and I, who is also ethnically Chinese, were stared down icily by several tables of young Israeli female travelers, leaving us feeling like we were second rate in the unofficial "International Hierarchy of Backpackers." I asked an Israeli-Australian hiker at the base of a Sikh pilgrim's site, Hemkund Lake, whether there were some sacred locations or some historical connection between India and Judaism.

She shook her head. "Israelis just like India!"

As do all manner of New Age spiritual sorts. Dreadlocks are more common in shades of blonde than black, and coffee table conversation resounds with comparisons of yoga instructors, meditation bowl colors and general karmic togetherness. In bookstores, Osho's treatises on sex sell next to William Sutcliffe's "Are You Experienced?"

It turns out that finding inner peace in India is big business, propeling the ever-growing commercial industry built around assisting in our attainment of true enlightenment. Or at the very least, a three-day Keralan detox session. A local reiki teacher named Soma, who grew up in an ashram here and whom I'd befriended through Couchsurfing, lamented the changes at the same time as he lived off of them.

"Fifteen years ago, nobody charged for yoga. You would just go in and ask to do it, nobody would care. Now, everything costs money," he told me matter of factly.

"Western people took our yoga knowledge and sold it for $20 classes in their countries. Of course, you can't expect to come to India and not have to pay." He also told me of how, when studying reiki in Dharamsala, he would see numerous young Tibetan men to switch clothes, donning monk robes in order to impress Western girls, then sometimes going home with them: literally, as in moving to Europe on the strength of their new girlfriend's passport and eschewing monastic life. Earlier, I'd met one of his friends, a local yoga teacher who'd moved to France to teach there, along with his French girlfriend.

"But is it also common for local guys to do the same here?," I asked cautiously, hoping not to offend.

"Yes," he acknowled. "It's common here too."

Even in the ashrams, for decades centers of Hindu learning led by famous spiritual teachers, Western influence has waved its ugly wand. According to Soma, almost all of the leadership are in-fighting, following the deaths of many of the original gurus. I asked if they were fighting over interpretations of their gurus' teachings or other questions surrounding their faith.

"Only land and money," he answered. After a while we were silent. "Things were so different before," he said simply. We shook hands, and as I walked off to continue my comfortable "spa life" in the same hills where sadhus continue to live out ascetic lives of meditation, I wondered whether he thought Rishikesh was better or worse for my being there.

Expectant Days: The Lead-up to a Backpacking Trip

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. Quite likely a mixture of equal parts up as well as down.

For a number of years, I’ve been looking forward to such a journey. Catching the travel bug, exploring far-flung history and culture, the tangible process of “acquiring worldliness,” the image of me reflectively looking out a train window upon some breathtaking image of unspeakable human poverty back dropped by a landscape of incredible natural beauty: “Mark the backpacker” has been on my self-inspired personality card for a long time.

But lately, rather than a steadily increasing level of excitement and buzz as my departure date draws nearer, I’ve felt mostly anxious. Over and over again, I ponder questions such as “What do you hope to get out of this?” and “Why are you letting whatever amount of post-graduation social-ladder-climbing-momentum slip further and further away?” I know my parents and peers who are already establishing successful lives are or would be asking such valid questions.

The answer, quite simply, is to meet other people. Of course, I’m looking forward to the Taj Mahal, to Imam Reza Shrine in Mashad, Iran and the Registan in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. But they’re not the main reason I’m going to these places. And whilst I’m hoping to spend some time meditating at ashrams in Kolkata and elsewhere, I’ll be quite at peace with coming home still yet to experience the fullness of nirvana. But getting to know people of background’s distinctly different from my own--their opinions and stories--their hopes and dreams…these are the things that travel creates unique opportunities for.

In particular, one website will open doors, quite literally, most everywhere I go. Couchsurfing, described by a fellow Couchsurfer as: “social networking that actually has a purpose.” Though obviously not as many couches can be found in the east as in Europe or North America, India has proved filled with potential hosts: Delhi alone has over 100 available couches. Iran’s cities have dozens of eager participants, and Uzbekistan lists some as well. Only Turkmenistan seems to have missed (so far) the Couchsurfing train of international-camaraderie-by-way-of-free-accommodation.

So, blessed with this opportunity to meet different folks from places like Iran and Uzbekistan—and better yet, have them cook local cuisine and take you out with their friends, the question now becomes: How could I not go?

Sri Lalang and the Ethnic Issue
- 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 skilful 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 closed up, leaving oil palm bunches out front for collection and the quiet rumble of Cantonese telenovelas and buzzing games from Japan to fill the warm dusk. Laughter erupts from a couple of weathered Chinese men in wifebeaters, sipping pulled tea in the coffeehouse of a tired-looking Malay sporting a black songkok, the rotund hat commonly worn by Muslims throughout Malaysia.

I notice how much more overtly race-conscious this past few weeks here has made me. Sectatranism dominates political debate and social discourse throughout this small island state with even greater command than it does in the United States. There, political correctness has only managed to stifle and elongate discussion (largely through clarificatory qualifiers repeated unto meaningless redundancy, such as “Now I’m not a racist, but…”) on issues such as affirmative action and poverty measurement, rather than lend the clarity and dignity of debate which may have been its original intention. In Malaysia, the Anti-Sedition Act is well-known for its selective use, often employed to prevent criticism of contentious state policies which selectively target bumiputeras (non-Chinese and non-Indians) as recipients of a variety of benefits. In the former, minority rights are the target of liberal protection; in the latter, majority (Malay) rights are guarded by an incumbent party whose platform is rooted in ethnic assistance.

Sri Lalang, whose name starts off sounding like that of another small Asian country but finishes with a certain Sino-lyricism, has a short but interesting history. It was founded as a concentration camp of sorts for Chinese by the British during the “Emergency,” the 12 year long civil war between Chinese communist guerrillas entrenched deep in the interior jungle and the waning British authorities. In its original incarnation, the village was fenced off, and those leaving and returning to the compound had their possessions inspected to ensure no food or goods were being smuggled out to support the revolutionary “terrorists”, who had been fighting since prior to the departure of the Japanese following World War II for an independent republic. Even bicycle tyre tubes were routinely checked in order to ensure that air was not being replaced with grains of rice.

My mother reminisces occasionally about how the leftists would come marching around the village, singing catchy anti-imperialist songs and encouraging the children to follow them – a “Little Red Pied Pipers” fairytale mash-up, one might say. Some of the more adventurous children would take up the offer, joining the others in order to combat capitalist oppression before the Federation crushed what little resistance was left. Perhaps because her father was a proud member of the anti-insurgent Home Front, my mother focused her time on school prefecture, tapping rubber and the acquisition of a bachelor’s degree overseas, eventually leaving Sri Lalang far behind.

I recently returned to the village without her. A quick motorbike tour of its small streets provided a microcosmic insight into the current state of the country’s race relations. New low-income Malay settlements were popping up on land previously used for rubber plantation, augmenting the previously Chinese-dominated town. The distinction is not difficult to see: their homes use slightly different architecture (though the same concrete and stucco material) and lack the red lanterns and altars which adorn practically every Chinese home. Prayer houses and mosques can be found nearby, rather than Buddhist temples that Chinese women could be seen making morning offerings at. Though I witnessed a couple of Indian siblings playing soccer on one street, the majority of them can still be found in a separate Tamil settlement across the highway.

Ethnicity in Malaysia is a fascinatingly complex beast. Whereas the post-native populating of the United States can be spaced reasonably accurately through a series of events (British settlement, Slavery, Irish potato famine, etc.), the same cannot be said of Malaysia. The distinction between the bumiputeras (“Sons of the soil,” meaning Malays and Natives) and the Chinese and Indians may be validated by ethnicity but certainly not through chronology: swathes of Chinese-Malaysians arrived through trade relations long before many current bumiputeras arrived from other reaches of the Southeast. At the birth of its federation, the Chinese actually comprised Malaysia’s largest ethnic group, until Singapore’s secession in 1965, selective immigration and declining birth rates landed the Malays in the lead. Such ambiguities comprise a large part of the reason why legislation which quite obviously privileges Malays—95 percent of government contracts, for example, are distributed to Malays—ahead of minority groups is greatly resented by the remainding 40 percent of the population.

Whilst being carted about by one overly-generous set of relatives and family friends after the other, I found the parallel dimensions of their Chinese existence quite striking. A Chinese in Malaysia may be born in a Chinese Maternity Hospital, educated entirely in private Chinese-language schools, eat and shop at Chinese businesses, read and consume exclusively Chinese media and observe only Buddhist practices before finally being buried, naturally, in a Chinese public cemetery. Malay need only be spoken during brief public exchanges, whilst English remains almost exclusively the language of science and foreign business. It is only when taking a break from my well-intentioned but cloying family that I was able to observe life outside of this transplanted Sino existence, wandering through mosques and Hindu temples in Kuala Lumpur between delicious roti snacking in Malay hawker stalls, admiring the graceful movement of the women and smiling at the oddly endearing veil-to-head-size ratio of pint-sized schoolgirls.

It wasn’t always the case that ethnic groups lived in such separated parallel dimensions, walking the same streets but in virtually different planes as they do now. I recently visited a street in the old capitol of Melaka where two temples, a mosque and a Tamil church laid practically beside each other. It seemed a suitable symbol of a pre-Federation Malaysia that my parents’ childhoods can harbor only nostalgia for at this point. My mother played amongst Malays and Indians and my father the same, but with Kadazans and other indigenous children thrown into the mix. When inviting Malay neighbors over for dinner, they simply made sure not to cook pork separately. It was a multiculturalism through small town practicality: folks tolerated each other because they had little reason not to, nor to interrupt their mutually beneficial economic relations.

This changed dramatically following the ascent of the United Malay National Organization (UMNO) party to national leadership. Islam became the national religion, Bahasa Malaya the formally recognized language. Malays were by law Muslims, the Chinese and Indians classified as “minority groups” and a series of legislation involving quotas and business schemes were introduced, supposedly to “pull up” the bumiputeras. Perhaps because of this, minorities banded together, setting up private institutions or even moving overseas where state ones denied them access, and marrying amongst their own rather than face forced conversion. I find it sad yet understandable that the Chinese and Malays in Sri Lalang socialize at separate cafes on the weekends, though see glimpses of good will in the oft-colour blind commerce of the weekly market. I took hope in the “plural society” speeches my cousin’s classmates made during a school competition, though their lofty assertions also struck me as even hoarier than the naive multicultural grandstanding that hides far deeper problems for Aboriginal communities across Australia, and Dutch-Muslim relations in Western Europe.

Prime Minister Badawi has made claims that his moderate Islamic vision for Malaysia will successfully equip it for a planned technological and industrialized leapfrog toward Western standards of living while remaining true to Malaysian moral and religious standards. In Sri Lalang, I found rows of new “garden” developments, where hardworking families were moving into Western-standard homes purchased on the back of years of honest hard work. I was reminded of something my 22 year-old cousin said to me quietly: “What’s the point of (sectarianism) anyway? We’re all Malaysian.” I think it’s even simpler than that. By keeping religion out of state affairs and focusing on a merit-based system of advancement, a lot of this current ethnic distancing could easily be closed. Rather than existing as an officially united but in practice segregated society of Malays, Chinese and Indians, the country could serve as a timely example of successful Asian development and moderate Islamic practice. Unfortunately, with a comfortably entrenched bumiputera electorate and meddling Malay elite, ethnic relations in towns such as Sri Lalang throughout the country will likely remain as segregated as at present for some time to come.

i) Malay: Melayu, referring to the ethnic group which currently comprises the majority in Malaysia, that is: not of Indian, Chinese, or “indigenous” descent
ii) Malaysian: A citizen of the state of Malaysia, referring to nationality. Ex: Chinese-Malaysian, Australian-Malaysian, etc.

Squatter's Confessional
- 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 edge by some sneakily placed tofu during the thirteenth confrontational meal – nature worked its unstoppable force and unsurprisingly my will eventually gave in (as my colon gave out). But not to the squat toilet. Oh no, it would take more than mere excrement to hole me up in such a dungeon, with its foul odour and icky wet concrete.

Now as with any resistance movement that faces uphill odds, I had gone on several scouting missions in the backyard of my grandmother’s house beforehand. My thoughts followed the approximate reasoning: So it has to come out. That variable was as fixed as Newton’s third law. The real question was “Where?” Other components of the issue at hand were the need for disguise, accessibility and speed. I couldn’t just leave my loaves on the front door step like a dog, nor could I drop them off at the base of a tree, which Po-Po would inevitably stumble across during her daily vegetable gardening. Digging a hole and then covering over the matter – camper style – might have been the way, but for the fact that the whole backyard was being cultivated and I would inevitably be destroying something she’d been growing. Even self-righteous guerillas have to think about their grandmothers.

The next option was to dash beyond the confines of the family land altogether and off into the thick jungle with its huge banana foliage and overgrown vine vegetation, perfect cover for all manner of rank deeds. And I probably would have gone with that method of release, but for the fact that I was eight and still genuinely fearful of the local terrain. Malaysia itself was a source of continuous mystery and frustration to me at the time; dropping my daks in the bush and leaving my behind privy to various snakes and leeches was something my creative imagination would not allow. This dilemma over the sanity of my sphincter and the frightful clutches of Mr. Squat had by this point reached truly explosive proportions.

It was around this stage, whilst urinating my way along in the stream that runs through our backyard, that I had my “Eureka” moment. Of course, I’d found much simpler means of relieving my bladder, and this waterhole was but one of a number of locales at which I’d spilled my own golden stream. Casually observing urine disperse into water, I noticed that this particular channel appeared to flow straight out of the house, down towards the deeply sunken, well-shaded river. Connecting the dots, I concluded that if timed correctly, a quick drop of the short pants, 180 degree rotation by the stream’s edge and speedy expunging of the digested remnants of four days worth of rice and Hainan cooking would set the battle straight. My Number Twos would waltz right on down the stream and into the river, probably disintegrating into lovely soil nourishing food for all I cared. The triumphant result: Mark – 1, Squatter – 0. I would walk away the bigger man, and nobody, especially not my parents, would ever know.

Almost immediately, the point of no return arrived, when all a child can do is plead to self: “Hang on a minute, just don’t do it in your pants.” As previously scripted, I carried out Operation Bomb the Stream in the backYard (OBeSitY) in meticulous fashion, seemingly without a snag. I’d even remembered a roll of toilet paper. The trouble came only after I had pulled up my trousers. Letting out a small but satisfied sigh of relief, I came to the nasty realization that there had been a hitch. Alas, the current’s strength would not move my recently deposited brownness downstream. It stayed put, exactly where I had dropped it, and not even several rather panicked pebble throws could cause it to dislodge.

I returned to the house a sad and disillusioned boy. Counting down the minutes before the inevitable discovery, angry finger pointing, and useless but plaintive denial process would begin, I tried to console myself with the refreshing return of lightness to my lower stomach. But oh the humility! I could have died with shame that night. I didn’t, and I return to the same house today, only to find that the squat toilet has been replaced with a lovely plastic seater. I’ve long since overcome my aversion to the former, but shall never forget the bemusement it caused my grandmother, who has passed away since I last visited this house, that sunny afternoon some years ago.

A Wild Man in Borneo
- 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 are still not such bad fellows after all.

The party—14 Hiews of varying shapes and sizes, ranging from Uncle Yun-Loi, a small, agile chap of about 70 to the ever-bouncy six-year-old, Hua—set out early enough from Beaufort, scooping me up in KK, as the capital city is known (thank goodness its not Kota Kota Kinabalu!; many Malay words are doubled so it might've been possible). The previous night, my cousin Yong, who lived with my family in Australia during our high school years and now works in the city for Ernst & Young, had taken me out to sample the local nightlife. It was quite surreal going from the rural jungle living I had just observed, where lifestyles remain largely removed from or incapable of affording modern technological and economic change, to the rather bangin' scene at Shenanigans nightclub, at which a lively Filipino cover band played renditions of "My Humps" and "You're Beautiful" to a demure crowd with its fair share of popped collars and grinding that wouldn't appear out of place in Soho or Adams Morgan.

The outward journey was long and trying, compounded by the lack of air conditioning in my uncle's people mover (van). This might have been bearable but for said uncle's driving methodology: best described as a mix of rally car driver and bank robbery escapee. Caked in multiple layers of sweat and grime and being jostled around incessantly from my back corner, I discovered a newfound sympathy for Shake N' Bake Chicken. So this is what it feels like to be seasoned and thrown into an oven, simultaneously even! Because of such conditions, I found my motivation to sight-see somewhat dampened (if not drenched), however, Mount Kinabalu, its rocky black peak appearing from behind a veil of consistent mist, remained a sight of untrammeled tranquility. For several reasons, I shall not be ascending its 1401 metres on this trip, having to make do with imagined sunrises over the South China Sea instead.

The Borneo jungle is at this point a very different affair in comparison to its pre-logging glory. Between the nineteen seventies and eighties, 90 percent of its natural wood was clear cut and shipped out, largely in joint ventures between the federal government and Japanese businesses. Most of my uncles were employed, sadly, in the all too efficient destruction of their homeland's natural habitat, operating bulldozers and clearing roads in often-miserly conditions. The result is a mixed picture: though still outright beautiful and humbling, with its hilly green lushness, steep cliffs and picturesque waterfalls, the jungle itself is almost entirely new regrowth or oil palm plantations, which are currently the most profitable cash crop for the state's inhabitants. Apparently, over 64 native mostly agrarian tribes once roamed the island--some of who used blowguns and darts, and a few of who were headhunters, which appeals greatly to the omnipresent eleven-year-old in me—but, during my trip, the only employment I saw them involved in was the selling of Orang-utan dolls and traditional weaves at tourist stands by the roadside, occasionally in their native attire (which is dazzling) but most often in western garb.

Along the way, my father pointed out the road to the copper mine at which he and my mother worked immediately before moving to Australia, adding that it was the place of my conception. Now there are several things that people should not do, regardless of culture or heritage. One of them is pissing on somebody's grave. You just don't do it! Another is providing your children with details about their conception: the imagery is uniformly disturbing in a Freudian nightmare reality sort of way. Besides learning extraneous proto-Mark details, along the road I observed numerous dilapidated, faded wooden shacks, often featuring green creepers at various stages of eventual natural reconquest of these homes, which belong to subsistence and cash crop farmers. In uber-stereotypical third world form, I saw several naked children standing in front of open windows. Construction remains a consistent eyesore. Illegal immigrants from Indonesia and the Philippines, their faces protected from the dust by makeshift cotton rags, hung from rickety wooden scaffolding.

We reached Sandakan not long before dark, greeted by a tacky Orang-utan statue in the town's entry roundabout. Blessed with potentially the least romantic name in history—it means "to be pawned" in Sulu, the Sultanate to which it used to belong—Sandakan successfully puts the "shit" in "hole," providing fresh new meaning to the word "fugly." Possessing none of the subtle majesty of traditional Malay architecture or any of the Hong Kong charm of its former major trading partner, it appears to have shuddered into the 21 st Century through an utterly indelicate shove from modern industry. A port for largely Chinese and Japanese-owned oil palm and fishing distributors, in its wake Sandakan makes Detroit look like Paris, Glasgow sound like Venice. Its main sights of interest involve a three-legged rock and a pungent fish market, the latter of which my seafood-adverse self was spared the odour. We stayed for only a short while, meeting up with my politician Aunt's fellow party cadre for a seafood restaurant dinner. (I had the venison.) We chose to stay outside of Sandakan for fear of desperate Filipino robbers, choosing a hotel at the more-suitably Chinese "Mile 4." Outlying suburbs, in keeping with the town's utilitarian spirit, are named according to their distance from downtown.

The following day, after a noodle soup breakfast at one of the local market stalls—where one enjoys the dubious pleasure of seeing your food cooked and dishes washed in quite squalid conditions—we set off on our return journey. Along the way, we passed shanty kampungs built over the bay, home to the absolute poorest of the poor. If Malaysia wishes to become a developed country by 2020, which its former Prime Minister announced several years ago—it must come up with a way to cope with the rural/urban divide, a pervasive problem certainly not limited to its borders. After revisiting the farmland where our family once lived, we stopped at a crocodile farm. Young Ah-Hua raised a bit of a ruckus amongst the largely immobile, sun baking reptiles when she stomped up and down excitedly on the wooden walkway above, allowing me to snap some quality Steve Irwin-without-Steve Irwin photos of the animals play-wrestling. One humorously straightforward description read:
"My name is TAKO from Lahad Datu, around 60 year old. My length is 17 feet and weigh 800 kg. Wild Life removed me to this place, because I ate 4 residents in the wild, Now I eat only one chicken everyday." (Sic)

Following, we visited the Sandakan War Memorial, the site at which thousands of Australian and British POWs were held towards the tail end of World War II. The Japanese forced my grandmother to work on construction of a new airfield, and the photographs of skeletal Aussie soldiers working away on the same war project brought home to me how easily the pendulum of history can change course. Interestingly enough, I learned that an underground network existed between Australians and locals, through which guerilla resistance fighters could plan ambush attacks. I walked along the wooden walkway which followed the identical path that the troops were once forced, along with my grandfather, to take during the Sandakan-Ranau death marches with Ah-Hua's hand in mine, attempting to visualize the scene some 61 years ago. Through terrible torture, measly rations and hellish labour, it's not difficult to see how so few Allied POWs survived out in this humid terrain, in conditions so far removed from the dry dust of the Australian plains or of grassy, temperate England.

We then set off back to KK, this time I was in the other, far more sensibly driven four-wheel-drive, and thus was able to read and reflect on the journey home. Close to home, the mists of Mount Kinabalu descended upon the road, and my uncle turned on the headlights. That night, it was back to Shenanigans for the same cover band's stirring rendition of "Y'all Gonna Make Me Lose My Mind" by DMX. The bipolarism of Malaysia's urban-rural gap had never sounded more incongruous.

On Qingming and Family
- 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 creams into our ever-insolent mouths. Being ignorantly assimilationist, “White-culture-is-better” children, we made no effort to learn either Mandarin or the local Hakka dialect, thus leaving our myriad cousins the privilege of attempting to communicate with we high-and-mighty Australians in the 4th language English they learnt in grade school.

I never exchanged a single sentence of conversation with my grandfather, who was illiterate and did not acquire Malay, let alone the tongue of his white colonial masters. He did, however, willfully weather my then five-year-old brother’s gleeful assault by water pistol, much to my parents’ chagrin. And once, when he was already into the 10th decade of his life, I recall him slowly climbing the steep set of stairs in the creaky two-story home that he built with his own hands in order to call me to dinner. My most vivid memories of Gong-Gong involve him rocking in his chair, contentedly watching as his thirteen children and dozens of grandchildren puttered by as he rolled tobacco, crossed legs swaying gently.

These are the bridges I attempt to cross in returning to Borneo and its dilapidated, stagnant ways for Qingming. Utterly crippled by my inability to comprehend nor articulate, I sit at the table as my father and his siblings play catch up, exchanging gossip and stories of the West over Chinese tea and cans of Tiger beer. Hakka, which passes unruffled through my monolingual brain, sounds like a courser, more rural Mandarin (Sentences ring with suffixes like “num,” “phat,” and “sit”) and has a surprisingly potent hypnosis effect. I find myself zoning out, before subsequently passing out (work colleagues, Nikki, may not find this surprising!), before being tapped back to consciousness when it is time to leave. At once frustrating and boredom-inducing, my linguistic incompetence makes the process of reconnecting with my roots—those curious, meta-historical pieces of immigrant make-up which hover in the sub-conscious, always resisting one’s subjugating tendencies—an exercise comprised largely of inferrence and abstraction.

A few days ago, we journeyed to my grandparents’ grave in a humble Chinese cemetery a few miles from the Hiew clan estate. It is built straight into the steep hillside for feng shui, the tombs surrounded dramatically by the voracious, tropical Borneo jungle which often seems to swallow up its inhabitants’ clearings. After greeting the caretakers and praying to the Protector God who oversees the dead, we walked around the hill to my grandparents’ graves. They lie side by side, their tombstones reading “Chinese Public Cemetery: Guanxi, Hiew Nee” and “Bao On, Kwangtung, Nyam Choi Yu” respectively, providing only place of birth and name for identification purposes. Each of us symbolically swept clean both cement graves with the palm leaves my cousin had cut down from our back yard earlier, then laid down food and drink as offerings. Oranges and apples, a couple of whole boiled chickens, peanuts and biscuits, rice wine and soy milk – a glance around the cemetery proffered similar scenes as numerous other Chinese families went about their business. Aunt Moi-Yun handed me a bundle of joss sticks as my father provided guidance: “Bow three times to Gong-Gong and place three sticks in the dirt in front of him. Do the same thing for Po-Po.”

After the burning of incense came the offering of money and possessions for the underworld. Though few of my family members are practicing Buddhists, they made sure to bring a bountiful amount of goods. At first, I was surprised to see they were burning actual shoes and actual shirts. “They sure take this offering business seriously,” I thought, before sheepishly realizing that they were made of cardboard, designed expressly for Qingming. My cousins spread out fake paper money, some of which looked like Taoist scrolls, others like bills and still others like silver coins. Each bill had a numerical amount of 1,000,000,000 UWC (Underworld currency) listed upon it.

“Unfortunately, the exchange rate is very low,” my father joked.

As the wealth of paper and cardboard burned away before the tomb of my grandparents, I looked around me at my fellow Hiews, of whom I spend such little actual time with. They chatted light-heartedly, dressed casually in the rag-tag t-shirts and shorts Western fashion has conferred upon us. One cousin, a gentle eighteen-year-old named Ming Jai, asked me how Christians worship their ancestors. Black ashes rose and fluttered through the air, wafting slowly upwards, perhaps towards my grandparents. I tried to imagine the life experiences that Hiew Nee took to his grave and of all the quiet drama and scrappy tribulations of rural Sabahnese life: arriving with little but the clothing upon his back, being abandoned by his first wife (a half-Jamaican), losing two children during infancy, surviving Japanese occupation and then watching his family prosper until passing, just two years short of a century.

I looked for the parallels in our subsequent generations. Where the British shipped him to North Borneo from China in servitude, my Uncle Fook Choi and the New Zealand government flew my father to the University of Otago, following which a multi-national chemical producer expatriated my own family from Southwestern Australia to Maryland. In all honesty, it’s a hard act to follow. Unless I “go corporate” (a most sinful deed indeed in the eyes of my liberal, activist mates) and settle into a vacation house in Martha’s Vineyard, Miami beach or the Greek isles, our exponential rise in standard of living appears destined to plateau. I think of all the nouveau riche Indians I met in London, of the warm gaze of the Salvadorean woman who served me pupusas in West Los Angeles, of the fiery Palestinian neurologist PhD student I ate with in the student union and of the West Bengali paralegal I recently started dating. There are millions of stories such as my family’s, ones which anti-immigrant legislators and their economic data will never encapsulate, and an enduring supply of long-distance love that remittances only hint at.

As the fires burned, a warm rain began to fall and we hastily farewelled my grandparents before rushing for cover. A feral dog skipped past with a chicken offering in its mouth, welcoming our annual ritual as a free feast in its immoral mind. We drove off to my recently deceased Uncle’s grave at a nearby cemetery, leaving Hiew Nee and his wife to rest peacefully.

Malaysia Bound
-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 plop over to Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru in Peninsular Malaysia before catching up with an old Aussie mate in Singapore. Along the way, I have some of the following highlights planned:

-Qingming Festival: At which I will offer food and libations at the tombstones of my ancestors and worship them. A feast shall ensue (with any luck).

- Sandakan Death March, Revisited: During that miserably long spectacle long since turned into hoary History Channel fodder, otherwise known as the Second World War, the Japanese forcefully marched 6000 Javanese, Australian and British POWs through the jungle from Sandakan to Ranau. Six survived. My grandfather happened to have been recruited (read: forced) to carry ammunition, but found the trek rather uninspiring and managed to escape on the third night. I find this of particular interest, because it led to A) My father’s birth, some years later; and subsequently: B) My existence.

- Mount Kinabalu, Ascended: As some Hiew loyalists may recall, I wrote about climbing Mount Matebian in Timor-Leste this past summer. As you may also recall: I sucked. Big time. To refresh your memory, a combination of diarrhea-disaster and general weariness was overcome only through the fortitude of my wizened Timorese guide and the intoxicating scent of his cloves. Thankfully, my recent lifestyle—dominated by office monkey and egg restaurant habitation, has converted me into a lean mean mountain climbing machine*. Which is a good thing, because this one contains pitcher plants (remember those cartoons in which giant plants trap and eat animals…yeah, they actually exist!).

I hope (free wireless willing) to share some of my experiences with you. I hope even more that you find them interesting, entertaining, or at the very least, a worthwhile distraction from academic and work commitments.

A Listener's Journey: Travelling a path with Ben Lee
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 brother and the prospect of Dad going on another business trip to America, I duly change the radio station from the local news to Triple J, the public national youth station whose attentive listenership played a not insignificant part in any aspiring high schoolers shot at true popularity. I roll down my knee-length gold-and-blue socks in order to remove the sweaty, grimy leg guards which save young hockey players from the dual perils: fast-moving balls and errant flying sticks. As we pull into the community centre to scoop up my brother from his tutoring program, the deejay spins “Cigarettes Will Kill You,” Ben Lee’s breakthrough hit song. With its skipping electronic beat, irrepressible piano vamp and plaintive vocals, the song is only narrowly pipped by the Offspring’s unmistakably heartfelt composition—“Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)”—for the number one song in Australia for 1998.

“It must feel good to stand above me / While I make you so proud of me /It must feel good that I’m now gone / I wish I could say that everyone was wrong,” Ben sings during the song’s climax. And I sing along, shielding the glare of the bright Australian sun with my hand, mulling over pubescent crushes on girls in blue uniform frocks with names like Nicola and Cassandra. At the time, balancing a routine built around piano eisteddfods, hawk-like observation of the hem length of schoolgirl skirts and birthday parties (often a cover for 14 year-old pyromaniacal gallivanting), I was consuming a pop diet limited almost exclusively to heavy rock along the lines of Korn and Nirvana. But that afternoon, something about the singer’s straight-forwardness and fragility resonated sharply with me.

II. REVIVAL:

I slide the two thin wires of my iPod earbuds inside my scarf. Leavng my Globalization and Governance course, I mention to my professor an apparent theoretichttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifal bias in the assigned reading. Ascending the spiraling stairway, packed in amongst dozens of undergraduates adorned in red University of Maryland sweatshirts, I glance over headlines involving off-campus robbery and basketball spectator etiquette (or lack thereof) in the campus daily. “Catch My Disease,” the lead single from Ben’s most recent album and one of the most dangerously catchy pieces of bubblegum pop this decade, re-enters my aural stream. I walk across the streaming sidewalks and into the student union, where I will volunteer an hour at a vegetarian co-op, making sandwiches for computer programmer types from Italy and singers in training from the Ukraine. In the midst of completing a degree in the often somber field of international politics amongst classes peppered with future Defense Department Osama-hunters, the warmth and purity of Ben’s vocal offers startling contrast to my immediate surrounds. “So please / Open your heart / And catch my disease,” he pleads. (Live, courtesy of Joy from Pinkbeltrage)

And the disease he speaks of is jubilation. Awake is the New Sleep, which won Record of the Year at the most recent Australian music industry awards, is filled with sugary, pick-me-up slices of tuneful secular preaching which champions “making eye contact with strangers” and being “all in this together.” Which, in this time of Christian anti-ism and Islamophobafascism, seems strangely revelatory.

III: REALIZATION:

A chill wind blows through the deserted cobbled streets of Fells Point as we make our way from local music oasis Soundgarden to Fletcher’s Bar in Baltimore. It takes approximately two minutes for me to meet another Aussie expat, a rangy bloke from Melbourne whose accent displays far less sway to the hegemonic tongue of his adopted community than my own. Inside, Ben receives a good-humoured reception from the mostly 20-something, mostly white, mostly female audience. Wearing trousers that I can’t imagine him paying more than seven dollars for at some tour stop thrift store, grandpa-meets-Jay Z white reeboks, an unruly tangle of Jewfro hair and a broad smile, he looks comfortable and occasionally ecstatic on stage. His partner on stage, a disarmingly cute red-head who “kicks a deep groove” while seated on a cabron, reminds me of some Australian actress whose name is not Nicole Kidman.

“I’m going to make everybody feel as not-cool as possible,” he says jokingly, following an obscure kick-off song from one of his early albums. “If you were a kitty / I’d be the litter / But I don’t think that’s a suitable metaphor,” I croak along, in my flu-strangled tenor. The crowd warms quickly to songs from his latest album, laughter erupting at Ben’s self-deprecating stage humour and reverent silence upheld for the ballads. On numerous occasions, he stops mid-way through songs to provide impromptu back-up vocal advice to the crowd or to take suggestions for improvised lyrics. The strength of his stage presence and mandate is readily apparent: as requested, the show is almost completely devoid of pretension or indier-than-thou oneupsmanship. The Johns Hopkins couple, of which the Y chromosone half is sporting an unfortunate double Polo popped collar ensemble, leave early. The one goon whose attempt at the sideswept emo coiffe is actively failing stands alone as the sole audience member who refuses to give in to the geeky charms and simplicity of Ben’s songs.

After the show, I ask Ben about his recent interest in Eastern spirituality and the personal growth that is clearly apparent in his energy on stage. Avoiding affiliation of any sort, he stresses the importance of the individual’s own journey. “For me, it’s really about unconditional love,” he offers. When I explained to him how I recently took his song “Gamble Everything for Love” a little too literally during a painful recently aborted relationship, he provides similar guidance: “Have the courage to take your own path, to follow something you believe in,” he explains.

The next morning, I receive a call. After an apprehensive week of waiting, I have been hired full-time as a development assistant for an international NGO. Soon afterward, my thoughts began to stretch out beyond the confines of 21-year-old existential vocation crisis and towards the people I entered the business for in the first place. I am reminded of three-year-old Carla’s playful hands, oceans away in Timor-Leste. Of the unconditional love and the precious gifts that have been showered upon me. And the dream of seeing those gifts showered upon thousands of others, from the unemployed of the West Bank and Mongolia, to the HIV-ravaged of Rwanda and Honduras.

“Tell me the truth and I’ll tell you the truth / If you gamble everything for love / You’re gonna be alright,” Ben sings. It isn’t the first time our thoughts have fused together in the sort of listener/performer dialectic popular music is built upon. And it certainly won’t be the last.

III. Drugs and Rock n Roll: Written in January, 2006.

My last visit to L.A. was part of a month-long Southwestern road trip, during which time I passed through the city a handful of times without ever really getting a handle on it. I was overwhelmed and unimpressed. L.A. struck me as a series of endless strip malls; a “produce and consume” society in which hurried lawyer’s wives chugged about, shoving nutrient-deficient drive-thru food down their gullets as their middle schoolers gossiped over which Hollywood flash-in-the-pan was at their mall after class. At the time, I had pigeonholed the city into a box exemplifying all that was wrong with American society and post-industrial capitalism. Poorly laid out, superficial and alienating, Los Angeles was like the set of cancerous lungs I had viewed in a cadaver exhibit at the city’s Natural History Museum: though the Marlboro Man zeitgeist of Hollywood culture had comprehensively intoxicated the world’s inundated mind, nowhere did I find the disease most advanced than in the carrying body itself. Naturally, I presumed, L.A. would be the first to fall victim to the poisoned onslaught of its own perfectly marketed excess and self-absorption.

Reductive and thoroughly undeveloped (if not wholly untrue), I came to reject this rather Marxist interpretation of the city this time around. Busing around town (literally, I didn’t seem to go anywhere) I found there to be several classic American themes which emanate across L.A.’s intestine-like highway system and the tangle of neighborhoods it envelops. Among them: Hollywood popular culture/film/cult of the celebrity, referred to by locals simply as “the Industry;” the simultaneous symbolism of individual freedom juxtaposed against slavish dependency upon the car; and the anarchic relations of applied libertarianism (an ideology which crosses partisan lines here).

To a degree, it’s all partially accurate: whilst there I met and knew of numerous Angelenos whose largest calling card is having a sister who partied with Paris Hilton. I’ve also not come across a comparable public transportation system so obstinate and utterly inept at carrying people around the city’s major locations. Indeed, in the 1930s, General Motors scrapped the city’s existing electric train system, creating L.A.’s famously congested auto dependency. And here, as Pico Iyer notes, everybody lives side by side without having any idea how she correlates or where she fits in relation to the next person.

However, the real clincher to all of this is the absolute hegemony of it all. The idea of Los Angeles, which at its core is the popular idea of post-World War II America, has a grip so uniformly entrenched throughout the minds of my generation that one can’t help but be swayed by its trans-national leveling power. Social mobility, the primacy of the individual and personal choice, maximalist living, the pursuit of self-perfection; within much of the world, these notions are now the philosophical bedrock of my fellow baby-of-baby-boomer generation. This is not so much about capitalist economics; it has more to do with complete cultural empire.

When the revolution eventually stalled in its decidedly un-groovy bastardization - Stalinism - and when our hippie parents grew bored with Karma and chose Commerce instead, it was Uncle Reagan, former Californian governor (and Aunty Thatcher), who was left to raise us. Los Angeles was our generation’s breastfeeding nanny, nursing us along with reruns of “Rocky” and spin-offs of “Clueless.” She watered down Reaganomics and offered us the powder milk version, flavoring the mixture with neo-McCarthyist rhetoric (“Evil Empire,” “lone superpower”) and consumer culture overdoses.

Besides being the headquarters of all of these dominant ideas, L.A.’s inhabitants follow a lifestyle that is freer, more ostentatious and more outsized than in any other place I’ve visited. They seem to approach life like a Sunday fish market: raw, aggressive, devoid of subtlety. I found this in the steely Korean woman who joked in Spanish with her stall neighbor in an all-Hispanic market. Then, in Koreatown itself, I found it in the attire of young professional Koreans, dressed out of a Vanity Fair magazine, sipping on Frappucinos purchased from a bilingual Starbucks menu. There were Hummers trundling along every highway. Nowhere that I visited did it seem that people could resist the allure of attaining pre-wrapped samadhi, each one living out their own (albeit, personally fashioned) global-by-way-of-American dream.

On the train ride out towards the suburbs of San Bernardino Valley, a group of colleagues frittered endlessly over countertop renovation choices and prices (apparently, if one isn’t getting frequent flyer miles from Home Depot, their family’s vacation time is suffering). On Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, a gay couple purchased the perfect final adornment for a dinner party at the specialty cheese store. The counterculture intelligentsia/vintage store brigade go at it endlessly on MySpace bulletin board battles. There’s no resistance when the resistance movement has been commodified, quite some years ago, and American Idol contestants are singing Iggy Pop.

Whether you’re on top of the system or in the middle of it, satirizing its absurdities or being marginalized by it, L.A. symbolizes the uni-paradigmatic essence of living in a postmodern 21st Century. This creed is equally persuasive today, if not more so, in other countries. Over dinner in Orange County, a senior administrator in the U.C. system told me of his surprise when China’s vice minister of Education divulged to him that her son is working for a billion dollar I.T. enterprise in Arizona. If ever we had a shot at maintaining peaceful relations with China, doping its youth into entering the global rat race might just be it. It already looks like the Indians are on board.

If I were a post-structuralist, I’d call it the “semiology of pursuit.” As a Baudrillard devotee, you could label it the “meta-narrative of purpose.” If you were George W. Bush, you could call it “free people doing freedom-type things.” An Angeleno could call it, well…”life.”

Fittingly, the show I viewed at the Museum of Contemporary Art annex in Little Tokyo was on the effects of ecstasy. One of the exhibits features a dozen psychedelic super-sized magic mushrooms and a blissed-out blue character patterned after Mickey Mouse, all crafted out of brightly painted plastic. MoCA’s curator, whilst giving a guided tour, explained the difficulty that museum staff had maintaining this particular exhibit.

“The kids will just hug and climb on top of the mushrooms,” he said, receiving the subdued bemusement of his artsy audience.

It seems quite clear to me that these children are simply following the suit of the current generation: my own. We're all seemingly on one massive, group trip in pursuit of an unattainable happiness, and nobody, it seems, is ready to let go for the inevitable come down.

II. The King's Fool: Written in January, 2006.

It seems counterintuitive, but I received some of my juiciest background on Los Angeles from a farm boy who grew up in the Midwest.

“They’ve seen the Valley. They’ve seen Beverly Hills. They’ve been through Hollywood and they think they know L.A.”

Daniel pauses briefly, his jet-black non-coiffed ‘hawk falling over dark eyebrows, thin arms crossed across the table.

“…So he puts a picture of a fucken’ dollar store and a tiny taco truck up on his blog! Cos that’s what most of this city is made up of. And that’s what I fucken’ love about it!”

But later on in the conversation, talking to a fellow L.A. transplant originally from Chicago, he expresses consternation over the future of his adopted city:

“But now Silverlake just equals Williamsburg equals Silverlake…” he calculated, referring to the newly gentrified yuppie havens of L.A. and New York respectively, decrying the rapid homogenization of what once was fresh, what once may have been—dare I utter the phrase? —cool. As one who has had his eye on Williamsburg since visiting its Mandela-quoting street art alleys and alluring Asian-American female inhabitants last year, I feigned similar ennui at the swiftly changing face of both neighborhoods.

“Goddamn hipsters,” I muttered under my breath, wondering whether I should feel the slightest bit sheepish for owning a Members Only jacket.

Raised on a farm in Iowa, one would never have guessed that Daniel’s tenure in this most starry of cities amounts to roughly two years. It might be the effortless way in which he wears those remarkably tight black jeans. Or perhaps it’s his preference for Japanese glam rock and musical outfits whose passage-length names suggest a Faulkner-esque indifference toward brevity. Just to rub it in a little, he’s a 23-year-old who drives a motorbike to his job in Beverly Hills and has cartoonist friends who “are paid two hundred thousand to sit around in their studio watching DVDs.” Daniel is also adept at slipping too-perfect anecdotes on L.A.’s colorful demography and personality into conversation, including personal tales I can see etched into the smoky air outside the front door of hundreds of its bars:

“You wouldn’t believe how many times people call me, trying to pitch me their script! And I don’t even have anything to do with the selection process!” he laments.

I felt even stupider. Earlier in the evening, I’d just babbled excitedly to him about my (fanciful) thoughts on writing a biopic screenplay about the revolutionary guerilla leader and current president of the world’s newest nation. This was just after he had explained his current position at Participant Productions, financiers of recent acclaimed gems including “Syriana,” “Good Night and Good Luck,” and “North Country.”

“Think ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ meets ‘Hotel Rwanda,’” I had told him.

Following this ridiculous faux pas, I thoughtfully decided to consign myself to actually speaking only when the conversation approached subject matter of personal semi-authority. As the topics of hard-left political theory, British views on Irony and the ethnic dynamics of neither Malaysia nor Australia arose; I was more or less silent for the remainder of the evening. I did, though (perhaps as partial result), get past the first level on Donkey Kong on one of the circa-’81 arcade games the bar carried.