Skype = Awesome

Friends and fellow ex-pats, lend me your ears!

(904) 302-7336. If you dial it, my cell phone here rings. If I pick up, I get charged about 2.5 cents a minute.

How'd I do it? SkypeIn. For 30 euro you can buy a number anywhere in the world for a year to make your computer ring. With a quick adjustment, it can make your local phone ring too [goto Tools > Voicemail > Call Forwarding and set it to your local cell] .

This is how to reverse the process so I can call you back home: Buy your own SkpyeIn account with a number in China, set the forwarding to your preferred number and WHAM! I can call you from here for next to nothing. It costs 10 Euro for three months, and drop another 10 or so for our own calls and $20 or so will let you talk to Trey with infinite ease.

Multi-Post

I've been a bit sick, hence my slowness of posting. I was warned about eating the fried street food, but did I listen? Noooo. When I saw a dude frying banana's I just had to have one. And fried chicken on a stick. And now I'm paying.

It wouldn't be so bad if they Chinese didn't have an entire system of make-believe medicine. Err, "traditional medicine." When I was battling a cold earlier in the week I went to 7-11 to buy Children's Tylenol. They girls almost refused to sell it to me. The side of the box for their preferred medicine had written in plain English, "pear seed extract, grape stem, apple root,...". I got my Children's Tylenol with an orange Fanta Slurpee. I won.

As I type this I hear my roommate shout across the apartment "hot water!" every time I sniffle. Cold water, of course, is bad for your health. Dontcha know?

What's wound up saving me is Google's English-Chinese translator. Just find the scientific name for the medicine you need.

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Shenzhen is the land of homesickness. I just realized it after Hou Li told me one of her friends here from her home province is going back. It was too much being so far away. For my own part, I've had two bouts of acute homesicksness. It's not at all what I thought I'd be. It's short, spiky, and acute. It makes its attack and runs. It comes when you least expect it.

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And alas, the pictures I promised. Hera and I went hiking on Lamma Island last weekend. Great hike. Both of us being from beach towns, we wanted to find the nicest beach Hong Kong had to offer. Along the way we perused abandoned villages, which I'll write more about later.

A Distant Thank You

I didn't even realize it was Thanksgiving till yesterday, yet this morning I found myself suddenly sentimental if not a tad homesick...

I'm thankful for all the students who've grown with me in this fascinating career. I'm thankful for the students of Greenwood who had to endure a very green and, at times, emotionally wrecked new teacher who still thought getting angry at a class was helpful. I'm thankful for the students who showed me that I'm good at what I do by showing me their growth and staying in touch with me. I'm thankful for my fellow teachers at Greenwood, who served as both close friends and mentors and held my hand through some tough situations.

I'm thankful for my family. I'm thankful I have a sister who's my best friend. I'm thankful I have a father who reminds me of why I am who I am. I'm thankful I have a grandmother who can say simple words that mean so much, like "I'm proud of you."

I'm thankful I have friends as amazing as they are. I'm thankful I have people like Izak who's never turned a deaf ear or a cold shoulder. I'm thankful I have friends like Natasha, Beth, and Joel who've stayed in touch in my absence. I'm thankful I had people like Nick in my life and I'm thankful I know DJ because of him. I'm thankful I knew Richard long enough for him to convince me I was indeed a writer.

I'm thankful for the people of the Middle Kingdom for being so respectful, warm, and only curious at their worst. I'm thankful for having met people like Lyndsey, Brian, Gary, Daniel, Reagan, Dru, Cody and all the other expats here. I'm thankful for my Chinese friends like John Laoshi, Lili, Hou Li, Jessica, Zhong Yu, Victoria and so many others for spending time with me and showing me just how wonderful and [uncomfortably] generous the Chinese can be. I'm grateful of the wonderfully random circumstances that led me to befriend Nina, who inspired me to come here.

I'm thankful for my mentors, the people who help guide me through these changing years, like Dr. Halsall, Dr. Schwam-Baird, and my father. I'm thankful for you and the other people who read my blog and keep my motivated to maintain my artistic edge. I'm thankful for my muses, all the artists - musicians, photographers, writers, and wanderers - who keep me in touch with my spiritual side and remind me of the absolute beauty of it all.

Finally, I'm deeply deeply appreciative of the staff and financial supporters of Baptist Hospital, particularly Wolfson Children's Hospital. Everything they did for Jacob, my little nephew, was an incredible feat. And today they have my full confidence as they work on Carson, my very sick little niece.

Reflections

So I've been here almost four months now. I'm a month passed when serious homesickness should have started setting in. To be honest, it's not there. At least not in any way that I imagined. I miss my family and friends, sure, but I feel like there's supposed to be distance right now. It's been my plan to move away for some time. I'm also pretty bad at staying in touch when I'm at home, so in a lot of ways it's not all that different being out here. There were certainly month-long stretches where I wouldn't see my Dad or sister or a certain friend and I wouldn't even notice. I'm bad like that.

That said, I was awed about an hour ago showing my Chinese roommate, K., photos of a Jacksonville sunrise. I did a Flickr search and just browsed through all the seagulls, sand, and waves that align perfectly almost every morning in north Florida. I remembered my first day back home after my first international trip, a month in Europe, and walking on the beach jet-lagged as the sun rose and dolphins swam beside me. And I miss that. I miss the beach. I miss thunder cells developing against a blue sky over open ocean. I miss the sound of waves. I miss the smell of salty air. I miss the acoustic guitars and conversations that happen at night on the beach waiting for the sun to rise. I miss the marshes. More than the people, that's home to me. Florida.

My old Spanish professor asked me in an email if I could ever settle down in China. My response was that I couldn't. There's an aesthetic that's missing here, cultural and natural. You can't just sit back and watch the clouds because most days a blanket of carcinogenic gray pollution hangs over everything. Some days I can make out the mountains of Hong Kong from my school, which sits up against a bay I can never see.

There's a deeper cultural aesthetic that's also missing. There is no underground or independent music outside of Shanghai and Beijing. There is no art "community" in Tianjin or Shenzhen - cities both larger than NYC. There are no slackers who just want to sit around and draw, or play guitar, or take photos at the cost of not making too much money. I'd be glad to have more kids doodling during class, but I don't.

You can blame it on the Cultural Revolution - which I do - or Chinese society. You can hope, like Dr. Echols does, that if "[it took] 30 years after WWII for Japan, and 30 after the Korean War for S.K [to develop an art scene], so if you take 1980 as your starting point for China, then maybe that would put the sprouting of an interesting music scene around 2010."

You can hope for the future, but it's not here now. For now blue skies and clouds are hard to come by, independent art is even rarer. You know my roommate has never seen a sunrise before? I think that is what I miss most.

Off the Rails

There's a freedom living abroad that's difficult to describe. One is not judged the same as you are back home. Locals tend to attribute almost all our behavior - better or worse - as just being something foreigners do. The minor guilts that haunt everyday life are absent and true personalities shine. You begin acting on your own conscious without second thoughts instead of having to consider what other people think. That freedom is exponential in somewhere like Cambodia, an impoverished nation putting itself back together after wholesale slaughter during decades of civil war. There's an allure to the anarchy that draws many colorful characters.

It's also the subject of Amita Gilbao's Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja. Unfortunately, it was horrific in every imaginable way. To begin with the writing was sloppy. There was no narrative arch, no story to unfold, and he simply doesn't have a writers hand at description. Three times in one paragraph he described Cambodian music as somber. He invents words - something I'm not opposed to - but sticks with the duds throughout the book. One of the words in his last sentence was "tragicomic." No one says this. Your last sentence is supposed to be poignant, reflective... tragicomic is what you come up with? It's almost as bad as him stopping to add "shopping arcade" in parenthesis to let us know that's his clever term for strip malls.

So we've got down that he's a bad writer... so what does he pick as the subject of his book? Whoring druggie pedophile expats. He delivers almost 200 pages about men running around in Southeast Asia snorting heroin before their English classes and renting teenaged peasant girls sold into sexual bondage.

He throws out his cards early by having someone describe his work as a being " Like a Gonzo rant from Hunter S. Thompson" on the cover but then falls on his face emulating the unedited stream of consciousness style that only a select few can pull off. There's also little tension between the writer and over-the-deep-end friends like Thompson had with Oscar Acosta. Thompson uses his lawyer almost as a proving point of his own sanity and keeps Acosta at a safe distance when he's is at his worse, you really get a feeling that Gilbao deeply admires the men he writes about. He wishes he could be brave enough to sleep with a $2 illiterate 14 year old prostitute too.

It's so disappointing because the subject matter is so rich. Gilbao brings up the Josef Conrad link early saying that there's a reason Kurtz goes crazy in Cambodia in Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Copalla's re-imagining of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness is about a good man gone mad without any of the routine social factors keeping us sane. Deep in the jungle, far removed from civilization, morals and ethics bend beyond recognition. Gilbao makes the connection in the first chapter, but then does nothing more with it.

This would have been an excellent approach to the book instead of the self-important diary entries. Gilbao touches on it briefly, when he visits a brothel and leaves before anything happens, afraid that there was no turning back afterwards. It is precisely that moment, when heavy moral questions about actions disappear after trial, that is worth writing an entire book on. The depravity in and of itself is not interesting. It's the mental slide into an entirely different world where the values and norms you grow up with vanish without notice that holds literary weight.





Tags:Off the Rails Phnom Penh Cambodia Amit Gilboa Gonzo Thompson Hunter S. travel writing expat lifestyle Asia Treyopia