Notes on Newborns

They call the first three months of a newborn's life the Fourth Trimester. Ostensibly, the baby who has made the heroic journey from womb to world is not aware that he and his mother are two separate beings who might need to be separated periodically throughout the day. Rather the baby pays little attention to the fact that the life-giving force of the umbilical cord is now gone and that he must bother with breathing air and trying to get milk out of a nipple. In the baby's view, the mother is his only and constant source of warmth, comfort, security and food -- as integral to his person as, and more important to his survival than, his right arm. If the mother happens to sneak away during a nap to brush her teeth, the newborn panics as if a body part had mysteriously disappeared. It was here before, he must think, where is it now? His sense of time is immediate claiming only a few days or weeks as precedence. And his understanding of the layout of a house is non-existent, meaning that a trip down the hall is the same as falling off the face of the earth. When people said life would change after a baby, it is impossible to really appreciate what they meant.

This is why, for the first three months of my son's life, I showered in the middle of the night. There was a four-hour stretch somewhere around midnight when I was certain that the baby would not miss me. I could accomplish truly extravagant things like washing all the soap out of my hair or just standing under the hot water and stretching the aching mothering muscles. I could allow myself to be detached and self absorbed. It was supposed to be the 'me' time that everyone told me to get. But I was miserable. The whine of the hot water winding through the pipes sounded like a distance cry and I would stop and listen for distress in the silence of a sleeping house. I was not needed and the solitude was lonely.

'Are you able to get out and take a walk? Just get some time to yourself?' A concerned friend had asked at about week two of the mothering vigil. First it was freezing out so the obvious answer was no I hadn't gone out into that tundra. Second if by 'time to myself' she meant my twenties, then yes I've had almost a decade to do whatever suited me. It is a clever design of nature to erase both the pains of labor and the satisfaction once derived from such distractions as reading magazines or going to the bathroom whenever the urge struck.

In those early days, the demands of nurturing required such single-mindedness that there wasn't enough energy or attention left to give to my husband, the day's news or everyday household chores. The baby was born shortly after the newly elected Democratic Congress started opening the skeleton-riddled closets of the Bush administration. These were bright days for liberals after a serious losing streak. But something hormonal made me not as smart as I once was. Full sentences, coherent thoughts were secondary to the constant state of awareness a new mother endures. I slept lightly through the night, the baby cradled in the crook of my arm. During the day my arms were always full of baby. And the little chores of moderately clean people were ignored: the long hairs collected in the sink basin, the dust bunnies became tumbleweeds and the unwashed dishes became a buffet for a daring mouse. My husband spotted the intruder nibbling merrily and opened the back door as an invitation for it to leave. Although I wasn't present, I imagine that the ensuing scene between mouse and man has been depicted in countless Warner Bros cartoons. Perhaps there was a squeal, leaping on to a chair and lashings with a broom. Two days later the cat that lived in the backyard caught the mouse and left its carcass on our back stoop as tribute. At least one creature among us seemed competent.

Disaster Tourism

Sumatra is a beautiful island of rugged mountains and lush valleys, but you wouldn't know it from my travel photos. Here's a typical shot taken in Bukit Lawang, a riverside village that was nearly obliterated by a flash flood in 2003. You can't tell from this picture, but for some reason the toilets always survive every possible disaster: flood, earthquake, fire. I've got shots of rubble and toilets from the earthquake damage in Nias and the tsunami damage in Aceh. There were beautiful landscapes in between, but this island and the others in the Indonesian chain are the land equivalents of Job, seemingly innocent victims in a supernatural test of wills.

The forces of nature really despise the Indonesian archipelago. The Indian Ocean is one of its primary foes. That watery beast has many tactics for carving away at the landmasses that prevent its free range. Over millennia, the ocean pummels coastal rocks into sand and spirits away the debris through a ceaseless peristaltic motion. Not content with such a miniscule reward, the ocean floor periodically growls, sending up a wall of water to steal more bounty. The 2004 tsunami was just the largest and most dramatic assault in recent memory, smaller skirmishes beset the islands annually.

Then there are the volcanoes, the kingpin of the attacks. When viewed from space, the blue globe of earth looks serene but burrow into the planet's core to find a chemical factory of noxious gases and colliding solids. In terms of design, volcanoes are an ingenious venting system that cause destruction and creation in a supremely divine fashion. The toxic and fiery vomit of a volcanic eruption will eventually cool into rich and fertile soils, tempting plants and people to call these dangerous places home sweet home.

Visiting a disaster hot-spot is the tourism version of rubbernecking. The need to see destruction first-hand, and not be filling a humanitarian mission, is far from commendable, but the urge to know easily eclipses remote sympathies and the faulty imagination. History's great disasters -- the ash-buried city of Pompeii, Samuel Pepys' fire-ravaged London -- make epic stories, and perhaps to see the fresh scars in our own lifetime cements otherwise peaceful lives within the framework of history.

A year afterwards, I saw where the 2004 tsunami had erased an oceanfront middle-class suburb outside of Banda Aceh. For as far as you could see, there was a newly established nothing - no street signs, no electrical wires, no trees. And the nothing was an improvement over the chewed up debris of buildings and bodies left behind after the waters receded, sated and weary.

A converted pick-up (known as a labi-labi) carries passengers back and forth across the empty landscape many times a day from the central city to the rebuilt jetty. During the 15-minute ride, all the passengers grow pale and teary. In the bank, on a ferry ride, at the internet cafe, the Acehnese who speak English share their story of that day - losing loved ones, running from the water. The scientific phenomenon of violent seismic activity and the physics of displaced water do nothing to capture the experience of the event. Here only the creatures of myth can suffice: people described the rushing water like a great naga, a mythical sea serpent, that barreled across the land.

Further away and harder to reach is the island of Nias, a victim of the aftershocks that followed the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. The capital city of Gunung Sitoli crumbled into piles of rubble that today outnumber functioning businesses. There's no there there. At the southern tip of the island, the bridge leading to the surfer beach of Lagundri was later wiped out by monsoon rains and a nearby concrete school bears earthquake cracks large enough to walk through. Along the beach are rows of destroyed guesthouses - a wall here, and oh yes, a row of toilets over there. The surfers didn't come this year or the last, spooked by Indonesia in general and the tsunami in particular. The locals are nervous and a little pushy. My guesthouse owner followed me whenever I left the property; he was worried I'd spend my money elsewhere. Disaster tourism is not always a vacation, even if the setting is in paradise.

I Think That Stripper Likes Me

Being a foreign woman in Bangkok is a lot like being a blind person in a museum -- there is a lot that I miss. Nobody brushes past me and says, “Hello, hansum.” The teenagers in Patpong don’t try to sell me porno DVDs. Until recently I thought Soi Cowboy was the unlit parking lot next door to the infamous lane of girlie bars. And I’ve written several guidebooks to the city. A straight, married woman writes about the bawdiest place on earth. It cracks me up just thinking about it. While other guides might tell you about the low-key girlie bars near Washington Square, I make sure that people know where to get the best bowl of noodles and chastise newcomers for roaming around town shirtless. If Bangkok were more shy about its naughty side, I’d feel sorry for the ‘One Night in Bangkok’ contenders who unluckily stumble upon the books I’ve written. But by virtue of being the world’s oldest profession, prostitution knows a thing or two about self-promotion.

Oddly I’m not outraged by Bangkok’s sex industry, which should on principle send me into a feminist tizzy. Instead I feel left out, like everyone is laughing at a joke that I’ll never understand. I know the punchline, but I still don’t get it. I guess that’s why I let that stripper pick me up on the Skytrain that night.

I was coming home from a friend’s house on Bangkok’s elevated light-rail system, and a Thai women dressed in a body-length fishnet stocking stumbled aboard.

“Where you are going,” I asked, using the Thai greeting that is usually translated into English by pesky tuk-tuk drivers as “Hey, where you go?”

“I’m going to work,” she said as she plopped down next to me. “And I’m drunk.”

“Me too,” I said and our common altered state made us fast friends. Before I knew it, I had agreed to go with her to work. And, surprise, she just so happened to work at a strip club in Nana, hence the hooker outfit. Nana, by the way, is the real-deal for sex tourists. It is a honeycomb of strip clubs and hostess bars, a self-contained universe complete with its own hotel and its own moral code. Until I let the stripper pick me up on the Skytrain I had never entered the Nana lair, only glimpsed at it from the main street.

Arm-in-arm we traipsed past the cross-dressing drag queens and neon-lit bars filled with flirting couples into a bordello-red room with stadium seating and a stage filled with half naked Thai women doing what Thai women do normally with their clothes on. Most were gossiping around the dancing pole, another had a menthol inhaler shoved up one nostril and in the corner a few more were snacking on papaya salad. My new friend sat me down and went off to change into her work uniform, which could probably fit into a pant’s pocket judging from what her coworkers were wearing. She sent her friend over to take care of me and thus began my introduction to Thailand’s adaptation of the geisha tradition.

My new admirer asked if I wanted to buy her a drink, which contained a surcharge for her attention. She complemented me on my Thai and for being so brave as to visit Bangkok by myself. All this attention went to my head faster than the beer and I really felt like the smartest, prettiest girl around. A friend back home later explained this as the “I think that stripper likes me” moment. She was obviously very good at her job.

Eventually we got to talking about each other’s families and I mentioned my husband. “You have a husband? You don’t like girls?” she asked. There are a lot of things that foreigners do that confuse Thais, but this seemed to have topped them all. “Why are you here?”

That was a very good question, and I didn’t have a good answer. Curiosity, I guess. For research, maybe. Nothing better to do, surely. But all of those reasons sounded strange. I just shrugged and said I didn’t know why. Soon my original friend returned and I settled up my bill. They all waved to me and I waved back as if they had been a group of exuberant English students practicing their language skills with a foreigner. It wasn’t until I walked by the smirking madam that I remembered I was in a strip club.

When David Becomes Goliath

Has the South finally buried its Confederate War heroes in order to embrace the Union with unconditional post-9/11 patriotism? The Fourth of July wasn't widely celebrated in the region until after World War II. That's only 60 years of red-white-and-blue flag waving. It could be argued that occupied Hawaii might have a longer history of Independence Day cook-outs than Atlanta. And with the importance of ancestor worship in the former rebel states, wouldn't the colonel in the family tree bristle at the recent surrender to Washington, D.C.?

Perhaps the region's new economic prosperity has achieved something that the Civil Rights movement could never accomplish: dismantling the region's isolationism. With jobs come newcomers without the same family lineage or inherited grudges. Perhaps all the ghosts of all those dead generals that used to march through white Southern children's imaginations have been released from their terrestrial posts. Perhaps the War on Terror has finally buried the War Between the States.

Growing up in South Carolina, I was an outsider from the cult of the Confederacy. I wasn't weaned on legends of my family's Confederate war heroes. We didn't have any. One dusty story pulled out of my mother's inherited memory chest was of her ancestors who were burned out by the war and crossed the mountains into Ohio with only a few cents in their pockets. Peter Gunn, a fresh-faced young man and only child of a pious farmer, was the only family war martyr that I know of, and he fell for the Union cause.

Our family's only morsel of Southern military pride came wrapped up in state loyalty. My father grew up in the state that both created and tested the American experiment of representative government: Virginia. "Look kids," my father would point out the bronze statue in Old Town Alexandria of a sinewy soldier with his back turned to the offending cardinal direction. The statue's name is "Appomattox" and it memorializes the fallen Confederates. Every Southern downtown has a Civil War monument, usually a granite slab erected after the rebel states were released from federal occupation. The wounds were still fresh then. The names still immediately tied to the living and the sting of defeat still shackled to the collective consciousness. But times have changed.

The soldier's home is hardly what it was: The entire northeastern corner of Virginia is no longer distinct from the federal swamplands of Washington, D.C. The Alexandria accent is almost gone, now replaced by the monotonous drone of standard English. The old family names affixed to the statue are now watered down by other family names from faraway corners of the preserved Union. Most of the area's "Southern" character was lost before the war even started, according to long-standing jokes told by tribes further south. And today the Southern divining rod, sweetened iced tea, arrives in Alexandria restaurants as its bitter Yankee cousin, unsweetened with a side dish of sugar packs that when emptied into the cold liquid sink to the bottom like lead weights.

The once despised national government, so close in geography, provided the 20th century jobs that throttled Northern Virginia from tidewater farms into professional suburbs. Those post-WWII salaries and government grants even sent a machinist's son, like my dad, to college. The great struggle between North and South is over, and even the Old Dominion has forged an allegiance with the enemies across the Potomac.

But still standing with its old grudge is Appomattox assigned to antiquated discord forever. "How painful," I had always thought. The poor despondent statue could never be happy, could never crawl down from its ledge and get a secure federal job with good benefits and humane working hours. The statue's immortal burden of sadness in turn made me sad. But Appomattox is still relevant and has escaped the fate suffered by many a generals astride spirited ponies. Washington, D.C., is filled with meaningless statues long forgotten by the standard history textbooks and used only as pigeon perches.

In a goodwill gesture from more enlightened times, the soldier could have been replaced by a hollow bureaucratic attempt to honor Virginia's multiculturalism. That is, if it weren't for a statute forbidding such attempts passed by the Virginia House in 1890. In terms of monumental celebrity, surely nearby Arlington cemetery is the greater star. Arlington's sloping hillside filled with neatly ordered white crosses is still as arresting today as it was when the military formation of corpses were first scratched into Robert E. Lee's front yard. No statue could compete with the visual power of that final resting place.

But more likely Appomattox survives because successive generations adapted the symbolism of his pose for more modern times, a strategic career. Today he embodies a more universal struggle: David versus Goliath. Except for a few holdouts, the South's continued remembrance of the war no longer represents the initial conflicts of economics and equality or even a families' brush with history. Because of the loss and the subsequent occupation, the war with many aliases has morphed into that heroic struggle between the suppressed and the tyrant, even after the union has became an imperialist. And Appomattox survives as an orphan for orphans, an adopted war hero for newcomers who have no blood ties to those historical events. Every time we drove north to visit relatives, my father always made a special detour around the traffic circle to point out the statue. "Look kids," says every father about cows in fields, famous landmarks, and pieces of their youth. Fathers express themselves in these cloaked messages and children listen, even if the response is buried within ridicule or disinterest.

Seeing Double: Thailand's War on Terror

Thailand, the peaceful country that escaped civil war and colonization, has an internal problem: the deep south, a region isolated and culturally distinct from the rest of the country, wants independence from its colonizers (Thailand) or something close to it. And it isn't a cause being argued in the legislative chambers or at the ballot box. The modern weapon for the Davids of the world against the Goliaths is no longer a slingshot, but a bomb. At first the primary targets were government officials and agents of the perceived repressive state who were forcing mainly Muslim southerners to be more 'Thai.' This was low level stuff: a charred motorcycle or bombed-out telephone booth, nothing like the explosive and bloody scenes coming out of Iraq. But violence has continued -- slow and steady, a lot longer than anyone expected it to. And Bangkok's national government seems totally perplexed that the region hasn't snapped into shape after a few good reprimands.

The ongoing violence in the south has sparked something of a national debate about how Thais define themselves. On the one side is the nationalist majority, who view Thaksin as a strong and effective leader and who criticise the Muslims in the south as ungrateful trouble makers. Taxi cab drivers are usually the most accessible spokespeople for this view, but the sentiment extends into the Thai aristocracy. They admire Thaksin for being a rich man, hoping that success in one arena will breed success for the country, and they applaud him for his tough talk regarding the Muslim insurgents. If the Muslims don't want to be Thai, one cabbie told me, then they should leave Thailand. Nevermind the fact that the deep south used to be the independent sultanate of Patani, long before Thailand conquered it.

On the other side is the intellectual left-wing, typically speaking through the English-language newspapers. Editorials urge Thailand to embrace its cultural diversity rather than propagate the long-standing myth of one unified people with one unified history. They are critical of Thaksin's PR-style campaign in the south, most notably the government-backed airdrop of 120 million origami birds as a gesture of peace. And they charge that using excessive force in the south will help recruit mainstream residents to extremism.

What's most interesting about this debate is that the idea of 'being Thai,' one that is often used to silence critics, has been defined by the culture and history of central Thailand. Not the north, not the south and not the northeast -- all of which have been shaped by the different foreign influences that geography allowed. Surely the northeasterners who were at one time part of the Khmer empire and of the Lao kingdom have wrestled with the mirage of political and cultural boundaries. Most village kids in the northeast grow up speaking Khmer or Lao and learn Thai in primary school. Their definition of being Thai must surely be different than the Bangkok elite. But people's capacity for contradictions are limitless and some of the staunches nationalists are working-class Thais from the rural northeast, long considered second-class citizens by the Bangkok rulers. It reminds me of another nationalistic debate in a country across the ocean from Thailand.

The Man Who Let New Orleans Die

To the rare reader, this blog has detoured to political outrage.

Why couldn't New Orleans' residents just walk out of the city to safety and dry ground? Because this man stopped them. He is Gretna Chief of Police Arthur Lawson and he ordered his officers to seal off the bridge that links the two cities. This bridge could have served as an escape route for people stranded in the city without food, water, hygenic surroundings, and safety. It also could have been a staging ground for a relief effort had anyone with the capability cared. Most interesting is that he admits to it without remorse in this San Francisco Chronicle report.

"Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson confirmed that his officers were under his orders to seal off the suburban city of 17,500 residents. 'We had individuals bused into Gretna and dropped off, and we had no idea they were coming. No one ever called us -- we have no shelter in Gretna, and our citizens were under a mandatory evacuation. This place was already locked down.'"

If you thought that the recovery debacle was just incompetence, think again. There are a million alternative plans he could have chosen to do his job as a police chief and help his neighbors. But he chose the least Christian, the most criminal, and the most inhumane path. Wonder what type of person orders his officers to stand armed will watching people suffer. Here is his bio from the Gretna Police Department's homepage.

CHIEF ARTHUR S. LAWSON, JR.
Chief of Police

Arthur S. Lawson, Jr. is presently Chief of Police of the City of Gretna Police Department. Born in New Orleans in 1954, he was employed by the City of Gretna Police Department on November 1, 1975; where he started as a patrolman, working his way through the ranks to his present position. Chief Arthur S. Lawson, Jr. was elected February 11, 2005 as Chief of Police for the City of Gretna.

Yerba Buena’s Emerging Artists Need Longer in the Oven

From the frilly Victorians to the Mission murals, San Francisco is an inherently artistic city unburdened by the self-conscious legacy of New York City or the disjointed identity of Los Angeles. Within the city’s reigning alternative trend of skateboard-graffiti art, the aesthetics of youth and freedom are viscerally translated into color and form, making the viewer, however terminally square, feel infinitely hip. And then there are the uncooked metaphors, art for art-school’s sake, and the self-referential vanity trips -- in other words, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts (YBCA) 2005 Bay Area Now 4 exhibit on view from July 16 to September 25. Held every three years, the center selects the works of emerging artists destined to become national trendsetters. These works, claims YBCA, push boundaries, capture the essence of living in the Bay area, and embrace the new and different.

More power to the YBCA for unbuttoning the reigning artistic monarchy. More power to the YBCA for its unconventional attitude toward the artistic merits of video games, advertising, and new-genre art. But the best of intentions don’t take the final step into expression in the majority of the Bay Area Now 4 works. Is Libby Black’s meticulous reconstruction of a Kate Spade store really the best of what San Francisco has to offer? Finding such an obvious example of consumerism in the museum is intriguing but simplistic. Andy Warhol turned the Campbell’s soup can into an icon, he took the image one step further. In Libby Black’s work, Kate Spade brand designers have done all the work, from product design to product placement. Black has shown herself to be an expert imitator, not a social critic, or an artistic innovator.

Standing over a soup pot, sampling the outcome of a kitchen experiment, you might ask yourself what flavor is missing? A little salt, more herbs? The same question arises in the YBCA's galleries. Something is missing: the provocative pieces are flat, the elaborate pieces don’t engage the viewer, the video installations are reminiscent of cable-access shows. Let’s keep this self-congratulatory show well-hidden from prying eyes back east. It will only boost New York’s gargantuan ego.