For "my friend" Kendra
Sitting in the Chiang-Mai airport, the slurring of consonants and the lilting intonation over the loud speaker apparently call passengers. People all over the room gather their belongings and families together and move in the direction of gate 15. No one looks familiar to me, no one looks like me. And it is 11 o'clock at night. There is a strange, almost eerie feeling to be in such an unknown place. Yet as soon as I settle into my chair, I realize how much there is to see in an airport waiting room. The combinations of people together, the variations in races. I guess I wonder why there aren't more white faces here. Simultaneously, I consider why it has taken me so long to travel to the other side of the world. Why? I think the problem is- we feel we have something to lose. There is something to be said for not feeling you have much to lose. Yet it seems many of us are in the protection game more than the living. Is this a fear of risking? An attachment to things? Attachment to identity? To what we know? You know you are a big girl when you can travel from Chiang-Mai to Bangkok on the way to Beijing on your own in the middle of the night. What a feeling to be in a place which is so foreign and somehow not so frightfully scary as you had made it out to be.
What do people feel they need to protect? I just wanted to think this through. First we protect ourselves-from death, injury, illness. The amazing thing is that for white people, Asia is safer than Europe or America. In the land of tuk tuks and a plethora of street food stands and the smell of curry that I cannot get out of my nose, we are safer. So the idea that we are in physical danger is false and made up. Do horrible things happen to people in these places? You bet, but it is not the non-stupid white person who is at risk.
I know people fear they will be taken advantage of or that their property is in potential danger. I have to admit that this can happen. I have heard of pocketbook snatchers, although no one ever seemed to look twice at my open bag. Also, one has to negotiate prices for goods and services in advance so there is agreement. The taxi to the apartment cost under three dollars. A tuk tuk for two hours cost almost eight. I think we might have ripped him off in the end. Everyone is bargaining for the lowest prices or the highest depending on what end of the negotiation you are on. At times you will walk away with a deal on a gold Buddha head that you don't feel quite right about. You think you may have bargained too hard and left the seller with little profit margin. Whoever carved the statue must have made but pennies and your stinginess is the root cause of their poverty. And it had even been blessed in a monastery.
Once we were ripped off when the massage people, ironically friends had even introduced us, had told us that it was 120 baht (four dollars) for an hour foot massage. Then when we went to pay, the price jumped exponentially to 460 baht and it wasn't even a good massage. The masseuse simply rubbed oil all over our feet ignoring the pressure points which would have surely been hit if we were in China. We thought something was strange when a German woman came from a mysterious back room complaining that her body rub was no good and that she was told it was going to be 200 baht when in the end, they were now asking for 250. She was furious and we, with our feet in oil, thought she was being a horrible, arrogant abusive Westerner swindling the poor Thai out of a couple of dollars. Little did we know that we would soon feel the same. Since the foot massage was my idea, I really felt I had to stick up for my friend, I didn't want her to pay too much. So I insisted and said we wouldn't pay the extra. There was a lot of back and forth through the beaded doorway. After about three or four passes through the beads, each bringing a different underling to demand their new and improved price, I was asked to go back through the beads to talk to the owner. I didn't want to go. I had already imagined the crowded living arrangements, the smell of fish was already in my nose mixed with wafts of confusing, sharp spices and complicated poverty. At first I refused, but I had no choice. I looked back at my friend as if to ask, "will I return? And will you come get me if I don't?" I was also looking for assent, but I knew I couldn't hesitate too long or it could be construed as... I turned and went in pretending I was an American female James Bond, unafraid. I saw what I had dreaded. Massage girls crouching on the floor around a foot high round table eating mushy greyish food from bowls. I held my breath. I don't like stinky. I wasn't sure I wanted to see where we were going next. It seems a small dingy corridor lead behind the shop next door where schools of skin eating fish were in tanks. I had seen this all over Chiang-Mai. Apparently the owner of the oil rub place had this shop as well and she was getting a treatment on her feet as they were submerged in water and the tiny fish came after them to eat the dead skin. In the end, we paid too much but not quite what they wanted. We left quickly and unharmed.
People fear feeling uncomfortable and not able to continue with their habits. Yes, when you travel this will happen. This was clearly the case in the beaded transgressions to the fish eating flesh shop. Or if you are in an airport all night, like tonight-I will not sleep in a bed and this is uncomfortable. Not knowing how to get around is awkward, not knowing where to get food or where to eat results in unpleasant situations and at times hunger. If you are someone who expects to do the same thing at the same time every day, you will be challenged. I will admit that I have eaten some frightening food (I don't even want to mention the chicken livers for fear of bringing the taste of fat back) and have ordered dishes in restaurants which have haunted me. I have endured smells I don't have the words to describe and would never have imagined could exist but in a nightmare. It is all true.
Perhaps people fear losing their beliefs. Are these their culturally ingrained customs? It's as if, if they do something different they will never be able to come back to their former ways or somehow have betrayed them? As if, if they walk barefoot in a Buddhist temple they will then somehow be Buddhist? We fall back on wonder and shock when we do or see anything outside of our limited view of ordinary. I remember feeling shocked by the numbers of white men with young Asian women and thought there was something terribly wrong with this. This is not a custom where I come from. I felt personally offended. But then I had to think this through. Isn't my disgust rooted in the fact that I am an aging white woman who watches men my race and age go for much younger Asian versions? And no, there is no proportional inverse to this which would somehow give me the attention of Asian men of any age. But what I have come to realize is that this arrangement gives both what they need. I cannot begrudge a man who doesn't need a partner who can speak his same language any more or less than I can find fault with an Asian girl for wanting whatever she may get from the balding, overweight Westerner. Even if it is only financial security. That has got to be better than wondering where your next meal is coming from. None of this really jeopardizes who I am and what I want out of life. In the US, I would never have looked at those guys twice and the fact that this is the kind of relationship they choose only reinforces this. If you know who you are and what you believe in, it does matter what anyone else does. And although what you believe in may change with experience, you are the one, after all, who decides this. Besides, I really liked waking barefoot in the temples and I may even chant Om namo bhagavate vasudevaya subconsciously. But I figure I could use all the help I can get.
Aren't all these fears about losing some kind of control? And if you lose control- a spiral of destruction waits just outside lingering to wreak havoc like the devil waiting to lead you astray? One wrong move and your life can fall into a well of darkness and murky confusion and you could lose your family and friends-like losing control of your environment is synonymous with addiction, which would inevitably lead to homeless destitution? What if the man in the saffron robes makes you doubt yourself or his beliefs seem to come into contrast with yours? Would this be the end of the world? Do you really need to protect against this?
The question I ask myself now is, do I really want to protect myself against the irreplaceable challenges that traveling has faced me with? I ask myself, what am I really protecting and is it worth it? I, like all humans, am programmed to guard against hazards which threaten me physically, but the worst threat to my physical wellbeing, as I have been traveling these last 20 years, is really digestive, when I have not been able to process all the spicy foods. But this has happened to me in the US as well. We also think that only in the US will we get quality medical treatment. Unless you have traveled you will never know that people come thousands of miles to get the medical services and care that is provided in the Bangkok. Everyone in Asia knows this.
There is a reason the world is round. It defies our linear logic -if we projected our linear logic it would go right off into the cosmos-into the stars. Profound wisdom must have a circumference-must wrap around. It holds every single dot of existence, making a point insignificant. I keep thinking there is a reason the world is round-if you travel in any direction you will end up where you are or where you started. There is no hierarchy in terms of place. If the world is round there is no up and no down, no Middle, no Near and no Far East. The great thing about the world being round is that there aren't just two sides, but a whole spectrum to every thought and every experience. And none of them are really given a preference. A globe is a true whole unlike a point or a line-it has so many dimensions.
I am in Asia on "the other side" of the world. This place always seemed so far away when I was growing up. This must be what we say to each other. This idea must be passed down from one generation to another. For my parents Asia was further away- and for each generation it will come closer and closer. It is 13 hours away by plane. But Rome is 9 hours away and that never seemed so far. Ideas originated in the mind are not always true. Ideas need to be tested and challenged. There is a strange tension in the mind- a paradox?- I am now in the place that was once so far away.
There are so many things to know and understand-that you would never be able to get- if you had never been to Asia. First of all, It is four hours by plane from Beijing to Bangkok. Bangkok always occupied a dark spot in my mind-which must have come from the movies. I pictured opium dens and child prostitution, what I got instead when I arrived was an array of beautiful yellow, purple and green colors and rich fabrics and people with their palms together in recognition of your presence. I imagined it inherently uncivilized, what I experienced was quite the opposite. "Sawadee Kha", the stewardesses bow in unison at the end of the safety procedures.
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