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March
What about it?
6/4/2006
Paris in the Spring
Neung is a nickname, as I think I have mentioned. Neung's real name is Parichat. As Thai names go, this is pretty straightforward, but it is still not easy to pronounce correctly: the middle syllable has a high tone and the final syllable a falling tone; the final consonant is unvoiced; the "ch" is halfway between the English "ch" and"sh"; and so on.
Because of the difficulties of pronouncing Thai names, most Thais who interact frequently with English speakers adopt English nicknames. Jill and I spent a lot of time discussing what we should call Neung in Singapore. In the end, we went for "Paris", as it is a short version of her real name that is easy to recognize, spell, and pronounce. If we are being honest, neither of us is sure that the name quite fits her (and of course there is that whole Paris Hilton thing which we have to ignore), but we could not find anything that worked better. Neung herself seems to like it, it gives her an easy way to revert to her Thai name when she is older if she would like, and it does have the advantage that we can easily purchase merchandise with her name on it.
(She also goes by Jill's last name in Singapore, rather than mine, and if we are able to adopt Neung one day, that is the name she will be given. There are many reasons for this, from euphony to feminist statement, but the most important goes by the name of Herman. Herman was Jill's paternal grandfather, murdered in Auschwitz. He had one son and two daughters, all of whom survived the holocaust, and his son in turn had two daughters. Hermann's daughters took their husbands' names, as did his granddaughter, Jill's sister, and so none of Herman's greatgrandchildren now bear his family name. We would like that name to live one more generation, at least.)
Neung had two weeks of school vacation at the beginning of April, and Jill had some teaching to do in France, so we decided it would be fun to bring Paris to Paris. Jill has been traveling back and forth to France frequently over the last few months, but for me it was my first time in France in more than a year. The weather was kind to us -- unseasonably cold, perhaps, but bright and blue almost every day. We spent most of our time in our house near Fontainebleau, thus allowing Neung to experience a real backyard for the first time, and giving Jill the chance to show Neung off introduce Neung to her French colleagues.
We also went to the big city for a couple of days. Neung had been very excited about this trip in the weeks beforehand, exclaiming "Paris!" every time she saw a picture of the Eiffel Tower. It was only when we got there that we realized that, in her mind, the Eiffel Tower was Paris.
We went to the Centre Pompidou, where we saw a children's exhibit about faces. We ate at Georges and at Le Bistrot des Pingouins. We had hot chocolate at Deux Magots (in all my dozens (hundreds?) of times in Paris, the first time I had ever been there), where I resisted the temptation to discourse to Neung on Sartre and de Beauvoir. We walked across the Pont des Arts, and through the Cour du Louvre, where I did not resist the temptation to discourse on triangles. We had the best ice cream in the world at Le Bac de Glaces. We ate mussels and played by the statues at the Forum des Halles. We went to see L'Age de Glace II, on opening day (we were just too early for Asterix et les Vikings). We ate crêpes with egg and with crême de marrons (no, on different crêpes). We bought merchandise with her name on it. We will come back in the summer and do much more.
Oh yes, and we went to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
10/4/2006
On the Beach
We are returned from France and back in Thailand again. Neung is with her grandparents, and I am sitting on the beach on yet another one of those perfect Khao Lak days. The ocean is pale blue and calm.
I mentioned in my last post that I had not been in France in more than a year. My previous visit was at a much less pleasant time: it was a brief stopover on the way to my father's funeral in January 2005. My father died after we had met Neung for the first time but before we returned to Thailand to look for her.
The last time I saw my father face to face was in late 2004. I had not the slightest idea how my life was about to change. My last phone conversation with him was shortly before his death, and I remember telling him about the relief work we had just done in Thailand. I recall thinking that he would be glad to know that we had been there. I don't know if I mentioned Neung (I doubt it, actually), and in any case, I don't know if he would have really registered what I was telling him, for he was suffering some cognitive impairment near the end of his life.
A little under two years ago, I posted the following short piece about him elsewhere. Perhaps it does not really belong in this narrative, but I have decided to include it here anyway.
* * * *
I am writing this in a plane that took off from Paris Charles-de-Gaulle airport about half an hour ago. Thanks to frequent flyer miles, and upgrades, and clients who pay the bills, I’m in a comfortable seat, drinking champagne. Thanks to the technological advances of the last six decades, I am writing this on my laptop while listening to a CD. I have friends, a spouse, brothers, nieces, nephews; I love them dearly. I am healthy, I have a house near Paris, I have a job that permits me to travel the world. In short, I live a privileged life. And though it is true that, post 9-11, post Madrid, we all feel a little less secure; by the same coin I appreciate my privilege more and take it for granted less.
The map on my personal video screen shows that we have just left the French coast, having flown the length of the coast of Normandy. From this height, the ocean is a startling blue, a colour that I associate more with tropical waters than with the English Channel. It looks very peaceful. I am writing this on June 5, 2004. I am 44 years old.
When I was growing up, in the 1960s and 1970s, World War II seemed like ancient history. It was black-and-white movies, Colditz on TV, those old volumes of Churchill on the bookshelves, my mother’s only half-believed stories of rationing. War, if I thought about it all, was in the jungles of Vietnam, and was a cause for protest, or – more likely – was just an abstraction of the protest singers. The Second World War had nothing to do with me, not really.
I can place the moment – the embarrassingly recent moment – when this changed. It was the summer of 1998. I was standing on the cliffs of Normandy for the first time. I looked out over the sea, which appeared not in the least tropical, and I thought about the fact that the D-Day landings had taken place sixteen years before I was born. And, nearing forty, I was suddenly aware that sixteen years was a very short time.
I have friends, a spouse, brothers, nieces, nephews. I also have a father, eighty years old now, five times sixteen. Sixty years ago he was a captain in the British Navy, and in the days following the D-Day landings, he ferried troops and equipment across the English Channel to the Normandy beaches. Can you imagine being in charge of a naval vessel at war, at the age of twenty? I can’t. I have tried, but I really cannot.
I am more proud of him than I have ever managed to say to his face.
Some of those young American, Canadian, or British soldiers that he transported liberated Paris two months later. And now I have a house near the city they freed. I have a wife whose father was freed from a concentration camp by Russian soldiers. I fly business class and I have a laptop computer that plays CDs. I live a privileged life.
For whatever reason, anniversaries and dates mean a lot to us. For the next few days, therefore, we will commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the D-day landings. We will remember those young men who landed on the beaches – those who are now old men, and those who were torn apart by bullets before they even made it to shore. There will be TV specials and interviews with those who were there.
But in 2014, when the next decadal anniversary comes around, there will be only a handful left. It is no longer sufficient to think of this every ten years. Instead, these days, whenever I meet someone who fought in World War II, I make a point of thanking him on behalf of myself and on behalf of my generation. It is not much, a few words of thanks for the life that they allowed me to lead, but it is something. I have not done this enough, and I am making up for lost time. We have not done this enough, my generation, the generation of laptop computers and "Give Peace a Chance”.
Try it. I promise that you will be surprised and gratified by the response. And time is running out. Soon you will have missed your chance.
* * * * *
My father's eightyone years were not quite enough for him to meet his latest and most unexpected of grandchildren; she whose mother also died much too young, also on a beach.
He would have liked her.
14/4/2006
In Which I Admit that I Am a Hopeless Case, Buddhism-wise
The late afternoon rains bring out the frogs. The humid evening air resonates with their croaking. My headlights pick out several by the side of the road as I drive slowly up to Ban Nam Khem in the ebbing of a rainstorm. And then I see it -- as big as a mouse, hopping across the road from right to left in long high arcs. I can tell what is coming two full hops away: hop ... up ... down ... hop ... up ... down ... and then I am driving over it ... hop ... up ... *THUNK*.
15/4/2006
Hands
Some were twisted, calloused and arthritic. Some were still tough and powerful. All had clearly seen hard labor, hauling nets, digging tin, gutting fish, gathering coconuts, tapping rubber. Some had carried bodies to this place. Perhaps some had clung on desperately, futilely, as children were dragged from them by the water.
All were cupped to receive the water that I scooped and poured. The first pair belonged to Khun Sanam, as it happened. They accepted the water, then were placed together as she muttered in prayer. As we made our way down the line, some simply received the water; some were then lifted to our heads or faces or shoulders. The warmth and welcome in their touch was extraordinary. There were perhaps fifty or sixty pairs in all.
Some had been held in front of us before, when we had placed trivial essentials in them: shampoo, toothbrushes, baby bottles. Back then, the gratitude of their owners had been gratifying and distressing at the same time; it reassured us that we were doing something valuable, yet we were painfully aware of the humiliation of being so thankful for so little. Now it was our turn to be grateful for -- there is no other word for it -- the benediction of their touch.
(Thanks to Jill for providing the driving idea for this post.)
19/4/2006
Thai Festivals: Number Two in an Occasional Series
Our last trip to Thailand was timed so that we could be there for Songkran -- Thai New Year. The guidebooks emphasize the fun aspects of this holiday, for Songkran is celebrated primarily by throwing water on people. Those on motorcycles run a gauntlet of kids who wait at the side of the road with basins of water. Groups of people -- mostly young men -- ride around in pickup trucks laden with barrels of water. Occasionally two trucks meet, and pitchered battle ensues. At the Ban Nam Khem temple there were games and dancing and water flying everywhere. Jill and I were, once again, the only farang.
I was expecting all of this. I was not so ready for the more solemn aspects of the day. By now it is old news to readers of these pages that I repeatedly find myself in places that I could not have imagined prior to the tsunami. At this point, I suppose I should no longer be surprised at my surprise. Yet I was incredulous once more. I have never experienced anything remotely like the ritual of honor for the older men and women of the village that I described in the previous post.
Most people have largely forgotten the tsunami by now. You probably have, unless you were directly affected. I do not say this critically. We are all the same, and the tsunami is just one of the long list of disasters that the world suffers. I hardly think from one week to the next of the Pakistan earthquake, or the Philippines mudslide, or the drowning of New Orleans. Time deadens the impact of these events for most of us, more and more as the years go by: when was the last time you thought about the half million people who perished in the Bangladesh floods of 1970?
In our day to day life in Singapore, even we sometimes find ourselves forgetting just how awful the tsunami was. But when you keep returning to the heart of the event, as we do, the reminders are everywhere. The day of Songkran, amidst all of the fun, we were reminded of the tsunami by both presence and absence. The temple was filled with photographs of the dead and there just didn't seem to be enough children around.
19/4/2006
Introspection
I mentioned a couple of months ago that I am trying to write a narrative of my times in Thailand. It is going slowly. I am not good at this kind of writing. I am not good at description: the sounds, the colors, the smells. There is a reason for this: description, or at least description without cliché, is hard, surprisingly hard.
A bigger obstacle is that I am unwilling to reveal myself. It is in my nature to be highly analytical about the experience (even, as you can see now, about the experience of writing about the experience), to inspect and explain even my emotional responses. In short, I find it very difficult to write what I feel. This is not only because I am reticent to expose my feelings but also because I fear that much of what I would or could say about them would be numbingly banal. If there is interest in the story that I tell, it is because of the circumstances rather than my reactions to them. My love for Neung is the love that every parent feels; I have nothing new to say on such an old subject.
Other problems crowd in. I wrote once before that being a parent brought fewer surprises than I expected, so I cannot write gushing saccharine passages about discovering feelings that I did not know I had. Yet this brings on a defensiveness: if I do not write such passages, then will people doubt me, suspect that the love is less because my daughter does not have my genes? I am sure that it is not, but this admits of no proof. I'm over-analysing again, aren't I?
So here is one anecdote, saccharine, uncomfortably revealing, banal. Neung was with her grandparents, and Jill and I were in the hotel watching Empire Falls on DVD. (The original book, by Richard Russo, is highly recommended, and the television adaptation boasts a fine cast and some excellent performances; definitely worth watching.) Near the end there is a scene [[*Spoiler Alert*]] where there has been a school shooting, and the main character goes to the school to find his teenage daughter cowering behind a desk, holding a blooded knife and in a state of severe shock. I watched, and I thought that I never want to be in such a place with my daughter, and I wept for the terror of that thought.
19/4/2006
Quis Custodiet?
Today, a Singapore judge appointed us Neung's official guardians in Singapore. This does not invalidate Khun Sanam's guardianship in Thailand, but it does give us explicit legal rights to make decisions for Neung here in Singapore. On one level, it is just a legal formality, a rubberstamping of the existing situation, but on another it is a huge moment, the culmination of ten months work, the first legal document to acknowledge our relationship with Neung.
19/4/2006
From Space
Google Earth has improved its satellite coverage of much of the world sometime in the past few months. (It used to be, as far as I could tell, that only the U.S. had really good coverage.) In particular, the area around Ban Nam Khem has very high resolution pictures. The images must have been taken shortly after the tsunami: the destruction is clear and there is no sign of reconstruction. The original camp where we first met Neung is visible, but the camp where they were rehoused for several months has not yet been built.
Neung's old house stood on the northwest corner of the crossroads at the center of this picture. Nothing remains of it. Notice the fishing boat about fifty feet southwest as well.
This is the relief camp where we first met Neung. I am going from memory, but it seems to me that this is probably in the early days of the camp -- possibly before we were even there in early January.
This is Takua Pa Hospital. The picture is centered on some tents set up in the forecourt, where family members of those inside were staying. We distributed goods there in the aftermath of the tsunami.
And this is where we live in Singapore.
29/4/2006