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Two True Stories
Khun Mo had a dream.
The dream was vivid, impossible to ignore, a vision more than a dream. In it, a young girl approached him, carrying a boat. He recognized her. "Please help me launch my boat," she said. For two nights he could not sleep. He talked to friends, co-workers, family, asked them what he should do.
He comes from the north, where the traditions are different. He didn't know that in the coastal villages of the south, such boats are launched to help the spirits of the dead. "You must help this girl, help her launch her boat," he was told. He found the girl's grandmother, told her of his vision. The grandmother talked to friends, family. She went to the temple, talked to the monks. This means that the girl was an important person in a previous life, they told her.
She commissioned a local builder to construct the boat. Weeks passed. He drew the plans, sawed and painted the wood, cut the sails. When it was finished, the boat was two meters long and a meter and a half tall. It bore five masts and twentyone sails. The hull and the sails were gold in color. It was exactly as in the dream. It was magnificent.
The girl arrived from a foreign land. They took her, dressed her in traditional costume, adorned her face. She was a vision in red and yellow and gold. She was beautiful.
Nine monks sat on a dais in their robes of saffron. They passed through their hands a shank of string, one end of which was affixed to the boat. They prayed for the spirit of the girl's mother.
One monk, the most venerable, sat to the side. He wore a robe, gold in color, the dusky gold of the boat's hull and sails.
Friends and neighbors gathered to join the praying and chanting. They placed offerings in the golden boat, pineapples, a pig's head, coins, a bottle of sweet wine, banana leaves.
The monks feasted. They ate curries of red and green, soup with seafood, poached and fried fish from the local waters, sour and spicy and sweet sauces. When they had had their fill, others took their places at the table.
When all had eaten, four strong men bore the boat to the ocean. They affixed it to a raft of bamboo, and loaded the whole on to a long-tailed fishing boat. The girl and the most venerable monk boarded the boat as well. The boat sailed to open water, the golden boat proud in the prow.
Under the gaze of the girl and the monk, the men slipped the raft overboard, where it was welcomed by the salt ocean. The girl's duty was done and the vision fulfilled. The burden that the grandmother had to bear at all times was assuaged, at least for a while.
The long-tailed boat turned back to the land, leaving the spirit boat to be carried wherever the currents would bear it.
For a brief while, until they vanished from view, golden sails fluttered on the horizon of a turquoise sea.
* * * * *
Khun Mo had a dream.
He was a restaurant manager in a resort hotel, passing his days greeting, smiling, apologizing to ungrateful foreigners. The work was hard, and he no longer felt at home in his native country. He had recently returned after many years as a cook on the other side of the world. He longed to leave again.
An anniversary of a disaster passed. Commemorations of all kinds were everywhere. While he did not actually remember seeing or reading about spirit boats, who knows what lodged in his subconscious.
He dreamt of a girl with a boat. He recognized the girl as someone who had stayed at the hotel, and he tracked down the phone number of her grandmother through a co-worker at the hotel. This was a clear violation of privacy, but let that pass.
Superstition is widespread in the grandmother's village. Believe it or not, she took the dream seriously. She decided to build the boat from the dream.
The project rapidly got out of hand. It was not clear who was in charge, there was bickering about who should pay. The boatbuilder asked an exorbitant sum for some painted scraps of cast-off wood, hurriedly nailed together. He knew that the grandmother would pay whatever it took. Anyway, he reasoned, she could always get money from the wealthy foreigners whom she knew.
The grandmother and grandfather worked for two days to prepare for the launch of this unseaworthy vessel.
The monks came to practise their own licensed extortion. A few minutes of mumbled chanting, and in return each would receive money, food, and a bucketful of goods. Nice work if you can get it.
Who knows quite what the little girl was told, but the stress was sufficient to cause her to vomit on the way to the ceremony. Yet no sooner did she arrive than she was carried off and subjected to an hour and a half of make-up and costuming.
The toy boat was loaded unceremoniously on to a pick-up truck for a precarious ride to the dock, then offloaded onto a waiting fishing vessel. Ten minutes later, the boat was dumped into the water, again without ceremony. One of the monks and the girl were in the fishing boat, but it was unclear why.
Within a few hours, the boat would beach itself half a kilometer down the coast. Passers-by would pick over the offerings, leave the pig's head, remove the bottle of wine.
That was in the future.
For a brief while, until they vanished from view, golden sails fluttered on the horizon of a turquoise sea.
6/2/2006
Salience
So, I'm sitting at my desk working on a piece of research, and I have this figure in front of me.
(See, my co-author and I are looking at non-existence of pure-strategy equilibria in a dynamic general equilibrium setting where one firm's decision about price adjustment depends upon other firms' adjustment strategies, because it turns out that if a certain fraction of other firms are changing their prices then a given firm might actually be indifferent between adjusting its price often but only by a little bit, or adjusting infrequently but by a larger amount, which means that the steady-state best response function can exhibit a discontinuity at a point where the steady-state value function takes on the same value at two local maxima, and so ... wait! don't go away!)
Anyway, Neung comes in.
— Hi Papa. Whatcha doin'?
— I'm working.
She stands on the other side of my desk. This means she sees this:
(I did that to save you from having to turn your monitor upside down.)
— What's that, Papa?
I think quickly about whether there is any way to explain this in a child-friendly manner. ("See, Papa and his friend Alex are looking at non-existence of pure-strategy equilibria in a dynamic general ...")
— It's my work, Norng Neung.
— Is it tsunami?
24/2/2006