The Football, The Monastery, and The Ugly

After a twelve-hour train ride from Chiang Mai to Bangkok last night, I find I'm not particularly thrilled to be back in this steamed-out metropolis. I seriously feel sort of like a dumpling here, you know? Maybe not. Shrivelled, damp, claustrophobic - these are the things I'm trying to communicate. At least my room for this one night is nice, though. It actually has a window to "the outside" rather than just a hallway. That's some serious ritziness for the Khao San area. Tomorrow morning, I'll be headed to Beijing, and then from there on to Mongolia! Mongolia by Sunday. It could be a movie title.

Speaking of movie titles, the attentive reader - attentive enough to realize the obvious, at least - will notice the title I used for this post. Think of it as narrating the photos I'm posting, and then "The Ugly" just had to go in for good measure.

As for The Football, one of the Thai youth national teams - say, under-21 maybe - played an exhibition match against a really strong South Korean club at a stadium in Mae Sot. That's right: a) Mae Sot has a stadium (a sandy one) and b) two well-regarded football teams would visit it. I was surprised, too. The whole town turned out, it seemed. The sidelines were packed. I spent most of the match craning my neck over the bald head of one of the Burmese guys I worked with last summer. For the shoot-out, the result of a 0-0 tie, the whole crowd lined around the 18-yard box. It was sort of the populist thing where it's like "the people's game," where every neighborhood kid comes out to see what's up with the show in town. After the game, everyone swarmed the Korean team (which lost in the shoot-out) for pictures and handshakes, though none of that could happen until after the Korean team's prayer circle had ended - a good compliment to their coordinated dance routine during half-time set to a song "Celebrate Jesus." Turns out their club is called "Hallejulah," and their jerseys say "God Loves You." There were a few hippy-ish white missionaries (I'm assuming) who came in on their bus. Weird stuff.



Then for The Monastery, it's Doi Suthep. It's on a mountain outside of Chiang Mai, and it's definitely super scenic, beautiful, etc. But of course it was choked with tourists. After snapping the obligatory photos, I retreated to a bench down the hill a bit and finished a novel - "Waiting," by Ha Jin - while doing some journal writing. All I could here down there was birds chirping, water running (a brook? no, a water spigot, but still), and monks' robes swishing past every so often.



Which reminds me! I've been meaning to post my reading list for this semester, i.e. the books I brought with me. My list from last summer provoked some of the more interesting comments, so I want to throw them out there again. Along those lines, I just figured out why none of your comments showed up last summer. Because I have to "moderate" them! Somehow that option never made itself known to me; they just disappeared. Until now, that is, when the system was kind enough to let me know I should publish the 24 comments that had been lurking mysteriously. I'm psyched to read them.



Back to the peaceful, windowed room. Ah. The Forbidden City awaits, then a quite forbidding land thereafter.

Applications, Acronyms, and Appearances

Tomorrow morning I leave Mae Sot to head up to Chiang Mai, where I'll be meeting with some professor-types. Hopefully I'll also see this sweet monastery on a mountain outside the town - Doi Suthep. I'll be sorry to leave Mae Sot, of course, but so it is.

This past week here in Mae Sot has been, well, something (probably) - but I'm finding it hard to characterize. I've kind of been racing to meet the deadline for my first grant application, so much of my time has been spent here in this internet cafe downloading forms and writing short little snippets about "Career Objectives" and "Personal and Academic Interests." (Carol Gluck is writing me a recommendation for the Weatherhead grant, which made me ridiculously happy.) Outside of grant applications, I've also been meeting up with a lot of the people I knew from last summer. I had dinner at a Japanese style barbecue place the other night, where I finally got to say hi to all of my students I taught. Getting to hang with them for a little, even if it was super brief, was incredibly meaningful for me. The whole "Please don't forget us" issue has weighed really heavily on my mind, so I hope I was able to communicate to them that indeed I had not forgotten them.

One of the other main things I've been up to is meeting with the different youth-focused CBO's in town: the KYO, AASYC, SYCB, PYNG, KSNG, etc. In Chiang Mai I'll meet more: the NYF, the PYO. (I'm too lazy to write out the acronyms, sorry.) I'm gathering their input for a project I'm working on through Young People For - that is, I'm trying (perhaps unrealistically) to build an international network of students doing Burma activism. I've been stumbling over its name. Perhaps the International Burma Solidarity Network? The International Burma Student Network? Also I was overhauling my resume yesterday, and I couldn't figure out what my title should be. Currently I'm Secretary General. (I kid.)

Anyway, I'm always sort of amazed by the tenor of Mae Sot, all of the latent currents of meaning flowing through this town. What am I talking about, you ask. And rightly so. I'm not entirely sure, but this town really does seem like a hall of mirrors sometimes, a place of appearances, a place of masks. On the one hand, small Pad Thai stalls serve *unbelievable* food for next to nothing. The fruit stands are overflowing with abundance, and the sunsets make wonderfully spiky silhouettes of the palm trees. In the early morning mists, novice monks in saffron robes weave through town with begging bowls in their hands. And in the night, the stars shine down on Chang-fueled conversations about Nietzsche and morality. And then there's that other hand, the one with human rights violations - nay, crises - scribbled all over it. And then just outside the Pad Thai stall you see the Burmese migrant worker begging, and you realize that the monks in Burma are monks because monasteries are the only places of learning the regime hasn't crushed. And then maybe one of those huge NGO trucks rolls by, maybe IRC, ZOA, MSF, or even UNHCR. Maybe the noise of it breaks the illusions.


The balance is a tenuous one, between the masks and the maimed, if you will. There are all these trucks in town, delivery trucks I guess. The trucks aren't all that big, but they're stacked super high, like so high I'm always wondering if they get clotheslined by either of the two traffic lights in town. And then on top of the boxes stacked so high, way higher than the cab of the truck even, there are always a few people perched, swaying wildly - to my perspective, at least - as the truck rounds a corner or swerves away from a motorbike. That's the balance I'm talking about. That's my Mae Sot: a place where chaos is avoided only by the laws of an invisible physics. The latent meaning remains latent.


Anyway, it's been a good little stay here. I'm actually kind of looking forward to putting on my headphones tomorrow - I've been listening to The Good, the Bad, and the Queen quite a bit - and watching some Thai countryside fly by. I'm staying with friends of friends in Chiang Mai. Hopefully they'll be good people.

Enjoy the pictures.

Reflecting on the Clock

In "Tristes Tropiques," Levi-Strauss has a phenomenal chapter about the nature of travelling. Unfortunately I don't have the book in front of me right now, but what calls it to mind for me - and it is very often called to mind for me - is that I'm sitting in a very Starbucks-like internet cafe right in Mae Sot. Why does this cafe exist? Is it "a good thing"? Why does such a large part of me dislike it? (If I dislike it, why am I here?)

Even in the six months that I've been gone, Mae Sot has grown considerably. This cafe is evidence of this, as is this *huge* grocery store towards the north end of town called Tesco. It's not exactly Wal-Mart, but it certainly smacks of A&P, or some other such large supermarket. I don't like it.

But what of this dislike? Levi-Strauss encounters a similar issue in his travels in Brazil - that is, he, too, has unsettling "run-ins with modernity" (my phrase, not his) that make him long for some time past, a time in which a "purer" existence could have been experienced. But he is wiser than I. What he argues is that had he arrived earlier, he would have experienced the same wish, the wish to have seen the society at hand another 200 or 300 years earlier. For every present, there is a purer past. It is impossible to find the right moment, in that sense. And what's more, he says - and here he is very much in his role as a fairly scientific anthropologist - that arriving earlier would mean forgoing data sets and lines of inquiry that are available to him now.

The clock, then, is an elusive thing. It can always be turned back. One can always turn it back further, and once one steps out of the time machine in that earlier present, one is still looking for an earlier present. And so it is with me. Had I arrived in Mae Sot in the early 1990s, I would have decried the state of the town as beset by damaging business interests even then - and I would have longed for the 1980s. The lesson, it seems, is to recognize oneself - not without a tinge of sadness, but not, also, without an amount of redemption - as endlessly, hopelessly contemporary, despite all wishes for the crystalline past. As Levi-Strauss says, "Yet I exist." (That is a sentence I can quote without the book in front of me.)

I haven't loaded any new pictures onto my machine yet, so I'll try to get some of those up soon. For now, I hope my sketched out - and sketchy - thoughts may be something more than rambling.

The Road Back to Mae Sot is Nice, Too

On Wednesday, I hoist a very full pack upon my back, send a wave and a smile over my shoulder and poof - I am once again in transit. I am slowly getting in what would seem to be the appropriate frame of mind for my upcoming journey, a frame of mind somewhere between constant daydreaming ("Yes, I'll take two mangos, please.") and constant clinging (to friends and family at home, that is). I will also finally begin checking out the blogs - namely Casey's and Arielle's - of my fellow wanderers.

And a wanderer is what I will be. Hopeful itinerary, forthwith:

2/7 - 2/23: Thailand (Bangkok, Mae Sot, and Chiang Mai)
2/23 - 2/25: Beijing
2/25 - 6/8: Mongolia (Ulaanbaatar and other aimags)*
6/8 - 8/6: Thailand (Mae Sot, primarily)

The picture is from Angkor Wat. I took it - and many others, truth be told - at sunrise. Think symbolism. Setting out. Levi-Strauss, anyone?

* "Aimag" apparently is the Mongolian equivalent of "province," or state - you know. We'll be traveling around Mongolia a fair amount.