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When that Kate Bush song “Running Up That Hill” became popular again after it featured in the fourth season of Stranger Things, I came across a passage in that made me think of a friend:

Kate Bush has a unique appeal for young people with a gentle outward nature but with a powerful will trapped inside them. She shows them how to direct their will, not into aggressive outward displays of conventional competition, which they are not made for, but into quietly creating something unique.

Possibly, it was because I had recently met her over coffee when she was back in Malaysia for a holiday. (I don’t think I’ve ever told her this, until now—here! in this email Q&A! 😆) But I’ve also long had this impression of her quietly tending to what she loves, when so much in our modern world pushes us to “show” people what we’re working on. It feels like Reb—an art director, designer, and illustrator (who also takes beautiful photographs)—doesn’t often wear her aspirations on her sleeve, preferring to let her work speak for itself when it’s ready.

Anyway, Reb and I first met years ago when I joined Esquire Malaysia as associate editor, but she had been the art director of the magazine since its start c. 2011, and also for some years at Esquire Singapore—international editions of Esquire, largely run independently (though content that translated well across cultures was sometimes shared). At the time, the magazine, now defunct, felt like the only publication in Malaysia that really encouraged longform nonfiction (which was what had attracted me); and it was tastefully designed, with an aesthetic that dared to be subtle—thanks to Reb.

Fast forward to around the start of the pandemic: Reb moved from her hometown of Subang in Selangor, Malaysia to San Francisco for a new job at California Sunday—a print magazine known for its narrative journalism and its emphasis on publishing stories from Asia and Latin America. When it folded, she moved to New York as a print art director for the New York Times’ Opinion pages.

That’s not all we’re going to talk about, but things flow from there. I’ll let her tell you the rest ❤️

E.

EMILY DING: So, you made the move to the U.S. at a particularly tricky time—at the start of the pandemic, if I remember correctly? I know it was to start a new job with the magazine California Sunday (I’m gutted that it has ceased publishing!) but can you tell me more about how you got there? I don’t mean the logistical process of getting the job so much as the personal feelings, dreams, or circumstances that led you there. Had you been thinking about it for a while?

REBECCA CHEW: Funny (and sad) that since you reached out, the parent company of California Sunday, Pop-Up Magazine, has also ceased operation. A friend once joked that every magazine I work for is doomed. Apparently I have a proclivity for the doomed. Well, at least I have a track record in something. Anyway. I didn’t intentionally seek to work in the U.S. It’s just that the publications I wanted to work for are based there. After working in publishing for a few years I felt stuck. Not that there aren’t any good writers or editors in Malaysia—we just don’t have the level of support and interest that makes publishing sustainable. I knew there are bigger ideas out there, more demanding standards, and I was hungry to learn and absorb. Working at the New York Times was a pipe dream. So the fact that I’m now working at the Times still surprises and humbles me.

ED: Actually, wait, maybe we should talk about the logistics of migration, if you’re happy to share. Because I think there’s the assumption that if you haven’t already got a permit to work in places like the U.S. or U.K., you would generally be unable to apply for jobs there—especially in the creative industries. Foreign graduates in these countries, after spending all that money going to university, often run out of time to get jobs and switch to work visas there, when their student visas expire. And once they leave the country it’s harder to get back in anew—again, for creative industries. But that’s exactly what you did. You had never studied in the U.S. but you applied, did interviews online, got the job, got the visa. So it’s difficult, but it’s not impossible… Having gone through the process, was there anything that struck you about it—and also, more broadly, about the idea of migrating to “manifest one’s potential”?

RC: I harbored fantasies of studying abroad as a teenager but quickly put that aside when I realized it was not something my family could afford. Because I had neither a foreign education nor a network of contacts that one would have accrued overseas, I had to find another way to work abroad. It required a thick skin, doggedness and necessary naivety. I started applying for publishing jobs in New York early in my career as a graphic designer. It might seem like an ambitious aspiration but I was more motivated by desperation (and unbridled pessimism!) caused by shrinking opportunities in an already unstable industry. I’ve been passed over multiple times until the creative director at California Sunday took a chance on me. I wish the hurdles ended there but the O-1 visa process is dehumanizing as it makes you question your worth. And even after obtaining the visa, your status hinges on you maintaining your worth. And your worth in the case of the O-1 visa is your professional ability. Essentially, you are reduced to utilitarian attributes. Good mental health fodder.

ED: I remember checking in with you a month or two into your move to the U.S., and you didn’t seem entirely convinced by the place and the “competitive”—I think you said?—state of being it kind of forces you into that is very different, I guess, from the general vibe in Malaysia. But you stayed and when I met you again earlier last year, after you had moved from San Francisco to New York, you seemed much more optimistic. There was even an air about you, I felt, that was ever so slightly different! Looser, somehow, in a way that was physically manifest? Is living in New York all they say it is? Or maybe it was just the longer hair, haha.

RC: I think you just caught me in a good mood! I work in the visual side of publishing where there’s this notion of constant productivity. I’m sure you encounter it as a journalist, too. This projection of busyness, of being in demand, through the sharing of work on social media. I’ve consciously (maybe even self-consciously?) tried to not do that as much. And when I moved to the U.S., that hum of productivity felt more heightened especially when creatives here appear less reserved about yoking their identities to their job titles. I’ve always been uneasy about having my job define who I am because it opens up a sinkhole of existential despair. But I’ve since made peace with the fact that everyone struggles with imposter syndrome and I shouldn’t take it so seriously. Self-promotion still makes me cringe but I’m learning that it’s okay to be proud of the work you make. Milestones and achievements are simply things that happen in life, not life itself.

ED: It’s interesting to hear you talk about impostor syndrome because it always felt to me that you’re quietly sure of yourself and what you want to do creatively—like, you’re not going to be swayed by, say, the feedback someone more accoladed has on your art if you don’t agree with it, and you can put it aside to better pursue a kind of “purity” of your own vision. Would you say this is true? If so, how do you think you’ve managed to hold on to that in a world where there’s so much striving for recognition?

RC: I’m a designer, not an artist, so I doubt that what I’m adhering to is artistic purity. Better to call it principles, I guess? While I’m certainly intimidated by some creatives, I don’t have artistic heroes. I know it sounds so cynical but there’s a lot of bullshit and wanking in the industry—self-branding, self-promotion, messiah-complex opining, highfalutin mission statements, etc. I should know because here I am navel-gazing in this Q&A. Always sniff out your own bullshit before anyone crinkles their nose.

ED: What would you say are the differences between being a creative in Malaysia and in the U.S.?

RC: I can only share from my experience working in publishing in Malaysia, and California Sunday and the New York Times in the U.S. I found editors in Malaysia to be less open-minded and the organization hierarchies more rigid. There’s a lot more politicking. Editors and managers prefer designers to stay in their lanes. Designers are treated as decorators and subservient pixel pushers. You aren’t encouraged to ask questions. Maybe it’s partly the fault of the Malaysian education system that the arts or anything artistic is seen as the last resort for those who can’t make it academically. But here, you don’t have to apologize for expressing your point of view because having an opinion is one of the reasons why you’re hired.

ED: Now that you’ve been in the U.S. for a few years, how has that changed your relationship to home? And actually, what was your relationship to Malaysia in the first place?

RC: Home is never a physical place for me. It’s my family and friends. Home is wherever they are. I moved to the U.S. without really knowing anyone, so I am in a sense homeless. I’m still figuring out if New York is my home, but I’m not inclined to define it. I guess I’m more comfortable with that uncertainty now having gone through the pandemic.

ED: Had you been to the U.S. before you moved there? How is social life there different from in Malaysia? Do you find yourself to be different there socially?

RC: In 1994 my dad, a motorcycle enthusiast, won a bike in a contest and sold it off so we could all go on holiday in the U.S. And then in 2007, with more savings, we went on our second family trip, this time for almost a month. We rented a car and made a road trip across several states. We squeezed into motels, took turns under the shower, grew constipated from American food, watched middle-aged Americans tilt their doughy bodies over the rim of the Grand Canyon, and was scandalized by the gaps in restroom stalls. It was great. And then I was in New York for a week when I started at Esquire Malaysia, where in the Hearst Tower, the creative director said I needed to “man up” my designs. Interesting. I also stole a few snapshots of Helen Gurley Brown’s leopard print-carpeted office—10/10 would recommend… And I totally meandered.

Back to the point, I’ve gained a few friends since living in the U.S. I don’t have my closest friends to hang out with on weekends but we still talk every day. I’m naturally an introvert so I mean it when I say I enjoy my own company. I’m comfortable going to gigs and movies on my own. And of course it gets lonely. I’m taking friend requests. Just DM me on IG.

ED: Going back to what the creative director at Hearst said, did you ever feel hamstrung working at a man’s magazine?

RC: I sort of knew what I was getting into when I took the job at Esquire. It was one of the few magazines at the time that was still experimenting with typography and design. It has a rich graphic design history and some of the designers whose work I’m interested in once worked there. But I hated the way women were photographed for the magazine and how men were directed to fuss with their cufflinks as the default “Men’s Magazine” pose. For the first few months, I was the only female staff on the editorial masthead. I wanted Esquire Malaysia to be a smarter, more nuanced magazine. I wanted more white space, I wanted fiction and more long-form pieces, I wanted photo essays. I took it as a challenge and am glad we made a difference, however small or short-lived.

ED: I remember that I looked forward to the box of international Esquire editions arriving in the office every month, so we could see how different countries manifested their magazines in different ways. The perception, performativity, and lived experience of masculinity is obviously different in Malaysia versus the U.S. How would you characterize the differences from your years working at the magazine?

RC: I think Asia is a little more comfortable with androgyny. There are traditional archetypes for sure (i.e., strong, stoic men) but in the media at least, men having delicate features isn’t an indication of eroded masculinity or being less sexually appealing. The American masculine archetype of a gun-toting, whisky-swirling, Hemingway-reading ladies man couldn’t be translated wholesale for the Asian context. That “Esquire man” of the 1960s was dated, misogynistic and would gladly mansplain menstruation. He died of a heart attack at the BBQ pit. The Asian equivalent is probably a Kurosawa lead but he’s not the only representation of manhood. Asia seems less married to a rigid idea of masculinity, or even a singular definition of masculinity. That was what the Hearst CD didn’t understand. I don’t think he anticipated Harry Styles wearing a dress.

ED: Your work—and your Instagram—feels uniquely and subtly informed by an eclectic array of influences that you make your own. I remember one of our ex-colleagues saying, “I wish I could get inside Reb’s head!” What’s one experience that has been most formative for you personally, culturally, artistically?

RC: You don’t want to get inside my head. But seriously, Chungking Express, 1994. I was maybe eight or nine years old. I was a huge Faye Wong fan so I sought out this movie she was in. I didn’t know much about it but after that first viewing on a grainy videotape, I found a language for something I’ve been carrying inside me that I didn’t quite know how to express. That movie opened my eyes to creating stories, framing, aesthetics and music—all filtered through the eyes of a child, of course. I was still chasing ice cream trucks and wearing tattered t-shirts from pasar malam. And then there was this whole world that I couldn’t share with friends because they just didn’t get it. Chungking Express became my gateway drug. It led me to other movies and filmmakers, to music, to books, to art, to photography. It ultimately groomed me into a teenage snob.

ED: I often imagine you tinkering happily in private, ideas filling your head, telling stories by actually making things. Some of the art you created and directed at Esquire Malaysia was very tactile, made by hand, and then photographed or scanned for the printed page… but wait, I’m not exactly sure where this question is going, haha. I think what I want to ask is: what kind of environment is most conducive to your imagination?

RC: I think being an outsider, or having that perspective, helps. Not being truly comfortable in this world can be lonely, unsatisfying and cynical but also unwittingly optimistic because there is hope for an alternative or something better. This is obviously bad for relationships (haha) but probably vital for the creative pursuit. Having the luxury to daydream helps, too. I used to do it a lot more as a child. It appears completely idle to everyone on the outside but there’s a lot of uncensored play going on internally.

ED: Where have you spent most of your life, actually? How would you say the place shaped you—if it did? If it didn’t particularly, why not?

RC: I spent most of my life in Subang Jaya with many trips to Kuala Lumpur on a weekly basis. Subang Jaya is a suburban mall town with horrendous traffic. Growing up, the biggest thing going for it was an ice skating rink in a pyramid-shaped mall. When I was sixteen, Subang felt like a dead-end small town. It still sometimes feels that way but it has a special place in my heart. Deep down I’m really just a suburban kid with a biblical name. Low-brow tastes tickle me, ugliness intrigues me, tacky aesthetics comfort me. My childhood in Subang keeps my feet firmly on earth.

ED: What’s a place in Malaysia you love?

RC: Wandering around Penang at dusk or dawn. Or any small towns in Malaysia, really.

ED: What’s a place in New York you love?

RC: Walking around at dusk, peeking into windows when the lights are turned on. It makes me sound like a total creep but I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they don’t look into people’s homes or are not inclined to peep. Like, aren’t you curious? Sometimes my mind takes over and I start imagining stories, the windows as frames where movies play out. I wonder about the people who exist in these rooms. There’s a certain Hopper-esque melancholy in this act that fills me with existential loneliness but it also strangely calms me.

Views and experiences related are the speaker’s own. Guest appearances here hope to reflect the variety of life in this world.

Reb’s three good things

Aftersun: So gentle and heartbreaking. The performances and framing, the 90s childhood redolent of chlorine and sunscreen. I soaked this movie in. One of the best things I’ve seen last year.

Self-Help by Lorrie Moore, or anything by her tbh: I’m a huge fan of her sense of humor and the way her characters view the world. Very few writers make me LOL. Lorrie Moore is one of them. And when you don’t see it coming, she wrecks your heart and leaves you bereft.

Stay True by Hua Hsu: At the risk of sounding earnest, this book made me ugly cry. This is for the awkward music-obsessed teenager in me.

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You’re about to read a guest letter from Mae, whom I’ve known since we were teenagers, though we’ve gotten to know each other better in recent years. We’ve often found common ground in books and writing and freelancing and despairing about not getting through an over-ambitious to-do list because we weren’t sure which task to prioritize first 😅 We’ve also shared a perennial unsettledness, though every person’s experience of it—what drives the feeling and what they are looking for—is, of course, different.

When I saw an Instagram Story she posted about volunteering as a polling/counting agent for Malaysia’s general elections last November, and how she was compelled to do it because she wanted to belong more to Malaysia, our home country—a feeling that had for so long eluded her—I felt that the sentiment it encapsulated fit right in with Movable Worlds, and asked if she would like to explore it further in a guest letter.

Here’s what she wrote, which I found to be frank and moving—critical, but also filled with love. It comes at a particularly good time, since Michelle Yeoh’s recent success has ignited the debate again among Malaysians on whether one has to leave the country in order to make it. Enjoy reading, and feel free to share your thoughts with her in the comments, or hit reply and I’ll pass it on.

If you have a story you would like to write and share on Movable Worlds too, please pitch it here. Feel free to also send it on spec. The fee is USD$150 per letter and I promise it’ll be a collaborative process ❤️

E.

A letter from Kuala Lumpur by Mabel Ho

Photographs provided by the writer

Mabel Ho is a writer and reader—learning, feeling, and listening her way through life in Kuala Lumpur. She writes at maemoji.substack.com, where she hopes to start publishing regularly soon. (It has been three years!)

Days after Malaysia’s fifteenth general election last November, my country was still at a political stalemate. There was no clear winner and we had a hung parliament. Confusingly, both the heads of the two coalitions leading the race were saying they had the numbers.

Memes about how Malaysians were incapable of getting any work done flooded social media as we waited. It was impossible to concentrate on anything else, so I joined the masses refreshing Twitter and Malaysiakini every few minutes. I watched explainer videos from rebel activists and Tiktok pundits like Kuasasiswa and Iqtobal on Malaysia’s democratic and political processes: what contingencies would kick in if this or that happened, or if the impasse persisted.

I needed the political education. Despite growing up in Malaysia—I left when I was fifteen to study in Australia—I had always felt insulated from it. While I carry a Malaysian passport, I had no clue what it meant or what it had to offer me. Why did I have to know, if I was brought up on the notion that I was always meant to migrate elsewhere? Even when I came back as an adult in my mid-twenties, I felt much the same, thinking my return was temporary.

All my years here, I had often asked myself, What is this bubble I live in? But I never arrived at a satisfying answer. Now, having fashioned a semblance of a life here over the past decade, I thought it was time to unravel the complexities of my relationship with my country. I wanted to see more of it, understand it better, just be a part of it more—but on my own terms, not my parents’.

One thing I decided to do was to participate more actively in the democratic process. This is, after, all, the only country in which I have the right to vote. So during the general election, I signed up as a PACA—polling agent/counting agent—who volunteers on behalf of a political candidate to observe the polling and voting processes at a particular constituency on election day.

Yet, I was padding what I was doing with caveats. “I’m not doing this for the country. It’s for my own selfish reasons to understand more about things I clearly do not know,” I told my friends. “Being Malaysian, for me, has felt like being married to someone you don’t know.”

This knee-jerk reaction, lest I appear a blind patriot, gave me pause. Why was I so quick to reject Malaysia? The disconnect felt discomfiting. I knew I had to stop being forever angry and resentful, but why were those the only feelings I had ever really felt for my country? I can’t keep worrying over the same old wounds. At the same time, I thought that Malaysia, too, had to stop being forever angry and resentful, if there was to be any hope for political change.

For a long time, I was hesitant to say that I was Malaysian when I was abroad. I felt a sense of embarrassment that I was not “Malaysian” enough.

I felt that way for various reasons, but in large part because English is my first language and I am unable to speak the Malay language properly, and I often felt the need to justify why I have an accent that apparently sounds American. I know how it made me look when I offered up half answers as reasons, though they’re all true.

—“A big portion of my mom’s side of the family lives in America, and we used to go there a lot.”

—“Hollywood and TV, you know.”

—“I don’t know, I’ve just always spoken this way.”

I grew up speaking English with my family. And even though I had gone to a school that put me through the local education system and structure, where I learnt Malay as its own subject as well as the teaching medium for other subjects, I still had no real grasp of the language. My peers all spoke English. Most of our teachers spoke to us in English. A fair number of my country’s mainstream news media are in English. All the books and movies and culture I consumed were in English. All this oriented me, for the longest time, to always look outward.

When I returned to Malaysia in 2012, I remained steadfast to the idea that I was still only in transit. My shipped boxes home remained unopened, just in case I was to move somewhere else again. I became accustomed to fielding questions about when I was going to leave next.

It would be tempting but dishonest to say that I felt I didn’t belong in Malaysia because it had rejected me, somehow, because it wasn’t the country I wished it to be. There is widespread corruption, racialised policies, and a lack of freedom of speech, among other issues. But I see now, with the gift of maturity and time, that I had it on backwards. The obnoxious truth was: I did not want to fit in. I had it in my head that Malaysia was not suited for me, I was the one doing the rejecting.

I can only wince now at the audacity of my younger self. I want to deny that I had ever uttered these thoughts out loud.

Every new place I imagined moving to felt like an escape hatch, but what I told myself about what I was reaching for and why I was reaching for it started to feel disingenuous. I mean, what was I running from? I had a very sheltered upbringing, one removed from most of the people who make up this country. I was educated in a private school, and the people I grew up around had the privilege of not having to depend on public services. The idea of leaving began to feel like a marketing ploy: romantic notions upon which I rested my ambitions—surely a mere impression of what my new life could be. These delusions of grandeur meant that I was always halfway checked out of my life in Kuala Lumpur.

That went on for six years before I conceded, finally, to unpack those boxes. Until a couple of years ago, I was still building my exit plan from Malaysia.

As a PACA, all that was required of me was to sit at my assigned polling station and watch for discrepancies and to ensure that the electoral officials were carrying out their duties fairly. On November 19, we carried these out in shifts, and due to a shortage of volunteers, I had to do a six-hour run—four hours observing the polling process, two hours observing the counting of votes.

I volunteered for Gobind Singh Deo, the Democratic Action Party candidate for Damansara, and honestly, I had no idea what his policies were at the outset. I just knew that I wanted to do it for an opposition party, and that they needed people—which was reason enough for me. The Damansara constituency is large, with almost 240,000 voters, and he ended up winning by a six-figure majority so there was no real contest, not much room for dispute. The leader at my polling station was a firm but kind lady—I think she was a teacher, as voting is often done in schools, where teachers are tasked with administering the process—and if I felt out of my element, she put me at ease.

Nevertheless, I was still anxious the night before, particularly about the possibility of having to use any of my atrocious Malay. For most of my shift, I was seated next to a PACA from another party who was extremely chatty with me—in Malay. Eight years younger than me, he had PACA-ed many times before. He talked about being in gang fights, having a gun licence, and being a freelance bodyguard for rich men’s children. Were it not for the language barrier, I would have liked to ask him more. He’s not someone I would usually meet among my circles of friends. What kind of Malaysia has he known?

Anyway, a PACA stint is just that—a stint. It’s not like it changed my views or feelings about Malaysia overnight. I think I had hoped to feel inspired by doing it, though I can’t say that I necessarily was. But I did feel like an active participant in the process of choosing, in a little way, the Malaysia I want to live in. I was wading in, finally, now that I am living here—not somewhere else.

My parents couldn’t understand why I was doing what I was doing. They didn’t even know what a PACA was. When they found out, they looked at me, bewildered. But why? they asked. Evidently, my oblivion and naivete to this country didn’t come from nowhere. I just had to look at my parents’ own relationship to Malaysia.

I grew up with the understanding that I was always meant to leave Malaysia. Heavily influenced by my mother’s side of the family, half of which is based in the U.S., the dream was always to leave for more “Westernised” countries, for bigger economies, for supposedly greater freedoms. Even if one were to move just across the causeway to Singapore, that would be better than nothing. My parents had essentially placed all their focus on making my brother and I leave. (He did.)

In the days after the election, before the long-suffering Anwar Ibrahim was finally confirmed as Malaysia’s new prime minister on November 24, I learnt more about the history of Malaysia through this Malaysiakini story on the spectre of May 13. It was published in 2019, on the fiftieth anniversary of the violent racial riots which were taught to us as Malaysia’s darkest episode of history.

As I read more, I learnt that the riots in Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding areas were triggered by the upheaval of the 1969 general election, leading to a reconfiguring of the political landscape and a hung assembly in the state of Selangor. I felt my cheeks burn with mortification. I had known about the riots, but I hadn’t known what had led to them. It seemed like stories about the riots were making the rounds again because the present election had resulted in similar upheaval—a hung parliament for the first time in Malaysia’s history.

My mother’s side of the family had grown up in the district of Petaling Jaya in the state of Selangor, so they would have been close to where the riots were. My mother was thirteen years old at the time, home alone with her four sisters and her mother. She saw military tanks on the street, was afraid to walk to school. My youngest aunt was only eight months old, still being fed formula milk. My grandfather was away on business in Penang and could not make it back due to the public emergency that had been proclaimed. These were the stories fed to me growing up. It was the fear that had made an impression on them, and on me.

My maternal family’s WhatsApp group chat had been pinging with messages throughout the elections. Only three of us still lived in Malaysia: my mother, my aunt, and me—the rest of the messages were coming in from other parts of the world. But my relatives abroad continued, as they always had, to share anecdotes and outdated information about Malaysia, in a way that I felt to be glib. When talk of the riots came up, the assumption was mostly that they were caused by the Malays. “Nothing to do with us what!” they said.

Hoping to inspire some dialogue with my family, I shared the Malaysiakini story and marvelled at how I had not known such an important piece of our historical puzzle. I asked if they had known, but I was met with total silence. Then I was blue-ticked. Nobody seemed to want to engage.

A few hours later, my mother texted: “Happy Thanksgiving Day everyone!”

I stared at my phone in disbelief, feeling suddenly overwhelmed by the chasm between us. I pinged her privately: “Mom, we are not American, why you go and say this??”

“Well it’s still Thanksgiving day, celebrate or not.”

My paternal grandparents were the first on my father’s side of the family to arrive in what was then Malaya. They came from Guangzhou as married young adults, and focused all their energy on surviving in their new country, hoping for a better life. But Malaysia then is not Malaysia now, and my grandparents rarely went outside their community. They only spoke Hakka, and regarded other races with some wariness.

My father, too, seems to have a fractured sense of identity in relation to Malaysia. At one point, he talked often about leaving Malaysia to live out the rest of his days in Lijiang, a part of China he has never been to. He almost exclusively consumes China-based media, so much so that I’ll often jokingly ask him, “What are you watching, Dad? Propaganda?” And whenever I visit my parents and ask him what he’s been reading, he’ll quip, “More propaganda.”

I don’t think my father feels that he belongs in Malaysia, but he also has nowhere else to go. His parents came from China, but he has no real ties to it.

In a way, his fumbling search mirrors my search, except that I have the benefit of at least another thirty years to build a life. He has already built his life—it’s right here, but he can’t live in it fully. And I wonder if holding on to the dream of somewhere else is the only way he knows how to deal with his disconnect.

I used to think that I had to choose the country that would offer me the best way forward. But I’ve realised I no longer need that certainty—and Malaysia’s path forward is yet uncertain. It’s enough for now that I am where I choose to be, and that I make the most of it. In looking a little more beyond myself and whatever disappointments I may have felt in my life, I’ve begun to appreciate things I hadn’t appreciated before.

Because what this country lacks in good governance, we make up for it with kindness in spades. I’ve learnt over and over that every Malaysian’s coping mechanism in times of crisis is a generous sense of community, with a healthy dose of memes and dad jokes. The pandemic grounded me, both literally and metaphorically, in witnessing how people came together. #KitaJagaKita (“we take care of us”) started as a grassroots effort on social media, matching those who could help with those who needed help. This continued when floods ruined the homes and livelihoods of Malaysians in December 2021, and many who were able jumped right in to lend a hand with the clean up.

I’ve even come to appreciate how we Malaysians don’t try to be anything we’re not. If we’re mediocre in something by some put-upon external measure, we learn to contend with it in our own ways. Maybe some of us are too mild-mannered for the kind of forging ambition we’re supposed to want; or maybe call it age, because I’ve become less intense myself.

But though life may feel smaller here, in a country that rarely figures on the world stage—unless, it seems, one goes abroad and succeeds, like Michelle Yeoh—it isn’t any less gratifying. There are many little things I love about living here: the year-round sunshine (something I used to hate growing up, especially after experiencing the changing seasons overseas), the random food stalls cropping up at the side of the road at all hours, the community of friends and chosen family I’ve come to build. I’ve been able to spend a lot more time with my parents and Fitzy (Fitzgerald), my miniature schnauzer, who takes up a large chunk of my phone’s camera roll. Life is chill. I’m learning to cherish what we have and what we are—and what I have and what I am—instead of picking constantly on what we are lacking.

It was completely understood that I was not meant to stay, and I wouldn’t have to explain myself if I decided to leave tomorrow. But I find myself stuttering justifications for having remained here. There is no neat story; it comes out in a tangle of defences and validations. The simple answer now is just: I want to. Although my life here doesn’t look like how I envisioned when I was younger, Malaysia is the only place in the world that has afforded me the space and time to feel my way around and find my life’s contours—eventually.

I’ll admit that sometimes, when aspects of life here frustrate me, I still flirt with the idea of leaving. But that dream plays to a different tune now. If I were ever to leave, I wouldn’t be running away or looking back in disdain. I would be excited to go, and I would also be excited to come back. It most definitely would not be an exit plan.

Views and experiences related are the writer’s own. Guest appearances here hope to reflect the variety of life in this world.

The way she departed: standing on the ferry moving away from him over the water toward the city of Naples, looking at him where he stood. She was half-smiling in a way that he felt was meant to convey something—sorrow, hope, reproach?—but he couldn’t bear it and so he turned away almost immediately, while her features and her half-smile were still clearly visible and the boat still out in the water, and later he recognised this as the moment when the cord had finally snapped between them.

He found himself repeating the motion at intervals in the weeks that followed, trying to recapture the clarity of that moment at the ferry terminal. Standing on the road near Sant’Angelo and looking out at the sea, for example, he would turn very slowly and deliberately away from the sunset, and he was invariably disappointed by the lack of finality in the movement.

—from The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

If you’ve been wondering why Malaysians have been proudly posting selfies of their purple index finger, it’s because we voted in our fifteenth general elections on November 19. The “indelible ink”—indeed, it hasn’t washed off; not that I’ve tried particularly hard to—is meant to prevent cheating by double-voting or identity theft. But we don’t actually vote with our inked fingers; we use a pen to cross the box next to our preferred candidate’s name like, I think, most of you in other countries.

Since then, it has been, and continues to be, a nail-biting time for Malaysians as the powers that be try to broker an arrangement to decide who will lead the country in the next few years. This is because our votes have resulted in a hung parliament for the first time in our country’s history, where no single political coalition garnered enough votes for a simple majority.

The largest two blocs—Pakatan Harapan (led by Anwar Ibrahim) and Perikatan Nasional (led by Muhyiddin Yassin)—have tried to rally the other coalitions and parties to their side. But that has failed, with Barisan Nasional (the third largest bloc and the coalition that has governed Malaysia for most of its existence) refusing, ultimately, to be the kingmakers. As I write, Anwar and Muhyiddin have both been summoned before the King, as he has the constitutional power to appoint a Prime Minister who, in his judgment, is likely to command the confidence of the majority of the members of parliament. Beyond that, I’ll refrain from speculating. We are all waiting with bated breath to see what will happen.

Meanwhile, I took a break from stress-eating and stress-scrolling on Twitter to send you this. Pictures are from a work trip to Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, during which I also dropped in on Lok Kawi Wildlife Park in Kota Kinabalu, thinking I might see Baby Joe again, whom I wrote about for a story on human-elephant conflict a while ago. I couldn’t recognize him of course, but I did see an elephant with a truncated trunk, which may well be Bikang, a friend of Joe’s who was injured by a poacher’s snare, whom I also met back then. Coming to Lok Kawi as a tourist this time, however, it felt wrong to be a spectator to these animals’ captivity. Some of them were exhibiting highly repetitive behavior—elephants swaying continuously on the spot from side to side to side; the sun bears ambling to the door of their cage and then away, over and over and over. Perhaps I was looking at things wrong, but their behavior didn’t seem normal.

Anyway, once election fever dies down (or even if it doesn’t), I’ll have a couple more reporting trips to make before I settle in for the next couple of months to write all these stories. Until then, here’s another Landmarkings issue. Enjoy.

p.s. As I was about to send this out, some local news outlets reported that Anwar had been appointed as the interim P.M. Then, Anwar himself refuted it. In fact, no decision has been made, so it’s anyone’s guess what’s really happening. There’s been quite a few seeming U-turns over the past couple of days 😅

pp.ss. Ended up helping Washington Post with coverage on Anwar’s win.

Making sense of the world & our place in it

Sometimes I feel like I’ve thought and read enough about women traveling alone, but then I read At the Bend of the Road by Aube Ley Rescure, and remember that a good writer will always find a way to make you see or feel something new about a common shared experience. What stays with me from this piece is the way we tell ourselves that, of course, nothing will happen, everything will be fine, because it’s always been fine… or will it…?

Then B arrives, and there is no more time for Amazon deliveries. I thought I might feel relief, but instead I find myself on WikiHow: “How to Make Pepper Spray.” I eye the piri-piri hot sauce on my counter. No, that would be ridiculous. B and I eat at a little restaurant up a cobblestone street not far from the apartment. Before going to sleep, I ask B with feigned casualness whether she happens to have brought any weapons. B has always been so maternal, so well-prepared. “No,” she says, “but I have this Swiss Army knife.” It is the same small red tool she had used to cut up apple slices in our dorm when we were sixteen. “Okay,” I say, laughing uneasily, embarrassed again. “That will do.” That will do, I tell myself.

From Malaysia: One man’s lonely quest to save the world’s corals draws a following by Rebecca Tan:

For nearly four decades, the coral gardener worked alone. Twice daily, he went out to sea, staying underwater for as long as his oxygen supply allowed. He learned the shapes and textures of corals long before he knew their Latin names. He studied the conditions in which they thrived—the water temperature, the sun exposure, the diversity of marine life—and saw how the disruption of just one of those factors could bring about mass death. He dedicated himself to reviving the reefs, but for a long time, no one cared to join him. Locals whispered about the eccentric diving instructor who spent his off days in the water, who spoke to corals like they were people.

The Taliban wants to segregate women. So it’s training female doctors, by Claire Parker:

The Taliban effort to expand medical education for women, especially in fields traditionally dominated by men, contrasts with the government’s draconian restrictions on girls and women. Since taking power, the Taliban has barred many girls from secondary school and shut women out of most professions. This fall, authorities prohibited female university aspirants from enrolling in subjects including journalism, engineering and economics.

The educational restrictions seem certain to limit the number of women in the coming years who can train as doctors. Other Taliban policies, such as requirements in some areas that women only travel with male guardians, have hamstrung the efforts of female doctors to practice.

A Proud Nuclear Town Grapples With How to Remember the Bomb by Mike Baker:

These days, decades after a nuclear bomb destroyed Nagasaki, Japan, the engineers and scientists who enriched the radioactive material for it have a legacy. Diners at a brewpub in this company town can wash down a Reactor Core pizza with a Plutonium Porter. Nearby, when I visited recently, teenagers were mingling at the Atomic Bowl bowling alley. Across the way sits Richland High School, home of the Bombers, where flags, walls and the school basketball court feature a mushroom cloud.

“Proud of the cloud,” many students declare.

That boisterous civic pride has at times become a point of contention between those who see the city’s history-making heritage as one deserving of overt celebration and those who find the current motifs far too cavalier for commemorating an event that killed tens of thousands of people.

Do Yourself a Favor and Go Find a ‘Third Place’ by Allie Conti:

To me, the ideal hangout has a few components: spontaneity, purposelessness, and a willingness among all parties involved to go wherever the conversation leads them. This one met all the criteria. Two strangers took a chance on spending an hour with an outsider—a tiny woman of ambiguous age who is sometimes told she resembles the Disney character Spinelli—who was enticed by a simple sign. They had no reason to expect we would share common ground. But we managed to have a perfect, no-stakes interaction after two years in which many people haven’t taken a chance on anybody.

Something to shift your mind

There’s one big subject our leaders at Cop27 won’t touch, by George Monbiot:

Livestock is mentioned in only three agreements, and the only action each of them proposes is “management”. Nowhere is there a word about reduction. It’s as though nuclear non-proliferation negotiators had decided not to talk about bombs. You cannot address an issue if you will not discuss it. […]

Popular food writing is dominated by a disastrous combination of aesthetics and elite tastes. Famous authors propose that everyone eats the food that they like, promoting diets that couldn’t be scaled unless we had several planets and no space on any of them for wild ecosystems.

How we see the world & tell its stories

The Land in Winter by Madeleine Thien:

In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, places are folded inside other places. Cities are not only what they appear to be, but also what they are subjected to: memory, history, desire, forgetfulness, dreams. The buildings, storehouses of emotion, are far more than mere edifices; they are the visible structures of the human condition. In Israel and Palestine, I thought often of Calvino’s seen and unseen places, where the horizontal and vertical axes of history and place bend into the space-time of memory and desire. Of cities, Calvino writes, ‘Everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.’

Treading Water by Nazish Brohi:

So if moralizing is now misplaced in literature, what space is there to write about imperiled people, except to set them up as subjects for recreational grieving? And why should imperiled people be expected to display their pain for empty empathy that won’t translate into lifesaving action?

The Unbearable Denseness of Artist Statements by photographer Dina Litovsky (who is now on Substack since Facebook shut down Bulletin):

There is a uniquely generic way in which the art world speaks. Someone is always interrogating, exploring, exposing, inverting, subverting, reflecting or reimagining elements of—and duality is key here—space and non-space, the conscious and subconscious, hyper-reality and non-reality, object and non-object. There is almost always some kind of void, tension, psyche, abstraction, deconstruction, intersection, fragility, paradox and juxtaposition. None of these are particularly obscure concepts, but when strung together and peppered with an obscene number of adverbs and adjectives, their meaning dissolves into a puzzling illusion where the more I read, the less I seem to understand.

Something to sink into

But wealth is no longer built through allegiance to a community or a town; it is increasingly achieved in isolation by individuals and grown through rootlessness, not through loyalty. When we lose hope, we move on. When the prospect of future joy and prosperity abandon a place, we abandon it—if we can. That is how a modern, mobile society works. The wealthy and corporate success stories of our world are constantly jetting from coast to coast, country to country, time zone to time zones—and they encourage the rest of us to do the same. […] But the price of this mobility is paid by those who do not have the money, the opportunity, or the desire to leave: people like the members of this little farm town.

Joy is not a crumb

For a friend’s birthday recently, we went to Raw Kitchen Hall (it doesn’t actually serve raw food), a new restaurant in the earthily swanky Else Hotel, housed in the historic Lee Rubber Building in Kuala Lumpur’s Petaling Street neighborhood—which tourists know as “Chinatown”. Great food, great ambience, and a possible consideration for a staycation—though I didn’t look up how much it costs (also, I have actually never done one in my own city). You can also have a very decent vegan/vegetarian three-course here, though there’s not much of a range to pick from. Alas, I did not take any photos aside from the quite random one above.

And I leave you with…

A funnyman—Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa, Sri Lankan based in the U.K.—you might want to follow on Instagram. He parses the sore points of privilege and race really well 😂 and you can stream his show “Monsoon Season”. I’ve watched it and it’s worth shelling out for and supporting!

Until the next,
E.

Play for a brief reading from Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels:

At night, a few lights marked port and starboard of these gargantuan industrial forms, and I filled them with loneliness. I listened to these dark shapes as if they were black spaces in music, a musician learning the silences of a piece. I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence; the moment I looked into the room and took in only what was visible, not vanished. The moment I failed to see Bella had disappeared. But I did not know how to seek by way of silence. So I lived a breath apart, a touch-typist who holds his hands above the keys lightly in the wrong place, the words coming out meaningless, garbled. Bella and I inches apart, the wall between us. I thought of writing poems this way, in code, every letter askew, so that loss would wreck the language, become the language. If one could isolate that space, that damaged chromosome in words, in an image, then perhaps one could restore order by naming. Otherwise history is only a tangle of wires. So in poems I returned to Biskupin, to the house on Zakynthos, to the forest, to the river, to the burst door, to the minutes in the wall.

I started writing this letter in August, but wasn’t able to put in the finishing touches until now.

So much has happened in the world since you last heard from me. Wildfires across the globe, Salman Rushdie stabbed on stage, a third of Pakistan flooded, the death of Queen Elizabeth, Mahsa Amini’s killing by Iran’s morality police, the heated debate building over A.I. art, our former Prime Minister in Malaysia sentenced to jail for a global corruption scandal that involved the making of The Wolf of Wall Street…

But, as with more recent Landmarkings issues, this one is not intended to mirror the breaking news cycle except by coincidence, for the sake of my own sanity. I’m not saying anyone should tune out of the news—in fact, there has never been a time where it is more important, and those who are most affected by the news cycle can’t afford to switch off—only that I trust you’re keeping up with it elsewhere, as I am.

Instead, may this be a space that helps you linger on things nevertheless important but less talked about, that helps you consider the bigger picture and the long shadows of the past, and that helps you try on different frames through which to look at the world.

p.s. Look out for another letter this month that will provide more of an update on what I’ve been up to.

Making sense of the world & our place in it

The Provenance Detective—a story I wrote about efforts by Jacques Schumacher at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum of decorative art to trace the origins of items in the Gilbert Collection. An excerpt about an enamel portrait miniature that once belonged to a man named Adolph List:

A postcard sent in 1937 to the board of the company that Adolph founded ultimately exposed him. Shareholders had begun claiming Adolph was Jewish, which he denied. This time, the sender—an anonymous shareholder—requested Adolph’s dismissal, charging that his being Jewish would harm the company. Adolph was forced to resign. The board also deemed his wife to be Jewish and refused to pay her his pension when he died the next year.  

But Klara Helene was not Jewish. To prove it, she submitted herself to a check by the Reich Agency for Genealogical Research, which certified she was of “German or related blood.” That she had to play to Nazi race logic to claim what was hers seems a tragedy. But this entitled her to Adolph’s pension, and to the proceeds of his art collection: She auctioned the portrait miniature in 1939.  

I’m not sure what it’s like in Kyiv right now, but amid all the news of Ukraine, I’m thinking about two stories I had read before that paint a poignant portrait of Kyiv’s nightlife—before and after the Russian invasion:

Human Trafficking’s Newest Abuse: Forcing Victims Into Cyberscamming, by Cezary Podkul with Cindy Liu:

Unlike the countless people trafficked before them who were forced to perform sex work or labor for commercial shrimping operations, the two brothers ended up in a new occupation for trafficking victims: playing roles in financial scams that have swindled people across the globe, including in the United States. […] The victims are then coerced into defrauding people all around the world. If they resist, they face beatings, food deprivation or electric shocks. Some jump from balconies to escape. Others accept their lot and become paid participants in cybercrime.

The sultan, his family and a $15bn dispute over oil in Malaysia by Oliver Telling—a fascinating look into the continued claim, dating from British colonial days, by the purported heirs of the Sultan of Sulu in the Philippines over Sabah, a Malaysian state that is part of the island of Borneo. The first we Malaysians learned widely of this was when a group calling themselves the Royal Army of Sulu invaded Sabah in 2013. Now, the dispute has gone legal, and global:

It is an unlikely setting for a legal fight over a British colonial holdover. But at lunchtime last Monday, a bailiff walked into a serviced office building in the Avenue John F Kennedy in central Luxembourg to serve an asset seizure notice on two subsidiaries of one of the biggest energy companies in the world, Petronas. It was a stunning salvo in a $15bn legal battle that centres on a Malaysian state about 11,000km away, and involves descendants of a former sultan, a land deal with British colonialists, a publicity-shy London-based litigation fund and a dispute 144 years in the making. […]

The case, which until now has attracted little international attention, centres on competing claims over the oil-rich Malaysian state of Sabah. The eight claimants say they are the heirs of Jamalul Kiram II, the last formally recognised sultan of Sulu, a small archipelago in the nearby Philippines. For several years they have been seeking compensation for the land that they say their ancestor leased to a British trading company before the discovery of vast natural resources in Sabah.

Sometimes, my picks here consist of stories I’d had in mind to write, but was beaten to. Here’s one of them, The Wild West Outpost of Japan’s Isolationist Era by Rob Goss:

Although Toyotomi died in a delirious stupor in 1598, subsequent shoguns continued his purges. But ridding the country of Christianity was only one part of the ultimate plan. Shogun Tokugawan Iemitsu also issued a series of sakoku (“closed country”) edicts, which included barring foreign nationals from entering Japan, as well as banning all Japanese, on threat of death, from leaving the country. With these orders, he set Japan on course for more than 200 years of complete and utter self-isolation. Or almost.

The now closed-off country would maintain limited trading routes with the Chinese and Koreans, as well as the Ryukyu kingdom and the indigenous Ainu people, both within the borders of modern-day Japan. But Europeans would be restricted to a single patch of earth—a manmade island in Nagasaki Bay. There, these traders could interact with the Japanese, but with a few (carefully escorted) exceptions they were barred from continuing on to mainland Japan.

To the Divorcée at the Dive Bar by Diana Hubbell, also a love letter to Berlin:

One month earlier, in the unearthly dark of a Northern European January, I’d moved back to Germany, to a sublet just above Die Legende, a five-minute walk from my old address in Berlin. I was fleeing New York, and the new flat was everything my New York apartment was not: an airy Bauhaus loft with two floors and a view of a gothic cathedral. My first evening in it, I wandered through the rooms like a cat, overwhelmed by all the quiet and space that were suddenly mine.

When you asked me what I was doing here, I replied in stilted German that whenever I didn’t know what to do, I went back to the familiar.     

News of Mahsa Amini’s killing in Iran reminded me of this animated short by a cohort of Gobelins students I watched recently. I won’t give it away, but do watch—and then you can read this (it contains spoilers) for context:

Something to shift your mind

We have many good ideas about how to save the world, but they can have unintended consequences when we fail to keep the big picture in mind—and it feels to me like we do often fail to do that. Though, arguably, in a world where the unfettered growth of our businesses and economies is prioritized above all else, even the best solutions, implemented unevenly and without careful nuance, can be taken to its most perverted ends.

Read Europe Is Sacrificing Its Ancient Forests for Green Energy, by Sarah Hurts and Weiyi Cai:

And while European nations can count wood power toward their clean-energy targets, the E.U. scientific research agency said last year that burning wood released more carbon dioxide than would have been emitted had that energy come from fossil fuels.

“People buy wood pellets thinking they’re the sustainable choice, but in reality, they’re driving the destruction of Europe’s last wild forests,” said David Gehl of the Environmental Investigation Agency, a Washington-based advocacy group that has studied wood use in Central Europe.

In Malaysia too, Yao-Hua Law has a great story on how Malaysia’s so-called forest plantations—originally established to discourage the logging of timber from natural forests—has actually “been used as an excuse by the unscrupulous to clear-fell reserves”.

How we see the world & tell its stories

After Salman Rushdie’s stabbing, Patrick Ness on censorship in the internet age:

But if I’m honest, isn’t part of it also fear? Fear of having whatever I’d say about the Islamic veil—no matter how thoughtfully I’d said it—misappropriated, misquoted or badly paraphrased in the inevitable tweeting that’s going on right this very second? Fear of having my words turned into something they aren’t, and having to suffer the consequences.

Because the price of being misunderstood is very high. In the online world, nothing can be unsaid and nothing is off the record. And once you’re forced, fairly or not, to start saying something like, “I'm not a racist,” haven’t you lost the legitimacy of your voice forever? Is that something a writer can risk?

On “blunt force ethnic credibility”, by Som-Mai Nguyen:

There’s a jazz-hands half-nelson device I dislike in diasporic literature and criticism. Writers extrapolate from orthographic coincidence and sprinkle in non-English words to assert unearned authority. I tire of variants on: in Vietnamese, a tonal language, ma can mean many things. The author rattles off ghost, mother, tomb, horse, code, accompanied by the suggestion that this phrenologically means something. These claims are in-group sleights of hand, smugly announcing, without real evidence, that the author has exotic cultural knowledge the outsider cannot fathom. If you know, you know.

In an earlier letter, I shared an essay I wrote based on Tim Hannigan’s Travel Writing Tribe, which grapples with travel writing’s place in our present world. On his website recently, I also found this on the “new” nature writing:

By ostensibly focussing on “nature”, the genre often manages to ignore “the natives” altogether, denuding the countryside of inhabitants entirely, or encountering only a handful of atypical representatives (who often turn out to be “expats”—organic downsizers, well-heeled literary types, elective refugees from some other, metropolitan existence). Ignoring people is a very potent way of representing them: a tacit acknowledgement of their existence remains, but they are firmly put in their place; they are made singularly insignificant. It’s also a prime example of a writer awarding himself tremendous authority: that to entirely unpeople a landscape. A travel writer ignoring the inhabitants of, say, the Hindu Kush to glory exclusively in the grandeur of its natural features is the sort of thing scholars have been vigorously critiquing for decades. And yet New Nature Writers often do exactly this in smaller mountain ranges, closer to home.

Something to sink into

I’ve long meant to watch this documentary about Timothy Treadwell by Werner Herzog: a fascinating portrait of one man’s relationship with the bears in Alaska’s Kanmai National Park that he ostensibly sought to protect from poachers, though the park’s bear population were reportedly never at risk. At times, it was possible empathize with Treadwell’s clear sincerity, to feel that the lone voice can ring true, if with futility, against prevailing forces. At other times, watching Treadwell—he filmed hours of footage of himself, which Herzog had access to—felt like being forced to look into a light too bright. It was hard not to feel that he was unhinged: when he treated the bears like cuddly pets and cooed at them, ‘I love you, I love you”, or when he spewed abuse at his critics. Increasingly, he seemed to be unraveling into his isolation and the aggressively defensive position he had taken against the world. In his mythology of self, he believed that he alone was the bears’ savior. It reminded me of how, despite our best intentions, we don’t always find what we seek in nature, and, because we don’t truly understand it, how little control we can really exert on it without risking its—and our—destruction.

A good place

At GMBB, an art community mall in downtown Kuala Lumpur, there’s a free exhibition by American wildlife photographer Chien C. Lee about Borneo’s “Masters of Disguise”. We went on a day when he was leading tours through his exhibition, which was absolutely fascinating, and there remained plenty more to discover on our own after. Highly recommend it.

While you’re there, also check out concept artists Tintoy and Take Huat’s superhero shadow puppets. To learn more about what they do: here’s a story I wrote before about what shadow puppetry has to do with the politics of Islam in the Malaysian state of Kelantan.

And I leave you with…

Sinead O’Connor, back in the news as the subject of a new documentary (and her voice is still amazing). I actually got reacquainted again with her, through this song, a few years back when I was doing a story in Belfast.

For now, if you’re in need of transporting—don’t we all sometimes?—her singing “Molly Malone” will do it.

Love to all you long-time readers, and welcome to the two hundred or so new subscribers—largely thanks to Far & Near, Couchfish, Solidaritas, and A Broad and Ample Road, as far as I can tell 🙏❤️

E.

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Friends and dear strangers,

I have a guest for you this month. I had read Wael’s journalism on refugees in Malaysia and thought, of course stories about them in Malaysia would greatly benefit from a refugee’s lens, and made a note to reach out for a chat. We spoke about life in Syria and Malaysia, and how he’s beginning to define for himself what being a journalist, who is also a refugee, means. He was candid about many things, some of which we’ve left out here, for privacy and safety reasons. I appreciated seeing Malaysia, my home country, through his eyes; and tried to imagine Syria through his stories, lightly filtered through whatever rolodex of headlines I could recall. It also made me think about the simplest things I take for granted. I had asked Wael to share a personal photograph of Damascus—where he’s from—in this letter, and he said, “Unfortunately, I lost all the photos that I had in Syria. I have to use my memory to remember things about home.”

Before you read on, I should probably add some context on how refugees are regarded in Malaysia. In the past, Malaysia has, for the most part, tacitly allowed refugees to remain in the country, though it refuses to recognize them as such; legally, they are considered “illegal immigrants”. Nearly 180,000 refugees—the vast majority of them Rohingya—hold identity cards from the UNHCR that allow them to stay in Malaysia, and many have managed to find piecemeal and irregular access to employment and education. But their lack of formal status means they are always insecure and subject to the whims of public and political sentiment; they have often been swept up and detained in raids for the undocumented and only released after their status as refugees or asylum seekers is verified—though that’s not something they can always count on. Moreover, the precariousness of their existence has grown a lot worse since the pandemic, along with rising xenophobia in a time of scarcity, as you can read in a piece I wrote before. Refugees of different nationalities also receive unequal treatment—Syrian refugees can ostensibly apply for temporary residence passes that let them to work legally—which does not mean, of course, that things are fair for any of them.

I hope this conversation helps expand the idea of who a “refugee” is: not a definition of a person, not part of a monolithic bloc of suffering, but simply a blunt legal category. And though Wael, who speaks fluent English, may be more relatable to some of us, a refugee need not in fact be anything like us (I’m thinking of an old video where a Syrian refugee girl was interviewed by an American journalist about how much she also loves Star Wars), nor unassailably “good”, to deserve the basic rights anyone requires to secure their own survival and wellbeing in this world.

Emily Ding: Wael, how long have you been in Malaysia?

Wael Qarssifi: I graduated in 2016 and left Syria in October 2017. Like a lot of Syrians, there was just no option for me to stay anymore. The violence was getting worse. I had only two choices in Syria: join the government forces, which was compulsory for every man in the country, or leave. If I stayed, I would be forced to hold up a weapon and fight for the government; or I would be in prison, and I would probably die in prison. I chose to leave.

ED: What was it like for you when you first arrived?

WQ: I still remember the day I made the decision to come here. With a Syrian passport, your travel options are very limited. You have five or six countries that allow you to get a social visit visa on arrival, and one of those countries was Malaysia. I was like, Wow, that’s so far away. All I knew of the country was the Malaysia Truly Asia travel advertisement—we used to see those years ago. They were everywhere on TV. Also, a lot of people had Proton cars; my uncle had a Proton car. It was a good car, especially in Syria where most people can’t buy expensive cars. And we knew of Mahathir: he was famous. I mean, he was a god in the Arab world. People were fed this propaganda that he was the person who built Malaysia into a modern Islamic country, whatever that means. And he stayed prime minister for a very long time. That’s also very Arab, you know, to stay in power for decades. [Laughs.]

So, I spoke to my cousin who had cousins in Malaysia, and they told me more about the country. But I didn’t really have a detailed idea of what the refugee situation is here. My idea was to come to Malaysia and find a job, get on with my life. It all happened in a week. When I arrived I met someone who has since become a very close friend. He helped me rent the room I used to stay in, and he sat down and explained to me the reality in Malaysia. I was like, You mean I can’t find a job here and get a visa? And he’s like, No, that’s not how it works. And he said, I think the best option for someone like you and me is to go to UNHCR and get a refugee card as some form of protection. It was traumatic.

There was this program they were running for Syrian refugees to give them a special permit to stay and work in Malaysia. I applied and they asked me to go for an interview with the immigration department. It was a bizarre experience. They asked me all sorts of questions. After asking some basic details, the officer started asking me, Are you Muslim? I said yes, though I’m agnostic—I mean, you’re not going to tell immigration that, right? Then he asked me what my sect is, Sunni or Shia? I said I’m Sunni. They asked me if anyone in my family is Shia. And I was like, My aunty married a Shia guy. And he was like, Are they planning to come to Malaysia? And I’m like, No, they are never coming here. Then he asked me, Do you pray? I said, I go to Friday prayer, but I don’t pray five times a day. And I remember I was wearing this bracelet my cousin made for me before I left Syria—that little boy, he really loved me. It was a colourful bracelet, and I never removed it. And the official was like, Is this LGBTQ bracelet? And I was like, No, it’s just a bracelet my cousin made.

Two months later, I found out they refused my application, and they didn’t provide any reasons. It was strange. I just didn’t know what the criteria was. I appealed and they rejected my application again. I was like, Can I know at least what the reasoning is? And they didn’t respond.

ED: Yes, that unbudging wall of bureaucracy seems to be a familiar story here. Let’s backtrack a little bit. What was your experience of the Syrian revolution?

WQ: In 2011, that was when the revolution started. I was detained in 2012 by the security forces without charge. I was eighteen. I didn’t know what I was being accused of, but I think it was the things I was writing on social media against the regime.

I was so lucky they detained me for only twelve days. They took me to court, and the judge brought out a twenty-page document, apparently with my signature on it. When I signed it, it was an empty document. When they first brought it to me in prison, I said, I’m not going to sign the papers. And the guard was like, Okay, then you can go back to your cell. And he kept doing the same thing over the next few days. He told me, You know, I can keep doing this, for two months, three months—I don’t mind. The faster you sign, the faster you’ll get out of here. So, I signed it. 

In the end, there were all kinds of charges on it, like incitement against the president, promoting violence, and crowdfunding for terrorism. I remember the judge smiled at me and was like, You did all this? And I was like, I don’t even know what I signed on. And then he asked me to take my shirt off, because he wanted to see if there were any torture marks on my body. There were. Then he released me the same day. He dismissed all the charges. This was back in 2012, when people still had the chance to be brought to a court.

ED: And what happened after? Between then and 2017, when you left for Malaysia, what was life like in Syria?

WQ: I spent those years in anxiety. There’s a government body called the National Union of Syrian Students inside universities run by the national intelligence service. So, many students work with the intelligence, and they’re around you all the time. They monitor you. For years I was left without any freedom of speech. Whenever I wanted to write something, I had to write it very subtly. I couldn’t talk directly about what was happening. It was very complicated. 

ED: And when they arrested you, it was at your home?

WQ: They arrested me in college. Because, I mean, they are there. They control the university. They arrested me and my friend and many others. In two days, they arrested around twenty-two people.

ED: You said you had to be indirect about how you wrote things. Were you talking about your journalism, or personal posts on social media?

WQ: It’s only lately that I’ve started thinking of myself as a journalist. All the time, I thought of myself as just an ordinary person, a concerned person, who comments on things that are happening. I mean, I studied journalism and worked in journalism, but I always thought that even if I hadn’t, I would still find the space and time to comment and write about what is happening around me. Because I just have this urge and feeling of responsibility that, when I see something that is unfair, I need to let other people know too, you know? Even if a restaurant is exploiting their workers and I know of it, others must know too, I can’t just ignore it and keep quiet and keep living my life. I’ve always felt this, even as a teenager.

ED: What changed? What made you start thinking of yourself as a journalist?

WQ: Maybe I never thought of myself as a journalist until lately because I didn’t want to box myself in. But then, I was looking at the refugee situation in Malaysia and I realized that I was privileged enough to get a good education and to speak English well. As a refugee myself, I have access to the refugee communities; at the same time, I have connections with journalists. And I thought I could be a connection between the two. Because of that, I realized there’s a huge responsibility there and I should stand up for them.

Basically, that’s what a journalist is, right? You’re seeing what’s happening in the society around you and taking it to a broader audience. And I realized that calling myself a journalist doesn’t mean boxing myself into anything. It just gives me more responsibility. I still do things many journalists don’t do, like being very opinionated about things. Your opinion is yours, and you can find out you’re wrong later and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m fine being wrong about some things. And I don’t think that has a negative effect on the quality of work that I do.

ED: The idea of “neutrality” or “objectivity” is also changing a little in journalism these days, with so much in the world that is wrong. Some journalists are more openly activists, for instance…

WQ: Yes, though I would never chase the classic definition of activism. I don’t believe in most of it. It falls into many traps of having a savior complex. But again, I believe that everyone saying what they think, out of love, is an act of activism. If you see something unfair and you call it out, that’s activism for me. You don’t have to be an activist to do that. And as a journalist, when you speak out, it doesn’t mean you’re being an activist. I mean, journalists are just humans, right? We have opinions. We feel anger. Sometimes we say bad words. When someone says something racist and xenophobic, sometimes you get angry, you get frustrated. What’s wrong with expressing ourselves?

ED: Was there a specific event that made you embrace calling yourself a journalist more? I guess it was during the pandemic in Malaysia. Was there one thing that stood out to you?

WQ: I remember someone wrote a crazy racist opinion article about the Rohingya refugees. They were calling for the Malaysian government to send them all back, and they used the example of when Mahathir said he was going to shoot Indochinese refugees coming on boats in the seventies. I remember I was shocked that it was published. It’s not just an opinion anymore; it’s incitement of violence against a group of people. The moment I saw it my blood started boiling. I had to write something. I replied to that piece and they published it.

I remember a lot of people saw it and I received around twenty messages from Rohingya refugees here in Malaysia. One of them said, like, Seeing a fellow refugee stand up and say that for us, makes us feel like we are cared for. And just reading that message gave me a great feeling—that, you know, I can do a job, but at the same time I can defend valuable causes. That changed everything for me.

ED: Before that piece, were you already writing and reporting in Malaysia?

WQ: I was working as a freelancer for this Arabic website in Malaysia, writing about current affairs in Malaysia, but their direction is not very political. They mostly cover topics like business; they don’t cover refugee and human rights issues. I need to do work for them to pay my bills, but I’m glad to be able to write for different outlets to discuss human rights issues.

ED: Now that you’ve been in Malaysia for some five years, how has your impression of Malaysia changed from the impression you held before?

WQ: Oh, it has changed drastically. Because, again, in the Arab world, they have a very shallow image of what Malaysia is like. To them, it’s a modern, developed Islamic country. It has the magic mixture a lot of Arabs still dream of: being Islamic and everything that means in this complicated world, and being developed at the same time—you know, like having skyscrapers and trains, tourism and technology, and all that. 

But then you come here, and you realize the world “Islamic” is not the way to describe Malaysia at all. Malaysia is a mixture of colours and cultures and races. And then I started reporting on issues in Malaysia and I realized there are some really messed-up things happening here, like racial discrimination. You realize you have to be very skeptical when you use the word democracy to describe Malaysia. The more I live in Malaysia, the more complicated I realize the political situation here is.

ED: So, you’ve been here for five years. How do you see your future? Resettlement to another country is a very difficult process and may never happen, and some refugees have lived here for over two decades. What options do you feel you have?

WQ: It’s interesting to talk about options, because as a refugee, you don’t have those, only uncertainty and limbo. Even simple things, like whenever I want to buy anything for my place, I think three times about it. Is it too heavy? Would it be hard to get rid of if I have to leave suddenly? At the same time, I don’t know if I will ever leave.

It’s just a continuous feeling that you can’t own things because you might leave at any moment. And this extends to your human interactions. Since I came here, I have been so scared of falling in love with someone. Because what if I do, and I have to leave? I can’t keep losing people. I came here and I lost my family. You’re living with this mentality all the time. You can’t build a strong connection to things or places or people. It’s torturous. Like, even with friendships, you’re very hesitant to get closer, to open up to people, because what if I get to know them and they become good friends and then suddenly I have to leave again? You become hesitant about everything.

I always say that I’m a rootless tree. I can’t move because my mobility rights are taken from me. But at the same time, I can’t plant my roots either.

ED: Hearing news from your family back home, how would you describe the situation in Syria now compared to when you left?

WQ: People are living day by day, not just in financial terms, but also mentally. They don’t see anything beyond tomorrow. My mum and dad are retired now, and they have no other option but to… You know, you wake up, spend your day, and eat what you eat today. They try to visit relatives sometimes—if they can, because moving around is really a headache; there’s a continuous fuel crisis and sometimes the whole transport network is paralyzed for days. But that’s it. They don’t have the opportunity to dream about anything. You just feel like people are on autopilot mode all the time. It’s the only thing they can do to survive. You’ve just got to finish today and then tomorrow, you can deal with tomorrow.

It’s a dystopia. There are no more battles anymore in most parts of the country, but the inflation is mind-blowing. Like, it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s just comedic, right? When I left Syria, one American dollar was three hundred Syrian pounds. Now one USD is four thousand Syrian pounds. And I hear people here talking about chicken being expensive in Malaysia. I understand it’s a valid concern. I’m not comparing the two, it’s two different worlds. But Syria is now a world unto itself. It has its own laws and physics and when you talk to people there it’s so painful to see how it’s normalised. They have normalized the torture and humiliation they face because they don’t have any other choice.

ED: Do you write about Syria from here?

WQ: I would love to, but I can’t. Because of different family and personal concerns, it’s not safe to say too much when you have family in Syria. I comment sometimes and share things, but I wouldn’t write a piece on Syria, knowing what’s happening. I’m really happy there are a lot of brave journalists who are doing a great job writing about Syria.

When I left Syria, I remember saying things like, I hate this place and I don’t ever want to care about it anymore. The moment I get out, I will never look back. But after months in Malaysia, I was just, again, all over social media, reading the news and calling my family. And I realized that my anger wasn’t the anger of someone who hated their homeland. It was the anger of a child towards a neglectful mother. I was angry that my motherland didn’t care for me. But I love it still. I’m sad that it’s the way it is and I wish I could fix it. You live your life with that hope. But maybe there will come a time when you realize it will never be fixed, and you’ve got to find a way to live with that. 

So that’s how I’ve always seen my relationship with Syria. I will always care, I can’t help but care. But, you know, it’s an abusive relationship.

ED: You said that when you logged onto social media after arriving here, everything just came flooding back. How does that feel, actually? You know, physically being away from a place, but still feeling so emotionally involved in it from far away, facilitated by the internet? Even I feel that in relation to Malaysia when I’m abroad, and of course my relationship to my home country is nowhere near as contentious as yours is.

WQ: It just takes a toll on your mental health. You want to work, you want to focus. But the scenes you saw keep playing in the back of your mind. I don’t know if you’re aware, but there was a massacre in Damascus where the Syrian army executed civilians and took videos of it, and they were laughing. When I was working on my story about refugees in the food industry here, those pictures kept playing in my head. I had so much difficulty doing the story at the time. I couldn’t eat well, I couldn’t sleep well.

It felt most painful when I was watching the news and reading things that were happening and I was this close to crying, and people around here were just discussing a TV show or the new iPhone 12 or, you know, wanting to go to town on the weekend. And I was like, there were children slaughtered in an airstrike yesterday. Like, we’re here sitting drinking tea, or a matcha latte [laughs], while some child is dying somewhere else. We don’t know about it, we might never know about it. And rightfully, you can’t blame people for not knowing. Even if they knew, but didn’t care, you can’t force them to care. It’s normal. You can’t care about everything or you would go crazy, you wouldn’t be able to live your life. You get desensitized to the news. That’s what humans do to survive.

But one thing, too, is that even your own people inside your country start depriving you of your right to comment on things happening there. Because you are outside and privileged. Of course, I am. I don’t see privilege as a stigma, and it should be acknowledged. But sometimes you just want to explain, I’m saying this because I care, because I’m one of you. Even family members, sometimes when you tell them things, they’re like, You’re not living with us, you don’t feel our pain. But I lived with that pain for seven years. I lost friends. So how can you claim that? I understand that now it’s way worse there, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have the right.

ED: I think that’s something that many migrants will understand. There was also some talk on Malaysian social media recently about whether Malaysians who have migrated abroad have the right to criticize the country (my opinion: of course they do), as they’re seen as having defected in self-interest instead of staying to fight a common cause.

What has it been like for you to be a journalist in Malaysia?

WQ: It’s like walking in a field of landmines. First of all, just generally being a journalist in this time of authoritarianism is a big risk. In Malaysia, we’ve seen how the police and the government are calling up journalists and activists on the most ridiculous charges. I mean, it’s just a joke. Then, add to that another layer of being a refugee, a person who is supposed to have no eyes and who is supposed to be silent—they expect you to shut up and just nod your head and be thankful for even being able to have a coffee. You add all those layers and it gets really risky. 

The question that I put in my head every time I approach a story is: Is this the one that’s going to get me deported from here? Is this the story that’s going to get me killed if they send me back to Syria? And every time, I think, No, maybe I have one more story before I get deported.

ED: Right. Because you would be in huge trouble if you were sent back to Syria.

WQ: To put it very clearly, I would be dead. In prison for years, or dead.

Some people think, how can you be a refugee and a journalist? It doesn’t make sense for a lot of people, because they have a stereotype of what a refugee is. But maybe because of this reason, I’m safer. That’s why I chose to be out in public about my journalism. I thought, if I tried to hide my identity, but then they found out, it would be a greater risk. I think the best approach for me is to face the authorities, and do it loud and in public.

ED: Actually, what was it like growing up in Syria before the war?

WQ: They were mellow, happy days. We had a very small home because my family was lower middle class. My parents hate to acknowledge that they were poor, but they were poor. [Laughs]. So I grew up in a very small house and maybe that’s the reason I was very close to my family. My relationship with them was always very cozy. I was rebellious all the time. I played with fire. I cut up clothes. I remember one time my uncle, who was studying in Russia, sent my mum this big rare plant from Russia, and I wanted to cut it up—she caught me at the last moment. I used to just mess things up, trying to make sense of the world around me.

Then I started going to school, and school in Syria is a very different story. It’s controlled by the regime, and the education system is full of propaganda. They will destroy your curiosity or any ability to think critically about things, and the teacher just sits and lectures you the whole time. We had a class that we studied from first grade until we graduated college called “National Education”, which is basically propaganda about the president and his son and his other son. It’s about his great words and why he’s a genius, and the party and our nation’s great victories, blah blah blah. It’s comedic. It’s dystopian.

So, you know, I had that lovely childhood, but also the horror of studying in such an education system. Even the schools look like prisons in Syria. They look so gloomy with high walls and uniforms, military salutations every morning.

ED: What were the years leading up to the revolution like for you?

WQ: Most families used to not talk about anything political in front of their children, because Syria was built on fear, you know, ever since the Baath regime came to power in 1963. But as a child I used to hear a lot of things from here and there. When I was a teenager, I had access to books about the modern history and the military and prison torture in Syria. And I realized, this is not what they teach us at school. This country has a big problem.

When the revolution happened, I was just finishing high school and joining college, and I saw the Arab Spring happen. It started in Libya, then Egypt, then Yemen. And I felt we were next. Something is going to happen, right? A lot of young people felt that. Then it happened, the first protest. And I remember watching it on TV, and I was so excited. I remember I told myself, It’s our turn. We have to bring down this regime.

And yeah, as you know, twelve years later it didn’t happen. [Laughs.] But I remember how I felt. I remember the first time I participated in the protests.

ED: When was that?

WQ: In 2011. A lot of protests used to happen in mosques for the reason that in Syria, if you have a gathering of people, you will be arrested. The police and the intelligence will suspect, why are fifty people gathering in one place? So, the only places you could gather were at football stadiums or at mosques.

And one Friday, after prayers, I was tying my shoelaces and suddenly, about fifty young men started protesting and chanting, like, Down with the regime! And I really believed in what they were saying, and I joined in. After half an hour, my dad finally found me—he had been looking for me—and he caught me and took me home. He was like, What, are you trying to kill all of us? Never, ever, do that again. I did that again, but without him knowing.

And yeah, there was huge excitement and hope when the protests started and it was really a civil movement by people of all religions and all races for freedom and democracy, but the regime destroyed it with violence and it changed into what it is today: a civil war. And, you know, violence will lead to other violence, and then it gets really complicated. Then political agendas from different countries came into it, and suddenly the whole world wanted to be involved. I don’t claim to be a political analyst, I don’t claim to have the full picture of what happened in Syria. But for me, the revolution was robbed from our people.

ED: For the sake of a future, you had to leave your parents in Syria. Have you ever had a conversation with them about—I mean, if there was a possibility of getting them out, is that something they would ever consider?

WQ: I would love to have the financial ability to take them somewhere else, but I wouldn’t bring them here. My dad is sixty-four. I’m not going to bring him here as a refugee to be humiliated, you know? As painful as it sounds, I would prefer for him to die in Syria than to go through what I went through in Malaysia. My dad is a very dignified person and he’s very sensitive when it comes to how human beings treat one another. He’s a person who is always respectful of other people, and I would never allow anyone to treat him with disrespect. So, bringing my parents here was never a conversation. I wish I could afford to bring them here for a visit for a month or two. But I would never think of trying to bring them into the life I have here as a refugee.

p.s. Views and experiences related in these conversations are the speakers’ own. Guest appearances in this newsletter hope to reflect the variety of life in this world.

As the train moved south, following the line of the Slaney, she imagined Jim Farrell’s mother coming upstairs with the morning post. Jim would find her note among bills and business letters. She imagined him opening it and wondering what he should do. And at some stage that morning, she thought, he would come to the house in Friary Street and her mother would answer the door and she would stand watching Jim Farrell with her shoulders back bravely and her jaw set hard and a look in her eyes that suggested both an inexpressible sorrow and whatever pride she could muster.

“She has gone back to Brooklyn,” her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmine Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years ahead, when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself.

Making sense of the world & our place in it

New Zealand wants to eliminate almost all imported predators, which are threatening its native biodiversity. Is this feasible? Story by Pete McKenzie and Jim Huylebroek.

Many of its most iconic native creatures are flightless. As a result, they are defenseless against predators like stoats—weasel-like creatures with jagged teeth and remarkable agility—which were introduced to New Zealand in the 19th century to control rabbits. Approximately 4,000 of the country’s native species are classified as “at risk” or “threatened”—the highest proportion of threatened native species in the world. […] Their goal may seem unrealistically ambitious, but it has become normal in New Zealand, where the government committed in 2016 to eliminating most nonnative predators by 2050.

The Vietnamese Secret Agent Who Spied for Three Different Countries—France, Britain, and Japan—by Richard Collett. This will be of particular interest to Malaysians. (Also, a long time ago, I wanted to write this story! Well, another one to cross off the list, haha.)

Relatively obscure in the modern Western world, Lai Tek’s espionage had geopolitical implications across Southeast Asia. Dubbed the “traitor of all traitors” by scholar Leon Comber, he brutally betrayed the most important figures in the Malayan Communist Party, rising through the ranks of the organization he’d been tasked with taking down by both the British and the Japanese. Delaying the MCP’s efforts to launch a revolution, Lai Tek ensured that a communist government never gained power in Malaya, contained communist influence in the region (Vietnam aside), and paved the way for the eventual smooth transfer of power from British colonial authorities to local leaders.

A Teacher in China Learns the Limits of Free Expression, by Peter Kessler:

Some of my most powerful memories from the classroom in Fuling involve incidents in which I made a statement that touched, even obliquely, on a sensitive aspect of Chinese history or politics. At such moments, the room would fall silent, and students would stare at their desks. It was a visceral response, and it became the same for me—looking out over the bowed heads, my heart raced and my face grew hot. Initially, I considered these to be the instances when I felt most like a foreigner. But I came to realize it was the opposite: my body was experiencing something that must be common to young Chinese. The Party had created a climate so intense that the political became physical.

Nomadland, My Mother, and the Frontier’s Broken Promise, by Mitchell Johnson:

If Nomadland has a pioneer subject, it’s missing an object—there’s no land to settle, no future to work toward. It has the emotional texture of a frontier story, divorced from that story’s original source of meaning: property. Instead, Fern has brief experiences communing with nature, brushes with the romantic sublime. For much of the movie, her character is emotionally withdrawn, but she comes alive in the natural world, gazing up at a redwood in childlike wonder or running along an oceanside cliff, overwhelmed with emotion. But these moments occur in periodic bursts, interrupting the drudgery of hard, physical work. Earlier pioneers might have made claim to the land, but the most Fern can do is visit it, briefly, before heading to her next gig.

Wild animals are adapting to city life in surprisingly savvy ways, by Christine Dell’amore and Corey Arnold:

The advent of the city bear in Asheville and elsewhere stems from a combination of trends, including changes in land use and the tempting buffets available when living near people. These factors have boosted North America’s black bear population to nearly 800,000. At the same time, sprawling cities and suburbs have swallowed up large swaths of bear habitat, leaving the animals little choice but to adapt to living with human neighbors.

Something to shift your mind

Ocean Vuong, in a review of Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre:

She’s a Taiwanese immigrant to Paris—and we often don’t think of the immigrant having, or the immigrant story having a sex life, a love life, a life of depression and deep existential angst. And Miaojin really positions immigrant narrative in an existential wonder. And I think this is one of the most powerful testaments of rewriting or repositioning what immigration is on a global scale. And it positions the immigrant in the trajectory of the artist, because I think immigration demands a great amount of innovation and creativity. Nobody really survives the process of immigrating to a new country—to America, no less, which is so rich and complex—without being creative. So I love this book because it kind of pushes creativity and innovation at the center, that immigrants are not just victims who are trying to get by, they are active agents in their own life.

How we see the world & tell its stories

Nature Writing is Survival Writing: On Rethinking a Genre, by Michelle Nijhuis:

Nature writing still tends to treat its subject as “an infinite variety of animated scenes,” and while the genre’s membership and approaches have diversified somewhat in recent years, its prizewinners resemble its founders: mostly white, mostly male, and mostly from wealthy countries. The poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie calls them Lone Enraptured Males. Meanwhile, writers in every genre and discipline are wrestling with the relationship between humans and the rest of life, recognizing that while writing about other species is often about wonder and uplift, it is also, inevitably, about survival—the survival of all species, including our own.

Digital journalism didn’t have to be this way, in conversation with Marcus Gilroy-Ware, who researches the politics of the attention economy:

At a certain point we started to use a word that troubled me, which was content. This is content, or creating content. This is emphasizing the wrong part of what we’re doing. Journalism isn’t just content—it may be content for somebody, but that’s somebody who only cares about very specific aspects of its presence and its exchange value. Neoliberalism has reduced journalism to being content to the extent to which it now has to compete with all the other forms of content that are out there on the internet.

Jami Attenberg, When the Place is New to You:

Walk everywhere and also, walk at different times of day, too, to see how things move differently, how things are lit up differently. For example, I have distinct feelings about places in my neighborhood early in the morning versus at sunset; I notice different things. Even just that a car might not be parked in front of a building gives me a new perspective on—the way a street looks.

And I leave you with…

A sound postcard of post-pandemic merriment in KL:

E.

In Wintu, a language of ancient California, there are no words for right and left: speakers differentiate between riverside and mountainside, from a time when it was taken as a given that you would live your life and bear children and die in the landscape where you and your parents and your great-great-grandparents had been born. A language that would disintegrate at sea, or while travelling beyond either the river or mountains; go beyond the boundaries and there would be no reference points, no words to describe the landscape you moved through—imagine the unfathomable cost of leaving home.

Making sense of the world & our place in it

Taiwan’s Han Chinese seek a new identity among the island’s tribes, by Lily Kuo, Alicia Chen, and Lam Yik Fei:

“I have been completely naturalized. I’d say I am from this tribe,” Li said. “I am Indigenous in spirit, even if not by blood.”

Li is one of an increasing number of young Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in Taiwan, who in recent years have fully immersed themselves in one of the island’s Indigenous cultures—spending days exploring the ancestors’ routes through the mountains, hunting and taking part in festivals and ceremonies.

The growing identification with Taiwan’s Indigenous communities comes amid a revival of Indigenous culture and a renewed emphasis on Taiwan’s Austronesian roots—trends that undercut Beijing’s claims to the island, which it says is an inalienable part of China.

From Niger, How farmers in Earth’s least developed country grew 200 million trees, by Katarina Höije, Craig Welch, David Rose, and Sven Torfin—about how, sometimes, the solution is simply to desist from doing what we have always done:

Since 1981, Rinaudo, a young missionary from Australia, had been in Maradi trying in vain to plant trees. He knew they would cool the air by emitting moisture, provide shade, and potentially help crops. But planting trees was taxing, and the new ones mostly died before their roots could reach the water table, which was dozens of feet deep. Local farmers, facing crisis, had little interest in waiting around years for baby trees to blossom into something useful. “They were more concerned with growing food,” says Rinaudo.

One day, Rinaudo spotted a desert bush, a fresh new stem emerging from a cut stump. Something clicked. “I’d observed cut trees regrowing before,” he says. “But it just connected it for me—all these stumps can become trees again.”

The Magic of Alleyways, by Will di Novi and Zoe van Dijk:

Flocks of manic songbirds squabbled in the bushes. Hunchbacked trees dangled fragrant purple fruit, luring hungry pedestrians and voracious raccoons. And because of the alley’s seclusion within the heart of the city, it offered a space where people escaped to be their most intimate selves. Dad rock-loving yuppies jammed out in their Volvos. Homeless can collectors paused to whisper prayers. At night, I witnessed the surreptitious butt-taps of couples in love.

This was a microcosm, the city in miniature, and it defied my assumption, reinforced by the stabbing and countless Hollywood films, that alleys were hostile spaces. The setting I observed and started documenting—first in frantic iPhone notes, then a formal diary—was something more inviting, and so much more complex: a vibrant public commons, a backstage in what urbanists call the “theatre of city life.”

Three prodemocracy activists on the run from Beijing, three wild and bizarre journeys to—and through—America, by Timothy McLaughin and Adams Carvalho:

Hong kong was long a magnet for people seeking opportunity and running from persecution. Residents of mainland China fleeing the violence and political purges of the Cultural Revolution swam toward the city’s lights—Tommy’s grandmother among them. In the late 1970s, thousands packed into ships, many of which were cramped wooden fishing boats, to escape to Hong Kong from Vietnam as that country’s war ended. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, student activists from China snuck into Hong Kong.

Now the fleeing has reversed, as Beijing’s crusade to strip Hong Kong of its defining freedoms has created a wave of exiles.

Saving the Sounds of an Ancient City — I have, for the longest time, been talking about wanting to go to Cairo. I keep putting it off, hoping I’ll manage to learn a little Arabic before I go. I guess that will take a while yet. Anyway, here’s my immersive armchair introduction: a compilation of photographs set to sounds, built on the recordings of Youssef Sherif and Nehal Ezz.

Overwhelmed by the chaos of older neighborhoods, many residents who can afford it are moving to modern, quieter compounds on the outskirts of the current capital—seeking relief from congestion, traffic and, yes, noise.

This migration looks to dramatically remake the city’s soundscape in the years to come.

Something to think about

Jan Dutkiewicz asks: Should We Be Breeding Pigs Just for Their Hearts?

Ethically speaking, the use of animals for medical purposes is thorny. While eating animals prioritizes humans’ gustatory pleasure (your love for bacon) above animals’ interest in not experiencing pain or being killed, leading many ethicists to consider it unethical except in particular contexts, the medical question changes the stakes, weighing the life and suffering of both currently existing and future humans against the life and suffering of animals. If a medicine can save many humans, is it not worth killing some lab mice or beagles to get there? If pigs’ hearts can save people dying on organ waiting lists, is it not worth killing some pigs and baboons?

How we tell the world’s stories

From Malaysian artist Sharon Chin:

A couple of years ago I was invited to apply for a government-funded art residency to Antartica. An artist’s dream: explore the farthest ends of the world, and make art about it. I turned it down, because I’ve seen how art is used as the initial, “soft” strategy in staking claim on a territory. Antartica has vast reserves of oil and gas, and the world’s largest stores of fresh water. In the coming years, as the climate crisis deepens, we’ll see corporations and nation states fight for control over these resources, while art programmes focused on Antartica will increase. It’s painful but necessary to see how art accompanies capitalist exploitation like a loyal handmaiden.

One down, 39,136 to go: the explorers who walk every street in their city, by Amy Fleming:

No one is yet close to completing all 39,137 streets of Greater London, but in 2014, before CityStrides took off, Noelle Poulson from Utah in the US blazed a trail by walking every street within London’s congestion zone—about 400 miles, she says. Armed with a trusty A-Z, she was determined to become intimately acquainted with the city before her visa ran out. For her, she says, “it was a lot about chatting with people, and going into little shops that I hadn’t seen before, and taking photos and having picnics in the park and really engaging with the city.”

Documentaries and the Art of Manipulation, by Blair McClendon:

Although the two are intertwined, it doesn’t quite make sense to think of documentary, especially its Trump-era surge, as an outgrowth of journalism. Most of the earliest motion pictures—depicting workers, trains, dancers, galloping horses—qualify as nonfiction. Only after it was swallowed by Vaudeville and the nickelodeons did the distinction between different kinds of cinematic images even become meaningful. Debates about truth and deception have value, but they obscure the fact that documentaries have always been more akin to essays than articles. It would be hard to hold up an essay as proof of anything at all, except perhaps consciousness. They are dramas of a mind, or often several, learning, searching, and making things cohere. Trying to relate the problems the booming documentary field faces to the supposed ethical commandments of journalism, as Funt does, obscures a bigger issue: most viewers are not taught to comprehend and evaluate documentaries on the terms by which they are constructed.

Reader rolodex

As more of you subscribe here, I’ve been sharing what some of you have been tending to, professionally or personally. On this occasion, say hello to Nico Vera, a vegan Peruvian chef based in Portland, U.S., who writes the newsletter La Yapa.

I love, love, love Peruvian food, and its tangled diversity and embedded histories, having spent some months living in Lima and traveling around the country some years back. Reading Nico’s published work and his newsletter has been a way to reconnect with a cuisine and culture I am no longer living in proximity to—and through a different lens: to recognize what has always been there, and new possibilities that can be adapted and reimagined, yet again.

He also often reflects on the connections between family, food, and migration. Here’s a piece he wrote about how tacu tacu tells the history of Peru and how it binds generations of his family together:

Peru’s comida criolla is a fusion of Inca, Spanish, African, Chinese, and Japanese culinary cultures that has evolved over a period of 500 years; tacu tacu is one of those dishes with strong Afro-Peruvian roots. Colonists brought African slaves to Peru’s Pacific coast to labor on sugar plantations, cultivate rice, pick cotton, and mine guano. It was at coastal haciendas that slaves began to prepare some of Peru’s first criollo dishes, using ingredients like rice, onions, and limes that had been introduced via Spain’s colonial foodways. These Black women creatively combined leftovers or discarded foods, like frying rice in lard and mixing it with a stew of local canary beans over a wood fire. This was the humble beginning of tacu tacu, whose name comes from the Quechua word taku, which means “mixed.” Over the centuries, this simple dish became popular among Lima’s families—like my grandfather’s—that were part of the city’s working class of Andean, Asian, Italian, or Afro-descended heritage.

Where I leave you

Rediscovering Southeast Asian cinema:

Thanks again, for reading.

I loved what Patti Smith said recently about Substack: “It makes me feel like, in the movies, where you see the reporter that goes to the phone booth and calls in her article. I feel a bit like that.”

Before you go, have a read of last month’s guest letter by Abby Seiff, and our accompanying Q&A:

And something I was commissioned to write in March on the rights of girls in Malaysia, published earlier this month. Good news: the girl’s been granted bail!

Until the next,
E.

Subscribe now

Hello again, everyone,

And welcome to the influx of new readers here. Many thanks to Far & Near for sending you all my way! (It’s a newsletter I’ve linked to here before that rounds up visual storytelling by Chinese journalists, and you should subscribe if you haven’t.)

Diving in: This month’s guest letter is from Abby Seiff, an American journalist and editor who was based for much of the past decade in Cambodia. I first read her work in the Mekong Review and we became acquainted when she edited one of my pieces at Foreign Policy. She recently published a book of narrative reportage, Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia, on the continuing degradation of the Tonle Sap Lake caused by unrestricted human development and exacerbated by climate change, and how it’s affecting the fishing communities that have lived on and off it for generations. She captures both the poetry of the place and the urgency of what’s happening so well, and I reached out to ask if she would be happy to share an excerpt—particularly this chapter on the ethnic Vietnamese communities who have been made convenient scapegoats for the lake’s dwindling bounty. And here it is.

It’s also followed by a Q&A with Abby on her process writing the book—her more pragmatic approach offers some valuable insights—and her experience reporting in Cambodia. I hope you enjoy reading it!

And if you’d like to write a guest essay for Movable Worlds, please get in touch. I pay USD150 for original essays and USD50 for reprints. More details here.

A letter from Cambodia by Abby Seiff

Photographs also by the writer

Abby Seiff is a journalist and editor who was based in Southeast Asia for nearly a decade, writing for publications like Time, Al Jazeera, Mekong Review, and Pacific Standard, among others. Her reporting has garnered several awards as well as fellowships from Yaddo and the Logan Nonfiction Program. She is the author of Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia. She is studying for an MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College.

On the banks of the Kampong Luong inlet, there’s an unsettling new ritual. Each evening, it seems, a family from one of the nearby floating villages draws up in a boat piled high with their worldly belongings. The fan. The blankets. The empty jerry can and plastic flowers and money box and shrine. All of it is pulled off the boat and hauled onto a waiting flatbed truck. When the boat is finally empty, that goes in too—maneuvered up the shore and heaved along the length of the truck by half-a-dozen men, coming to rest on top of the other possessions. By the time the workers finish lashing it to the bed, they’ve created some mythical beast: half-truck, half-boat, the prow extending past the cab, pointing up at the now-darkened sky.

Tonight, a woman and her children are getting ready to depart. They clutch pillows and twist at bag handles as they watch the men slowly turn their watercraft into a land one. When everything has been loaded up, the family will crowd into the cab and drive twelve hours to Vietnam. At forty-five, Mai hasn’t been back in twenty years. Her children, all born and raised in Cambodia, have never set foot in their mother’s country.

“We can’t get by here because there’s no fish,” Mai explains, keeping one eye on the truck. Her purse is strapped crosswise to her chest, a backpack and small cooler rest at her feet. A daughter hugs a zipped square of hammock, her younger brother hovering by her side. They stand, silently, with the rest of the onlookers who have gathered for the spectacle.

 “I have six kids and there’s nothing to eat here so we have to go back to Vietnam. No one has any money, so we have to go back.”

The family has decided that Mai’s mother and one daughter will stay. They’ll remain on the lake, looking after their home, in the hopes that the situation will improve and the others can return. Some neighbors have just been wholly moving out. The ethnic Vietnamese villages are emptying: one abandoned home after another left bobbing on the water.

“In five days, five families have left,” a bystander tells me. “It’s getting hard to make a living here. Fisheries officials are really cracking down and arresting everyone. You have to pay one million or two million riel to get out. I got arrested and had to pay 1.2 million riel to get out. They’re always arresting people.”

Some watching, though, are likely to be muttering under their breath: “Good riddance.”

Ask any Khmer fisher about what’s happened to the Tonle Sap and the word yuon will almost certainly float into the many explanations. Yuon is slang for Vietnamese; it is the most commonplace of words but can also be deeply derogatory. Whether they’re using it as a cruel slur or as a casual descriptor stripped of rancor, the fishers are adamant the Vietnamese are the problem. There are too many Vietnamese on the lake; there are too many fishing with illegal methods; there are too many bribing officials and working in cahoots, speeding out to the center of the lake to take the big fish.

“Over there is the Vietnamese village,” my boat driver once pointed out as we sped past. “And there is the Cambodian. They’re separate. We’re going to have a war soon,” he said, laughing.

The reality is far more complex. If some of the biggest illegal trawlers are operated by Vietnamese, plenty are operated by Khmer—and all are doing so with some Cambodian authority’s collusion. Meanwhile, the ethnic Vietnamese population is the poorest and most vulnerable among Cambodia’s fishing communities.

This group is the handiest of scapegoats; the hatred a flashpoint that even today occasionally sparks into violence. Significant territory lost to Vietnam since the 1600s, French preference for importing Vietnamese workers and civil servants during its administration, badly drawn colonial maps, and a decade of Vietnamese occupation following the fall of the Khmer Rouge have all contributed to deep animosity. When it peaks, hostility transforms into terrorism. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Vietnamese were driven from Cambodia during the Lon Nol regime in the 1970s in pogroms that killed thousands. Once the Khmer Rouge took over, the targeted attacks continued, sending ethnic Vietnamese fleeing into neighboring Vietnam. Those who stayed faced genocide—marked as a foreign enemy. Still, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, most returned to the only home they had ever known: Cambodia’s waterways.

For many, however, documentation that might have proven their Cambodian residency or citizenship was lost in the chaos of war. Without papers, the water is where most of Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese have remained—a floating, stateless community numbering perhaps 700,000 of the country’s roughly 16.5 million population. Even among those whose parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and ancestors further back were born in Cambodia, most have found it impossible to obtain identification documents. Without those, there can be no school, no government healthcare, no chance of obtaining a land title. And so most of them stay on the water, eking out the exact same living in the exact same place as their ancestors have for centuries, be it a weak echo of what it once was.

“During the fall of the water level we see boats of all sizes sent from Cochinchina to the Great Lake of miraculous fishing,” the French lieutenant Jules Marcel Brossard de Corbigny recounted. The river reversal “is the life of the fishermen that Spring brings there each year, and the most extensive source of trade among the races of Indochina.”

The Annamites from Cochinchina, as the colonial French termed the South Vietnamese and their country, didn’t just enter the Tonle Sap with the yearly floods—they lived there. Henri Mouhot, the explorer, wrote of “a floating population of Annamites,” and a young member of a colonial expedition named Louis de Carné detailed their life on the lake: “The Annamites give themselves almost wholly to their fisheries. Some thousands of their boats are employed on the lake itself, and in the arm which connects it with the Mekong, and loaded very deep with the fish taken,” he wrote.

“Villages are scattered thinly along the banks, others come out over the water, the frail posts which support the huts bending under the force of the waves without its seeming to trouble the inmates. They are Annamites, and, like the buffalo, their faithful servant, if the land fails them, they take to the water.”

Ice comes to the lake in the early morning, from a truck packed with sky blue rectangles taller than a child. The blocks have their own atmosphere, swirling clouds across their handlers. One man swings a pick at a block, catches at its center, and slides it onto a waiting platform. With five quick moves, another man saws the ice in half and pushes it toward a waiting boat. Along its route, the ice will be divided and divided yet again: planks for coolers, chunks for beer, slivers for coffee. Split ever smaller as the day wears on and all the while melting back into the Tonle Sap.

Boats crowd in here, at the edge of the inlet leading to Kampong Luong and the smaller floating villages. They are parked two deep at the mucked bank where land meets water—the vendors beginning their brisk trade with the middlemen. Loads are divvied up and transferred from motorbikes and trucks to boats. A pig head tilts at the sky, sniffing air through bloodless nostrils. Green mangoes—firm and sour—are humped up in a bow. Bitter melon stretches the skin of a plastic bag. Fish, fat snakeheads straight from the farm, are coiled into a wicker basket.

A vendor in a Barbie-pink sweater and matching sandals drags an enormous basket of lettuce onto her wooden rowboat. A trio of sellers sit in their boats, the metal bowls of their scales collecting the rising sun. One kneels in front of a mound of thin eggplants, arranging them on a tarp; a neighbor settles herself before her cutting boards; a third readies to push off with her herbs.

This group rents their boats, $10 for each day, and then there’s the outlay for the food. Selling to people who have no other way to get vegetables, eggs, or snacks should be easy enough, but the economics of the lake just aren’t working anymore. More and more frequently the vendors are falling into debt themselves, spending more than they earn. “I don’t know what to do or how to make a living, I just go day by day. I’ve done this for twenty years and this is the worst year,” one of the vendors tells me in 2016. A wild, flower-patterned hat screens her face and her plaid shirtsleeves are rolled down to the wrist against the sun. She sells chicken and palm sugar, things a family might be willing to forego. If they’re even there to sell to anymore.

“Business is very difficult compared with before. Most of the Vietnamese went home to their country. They can’t make a living from fishing. The government arrests them, and they just go back to their country,” the vendor continues. “Generally, everyone has it so difficult. In the village they can’t find anything to eat. When you drive the boat you’ll see some houses with no people—the Vietnamese went back to Vietnam. And the Cambodians, some have gone to Thailand.”

She begs off and pushes out. A few minutes later, we follow, carving up the gray-green inlet toward the floating homes. By the time we get to the lake’s edge, morning has fully broken, and the sky is streaked hot blue and white, spilling silver atop the brown orbit of the Tonle Sap. As he slices forward, Seng Sokum, our skipper, looks toward villages in the distance, squinting out from under his cap. He’s dressed for business in his polo shirt and khakis, a gleaming new phone bulging his pocket, edging out toward the small tear in his seam. A steering pole extends from the outboard engine, and Sokum keeps his hand curled around it, a gentle push directing the propeller. He’s kicked off his sandals and leans, perched against the small stool at the stern, one bare foot keeping balance on the hull.

The villages here are numbered. Sokum points them out for us: villages 1, 2, 3, and 5 are ethnic Vietnamese, maybe twelve hundred families in total. They’ve been moving out, he says, leaving behind their sparse floating homes. The Cambodians, too, are moving off the lake that can no longer support them.

Before he got this rental boat, Sokum worked as a fisherman, like his father before him. He hopes his three-month-old son can grow up to have a good job, something far off the lake.

“In the future, poor people will become slaves for rich people because they can’t support themselves,” he says with a wry laugh. “If the government created opportunities for people, created investment, Cambodians would not have to leave.”

Upending history, it now goes like this: the water failing them, they take to the land.

It’s early morning at a port near the bottom of the lake and the cockle boats are being emptied at a clip. A teen digs at the shrinking mound of shells—thumbnail-sized mollusks heaped up in the hull like gravel. He’s using a plastic jerry can with the top corner sawed off for easy scooping; each pour into the waiting hamper sounds like a hailstorm. The boy fills the basket to its brim with cockles and a skinny kid in a Hollister hoodie and acid-washed jeans grabs at it like it’s nothing, like it’s not thirty pounds or more, and empties it into a waiting polypropylene sack. The team moves fast, crunch and scoop and pour while their boss, a woman wearing hot pink pants rolled to the knees and a fat clutch of bracelets round her wrist, holds the bags steady. When a bag is full, upwards of one hundred pounds, she swiftly sews the top closed with a length of red plastic string. One, two, three, four, five. The bags are piling up faster than the laborers can move them, sweat trailing down their necks as they heave each sack one by one onto a waiting flatbed truck. All around the workers, a fine dusting of shells lies lightly on the red dirt like prehistoric snow.

Just off National Road 63, partway between Siem Reap city and the lake’s northern rim, a little-visited ninth-century Angkorian temple called Prasat Phnom Krom sits on a small hill. A few hundred yards on toward the lake, dirt roads meander west from the graveled two-lane highway, spilling into grasslands and golden paddy fields. The houses at the edge of this land sit in the shadow of Phnom Krom and cut an odd sight: they stand in two rows, identical blonde wood boxes topped with sky-blue roofs. They’re large and cookie-cutter, so out of place next to the modest, varied neighboring homes that come in all shades and heights and are patched with every conceivable material. Some unknown nonprofit bought the land and built these uncanny houses, selling them at a low cost to a lucky few before vanishing into the ether, leaving residents to buy and sell as they pleased.

Sles El, Aiy Sash, and their four children ranging in age from two to fourteen are among the newest residents—eight months, now, on land. The family purchased the home from a neighbor and moved off their houseboat, one less thing to worry about as the fishing worsened.

Up close, the houses lose their grace. The new wood is warping, bloating until windows and doors become trapped in their frames—there’s a reason most homes here have metal walls and shutters that drop down on a hinge. But land is land, and the family is relieved to have left the water.

“I was a fisherman since I was young, and I lived on the water since I was young. I just moved to land now for the first time,” says El, who is thirty-six. “I think living on the mainland is much easier.”

School is close by, and there’s no worry of his youngest children falling into the lake. The fishing has become untenable. And, posing danger for a small boat, the winds have been worsening each year due, in part, to the mass deforestation birthing new land like his.

“Now you can see, there is a bit of forest but in front there is rice,” he says, gesturing at the paddy abutting a hill all but stripped of its trees. “In rainy season, you can’t even find a tree to tie your boat to.”

As El speaks, his two small sons play on a motorbike behind him, while their older sister looks on. He glances at his children and gathers his thoughts.

“I don’t want my kids to follow me to become fishermen. It’s hard work, you don’t sleep well. I just hope they can get a different job.”

Prince Puthisen was born and raised into horror: his mother and eleven aunts had been blinded by the evil Santema, sent to a cave, and forced to eat their newborns. Only Puthisen survived, growing to manhood and promising vengeance for his destroyed family. Through trickery, he came to marry Kong Rei—daughter of his mortal enemy. And she, madly in love, divulged her mother’s terrible deeds and told Puthisen how to access magic. The marriage ended in heartbreak. Puthisen set out to recover the stolen eyeballs of his family and enact his revenge. Kong Rei chased him, begging the prince to return to her. Instead, he flooded the land. A lake spread, separating the couple. Kong Rei threw her body upon the ground and cried herself to death. She became a mountain, her back and head nestled into the ground, an arm thrown despairingly forward.

Phnom Kong Rei lies at the southern lip of the Tonle Sap, where it spills into its river. If you sit on the bank and stare at the mountain from the right angle, that is what you will see: the hopeless princess prone on the ground, sprawled before the water that tore away her love.

On a drizzly April afternoon, Ly Oeu sips an iced coffee and considers how his life has changed since he left the water two years earlier. In 2015 he moved with his family and neighbors from a nearby floating village to this dusty, new community on a steep bank near the bottom of the lake. Here, just a few miles outside of Kampong Chhnang city, plots were cheap enough that the fifteen families could just about manage to afford them. The river is only a few hundred yards away, but the ground is so high we can’t see it from here. Instead, there’s a view of Phnom Kong Rei—the poignant slopes a hazy blue-green in the distance.

Oeu crosses his arms against his crisp, white T-shirt and screws his mouth into a knot while he mulls his two lives.

“Living on a boat is different than living on land. At that time, we had six kids. Sometimes when we slept, my feet would hit my kids’ heads. Sometimes, they’d kick mine.” Eventually, the family moved to a roomier floating house. The children grew up and left home. But life on the water hardly got easier. “Our living depends on fishing. If we can’t fish, it affects our lives.”

On the land, Oeu and his wife, Saros, built their house and were done—no need to buy new floats every few years or replace rotting walls. Half of the house serves as a cafe, the only one in the village so far and a growing side business. Folding tables are ranged the dirt floor, topped with porcelain teapots featuring cartoon deer and small sugar bowls. A jumble of electric cords snake from an extension. A large tv, perched on a neatly hewn wood ledge, peers down at customers. The coffee is thick with sugar and a silky dollop of condensed milk.

The group chose this spot because of its proximity to the water; their boats stay moored there and they still fish most days. But land has offered other options too. Or, more accurately, without enough fish to get by on, life has demanded them.

Over the past few years, the children have moved to Phnom Penh to work in garment factories. The money they send home now supports their parents.

“If we just depended on fishing, we wouldn’t have enough money,” says Oeu.

And so this land, too, is being transformed. By early 2017, the forest that was once here has been completely cut down. A road came in a year earlier. There are dump trucks and bulldozers the day I visit, leveling out a sweeping plain of cleared, dry dirt. It’s being readied into parcels—part of a government plan to move hundreds more families off the river.

Saros is skeptical that this alone will save the fish. “It’s difficult to say that moving people will make a difference. Unless illegal equipment declines, the fishing won’t improve.”

And so the newcomers, too, will find they need much more. They’ll need money for their electricity and water; money for gas to get to markets; money to make payments on the loans they’ll likely have to take on their land and homes. They’ll need to find second jobs, a new way of living. Their kids will need to leave for the factories, the construction sites. Even now, despite all the trappings of a step up, “it’s very difficult,” admits Oeu. “We live hand to mouth.”

This is an excerpt from Abby’s recently published book, Troubling the Water.

Catching up with Abby

Emily Ding: You arrived in Cambodia to work at the Cambodia Daily and Phnom Penh Post, before going on to freelance there. How did that happen and what first drew you to the country? Why Cambodia?

Abby Seiff: I always wish I had a better, more meaningful answer to this question but it was pure happenstance. When I was in my early twenties, I had wanted to live abroad and spent a lot of time trying to find interesting jobs overseas—I didn’t give much thought as to where.

One day, I was looking at a journalism jobs site and there was a posting for the Cambodia Daily. I was shamefully ignorant about the country, but it sounded like a fascinating job. At the time, the Daily operated as sort of a training paper, meaning: ignorant as I was, my writing and editing background (and I suppose eager youthful demeanor and willingness to be paid a pittance) made me qualified to join the copy desk. Of course, there was barely a website back then—so it was hard to tell if this was even a real newspaper and a real job—but the editor put me in touch with an intern who had just returned and couldn’t stop raving about the experience. At the time, it just seemed like a neat adventure and I thought I would do it for a year or so, tops.

In hindsight, I was so very lucky to stumble on this job which changed the course of my life.

ED: What has it been like reporting on and living in Cambodia? And how would you describe your relationship to it? You mentioned moving around a lot, but always boomeranging back to the country.

AS: I came back to New York in January 2019 and this is the longest I’ve been away from Cambodia since I first moved there in 2009.

Even though I came back intending (perhaps) to stay, it’s a very strange feeling not having gone back to Cambodia even to visit. Though I have many dear friends there, I do not think of Cambodia as my home. That said, I spent my most formative professional and personal years there; nearly all of my closest friends are people I met there. So, even being away, it feels like I’m still part of this community in and around Cambodia. It’s hard to explain how a place can get into your bones; everyone has their own experience on that front.

Part of it was the way the Daily was set up—half Cambodian staff and half foreigners (with housing for us, no less!)—which made for a very easy entry into the country. I don’t want to be overly rosy or nostalgic about the job or place, but working there meant I could learn a lot, on the job, in a pretty short amount of time and that I got to report on pretty serious stuff fairly quickly (though it felt like forever at the time). And the other part was that there was an incredibly, maybe unusually supportive larger journalist community—Khmer and foreigner; staff and freelance—which I’ve always felt very grateful for.

I would add that from a very pragmatic, reportorial standpoint, Cambodia had always been sort of a joy to report from because people tend to be quite open and willing to talk to reporters, even about sensitive or political issues. That said, in my own field reporting I am almost always working with translators, which is like a screen of sorts with pluses and minuses. It’s something I think a lot about, but to avoid going off on a long tangent I’ll stop there!

ED: I’m curious about how this book first started to coalesce into one. You were already writing and reporting on the Tonle Sap Lake before you ever thought about writing it. How much had you done before you thought, This is a book? And what was your process in reporting the rest of it?

AS: I sometimes call this book the book of necessity rather than the book of my dreams, because I didn’t do it the way I wanted to.

If I’m totally honest, I think the book started as a bit of a whim. I found a fellowship I really wanted to go to and thought, well maybe I can sketch out that book that’s been bouncing around in the back of my head. The fellowship was wonderful and gave me some confidence in the idea, that it wasn’t too bad, and I started writing sample chapters and a proposal in late 2019, with the idea of finding a publisher and getting an advance and then going back and doing more reporting.

And then Covid hit, and I was sort of in a rush to finish the book and wasn’t able to go back. (I should say, this rush was my own doing because I am not a patient person; I almost certainly could have taken more time but I somehow just really wanted to write the book and get it out, however I could. Maybe I was scared to sit with it too long?) So instead, I turned back to all the field reporting I had done—mostly in 2017 and 2016—and really scraped the marrow.

I always knew that I wanted to weave together the scientific and historical and experiential, but I wanted to make it a lot more narrative—following a few families, ideally going back to re-visit those people I had interviewed in 2016 and 2017—and that just wasn’t possible with what I had. I focused a lot on making those small interviews and vignettes as vivid as possible; recreating the scene as much as I could with photographs. And I focused a lot on creating rich depictions of the lake (again, with the help of the photos and videos). Local media and friends in Cambodia and the photos my colleague Nicolas Axelrod had taken on our lake trips were all supremely critical in helping me flesh out what I feared was a bony skeleton.

ED: In your book, you also mentioned the advice you got on needing to be sure that this was the story you wanted to commit to, because you would have to live for years with it. Did you arrive at this certainty? Did the book always feel like a “guiding light”, so to speak—or were there serious moments of doubt? What was it like writing it during the pandemic?

AS: If I’m being honest, I’d say I’m not the most passionate of journalists. I generally pursue stories because I’m somewhat interested in them or assigned them, but I’m not—like some of my friends—just blazing to cover X topic. And so I did worry about that aspect quite a bit, that I wouldn’t feel that I cared about it enough to be able to stick with it for years.

But, with a book, it turns out there’s plenty to do apart from the writing of it. You find an agent, you find a publisher, you apply for grants, you write it and have friends read it and edit it and throw it against the wall and do some more research because you’ve found a huge hole and write some more. What I mean is, it doesn’t feel like you’re just sitting with this story for years. (You are, of course, in hindsight, but it doesn’t feel like it at the time.) To me, it just became part of my life, a job like any other.

I certainly had moments of frustration, but I also tried hard to accept the limitations of this book, which helped. Once I knew it was not going to be that perfect, incredible narrative book, the going got easier. I am not a perfectionist, which gets me into some trouble but maybe served as a good mental shield in this instance. My only real source of doubt wasn’t at all about the writing but were about the translators, fixers and local journalists I had worked with years ago. Even though this isn’t a particularly sensitive book, even though I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been widely reported and even talked about by government officials, I became very nervous that I’d inadvertently say or do something that would get them in trouble—them, or sources who had talked to me years ago and whom I had no way of finding. I was sending my colleagues drafts and checking with them repeatedly that they were okay being credited, and so on and so forth.

I think because I was writing this so far away from Cambodia, in the middle of the pandemic with no clear return in sight, it was easy to get a little overly worried. As a journalist and editor who is often working off my home turf, my absolute nightmare scenario is to somehow cause problems for the local journalist or translator or source who was generous enough to help me understand their country and situation, or to trust me to edit their story.

ED: I feel like many writers and journalists, driven by a curiosity about the world, share a certain restlessness. Has that generally been complementary to aspects of your life, or is it something you’ve struggled with or had to negotiate? Has the pandemic made you think about it differently?

AS: Restlessness is a very good word. I’m antsy about everything (hence the nine apartments in four countries in ten years I mention in the prologue), and it’s definitely something I’ve struggled with because I don’t think of myself as that person. I like the idea of settling somewhere (or at least having a base) and getting a staff job and staying in the same place and so on. I have some friends who move every two years and that seems unimaginable to me—and yet I’m envious of them. So I think that clash between what I perhaps am and what I would like to be is the difficult aspect. I have been among the luckiest in the pandemic: keeping healthy, being able to find work. I applied for an MFA program during the pandemic, in fiction—something I’d always wanted to do but hadn’t because I thought I couldn’t stay somewhere for two years. It’s at Brooklyn College and I started in the Fall and I adore it. Of course, when it ends maybe I’ll feel as restless as before, only in a new genre.

ED: For those of us who want to learn more about Cambodia, can you give us a couple of recommendations? What’s a good book—fiction or nonfiction—you’d recommend on Cambodia, either written in English or translated into English?

AS: Oh no! Just one? There are so many excellent books but since I can only name one I’ll go with something likely to be little known, which is a beautiful tiny photobook called National Road Number 5 by Lim Sokchanlina. Lina is one of the best Cambodian photographers around and has spent years shooting houses that have been split in half to make way for a major highway redevelopment. I saw one of these photos years ago in a museum and it blew me away. A number of people I spoke with for my book asked: “Development for who?” And while it’s taken me something like 45,000 words to explore that question, Lina answers it silently with these photos.

ED: A Cambodian film or documentary?

AS: I haven’t seen it yet because it’s not been released here, but I am absolutely dying to watch White Building by Kavich Neang. It’s about an iconic New Khmer Architecture apartment block in central Phnom Penh that was demolished to make way for an $80 million tower in 2017 (“development”). By then, the building was fairly dilapidated, but it remained home to about 2,500 residents, many of whom had lived there for decades. It was often classified as a slum, but it included a vibrant community of artists and artisans. As with many of these projects, the development plan entailed mass evictions and poor compensation—certainly far too little to allow residents to move into similarly central apartments.

The evictions of poor communities was basically all I covered when I first moved to Phnom Penh because it was such an omnipresent issue. Sometimes they were very violent, often they were protracted, arrests were not uncommon and at the end of the day it was the same thing: a few thousand more of the city’s poorest residents made poorer and more vulnerable to make way for a sleek new mall or high rise. Kavich grew up in the building, so while the film is fictional I expect it has a really unique insight. The trailer had me tearing up so I can’t wait to see the full film.

p.s. Views and experiences related in this essay and Q&A are the writer’s own. Guest appearances in this newsletter hope to reflect the variety of life in this world.

When the bus stopped on the highway north of Rivne and in climbed an old woman whose sheepskin coat smelled of hay and cows, the people turned up their noses, not appreciating that this old woman was, in fact, the Ukraine. The official folk kitsch—that stereotypical woman with ribbons flowing from her hair, holding bread and salt on a traditionally embroidered towel—is a fake, but that dilapidated mosaic at the entrance to the village, depicting a Ukrainian woman with ribbons in her hair—only she’s missing an eye—now, that’s the Ukraine. The Ukraine is also the romance of decline. The unfinished concrete building on the outskirts of Kamianets-Podilskyi. The bottomless, purple-green lake in a submerged quarry in Kryvyi Rih, which you’re looking at from a tall pile of bedrock, fearfully watching as a single minute swimmer slowly does the breaststroke, holding himself up above the lake’s impossible depth on the treacherous film of the water’s surface.

And a recent conversation here with Chapeye that takes in the latest developments in his home country, where he is also now serving in the Ukrainian Army: “This is quite surreal. In one reality, you’re a private (the lowest rank) in the Army. In another, you’re answering questions for The New Yorker. And these realities just don’t intersect”.

Friends & familiar strangers,

You may have noticed that I’ve downsized Landmarkings since the last edition. Curation takes more time than one might think, and I’ve decided to keep this series leaner in order to keep it going.

In an attempt to be somewhat comprehensive, I used to include reads here on what I considered newsworthy happenings from around the world, but from now on, you can follow me on Instagram Stories for that. Here, I’m going to focus mainly on essays and journalism that I simply find a pleasure to read or that explain a particular phenomenon—guided by the desire, essentially, to learn about the lived experiences of different people in different places; you may also notice that I have a certain fondness for what a friend, Rebecca Chew, once described as “the absurd”. In truth, I’m also attempting to narrow my thought landscape a little more this year to focus on deeper work, and I’m hoping this little shift will help.

Meanwhile, I’ve been glad to be back home in Malaysia amid all its teeming green. Even the scattered protrusions in the spaces between mammoth towers of concrete in Kuala Lumpur have a dense wildness to them that is invigorating to the spirit, even as I have to adjust again to a city made more for driving than walking. I should have more for you from here, in my always deeply felt but never completed mission to see my home with new eyes, but I’ll keep this note short for now, with just two photos from a recent trip to the island of Langkawi.

Enjoy reading!

Making sense of the world & our place in it

Piecing Together the History of Stasi Spying, a photo essay by Annalisa Quinn and Mustafah Abdulaziz, as part of NYT’s Surfacing series:

First the researchers cut the sacks lengthwise, careful not to disturb the jumble of torn paper inside. Then they go through the bags loosely, pulling out food scraps, trash or anything else mixed in during the chaotic rush to destroy evidence.

They are working to reassemble, scrap by scrap, some 40 to 55 million pieces of paper that were torn up and stuffed into sacks by the East German secret police in the final days of the German Democratic Republic.

Can India clean up its holiest river? It will take a village, by Laura Parker and Sara Hylton:

Yet even in the face of it, and of sometimes lethal counts of fecal bacteria, belief in the mythic purity of the Ganges endures—and it complicates long-running efforts to clean up the river. […]

“The river is really two rivers,” Sen said. “There is this belief that the river can clean itself and has magical properties. If the river can clean itself, then why should we have to worry about it? I have seen this. I have heard many people say the river cannot be polluted; it can go on forever.”

War Strands Ukrainian and Russian Tourists Together in Egyptian Resorts, by Vivian Yee and Laura Boushnak:

Egypt never stopped catering to Russians and Ukrainians, who once made up a third of visitors to the country and were starting to flock to Sharm again late last year. At resorts across Sharm, guests can find menus, signs and activities in Russian, which is also spoken by many Ukrainians. In the guest rooms, the TVs carry mostly Russian and Ukrainian channels.

Until two weeks ago, united by language, culture and history, the two nationalities vacationed in harmony. Then the Ukrainian channels started showing Russian forces destroying Ukrainian cities and firing on fleeing civilians, and the Russian channels started claiming that there was no war at all.

The Language of Your Fathers, by John Merrick:

At 18, I vowed to never look back. The act of leaving home offered a freedom from my past. As a teenager, I would sneak out of Crewe, to the nearby cities of Manchester and Stoke. Cities offered a sense of possibility. Like Baudelaire’s man of the crowd I was anonymous, able to be whoever I wanted to be. Yet there is a form of community that working-class towns like Crewe offer, one that provides a form of basic social safety net, however meagre that may appear from afar. Family and neighbours look after your kids for the evening, allowing a momentary respite from childcare, or help if you fall sick or unemployed. But to have this means the presence of an invasive surveillance, even if it is meant as a loving form of care. Community can be both freedom and subordination, often at the same time. Growing up, it was this sense that came to dominate. An often-overbearing feeling that I couldn’t escape, that I was being watched, observed, mapped, that what I was doing and when was known by all, that the communities that formed around my family were holding me back. It was this that came to define my relation not just to the town but also to those around me.

Mark Rayan Darmaraj, a Malaysian wildlife conservationist I spoke to recently for a story about the near-extinction of the Malayan Tiger, referenced the disappearance and reintroduction of wolves in America’s Yellowstone National Park as an illustration of how the presence or absence of tigers could affect Malaysia’s biodiversity and ecosystem. I had already been following that story trail with some interest, and here’s Paige Williams and Balazs Gardi with a recent longread: Killing Wolves to Own the Libs?

The extirpation was recognized as a mistake even as it was happening. In 1924, a naturalist at Yellowstone National Park, Milton P. Skinner, observed, “We need these predatory and fur-bearing animals alive and living their normal lives.” Balanced ecosystems require predators. Wolves can regulate the presence of coyotes, sparing many of the small mammals also eaten by hawks and bald eagles, and wolf kills feed a range of scavengers. Wolf packs keep ungulates agile and alert, and they cull herds of weak or diseased members. Skinner considered it appropriate for wildlife managers to kill “animals individually responsible” for attacking livestock, but advised against “declaring war against a whole species.”

From before the pandemic—For lonely men in Spanish towns, the ‘caravan of women’ brings hope of love, by Meg Bernhard and Angel Navarrete:

They have paid 23 dollars to ride on la caravana de mujeres, a private bus that takes single women from Madrid to small, rural towns for an evening of food, drink and dance with local farmers. […]

Three men lean against dusty trucks near the red-brick hotel where, a few hours later, there will be dining and dancing. Their sun-wrinkled faces are impassive as they stare at the women spilling into a tiny plaza, where they straighten their skirts, light cigarettes and take selfies in the fading daylight. The bus arrived about 7:30 p.m., earlier than expected, and most of the men are still at work in the surrounding farmland. They’ll come soon, the hotel owner assures the women. Everyone just has to wait.

Something to think about

Jack Shenker, in Meet the ‘inactivists’, tangling up the climate crisis in culture wars:

But there is now an even more powerful weapon in the inactivist armoury. It comes in the form of an appeal to social justice: one that casts environmentalists as an aloof, out-of-touch establishment, and the inactivists as insurgents, defending the values and livelihoods of ordinary people. “The biggest single threat to the net zero transition is a culture war-style backlash that heavily politicises this agenda and spooks governments into moving more slowly,” says Murray. “At present, it’s on the periphery. But as the past few years have taught us, ideas that were on the periphery can become very influential, very quickly.”

How we tell the world’s stories

To the Son of the Victim, by Sophie Haigney:

I’d moved to San Francisco just a few months before to become a “breaking-news reporter.” The romance of breaking news was that you were just thrown out there, learning on your feet, somehow transforming into a real reporter in the process. I had wanted this badly, all of it: the crime scenes and fires, the early-morning wake-ups and late-night phone calls. But it turned out I hated showing up on people’s doorsteps in the wake of disaster and death. One Friday, there had been reports of a hostage situation many miles north. While the details emerged online and over the radio, I did something unforgivable in the profession: I went to the bathroom, took deep breaths, and waited a few minutes until someone else was sent instead.

Kate Harris, author of Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road, in a conversation with fellow travel writer Rolf Potts:

Is there anything left to exploration beyond grandiose, obsolete jargon, especially on a planet that feels, at times, so mapped and tamed? After all, exploratory “firsts” these days really only count in terms of landing the “explorers” lucrative gigs on the inspirational speaking circuit! But one job of literature is to make language mean again, and exploration at its idealistic heart is about setting off into the unknown, not in search of profit or power but truth or beauty. This is a beautiful impulse and one worth keeping alive in the world in some form, and words are how we keep ideas alive. So I wanted to celebrate that kind of longing in exploration and I also wanted to live it out myself, not just during my and Mel’s bike ride on the Silk Road, but forever, throughout my life. Exploring is an attitude, really, a quality of attention to the world around you. It’s also more of an art than a science, and like all art, creative and digressive and rebellious to the status quo. Exploration demands a refusal of all the usual maps: of the world, of how you’re told to live your one and only life.

Reimagining Magic City, by Erika Meitner and Anna Maria Barry-Jester:

How could we present something that’s long-term and large-scale dramatic, but harder to see in smaller daily moments, and almost impossible to photograph: raised roads in Miami Beach leaving sidewalks and storefronts below grade, or giant pumps that move water from the streets back into the Bay that simply look like large metal boxes? What language should we use to describe the paradox of a city in a time of sea-level rise, lying just feet above sea level, that’s also built on porous limestone—where rampant development means that multimillion-dollar waterfront houses and condominiums are still going up all along the shoreline?

Reader rolodex

As more of you join in here, I thought it would be nice to share what some of you have been tending to, professionally or personally. This issue, say 👋 to Fuad Alhabshi and his band, Kyoto Protocol—based in Kuala Lumpur—whose music inflects a varied mix of influences. Their latest music video:

And I leave you with…

As always, if you’ve been enjoying Movable Worlds, please share it and tell your friends to subscribe. Meanwhile, here are some very nice words from a reader (thank you, Abby!)—also a journalist and editor:

“This looks so wonderful! (In fact, breaking my vow not to sign up for new newsletters for this one!) Everything Emily writes is stellar.”
—Abby Seiff

Until the next,
E.

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Dear readers,

I met Travis, an American, briefly more than a decade ago in Central America, and we stayed Facebook acquaintances. Two years ago, he reached out online to tell me about a personal dream he was embarking on along the Via Francigena, a medieval pilgrimage walking route that runs from Canterbury to Rome and spans England, France, and Italy. Now he and his partner Juliane have made a new home in Capranica, a town in Italy’s Lazio region just north of Rome—in a house that they have opened up to walkers on a donations basis, as part of what they call their Road to Rome project.

Connecting again after so much time had passed, we exchanged admittedly scant memories about how our travels had coincided—we’d stayed in the same hostel, had a meal together at this great little Korean restaurant, shared the same Spanish tutor. And in edited parts of our conversation I’m sharing here, we talked about what his Central American travels meant to him and how they have oriented his life, how the death of his father and his experience on Spain’s Camino de Santiago eventually pointed him to Italy, and what his hopes are for the future in his new country. When we first reconnected back in September 2019, he was staying with his mother back in the U.S. while waiting to make his way back to Italy. Battling through Covid travel restrictions, he’s since reunited with Juliane, who is German, in Capranica last year.

“Because I became Juliane’s partner, I didn’t need a special visa to enter Italy, and I was able to get my Permesso di Soggiorno here, which will be valid for five years, after which I will renew it to be permanent. I've gotten signed up for the national health service and can now work and pay taxes in Italy. Basically, this is officially my new home—finally! I haven't had a real home in over three years, so these last few months have been wonderful to finally feel grounded.”

Best of luck with your next adventure, Travis! To everyone else, I hope reading this reminds you of a time when you traveled, too, without expectations, and felt like the world was looking out for you.

As mentioned, this conversation began in September 2019, around the time Travis was expecting a hurricane back home in Louisiana, updated with a couple more exchanges in the following months.

Emily Ding: Hey Travis, how are things? Did you guys get through the hurricane okay?

Travis Criddle: We did, thanks for asking. In the end, not much happened here in Louisiana. The first hurricane just skirted the coastline and didn’t really do any damage. The second hurricane went all the way on the west side of the state and I’m on the east side. We had a couple of stormy days, but that was just like a normal summer storm. There’s one tomorrow coming straight for us, so let’s see.

ED: Where exactly are you in Louisiana?

TC: So, Louisiana is shaped a little bit like a boot, and my house is in the toe of the boot. We live in Franklinton, about sixty miles north of New Orleans in a rural area, just outside the area that is Cajun- and French-influenced. I’m currently living with my mother, who recently underwent heart surgery. I’ve been staying here through the Covid crisis and helping her by doing much of the food shopping, together with my siblings. In this way, she wouldn’t have to risk exposure, since she’s very vulnerable to the virus with her health issues.

ED: And you were born in Franklinton? What do you think the experience of growing up in Franklinton gave you?

TC: I was born in West Virginia, but we moved down here in the early eighties when I was about six weeks old. My dad came to work in the oil industry—there was a big boom during Reagan’s era. The economy in West Virginia was really bad at the time. The only jobs were in the coal mines and those were super dangerous. My father didn’t work in the coal mines, but he occasionally drove trucks for them. 

I had a pretty good childhood, all things considered. Franklinton was mostly peaceful, but being part of the Deep South, it had its fair share of racial problems. I didn’t recognize them easily at the time, because that was all I knew. It wasn’t until university, or even after, that I gained the perspective to look back at my earlier life and realize how isolated it was, culturally. Even with that in mind, I feel the town offered a good, safe place to grow, even if it wasn’t able to prepare me for the broader world, or competitive job and school environments. 

ED: When did you leave Franklinton for the first time? 

TC: The first time I left home to live in a new place I moved to Mississippi, just about eighty miles from my parent’s house, and attended university there for three years. It was close enough that I usually drove home for weekends. I did, however, spend my second year of university doing a study abroad program in Swansea, Wales, back in 1999-2000, and that was what set me so strongly on a new path. 

ED: So, how old were you when you headed to Central America for the first time? Was it particularly momentous for you?

TC: I was twenty-six at the time. It was pretty life-changing for me. Since Wales, I hadn’t really traveled. Then, Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 and altered my entire life. I had left my job just before, and after the hurricane landed I worked in debris clean-up on a temporary government contract, which paid quite a lot of money. I took that money and I went back to university for a couple of years. I was enrolled in computer science in Mississippi, but I also took anthropology classes and absolutely loved it. That was what made me decide I wanted to travel. One of my professors had done all her work in El Salvador, and a girl from Southern Mexico also gave a presentation at our university about the Zapatistas and the La Otra Campaña political movement. I was very politically minded at the time and I was pretty far left in my thinking, so it all just got me really interested in the region.

I made a plan to go down there with three friends, from Mexico City all the way to Panama. But all of them backed out and I wound up going alone. It was the first time I really traveled alone. I had traveled alone a couple of days when I did my study abroad in Europe—in the sense that I was traveling with friends, and then I traveled the last few days alone, but I didn’t leave to go on a new journey alone. The first time I did that was in Central America. I spent about five weeks on that trip before I ran out of money, and I didn’t make it anywhere near as far as Panama. I had thought I would spend about a week in each country, but in the end I wanted to spend more time everywhere I went. The next year, when my study abroad in Tibet was canceled—our professor was seen at a protest for Tibetan Freedom and we had our visas canceled—I went back with my girlfriend at the time.

ED: Did those trips to Central America make you think about how travel could play in your life in a more substantial way?

TC: Yeah. Not that I was close-minded before, but it made me rethink things and open my perspective a little bit more. On my study abroad in Wales, my only real travel was one of those whirlwind Euro trips kids do with the Eurail pass. That’s a very different experience from traveling in Guatemala and Mexico. It’s very sheltered. I mean, you see new cultures, but it’s sort of self-contained and is its own separate world. I don’t know if I want to use the word “safe”, but it felt very much within my comfort zone. Whereas going to Central America, there was a lot I didn’t know to expect and I was presented with a lot of situations that were new to me.

Traveling there, I also started to realize what life is like for people living in poorer nations. It challenged a lot of my preconceived notions about them, and I found that really liberating. The best place I went to on that trip was a town in Southern Mexico’s Oaxaca state, called Llano Grande. It’s part of a network of small villages up in a mountain range and the people who live there are mostly indigenous. A lot of the buildings didn’t have electricity, and a lot of them still got water from a hand-pumped well. I stayed there for three days, which made me reevaluate my entire mental relationship with the concept of success and happiness—which I was reasonably open-minded to before. But now, I was presented with the reality that you don’t need all the trappings of success in America. You don’t need the American Dream, essentially. That was a huge moment for me.

ED: Was there something in your life after that trip—a decision you made, a course you changed—that had its beginnings in what you experienced in Central America?

TC: So, I went back to university but ended up not finishing my degree, for reasons I won’t go into. I stayed in Hattiesburg, my university town, for about a year, working part-time jobs and making ends meet. Then I got a job in New Orleans washing barges on the Mississippi River. That was a radical change for me. It was very hard physical labor, but it paid well, gave me lots of time off, and got me in better shape. It’s weird. That’s the job I’ve had that society would view as the lowest, but it’s been my favorite. I liked being able to see my finished work at the end of the day and being part of something big. It gave me a sense of purpose and pride. 

And it did have a romantic appeal to it. I was proud to be on the river and to see all the machinery in motion. You know, a single barge has like 1,500 tons of cargo and they would bring in twenty to thirty barges in a day. We mostly dealt with food products like grain, corn, and fertilizer, and to see that much material moving along was incredible. It’s a bit like when you see a massive landfill and realize for the first time just how much humans consume and throw away, except this was in a positive way rather than negative. It was a little unbelievable to see how much raw food and goods we move, create, process, etc. on a daily basis. At one time, they were sending supplies to Haiti, which had just had a big earthquake. I was just a worker, it’s not like I was doing charity work or anything noble. But it was really cool to see the scale of those operations at work. I think when I worked on the barges, the desire to travel was pretty far from my mind.

Anyway, I worked at that barge company for a couple of years, and then our shipyard got shut down after it was bought out by another company. Then I got a job working for a fire protection company designing sprinkler systems for buildings. It started pretty great, and I felt really connected to the job for a couple of years. Then I got moved back into the main office doing the lowest, simplest design work, and it was pretty soul-crushing and tedious—mostly paperwork and reading regulations. I was stressed, eating more, sleeping less, and not really exercising. I probably wouldn’t call it depression, but I became much less happy with the general state of my life.

That was in 2014, and then I took three months off to try to find a job in Europe. I didn’t have any great ideas of what I wanted to do, but I saw that labor laws in Europe were much better than what we have in the U.S. Life seemed less about work and more about family and community and quality of life outside work. I just wanted to explore the idea of this.

I started in Norway and I really enjoyed it, but there wasn’t really work available for me. I don’t have a degree and it’s hard to find work for which a company will justify the effort of getting a work visa for you. It also drained my money way too fast, and that’s how I ended up going to walk the Camino de Santiago, as a way to figure out a new plan while doing it very cheaply. I just wanted to have time to clear my mind a little bit and to come up with a new strategy, and walking is obviously free and the hostels on the Camino are very cheap. 

So, it wasn’t really a noble idea at the start. I just went out there for a lack of knowing what else to do. I had only planned to walk a week or so until I came up with a new plan, but I loved it so much I stayed and walked the whole thing.

ED: How did the Camino change things for you?

TC: I absolutely loved the Camino. It changed my life a hundred percent, more than my Central America trips even—though it was an extension of the same ideas. It showed me a life without the daily grind, living and working for yourself, and how helping others can mean so much to them when it costs you so little. I wanted to live that way.

But after three months I had to get back to work, and I soon got bogged down in dreariness again. I took a few hiking trips in the U.S., to California and Colorado, but I realized that it wasn’t enough for me to just take two-week trips once a year.

In 2016, my grandmother and one of my uncles died. I had used all my vacation time going to my grandmother's funeral, and then visiting the uncle for a few days while he was sick, so I couldn't attend my uncle’s funeral without losing my job. That was a breaking point for me. I realized there’s a problem with the American system when you have to choose between such things. That’s a choice you shouldn’t have to make. I needed a new life.

So, in 2017, I put in my two weeks’ notice and used my last vacation from work to visit Italian friends I had met on the Camino de Santiago, and that’s when I decided to change everything and try something new.

ED: And why did you pick the Via Francigena in Italy?

TC: My Camino hiking family was mostly a group of three Italians, and they became brothers and sisters to me. I feel incredibly close to them. I came to Italy to visit them in the spring of 2017, and all the old joy of the Camino de Santiago came back to me. I fell in love with Italy as a country. I had been there for a couple of days in 2000 on that Eurail trip, but didn’t really see much. This time, I realized how wonderful it is, and I didn’t understand why there isn’t a similarly popular pilgrimage around Italy as the Camino.

So, I looked into it and found out about the Via Francigena. Earlier on, I had thought about supporting the Camino de Santiago in some way, but I had started to hear negative things from people who had gone there to hike—how it was overcrowded and drawing people who were going there with a party atmosphere in mind, distracting from the original spirit of the journey. It seemed to me that adding to the number of tourists on the Camino would only make the problem worse, whereas the Via Francigena is underdeveloped and there’s still a lot of room to grow before it becomes problematic. The Camino routinely sees 200,000 to 300,000 people per year finishing it. The Via Francigena gets more like 11,000 to 12,000.

ED: And your dream is to set up a few lodgings for hikers along Via Francigena?

TC: Exactly. When we looked at it closely, the trail—in Italy, at least—is fully signposted, fully walkable, but there are very few places to sleep, especially in the pilgrims-only style that is most popular on the Camino de Santiago, and especially in the final hundred kilometers of the trail. By “pilgrims-only”, I mean that they don't usually accept anyone who's not walking or cycling the route, and they have a spirit more like a backpacker's hostel, where you meet people and share space, share experiences, and feel like you're part of a community of walkers.

I didn’t raise enough money in our first round of fundraising to buy the building I wanted in the town that I wanted—Sutri—along the Via Francigena, but I found an apartment in a town called Capranica about five kilometers away that was much cheaper, albeit much smaller. It’s basically self-funded, and it was what I could afford. I’m borrowing money from friends back in the U.S. I’m essentially paying a mortgage to them rather than to a bank because the bank wouldn’t loan to me.

So, we decided to start with that, and we’re actually really happy with it now. It’s a two-bedroom apartment, which is basically also our home, and we have a spare bedroom with several beds for pilgrims, like a hostel. I think we can host about six to seven people now. Essentially, according to Italian regulations, we can host people as long as we are not running as a business, which supports our model as a non-profit registered in the U.S., because we’re not planning on charging people to stay. We’re running it on a donations basis, meaning payment is not mandated. We’re completely comfortable with someone staying for free if they feel like they need to for whatever reason. We don’t want them to feel like it’s about the money at all. It’s about the spirit and experience together. Because honestly, each time we have hosted, we have had wonderful evenings together with our pilgrims.

I had crowdfunded over 2,000 dollars that is essentially still sitting in the virtual account. The only thing we spent out of it was to maintain the website and deal with the paperwork for the project. We hope to crowdfund again in the future to raise more funds to buy another property for a second donations-based hostel. But if, in the end, we’re only able to open one or two hostels, but that works as a foundation to inspire more people and grow the larger trail, then we'll be pretty happy.

ED: Do you remember at which point you committed to this idea?

TC: I think I really did it before I even went to Italy, truthfully. I had already been looking for a way to leave the rat race in the U.S. behind for a couple of years. When I got back from my 2017 Italy trip—to visit my three friends whom I had met on the Camino de Santiago in Spain—I left my job at the sprinkler company and began making plans almost immediately. I started selling off things and pooling all my savings, even some retirement money that had been sitting untouched for almost ten years. I found a tenant to move into my house so that the mortgage wouldn’t weigh me down, and I started looking for a way to volunteer in Italy.

My first three months on my return to Italy were mostly spent volunteering at a hostel outside of Rome, so I could learn the industry a bit, learn the culture, make friends and allies in the area, and make sure it’s something I really wanted to do before I ask anybody to give money to my project. That was a very happy time for me, and it cemented everything. I met my Juliane while there as well. She’s German, but speaks Italian. She was volunteering via Workaway at an organic farm that partners with the hostel I was volunteering at, and we met at one of the shared events.

There were another two pilgrims who came to stay at our hostel as volunteers. They had just finished the route and were looking for a place to stay for a couple of weeks to recuperate from the trail before they traveled again. They were much older than the hostel would normally employ. I was thirty-six at the time and I was already old for the hostel; it’s mostly twenty-something kids. They were probably in their sixties.

I’m a bit spiritual and Christian, but I don’t like to say that I’m religious, because I don’t agree with most of the churches and their doctrine. But these people practice Christianity in the same way I do, and they said they had recorded a bunch of information about their journey. They didn’t know why; they didn’t have any plans to open a hostel of their own, but they had a packet of information about all the towns that they had gone through and which towns had cheap hostels, which hotels had places you could stay in for free, and which places were donations-based or Airbnbs. They basically gave me research to see which towns needed help first. I felt like the universe was putting us together to guide me to the right place to start.

ED: I think you told me before that you had been in touch more with your spirituality when your father died?

TC: Yes, my father died about the time I moved back to Louisiana to work on the barges, in 2010, when he was sixty-five. He had been sick for some ten years, with major damage to his lungs from exposure to chemicals throughout his career. He had told somebody not too long before that he felt his time would be up fairly soon, and that his ideal last day would be to ride his motorcycle with his friends and be out in the open air for a few hours and to play pool with his friends—and then to come home and go to sleep and be with his best friend, his wife, and then to die in his sleep. And that’s exactly what happened.

The day before he died, I was working on the barge and they were the most difficult days of the entire job, and I was exhausted. I was a little bit proud of what I was doing, actually, because it was so difficult physically for me, and my dad called me to tell me he was proud of me and just said a lot of nice things. He had the same experience with my brother that same day. My brother at the time had left his job—I think as an engineer for a turbine engine company—to pursue his passion for music as a sound engineer, which my dad had disapproved of for a long time. But that day, he told my brother he finally understood how much it meant to him and that he was great at it; he was proud of him. And later at his wake and his funeral, so many people came to talk to us and every person had a story to relate in the previous weeks about him—he had said something important to them somehow, or reconnected with an old friend, or buried the hatchet with someone.

He died peacefully, and happy. I hadn't seen him truly happy in a long time. To me, it felt like a miracle had taken place, that he had been given some extra time to wrap things up. It was the first time in my life that I felt certain there were spiritual beings looking out for us. It’s a bit vague, but at the time it was extremely powerful to me.

ED: Ultimately, what is it that you want to share with people along the Via Francigena?

TC: I walked the Camino de Santiago with basically no plan, and for me, that was the key magical, beautiful part of it. I was walking with just what was on my back and realized that was the happiest I had ever been. It’s a bit like the feeling you get when you relax in water and float—safe. I just sort of trusted that the world would be okay and I would be okay, and I walked with an open mind and heart, and no plans. And it was, I was.

The amount of kindness and amazing, wonderful coincidences I experienced on the Camino—it’s like the world is a beautiful place if we just let it be; it only becomes chaotic and stressful and bad when we fight it and try to force it to our expectations. That's what I felt there. And that feeling of letting go of everything and feeling that the world was actively taking care of me, that was overwhelming. It's hard to worry much after that.

That's the kind of experience I hope to share here with Road to Rome. To make it so that people can walk the Via Francigena without a plan, and arrive in a town tired, hungry, but spiritually or mentally clearer and happier. They don’t have to make a plan, or a schedule, or worry about how many kilometers to do before sunset and all that. Or if they have a foot pain, for it to be okay to stop earlier than expected. Or if they have a second wind after lunch, to feel happy to go one extra town, and not worry that there won't be a place to stay.

When I checked in last month for a quick update:

ED: So, how long have you and Juliane been staying in your new Capranica home now? How has it been settling in?

TC: We’ve been here for eighteen months now, and we feel very at home in our new town. We’ve started teaching English lessons here, both in a class format and also some private lessons. We’ve also joined a local association that does small works to improve the town and hosts history walks and other small events at times. Our most recent projects are restoring some old shepherd trails and clearing the brush and trees from them, so they will be usable as hiking trails again. They connect to some old Etruscan, Roman, and Medieval-era tombs and shelters, so it’s a way to preserve access to Capranica’s cultural and historical heritage.

p.s. Views and experiences related are the speaker’s own. Guest appearances in this newsletter hope to reflect the variety of life in this world.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again. Even stopping for luncheon at a wayside inn, and going to a dark, unfamiliar room to wash my hands, the handle of the door unknown to me, the wallpaper peeling in strips, a funny little cracked mirror above the basin; for this moment, it is mine, it belongs to me. We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.

Making sense of the world & our place in it

Earlier this month, thinking of family reunions as we segued into the Chinese New Year—a handful of moments in this Chang Rae Lee essay, Coming Home Again, broke me in little ways. In this passage, he writes about his mother:

She believed back then that I had found her more and more ignorant each time I came home. She said she never blamed me, for this was the way she knew it would be with my wonderful new education. Nothing I could say seemed to quell the notion. But I knew that the problem wasn’t simply the education; the first time I saw her again after starting school, barely six weeks later, when she and my father visited me on Parents Day, she had already grown nervous and distant. After the usual campus events, we had gone to the motel where they were staying in a nearby town and sat on the beds in our room. She seemed to sneak looks at me, as though I might discover a horrible new truth if our eyes should meet.

How Berlin’s club scene is weathering the pandemic, by Arikia Millikan and Ruben Salgado Escudero:

But most interestingly, many nightlife spaces also found ways to contribute to the battle against COVID itself by converting into coronavirus testing and vaccination sites, offering former employees the opportunity to reinvent themselves in a new line of work.

For Basti Schwarz, who became the staff manager at Arena Berlin after spending the previous 30 years of his life touring around the world with his brother in the DJ duo Tiefschwarz, working at the former concert venue turned vaccination center provided a rare opportunity to have a social life while staying put and remaining in the present. Basti estimated that 85 percent of the vaccination center employees at Arena came from the nightlife world, from artists to booking agents to bouncers, which presented an interesting working and social environment in daylight life.

Her Name Is Untac: UN Peacekeepers’ Forgotten Children in Cambodia, by Marta Kasytelan:

Even today, all she knows is that she resembles the Ghanian United Nations peacekeeper who left Cambodia shortly after her birth in the early 1990s. The exact year of the man’s repatriation and Zamel’s birthday, like many aspects of her biography, are unclear. Her family identification document, or family book, says she was born in 1990, but that is almost certainly incorrect. Mistakes on official documents, especially dates of birth, are common in Cambodia. Zamel’s given name on her ID card is “Untac”—the acronym for the UN mission that brought her father to Cambodia and lasted from 1992 to 1993.

How Malaysia Got in on the Secondhand Clothing Boom by Ezra Marcus, with reporting by Ushar Daniele. The story began with a question: “I’ve wondered for a long time why all the best clothes on Grailed and Etsy seem to be in Malaysia”:

Nowadays, a given clothing item—say, a Nike hoodie—may be made in a factory in Taiwan or Bangladesh, sold to the United States, donated to Goodwill, shipped in a bale to Malaysia, and then sold back to the U.S. on Etsy.

'Colonialism had never really ended': my life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes, by Simukai Chigudu:

I am often asked how I feel about being an associate professor at Oxford, specialising in African politics. Do I see any contradiction in working for the institution that I am agitating to change? Who is the target audience of my writing—privileged, often white students, or my fellow Africans? The answers to such questions are long. However, there’s a fallacy in thinking that Africa is where I am needed most. Yes, I remain committed to writing about the combustible politics of the country of my birth, and I hope the true promises of liberation will be fully realised one day. But Oxford, Britain, and the west must be decolonised, too. Essential to this is advancing a richer, more complex view of the imperial past and its bearing on the present. Zimbabwe is not Britain’s troubled former colony—it is its mirror.

No school, no hair cut: one girl’s journey through one of the world’s longest Covid lockdowns, by Naomi Larsson and photographer Irina Werning:

Animals That Infect Humans Are Scary. It’s Worse When We Infect Them Back, by Sonia Shah:

For spillback pathogens, cities full of people, colonies of free-living animals and herds of captive animals are an unbroken continuum of flesh and tissue to exploit, but for our surveillance systems, humans, wildlife and domesticated animals are separated into three distinct biotic spheres, monitored by different entities with peculiar jurisdictions and distinct technical approaches. Those creatures that defy our ontological categories—the supposedly tamed captives that go feral, for example, or the wild creatures intimately embedded in civilized spaces—can escape notice entirely.

I started this list with mothers, here’s ending it with fathers—one of my favorites from a while back. Schemes of My Father by Eric Puchner is about how his “East Coast dad tried to relocate—and reinvent—himself in the land of red-hot cars and eternal suntans”:

At the beach club, my father circled the parking lot a couple of times in the car he drove most often, a Porsche 928. I don't know why he wanted to impress the guests so badly, but I suspect it had something to do with the vision of Californian life arrayed so platonically before us: the mothers in bikinis, the thwock of Smashballs, the smell of sun lotion mid with the briny breeze from the ocean, whose gentle waves seemed to frost the sand like a cake. Boys in Jams and rope bracelets slurped Cokes or played volleyball or skimboarded across the wash with sunglasses on. These of course were the effortlessly tan Californian kids I so admired and feared, the ones who knew how to surf and skateboard and had managed to lose their virginities at preposterously young ages, generally to their older sisters’ friends. They said “gnarly” with a straight face and spoke in a diabetic drawl that made each word seem like a message washed up on the beach. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get tan, and though I burned my face and arms every summer to a freckled variant of brown, my legs were hopelessly immune to the sun's rays.

Something to think about

To immigrants, papers are everything. They can also mean nothing. For how often my community gets called “undocumented,” perhaps no one in this country possesses more documents, or clings to them more fiercely to prove their existence, than we do. Practically every immigrant family in this country has a thick folder padded with their most valued documents—some put them in a safe box; others make virtual copies that they upload to encrypted cloud servers. Even vaccination charts or a spelling-bee certificate can prove something. I keep my papers in a yellow manila envelope.
—Jesús A. Rodríguez in The Heaviest, Lightest Thing

The strains of someone busking on a wet day in a tube station in London:

How we tell the world’s stories

As I slowly make my way through The Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and the late David Graeber (of Bullshit Jobs fame)—btw, an interesting exchange on the book between Kwame Anthony Appiah and the authors here and here—I’m thinking of how the increased popularity of Big History, epitomized by Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, has changed our way of thinking about the world and ourselves. As someone who is more naturally a generalist (perhaps it’s wired to the storytelling impulse?), I feel like this broader, more holistic view offers up refreshing perspectives, and its proponents say it may serve to overcome nationalistic impulses and unite a fragmented world. But it also has its shortcomings. What Big History misses by Ian Hasketh offers some insights, including the history of Big History itself:

What accounts for Big History’s attraction for popular audiences and educators? For Christian and other big historians, the answer is built right in to the premise of writing Big History in the first place. By producing an overarching story of life, Big History is meant to fill the void that was left by the processes of secularisation that have dismantled the holistic narratives that were provided by traditional religious systems. According to Christian, secularisation has left people feeling fragmented and searching for some sort of grander vision and meaning of life that they can no longer find in religion. In supporting this view, Christian often refers to the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who in 1893 argued that modern life has engendered a state of ‘anomie’, meaning that most individuals find themselves disoriented and uprooted from a deep sense of social belonging. Big History should, therefore, be understood as providing the kind of holistic meaning that used to come from religion. In this way, it is a ‘modern creation myth’ or an ‘origin story’, but one based on science rather than ancient scripture.

Robert Macfarlane, reviewing three books on wayfinding in Landscapes Inside Us:

Underlying all three of these books is a deep belief in the importance of collaboration and cooperation between humans and their environments, as well as between humans and other humans. Having read them, I’ve come to think that we might best imagine wayfinding not as a skill or art but as an ethic. The abilities that are cultivated in wayfinding—imagining things from different viewpoints, moving the mind backward and forward in time, seeing situations from other perspectives, weighing alternatives subtly against one another before making the best decisions, seeking information from others and giving it freely in return—might be the same abilities that contribute to a resilient, equitable community or polity. If this is wayfinding, then we need it now more than ever.

Re-reading some of Joan Didion since her passing. Here, a less oft-quoted passage from her 1975 commencement address that was making the rounds:

That was the question the ‘60s gave us—was there any objective reality? That was the question most of you grew up on. And you grew up, a lot of you, correctly suspicious; suspicious of ideologies and answers and easy symbols. And you’re probably not in too much danger of being blinded by those things.

I think what you might be blinded for, what you ought to watch out for, is the habit of saying no, the habit of not believing anybody or anything. You’ve got to watch out for moving into a world where you don’t think there’s any objective reality, where there’s only you and that tree you just planted. There’s an objective reality, there is an objective social reality. Take it on faith.

All I want to tell you today, really, is not to do that. Not to move into that world where you’re alone with yourself and your tree. I want to tell you to live in the messy world, throw yourself into the convulsion of the world.

Reader rolodex

As more readers subscribe to this newsletter, I’ve invited some of you to share what you’ve been tending to, professionally or personally. In this letter, say hello to Amanda:

“I’m Amanda Magnani, a Brazilian (photo)journalist, passionate about the human side of stories. I am currently living in the Czech Republic, after having spent a year in Denmark and six months in Ireland—a lot of moving around since the pandemic started.

Over the last year, my work has mostly been focused on migration and climate justice—preferably with a strong gender perspective. As a storyteller, I believe knowledge can’t be separated from those who produce it: it’s always situated and anchored on experience. This, however, doesn’t have to be a limitation. Quite the opposite. Every story I tell is a reflex of my perspective as a woman, as a Latin American, as an immigrant.

As this new year starts, I hope to continue bringing forth stories that matter and that, hopefully, promote change.”

Read Amanda’s work on how refugees are being forced to leave Denmark and how melting Andean glaciers are reshaping indigenous rituals.

And I leave you with…

“Joy is not made to be a crumb.”

Some very kind words from a new reader:

I want to thank you for your contribution to some really interesting articles. I’ve been enjoying your newsletter; the subject matter is capacious and your writing style is succinct and unique. When I'm reading your webpages, it's like going down another rabbit hole, but one filled with intrigue and relevance.
—Jan Setter

If you’ve been enjoying Movable Worlds, please share it with your friends.

Yours,
E.

Subscribe now

Hello again, dear readers!

I meant to send this off in January, but due to some personal transitions that have complicated the juggling act of living and working (and administrating), I’m kicking off this newsletter for the new year according to the Chinese calendar instead—and with another guest essay I’m keen to share with you.

Sohini is a journalist in Kolkata, and we met at a workshop in her city in 2018. Her writing offers an illuminating look into the Indian psyche and culture; and one piece she published a while back, about the conflicting feelings she grappled with when she considered donating part of her liver to her ill father—in a country where women make up 78% of organ donors but just 19% of organ recipients—was fascinating to me. It’s a piece that deftly weaves between public policy, social mores, and personal experience, and I thought it would be something that you might also find interesting. Thanks, Sohini, for consenting to repurposing it and republishing it here!

If you like Sohini’s letter, please ❤️ and share it, and don’t forget to catch up on previous guest letters. If you’re interested in writing one, please reach out.

Sending you all my warmest wishes. I hope your year has got off to an encouraging start.

A letter from India by Sohini Chattopadhyay

Sohini Chattopadhyay is an independent Kolkata-based journalist who writes about public health, politics, and film. Versions of this story were previously published in the Hindu and the New York Times. Read more of her work at sohinichattopadhyay.com

In the spring of 2018, I found myself in the position of being my father’s potential liver donor. Although he had steadfastly refused a transplant, he then slipped into a sickness so severe that my mother and I feared we might lose him.

I am his only child and our blood groups are compatible. Between taking him to endless medical appointments, I began undergoing my own transplant work-up—the long and expensive series of tests to ascertain my fitness to be a donor.

One morning when I walked in with my test reports, the transplant surgeon at the New Delhi hospital waved them aside and asked, “Has anybody put pressure on you to donate?”

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“People don’t ask women if they want to donate,” he said. “If there’s anything like that, I will give them some clinical reason for rejecting you.”

India, my country, is often viewed by the world as being an unsafe place for women, steeped in a culture that is patriarchal and misogynistic. The World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Gender Gap Report, which examines gender inequality based on access to work, education, health, and political empowerment, ranked India at 140 out of 156 countries.

Although the bodies of women in India are policed like international borders, families don’t appear to mind them being cut up (by large male teams of surgeons) for organ donations. Data from several other countries also shows that women make up the majority of living organ donors there, but a study carried out across India between 2013 and 2019 revealed that women in my country constitute a strong majority—at 78 percent.

The cadaveric organ donation rate in India is abysmally low because of cultural misgivings, mistrust in the healthcare system arising from reports about organ trafficking, and the absence of state initiatives and infrastructure to facilitate it. In 2019, 88 percent of 9,751 kidney transplants and 77% of the 2,590 liver transplants performed in India were from living donors—a high proportion compared to global figures, which in 2018, was 36 percent for kidney transplants and 19 percent for liver transplants. Still, 500,000 people reportedly die each year in India waiting for an organ donor.

Indian law permits both related and unrelated persons to be living donors for strictly noncommercial reasons. The donor and recipient must prove their relationship and emotional closeness through documents and photographs, and satisfy the authorities that the donation is made for “reasons of love and affection”. The process is simpler for grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and spouses because the relationships are documented in identification papers.

Yet, at the hospital, I noticed women all around me: mothers, sisters, daughters, daughters-in-law, and sisters-in-law. They were donors or donors-in-waiting, heavily outnumbering male donors.

The year his daughter Sheena turned eighteen was the longest year of Ramendra Nath Singh’s life.

Although she had offered to donate her liver to him without being asked, Singh felt a strange weight descend, as if a balloon had lodged itself in his chest, clamping his breath and shrinking his appetite. She was a child after all, in her first year of engineering studies. When he took her to the hospital for preliminary tests, she was detected with jaundice; the doctors would not touch her until she recovered fully.

How long would it take? Singh felt guilty counting the days. He had always said no to Sheena when she offered. But the day he vomited clumps of blood and the hospital in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand state, struggled to treat him and called the doctors in Delhi, he felt afraid. He wasn’t ready to die yet, he realized, even if it meant taking his daughter’s liver.

Six years earlier, Singh had been diagnosed with cirrhosis: scarring of the liver caused by long-term damage. For some years, the doctors managed his condition with medicine, and then advised a transplant. He registered on cadaveric organ lists in Vellore and Delhi, but a cadaveric transplant is not easy. It requires moving to the city of registration for an unspecified period of time, so that you can rush to the hospital when an organ becomes available. It also requires money, patience (a lot of it), and, most of all, luck.

After he started vomiting blood, Singh’s hold on the world suddenly felt slight, a thing of air and thread, and the lottery of the cadaveric organ list seemed too much of a risk. It would have to be a living donor transplant. 

Even so, it was almost a year later that the approval came through for Sheena to be his liver donor. At first, he was grateful for the delay. Perhaps someone else in his family would come forward to donate? Would Sheena be able to marry if potential suitors saw a large scar across her body?

But when fluid started to fill his abdomen—a condition called ascites, where the body is unable to filter out fluids adequately—he again felt grateful that Sheena had offered to be his donor.

In the stupor of the ICU after the transplant, his wife didn’t tell him that Sheena had rejoined college just ten days after her day-long donor surgery; she didn’t want to miss classes. Later, when clarity slowly came back to him and he could again tell day from night, he thought of what he owed his daughter.

Once he was out of the hospital, disentangled from its hum of polite beeps and white light, it seemed impossible to say thank you. It seemed too little. And at the same time, too much.

Being a living organ donor is a curious pressure in itself—knowing that you have the power to save a life. The healthcare system treats organ donors with unusual respect, too: Laboratory technicians moved me to the head of the line and congratulated me for my courage. Doctors praised me, pointing me out to other patients.

My father was like a child, wandering off on his own, his mind clouded by his failing liver. I wanted to pick him up before he never came back. But there was the remote but real possibility of death for donors: generally, one in 200 liver donors die due to complications from the transplant surgery. What if I never woke up after anesthesia? I didn’t have the courage and readiness the doctors credited me with. I felt guilty thinking more about my own possible death than my father’s imminent one if he didn’t find a transplant. 

I often thought of Sheena in those moments. Did such doubts ever cross her mind? Or did she put them aside? Her father waved away my question. “How can anything go wrong when you do such a good thing?” he said. “And even if it does, you would have given life to those who gave life to you.” 

I looked for such certitude but found none. I was full of doubt and shame. I found myself in a place where it was difficult to talk to anyone.

While women in India make up the majority of living organ donors, they represent just a small proportion of organ recipients. In 2018, using India’s Right to Information law, I found out that women made up 19 percent of kidney-transplant recipients and 24 percent of liver-transplant recipients in the preceding decade. Indian women give more and receive far less.

Apart from the cost of the organ transplant surgeries, a recipient’s family also has to bear the lifelong cost of medical tests and immunosuppression—the medicines transplant recipients must take to ensure that their new organs aren’t rejected by their bodies. “My guess is that most Indian families will find this is not worth the investment on a woman,” Vibhuti Sharma, an organ transplant coordinator in New Delhi, explained.

Economics is also part of the explanation that the transplant community offers for women being the majority of organ donors in India. Donor surgery requires time to recover, longer in the case of liver donors, which means taking time off from work. Indian women mostly don’t do paid work. In 2020, the female employment rate in India was 27.2 percent, while the male rate was 78.8 percent. Women who do work are paid more than 30 percent less than male workers, according to a 2016 International Labor Organization report. By such calculus, Indian women are particularly cost-effective donors.

It is entirely legitimate for daughters-in-law and sisters-in-law to donate organs, Dr. Aabha Nagral, a gastroenterologist and liver transplant hepatologist in Mumbai, told me. “The question to ask is, are brothers-in-law and sons-in-law donating organs similarly?” 

One of Dr. Nagral’s male patients, for whom she had recommended a liver transplant, had hoped that one of his three brothers would be fit and willing to donate. But each brother declined. In the end, his sister-in-law stepped in to donate part of her liver to him. “Even husbands donating livers to wives is unusual,” she said.

The stakes appear to be different when the recipient is a woman, said Prakash Saindane, a transplant coordinator in Mumbai. In 2017, he and his team raised funds for the liver transplant of a two-year-old girl. By November, the money was ready and the father was declared fit to donate. But the transplant only took place in June the following year, eight months after. 

“Why? Because the mother, who was pregnant at the time, was made to undergo a medical termination of pregnancy, then they waited for her to recover and donate her liver instead. He did not tell us this; I learned it later. I believe the father’s parents said their son should not risk the operation for a daughter, that the couple could try for other children.”

When the call came from a Bengaluru hospital in September 2017, it was after midnight. Singh felt real fear, but did not share it with his wife. Instead, he asked her not to wake their younger daughter, and to focus on packing their bags. He booked them tickets out of Ranchi, and when they reached Bengaluru, he found them a hotel near the hospital.

When they arrived at Nimhans (the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences), where Sheena was admitted, they found her lying unconscious, attached to many machines. The doctors had performed surgery on her brain the night before, but were cautious about her prospects of recovery. Singh felt his hold on the world slipping away again—a flimsy wisp of thread clinging on to a restless balloon. Everything seemed to be happening at a great distance. 

They returned to the hotel. At 11 p.m., they got a call: Sheena was dead.

Singh learned of the dinner plan much later: how Sheena and her friends at IBM had decided to celebrate their first salary cheque by renting a car and driving to a dhaba on the highway for dinner. The impact of the collision had ejected Sheena from the car and given her a head injury. She was the only one in the group to die.

The year that Sheena donated part of her liver to Singh, his younger daughter had tied a rakhi—a ritual thread sisters traditionally tie to their brothers’ wrists during a festival in north India, signifying their brothers’ pledge to protect them—to Sheena’s wrist. She was seen as the true protector of their family. His wife had started consulting Sheena for most things: how she should handle her diabetes, where Sheena’s siblings should take tuition, where they should go for family holidays.

In the days after Sheena’s death, when their relatives came to visit, one of Singh’s brothers said he and his wife had given Sheena too much freedom.

Singh found himself wondering if his brother was right. Had he given his daughter too much independence? In the dark hours of the morning, when everyone was asleep except him and his wife, his thoughts returned inevitably to her: Sheena, his firstborn. He still welled up with anger. 

“I wanted to send her abroad to study. I was thinking of a plastic surgery to conceal the surgery scar. I had so many dreams for her,” he said.

“But she made bad friends. Children get out of hand when they live by themselves, you know. This would not have happened if she was in Ranchi. I would never have allowed her out so late at night.”

My mother did not want me to donate my liver. She thought a daughter with a twelve-inch surgery scar would be a poor return on investment in the marriage market. Instead, she donated her liver when I dropped out in fear, pleased with the turn of events and seemingly free of fear herself.

Since her surgery, a curious thing has happened: she displays the large L-shaped scar on her abdomen with an ease I have never seen. 

It’s as if she has a pride in her body that she didn’t have before.

p.s. This is a guest letter, and views and experiences related are the writer’s own. Guest appearances in this newsletter hope to reflect the variety of life in this world.

After the visit, we could find no café in the neighborhood at which to sit and talk about our impressions, so we took the train back. On the way, we both said that we’d liked the diversity of the area, and would be excited to live there, though it also seemed that we might not be able to become part of the community, that we’d be living shuttered within the confines of the splendid loft, travelling all the way to the city whenever we went out. Over drinks the following evening, Sami told us he’d take the train to visit us on weekends. He was such a good friend to us, always offering his support of our choices.

My inbox is burgeoning with year-end round-ups and reflections, as yours probably is. I’m not so adept at such things—not reflecting per se (I feel like I’m constantly reflecting, as a writer), but reflecting on time, prompt on occasion. This year, it feels even more difficult.

I’ve tended to see my life as being divided into years-long chapters, and this one, which started in late 2019 doesn’t feel like it’s ended yet. The same considerations that underpinned the pandemic for me, on how best to live, love, and work, still preoccupy my mind. I have not yet caught on to that rumbling undertow that might catapult me into yet a different groove, though I have felt it, while worrying over ideas in recent weeks until they either animate or crumble. I’m waiting—willing—for something to take shape.

So here’s a good old Landmarkings round-up for now, back to just one instalment. May you find something interesting in it. At the turn of the new year, I hope you get to hold your family, your cats and dogs, and your dearest ones close. And I’m sending you all my best wishes for the times that lie ahead.

A world at once quotidian, absurd, brutal, poignant, and extraordinary

A very long but comprehensive first-person look at what happened in Afghanistan—Inside the Fall of Kabul by Matthieu Aikins (who, btw, also wrote that great piece on Syria’s White Helmets, Whoever Saves A Life):

It was noon when I got home, and I found my housemate, Jim, with his camera in hand, already wearing a traditional robe. I donned mine; we both spoke Dari and could usually pass for locals. He wanted to take a walk and see what was happening in our neighborhood; it wasn’t clear to us, from the rumors and official denials on Twitter, whether the Taliban had actually entered Kabul.

The last shopkeepers were locking their gates as we walked down Chicken Street. Workers were rushing out of their offices and heading home. Now and again, we could hear scattered gunshots. There was a police headquarters and ministry nearby; some guards were still in uniform, but others stood wearing robes, ready to run. Some checkpoints were deserted.

A police commander lived on our street, and when we got back, we found his guards milling outside his house, most of them in plainclothes already. I had a sudden sense of the fragility of the social contract that bound us; our shared reality was melting into air. I was as worried about being robbed or shot by them as I was about the Taliban.

The Secretive Prisons that Keep Migrants Out of Europe by Ian Urbina, as part of The Outlaw Ocean project (which continues where his book left off):

In the past six years, the European Union, weary of the financial and political costs of receiving migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, has created a shadow immigration system that stops them before they reach Europe. It has equipped and trained the Libyan Coast Guard, a quasi-military organization linked to militias in the country, to patrol the Mediterranean, sabotaging humanitarian rescue operations and capturing migrants. The migrants are then detained indefinitely in a network of profit-making prisons run by the militias.

Yan Cong, Beimeng Fu, and Ye Charlotte Ming translate visual storytelling on China for English-speaking audiences in their newsletter Far and Near, and their latest window on that world is fascinating:

A school in Harbin, Heilongjiang province has been teaching business drinking etiquette—from how much to pour, to who to toast first and what to say when making the toasts. The most telling part of the video is the interview with the students: a businesswoman, a red wine salesman, and an accountant. Few of them enjoy drinking and socializing on such occasions and feel compelled to put on a disguise and suck up to their superiors or clients. But most agree that chugging that glass of beer or Baijiu is an important, possibly the only, way to cement a deal, and thus to advance one’s career and get ahead in life.

Selections here sometimes mirror the things I’ve been wondering about, which may not be new. Here, a piece by Archie Bland on the alternating perniciousness and vapidness of “banter” in British culture:

The trust game in banter was traditionally supposed to be: do you trust me when I say we’re friends in spite of the mean things I’m saying about you? But now there’s a second version of the game: do I trust you not to tell anyone the mean things I’m saying about other people? “I think originally it was a harmless thing,” said Cameron, whose analysis is rooted in an archive of male group conversation, mostly recorded by her students, that goes back to the 1980s. “But then it started to be used as an excuse when men were caught out engaging in forms of it that weren’t so harmless.”

I wonder if Calcuttan friends will find this next piece romanticized, but the idea of adda—I am unsure if, in my lone wanderings about the city in 2019, I had managed to experience the real thing—was something I was searching for (particularly after reading passages on it in Kushanava Choudhury’s The Epic City, a book I can’t recommend enough). Coffee or Chai? At 2 Kolkata Cafes, ‘Adda’ Is What’s Really on the Menu by Mujib Mashal:

“Adda is something that goes unnoticed—because it’s so part of our every day and it’s so integral to the identity of being a Bengali,” said Dr. Nabamita Das, a professor of sociology at Presidency University in Kolkata who wrote her doctoral thesis on adda. “And when you think about adda you think about adda integrally tied to the space of adda—you talk about the Coffee House adda, the Favorite Cabin adda.” Some of Bengal’s favorite icons would hold adda at the Coffee House, from the legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray to Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel in economic science. Many of the city’s intellectual giants have spoken fondly of how the coffee and conversation shaped their worldview, likening each table to its own literary salon.

Pigs to the slaughter by Leighton Woodhouse—“The [U.S.] meat industry’s response to COVID-19 was a confluence of cruelty to animals and workers alike—yet the owners are doing better than ever.”

To date, an estimated 86,000 workers have caught COVID-19 and at least 423 have lost their lives to it. Today, fewer workers are getting sick because of the vaccines, but one poultry worker told me that at her plant, managers had learned from the pandemic that they can keep up the same pace of production with fewer workers. They never bothered hiring new staff to replace the workers they’d lost to COVID; they’re just pushing the remaining workers even harder. That’s led to fatigue and injury, which is a hazard to workers and animals alike. Whenever workers are pushed to the brink, animal welfare suffers too, as tired workers means less focused workers, and that can mean animals not being fully killed before they get through the kill line, which means they’re eviscerated while still alive.

In China, Bragging About Your Wealth Can Get You Censored by Vivian Wang and Joy Dong:

The Chinese authorities have declared war on content deemed to be “flaunting wealth,” amid sweeping calls by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to combat inequality. As Mr. Xi positions himself for a third term, he has cast himself as a man of the people, leading a campaign against entrenched interests.

London No Longer Has One Chinatown. It Has Many by Angela Hui:

Migration isn’t limited to the Cantonese south any more; China’s growing middle and upper-classes are exploring the world and arriving in London en masse, bending entire global industries as they go and fueling demand for goods and services from home. Attracting a younger generation to neighbourhoods like Aldgate, Hackney, Holborn, Lambeth and Victoria, the past two decades have seen a huge influx of investment from mainland China, and the number of traditionally-run family-owned Cantonese restaurants are dwindling, making way for more specialist, regional Chinese and pan-Asian businesses in a bid to appeal to this newer demographic, as well as attracting a broader spectrum of customers. 

The Aldi effect: how one discount supermarket transformed the way Britain shops by Xan Rice reveals fascinating things about Aldi’s secretive, media-shy German founders (one of them having been kidnapped before) and how the supermarket chains work:

As anyone who has tried navigating a ram-packed Aldi on a Saturday afternoon will know, you still don’t go there for the ambience or relaxed shopping experience. “Aldi panic” at the till endures in the electronic age thanks to a simple innovation that allows for instant scanning of goods. Packaged products in all supermarkets come with a barcode, which the checkout assistant will locate and scan. But look closely at a packet of Aldi toilet rolls and you will see not one but four barcodes: two long ones down the sides, and one on each large flat surface. A container of butter has three barcodes; a bag of carrots has two. For kidney beans, a pinstripe barcode is wrapped around half of the can. This means that whichever way the assistant holds the product the scanner will register it.

From time to time I like to go back and share my favorite pieces of narrative nonfiction. One of them is The Contestant by the Peruvian writer Daniel Alarcón (who is, btw, equally skilled at fiction)—“Ruth Thalía Sayas Sánchez, a teenager from the outskirts of Lima, Peru, became an overnight sensation on a hit television game show. Then, she disappeared.”

Then came question number 18: Have you ever accepted money for sex?

Vilma bent over, as if in physical pain.

Ruth Thalía answered yes, and the show’s announcer, a disembodied, almost robotically precise woman’s voice, called out:

“The answer is… true.”

There was a long silence.

“Just twice,” Ruth Thalía explained. “We needed money. We were in a bad situation. It hasn’t happened since, and it won’t happen again.”

For this truthful admission, Ruth Thalía had won 15,000 soles, or about $5,300—almost ten months’ wages for someone living in Lima. Beto asked if she wanted to go on, in search of 50,000 soles.

Making sense our place in the world

Stupid Xenophobic Parrots: On Transitions and Transformation by Michelle Kuo, writing with unapologetic candour about her return migration to Taiwan (in the newsletter she writes with her husband, A Broad and Ample Road):

English has long been the best thing I’ve had going for me, proof I have something to offer the world. It gave me confidence as a shy kid, helped me create something out of myself. It made me virtuous, a woman of action. A word after a word after a word, as Margaret Atwood wrote, is power. English made me a teacher, encouraging students to find their own voice; it made me a lawyer, crafting legal briefs to sculpt fury and kill doubt. It made me a wife, crying as I wrote my marriage vows.

Did it make me a daughter? That’s more complicated. My parents were always proud of my love of books and my achievements as a writer, even though it meant losing something in the way I communicated with them. I think if a Faustian devil had said I will grant your child mastery of English, on the condition that she will be dumb to your mother tongue and never understand a word you say, they still would have agreed.

Somehow, I had never read this piece. The 15 Year Layover by Michael Paterniti tells the extraordinary story of the man who inspired Spielberg’s The Terminal. Due to some truly mind-boggling confluence of circumstances, he lived, waiting, at Charles de Gaulle airport for eighteen years before he had to be hospitalized due to illness:

Alfred's odyssey had begun when he was a young man from a well-to-do family living in Iran and had ended here on an airport bench in Paris, by mistake. Twenty years ago, while living in Belgium, he'd simply wanted to go to England by boat. But having rid himself of his identification papers during the voyage, he'd fallen into a twilight limbo as a nationless, unidentifiable person no one wanted, bounced from Belgium to England to France, where, finally, he'd been left stranded at Charles de Gaulle Airport. He'd lived there ever since.

Watch the deliciously flamboyant music videos (I feel like it captures perfectly a kind of humour from our part of the world—simultaneously campy, nerdy, and ironic), filmed against familiar tropical backdrops, by Yung Raja—a Singaporean who raps in English and Tamil, in this profile by Nyshka Chandran with photographs by Lenne Chai (who, btw, also shot this brilliant fashion spread imagining what a queer Singaporean wedding would look like).

A view of home

No one article could capture the full scale and devastation of the floods in Malaysia—the worst since 2014, at least 48 dead—or the community relief efforts that have sprung up to make up for the sore lack of government initiative; you’d have to refresh social media feeds constantly for that. Najjua Zulkefli, one of my favorite Malaysian photographers, shot an incredibly evocative photo essay. Fazry Ismail and Firdaus Latif too, captured moments that make me wish I were home to help in a way that goes beyond donating money. Kudos to friends and acquaintances helping in the clean-up. Oh, and did you see that burly croc that got washed out of the river onto a bridge?

Bornean communities locked into two-million-hectare carbon deal they don’t know about by John C. Cannon—more details here. In the same vein, a note on why indigenous communities are wary of carbon-offsetting schemes.

Terengganu state has passed a law to ban the sale of turtle eggs by June 2022 (it is commonly and openly sold here for consumption), by Bryan Yong for Macaranga—an environmental news outfit co-founded in 2019 by Yao-Hua Law and Siew Lyn Wong that could use your monetary support.

Another scandal on how Malaysian companies—a Dyson supplier this time—treat migrant workers. Also: U.S. Customs bans fifth Malaysian glove maker over alleged forced labor!

A Thousand Thousand Islands is a series of beautifully illustrated zines inspired by Southeast Asia history and folklore, for use with fantasy adventure tabletop RPGs, by Zedeck Siew and Munkao. A helpful preview, if, like me, you know hardly anything about RPGs:

Something I wrote for the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Foundation teasing out some of the issues that were discussed at Women's Tribunal Malaysia—the first of its kind in Malaysia.

Malaysian food via London: Escaping the Roti King Queue by Jonathan Nunn of the Vittles newsletter. (Which also contains a couple of passages I wholeheartedly agree with on the new not-really-a-queue queue system that has infected some of the city’s restaurants. Just take bookings already!)

Reimagining our world (for better or worse)

Octopuses, crabs, and lobsters will be recognized as ‘sentient beings’ in U.K. by Kelsey Vlamis. Coincidentally, the news came immediately after I watched My Octopus Teacher (on Netflix), which is really very profound, and as affecting as people say it is. I realize I knew nothing about octopuses. You will marvel at what it is capable of, the relationship we’re capable of having with non-human creatures, and what that might tell us about ourselves.

Our Self-Imposed Scarcity of Nice Places by Daniel Herriges

The Year Basic Income Programs Went Mainstream by Sarah Holder

In the works for years, a suicide machine will soon be tested in Switzerland by Julian Mark

Why rich countries could be sued for destroying the climate by Jocelyn Timperley

Inside Mexico’s Historic Lawsuit Targeting U.S. Gun Companies by Ryan Devereaux

What if we didn’t build a single new building in 2022? by Elissaveta M. Brandon

Saving lives and making money: Can humanitarian impact bonds marry the two? by Ben Parker

After two failed attempts, Canada bans conversion therapy by Rachel Treisman

Rohingya sue Facebook for £150bn over Myanmar genocide by Dan Milmo

To sink into

Something to think about

Like Ayşegül Savaş’s short story quoted at top, Deborah Levy’s memoir, Real Estate (which I recently read and recommend), is concerned about finding a house to hold a home, and all the illusions of womanhood that come with it.

Seeing a woman feeding pigeons on the sidewalk, she finds herself thinking:

When I saw she had painted on her eyebrows so that one was much higher than the other, I suddenly felt exhausted and didn’t think I could commit to the slog and sorrow of her back story. I saw her as a child with both eyebrows in the right place, but knew I would have to track the long female journey to the left eyebrow floating near her hairline. As a structure for a film, that was quite appealing. I was also thinking about my best male friend’s idea that his wife, Nadia, was happy but pretended to be unhappy. Why did he think she was pretending?

And I leave you with…

A belated Christmas Carol:

Thanks, as ever, for welcoming my letters to your inbox!

Happy new year ❤️
E.

You might have noticed that I didn’t end up sending out a guest letter last month, since I wrote one of my own. This time, I’m happy to share something with you by Kaori Fujimoto, whom I first met at a writing workshop many years ago. In the intervening years, we’ve exchanged messages about writing and reading, and visited each other’s countries for the first time. The experience of seeing someone you know from another place in a place you’ve never imagined them before is a very particular kind of joy—a way of collapsing time.

When I reached out to Kaori about writing for this newsletter, I was thinking about the mixed feelings she had shared with me before about being a woman in Japan—a country with traditions so distinctively beautiful but also, for some, confining. When I approach someone to write here, I often have something in mind from what I already know of them, but I always let them know to disregard my suggestion if I’ve somehow misunderstood the import of something or if it doesn’t feel meaningful enough to write about. I make sure to let them know that they should feel free to explore without any particular “message” in mind or any contrivance of connection to place, though they would use the idea of place as a starting point.

As it turned out, Kaori wrote back saying she might have something along the lines I was thinking of—“The idea of writing about condolence money had been hovering in my mind for years,” she said—and she let it go where it wanted to go. This is the result. If you enjoy reading it, give it a ❤️, leave a comment, or share it. Many thanks!

Don’t forget that you can catch up on all past guest letters here. If you’re interested in writing one too, please reach out.

A guest letter by Kaori Fujimoto

All photographs provided by the writer unless noted otherwise

Kaori Fujimoto is an essayist from the greater Tokyo area, where she also currently resides. Her writing has appeared in the Common, Literary Hub, the Threepenny Review, Mslexia, and other literary journals and anthologies, and been listed as Notable in The Best American Essays. To read more of her work, try “Shinjuku Golden Gai and the Midnight Diner” and “Embracing Imperfection: On Writing in a Second Language”.

A letter carrier delivered another batch of registered mail envelopes filled with cash to my parents’ house. My mother and sisters counted the money and jotted down the senders’ names and the amounts before placing the envelopes on the Buddhist altar, in front of which my father’s body lay.

Money had been rolling in since his passing—condolence money, or kōden in Japanese, literally meaning “offering of incense”. It came from family and friends, who were unable to attend the wake or funeral in the countryside where my parents had lived since retirement. The accompanying messages read: “It breaks my heart to think about the grief your family is going through,” or “This is a small amount, but please spend this on incense.” They all sounded similar, some almost exactly the same, as many were traditional stock phrases. Nevertheless, these notes seemed better than no message at all.

Kōden also follows long-standing rules: Never use crisp bills. Place the money in a special condolence envelope according to specific instructions, such as that the front of the banknotes must face the back of the envelope that must be closed also in a specific way. The amount to offer depends on the sender’s relationship with the deceased. So, my siblings exclaimed when our father’s distant friend sent 50,000 yen (about 500 dollars), though 5,000 yen would have been enough, and when a close relative, whom our father had helped many times, sent only 10,000 yen, though 30,000 yen would have been more appropriate. After the funeral, the senders would receive gifts in return that would be worth half the value of their kōden. My family, just as other families, would commission this overwhelming task to a department store after other daunting tasks for the funeral. “What people say is true—the bereaved have no time to grieve!” one of my sisters said.

I made no comment. I was not in charge of the family’s practical matters, especially when they involved handling traditional protocols, which I hadn’t bothered to master. I didn’t understand their point. These formalities often require that only cash be given, for both funerals and weddings, and the rules that apply significantly differ according to the type of occasion. Why won’t gifts do? Why the detailed rules? Why does everyone follow them blindly?

I’d long considered myself lucky that in my family, it was my older siblings who helped our parents take care of such customs. In any of the offices where I’d worked, I also escaped a permanent employee’s obligations to attend coworkers’ weddings and to be involved in other office customs, including periodical after-hour socials. I temped as a business translator, moving from office to office—bank, law firm, IT company, ad agency, among others—before becoming a full-time freelancer.

“Working for different places must never bore you. That may be good,” my father once said. This was the first time he had shown approval for the way I worked. In a country where most university students are expected to secure employment in their graduating year—in recent times, it’s been reported that at least ninety-six percent do every year—my refusal to stay on the payroll of one company had maddened him.

Understandably, he wanted his daughter with university degrees to follow the usual course of decent job, marriage, motherhood. But my priority was to become a writer and versatile translator, rather than a wife and mother. I’ve loved reading and writing for as long as I can remember, and I am fully in my element when I work with words. I’ve chosen business translation as my day job for the challenge of rendering different types of Japanese texts into English and because it lets me engage in the act of writing all day, learning new words and constructions I could use for my own writing.

My father often sighed at my non-permanent employment status, yet he also understood my craftsman’s temperament and inability to cleave myself to an organization, because I inherited these qualities from him. He was a self-employed architect with a first-class license. He prided himself on his skills and knew it would take grit to work for different clients with no job security. So, eventually, he accepted my choice.

“Kaori, are these your friends?” My mother showed me the senders’ names on three envelopes.

“Yes,” I said, and read the enclosed condolence messages. They were from high school friends who had met my father only briefly. Two days before, on the night he died, they had texted me wishes for the New Year. When I told them the news, they immediately phoned for my parents’ mailing address so they could send kōden.

“I didn’t let you know to solicit kōden,” I said, astonished. “You hardly knew him, so don’t do anything.”

“I won’t not do anything,” they all responded. “This is the only thing I can do for you now, so let me do it.”

Despite having small children at home, they each made the effort to buy a special envelope, handwrite their messages, and travel to the post office the next day.

In high school, these women effortlessly blended in with classmates and thrived in school activities, while I never fit in—I just couldn’t enjoy my schoolmates’ company or group activities, and it showed in the way I carried myself. After high school, these women followed the course my parents had wanted me to follow. Yet, they were among the few people I knew who didn’t dismiss me for frequently changing jobs, for dating men I never considered marrying, and for being ill-equipped with the intricacies of Japanese social etiquette.

“You shouldn’t have a life like mine, Kaori. If you did, that would make you a person who’s not you,” one of them once said. How I wished my family members understood me the way she did.

But my father might have, albeit vaguely.

My parents moved out of the greater Tokyo area when I was in my mid-thirties. When I visited them in their provincial town, my father and I often traveled to a grocery store in his car. Once, on a sunny autumn’s day, as we drove past vacant lots overgrown with tall grass, I asked him to pull over so I could get out and take some photos. The sepia grass swayed and rustled in the breeze, and I felt compelled to photograph them in the soft, bright light.

After snapping a few pictures, I just stood there in the quiet of the sun-filled field, comforted, but also dispirited. At the time, I was in a limbo of staying put—in a job and a relationship I had temporarily settled for, and in a state where I read and wrote as an aspiring writer with no prospects of publication. I had no idea where I was going, where I would be happy—if I would ever be happy.

I turned around and saw my father watching me. The apprehensive look in his eyes told me he sensed my predicament.

A condolence telegram from another friend arrived two days after the kōden from my three friends, one day before the funeral. Kōden was not enclosed. She was my oldest friend and had talked to my father numerous times. The telegram did not offer any conventional phrases of comfort. She wrote about how glad she was when my father looked after her little daughter’s goldfish when they were away on a family vacation. The whole message sounded like one written by an elementary schooler.

When I’d called her to let her know about his passing, I said she wouldn’t need to do anything, just as I did with the other women, and I meant it. Yet, after receiving the kōden my other friends sent, despite my resistance and all the trouble they clearly had to take, I felt offended by one childish telegram sent so late—particularly because I knew she was a penny pincher.

I sat by my father’s body in front of the Buddhist altar that had been assembled by two men from the undertaker’s. Receiving our call late at night, they came to the hospital in black suits and ties, transported his body to this house, and put up the altar with incredible swiftness. Both of them were respectful and thoughtful while they worked out the details of the wake and funeral for us, which moved me. Money and messages piled up on the altar.

I had always regarded Japan’s traditions as shackles. But, going through all this, I began to understand that strict adherence to some formalities is the best and easiest way to show care and respect, especially on the occasion of a loved one’s death, when there is little you can do to blunt the pain of grieving.

“Holy cow, you’re impressive,” my father had said to me when an article I wrote was accepted by a British magazine, and when I was selected as a fellow for a creative writing workshop in Europe. His compliment surprised me more than it delighted me at the time. Now, after his death, the value of the words finally sank in, with the weight of the knowledge that he had truly meant it.

His body would be transferred to a coffin for the funeral the following day, and we would fill it with flowers. We asked the undertaker to prepare jolly, brilliantly colored flowers. We knew he’d hate typical funeral flowers like chrysanthemums. He was an offbeat fellow in many ways. He disliked most of the conventions he had to handle as the head of the family, but adhered to them anyway.

“You never listen to me,” he often said.

“I’ll continue to not listen to you,” I thought by the altar. I had bucked everything he expected of me as a Japanese woman, trying to carve out my own happy place in a homeland where I found it difficult to be happy, partly because of the traditions I didn’t comprehend. But I knew I would send kōden quickly from then on whenever the occasion arose. Ignoring what I didn’t understand wasn’t the only way to carve out my own place. Sometimes I should just serve tradition to show my respect for others.

“Finally got it?” I imagined he would say. “But don’t overdo it. Be yourself.”

p.s. This is a guest letter, and views and experiences related are the writer’s own. Guest appearances here aim to reflect the variety of life in this world.

Writers on the road

Is the Digital Age Costing Us Our Ability to Wander? by Alejandro Chacoff, in reviewing Antonio Muñoz Molina’s novel, To Walk Alone in the Crowd:

Whatever the source of his malaise, the flâneur’s classic gesture of unearthing leads, here, not to imagined human stories or a contemplation of the city’s haunted past but to a catalogue of used-up products, a few marked by multinational brand names, none pointing to anything beyond itself. Throughout the book, it is difficult to tell which city the wandering narrator is in unless he explicitly names it. There may be a tacit critique in this approach: have big cities across the globe become products, too, soulless and interchangeable? Still, there is something self-defeating in an homage to flânerie that offers little sense of place.

On the Logistics of Memory; Or, Writing While Uprooted, by Anjanette Delgado:

For the uprooted, a room of their own is not enough to write; her most important tool is not paper and pen or pencil, not even place or space. It’s memory. But from the moment she leaves, she is halved; her memories are tainted by sadness, by guilt, by relief cooked in regret. Who did she leave behind? If she was forced to leave, her sadness is unbearable. If she chose to, the guilt murders her daily. She doesn’t yet belong in the new place, but the old place is already dissolving, never to exist again. Not exactly. Plus, forget identity. Who is she, really? Her new environment knows nothing about her—just that she is a person who leaves.

Some notes I had copied down a while ago from Malcolm Gladwell (possibly from Masterclass):

I think you have to feel free to go down roads that don’t lead anywhere immediately. I was essentially going for a wander, and collecting something and stick it on the back shelf in hopes that I would someday use it. And I did. And if you do enough of those little wanderings, then you have a shelf that’s packed with all kinds of really cool things. But doing something just because you can perceive in the moment that it might be useful is a really good way of not gathering anything at all. Because you can’t know in the moment. The pressure’s too high. Who knows, you know, what will come of some stray fact? You just have to be patient.

How we make sense of the world & tell its stories

Apophenia: How the Internet Transforms the Individual into a Conspiracy of One, by Edward Snowden:

when you do live at the center of a private world, reverse-engineered from your own search history, you begin to notice patterns that others can’t. Believe me when I say I know what it feels like to be told that you’re the only one who sees the connection—a pattern of injustice, say—and that you’re downright crazy for noticing anything at all. To manufacture meaning from mere coincidence is the essence of paranoia, the gateway to world-building your own private conspiracies—or else to an epiphany that allows you to see the world as it actually is.

The Sticky Issue of Consent in Street Photography by Dina Litovsky:

Requiring consent pretty much eliminates street and most documentary photography as a genre. For some people that would be an absolutely fair price to pay. For many others, myself included, that would be a very unfortunate world to live in. I fell in love with street photography because of its vital place in our culture, reflecting our fragile reality back to ourselves.

Susan Orlean on writing her Outside story “Life’s Swell” in 2002, which was turned into the movie Blue Crush:

I’ve always shied away from the story that is about a woman performing something that is not normally associated with women, because that had become a kind of tired trope in magazines—you know, the first woman arc welder, or whatever. So I think that I’ve avoided those stories. There was something about going, “Oh my God, oh my God, there’s a woman doing a man’s job” that really offended me, because you think, Well, wait a minute, this shouldn’t be treated as a crazy freak show; we should accept it as that’s the way things should be, so let’s not turn it into a big deal. But the bottom line is, I didn’t write the story with that as the point. I just thought, This is an interesting thing to observe, and I don’t have to feel burdened by this idea that, oh, the big point of the story is girls doing a man’s sport, but instead let’s go past that and write about the experience that these girls have doing this sport.

Great article by James Hansen on this debacle you’ve surely heard of: London Chef Elizabeth Haigh’s Cookbook Withdrawn After Plagiarism Allegations, with particularly egregious filching—personal history anecdotes even, though this also brings up the question of what happens when personal memory overlaps with collective memory?—from Singaporean writer Sharon Wee:

Haigh and Wee alike are enmeshed in a cookbook industry that—particularly when publishing books that aren’t in Eurocentric culinary traditions—frequently reduces people’s credentials to lived experiences. It uses these credentials to turn cookbook authors and chefs into monolithic avatars for representation, even if the avatar goes beyond their knowledge of a given cuisine, tradition, or place. It, as in the restaurant industry, limits these avatars to one or two per cuisine, creating scarcity, and then judges their continued suitability for the role. Either on the purported authenticity of their stories, or, worse, what they look like.

Rethinking Reporting on the Place Where You Live by Sari Botton:

I still felt compelled to be the foremost chronicler of my area. I see now that I didn’t necessarily have the healthiest of motivations, nor sufficient perspective on an area I was fairly new to, nor my role as a newcomer from the city. I got a rush each time I sensed there was a story and then managed to persuade my editors to let me cover it. It felt like a conquest, and stoked my ego. […] I went on to write and co-write some really dumb shit I now regret (nope, not linking) without much self-awareness, or the realization that even articles framing gentrification as a scourge tend to inspire speculators to start buying up property and driving up housing prices, which eventually leads to displacement.

Reader rolodex

As more of you join in here, I thought it would be nice to share what you’ve been tending to, professionally or personally. This week, take a look at the pottery work by one of my favorite people, Li Sia Tan, a digital designer based in London.

Some words from Sia:

“I learned hand-building with clay in my foundation year at university, and made clay figures for people’s birthdays, like for my gong gong. When I moved to London about five years ago I did a taster pottery class with the wheel, and then started a weekly routine. But after some months, I began to feel frustrated: I wasn’t progressing, and I found myself disliking pottery more than I loved it. So I took a hiatus. After a year away, though, I started to miss it and decided to go back. I’ve kept at it ever since. I find it calming. It’s a way to switch off from the world, using my hands to make something. I’ve sold a few pieces to friends—sets of plates, jugs and bowls, a vase. Otherwise, I make what I need, or what I think could be fun to make. I like simplicity, and I like colors—bright or pastel hues, speckles. I just want to keep making more, improving and having fun, and hopefully I’ll be able to have my own little store one day.”

Follow her on Instagram @lisia.ceramics

Don’t forget the first part of this letter!

E.

All my feelings and experiences were in one sense extremely intense, and in another sense completely trivial, because none of my decisions seemed to have any consequences, and nothing about my life—the job, the apartment, the desires, the love affairs—struck me as permanent. I felt anything was possible, that there were no doors shut behind me, and that out there somewhere, as yet unknown, there were people who would love and admire me and want to make me happy. Maybe that explains in some way the openness I felt towards the world—maybe without knowing it, I was anticipating my future, I was watching for signs.

—Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You?

A quick note:

You’ll notice that I’ve changed the overarching name of this newsletter to Movable Worlds; I gave “The Great Affair” over to the guest section. I wanted something that could more readily encompass the idea of a world in flux, a world capable of change, and—a riff on Hemingway’s “moveable feast”—the inner worlds of our own making that we carry with us wherever we go. I thought the name change would also better embrace some other ideas I have for the newsletter—but more on that in another dispatch. You can still reach this newsletter at its old URL, which will simply redirect to movableworlds.substack.com

I hope you enjoy this month’s curated letter. As always, feel free to let me know your thoughts.

Making sense of our place in the world

Tiki Girl by Amanda Lee Koe—fairly sure this is nonfiction, but even if it’s not, I love the spot-on vibes this scene conjures up!

More often than not, when Bud stepped off Bus 10, she would be in a cosy sweater. Aircon on those double-decker night buses was extra frigid, but on alighting, the streets were balmy again. I would hold her T-shirt down as she removed her sweater. Then we’d walk to my favourite neighbourhood kopitiam, where the Mainland Chinese drinks stall lady with a frizzy perm knew my order: I’d start with a cold teh c peng and end with a warm Milo. She was friendly to me, unlike the Singaporean Chinese beer auntie in an ass-hugging Tiger-Beer skort who only bussed the tables of bawdy uncles who started every sentence with ‘Kanina’, the Hokkien equivalent of ‘Fuck you’. From what I could hear, they seemed to be using this merely as a placeholder for ‘Let me tell you…’ and the appropriate response once someone had finished relaying his anecdote was a hearty chorus of ‘Lan pa!’, the Hokkien for testicles, which appeared to connote ‘No way!’

My Accidental Visit to the Pandemic’s Party Capital by Rosa Lyster and Gueorgui Pinkhassov, which I love for how closely it hews, in feeling if not necessarily in its material facts (at the risk of sounding square, I am not much of a clubber), to my own experience of growing to love the places I’ve loved:

Becoming abruptly besotted with a new city can be like falling dramatically in love with a new person, and much of it rests on the sense of elated mystification that is unsustainable in the long term—if you walked around swooning at coincidences like this all the time, you would fall in a hole or become unemployed—but it is also one reason the species continues to thrive. The difference between a city and a person is that a city can’t love you back, but Kyiv frequently gives the impression that it is trying, in that it instantly repays whatever attention you might lavish upon it. It is a city of hidden courtyards and underpasses and bars that you come across by mistake, all of which enables a sense of personal ownership over discoveries everyone has already made. This still isn’t a reason. I can’t say why Kyiv knocked me out the way it did any more than I could objectively account for why and when I fell in love, other than to establish for the record that a feeling of instant affinity is still possible, where matters progress with a speed both astonishing and inevitable.

American Spit by Malaysian writer Vanessa Chan—very short, very punchy:

You roll your eyes at me in bed, sigh with the resignation of someone who feels the burden of civility resting on your thin shoulders.

“No, babe. It’s ‘con-TEM-pla-tive not ‘con-tem-PLAY-tive.’ You said it wrong again.” 

You are Asian too, but American, and this makes all the difference. It means that you know how to use filler words like like in the right places, even if you don’t seem to like anything about me these days.

Making House: Notes on Domesticity by Rachel Cusk:

Not long before, I was driven to what appeared to be the brink of mental and physical collapse by embarking on the complete remodeling of our London flat, and while it was true that my children and I were now enjoying the benefits of living in a more pleasant environment, I still felt a certain sense of shame at how determinedly I brought these events about. I caused walls to be knocked down and floors to be ripped up and rooms to be gutted; I threw away decades’ worth of clutter and keepsakes and old furniture; with what at times seemed like magic and at others sheer violence, I caused the past to be obliterated and put something new, something of my choosing, in its place.

The Places We Lost, an illustrated comic by Kathy MacLeod (from Believer magazine—which, very sadly, will cease publishing in 2022):

A world at once quotidian, absurd, brutal, poignant, and extraordinary

On migration

How Africa will become the center of the world’s urban future by Max Bearak, Dylan Moriarty, and Júlia Ledur

The Migrant Workers Who Follow Climate Disasters by Sarah Stillman

Brain Drain From Britain Delivers Financial Boon to Estonia by Stephen Castle

A once-remote patch of rainforest is now packed with migrants trying to reach the U.S. by John Otis

Why Belarus is using migrants as a political weapon by Ellen Iones

On culture, conflict, etc.

What happened to the women who stayed behind in Afghanistan, from a photo essay by Laura King and Marcus Yam. “Unlike many Afghan women, Sahar didn't lose her job when the Taliban returned to power. But something has changed: She has to pretend that a man is the one doing her work.”

Why Japan Can’t Bring Itself to Ban Sexual Depictions of Children in Manga by Hanako Montgomery. “Some also argue that children who grow up seeing this unregulated media could think it acceptable to be sexualized, even making them susceptible targets of sexual grooming by perpetrators of child sex crimes.”

The global streaming boom is creating a severe translator shortage by Andrew Deck. Quoting Paolo Sigismondi, a professor who researches the global entertainment industry, “Squid Game is another sign that there is a demand for locally produced media entertainment content above and beyond local audiences—for Korean content outside of Korea, for Mexican content outside of Mexico.”

The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s’ Most Decadent College by Lili Anolik. Quoting Donna Tartt, of The Secret History fame: “[E]verybody there was like the oddly gifted person who made bad grades and hung out in the parking lot.” Also appearances by Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem. The story is relevant again because of a new podcast by the same writer.

Global Hunt for Looted Treasures Leads to Offshore Trusts, by journalists at the Washington Post, as part of the Pandora Papers exposé—and what it turned up about the religious artifacts Cambodia wants returned to it. “This led to a broader examination of the global trade in art, a realm in which shell companies and trusts conceal smuggling, and some famed institutions and private collectors buy items of murky origin.”

Terror & tourism: Xinjiang eases its grip, but fear remains by Dake Kang. “Many of the practices that made the Uyghur culture a living thing—raucous gatherings, strict Islamic habits, heated debate—have been restricted or banned. In their place, the authorities have crafted a sterilized version, one ripe for commercialization.”

In Texas, where legislators have passed a bill to usher in a future without abortion rights, a maternity ranch is born, by Stephanie McCrummen. Uh, to quote the founder: “What if Texas ends up becoming a model for the future? What if Texas meets this shift in culture? And instead of having high abortion rates, what if we help single moms to become stronger moms, to become successful?”

Spätis: The convenience stores that rule Berlin by Krystin Arneson. “They supply locals and tourists with cigarettes, snacks and €1 after-work wegbiers ("beers you drink on the go"). But during the pandemic, and particularly during the warmer months, they became essential fuelling stations for outdoor gatherings, as shuttered bars and nightclubs turned social life inside out.”

After Rittenhouse: Will deadly clashes multiply as the right to self-defense expands? by Mark Fischer and Mark Berman. “Under Wisconsin law, people who perceive a threat to their life don’t have a duty to run away. Such laws are designed to give armed citizens the flexibility to shoot first and ask questions—or be challenged on their decision in a courtroom—later.”

The Thrilling Dare of Scorched Rice by Ligaya Mishan. “To turn a mistake into a virtue, to recast dregs as bounty, to make a gift, an honor, of something that would once have been cursed at and cast aside: Is it possible that this says less about resilience and more about the sheer perversity—and generosity—of human nature, which leads us so often to seek the good in the bad, to favor the damaged, to love the flaw?”

On climate change & the natural world

Got to delve into the history of the Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia for a story I contributed reporting to: How the hunt for this deadly virus shaped the search for coronavirus’s origins by Karin Brulliard and Ben Guarino. “By 1998, Malaysia had undergone an economic boom that led to a greater demand for meat, and more forests cut for agriculture. Some pig farms, previously a backyard industry, had tens of thousands of animals. Some farmers supplemented their income with fruit orchards, planting trees next to open-air pigsties—perfect flying fox buffets."

Please Don’t Feed the Whale Sharks? Fishing Town Says It Must, to Prosper, by Hannah Reyes Morales:

“Where have you been?” Mr. de Guzman asks 180, whom he hasn’t seen in weeks, as he drops handfuls of shrimp into the water and gently scrapes off some debris from the shark’s body. “You must have traveled to a far-off place.”

How Americans’ Appetite for Leather in Luxury SUVs Worsens Amazon Deforestation by Manuela Andreoni, Hiroko Tabuchi, Albert Sun, and Victor Moriyama. “Amazon deforestation has surged in recent years as ranchers race to supply the growing demand for beef, particularly in China. Leather industry representatives make the point that as long as there is demand for beef, they are simply using hides that would otherwise be sent to landfills.”

Countries’ climate pledges built on flawed data, Post investigation finds—particularly damning of my home country. “Malaysia’s latest catalog of its greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations reads like a report from a parallel universe. The 285-page document suggests that Malaysia’s trees are absorbing carbon four times faster than similar forests in neighboring Indonesia.”

The Money Farmers: How Oligarchs and Populists Milk the E.U. for Millions by Selam Gebrekidan, Matt Apuzzo, and Benjamin Novak. “They have created a modern twist on a feudal system, giving jobs and aid to the compliant, and punishing the mutinous. These land barons, as it turns out, are financed and emboldened by the European Union.”

A view of home

How The Pakatan Harapan legend crumbled in Malacca by Bridget Welsh: “The opposition stalwart and prime minister hopeful [Anwar Ibrahim] has consistently failed to secure a major election victory at the leadership helm. How many times does he need to be rejected before the opposition realizes that Anwar’s time has passed?”

Singapore court orders temporary reprieve for mentally disabled man on death row by Shibani Mahtani—“Exacerbating the pain for Dharmalingam’s Malaysia-based family are travel restrictions that have made it challenging and isolating for his family to see him in person and say goodbye.” But that is not the end.

Of Putrajaya, Amnesic Utopias, and The City of Omelas by Lily J.: “What are the terms that a city like Putrajaya must accept, in order to remain pristine? Primarily, it must remain an amnesic city, constantly forgetting the country around it, and the history that existed before it. It’s a city of erasures.”

Reimagining our world

The elephant who could be a person by Jill Lepore—“the most important animal rights case of the 21st century”.

EU aims to curb deforestation with beef and coffee import ban by Jennifer Rankin—“for the first time the EU will attempt to regulate products linked to all—and not just illegal—deforestation.”

The lettings agency that's exclusively for homeless people by Lauren Brown

New York City is building a wall of oysters to fend off floods by Julia Hotz

The German Greens are proposing a Europe-wide network of sleeper trains, by Frank Jacobs. (Found this in Lauren Razavi’s Counterflows newsletter about borderless living.)

Something to think about

Anne Helen Petersen, who writes the Culture Study newsletter, on what community means:

You can show up for others, which can mean so many different things. You can talk to people you don’t know, which can take many other different forms. You can give alms willingly and without expectations. But most of these things involve taking time away from the concentration on your own to-do list. Community is showing up to weed the library garden even though it’s on a Saturday and you like a certain routine for your Saturday. It is actually joining the volunteer fire department. It is committing to a two-hour-a-week volunteer spot even though it feels weird because you’ve learned to dedicate all hours to work, and then blocking it off the same way you would block off any other commitment. It is offering assistance before it is asked for, even if it means camouflaging it in the form of “I’m going to the store, can I pick anything up for you?” It is having conversations that go nowhere even when you have dinner to start. It is unlearning so much of what many of us have taught ourselves about making every moment of our lives as efficient and optimized as possible.

Before I go, a sound postcard: after a late breakfast one weekend, while it was crisp cold and sunny outside, W.C. and his younger brother filling their childhood home with music:

A reminder that this dispatch is split into two parts. The second is here.

Thanks, as always, for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, found it illuminative in any way, tell someone you know to subscribe.

E.

I’m afraid this finds you a little late in the month. I’ve been busy with editing and writing commissioned pieces, which I need to finish before I can move on mentally to other things, so thank you for your patience and continued readership.

Meanwhile, I have another guest letter for you. It’s from Ying Reinhardt, a Malaysian travel writer and blogger, a.k.a. The Tiny Wanderer. We’ve never met, but we’ve exchanged messages here and there about writing and travel. I knew she had worked on cruise ships for a time and was planning to write a memoir about that chapter of her life, so I reached out. This has honestly been the nicest thing about this newsletter: inviting strangers to share something of their own lives. There are many more people I want to reach out to.

Ying’s letter is a collection of memories from her experiences aboard different cruise ships, where she worked as a crew lecturer between 2007 and 2011 teaching their staff English as a means to travel further. I’ve always found the seafaring life romantic, even as I know enough from what I’ve read that it often isn’t (especially during this pandemic, which stranded hundreds of thousands of workers at sea), and I enjoyed reading in Ying’s essay the specific details, even the language—the job titles, the code word for a certain emergency—that are rooted in the particularities of this life. I also know, from my own experience, that the greatest travel adventures, though often rewarding, can be the most difficult and lonely: a sentiment that is also woven evocatively through this letter.

Thanks again, Ying, for writing. And I hope her letter transports all of you for a moment, wherever you are.

Before you leave, you can also catch up on past guest letters. There’s the one by Kate Walton, an Australian activist-journalist, about being deported and banned from Indonesia, where she had built a life, and reconciling her feelings for her home country. And another by Elizabeth Wong, a Malaysian writer, about how a trip with her mother to a fishing village—and the complicated feelings it surfaced about identity, privilege, and belonging—led, thirteen years later, to a novel.

If you’re interested in writing a guest letter too, please reach out.

A guest letter by Ying Reinhardt

Photographs also by the writer

Ying Reinhardt is a Malaysian writer based in eastern Germany. Her work has appeared on Roads & Kingdoms, BootsnAll, Traveloka, Off Assignment, and Marie Claire. Her essay “To the Man Who Spoke with His Hands” will be included in the upcoming Letter to a Stranger anthology from Algonquin Books (Spring 2022). She is currently working on a memoir of her time on board Costa cruise ships. You can find her at www.tinywanderer.com and on Instagram @whereisying.

I wake up to sunlight, soft and warm, streaming through the streaked porthole in my cabin. It is seven in the morning. In an hour, my English class with the crew trainees will start.

I clamber onto my knees to admire the calm waters of the Suez Gulf. We’re on the Costa Europa, a creaking mid-sized cruise ship that can carry 1,506 passengers. Its sailing season around the eastern shores of Africa usually begins in December, when the frigid winter hits the shores of Europe. From the port of Savona, Italy, it makes its way across the Mediterranean and squeezes past the Suez Canal, before sailing into the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean. Passengers board the Europa in Port Louis, Mauritius, for a cruise that lasts fourteen days, during which it calls in on stunning island nations and port cities almost daily—Seychelles, Mombasa, Madagascar, Reunion, to name just a few. Then, in April, when spring thaws the ice and birds burst into joyous song once more back in Europe, the ship makes its return voyage.

Now, we’re sailing towards Alexandria, Egypt, on the way back to Savona. Amid the constant whirring of the engines and the lapping of the waves against the ship’s hull, I hear a crew steward running the vacuum cleaner along the long corridor that connects us all.

I sneeze and Rosano, the Italian singer in the cabin next door, shouts, “Salut!” 

From the electrician’s workshop, the Italian-Lao chief electrician makes a joke (probably a dirty one) and sends other men into guffaws of laughter.

I listen to all this for a moment and relish my time onboard. These scenes, so utterly quotidian, are somehow comforting. They remind me that I am part of a bustling community, so often invisible, that keeps the floating hotels of the world running. These scenes can hold no meaning anywhere else.

A man in stained overalls is doodling into my desk. In front of him, a B1 English textbook lies open, but instead of tackling the past continuous tense as I’ve told him to, he sketches a strangled-looking cat.

“Andrea,” I sigh. “Do you really have to do that?” 

He smiles wickedly at me, like a toddler caught stealing from the cookie jar. “Do you really have to do that,” he repeats after me in his Italian accent, his voice pitched high. Just like a three-year-old.

I purse my lips to show him that I am not amused. It’s almost 8:30p.m. and I am exhausted. The Costa Classica has been at sea all day. My English classes are scheduled back-to-back; I spend most of the day sitting in the office, waiting for my fellow crew members to trickle in. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But they’re my students and it’s my job to be available to them.

From the tiny training room, I can hear cutleries and dinner plates clinking against each other as a crew steward polishes them and puts them away. The training room is inside the staff mess, where we have our meals. As my time with Andrea ticks by, the last of the crew still dining are already wrapping up their conversations, taking their dirty trays with them on their way out. 

“You know, if you continue this way, I’m going to have to let your chief know,” I say. Andrea continues pressing his pencil into my desk, and a floppy-eared dog appears next to the cat. It’s infuriating. There’s no stopping him and he knows it. He’s a second engine officer, whose rank precedes mine. 

Living on a cruise ship is like living on an independent floating territory, far from any inhabitable land, where the captain is sovereign. The hierarchy onboard is not unlike the hierarchy in large corporations, but on a ship, the chain of command is stricter, almost military-like: it’s essential to better manage hundreds of staff at sea, to avoid confusion as to who is in charge. What you wear, and the position inscribed on your name tag (which must be worn at all times, on and off duty), constantly reminds you of where you stand onboard. Those occupying the lower rungs of the ladder would hardly dare to question those on the higher rungs. A crew lecturer like me is somewhere in between—not really an officer, but not really a crew member either. We’re more like consultants; and as consultants, we can only suggest. 

The last time I made a complaint to a chief engineer, he told me that if I really wanted his men to attend my class, I should dress up in a short skirt and heels. He said it in a manner that wasn’t unkind, but in the way of a shrug: This is the way things are done here. Stunned, I simply said, Fine, and fled down the corridor feeling indignant, enraged, and confused. I am not the kind of person to confront people and I knew I was in no position to ruffle any feathers. So I swallowed my fury and ranted to friends far away who would listen.

It is laughable for a man in his late forties such as Andrea to behave as he is behaving, but I know it’s his way of expressing his resistance to the company’s new policy. Management ashore had insisted that it is now obligatory for both bridge and engine officers with a poor command of English to attend lessons. It quickly became clear that not everyone is a fan of the policy, though not all officers are like Andrea. Many turn up and excel. Some already speak English well but enjoy a break from their nautical duties. 

“Look, Andrea,” I try again, with as much enthusiasm as I can muster. “We both know why we’re here. Why not just try to make the best of it? If you want, let’s forget grammar. We can just chat in English.” I want him to know that I’m on his side. We’re both just trying to do our jobs.

“Ah, teacher! I got a better idea,” Andrea says. “I will learn English from you, but maybe in the crew bar? We drink, I study.”

I am first introduced to the possibility of a job as a crew lecturer on cruise ships by a Couchsurfing friend. Steve from Boston had been traveling for more than seven years when I meet him in Kuala Lumpur. He had funded his travels by teaching English in China, South Korea, and Vietnam. When he accepts a job offer to work on one of Costa’s ships, he tells me to consider applying as well. Working on cruise ships would not only fund my adventures, it would also be an adventure of its own.

I take his advice. In 2007, after four days of hands-on training on the modern, mega-sized Costa Magica, I get my first contract lasting ten months to teach English on the smaller and older Costa Allegra, which sails closer to home across the South China Sea. In the end, I am grateful for this experience, but it’s hard not to feel claustrophobic after a few months on a ship. The job isn’t difficult, but life onboard becomes repetitive. I am not ready to give up a life of travel, but I don’t want to embark on another cruise again—at least, not yet. When I discover that I’m eligible for a working-holiday visa in the U.K., I decide to go for it.

The next year, I move to London. There, I begin to build a strong network of friends. I have a fun gig working in a popular organic cafe on the ever-colorful Carnaby Street, and whenever possible, I travel to neighboring cities. It’s living abroad at its best. I’m thriving. 

Yet, just a few months later, in November, I step aboard the Costa Europa in Savona, Italy, to begin my second contract.

It isn’t an uncomplicated decision. I already know how tough the going can get and have my reservations. But the hiring manager from Costa told me she would make it worth my while. The Europa promises an exciting itinerary from Europe to East Africa on a sixth-month contract, and after that, I will be transferred onto the Costa Atlantica for two months. They will fly me to the Caribbean, and I will do a transatlantic route back, sailing around western and northern Europe.

I have never been particularly good at geography or reading maps, but the thought of setting foot on Madagascar or Guadeloupe, places I had only heard of but never imagined I would travel to in my lifetime, compelled me to say yes. I let myself dream again.

I am twenty-four, with a penchant for wishful thinking and a determination to have the adventure of a lifetime. In a toss between a career and my wanderlust, I choose the latter. That visceral ache to go somewhere, anywhere, might have been the same thing Charles Baudelaire felt when he penned in his poem “Le Voyage”: 

But the true voyagers are only those who leave
Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons,
They never turn aside from their fatality
And without knowing why they always say: “Let’s go!”

To maintain the seaworthiness of a floating behemoth, the crew has to keep cleaning, polishing, serving, painting, entertaining, vacuuming, baking, repairing, decorating, babysitting, managing, training, navigating—rinse and repeat, for twelve punishing hours, daily. When you work on a cruise ship, you learn to assemble a mental calendar by the ports it calls in on, rather than the days of the week. Sunday means nothing to us. We sign on to a ship with a contract that stipulates the amount of time we must stay onboard. In between, there are no weekends, no rest days, no vacation breaks, and no public holidays. There are only the occasional hours off.

Despite all the lofty ideas and impressions I have before I ever take a job with Costa, I quickly begin to realize that this dream job comes at a cost. You’re trapped in a vessel for months with people whom you don’t know (and who really don’t care to know you), and who don’t always speak a common language (at least, not yet). You’re doing a job that can feel redundant, where the managers treat you like a pest—and really, what else is there to do most of the time? Even when the ship docks, all you do is sit in the terminal and use the free Wi-Fi, because in certain cities, it’s just too expensive to hire a private cab to take you somewhere. So, to make everything feel more palatable, you start drinking and saying things like, “Onboard, I am only happy when I drink,” and find others agreeing wholeheartedly.

Often, on my first evenings aboard a new ship, I find myself alone at a table in the staff mess. I know it will take a while before I find my own company to keep. During this time, it can feel like even the most superficial relationships, the ones that naturally bind two people on the basis of doing the same work, elude me. There is only one crew lecturer on every Costa ship, so I have no one to share the trials and tribulations of the job with. I spend many evenings in solitude and in dread, wondering how many months are left before I can leave and do whatever I want far from the watchful eyes of security, colleagues, and managers.

But one piece of advice helps me. When I first trained under Alex, a senior Canadian crew lecturer on the Costa Magica, he had passed on several nuggets of wisdom. One tip he shared didn’t make an impression at first, but I have since taken it to heart. The profundity of his words becomes obvious as I spend many evenings in my cabin alone, yearning for human company instead of books and Gilmore Girls.

“Make one good friend. Someone you trust and someone you can share your days with. Trust me, that will make all the difference,” he said.

“Just one?”

“Just one. When you don’t have this one friend, living with a thousand others can be really lonely.”

Roberto calls me Principessa, and I call him Maestro—which he is. A pianist, he mesmerizes the guests with his silken voice and piano medleys, ranging from the classical to the popular, in the lounges of the Costa Europa. When he plays on non-gala nights, he often dresses up in a casual suit, in the color of camel or anthracite, usually with a V-neck tee underneath. He’ll have a mint-colored scarf hanging from around his long and regal neck, his stringy, blond hair swaying, while his liver-spotted hands pound away on the Yamaha baby grand like a king.

He is the first friend I’ve made on this ship. I am not an assertive person by nature so I don’t know what drove me to approach him one evening, but I remember seeing him always eating on his own for dinner at a table near the entrance of the staff mess. Perhaps his solitary figure evoked in me feelings of kinship.

He smiled when he saw me approaching with my tray of food, and swept his hand theatrically over the table, as if to say, Welcome. Then he pointed to the bottle of Chardonnay next to him. “Wine?”

I nodded, and he looked pleased. In broken Italian, I asked if white wine is his favorite drink. I had noticed that he always has a glass or two to accompany his meal.

He said it calms him and helps him play the piano better. Then, he apologized for not being able to converse in English and asked if I would mind continuing in Italian. I said I didn’t; he spoke clearly, enunciated every vowel, and didn’t ramble. In the beginning, our conversation was halting and tentative, with many pauses in between as I searched for the right word. Occasionally, he offered up an English word to help me be more precise with what I wanted to say, but never out of impatience.

“Ah, you are Italian already!” he said, grinning, as I became more animated. It felt strange, forging a connection with someone closer to my father’s age than mine, but exhilarating too. I marveled at how two very unlikely people, who have practically nothing in common, could bond over dry lasagna and white wine. 

In her essay “This Is Not My Father’s China”, Lucy Tan writes, “I had arrived in China the first time in search of belonging, not understanding that most ways of belonging are not given but earned.” That’s something I am learning. If I want to belong, I will have to get over myself and work for it, even if extroversion doesn’t come easily to me. When I start spiraling into depression and find myself seeking refuge at the crew bar, I know it’s time to leave my own pity party. 

And that evening, after mustering the courage to join Roberto at his table, I worked harder than ever. Soon, it didn’t feel like work. When the conversation continued easily, like a ship’s sails catching the wind, my confidence swelled. The wine helped. My shyness receded into the background. I no longer felt self-conscious chatting away with the Italian vocabulary of a four-year-old.

Before long, two other musicians, a couple from Pesaro, Italy, joined our table. When Roberto left to play another set for the evening, Moreno and Francesca stayed on to keep me company. Just like Roberto, they were easygoing, vivacious, and patient with my broken Italian.

Since then, the three of us have formed a little gang of our own. Roby is my go-to Italian teacher, Francesca my fashion guru, and Moreno, the person who shares with me his love for manouche music. We’re a motley crew learning to find refuge in each other—even if it will only be for the five months we work and live alongside one another, even if our backgrounds, hobbies, and life philosophies differ.

On the Costa Atlantica, I meet Eduardo, a Peruvian who started working on cruise ships to save up for his wedding.

He tells me that for the first three months on his first contract, he hid in the aft of the ship every afternoon and cried. He was disappointed to have been commissioned as a steward of the petty officer mess, not the housekeeping job he initially signed up for. As a housekeeper, he would have had a chance to receive tips from passengers; serving the crew wouldn’t be as lucrative. But the manager only told him that, if he wasn’t happy with the position, he could go home—many would be happy to replace him. But how could he? He had already promised his family that they would have a better life. 

Thankfully, he found friends who dissuaded him from quitting halfway. They say that once you quit, you can never come back. In the end, Eduardo pulled through, got promoted, and made his way up to become a hotel storekeeper—responsible for receiving, storing, and issuing all supplies and equipment for day-to-day hotel operations. When I meet him, he is already an old seadog on his eighth contract, doling out words of advice to rookies like me.

I won’t last quite as long as Eduardo. But later, over a span of four years and eight contracts, I will end up working on six of Costa’s cruise ships. I will travel to most of the world’s continents, including the Arctic Circle. I will sail through a piracy threat, a passenger mutiny, and a collision with a Belgian cargo vessel. I will meet many people on board these ships—some I will never speak to again and some who will continue to haunt me, but also some who will become good friends.

I celebrate my first Christmas at sea aboard the Costa Allegra. In the early evening, before the festivities are underway, the ship heaves and rolls across the South China Sea. It’s what the weather forecast would describe as mare arrabiata—agitated seas.

The swells rise and slam against the ship with such relentless force I have to hold on to the railings and walk sideways with my back against the wall. Glassware and crockery are breaking in the galley and mess rooms; the floors of the lower decks belonging to the crew are slick with water. There must be a leak somewhere. A housekeeping manager rushes past me along the corridor with a bucket and mop in one hand, while the walkie talkie in her other blared: “Pizza! Pizza! Deck 5, Murano Lounge!” Pizza is code for vomit.

I am lucky. A crew lecturer isn’t required to work through the storm, but for the others, it’s business as usual. It is only hours later, at about 11p.m., that the squalls die down and the ship starts to sail quietly again. Curious to see the aftermath of the storm, I go down to the crew bar, only to discover that it has turned into a karaoke bar. Among the tinsel and faux snowflakes, the Chinese galley staff croon out ancient songs of the Middle Kingdom. The Latin Americans are on the couch, chatting among themselves as they gulp down their beers and pass around a packet of potato chips. When they see me, Pablo, the provisions master from Honduras, gets up and gives me a hug. “Feliz Navidad!” He hands me a drink and we toast to my first Christmas onboard.

Later, I go to the balcony to get some air. The storm has left the air sultry and thick. I spot Gianni, an Italian drummer in his forties, whom I have become good friends with after discovering he is fluent in English and shares my interest in spiritual pursuits of happiness. I take my place next to him on a wooden bench. Without speaking, we watch the ship leave a jeweled trail of light behind as we cleave through darkness.

p.s. This is a guest letter, and views and experiences related are the writer’s own. Guest appearances here aim to reflect the variety of life in this world.

Writers on the road

I don’t remember now how I first heard of Girish Gupta, but when I did, I asked to meet him. This was back in London, I think sometime after I had interned at The Guardian in 2012. I had learnt that he was having a go charting his own path as a freelance foreign correspondent in Latin America, and wanted to hear about his experiences, and he happened to be in London for a while before heading back to Venezuela. In the end, I never did exactly what he did, but I was similarly inspired by place in my search for stories, so there was some overlap. He was gracious and encouraging when I shared my ideas. In a nutshell, his advice was, “Just go.”

It worked for him, for a while. These days, he seems no longer to be reporting, and has gone on to do other interesting things (I think he was already doing varied interesting things before his foray into journalism), including, now, writing his memoir as a newsletter, Always Go—see? It’s candid and fascinating, written with enough distance to cast a critical eye over himself and a field he once wanted so much to be part of, and gives an insight into an era of freelance foreign correspondence that already feels slightly bygone (this might just be an effect of my growing older, haha). A passage, from his rookie days:

I’d done the backpacking thing two years earlier so I had plenty in common with the other twentysomethings passing through my hostel. But I was here to become a foreign correspondent. I spent the first few days calling and emailing every international editor I could find, telling them where I was, pitching ideas, and letting them know that I was open to theirs. 

I was excited for my new start, though the lack of a plan was beginning to show.

“I sometimes wonder what I’m doing here,” I wrote to a friend, adding that I felt lonely at times; it was a sentiment I’d feel again and again over the coming decade, be it in a major move like this or a quick reporting trip. Emails and Skype calls came at me from the UK, so I was very much still thinking in that time zone; I hadn’t yet made it to the Americas in anything but body.

From Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep by Ted Conover:

I like to travel and I like to hang out and Whitman helps me understand why. Whitman, as many Americans still do, nurtured an idea of a country where nobody is better than anybody else, where everyone can meet and engage. It strikes me as a democratic ideal worth keeping alive. When I’m out there talking to people I feel as though I’m emulating, and in turn maybe modeling, a kind of democratic discourse.

From Paul Salopek, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is walking around the world as part of his Out of Eden Walk project:

But what walking has emphasized to me as a continuum of storytelling is that all these boundaries that you and I and our colleagues in the media put around these stories, whether it’s water issues in a state in India, or whether it’s gender rights in Afghanistan, those boundaries are more or less arbitrary, because if you just tug hard enough on any story in the world, no matter whether it's in Manhattan or in Toronto or in a village in Ethiopia, it's connected to another story that is itself connected to another story.

How we make sense of the world & tell its stories

Because of the pandemic, many journalists and writers have had to do some of our reporting remotely. This reminds me of a piece I read some years back about how Laura Hillenbrand—the writer of Seabiscuit (yes, there’s a very good nonfiction book on that darling racehorse!)—researched and reported her second book, Unbroken (also made into a film, directed by Angelina Jolie), about World War II bombardier Louis Zamperini, who was held by the Japanese as a prisoner of war for more than two years. Hillenbrand suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, which has confined her indoors for the last three decades or so. It’s astonishing, considering that she writes the kinds of immersive narrative nonfiction books for which details, details, and more details are absolutely necessary. The Unbreakable Laura Hillenbrand by Wil S. Hylton offers a look into her process, and here’s a passage I found quite illuminating of phone reporting:

Hillenbrand, who recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with Zamperini, experienced a similar effect. “I thought it was actually an advantage to be unable to go to Louie,” she said. Because neither of them had to dress for the interviews and they were in their own homes, their long phone calls enjoyed a warmth and comfort that might otherwise be missing. She could pose the deeply personal questions that even her father had trouble answering. “I would ask a lot of questions about his emotional state,” she said. “ 'What did you feel right in this moment? Were you frightened?' ” The distance also allowed Hillenbrand to visualize Zamperini in the time period of the book. “He became a 17-year-old runner for me, or a 26-year-old bombardier,” she said. “I wasn’t looking at an old man.”

On beginning with image by Rachael Uwada Clifford:

I start with an image, or language around an image, that simply enchants me—that is downright arresting in its clarity and in its musicality. Sometimes I will carry it around for days and days, or even years. Sometimes I do not remember that I am carrying it. I will be in the midst of creating some “new” story—really, all my stories are old—and suddenly the image will return to me. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the image will turn to me, as it never truly left me. Most often, when the image does turn, it is at the right moment, in the right place. Because all of that time spent carrying it has allowed me to understand it—its air, its weight, and the work it must do.

Dog collar or slave collar? A Dutch museum interrogates a brutal past by Ye Charlotte Ming:

“The history of the Netherlands is international history, and our society is the legacy of that history,” says Smeulders, a specialist on underrepresented stories from Dutch slave history. Born in Curaçao, a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean that is still part of the Netherlands, Smeulders says that to properly tell the stories of a diverse society, museums need staff with varied cultural and professional perspectives, and change should not stop at exhibitions about race. “By making these changes permanent, the broad, diverse knowledge gets to be imbedded and used in all areas,” she says.

Reader rolodex

Daniel Alekow, a concept artist in Berlin who specialises in environments and architecture and does some great personal inking work too, was the Visual Director for the new Netflix animated Witcher film, Nightmare of the Wolf. I am not at all familiar with the Witcher-verse, but this was darkly entertaining!

Don’t forget the first part of this letter.

Meanwhile, I’m editing another guest letter and working on a couple of essays I’ve wanted to finish. Thanks for your patience while this newsletter shapes up. Because of you, this has been a great source of cheer and motivation for me, and I’m working to keep it going amid the other work—and non-work, let’s not forget!—I need, and want, to do.

Until the next,
E.

The changes were stunning, almost impossible to believe, but a lot could happen in three weeks, especially in a town like this. Levinson was all too familiar with the kind of person who deplored change, who swooned over old buildings and spoke vaguely but reverently of earlier times, and though he was startled and a little dizzied by the sight of the new downtown, which made him wonder whether he had fallen asleep on his front porch and was dreaming it all, he looked out at the street with sharp interest, for he was wide awake, drinking his iced cappuccino on a Saturday afternoon in town, and was not one of those people who, whenever the wrecking ball swung against the side of a building, felt that a country or a civilization was coming to an end.

—Steven Millhauser, “Coming Soon”

Friends and readers, hello again.

I turned another year old some days ago in a city where I don’t quite have my own community yet, so I spent it quietly, and simply, but with good feeling.

I woke up to a lovely surprise from W.C., spent half the day finishing up a deadline that I’d had to extend, attended a cousin’s wedding via Zoom with family, cozied up in a cafe where we sat indoors for the first time, spoke with friends (and their adorable children) on the phone, and played Ticket to Ride while having a home-cooked dinner of gnocchi stewed with a creamy red pepper-and-wine sauce. My parents also had an orchid plant and a bouquet of roses delivered—something we’ve taken to doing for each other over this pandemic. Since the first time W.C. delivered flowers to my family’s house back in KL when we were still apart, we’ve all been doing the same for each other. The pandemic, as hard as it has been on so many, has been a reminder to be good to the people who matter in your life—to not just appreciate them in your heart and come through in difficult times, but to also show them you care on a more consistent basis. Admittedly, I have a lot of room for improvement in this.

Thinking about birthdays: I feel like I’ve tended to play down my own after my university years, during which there was always a merry-go-round of celebrations among my circle of friends. It’s not so much to do with dreading the physical aspects of growing old, but a sense that I’ve felt less comfortable making things about me—and perhaps there’s a sense of guilt too, in asking people to come out on a particular day when you haven’t seen some of them for a long time.

Then again, why see it that way? Shouldn’t any reason to gather be a welcome thing? Or, put another way: Why does it have to be about ourselves? The times I did call for a bigger celebration I think we all always enjoyed having a reason to see each other again. It’s just another occasion to celebrate friendships. All this makes me think of a newsletter by Sari Botton called Oldster Magazine—not about the experience of “old people”, so to speak, but the experience of growing older, no matter what your age.

The other thing about growing older as a writer is, you’re always anxious about whether you’ve produced enough good work. When you’re in your twenties, it’s enough that you show your potential. When you’re in your thirties, you wonder if you’ve manifested it sufficiently, and how much more room you have to adapt and grow. It’s not so simple, and I do know better. Some of the world’s most famous writers got their start writing books in their forties or later—Toni Morrison, Helen DeWitt, Raymond Chandler, and more recently, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson. There’s time still to make concrete one’s dream writing projects, and as Mary Oliver said, “Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.” I have to remind myself of this, because there is so much more I want to do. As soon as you finish one thing, there’s always the next thing, and then the next thing.

In her poem Tomorrow Is a Place, Sanna Wani writes:

There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper. There, in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.

It’s beautiful. Read the whole thing.

Making sense of our place in the world

The Man Who Sailed His House by Michael Paterniti, a miraculous tale of surviving the 2011 Japanese tsunami:

You decided to abdicate to nature—or stand up to it—because somewhere inside, you had a flash of invincibility; that is, you thought, If my life is worthy and my house is well made, it will be strong enough to stand up to the wave—and the moon and stars (none of which care for you, Hiromitsu, nor soothe or feed or augur). You realize now that once you arrived home, once shown the precious thing about to be taken away forever, once you saw the garden and barn, the koi pond and the pigeons, and Yuko arrived with the rice seed, you knew you wouldn't be able to leave—that you would be doomed by obligation and memory and sentimental attachment—which is how you’ve ended up here now, on the roof of your house, nine miles out to sea.

Dancing Through New York in a Summer of Joy and Grief by Carina del Valle Schorske:

I’ve never known what “despojo” means, precisely, though it’s a word I use with some frequency to express a physical craving for spiritual catharsis: “Necesitamos despojo, quiero despojarme.” Or, watching a friend gain momentum on the dance floor and begin to enter a self-forgetful trance: “Esoooo! Des-po-jo!” My Spanish-English dictionary has only the verb (to despoil, to shed leaves) and the plural noun (the spoils of war, mortal remains, rubble, waste). Google Translate: dispossession.

The politics of archaeology in Jerusalem by Rachel Poser:

Archaeologists reconstruct the past based on whatever material has happened to linger in the ground for thousands of years—­a tiny percentage of what existed at the time. Turning that partial record into a narrative about people and events takes a deep knowledge of history and some degree of imagination. Because archaeology ties identity to territory, the questions asked of it are often animated by contemporary geopolitical concerns. Armed with potsherds and inscriptions, ethnic groups or states can tell stories about the past that enable them to make claims about who they are and where they belong in the present. But that logic relies on our ability to define group identity through time, which has become even more fraught as the character of the nation-­state adapts to flows of migration.

Goodbye House by Malaysian writer Samantha Cheh—about the homes that hold the memories of her childhood and her grandfather, their caretaker, who kept them lush and green:

Right in the middle was a path of octagonal stepping stones that led from the sliding doors to a corner of the garden made wild by low bushes and tall palms. We imagined ourselves as pirates leaping across treacherous, shark-infested waters, questing for a treasure buried beneath the brush. The bushes hid us from predators and adults, and there we dreamed of finding a lost city amid the towering red palms.

Young, Dumb, and Broke: Why Outdoorsy Types Suck at Money by Gloria Liu:

This same desire to belong can also drive the opposite behavior—putting on the appearance of being broke even when you aren’t. We tend to surround ourselves with people who have the same money beliefs we do, says Klontz, and we get uncomfortable if we drift above or below them financially. This is why you see tech bros and dentists wearing patched-up puffies and eating instant oatmeal in trailhead parking lots (out of their tricked-out vans). “It’s the same exact human psychology as I need to drive a Mercedes,” says Klontz, “except it’s How poor can I live? It’s a competition for that.”

Interior worlds

A series by Anne Moffat titled Forget Me Not 勿忘我 (2015-2019)—“a body of work made in Sandakan, Malaysia, portraying my maternal grandmother’s descent into Alzheimer’s Disease.”

A world at once quotidian, absurd, brutal, poignant, and extraordinary

The U.N.’s Own Humanitarian Crisis by May Jeong—on the organisation’s lacking response to sexual harassment and assault among its own ranks.

It’s not just video games. Xi Jinping’s crackdown on everything is remaking Chinese society, by Lily Kuo.

Dr. Sasa Visits a Bomb-Making Class by Aye Min Thant, about how an American is teaching activists and guerrilla fighters how to make weapons and bombs, and the involvement of the National Unity Government fighting the Tatmadaw. The context around how this was published is also worth attention.

Indonesia’s tech giants are battling to bring roadside stalls online by Meaghan Tobin, Adi Renaldi, and Jihan Basyah—but not all warungs are buying into it. “The companies may, in fact, be selling a solution to a problem that doesn’t fully exist.”

The young women behind BooksActually speak up by Charmaine Poh, about the blurred lines of relationships that lie behind the indie Singaporean bookshop’s success. Follow-up by Olivia Ho.

Al Jazeera’s 101 East has a video doc about The Rising Trend of Limb Lengthening Surgeries in India. For a long time before the pandemic, I had been thinking of doing a longform story on this. Well, someone got to it!

From Terrence McCoy: Deep in the Amazon forest in Brazil, a 22-year-old indigenous Tatuyo woman goes on Tiktok… and shows us scenes from her extraordinary ordinary life. Could social media help safeguard a culture threatened by development?

A fishery observer’s job sounds simple—to monitor fishing activity. So why do they keep disappearing at sea? Story by Alicia Chen, Casper Xu, and Haohsiang Ko from a new cross-border collaborative reporting initiative, Oceans Inc.

The Cult of Virginity Just Won’t Let Go by Helen Lewis—“This fall, Britain is poised to ban virginity tests—and will consider banning hymen-repair surgery too.”

Michael Marshall on tardigrades: “the microscopic animals can withstand extreme conditions that would kill humans, and may one day help in the development of Covid vaccines”. They also look like someone stuck a vacuum filter onto a paper bag 😆

A view of home

Absolutely love this dikir barat version of the Rukunegara (Malaysia’s five “national principles”, so to speak) by Projek Bina Bangsa:

How planting fig trees could make Sabah Asia’s top wildlife tourism destination and help restore its forests, by Marco Ferrarese.

Malaysia’s Drug Law Condemns Vulnerable Women to Death by Ngeow Chow Ying—a lawyer who has been campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty, and who has been immensely helpful in my own previous reporting on the subject.

Amy Chew on the government’s persecution of Nur Sajat, Malaysia’s wanted transgender woman and cosmetics millionaire, for dressing as a woman at an Islamic event. The authorities are looking to extradite her from Thailand to face charges of blasphemy at home.

How they made us feel, by activist lawyer Ambiga Sreenevasan, on Malaysia’s ongoing upheavals and how politicians are playing themselves into irrelevance. That leads us to the hope of the burgeoning youth movement in Malaysia, which I wrote about for Al Jazeera. Do have a read ❤️

Reimagining our world (for better or worse)

On Sunday, as Germans cast their ballots in the federal election, 56.4 percent of Berliners also voted in a referendum to expropriate the properties of landlords owning more than 3,000 units—which could involve some 240,000 apartments. This, in a city of rising rents where 84 percent of the population are tenants. More context here by Aggi Cantrill and Hayley Warren.

World’s first commercial cultured meat production facility operational in Singapore by Audrey Tan. In December 2020, the country was also the first to approve the sale and consumption of cultured meat. However, a piece from Joe Fassler to counter the hype: Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.

Two years ago, a Chinese scientist shocked the world when he reportedly used CRISPR to produced the world’s first gene-edited humans—twin baby girls—to make them resistant to H.I.V. What else can CRISPR do? It could be used “to save species from extinction—or to eliminate them”, reports Elizabeth Kolbert.

The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost by Lisa Wells. “He did look like a king, or like a woodland deity out of Celtic mythology—his gauze-wrapped neck the only evidence of his life as a mortal.”

Say Goodbye to Your Manager by Ed Zitron—“In order to survive, managers, in other words, will need to start proving that they actually do something.”

This is about what happens when the Chinese become the boss at an American factory. Cue several cringeworthy moments of culture clashes, sometimes laced with a kind of naïveté I also found moving—though I feel like the film only just skimmed the surface of the human relationships forged across the divide.

Something to think about

So when you think about anything from a Twitter feed or a Facebook feed to a news website, the most recent floats to the top always. It’s always in reverse chronology. And I think that’s conditioning us to believe, rather falsely, that the most recent is the most important and that the older matters less or just exists less to a point where we really have come to believe that things that are not on Google or on the news never happened, never existed, or don’t matter. I would say probably 99 percent of the record of human thought is off the internet and from the history of humanity.
—Maria Popova

Before I go, a sound postcard from Berlin.

For a long time, we only ever went where we could walk. But since getting vaccinated, we’ve started taking public transport again. Here’s a clip from the U-Bahn, when a heavyset man trundled onboard and started holding forth. Masked, he never made eye contact with anybody. He was thoroughly absorbed in himself, sounded like he was chanting. Then, just as abruptly as he got on, he got off, still mumbling his mantras.

This dispatch is split into two parts. The second is here.

Yours,
E.

Since I sent out yesterday’s letter, events of the past week in Afghanistan are already being overtaken. A bombing in Kabul airport that killed at least thirteen U.S. service members and more than a hundred Afghans was claimed to have been committed by a local offshoot of ISIS. Graeme Wood writes here about how the U.S., the Taliban, and ISIS-K play off one another—“[I]n the short term the Taliban are America’s allies in finishing its evacuation.” Biden has said, “We will hunt you down and make you pay.”

And so the loop continues.

Just a reminder that the first part of this dispatch is here. This, the second, is more of a storyteller’s handbook.

A writer on the road

With Afghanistan in the news, a look back at May Jeong’s piece from 2014 about what it was like living and reporting in the country, in a different time:

In candour, I should mention that I do not cover war. I report on the detritus of war, and write about a society whose drama happens to be unfolding just as a war rages on in the background. Which is to say, my day-to-day life is not dangerous by any measure (Hi, mom!). I wake up in the morning. I make myself eggs, tea, and retreat to a study that is equipped with fast-ish Internet. In the afternoon, I might set out with a translator to do some reporting, attend a press conference. Then perhaps yoga. Some foreigners have stopped, but I still go grocery shopping—at a local grocer for fresh produce and a supermarket for processed goods, some of which we assume have fallen off the back of NATO trucks. At night, the dwindling mass of expats gets together for drinks. Someone makes a toast. There may not be ice or lemon for your gin-and-tonic, but for the most part, life in the Afghan capital is like life in any other capital. Sure, bombs go off, and gunfights ensue. Many who have stayed say that it’s only a matter of time, a fact of probability, before you have a near miss. And yet, being on the ground is different from what the news leads you to believe. At times, yes I am seized by fear, but I certainly don’t live mired in it.

In 2018, things had already changed. That year, she wrote, in a story about a suicide bombing that claimed an Afghan friend:

It was jarring, as we spoke, to measure the distance between the living and the dead, and to realize that the distance was much shorter than we cared to admit. […] That math is what had eventually persuaded me to leave Afghanistan, in 2017. When I returned to Kabul, this past winter, I was struck by how much more violent the city had become. Things I used to do without ceremony—going shopping at the nearby market, taking local taxis, exchanging pleasantries with neighbors on the street where we lived—now seemed like impossibly foolish acts.

How we make sense of the world & tell its stories

I wrote an essay on Tim Hannigan’s Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre for The Mekong Review, thinking about what journalism can and can’t bring to what I would prefer to call “place writing” (if only it sounded less awkward):

In Hannigan’s consideration of journalism’s role in travel writing, there seems a missed opportunity in not considering the blurred boundaries between the latter and ‘foreign’ correspondence, which occupies a place that has similarly come under scrutiny. In any case, there is an important distinction in travel writing that is central to its survival as a separate genre: travel writers have the licence to be more imaginative, which does not include making things up. To paraphrase an essay of Thomas Swick’s, they can be interpreters of landscapes: two writers can observe the same set of facts but come to completely different conclusions. That’s where the magic of travel writing lies. And that’s why it’s so important that travel writers come from diverse backgrounds. Subramaniam hopes that, one day, we’ll have more travellers from the ‘third world’ writing about the ‘first world’, not just the other way around.

The Hamburg Portfolio Review’s conversation with Filipina Hannah Reyes Morales, a Nat Geo photographer, on how she works in surroundings often considered inhospitable to women:

I worked in the wire for a while, where there was a lot of pressure to be very masculine, you know, you gotta be a tough guy here, you gotta show how badass you are and all of that. And I did that, I tried that, and then I realised later on that I was forming myself into shapes that I was not, and it wasn’t doing a service to my process.

Tips on travel writing from the Unpacking Media Bias newsletter by Meera Datani and Shivani Ashoka:

Don’t use ‘colonial’ in conjunction with superlatives—there’s nothing ‘pretty’ or ‘elegant’ about colonialism and careless suggestions to the contrary are triggering for many. If you’re referencing colonial-era buildings, such as former slave plantations, you’d better believe we’re looking for accurate historical context beyond the architectural descriptors.

Louise Erdrich, Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place:

A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with. One must experience the local blights, hear the proverbs, endure the radio commercials. Through the close study of a place, its people and character, its crops, products, paranoias, dialects and failures, we come closer to our own reality. It is difficult to impose a story and a plot on a place. But truly knowing a place provides the link between details and meaning. Location, whether it is to abandon it or draw it sharply, is where we start. In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body’s interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers’ bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world. Once we emerge we have no natural limit, no assurance, no grandmotherly guidance like the Tewa, for technology allows us to reach even beyond the layers of air that blanket earth. We can escape gravity itself, and every semblance of geography, by moving into sheer space, and yet we cannot abandon our need for reference, identity or our pull to landscapes that mirror our most intense feelings.

Great thread here for journalists:

Wrestling with process

Coleen Baik’s newsletter, The Line Between, which charts the minutiae of her creative process, is a gift. Even if we’re not tending to passions in the same field, there’s a lot she thinks about I can relate to:

Animators often “flip” back and forth repeatedly between consecutive frames in order to “see” and draw fluid interstitial movement. It’s kind of magical because when you do this, your eyes fill in the lines between; the paper plane wants to arc in such and such a way, the scarf to fall in such and such a curve. The flipping makes a sort of after-image in reverse.

When I dally, the magic fades. Up too close, things become deformed. It’s akin to thinking about a word too hard—it loses shape, feels foreign, inspires doubt and suspicion. Try it—say “chair” five times, contemplatively, focusing on the sounds munging together, thinking about what it’s supposed to mean. You see? It is no longer English! It is not even a word!

Malaysian YA novelist Hanna Alkaf is offering advice to patrons on Patreon on how writers from the “Global South” can break into the U.S. book market:

When I started getting offers of representation for The Weight of Our Sky, one of the questions I asked every agent I spoke to was this: “I write stories set in my country, featuring my people, drawing from our folklore and our history and our culture, and I don’t see that changing in the foreseeable future. Is that an issue for you?” I didn’t expect any of them to say no—I’d done my research before querying, after all—but it was important to me that the expectation was laid from the beginning of our relationship. And I do the same with every editor I’ve ever worked with; from the start, I make it clear that I WILL protect the Malaysianness of my stories. I won’t work with anyone who insists on making them something they are not.

George Saunders’ best advice, IMHO, on writing and the importance of subtext. Fuck plans! Let the magic happen between the lines:

If the story wants to go in a new direction, you let it. If a line is good but it doesn’t fit with your plan, keep the line, kill (amend) the plan. I always quote that Gerald Stern bit: ‘If you start out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking—then you wrote a poem about two dogs fucking.’ Along with Einstein’s bit: ‘No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.’ Those two quotes are the essence of this approach. Let the story lead you.

Reader rolodex

As more readers join in here, I thought it would be nice to share what some of you have been tending to, professionally or personally.

First up: a fellow Malaysian, dear friend, and actor-writer Jon Chew, who is part of the musical cast of Anything Goes performing at the Barbican Theatre in London until October 31. Maybe catch it if you’re there!

Don’t forget the first part of this letter.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

E.