Category: Culture

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Unemployed Drifting in America

Sandy Springs, Georgia

It’s been a little while, hasn’t it?

It’s now 86 days since I had a job. In those twelve weeks, I toured New York with an old friend; visited Vietnam for the first time, gave a talk on how Jews raise kids, and came away with a book project; spent a month falling in love with Korea and Korean and Koreans again; took the last steps to secure my master’s degree in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University; and moved out of New York once and for all. I’ve been busy.

And now I’m not.

It’s been 12 days since I moved out of New York. My apartment has been cleared out, the deposit check is on its way, and the movers have delivered my stuff to my parents’ house in Arizona. All my big worries are, for the time being, handled. It’s a nice feeling, as I sit here in Georgia in my brother’s house, listening to the rain come down and smelling the pot roast that will be Shabbos dinner tomorrow.

Riding Shotgun

I’m sort of in Atlanta but not really. I haven’t actually been to the city, or much of anywhere outside of my brother’s suburban orbit.

I’ve been to his shul down the street, and to the the rabbi’s house, and to the houses of a couple of other members of the community. I’ve also been to the nearby Kroger supermarket, a few kosher restaurants, two different malls, and a Lowe’s to buy reflective vests for the Shabbos walk to have dinner with some friends who live where there aren’t sidewalks. (The house, and the meal, were lovely.) I’ve spent a fair amount of time working from a Caribou Coffee with either my brother or his wife. It’s good coffee, and there’s a great view of the Walgreens across the street.

Once we went to a National Recreation Area for a short hike, and also to do tashlich, a Jewish ritual where you cast your sins into a body of water. Then later we went to a birthday party for a three-year-old at a playground next to an airport for private jets and small planes, where you can sit and watch the planes take off and land. What with shul and the holidays and Shabbos meals and the birthday party, I’ve spent more time around children and pregnant women in the past eleven days than in maybe the eleven years before that.

My brother has a good life here with his wife and his baby. I’m glad to have this time to bond with my little nephew, to take it easy and not do very much, to ride shotgun in someone else’s life. My brother and his wife are working hard — unlike me, they’re not unemployed drifters, and they have to deal with the baby when he wakes up in the night — which all means that they don’t have much time or energy to entertain me or take me places. Which is fine. I sit around. I work on my book. I nap. I read. I drift a little. I do some pushups, because pushups are good. I help out with the baby.

I have spent a lot of time watching the baby, who is seven months old. He laughs, he climbs things, he topples over and bumps his head. He eats pureed bananas with terrifying excitement and intensity, flapping his arms and lunging for the next bite, until suddenly he is done; usually he sneezes out a big gob of snot somewhere in the middle of his meal, and it looks more or less like the banana, and he flaps and complains while we wipe his nose because we’ve cut off the banana supply for no reason he can discern. His eating habits remind me of Alex from A Clockwork Orange.

The baby likes his set of colored plastic cups very much. He has started to like me too, I think, now that I’ve fed him. He climbs me and smiles at me. And then sometimes he cries for a while, which reminds me why I never kept one of these things at home. My nephew has poor manners and lacks skills. He doesn’t know anything about anything; I’m pretty sure the notion of representation, of things standing for other things, simply hasn’t occurred to him yet. Which limits conversation.

Sins Committed Through Light-Headedness

I’ve also spent a lot more time doing Jewish things and thinking about Judaism than I have in a while. I’ve been working on my Vietnamese book about Jewish child-rearing, and I’ve finished a draft of the background section, about who the Jews are, our history, the basics of the religion. I have done Shabbos and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — by the end of the latter, I had a wicked caffeine-withdrawal headache, though a little snuff helped. As we read through the list of sins for the thousandth time, I began to wonder about the sins “committed before You through light-headedness” in particular.

I think the experience of writing my thesis on Korean shamanism has helped me to approach Judaism with a little anthropological distance, and maybe a lighter head too. I’m less judgmental about it than I once was, more able to engage it on its own terms without fussing overmuch about my own beliefs. This is also the one of the few times that I’ve been involved with Orthodox Judaism away from my parents, and that changes the dynamic: here it’s not a replay of my adolescent rebellion if I decide I’m done with shul for the day or duck out for a while or skip the night services.

America

So this is my sojourn in America. I sort of hate it when people say New York City isn’t America — we’re Americans too! — but the New York City way of life is very different from what I think of as normative America, with its cars and strip malls and wide-aisled supermarkets. By the time it’s done, this will be my longest stay in that normative America since 2003, when I got back from living abroad the last time.

I suppose it’s OK, but I don’t really get it. Somehow a coconut plantation on the Mekong Delta makes more sense to me as a place to live, and a giant city, whether it’s Saigon or Seoul or New York, makes way more sense to me.

It’s just about a month until I’ll be touching down in yet another Asian megacity, Bangkok this time. In the meantime, I have a book to work on, family to enjoy, naps to take, strip malls to visit. And I have to go soon, because Kroger awaits!

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New Beginnings

If ever there were a Rosh Hashanah that might symbolize new beginnings for me, this is it. For 23 years — even for the year I lived abroad — I have called New York home. Not anymore. Today I closed the door for the last time on my Brooklyn Heights apartment and walked out into a new life. Today I’ll fly down to Atlanta to meet my nephew, who will be experiencing his first Rosh Hashanah.

I have read that while our culture imagines us as walking forward into the future, some cultures see the future as something we walk backwards into: we can see the past clearly, but the future is hidden. It’s very easy for me to catalogue the things I’m leaving behind, and much harder for me to bring to mind, at this moment, what it is I’m heading towards. I suppose that I’m still in a bit of a pause before the start of what I have been thinking of as my new life, which is my life in Asia. For the next couple of months, I’ll be in the US, not at home in New York, but also not on my new adventure.

But this is also my real life, and something new and different. I am taking a pause, an interregnum, as we enter into the Jewish season of reflection and renewal. There’s an arc to the whole thing. Rosh Hashanah is the entry point into a period of sanctification, with Yom Kippur as its climax, the moment when (we hope) the purification is complete, and we are ready to begin the new year. Then comes Sukkos, a reconnection with earthy reality, where we build huts and eat outdoors under starlight and leaves and wave branches and fruit around. It’s a festival that focuses on joy, coming to its conclusion with a burst of celebration for the Torah, the text and the way of life that links the high spiritual plane of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with the material reality of crops and dirt and fecundity that Sukkos celebrates. 

I am thinking about all of this not just because my life is changing, but because of how it’s changing: among other things, I’m co-writing a Vietnamese book about Jewish childhood education. As I step away from what my life has been and prepare to set forth into what it will be, I’m interested in taking a fresh look at the Jewish part of my upbringing — a look that will be, I hope, a little distanced from all of the adolescent conflict that charged my experience of Orthodox Judaism when I was at home and living it. I will be writing my book over these next weeks and months, looking back on my own childhood to discover what was best in it so that I can share these things with a nation on the far side of the world about which I know very little.

As with my New York life as well, I will spend some time sifting out the resentments and frustrations, the disappointments and discomforts, to find the jewels I’ll carry with me. They will need to be compact and lightweight and durable enough for the unpredictable road ahead, and useful enough to be worth carrying.

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Floating in the Dark

I have just had my first experience of a “float,” or what is known, a bit misleadingly, as a sensory deprivation tank. And I feel great.

I decided to try it out as a bit of a birthday present to myself. I went down to Lift / Next Level Floats, where I spent an hour floating in the dark inside of a pod filled with high-density salt water.

One of the things about being 41 and having lived an active life is that most things I do now, even if they’re new experiences, are like other experiences I’ve already had. So: a float in a tank is like lying in the Dead Sea, but in a dark room and against a smooth surface rather than in the heat of the desert and with sharp salt balls underneath you. A float in a tank is like getting a massage, in that it’s an hourlong sensory experience that lets you drift. A float in a tank is like meditating, except that no one has told you to keep coming back to the breath. A float in a tank is like an afternoon nap, except you can’t roll over or quite get to sleep. A float in a tank is like being in your bed awake at 3 am with jet lag, in that you’re motionless in the dark at a time when your mind thinks you ought to be awake.

What’s surprising to me is how good — how relaxed — I felt when I was done and out the door. I don’t think I felt that relaxed during the session. As I began to float, I noticed exactly where all the tension was in my body: I could feel it in my legs, my arms, as they seized up while I tried to hold myself up, hold myself in place — which was, of course, unnecessary. The sharpest tension was in my neck and shoulders, which began to ache right away, such that I used the neck flotation pillow to hold up my head for maybe the first two thirds of the float.

After a while, once the water stopped moving, there was a curious sensation of solidity, as if I were lying on a solid surface perfectly contoured to my body. And it might have been this easing of the body into the float, and the melting away of physical tension, that led to the relaxed feeling I have now.

Whatever it was, I came out of the water feeling calm and mellow. We’ll see how this feeling unfolds over the rest of the day.

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Thesis

I have, at long last, posted my master’s thesis online. Called Swiss Gods Don’t Like Rice Cake, it tells the story of how Korean shamanism has begun to incorporate non-Koreans as shamans. You can find it here.

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Hitting the News in Vietnam

With the help of education entrepreneur Catherine Yen Pham, I have now made the Vietnamese news. Two articles have come out so far — one in Young Style, another in Family Life — and I’ve been told more are on the way.

The articles are about the talk I gave in Ho Chi Minh City about Jewish traditions of education. Catherine and I spoke to an audience of about 120 people, plus press, for several hours, including an extended Q&A session. I was amazed at how interested people were, how hungry they were for new ideas about how they can best raise their children. They want to do better. Many of them were taking notes. A lot of Asians, Vietnamese included, are convinced that Jews are smart, good with money, rich, powerful, and maybe slightly magical. I wanted to share with them some good points from Jewish culture, while at the same time puncturing some of the myths.

It’s an irony for me that after years of focusing on Korea, and pretty much an adult lifetime of distancing myself from Judaism, or at least Orthodox Judaism, I am now on my way to becoming an expert on Judaism in Vietnam. Catherine and I have begun work on a book, and it would also be pretty ironic if my first book were to be in Vietnamese — and about Judaism. But life is funny that way.

Identity and geography

When I was a baby, my parents began to worry about my Jewish identity. They’d grown up in New York, where everyone they knew was Jewish, but how would I know what it meant to be Jewish as I grew up in Marin County, California? That’s what first drew them toward greater involvement with first Reform Judaism, and then the Orthodox Judaism that has become a core part of their lives.

I sort of reverse-solved the problem my parents had raised by moving right back to New York, where I could have almost no religious involvement with Judaism and still be Jewish without having to think about it. In New York, there are Jews all around me. We share a culture. No need for a whole lot of fancy stuff to get the point across.

But I have found that at the various points in my life when I’ve been away from New York, and especially in Asia, identifying as Jewish has become more important and more interesting. Before I left on my current trip to Vietnam and Korea, I got myself a Jewish star to wear around my neck, and I’ve had several occasions where the easiest way to explain who and what I am was to pull it out and show it. Jewish culture — and, yes, the Jewish religion I don’t really believe in — are a core part of who I am.

Jewish wisdom

In being asked to speak about Jewish values, I’ve had to take a close look at my own values. After all, I’m not about to begin espousing a set of ideas that I don’t agree with. I’ve looked to find where what I believe aligns with Jewish traditions, and to find ways of presenting these ideas to an audience that doesn’t know the first thing about Judaism.

It turns out — not a big surprise, really — that there’s a lot in Judaism that I agree with and am proud to be able to share: the Jewish concern with ethics and charity, the Jewish passion for questioning and curiosity, Jewish humor, the Jewish tendency to be able to hold multiple opinions at once. And despite my frustrations with it along the way, it looks like all those years of Jewish education actually taught me something useful.

Maybe this isn’t quite what my parents were after, but the son they raises is certainly aware of his Jewish identity.

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The Lure of Asia

The American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Asian Peoples, inaugurated in 1980, opens with a diorama of a Samarkand market stall, undated, over which is the tag line “The Lure of Asia.” One couldn’t ask for a more perfect example of the kind of Orientalism Edward Said took to task four years earlier. There’s the othering — Asia is only a lure to non-Asians; for actual Asians, it’s just home — and the presentation of authentic Asianness as an undated premodernity. You see the same thing over and over throughout the exhibition, like the bier that’s presented as part of a Chinese marriage, with no notion that Chinese marriages in 1980 might be any different from whatever they were in the static eternal traditional past.

For all its flaws, though, the Hall of Asian Peoples was at least an attempt to make Asian culture, traditions, and artifacts legible to an audience unfamiliar with them. It belongs to a different era of ethnography — one corner describes “man’s rise to civilization,” as if it were unidirectional and didn’t involve women — but it’s not irresponsible. The collection is presented carefully, thoughtfully, with great attention to detail and a genuine attempt to respect the cultures presented.

The same, alas, can’t be said for China: Through the Looking Glass, the Costume Institute show at the Metropolitan Museum. The exhibition begins with a wall text that name-checks Edward Said in order to cast aside any serious reckoning with Orientalism as a field of power relations, choosing instead to see Asia as a source of inspiration and creativity for Western artists through the ages. All well and good, except that the show then colonizes the entirety of the Met’s Chinese art galleries, literally casting them in its own light, and making the objects and history of the actual China almost impossible to see. If it’s a show about Orientalism in action, it delivers.

At the Met, the Chinese galleries begin with the monumental, breathtaking 14th-century Buddha of Medicine Bhaishajyaguru, which, at 25 feet by 50 feet, gives a sense of the grandeur of Chinese tradition. Except that now you can’t see it, because of forest of glass bamboo poles is in the way, a work meant to reflect, I suppose, the repeating film clip we see of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The takeover continues, as the long hallway of early Chinese art is dimmed, lit in weird colors, and overtaken by an unnecessary wash of vaguely Asianish synth washes for no discernible reason. The Astor Court, normally an elegant refuge, is turned into a sordid nightclub, the rear wall lit red, the floor covered in black plastic meant to look like lacquer, the usual hush overtaken by kung fu movie sounds. The weird, bad lighting throughout — meant, I imagine, to preserve the clothing — destroys any opportunity to engage with the Met’s substantial Chinese art collection on its own terms. The exhibition even wanders down into the Egyptian wing, as if to say a little hello to Edward Said’s corner of the world. And you can’t escape the noise of this behemoth, even when you sneak off into the Chinese decorative arts, or the Korean collection, or the Gandharan Buddhist sculptures. Like any colonizing force, it’s insidious.

The exhibition tries to be clever, juxtaposing dresses and historical pieces. Sometimes it works, and other times it’s just facile. It might have been kind of hip if it had been put in the Costume Institute, or in its own special exhibition area. Instead, it’s just unnerving and weird: you look for your favorite pieces, like the Han Dynasty dancer, and they’re gone, only then you find them in some dim Plexiglas vitrine next to a dress with a dreadful Asiatic kitsch hat thrown on top for no good reason.

It is, I think, the first show I’ve ever seen at the Metropolitan Museum that actually pissed me off. I wanted to go look at the Chinese art, and it was buried. Fashion has a nasty habit of borrowing and burying, and also a nasty habit of turning Asia into raw material, whether it’s silk, ideas, or labor. That the Met gave it free rein to do so in its Chinese galleries is a disappointment.

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Travel and frozen time

I know what India’s like. I know because I’ve been there.

That’s how I tend to think, anyway. But do I really have any idea what India is like now? I first went there in 1997, spending four months backpacking alone around the Subcontinent. I returned for another six months in 2002, and then I made a brief, two-week visit for business in 2009.

I still describe experiences and memories from that first trip as if that’s just how things are done in India. Yet that trip was 18 years ago. Back then, cassette shops sold music, Internet cafes connected through dialup twice a day to send and receive emails at their own POP addresses, and typists plied their trade (they’re still around, but a dying breed). No one talked about an IT revolution in India — the dot-com boom hadn’t even hit America yet. Business, it seemed, ran on hand-written ledger books. This was the very end of the Congress Party’s long era of dominance: the BJP was running hard, and they won enough seats to form a government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee just a month after I left the country, and the country tested its nuclear weapons a few months later.

Change, in other words, was coming, if you could see the signs. I gathered some sense of the political shift during my travels, but I had no idea about the economic and technological revolution that would transform the country. When I came back in 2002, Internet cafes were everywhere, with uninterrupted power supplies and Internet Explorer 5. CDs had replaced cassettes. Indian Railways was so effectively computerized that a clerk gave me my change when I switched my ticket time and the new one turned out to be cheaper.

I saw further changes when I went back to India in 2009: shopping malls, an emerging security state in the wake of the Bombay attacks, greater ambient wealth. India still felt very much like India, but it wasn’t quite the place I experienced back in 1997.

My frozen home

This frozen-in-time quality is typical of travel accounts — I grew up on my parents’ tales of what Europe was like, as their late-sixties experiences receded ever further back in time — and maybe even more typical of how expats and exiles think of their former homes. It’s funny to me the extent to which parts of Flushing feel more like the Korea of 2001, or even earlier, than like the Korea of today. Restaurants like Kum Gang San cater to Koreans of a certain age, and of a certain Korean era. My parents’ New York City, which they left in the 1970s, is not the New York City I live in.

And very soon, I’ll be talking about a New York City that will be frozen in time.

I’ve been here since 1993, which is quite a while. I’ve seen in change. I’ve called in a dead body in Hell’s Kitchen, and done it on a payphone. I used to go to the 2nd Ave Deli on Second Avenue, and I used to ride the Redbirds out to Jackson Heights for Indian food and not Tibetan food. I remember Pearl Paint and the Twin Towers and the Barnes & Noble on Sixth Ave and the old, hideous Columbus Circle and tokens. A lot has changed.

And it will keep changing without me, after I leave. In a few years, I will be telling someone about New York, and all the hipsters in Bushwick or how Citibike works or how much fun it is to get some ice cream from Chinatown Ice Cream Factory and go to Columbus Park to watch the old men gamble and the old ladies sing, and some actual New Yorker will interject that actually it’s not like that anymore, that they cleaned up the park, changed the bike laws, and moved all the hipsters to Brownsville.

The passage of time

I suppose this is also just a function of getting older. When I was a kid in the eighties, I imagined that the styles then in fashion, music, film, whatever, were just the defaults. I’ve now been around long enough to see things I remembered from the first time come back into style and then go out again. I am aware of the passage of time in a way I couldn’t have been when I was younger.

But then there’s New York. I’ve been here long enough that it’s my home and nowhere else is, but I’m leaving. And New York isn’t a place you can hold onto. It moves on without you. It does not, frankly, give a shit about you, especially if you’ve gone off to live somewhere else. You keep up with New York, not the other way around. Quicker than most places, New York erases and replaces the things you knew.

Well, quicker than most places in America, anyway. Eventually I’ll be settling in Seoul, a city that changes even faster than New York — where you can leave for three years and not be able to find your old neighborhood because the whole thing has been bulldozed and replaced.

And in the meantime? I’ll be traveling, gaining new slices of experience, and trying to remember later when I talk about them to say, “This is how it was then,” instead of “This is how it is.”

Posted on

Travel and frozen time

I know what India’s like. I know because I’ve been there.

That’s how I tend to think, anyway. But do I really have any idea what India is like now? I first went there in 1997, spending four months backpacking alone around the Subcontinent. I returned for another six months in 2002, and then I made a brief, two-week visit for business in 2009.

I still describe experiences and memories from that first trip as if that’s just how things are done in India. Yet that trip was 18 years ago. Back then, cassette shops sold music, Internet cafes connected through dialup twice a day to send and receive emails at their own POP addresses, and typists plied their trade (they’re still around, but a dying breed). No one talked about an IT revolution in India — the dot-com boom hadn’t even hit America yet. Business, it seemed, ran on hand-written ledger books. This was the very end of the Congress Party’s long era of dominance: the BJP was running hard, and they won enough seats to form a government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee just a month after I left the country, and the country tested its nuclear weapons a few months later.

Change, in other words, was coming, if you could see the signs. I gathered some sense of the political shift during my travels, but I had no idea about the economic and technological revolution that would transform the country. When I came back in 2002, Internet cafes were everywhere, with uninterrupted power supplies and Internet Explorer 5. CDs had replaced cassettes. Indian Railways was so effectively computerized that a clerk gave me my change when I switched my ticket time and the new one turned out to be cheaper.

I saw further changes when I went back to India in 2009: shopping malls, an emerging security state in the wake of the Bombay attacks, greater ambient wealth. India still felt very much like India, but it wasn’t quite the place I experienced back in 1997.

My frozen home

This frozen-in-time quality is typical of travel accounts — I grew up on my parents’ tales of what Europe was like, as their late-sixties experiences receded ever further back in time — and maybe even more typical of how expats and exiles think of their former homes. It’s funny to me the extent to which parts of Flushing feel more like the Korea of 2001, or even earlier, than like the Korea of today. Restaurants like Kum Gang San cater to Koreans of a certain age, and of a certain Korean era. My parents’ New York City, which they left in the 1970s, is not the New York City I live in.

And very soon, I’ll be talking about a New York City that will be frozen in time.

I’ve been here since 1993, which is quite a while. I’ve seen in change. I’ve called in a dead body in Hell’s Kitchen, and done it on a payphone. I used to go to the 2nd Ave Deli on Second Avenue, and I used to ride the Redbirds out to Jackson Heights for Indian food and not Tibetan food. I remember Pearl Paint and the Twin Towers and the Barnes & Noble on Sixth Ave and the old, hideous Columbus Circle and tokens. A lot has changed.

And it will keep changing without me, after I leave. In a few years, I will be telling someone about New York, and all the hipsters in Bushwick or how Citibike works or how much fun it is to get some ice cream from Chinatown Ice Cream Factory and go to Columbus Park to watch the old men gamble and the old ladies sing, and some actual New Yorker will interject that actually it’s not like that anymore, that they cleaned up the park, changed the bike laws, and moved all the hipsters to Brownsville.

The passage of time

I suppose this is also just a function of getting older. When I was a kid in the eighties, I imagined that the styles then in fashion, music, film, whatever, were just the defaults. I’ve now been around long enough to see things I remembered from the first time come back into style and then go out again. I am aware of the passage of time in a way I couldn’t have been when I was younger.

But then there’s New York. I’ve been here long enough that it’s my home and nowhere else is, but I’m leaving. And New York isn’t a place you can hold onto. It moves on without you. It does not, frankly, give a shit about you, especially if you’ve gone off to live somewhere else. You keep up with New York, not the other way around. Quicker than most places, New York erases and replaces the things you knew.

Well, quicker than most places in America, anyway. Eventually I’ll be settling in Seoul, a city that changes even faster than New York — where you can leave for three years and not be able to find your old neighborhood because the whole thing has been bulldozed and replaced.

And in the meantime? I’ll be traveling, gaining new slices of experience, and trying to remember later when I talk about them to say, “This is how it was then,” instead of “This is how it is.”