Scenes from a Funeral

I’m looking through my closet, desperately trying to find something to wear to my grampa’s funeral.  I’ve been crying all day and picking out clothes is an arduous task for my current state of mind.  It gradually dawns on me that I’ve gotten rid of all my long black skirts during my last move and I settle on a pair of dark pants that I hope will keep me warm in the winter weather.  I grab my only long-sleeved button-down shirt and then rummage through my drawers, staring absentmindedly at a selection of brightly colored tank tops.  None of them seem appropriate until a swatch of bright blue catches my eye.  It reminds me of the Kansas City Royals and I stuff the shirt in my bag. I figure I can wear it under my shirt as a tribute to my grampa’s favorite baseball team.

Three days have passed before I arrive in my hometown.  My parents shuttle me directly from the airport to the funeral home where the family has gathered to view my grandfather’s body.  The first person I see is a cousin I haven’t seen in over ten years.  I give him a big hug and gradually work my way up the aisle, embracing family members until I get to the front row where my gramma is seated.  I give her a hug and as the tears roll down her face, I hold her hand and try to reassure her that things will be okay.  She is our amazing matriarch and we have gathered around her to support her during this life-changing event.

There are seven of us grandkids in all and before the funeral starts, our gramma wants us to document our presence in one place in photographs.  We force smiles while posing for the cameras.  As the flashes continue to blind us, we start to laugh at our paparazzi.  We give each other bunny ears and antlers and our smiles suddenly become genuine.  The years and distance fade away and we are all cousins again, acting like we did twenty years ago.

My sister and I are driving around the day after the funeral reflecting about how we both don’t feel like we fit in.  Unlike the other five cousins, we don’t have children and we both have college degrees that have taken us far from our Midwestern roots.  But as I thought about each of my cousins, I realized how we are all misfits.  Although we were much closer when we were younger, as adults, we are all struggling to figure out what exactly it means to be a family.

Our parents have chosen us to be the pallbearers of our grandfather’s casket. I lead the procession out of the church pews, but as soon as we get to the back of the church, I am accosted by one of my cousins for not letting the minister go first.  Yet the accusations of wrongdoing are quickly followed by sarcastic quips and laughter about how we had to screw something up.  As I think about our family of misfits, more than anything else, it is these small and obscure memories that bind us together and define what it means to be family.

The Mexican Driveway

Emily drives down into her beautiful steep driveway constructed from dark gray stone and edged in raised concrete.  As she pulls in, she comments that she hopes she can get back out.  I laugh, knowing that she’s driven it out before.  But then she turns and I know she’s serious.  “I’ve never driven it out.  I always had someone else do it.”  Somehow we have to turn the truck around to get it pointed in the right direction and then get enough traction to drive up the hill.

When the moment comes to get it up the hill, she begs me to try.  I want nothing to do with the hill, but somehow manage to turn her pickup around so it’s facing away from the house.  I hand the keys over to her and she tries to get it up the hill.  She puts it into gear, pushes the overdrive button and she gets up 10 feet of the driveway, before her back wheels start to spin and smoke starts pouring out from all parts of the truck.  She’s frustrated and I know she’s going to ask me to try.  Then she sees Mando (short for Armando) walking nearby.  He’s thirteen and the son of the man who sells building supplies just up the road.  “Let’s get him to do it!”  “Really?” “Really.”  So she asks and he gives it a stab, but has the same results as Emily.  An overheating truck that doesn’t want to climb the driveway.  He motions that he needs more weight in the back.  Emily turns to me and motions for us to climb in the bed of the truck.  We climb in and grab onto the edges of the truck. The truck spins into life up the rock driveway.  Mando parks the truck carefully, shrugs sheepishly and walks back to his dad’s shop.

our truck driver

Mexican Thanksgiving

Other towns have taco trucks.  Austin has bright silver vintage Airstreams that serve up cupcakes, pies, crepes, and other sugary goodness on South Congress.  After a day of exploring the Austin sights with my old college friend Allegra, I spent the next night in San Antonio with Emily, a former Peace Corps Volunteer with me in Morocco.  Her grandson was in town and I spent the evening unsuccessfully trying to get him to eat a small cube of tofu.

The next morning we set off towards the border in the pitch black of night.  Two hours later we watched the sunrise on our left and by nine in the morning, we had finished immigration formalities.  We took the back road up the mountain and arrived at her cabin in the small village of Laguna de Sanchez.

The last time I visited, I slept on the roof and we cooked over a camp stove squatting in the middle of the floor, open air pouring through the spaces where windows should have been.  Now, the windows are in place, trimmed with rough-hewn small trees.  The cement walls are whitewashed and ready for a splash of color.  The shower works, sinks are in place, a full kitchen island with a built-in stove has been installed.  The bedroom has a full-sized bed and a dresser.  An adventure in the outdoors has turned into the makings of a home.

We spend our time still working on the house.  I paint the one room that has still has bare cement walls and Emily stains the new window trim.  We make neat piles of the construction materials and sweep and sweep and sweep.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner consist of variations on tacos: beans, squash, cheese, salsa and guacamole.  Water is piped down from the ojo de agua, the mountain spring nearby.  It is simple and beautiful and even though the cabin has electricity, we are in bed by eight o’clock.  I toss and turn and my brain wanders amongst a myriad of topics.  After swirling round and round, it finally settles down and I fall asleep in the chill mountain air.

In the morning, we pack our bags and carry them up the steep driveway.  Once the truck is ready to go, we drive down the mountain into Monterrey.  We briefly stop at the tourist stalls lining the freeway and we purchase a pan de elote to nibble on.  Our fingers are covered with butter when we climb back into the truck.  Three hours to the border, an hour at the crossing, and then three more hours to home.  We arrive in San Antonio, exhausted and replenished.

Reflections

Since my journeys are now over, I’ve been reflecting a bit on my ten weeks of traveling.  Between major cities, I took 16 planes, 16 buses, 3 trains and 3 boats (please, let’s not discuss my horrible carbon footprint this year).  By the end of the trip, I knew my passport number by heart, but had no idea what day of the week it was.  I had to look both ways when crossing the street, because I couldn’t ever remember on which side of the street people drove.  I would stumble over the smallest of sidewalk cracks because I wouldn’t pick up my feet.  Even after traveling through six different countries, my stomach was still completely susceptible to bad street food.

On a different note, I’ve been thinking about why I like traveling so much.  Before I left the US, my friend Peter told me that it was because “I gotta do me.”  And travel has been a big part of me for a long time.  Travel humbles me in a way that few other experiences have ever affected me. With only a backpack of stuff and a mouthful of words, everyday life became significantly more challenging.  Those challenges allowed me to restore my faith in humanity.  Whenever I got into a tough spot, people always came to my rescue with a smile and an outreached hand.  It is an incredible feeling to allow yourself be helped by people who materially have so much less than you, because it transforms who is rich/poor, knowing/ignorant, and independent/dependent.

A friend once told me that he thought it was rude to travel to countries where you don’t speak the language.  My first thought was, “Hmmmm.  Well that’s surely limits your options a bit.”  But perhaps more importantly, this guy had forgotten to consider how much people communicate without words.  Speaking is just one part of communication and even if you know a particular language, it doesn’t automatically grant you cultural understanding.  I always make an effort to learn the basics of a language when I’m traveling.  But sometimes, it is truly surprising how little language is necessary:

I was sitting on the curb in the small Tibetan town of Tongren (in Mandarin) or Rebkong (in Tibetan Amdo) and a women with two long braids passed by.  She looked directly at me, obviously curious about the random foreigner in her town, and I smiled at her.  Slowly, this wide grin crept across her face.  I didn’t need any Amdo words to explain what had happened between us.  It was just a moment – a glorious, memorable one – that required absolutely no translation.  We had just made each other’s day.

The Man at the Shanghai Museum

As I was looking at ancient pottery at the Shanghai Museum, an older Chinese man came up to me and asked, “United States?” I nodded and he continued, “Where are you from? Missouri?” Seriously? This guy knew about Missouri? I was too stunned to respond to his accurate first guess that I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt his line of questioning. “Michigan? Minnesota? Carolina?” The time had passed for me to own up to growing up in Missouri, so I told him that I lived in California now. He proceeded to tell me that the middle of the United States is much better because there is more space and it’s not so crowded. Spoken like a true resident of an overpopulated, Chinese metropolitan city.

This ornery old man than went on to explain that China is not a Communist state any longer. He asserted that since “reform and opening” China has become a full-fledged capitalist dictatorship. My jaw dropped and I couldn’t believe he was actually saying it aloud. I started looking around to see if anyone else was listening to what he was saying. That’s when I knew he was utterly and completely correct. I was scared for this man because he was expressing his opinion in a public place.

He then went on to tell me about the four presidents he revered: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Franklin Roosevelt. Then he stated that it was so much better for poor men, like Lincoln, to become president. Now there are too many rich men who become US presidents.  This man was a nonstop, opinion-expressing machine and he had my undivided attention.

Finally, I untangled myself from this man’s ceaseless diatribe and I found myself amused as I walked around the rest of the museum. This man, who was clearly old enough to have lived through the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square and countless other Chinese atrocities, had spent over fifteen minutes openly criticizing the government in a very public place. I smiled because he reminded me that even in places where freedom is obviously repressed, the human spirit can continue to thrive.

China – Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing, Hangzhou (week 10)

China greeted me with all of the things I remembered most about it:

• overcrowded subways
• strange, unexpected sewer smells in the most random of locations
• rubber-stamped, middle-aged businessmen that all seem to have a peculiar, unpleasant odor

Nevertheless, it was nice to be back and even though my Mandarin is pitiful, it was comforting to know that I had some words to navigate and get around.  Shanghai is quite different from Beijing with more of a colonial influence.  I spent my first day back avoiding the heat (over 100 degrees!) and wandering the museums.  My favorite are always the urban planning museums (I’ve hit 3 so far on this trip – Beijing, Shanghai and Singapore.).  I came back to China to see the total solar eclipse but, sadly, it was completely rained out.  The clouds went completely pitch black at 9:30 am and that was about all there was to see.

I stopped in Suzhou and saw the canals and gardens that everyone raves about.  The gardens were absolutely gorgeous and the lotuses were in full bloom.  Next, I got to see Angela in Nanjing who flew down from Beijing just to see me.  We saw Sun Yet-Sen’s mausoleum (way less creepy then Ho Chi Minh’s) and took a long, long cable car ride up a hill.  It was nice and cool and the company was excellent.  We also explored the Rape of Nanjing Museum about when the Japanese took over Southern China and basically raped, murdered, and pillaged at will.  (And you wonder why those two countries still have some stuff to work through.)  The sculptures outside the museum were haunting and memorable.

My travels had been kind of a downer and seeing Angela again definitely cheered my spirits.   Next I went to Hangzhou which I found to be astonishingly lovely, even in all of the downpours.  The town is known for a large lake called West Lake and nearby villages have a special kind of dragonwell tea.  I walked all over town and even accidentally stumbled across a laser, fountain and light show (which included a dated tribute to Happy New Year 1999) which was kind of fun.  At this temple nearby there were these old, incredible Buddhist carvings on the sides of the cliff.

At the end of my trip, I was back in Shanghai.  I managed to get enough nice weather to have a good view from JinMao Tower and I stopped in the Science Museum.  I picked up some last minute souvenirs and the next day I was on a flight home to San Francisco.

Singapore & Kuala Lumpur (Week 9)

Singapore
Two friends I met while I was traveling around China showed me all around Singapore. They made me eat and eat and eat, which apparently is one of the Singaporean pastimes (the other being shopping). They also took me all around town and I was able to see several museums, the tourist attraction of Sentosa Island, and both the Singapore Zoo and the Night Safari. I got to see these ginormous bats and get kissed by a sea lion!

What surprised me the most about Singapore is that it is truly a nation of immigrants, similar to the United States. But instead of forcing assimilation, cultures and languages have been preserved and tolerance is the norm. And yet, I felt a deep divide among the population. Those disparate languages and cultures cleave the country into distinct pieces. It was rare to see interracial couples and stereotypes and prejudices existed underneath the veneer of acceptance. Tolerance has been achieved through the protection of strict cultural institutions. I’m not sure exactly how I feel about the issue of assimilation vs. cultural preservation, but Singapore seems to be on one extreme and America on the other.

Kuala Lumpur
If you’ve ever traveled for awhile, sometimes you get the feeling that a city hates you. KL hated me! There were no rooms anywhere when I arrived. Their public transportation system is a mess. I got turned around and a bit lost at least three times, which is completely abnormal for me. I couldn’t get tickets to go to the top of the Petronas Towers. And I missed the check-in for my flight back to China by ten minutes. (I have, seriously, never missed a flight in my life and on this trip I have missed TWO!) There were a few highlights. I got all the dry skin on my feet eaten off by a bunch of fish. I got to visit the national mosque and this great museum with miniature replicas of mosques from around the world. I also wandered through an overcrowded night bazaar and drank some strange concoction of soy milk, grass jelly (I think) and red beans. The city was not hopeless, but I was sure ready to leave.

Thailand (Week 7 & 8)

I’m getting behind on these things.  Sorry!  The highlight of my stay in Thailand was getting to see my sister.  I arrived just in time for her birthday and baked her a coconut cake, although I forgot the baking powder, so it was more like a coconut pound cake.  I still claim it was tasty and completely edible. Her other birthday present was a shiny new blender so we could make passion fruit slushies.  Yum!

I wandered all over Bangkok while Tanya was working and got to see lots of intricate temples and the royal palace.  The temples here are just so ostentatious and full of tiny ceramic pieces carefully put together.  I also ran into some friends of mine from Berkeley who I just happened to notice as I was sitting in a cafe.  I missed their wedding while I was traveling, so it was nice to see them while they were on their honeymoon.  (Such a small, small world!)

Tanya also took me on all day long shopping adventure in JJ Market.  We came home laden with packages and I’m claiming to have done at least half my xmas shopping this year already.  Next up was a weekend trip to go whitewater rafting in Chiang Mai.  Along with a couple of my sister’s friends, we braved some pretty nice class III & IV rapids.  Tanya and I rode back to the camp precariously perched on top of three inflated rafts strapped onto a pickup truck.  It was freezing and raining, but we arrived in one piece. And then it kept raining and raining and raining.  Overnight, the river had risen and when we went down the same part of the river again the next day, the rapids were huge and it took half the time it did the first day.  It was awesome.

Back in Bangkok, I roamed around some more for a few days and Tanya got sick so she couldn’t accompany me to my last stop in Thailand: Phuket.  Phuket is a big, crazy resort beach town.  Which is great, except that is poured the first two days I was there.  So I read the Twilight series instead of sunbathing (vampire stories are pretty good for rainy days).  But finally, the sun poked out from behind the clouds and I went hiking in the rainforest.  Within ten minutes, my shirt was soaked with sweat and I realized I didn’t have enough water to finish my intended trek.  I went for an elephant ride instead and they even let me sit on its head.  In case you are wondering, elephants have very hard heads and very pointy hairs all over.  My last day in Phuket, I finally managed to find a beach and I played in the waves all morning.

Cambodia (week 6)

Phnom Penh
As I’m waiting for my bus to pick me up from my hotel and take me from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, I strike up a conversation with the hotel clerk.  I tell him how much I like the city and how I wish I had more time to explore.  I mention that I’d visited the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng (the torture prison of the Khmer Rouge) that morning and how awful I felt.  I ask him if he has gone to them and he nods and tells me that his sister and two of his grandparents were killed during Pol Pot’s regime.  Somewhere between 2-3 million people were killed from a combination of execution and starvation (since Pol Pot was exporting the country’s rice harvest in exchange for weapons and machines).  He explained that his parents had been living in Phnom Penh and were forced to leave when the Angkor (the “organization”) evacuated the city.  His parents moved to Battamburg province where he was born in 1976 (a year after the Khmer Rouge took over).  Because his mom was so thin because there was so little food, she didn’t have enough milk to feed him.  Instead, she fed him using the juice extracted from palm trees.  When he comes to this part of the story, he starts to wipe the corners of his eyes and I feel bad for bringing up such a sensitive subject.  Pol Pot and his cronies didn’t even last 4 years and yet his brutal regime killed almost 1/3 of the Cambodia’s population.  So much destruction in so little time and yet Cambodians were quite willing to talk about the atrocities.  Quite different from China where people are very reluctant to discuss the Cultural Revolution.  

Siem Reap
Walking around temples for 7 hours is completely overwhelming.  The Cham empire was huge and I am astonished at how little I know about it.  I’ve heard of Angkor Wat.  I even knew it was a large stone building, but beyond that I knew nothing.  My world history class didn’t even mention its existence as far as I can remember.  Even now, after spending a full day wandering among the ruins, I feel that I know nothing.  Viewing the temples reminds you of your own mortality and how little your life matters in the larger scheme of things.  Even large empires perish as nature pummels the stones back into the ground.  Many of the tremendous structures are slowly, but surely being retaken by the local vegetation. Nature has a way of pushing away order and wrestling away the power and strength of the empire.  In the battle of nature vs. man, nature is almost certainly winning and not by a small margin.

Vietnam (Week 5)

Vietnam was a country I couldn’t bring myself to love, but one that I couldn’t bring myself to hate either.  Getting from the Chinese border to Hanoi was my first experience with tourist extortion.  Stuck in a taxi, I was dropped off not at the bus station, but at a local minibus company where I was charged at least double the going rate.  Grrrr.  But then, on the same minibus, there were a bunch of Vietnamese tourists who had just come back from a trip to China.  One of the girls was training to be an English teacher and she introduced me to her family.  At the rest stop, she (literally) pushed my butt over to their table and made me sit down with them.  They offered me corn juice, pineapple and sticky rice cooked in a banana leaf.  That night, I had my first passion fruit juice (of which there were many more to come) and delicious spring rolls and watched an amazing water puppet show complete with fire breathing dragons.

I spent another day in hot and humid Hanoi and have to admit that seeing the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh was a bit creepy.  Next up, I headed out to see Halong Bay, a remarkably beautiful collection of islands.  The heat made the experience less than desirable, but I made some new friends before heading off to Hoi An in the center of the country.   Hoi An is known for its tailors, so I had a couple of things made that were reasonably (if not cheaply) priced.  At this point though, I was beginning to feel like I was on the Western tourist circuit of Vietnam.  I kept running into foreigners I’d seen before and in many places there seemed to be more Westerners than Vietnamese.  It felt like almost all the Vietnamese I interacted with were trying to rip me off.  For me, this was a clear sign than I needed to get off the beaten track.

Next stop was Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon to almost everyone, even those that live there).  The first night, I went looking for a supermarket and took a wrong turn and ended up at a middle-class teenager hangout: a frozen yogurt store.   I filled up a plastic up full of tropical fruit flavored yogurt (lychee and passion fruit) and then topped it off with purple dragon fruit and kiwi.  They charged by the 100 grams and it was quite tasty!  Best of all, there wasn’t another foreigner in sight.

I visited the Vietnam War Remnants Museum and was taken aback by the giggling tourists in skimpy tank tops and barely there shorts. The museum itself was moving and many of the photos were hard to look at.  It’s hard to imagine people my parents’ age who actually lived through the war.  My taxi driver earlier in the week had been near the DMZ during that time and I can’t imagine what stories he has about the experience.  I couldn’t help wondering if it thirty years there will be an Iraq War Remnants Museum in Baghdad that documents the suffering of the last few years.  Heavy stuff.  I think I’d been avoiding the topic as I was traveling and I certainly left the museum feeling a bit glum.

I spent the next two days on the Mekong Delta.  Getting out of the city was a pleasant change.  People on the riverbank waved at us enthusiastically along the way.  The stilt houses and floating markets were a side of Vietnam not dominated by the hustle bustle of the city and the lure of American dollars.  I crossed the border into Cambodia by boat and arrived in Phnom Penh ready for a change.