Leaving Bangkok Behind

October 24

Sitting in the Bangkok Airport on the way to Burma - in a tiny, stifling gate miles away from food or a toilet, I can’t help but feel a bit nostalgic.  Not toward my traveling, my volunteering, the feeling of freedom and liberation that I found in transience, but rather toward the beginning.  Nostalgia; that bittersweet bubble that I let grow unknowingly in my belly during those times when I thought hatred was the only option.  But now when I think back I know that if given the same circumstance, I would do it again.  Bangkok, Thailand, all of it, it meant a lot for me, more than I would have let myself know at the time…I feel like more than ever now that I am leaving it for the last time, that this place is truly my South East Asia home.  Mae Sot, yes, that part of Thailand meant the world to me as well, but mostly this part - the rude and obtrusive, the meddling and the beautiful, the sprawling disgust of Pattaya, the children looking expectantly at me and me giving them the same look back, those days…the summer of my journey, that was the real beginning.  Malaysia, yes you opened my eyes, serving the function of  the Siren’s call to this part of the world, you gave me the gumption I needed to perhaps make the best decision I could have made in leaving Pattaya but now, as I sit here amongst the Sikh men and their turbans, the airlines employees wearing headscarves and the monks boarding planes, I think back to my time, my miserable, laughable, unforgettable time in Pattaya with my South East Asia soul mate, Jenna, and I think that yes, I would do it again.  I would do it again…maybe this is what nostalgia does.  I remember the bad, yes I do, but being here somehow makes me remember the good, remember the growth and ultimately remember the decision I made that impacted me greatly, the decision to leave.  How strange is this? I can’t quite put my finger on it, my missing Pattaya, the place I formerly called Hell on Earth and rightfully so.  The place that makes me shudder when I see Russian script anywhere, the place that made my heart crumble away in tiny pieces. But right now as I leave Bangkok, and this morning when I left my familiar hostel, the one I used to feel so homey in, and traversed my usual route to my favorite breakfast place and got my favorite breakfast (2 of them, I over-indulged…hadn’t had bagel sandwiches in a while), I thought that what I had done rather than traveled aimlessly for seven months was arrive, place a perimeter around South East Asia, then make it my home.  And this, Bangkok, Pattaya, whatever this feeling is, is the living room…the place I will always see when I open the front door. 

The Rest of Cambodia

October 22

What a whirlwind ride this past month and a half has been.  I think I’ve only had one or two days to myself, including this one.  The other one was spent dealing with my lost wallet in Kratie, the town with fresh water dolphins and sick babies whose parents carried their IVs…I still can’t figure out why each baby had an IV, or how the tiny clinic across from my tiny hostel could be that filled with tiny little brown babies crawling around with their parents holding  their IV drip bags over them, chasing them around, sitting them on the ground outside and placing the bag on motorbike handlebars while they chatted with other parents.  Poverty here can strike at some pretty random times.  What a strange day to have to myself, I thought, calling credit card companies, thinking about endangered dolphins, and watching sick babies. 

Nonetheless, Cambodia and the craziness since has been filled; filled to the max with no time or space to breathe, only to have fun and look in the mirror and practice loving myself and others in an extraordinary way.  Here I am, at a hostel after two weeks of luxury with my father, and I see there are plenty of ways to practice my newfound happiness, refine it, watch it spill all over multi-colored lines, watch it run over cups and crawl into tiny spaces, watch it spend money and smile at frustrating situations, watch it be blunt and feminine, watch it play all sorts of games and laugh through pain with friends, watch it ask questions through answers.  I see that I have become more proactive in self-governance. 

Cambodia…hm.  After the killing fields, regulating my emotions became something I realized I could talk about at any time I saw fit, either with myself or companions.  That place, those memories not only for me but for the people who actually went through it, brought me through the rainbow of black and brown, of morose and remorse and into one of connection and conversation.  It opened me up.  So cliché, but think about it, really think about what it means to be opened up.  Almost surgically, for inspection, for introspection and outrospection and retrospection and futrospection.  I saw there that my time here was limited but that my options and opportunities out of here were exponentially quite the opposite.  All of those people I walked over, all of that injustice and quiet comprehension that this place faced during and after the genocide made me understand the very same thing inside of myself and helped me to begin the process of walking out of it.  Loudness and voices and laughter and making sure I understand and am understood, confusion and color and brightness and stress and pressure and acknowledgement, positive and negative, all of it – it all holds the energy that I am working to finesse.  If this doesn’t make sense, that’s fine.  I don’t think it should because processes tend not to.  They tend to write, edit, re-write, erase, and speak over things they use to whisper about.  This month and a half has been all of that, encased in the realization that going places and ending new beginnings are also beginnings in and of themselves as long as I maintain what I think has grown inside of me. 

That I can love what I see on the side of the road, that I can love this poverty and inequality, these smiles and those children and that group of women talking, and this conversation I have with a tuk-tuk driver, and at the same time I can love what I want to do when I come home, what I want to be in this new journey, I can love this translation however difficult it will be, no matter how much it might suck; that I can love the process of loving the search because it is all passion…this is my newest revelation.  Evolving passion, (let’s be real here) because who’s to say that I won’t break down when I arrive in LAX and realize that everyone speaks English?  That I don’t have to use sign language, that fried noodles with vegetables isn’t on every menu, that people won’t offer me to hold their child while they get on the over-crowded minibus?  Of course I will have those break downs, especially at night, when I go outside to take my mind off…of…that…silence…that never ever exists here, not even in the most remote places.  That silence that exists back home, almost like someone pressed a mute button.  Of course that will break me, and of course I will go on my MacBook (yikes!) and look up cheap tickets to Laos and jobs and living arrangements and then I will stop and think about my passion and my ability to not stop this forward motion.  I will think about the journey I am on, think about my own education, well, my need to get one I suppose, and think about me and my friends, and the new things I will see because I have had this realization that it isn’t the place (although this place is majestic, at least), but it is me and my ability to love myself and think I am not that bad, and it is the people  I meet and the experiences we have together, no matter where we are.  A little mushy, I suppose.

So.  After hanging out with friends, friends from home who came to Asia, friends of their friends, friends I met in other parts of Asia, friends I met while traveling with these friends, and feverishly running around with them all around Cambodia, I saw how possible it is for me to not take myself so freaking seriously.  It was great.  I got to be flitty, flirty, whimsical, badass, while also never losing sight of my intelligence and wit.  I let myself have fun, and while this whole trip has been fun, I have been avoiding the inevitable - the transition into “home”, and hanging out with people who came directly from there made me see that it is possible for me to maintain myself, the self that I found, treasure, love, that Asia helped me fill in while not separating completely from a culture I am not totally satisfied with (home).  Meaning, I see now that I don’t have to live like a hermit once I come back to the US.  I can successfully engage with civilians while not losing sight of the person I have become.  Good!

Then came the ultimate challenge….my father.  Challenging in the sense that families are always challenging, and because with my friends I was at least able to take a breather when I needed to (being the only girl among them, they understood if I needed to have “woman time”/BeccaTime), but with my Dad this became a tad bit more difficult.  I saw that I needed to practice my happiness in the context that issues may arise when I move back in with the parentals.  I saw that communication about things, namely my newfound independence, may be tense when it comes to me being back, but manageable and even cool if done well.  I saw that I have been living by what Santa Barbarians might call homeless-person standards, and loving it.  I saw that air conditioning actually makes me physically sick, and, while my dad was sleeping, I would turn it up to roughly the same temperature it was outside.  I saw, above all, how awesome my dad is for journeying out into a crazy, rule-less place where he is a white Amazonian giant with strange facial hair and even stranger facial expressions.  I saw him talk to locals and develop his English-for-people-who-don’t-speak-English skills.  I saw him at first be very nervous at things not working out our way, like hotel bookings or flights, but by the end was fine when the ferry that took us and our motorbikes across the Mekong was actually slabs of wood draped haphazardly across two wooden dugout canoes.  At least, he looked fine.  He also looked fine when he made the ultimate decision to fly into a tropical storm, one that even I was wary about.  Bussing into one is fine, because I can use local people as a fear barometer.  But flying…first of all, this is a technology I had near forgotten about.  Secondly, not many locals fly.  Thirdly, Lao Airlines is notorious for crashing, even more than Lao boat-lines.  But we went for it, and I’m glad we did.  Planes are amazing!  And flying into Laos was a great experience, not to mention sitting in our resort watching a tropical storm pass us by while sipping on delicious beer and occasionally checking on the elephants that were also staying at the resort.  Way to go, Dad! 

So, now that Dad has left, and my friends have dispersed all over Asia, I am alone again.  Tomorrow I head for Bangkok if it’s not too flooded, and then on Monday I fly into Burma.  After that, I will stop in South Korea for about a week and then come home.  My trip is winding down, and I have plenty of mixed feelings about it.  As excited as I am to begin a new adventure, I am nervous as hell that reverse culture shock is going to be far more devastating than any other reverse culture shock has been for me before.  I am anxious that reconnecting with my friends and family in person will be hard and that the story of my trip will go unnoticed.  I am, however, ready to hear about the twists and turns your lives have taken these past few months and hope that the time we will share will be mutually engaging.  I am terrified about applying for jobs and scared that I won’t get a perfect one…there are so many things that I now want to do.  I am worried about following the rules that I have so neglected to follow in Asia, simple things like crossing the street at crosswalks and letting people know where I am have gone by the wayside as I tend to now plan as things come along.  I hope I can be patient with myself and people can be patient with me.  I am, actually, worried about using silverware.  I will need a purse or something big enough to accommodate the chopsticks I plan on carrying with me wherever I go, and will ask the wait staff at restaurants to cut my meat up for me before serving it.  Wearing shoes inside may also present a problem.  Taking showers inside the shower will be strange, as opposed to just using the showerhead inside the bathroom.  Cooking, driving, animals that aren’t meant for eating, tipping at restaurants, having a wardrobe, bike lanes, driving inside of things rather than outside of them, parking spaces, chains of stores and markets, white people…all of this will take getting used to.  What do I do if I need something right away?  Drive to the store?  Weird.  I should be able to walk outside and find the person selling it. What will it be like to not see water buffalo everywhere?  I know…I need to convince Mom and Dad to buy one and put it in the backyard.   I am also neglecting the wonderful things that I should like about coming home…seeing my family and friends, freedom to talk about governments, not seeing corpses on the road, fat children (not obese, just not with bones sticking out of them), Sebastian, carpeted floors, salad, sandwiches, other food in general, the ability to walk and maintain a conversation without having to look at the ground all the time, shade, jeans.  I guess this is all part of the return package.  

When I think about the funny shape this trip has become, it makes me smile, utterly grateful that it didn’t turn out any other way.  Back in July, I wrote in my journal, “in telling Tiana [my friend] a little more about how I got here, I realize it’s a bit of a messy story where nothing worked out and I’m still, still, still happy.  Like the sky today, unexpectedly exactly how it’s supposed to be.  Beautiful.”

Paying my respects

It’s hot and I don’t know how to think.  My mind moves in binary code, on and off, on and off.  It happened so long ago and here I am asking Cambodia politely to move into its black and cobwebbed memory hole and take it out, dust it off and hand it to me.  Hand it to me, so that it can break all over me and I can take it from them.  Take it from them in pieces; it’s all I can really handle of it, pieces.  Hard to say that now after all I’ve endured, I can only handle a country’s pieces, but if they would only dust it off, place it in my hands, and watch it break all over me, maybe my blood would mix with their memory and it would become mine.  Mine, so that they could for some time, forget about it.  I walked over their bones, bones and teeth and clothes and saw where it happened so long ago but for me in my empathetic container that I’ve always known to be my body and this strange thing that I have as a heart, I could feel it like it were yesterday.  I could feel it, like I can feel it in my stomach when people tell me their burdens, like I can feel it behind my teeth when people tell me what crawls behind their eyelids at night, I could feel it.  No, Cambodia, I will never ever understand what you went through so long ago before I was born, but not so long ago that I can’t imagine it; the same dusty roads, the same brown everything, the same.  With smiles so brilliant I can never let you have this suffering for your own so when I am here and when I come back and live here, I will take it back as mine so you don’t have to have it. 

I walked over them today, over their bones and teeth and clothes.  I felt it all over, more than I could have ever imagined.  I know their extremes of emotions as they made that journey to the fields, I understand and validate with an unconscious and unwavering love for humanity each and every emotion that they had during the last moments of their life; the patience and impatience, the idleness and nervousness, the calling out to loved ones, and the inevitable sink into the low-level functioning of acceptance.  I hold it in my heart and respect them all for feeling those emotions and for feeling the ones that I will never know. 

I saw the tree, the cryptically enchanting tree where babies saw the end and I heard the noise, the screams of their mothers, I heard it in that place behind my teeth where I would grind away my own screams at night when no one was watching.  Yes, Cambodia, give me those memories when I come back, when I can be inside of you forever if you’ll have me because I already see myself curled up in the fetal position, laying peacefully in a rice paddy like so many of your children have - peacefully looking up at the sky and the green and the nature that will never change to accommodate the human brutalities that forever occur under it. 

I walked over them, their bodies and teeth and bones, where they were left and where their clothes still are and I saw their skulls piled magnificently in a way that seemed to make people forget the terror they endured…not just a pile of bones, no these people were people, they took the same route I did from their prison to another prison; they took the same route I did and I walked over their bodies and I could feel what they felt.  I will never know it exactly but my teeth tingle and when my brain switched to 0 in the binary code, my arms and legs flipped to electric currents, pulsing though memories that were not my own, emotions that were not within my spectrum but that belonged to me, remnants of the last…pieces…and…I gasp for air and remember who I am and where I am and feel and feel and feel that by feeling what they felt the way I can feel what they felt, the way I walked over their bones and teeth and clothes and saw where the men threw her baby, threw hundreds of hers and babies against that tree that I am giving them an ounce of the pounds of respect that they deserved but never got.  That they inherently searched for but wouldn’t know until the afterlife when me and people like me would walk over their bones and teeth and clothes and marvel at how beautiful the nature was around these killing fields and now, miraculously, the souls of these people although as far away as the dusty Cambodian winds could take them from this hell.   At least their bones got to rest beneath the feet of someone who can marvel at their strength, someone who can feel their screams behind their teeth. 

Trees emerged and plants grew, green covered the brown and the deep unmistakable red but would never cover their killers’ shadows but at least their bones got to rest in the shade and now people come to cry like they did.  Gruesome violence makes these accommodations seem sufficient, doesn’t it?  I feel sufficient knowing that my soul got to feel their souls for a while, that my teeth will always hurt with that wildly painful and similar hurt, that that place inside my stomach will always be breathless at times like these, that this is my form of recognizing and respecting the immense suffering that these people, these thousands upon thousands of people went through.  It happened so long ago and today I walked on top of their bodies knowing that their hearts had flitted away in the dusty Cambodian air, but that their bones and teeth and clothes were still there and I felt it.  I don’t know it, but I felt it. 

My Womanhood is Purple

August 29^th

^{Look out.}

Womanhood is something that I love while traveling.  It’s buoyant, it’s radical, it’s simple and plain, loud and quiet.  We roar, we purr, we are slutty and we go home early.  We talk about it, we bond, we are jealous and envious and we hate each other.   We grow instantly and laugh and giggle over something silly and childish, like boys, masturbation, and books.  My womanhood is neither red nor blue, but rather purple, flowing between me and all other women, women I hate and loathe, women I love immediately, women who eye me with disdain and women who ignore me, women who hug me and women who lurk around me.  I bond with all of them because being a woman is everything to me.  I am neither red nor blue but I love the reds and blues, like the blood between my legs it is all and nothing of me.   I love the women who talk about it, the women who hate it and who will never talk about it; womanhood embodies all of it.  Womanhood, like a frayed rope, all together and nothing at all, ripped apart and held together by the very thing that we hate and love at the same time…a purple and red and blue and black and raped and survived garden of Eden which everything and nothing is our fault and we meet and gather and hate and love each other and everyone else and can bond over glasses of wine or cups of beer in every corner of the world. 

I can adore women from afar, from my couch alone in socks and sweatpants and ice cream, I can love them in bathroom stalls passing me tampons, I can respect them in hotel rooms talking about past failed loves and wonderful female accomplishments like making hard decisions and being intellectual and basically kicking ass in this male dominated world.  I love women who understand me, who understand my pain, the pain in my Pattaya hating soul, who can understand my hatred for hurt and suffering, who shudder when I shudder when the world’s women shudder.  I can love women who laugh with me, women who go off by themselves, who don’t need anyone else, women who used to need people but who have come to the point where they see that in the end all they have is themselves and they love it.

 I love women who don’t talk to me, women who befriend other women, women who are jealous, women who defy womanhood, women who hate women, women who don’t want to be feminists because to me they still are. Women…we are all women, bound together by this sameness, this magnificent ability to be women, to be one and the same despite all of these wretched, hilarious, hurtful, colorful, tearful and smiling differences we have.  I am purple, I am woman, hear me roar.