Kong Hee Fatt Choy photos

...posted to my Flickr account, here. (Phuket weekend holiday photos to come!)

Categories: Asia 2006

Comments [11]

Here's The Thing

Conservative minority government, Bloc holds the balance of power. ...Man.

Two things before I get to my point.

1. Goddammit, couldn't the NDP have the balance of power for once? Jesus christ, two seats away from the balance this time. TWO. Last election it was ONE seat that stood between them and the balance. You can't ask for much from the electorate in most parts of Ontario, Quebec, and the Prairies. They've got their hometown favourites or their clubby niche-i-fied shoo-ins. But C'MON British Columbia and the Maritimes! Couldn't you have pulled off TWO MORE SEATS for the damn NDP in some of those close-call ridings? For the love of god! Is it so much to ask?

2. Having said all this, it's going to be INTERESTING. In the gleeful heart of me I love the idea of the Conservatives and the Bloc having to work together. If they weren't so darn contrary to the whole notion of this thing called "Canada" I'd be a big fan of the Bloc. Their social policies are progressive and sound. And they've got their representative priorities straight: their MPs know they are in Parliament to represent the interests of their constituents, and that's what they do. ...It's just too bad for the ROC that we can't get such interested politicians to put their bums in our ridings' chairs.

In any case, I'm not a political blogger, so I'll keep this short. I'm glad of the result. No electorate should stand for corruption in their leaders. Of course, all politicians are lying bastards, so there's no getting away from corruption in politics whole hog. But when the corruption is thrown so completely in the face of the people as with the Sponsorship scandal, and the former PM is there on television yelling, "NOT ME NOT ME!" in the middle of the election campaign to the total detriment of the current fates of his party, and the patronage and appointments and graft are just too much to ignore, you just can't elect them again.

I should say that I think the Liberals did an okay job of running the country. I don't have too many complaints. I got my cushy government job as a result of that big wallop of Arts funding they put in place in 2001, so I guess I was happy about that, at least. I don't think any party could govern Canada without pissing off factions in all corners, so you can gripe about what they did or didn't do about softwood lumber, BSE, health care, Native settlements, energy revenues, arts policy, you name it - but if it had been a different party, it would be a different list of gripes.

However. Paul Martin insisted again and again he didn't know anything about what went down with the Sponsorship monies. I want to put a few irrefutable facts in front of you, in case you still have your head in the sand:

He was the Finance Minister.

He is a son of Quebec, and a Montreal MP.

He is a filthy rich businessman and a lawyer; he knows everyone who's anyone in power brokerage in this country, don't you doubt it for one second.

When I worked for government, I was a lowly PM-03. That means I was in charge of 7-10 people and/or up to $250,000 in funds - something like that. Now, in reality a PM-03 is pretty low on the bureaucratic totem pole. I wasn't exactly sent to get coffee, but people's eyes for sure flickered in my direction when they were too lazy to get themselves a refill. (For the record, sometimes I was nice, as a professional gesture, and offered to get people another cup, unasked. And sometimes I'd hand them my cup and say, "Yeah, I'd love some more, too - will you get me a refill when you go?")

And as lowly as I was, and as marginal an office as was the one in which I toiled, there in Calgary, between 2002 and 2004, I can tell you that we knew EVERYTHING before it happened in Downtown Canada (read: Ottawa). We heard about every snotty nose, every bad case of hiccups, every small fuckup. And because of our reliability security status, we couldn't say anything about any of it outside the office. ...Like about the provincial civil servants in Ontario who were caught writing grant cheques to themselves, with the collusion of their department's finance wing. Something like $175,000 down the pisser. Ever hear about that? Nope. Boy did that get dealt with quietly. Everyone sacked. Department essentially shut down. ...And no media coverage.

That Ontario scandal was an internal, provincial-government matter halfway across the country from our 8-person outpost of Canadian Heritage in Calgary. And we knew about it.

So really, don't insult your own intelligence. Let me make it baldly plain, in case it isn't already: Paul Martin knew about the Sponsorship money and where it was going. He knew names, he knew amounts, and he knew dates. Please, don't kid yourself. Or do yourself a favour and go buy an ostrich costume to complete the look.  

Anyway, what I'm driving at is this - once something like that comes out, you just can't elect that same party into power again. It'd be giving them a renewed mandate: Yes! More of the same graft and stealing, please! Well done with the last round of slimebag backroom deals - give us more! So for that reason and that reason alone, I'm glad of the result.

Hopefully Canada is well served by this new government. For the record, Turner and I voted at an advance ballot held in our riding of Calgary Centre (do I even need to mention that it's a Conservative stronghold?). I won't speak for T, but I voted NDP. Rock on.

Categories: Canadiana

Comments [17]

Val's One Liners

Coming soon to an embroidered sampler near you... Val's newest project, a comprehensive collection of truly funny One Liners.

A day without sunshine is... like, you know? ...  Night.  (Sez Val: "Ha ha ha! I laughed my HEAD off at that one!") 

"We've got our shit together" has been henceforth been replaced by "we've got our poop in a group".

But Mom's all-time favourite one-liner is by Groucho Marx: Time flies like an arrow... fruit flies like a banana.

UPDATE - this just in from Val: what if the hokey pokey really is what it's all about? (12:48pm, Wednesday)

In the honourable mentions category, the best-ever inappropriate one-liner was made by my Grampa, in 1978, upon the news that a friend of the family had died: "... Well, there are people dying today that have never died before!"

I defy you to say that with a straight face the next time you hear of a death in your community. It can't be done. It's awful.

Categories: Family | Nakusp

Comments [11]

I Dig The Expat Life

Now. It's far from home, and I don't speak much Thai. And you've heard about how I hate the dogs in Asia (but I've started investing in dog treats to keep them at bay when I walk at night, and it's going better). Those are the down sides.

Here are the upsides of expat life here in Bangkok:

• living with great friends - hurray!
• warm nights (28C after sundown)
• 55 cent papaya, 60 cent pineapple, 30 cent watermelon...
• two swimming pools, a kids' play area, and tennis courts
• affordable childcare (more on the new nanny to come)
• noodle and fried fish and iced coffee stalls just up at the corner... all food is delicious in Thailand
• two blocks from the BTS Skytrain, Ekkamai station
• Shiva and Ganesh and Krishna statues for Sloane to visit and ring the bells (the residents of this complex are predominantly Indian)
• giant bottles of drinking water delivered to the door
• also, flats of soda water can be arranged
• friendly adults coming from all directions to smile and laugh and wave at and play peekaboo with Sloane
• $10 massages (no funny business) available every two blocks
• wireless internet here at Chez Niedzwiecki-Sayo
• affordable sushi in every grocery store
• three blocks to the fancy-dancy movie theatre with recline-y seats and English films
• gym with treadmills, weight machines, and morning aerobics classes just one storey up from the flat
• bank at the top of the block
• affordable taxies everywhere ($6 max to go anywhere in Bangkok)
• a zillion kid-friendly activities all over the city - shrines, markets, temples, parks, shopping malls

So. ...Dad: keep the cat, adopt out our plants, redirect our mail. Then sell the house and send the proceeds - we're not coming back!

Categories: Asia 2006

Comments [12]

Thanks A Zil!

Thab has posted a lovely Ode to Sloane on her website: Beautiful Baby.

Lookit me go! Walkies with Auntie Thab!

Video gamin' at the Niedzwiecki-Sayo household.

Sloane may be nigh-near perfect, but Turner and I are trying to be on our best behaviour - cleanin' stuff up, doin' the towels laundry, and makin' sure there's an Ashley-friendly amount of toilet paper on hand (I... I have a sickness. It's about the toilet paper, and having enough of it in the house. Turner has banned me from buying ANY MORE toilet paper at Costco back home until we get through the four giant packages we already have in the basement. I have NO SUCH RESTRICTION here! Mwah ha ha ha!). You know. The stuff you do when you're a guest and you are trying to show your hosts that despite what they already know about how you live, you know how to act like you have good manners.

Thab and I live well together, for the record. I'll tell one story to illustrate this point. It won't be about how there were two bedrooms, one of which was regular-sized and one of which was tiny, and how we flipped a coin over the phone to see who got the big room, and that I was the coin-flipper and that it turned out that Thab lost/I won the big room, and that although I was the one flipping the coin I really was honest about it and I really did win it fair and squarely but Thab and I didn't know each other super-well at that point and although she was very gracious in defeat and her parents came and erected shelves and a special desk to allow her some semblance of normal life in that tiny closet of a bedroom, I always suspected that she suspected that I had maybe fixed the toss - which I totally, really, sincerely, genuinely didn't - until after a few months of living together when she probably decided that I'm the honest person that I am. I won't tell you that story.

And I won't tell you the story about how, before Thab and I first moved in together, I'd spent that summer living with these assholes who insisted that we have a shared-food situation even though I was never at home (I worked a lot), but that after they ate up all my month's worth of canned goods they decided that we weren't doing a shared-food situation anymore and I was out $400 in food and still worked a lot besides and I was really mad, so when Thab suggested we do a shared-food arrangement I was like "NO" and she was all, "Maybe?" and I was all, "NO" and she was all, "uh... maybe? Like, later?" and I was all, "NO NO NO, NO SHARED FOOD ARRANGEMENT, no, not ever", and she figured Okay, maybe later, and then fed me little things for a long time just to be nice even though I never shared food for months and months and finally, later, we both got really sick and I cured us with a ginger and garlic soup and then after that we shared food. Won't tell you about that, either.

No, I'll tell you just the one story, even though there are many, and the One is this one:

When we lived in Guelph, there was this glass in the bathroom. It was Thaba's, and it was gross. It got increasingly stained with flicky bits of toothpaste and hair and bathroom mung, the water never got rinsed out and it started to go all weird inside. If it had started to smell, I might have snapped. As it was, it just got bizarre and dirty and scary, and it stayed in the bathroom, always in the same place. Thaba is such a specific person about so much of her life that I figured if the glass was in the bathroom, then she wanted it there, so damned if I was going to mess with her special glass. Over the months that glass got grosser and grosser. I just could not, for the life of me, figure out why the hell Thab liked that glass so much, but like I say, I didn't touch it.

I don't know how it came up, but one day, finally, the subject of the glass was broached. We were in the kitchen, and suddenly it was there, upon us: what the fuck is with that skanky glass in the bathroom?!

Before we even started talking properly about it, we both started laughing. "I... thought it was... YOUR GLASS!" Thaba finally choked out. I think that was when I actually fell on the floor, asphyxiating, crying and laughing. "NO! It's YOUR GLASS! I wasn't going to touch YOUR SPECIAL GLASS!" screeched I. Months and months had gone by since the glass's first appearance on the bathroom counter. We'd both been looking at it every time we went in there to pee, every time we showered, every time we brushed our teeth. "NO! IT'S YOURS!" sputtered Thab, "I figured you WANTED it like that. I thought you must LIKE it somehow - otherwise it wouldn't be so disgusting and still in there!" I have never, ever laughed so hard in my IN-tyre life. Lord.

We finally decided that it must have been put there by a guest at one of our many English Department/School of Rural Planning and Development combo parties. The next day we were too hung over to notice it during the cleanup. And then it just... became a fixture.

...You see? That's good living. Respectful, no toucha my stuuuuuufff, but with a smile.

Thanks for having us, Thab!

Categories: Asia 2006 | Friends

Comments [11]

Sloane's Pictoral Week In Review: 43.0

Taken January 14, 2006

Naptime: Sloane's all settled in at Thab & Phet's here in steamy Bangkok... hiding from the air conditioning.

Categories: Asia 2006 | Sloane

Comments [12]

Lupang Hinirang

When we were making the plan to come to Asia for the book research, we knew having Sloane along with us would present certain logistical obstacles. That we wouldn't be able to balance the child care responsibilities between us like in Calgary (Turner takes mornings, I'm on in the afternoons), for example. If I was to be the primary,-all-the-time caregiver here it would mean I wouldn't be able to work on the research logistics, the blog, or the photographs as much as we'd like. So at Thaba's suggestion, we started looking into getting a nanny for Sloane.

In the weeks leading up to our departure from Canada, Thab gave me a website to browse that had local Bangkok nannies advertised in a classifieds section. I looked through it, but really couldn't commit to starting an interview process remotely by email or over the telephone - Christmas way too busy to get into long distance telephone calls with strangers about arrangements and details and salary conversations and whatnot.

Thab also kindly asked around at school and through her network: Do you know anyone looking for a temporary position? Beautiful, smiling 10-month-old baby seeks loving daytime nanny to play games and do walkies. Sounds like a good gig, right? She got a few interested bites. But overall we decided to wait until we arrived in Bangkok to make any final arrangements.

Which is what I've been doing for the last couple of days. Calling people from the local website. Registering with a worldwide au pair sourcing company, GreatAuPair.com - you can see our profile here. Emailing people back, arranging interviews, conducting interviews. I found one lovely woman who is leaving for a position in the US next week, but wanted to pick up a bit of work before she goes. So she's watching Sloane today and tomorrow while I get childcare for the rest of January and February ironed out with the other candidates.

There's a whole thing when you're hiring a nanny, obviously. Hours. Pay. Activities. But right off the bat you have to decide whether you want "live in", or "live out". Obviously, we don't want a live-in caregiver for Sloane. For one thing, there's nowhere extra for someone to live here, now that we've fully colonized Thab & Phet's guest room with our patented Explosion Of Stuff method of moving into new (even temporary) digs. But mostly we don't need someone here all the time - I'm just looking for a few hours each day to email people in Auroville about our February plans, chase around the morons at Singapore's Economic Development agency for contacts with their energy initiative, follow the progress of our grant applications back in Canada, take photos to accompany TheGeographyofHope.com's blog (soon to be live - live!), and get in a few hours of my own work and some treadmill time at the gym upstairs, besides. I need four hours in the middle of the day, maybe four and a half, tops.

The more I thought about it, and the further into the process I got, the more I liked the idea of a lovely live-out nanny for our girl - in my mind she'd be a young woman who would play with Sloane between the day's naps, keep her occupied and happy, while Mama pounds away on the computer. She'd speak Thai to the baby, take her for walks around the complex, feed her lunch, play with the blocks. I'd be right here, in the apartment, so I could go to her anytime Sloane needed me, and put her down for naps, an in general just satisfy my own need to be near her, while also getting my portion of the work done. Seemed like a grand plan to me. I'm just sorry we can't afford a nanny in Calgary.

Then the candidates started voicing their interest in our profile, and Thab's contact got back to her. A lot of the people available to work are Filipinos, most of whom are currently in the Philippines. We got a few hits from Polish au pairs, too, and an Afrikaaner from Jo'burg. I had to amend our online profile to state explicitly that we can't bring anyone over to Thailand from outside the country, which slowed the traffic from the rest of the world. But we keep getting statements of interest from the Filipinos, in Zamboanga and Iloilo and Cebu and elsewhere, hoping we will consider their profiles anyway, and I keep having to turn them down. It's been said that Filipinos are the world's nannies, and certainly this can seem to be the case in some parts of suburban Toronto and California. But I never really wanted to have a Filipino nanny for Sloane, and this whole process has set me to thinking a great deal about my experiences with the Philippines.

Bayang magiliw

When I first went to the Philippines in 1995, I was looking for something. An experience, I guess. I had one semester left to go at Queen's, and the mandatory final course I needed to graduate from my program wasn't offered until the winter term. Which meant I had the summer and fall to do with what I liked. I had a penpal in Singapore to whom I'd been writing since I was 11 years old, and I wanted to meet her. In retrospect I realize that I could have just packed up and travelled in Southeast Asia for seven or eight months. But, you know. I'd travelled around Europe on my own but Asia seemed a different matter entirely. This was before Thailand was a completely stomped-down well-beaten full-moon-rave path and Vietnam only that year started issuing 2-week visas to westerners. Plenty of people were travelling in the region, don't get me wrong - but it wasn't yet the Southeast Asia of The Beach, if you know what I mean. (Or rather, it was, but that fact hadn't yet been enshrined in western backpacker culture starring Leonardo diCaprio.) I wanted some sort of safety net, so I found a program that combined volunteer work with college coursework, paid my tuition, and headed off for four months in Manila - after which I would head to Singapore to meet my penpal and travel around the region a bit.

My memories of that first stint in the Philippines are fond, to a point. I made some lovely friends, though most of them were Korean nationals living in Manila to learn English, or other foreigners on cultural exchange-type programs like mine. The vicar who married Turner and I, Claire - for example. Claire and I met at Trinity College of Quezon City where we were both involved in service-learning programs. I had a few Filipino friends, notably Joshua (a cheating charmer who mainly wanted to get in my pants) and Jerome (a flamboyant bakla performer, head of the school's alterna-theatre troope). But mostly I was regarded by my fellow students and the teachers alike as an ungainly, rich foreigner, and I was treated as such. Overall, they didn't understand me and I didn't understand them. Most of the students at the school could speak English, but weren't comfortable enough with their command of the language to talk to me, so mostly they stared. The girls hid their faces behind handkerchiefs and giggled at me, slipping away. The boys looked at me with a mixture of curiosity, wariness, and lust. Before I got used to it (and before I joined the soccer team, where I found my friends), it was kind of lonely, I'll be honest.

Although Filipino hospitality is legendary, in my 1995 experience I found the legend to be in Filipinos' own minds. I was a student, and travelling with very little money. I think I had $450 in spending cash with me, meant to last my whole seven months overseas. But I was often treated by my hosts as a revenue-generating opportunity, and I came to resent this dynamic. I'm not talking about being 'ripped off' for bananas or a tshirt in the market. I learned basic Tagalog and the jeepney routes, I could get around the city and keep myself fed and clothed without too much hassle, and since my interactions with most of the people I saw daily were brief and transactional, my life was fairly simple in this regard. I wasn't looking to have some wild drunken coming-of-age experience over there - I was an earnest and probably somewhat misguided young woman sincerely interested in working for my volunteer placement and going to my classes (statistics and Spanish, mainly), and I avoided tourist areas and the trappings of western indulgence borne of the Philippine willingness to cater to foreigners' needs - military & sexual most famously, and otherwise.

So it was more like this: in my time in Manila I never met a Filipino who wasn't looking to immigrate. To the United States, preferably, but Canada would be just fine, too. Within a week of arrival I was privately approached by no fewer than a dozen total strangers asking me if I would assist them to immigrate to Canada. Over the course of my time there I'm certain the final tally of interactions on this topic numbered in the hundreds and hundreds. It was dizzying and off-putting and bizarre to be so consistently and unabashedly requested to perform what, to me, seemed to be a humungous, life-changing and profoundly important favour - by people I didn't know, by people I did know but had no real connection with, and by people with whom I thought I was developing a real relationship though it became quickly obvious that the friendship was a means to an immigration end... as soon as I flusteringly explained that I had no idea about how to help them come to Canada, the friendship disappeared and they'd glide past me in the halls as though I wasn't there (initially to my bewildered shock, and later to my resigned disappointment). After many months considering the situation, I came to think that this fact might be the crux of all the Philippines' problems: that many (most?) of the rich and able leave, and those who are left behind want to get the hell out, too.

I understand now what I seemed to them, at the time. I know that to even go to the Philippines as a 20-year-old on an extracurricular program represented a measure of disposable income and a nationality advantage that the majority of the people I met would never have. But in my small-minded way, I minded being taken advantage of, regardless of the reasoning. I minded that my host mother would ignore me except when I was paying my weekly rent, during which ritual she would behave as though I was a well-loved daughter. It made me feel a bit queasy, the hypocrisy and servility of that weekly routine. I finally had to move out because I couldn't take the simmering hostility of my host brothers, one of whom was a nurse who'd been denied immigration to Canada (officially, by our government - not by me) and held me personally responsible in some way (I slipped badly on the polished wood stairs one day, bruising my tailbone. He didn't help me up, and when I was later rubbing my bum and voicing my surprise at the fall he sniffed, "You're used to walking on wall-to-wall carpet, I suppose"). The other one was a lazy good-for-nothing, who lost the family's new puppy (he left the door open and it walked away, never to be seen again) and tried to pin it on me, among other things. My host sister and I were exactly the same age, but that was where the similarities ended. Initially I thought we could be good friends, but she was very involved with her boyfriend, who she'd met the year before at the Pope's visit to Manila. It was thought by my host mother (the strictest Catholic I've ever known) that her daughter's match was therefore blessed by the Pontiff and destined to be consummated in marriage - I don't think my host sister ever had a chance. Oliver, the boyfriend, was a dull, controlling boy who only hit her "sometimes". I tried to leave my Canadian feminism at the door when I entered the Philippines, but I couldn't ever get past the fact that he'd smack her, even in front of us - and worse yet, nobody said anything. I just couldn't bring myself to nice it up with him when he came over (which was often) as a result. ...I don't think he liked me much, either.  

Perlas Ng Silanganan

Now, let it be said that the Philippines is perhaps physically the most beautiful country I've ever visited. Volcanos, beaches, rice terraces, rainforest, seascapes and hilltops, misty mountains and steaming flat plains... the quality of light is incredible. It is rich in natural resources, and it's been said by more knowledgeable Asiaphiles than me that if the Philippines ever got its shit together (i.e. elected officials of an ilk different than the stream-of-nightmare-consciousness thieves and bandits they've elected for generations who've used the national treasury as a personal slush fund... anyone else, how 'bout?), it could take enormous advantage of the fact that it's the only large English-speaking country in Asia. Could capitalize on its relationship with the United States to push for preferential trade relations. Could host UN agencies, multinational corporations, and NGO headquarters. Could supply translators and executives to the whole region. It's a shame, really, the wasted potential and all the grab-the-money-and-run consequences of poor government and brain drain: urban decay, traffic like nowhere else on earth, the worst air quality I've ever experienced (and I've lived in Delhi), bureaucratic corruption and paralysis. It's tragic.

And every born-and-raised-in-the-Philippines-Filipino I've ever met outside the Philippines has a tragic story. I mean, we all have tragic stories. But they'll tell you their tragic story inside of five minutes of the first hello, I guess is the difference. The culture of immigration-into-servitude among lower-middle class Filipinos has created a kind of widespread normalization of long-term seperation of parents from children, wives from husbands, families from clan, that I've never been able to fully wrap my head around. It is not in any way unusual to meet Filipinas who have spouses, children, families, houses, jobs, and whole lives waiting for them in stasis back in the Philippines - while they toil away as domestics, nannies, and entertainers, in isolation and obscurity and at very low rates of pay, in Hong Kong condos and Dubai highrise compounds and faceless Canadian suburbs. There is this "what can I do? I must do this..." flap of the hands, sorrowful upturning of the face, when you talk to them about their situation. Why are you so far from your family? Don't you miss them? Isn't there ANYTHING you could do back home? When are you going to see your children again? Don't know, bahala na. By no means are Filipinos alone in being migrant workers working terrible jobs far from home and sending remittances back to keep the family afloat, I do realize this. It happens all over the world. I think it's these Filipinos' incomparable propensity to communicate the difficulty of their circumstances, and somehow plead for assistance while seeming entirely unable to act on their own behalf, that really gets to me. (And yet, and yet: so many want to immigrate. So much so that they'll leave under any circumstances. It boggles.)

And maybe it's just me. I don't know why, but I am so affected by these stories. I find them devastatingly corrosive to my sense of the world. Yes, wars; yes, child abuse; yes, AIDS. Yes yes yes, I know about all that. Turns out the thing that can set my skin feeling weird and prickly is proximity to a Filipino unpacking their life sorrows for perusal, and looking at me as though I should do something about it all.

Alab Ng Puso

Thab's contact's friend had been unreachable for a few days by phone, which is how I ended up on the au pair website in the first place. The more I thought about it, the more I was kind of glad I was involved in the whole interview process and able to assess a bunch of Thai candidates and choose someone well-suited to Sloane from a pool of interested applicants. And what's more, I was hoping I might find a suitable nanny through the website before we managed to get this contact woman on the phone. I knew Thab's contact's friend was Filipina and I was increasingly appreciative of the idea of hiring a Thai. I'd been thinking a lot about the Philippines over the last week, and pondering the repeated need to disqualify these online nanny candidates from the Philippines because they weren't reading the part of our profile that clearly states that we cannot bring anyone in from outside Bangkok. There was something about it all that made me think it might be better to steer our choice towards a Thai nanny for Sloaner.

So although I tried to keep an open mind, when I met the woman last night I suspected it might go a certain way, and it did. Over the course of the interview it came out that she was a primary school teacher in the Philippines. A friend from home is working at an international school here, and told her she could probably find work as a teaching assistant at the school. She has a one-year-old daughter and a husband back in Palañaque, and left them behind last August to come to Bangkok to look for work. The job didn't pan out, and she found herself stuck in the city, forced to take a domestic position with an Australian family to make a little money. Her current position is mornings; I would need her from 10:30am to 3:30pm, so it wasn't going to work out, anyway. But she told me that she has to take three "rides" (busses), transferring again and again, to get from where she stays to where she works at the Australians'. And that it would only be two rides to come to us... 

Sa Dibdib Mo'y Buhay

When I returned to Canada in 1996, I missed the Philippines terribly. I felt a kinship with Filipinos who'd emigrated and sought out opportunities to talk to them. I did all my final major undergraduate papers on various topics pertaining to the Philippines, and got into graduate school on scholarship on the strength of those papers and the volunteer work I'd done in Manila the previous year. I found the Filipino grocery near Bathurst and St. Clair in Toronto and took Turner there to look at the Tagalog movie boxes and sample the boiled peanuts and adobo squid when we were first dating. I went to Markham and Scarborough to visit relatives of Filipino acquaintances back in Manila, young women working as nannies or married to Canadian men who were lonely for home and still adjusting to Canada.

When I got into my Master's at Guelph I was assigned this yucky old lech as my advisor, and had to jettison my original thesis topic in order to get away from him in a hurry two-thirds of the way through my first year. In the midst of that schmozzle, I won a travel grant to return to Southeast Asia for research, and (too) quickly assembled a new topic and resources surrounding a project that would take me back to the Philippines. Mainly because I had contacts in place, there. Mainly because it would be easy to set up an advisor at the school I'd attended in 1995. Mainly because I was stressed, and had wrapped my memories of the Philippines in gauzy paper and cherished them, ignoring the difficult times and pushing them to the back of my brain. When I got to Manila, I quickly realized that my research was a mess and all the presuppositions for the proposed project were incorrect. It was all basically a big waste of time and money and energy, and I was lucky that I managed to pull enough facts and figures together to write my major paper - which basically confirmed two or three housing principles that many, many urban researchers before me had already established. It really wasn't groundbreaking or original or even very good, is what I'm saying.

However, that second trip to the Philippines was an eye-opener, different in so many ways from my first school-bound experience. I stayed in a friend's house in Cavite when I did the writing work of my research, hosted beautifully (and a bit over-zealously) by Rosing, the maid attached to my friend's otherwise empty home. My host's brother had me to dinner as a family member every night, and drove me into the city whenever I commuted back to my project site in Cainta. They kept me at Christmastime when I was far from home and sad, and never said a word about the crappy, totally sub-standard presents I bought for them using the last of my grant money. In my research village I lived with a family that had eight children, and they insisted I have my own room in their three-bedroom house. The people whose housing I was studying didn't want to cooperate with my research and they lied to me about everything on my surveys, but they were nice enough about it to make it clear they were lying (hence I was able to retroactively correct my results). I hired a research assistant who was amazingly competent (the aforementioned Joshua's sister, Julie) and worked her ass off for me, and really saved my bum when it came to the analysis.  

But despite all this, something inside me snapped when it came to dealing with the Philippines, and it crystalized as I was finishing that research work. Partly I think I was ashamed of how impatient I was with my host village, not being a good subject site for the poorly-designed project I was trying to carry out. I was angry that my first advisor at grad school had been such a manipulative asshole, but even moreso that I'd let him rattle me so badly that I didn't properly prepare and arrange a viable field project for my thesis work. I was a bit upset at my host mother from my first visit in 1995, a secretary at the school who I saw at least weekly because I'd be there to meet with my in-country advisor; for the weirdness with my initial stay in her home, plus the fact that I'd put in some money to cater a small party for my old professors from 1995 when I arrived to start my research, and she'd taken the money and made the food herself, instead - pocketing a big profit, and she bragged about this fact to me repeatedly. It was one of those things that you just didn't need to be told, you know? Just shut the hell up. 

Then there was the traffic (which is such a dominant aspect of everyday life in Manila that the word has evolved into an adjective in Pilipino English and Tagalog - ex. "It is SO trappik [traffic] today, 'di ba?"). The pollution. The noise (little known fact: roosters crow all night long - not just at dawn, and there were plenty of fighting cocks at my research site). The isolation from other academics, even other native English speakers. No hot water. Missing Turner like mad, just wanting to be in Canada with him - that was the worst. Just all the little and big things of living far from home, in the heat, trying to do an impossible and embarrassing job for which only you are responsible and only you are to blame. And with the two years' of reflection and distance, I was finally addressing some of the things that I'd seen the first time I lived in Manila - and it wasn't coming up roses by any means. The trying, that all-the-time necessary effort of living and working in the midst of the city and the people all the challenges, I just didn't want to do it anymore. So after Christmas, I finished up the research as quickly as I could, and went home early. When I left, I was pretty sure I might never go back to the Philippines. Unless it's to be a political tourist during an election, and we go with Joey, I still don't know if I ever will.

Lupang Hinirang

Riding the Skytrain

Sloane, on her busy morning commute in Bangkok

Wednesday morning, en route to Chulalongkorn University to meet up with Dr. Soontorn Boonyatikarn, a revolutionary Thai architect Turner is interviewing for the book.

Categories: Sloane

Comments [5]

Now You Know Why They Mostly Eat Out

Overheard at the Niedzwiecki-Sayo household in Bangkok, 7:46pm:

Thaba: "Okay Ji, if you want that last piece of bacon, you're going to have to have a couple more bites of pizza... Ha ha ha! Queeeeen of the Bangkok trailer park!"

Categories: Asia 2006 | Friends

Comments [11]

Turner has high hopes for Sloane's language proficiency. Turns out she has a knack for all kinds of tones and sounds. Apparently "babies" can "learn" "any" "language". Humph!

Thab & Phet & Ji's Thai alphabet chart

"Buh" - bbbumblebee stinger

"Juh" - Juuuh-orge Washington

"FF" - FFFFoghorn Leghorn

Categories: Asia 2006

Comments [12]

New Year's Resolution

I used to write a lot of letters, as you might know. You may have been a recipient of a portion of the largesse, or you may have read this post a few months ago. In any case, I was a woman of letters, as it were.

I also used to faithfully keep a journal. It used to be that I'd fill one of those big black art sketchbooks with my writing and pictures and souvenirs once every six or eight months. I have dozens of these books stored in big plastic boxes in the basement at Spiller Road.

What happened? Well, university happened, which cut my output by at least half, though I still wrote, a lot. Then email came into our lives (for me, circa 1994). It was an enormous blessing, was email, but it really changed everything.

I'm able to type much faster than I can write things out longhand and the advent of email allowed for the exponential increase of the amount of stuff I wrote down for myself and other people. But the reality is that email doesn't suit all relationships, and is a fundamentally different sort of correspondence than sending a note in an envelope with a stamp through the post, and different than squirrelling away your stupid navel-gazing self-involved memories in a black book. So I found that although my writing became fuller and deeper and cleaner through my worship of email as a medium, some stories and ideas got lost. And the people I know and love - I don't talk to them as often as I'd like.

So, one of my New Year's Resolutions is this: to tell people when I'm thinking of them. And to tell the stories that flit through my mind - those random ones that don't make sense in terms of timing but come back, unbidden, anyway. I started to put this into practice a bit before Christmas, sending a solitary xmas card out, to a friend I'd been meaning to write to for ages. And after the new year I sent out one or two emails to old friends telling them of a few memories of them that had been bouncing around my head the few days prior.

I know that some memories just get relegated to the dusty back shelves of my brain, uncatelogued and for all intents and purposes lost, if I don't write them down. So I think I'll put them here.

Therefore without further ado, I present today's story, "How Grandma Forgot That I'm Named After Her." It came to my brain while we were on Lantau, in the context of the many conversations we had about why we were there, and having named Sloane after the island. (It should be said that I am not airing a grudge here - it's just a funny and typical story about Grandma, and certainly my family will recognize Grandma's tone and attitude in this conversation.)

INT: Auntie Jackie's house in Canmore, December 2003. Grandma Kay is visiting for Christmas. Turner is living in Canmore, three blocks away, finishing up the writing of Planet Simpson. Ash is sitting on Grandma's bed.

Necessary background for this story: my full name is Ashley Kathleen Bristowe. My grandmother is Kay, short for Kathleen. Also, I am the oldest grandchild (except for Alanna). Leo is Uncle Leo, my grandmother's son. Jessica is his daughter, my cousin.

...We join the conversation already in progress.

Ash: So Leo was telling me about how he chose Jessica's middle name, I thought it was a cool story.

Grandma: What's that name? Tyra? ...What did he say?

Ash: Oh, you know - it was after a woman lion tamer in an old movie, that the character's name was Tyra. You know, Leo the lion, Tyra the lion tamer. I thought it was a neat reason, and interesting that he'd sort of picked the name out and thought about it.

Grandma: Yes, her mother Anne very much wanted her to be called, "Jessica".

Ash: Right. She is.

Grandma: The middle name, I was always sorry about that.

Ash: Why?

Grandma: Oh, well!

Ash: C'mon! It's a cool story, had some thought put into it - people are named without too much thought or without any good reason, lots of times.

Grandma: Well... I thought that Leo might name her after me.

Ash: For the Jessica part?

Grandma: No. The middle name. I always wanted a grandchild named after me.

Ash: [sort of not knowing how to put this, looking skyward] ...Uhhhhhh, Grandma, you DO have a grandchild named after you.

Grandma:No I don't... I was always sad about that.

Ash: Uh, no, Grandma. You do have a grandchild named after you.

Grandma: Who!?

Ash: Uhhhhh, Grandma, I am named after you. Kathleen. Is my middle name.

Grandma: ...Oh. Well!

Ash: ...Right! Well!

Categories: Family

Comments [11]

So What?

INT: Early morning, Bangkok, Thab & Phet's apartment. Ash and Turner are up with Sloane for her morning feed in the big bed. There is a local bird who does a loud, two-pronged call in the pre-dawn light, here. Yesterday morning it was calling and calling and calling after Ash and Sloane got up. It starts this morning's singsgong as Sloane is eating.

T: ...Ah, there he is, my old friend the So What bird.

A: Heh?

T: You hear it? So what? So what?

A: [he's right, it does sound a bit like So what?] Ah...

T: ...As in me, yesterday: - "Hey, tryin' to sleep here." - "So what?"

A: [finds this amazingly funny for 6:10am, and laughs and laughs]

Sloane eats, divebombs the boob.

A: ...he should meet the Cheeseburger Bird. [The Cheeseburger bird is a common bird in North America, but we haven't quite figured out which one it is, yet - the northern flicker? The spotted towhee? We're not sure - but I've heard it across Canada, from BC to Nova Scotia, in the summertime. It has a three-pronged call that sounds distinctly like Cheeeese-bur-ger! ...Hence the Bristowe-Turner-christened name.]

T: Nah, they wouldn't like each other. Both big showboats.

A: [laughing, laughing]

T: Like Madonna and Elton John.

A: [having been reading WAY too many of Thab's gossip magazines in the last few days] Apparently they like each other.

T: [on fire, this morning] But they wouldn't get married.

A: [laughing, laughing]

Sloane eats. Bounces her head against A's chest a bit.

T: Cheeseburger! So what? Cheeseburger! So what?

Categories: Married Life | Turner

Comments [15]

Jetlaggin'... She Hopes You Like Jetlaggin' Too

4:30am folks and it's Up and At 'Em with our girlie.

Making herself right at home, Sloane gets to gnawing on Ji's pencil crayons (don't eat the green ones, they're not ripe yet).

Categories: Asia 2006 | Sloane

Comments [13]

Lantau Island: Beyond The Airport

We arrived in Hong Kong very late on Tuesday night off our Korean Airlines flight. That's the background you get for this photo essay of our time on Lantau Island...

When Sloane woke, bright and shiny and rip-ready to start the day at 5:30am Wednesday morning, it was still dark. But we'd had most of a proper night's sleep and after hours and hours of travel I'd expected her to be a lot more whacked off her schedule. So I crept out of bed and wrapped us both in a hotel blanket, and we headed out to explore the environs. (Turner got extra sleep - I got parenting points for cashing-in later!) Before we left Canada, in quiet moments when I was thinking of the upcoming trip, I had this persistent nice image of riding the ferries with Sloane on my hip in the sling. So we made our way to the ferry landing at Mui Wo and caught the next boat to Hong Kong Island.

Sunrise over Hong Kong Island, as seen from the Lantau ferry

After our morning of ferry riding through the container-ship- and ferry- and tugboat- and other-boat-jammed waters of Hong Kong harbour (not shown above - in the photo HK's inter-island waters look uncharacteristically unpopulated, an anomaly), Sloane and I came back to the room and crashed for three hours.

Turner woke us up with a lovely afternoon snack of papaya from the market next door, for which he apparently paid about 80 cents. Everything in Hong Kong is expensive except for the papaya, apparently.

Something you may not know about me is that I love papaya. On our honeymoon in Cuba, Turner watched in horror every morning as I plowed through three-quarters of the papaya on display, to the exclusion of everything else at the gymnasium-sized resort buffet. ("Why did you never reveal this monstrous papaya appetite before we wed?", he was clearly thinking. Ah, but I am cleverererrrer than I look!, thinked I.) And in India I once ate so much papaya that the next day my poo was completely orange. Cousin Jenna actually witnessed this, so she can vouch for the truth of that statement. (For the record, I know you really wanted to know that about me. So now you do. If you are in a papaya-prolific area, I suggest you try this experiment. "Fascinating" just doesn't do justice to the ORANGE-ness.) Anyway, Turner is a lovely man, so he went out and foraged for papaya for his family.

Shown here: Papaya Eating Contest, part one. Sloane takes after Mama in the papaya enthusiasm department.

That afternoon (still Wednesday, mind), we took the bus 45 minutes down Lantau's hairpin highways (under construction every 3-4 km for maintenance) and up up up to the top of the island's mountain range, to the Po Lin monastery, where they have a bronze sitting buddha.

Whenever you're travelling in a Buddhist area, there's always a buddha image to go see, and it's always the "biggest"... most are pretty big, in truth. But the "biggest" always comes with a qualifer: the biggest jade buddha, the biggest reclining stone buddha, the biggest buddha above 1200m altitude, the biggest kneeling buddha in India, and so on. So this buddha was the "biggest" of course, in this case the biggest seated outdoor bronze buddha (in the world - I know you're keeping track. And you're thinking, "Is there a bigger one that's indoors?" ...Who's to say. Not me). ...It was pretty big.  

Turner heads up the approximately 60 kabillion steps to Po Lin's Tian Tan bronze buddha, with the Sloaner packsack on his back (Valerreeee valerraah)

Who's driving this circumnavigation bus, anyway? Zen mentorship or walkies - you decide.

Dusk at the bottom of the hill.

After the biggest-bronze-buddha hike (nice views, by the way), we took a taxi down to a nearby fishing village (Tai O? I think?) for dinner. ...Then we realized Sloane was getting cranky, and it was getting dark, and most importantly that none of the supposedly lauded restaurants had many people in them - Turner's cardinal rule of restaurant-choosingness-when-travelling. And the village smelled (just a little. But it was a fishing village, and it smelled like fish, so I guess I should cut them some slack). Since we weren't particularly starving yet (yay, papaya afternoon snackie) we decided to catch the bus back to Mui Wo and find something there. Here is a photo of the bus stop & schedule, for your enjoyment:

With Chinese characters on it, an' everything. Lookit us, in foreign lands! With busses!

We got dinner at the "Cooked Food Market" in Mui Wo, Sloane asleep in the sling. I took pictures, but they didn't turn out. It was dark, we were jetlagged, and I had a sleeping baby on my hip = my excuses.

The next day (being yesterday, being Thursday) we were up bright an' early to pack up and move em' out to the airport to catch our 10:45am flight to Bangkok.&n