Oh Canada

Canada continues to creep up on me in the oddest of places. While recently wandering through the Bangkok airport, killing time in that sluggish, aimless way that only airports allow, I checked out one of the myriad mini-bookshops that that seem to sprout, whole and complete, every forty feet, in between the Internet cafes and just beside the Duty Free shops, bursting with chocolate. One of the books on display was a collection of Canadian writer Mordecai Richler's essays on sports. Having not been in a Canadian bookstore in well over a year, it had been, logically, a great little while since I'd seen any book about anything remotely Canadian gracing the shelves anywhere in Asia. I bought the book (paid in baht), and spent the better part of the hour flight between Bangkok and Phnom Penh reading about Edmonton hockey and Montreal baseball, written in that droll, sardonic style that was Richler's grumpy trademark.

Oh, but there's more Canadiana drifting through the air than one would at first think. Here, in the Philippines, in Baguio City, at the mall. (Of all places.) While waiting for the afternoon matinee of the latest Harry Potter flick with a ten-year old boy and a twelve-year old girl in tow I noticed the familiar voices of SCTV's Bob and Doug Mackenzie (aka Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, the latter having been born in my hometown) floating from the loudspeakers, their classic, if irreverent, version of 'The 12 Days of Christmas' lighting up the drizzly, mallish afternoon. (Malls are malls, everywhere.)

So what am I to make of these disconnected examples of Canadian culture intruding themselves into my present-day, Asian experience? (And hey you, yeah, you in the back, Canada does, too, have a 'culture'. Are you trying to tell me that Alan Thicke just, like, emerged from nowhere? Hell, no.)

Probably not too much to make of it, I suppose. Canada is a G-8 country, after all; it's people are literate, and talented, and, periodically, worldly. Word gets around. Why shouldn't I find Canadian books in Thai airports, or comedy parodies in Filipino malls?

Ah, but there is no inferiority complex quite like the Canadian kind, growing up with our neighbour to the south ignoring us and unaware of its own, endless shadow; there is no experience quite like that of being Superman's slightly spastic kid brother.

And there is also the personal part, the comfortable part, Living abroad, the alien abstract inevitably becomes the routine necessity. Even from my present vantage point of the Philippines, itself not exactly the most prosperous of countries, I am able to gaze at Cambodia anew, and think: "Shit, that place is poor", as if it is only now, aay, taht I can truly understand what 'Cambodia' means.

Away, we lose touch with what we know, and we are sometimes -- if we're lucky, if we're listening hard enough, close enough -- reminded in the most mundane and unexpected ways of our roots and our depths.

WE ARE ALL HOWARD THE DUCK

Shoes.

After intense concentration and concerted reflection, I can sincerely state that my previous, sum-and-total knowledge and perception of the Philippines' social, historical, cultural, spirtual and metaphysical existence pretty much boiled down to:

Shoes.

Imdelda Marcos's shoes, that is. The wife of the leader. Infamous to me only because, during my late-childhood, early adolescence, he was known to my politically naive self only as one o those far-away in space and time world leaders sufficiently notorious to bear mention on Dan Rather's nightly newscasts, and probably because he was brought down to puppet-size life on that British comedy show Spitting Image, which also served as my first introduction to the Ayatollah and Qadafi. (If memory serves. And not that Marcos was all that bad; of that, I'm not sure. And while we're all gathered here, shooting the shit so casually about world leaders big and tall, why is it that so many newscasters still refer to Sadaam Hussein as 'Sadaam'. Isn't 'Saadam' his first name? Isn't that the equivalent of calling Carter 'Jimmy', Martin 'Paul', Seuss 'Dr.'?) I knew, too, probably from the occasional Johnny Carson joke, that Marcos's wife Imelda had a lot of shoes. Loved a lot of shoes. Probably had a fetish, all things considered.
(Not that I knew what that word even meant, but it was one of those pieces of vocabulary whose vortex contained within it all things adult and grown-up, from Johnny Carson's jokes to being able to drive to knowing exactly what to tell the barbershop to do when you sat in the chair and the scissors came out.)

Growing up, unless you're an army brat (or exceptionally curious), your knowledge of the world is understandably limited. Now I find myself, kind of grown up, for the third time (after Japan, after Cambodia) trying to make snese of a strange and foreign land. The process gets easier, to some extent (especially the third time around) the similarities inevitably slaughter the differences. And I always reach for whatever book I can find to help bridge the ever-present caps in knowledge and understanding. I've stumbled upon one here in Baguio called America's Boy: Marcos and the Philippines, written by an American who has lived, off and on, for over twenty years in a small Filipino villiage.

Things I've learned so far:

1) The Philippines are named after King Philip of Spain, who conquered this mass of seven thousand islands, largely in the name of Christ, which accounts for the fact that this country is now 95 % Catholic, an anomaly in Asia.

2) The Americans basically took over the country at the end of the Spain(Mexico)-America war, and until the Japanese seized control in WWII the Yanks weren't really sure what the heck to do with it. Was the United States conquerers or colonialists or what? Even they weren't sure.

3) The Philippines has been ruled by the Spaniards, the Americans and the Japanese; like most Asian nations (with notable exceptions, like Thailand), it's had other people telling them what to do and how to do it for extended periods of time, which usually, if not always, results in a pissed-off populace and years, if not decades, of convoluted politics and attempts, often armed, at achieving their own sense of solidarity and pride -- which is nothing more than dignity, elevated to the national scale.

These facts are just that, facts, and give little, if any, flavor. For that, you have to walk, listen, observe and see what your own confusions and uncertainties tell you about the land and, more importantly, about yourself.

Living in a foreign land you are, indeed, trapped in a world you never made, to steal the tagline from Marvel Comics' Howard the Duck. (The George Lucas-produced film version of which, by the way, I freakin' loved -- I must have been the only kid, if not person, to have seen the movie, read the comic adaptation, read the novelization, even, and actually bought the soundtrack to boot.)

Even as a kid, though, I never really understood that moto: 'Trapped in a world he never made!' Howard was, of course, an exile on earth from his home planet of DuckWorld, but who among us is not trapped in a world that we did not make? We don't choose where we're born, or to whom; we pop out into existence without a training manual or instructional video, and are thus expected to figure it all out as we go along.

In that sense, whether or not you live in a foreign country or the bedroom of your childhood home, you, too, are trapped in a world you never made. You have to look around and piece it all together. For me, with the Philippines, I start with Imdelda's shoes and work from there. For you, well, I'm not sure; that's your journey, in your world. It's just a matter of remaking that world again and again and again, day by day, until either you or it (or both) start to feel the gentle tug that indicates a coming together of the individual and society, however unlikely or jagged the fit may prove to be.

IN BAGUIO

They frisk you at the malls in Manila. In Baguio City, too. There is a slot for MEN and WOMEN, just like the (imaginary) doors we walked through in elementary school. You walk through, and you're padded down, and if you're absent of any hand grenades or switchblades or submachine guns, you're free to check out the Mickey Dees and cinema screens. I'd never been frisked before, let alone before going into a mall, but now, even after a few days, it's become a familiar experience. (And I didn't say I enjoyed it; don't go there, people...)

Landing in a new land, a strange land, you latch onto the familiar, noticing what's the same, what's different, what's odd, what's mundane. Usually it's a mishmash of all of the above. Here in the Philippines, given that most of the people are reasonably poor, people take jeepneys around town -- a kind of taxi-type bus that is reasonably cheap. Each of the jeepneys is decorated with their owners own particular colour and fetish, but most of them display red and white stickers that ask: "How's my driving?". Followed by a phone number, of course.

Here in Baguio, a mountain city, a northern city, it's full of what mountains are full of -- hills. Long and winding ones. Up and down ones. All of these hills reminding me of similar altitudes from my stay in Japan, down to the myriad checkerbox houses that dot the high and mighty landscape. Given that I'm 'up', it's cool, quite cool, late-October-in-Canada-cool. I like it. After the heat of Cambodia, endless and dense, it's nice to be cold again. Nice to need a blanket at night.

In a strange land, a foreign land, you embrace the unknown and reach for the familiar. I've already dived into a paperback copy of Lost Boy, Lost Girl, one of Peter Straub's latest fantastical, slightly horrific offerings. Straub being one of my adolescent idols, running right behind Stephen King, it's good, for a time, for a moment, to lose myself in harmless yet insightful entertainment. Good to see how literature can use the tangible weight of metaphors to make sense of the senseless. Good to be distracted from what even the fresh mountain air and sloping crescents can't deny.

LEAVIN' ON A JET PLANE

Somewhere in the endless suburbs of Tokyo there lies one particular train station named Sagami-Ono, on the Odakyu Line, and a stone's throw away from that particular station is a squat grey apartment building, four floors, that I lived in for four years. Room 417, if I recall correctly. I lived there and slept there and read there and learned there. Four years.

Whenever I hear about Japan or read about Japan or even look at a map of Japan, I always think: Something's missing. That 'something' is me, and my presence in that specific place, at that specific time. My sojurn there was not worthy of entry in an online encylopedia, of course, nor does it bear mentioning at the end of the latest economic and political news emanating from Nippon, but there is something special, almost sacred, about the fact that I was there, in that land, that I had a space of my own, if only briefly. It was mine.

I believe I will feel the same way about Cambodia when I leave, which is tomorrow. (I may be back, but who knows.) Of course, Cambodia is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the international news, but perhaps that will only accentuate the oddness and sacredness of the part it played in my life. There will always be me in Cambodia and Cambodia in me. Noone else need know; noone else need care. But the benefit of travel like this, of living in foreign lands, is that you become connected to the world.

Novelist James Michener's autobiography is entitled The World Is My Home, and famed Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, while resolutely maintaining that his films were made for the Japanese audience, acknowledged in his own autobiography that he, too, felt at home anywhere in the world. I don't know if I would go that far, not yet; I'm not sure how at home I would feel in Iraq, or Iceland, or Burkina Faso, where life expectancy hovers around thirty, tops.

Yet it really is one world; that most banal of truths is solidified again and again the more I travel, the more I see.

I was going to use this post to jot down a laundry list of memories of Cambodia, so that the future me (or the future you?) would be able to taste and touch and feel and sense what it was like. So that I would not forget.

But I will forget, some of it, and will remember, probably most of it. And the specifics I could list would only cloud my true intentions, which are to show that the differences are actually not so different after all. What would I list, anyway? People's smiles, people's actions, the specific contours of buildings and textures. To do so would be to highlight what's different, however, and I would rather leave this place and this time with the simple realization that perhaps such differences do not bear repeating. We're too much alike.

Off, tomorrow. Off to the Philippines. I never thought I'd end up in Japan, let alone Cambodia, let alone the Philippines, but so it goes. I guess I'm taking this 'canuckinasia' thing a bit too far; perhaps, eventually, I should return to 'canuckincanada', right?

Not that it would matter much, really.

In the end, it's all the same.

ESPECIALLY TIME

Time attains a different degree in a hospital. It moves at a stranger rate. Even if you are in a darkened room, light from the hallway outside, the world outside, blends in and reminds you that life moves on, regardless. Nurses bop in and out of rooms. There is no sense of night. An artificial glare bathes everything in its own indifferent glow. Racks of ragged paperback books sitting tight on a rack in the lobby beckon to be read, if only to substitute a story for the plodding passage of minute after minute. Who am I to refuse the pleas of such lonely books? While lounging around the Bangkok Hospital last week I took another gander at John Irving's A Widow For One Year, a book I'd read twice before years before, and, like Twain marvelling at how much his father had changed in seven years, I, too, was astounded at how much this particular book had mellowed and improved since 1998. (Not that I'm comparing myself to Twain, of course.)

As an unreserved John Irving junkie, I've always loved his work, but it's only been recently, in the past few years, that I've begun to truly understand what he has always claimed is the most important component of his novels -- or, indeed, any novel, namely: the passage of time. How time affects us. How it changes us. How it allows characters to grow and shift in unexpected ways, and how narrative, too, achieves its own special flavor and slant depending on what happened to who, and when. Especially when.

I'd always taken that remark for granted -- but the more I think about it, the more I agree with it, and learn from it. Time is nothing if not space stretched out, and a novel is full of space. Irving's novels in particular tend to trace the entire arc of characters' lives, and can often take reckless leaps in narrative time that, in retrospect, seem not only bold, but absolutely essential. (One chapter towards the end of The Cider House Rules jumps ahead twenty years -- a surprising, disconcerting decision that is that much more poignant because of its ambition. The film version had to abandon such recklessness.)

It is only through time that we achieve any perspective, or meaning, or resonance, in our own lives and the lives of others, and the best works of art recognize that. Novels can do that so easily; turn the page, and presto-changeo, it's a decade hence. They rarely do so, of course, because that requires patience, and plotting, and the signs of a well-thought out story; in today's contract-driven, book-a-year world, who has time for plot? Who has time for craftmanship?

Film, too, is at a disadvantage, because the experience itself unfolds in linear time. And yet, upon reflection, some of my favorite films from my favorite filmmakers are obviously, even relentlessly obsessed with what time does to us. What time demands of us. The Oliver Stone films I particularly love -- Born On The Fourth of July, The Doors, J.F.K., Heaven and Earth, Nixon, Alexander --span months, years, even decades in the lives of its protagonists, a technique that lends some to argue that much is truncated, much is condensed, much is slighted in the race to cram as much life as possible into the shortest time possible. Fair enough; a valid criticism. But I would argue that it is precisely such 'cramming of life', so to speak, that inevitably creates the boldest, most emotional effects. Only time can tell us about ourselves, and only time can teach us, scold us, spurn us and reveal to us. Only time.

The days are long in a hospital room. I sat in a chair and looked out the window and read my battered copy of A Widow For One year. Took only a couple of days, it did, but within those days and beneath those pages I saw children grow old, spouses die, decades pass and minutes stretch out. Will my life follow a similar pattern? I think of my grandfather, who was my age in 1949. Will I endure a similar span? Who were we, and who are we? Where are we, and where are we going? How do we move on, and how do we retain the best of who we were? These are the questions I asked myself while reading the book, as the nurses made their nightly rounds, and the hallway lights, as always, stayed on.

ON A DOCK

While eating breakfast a few days ago in the restaurant of the A-One Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, the lazy seventies rock of Steve Miller drifted through the gaps in the morning buffet, taking me back.

Back fifteen, sixteen years, to a lake, and a dock, and a cottage. Near Halliburton, Ontario (where Bill Murray and his comedic gang filmed the first, best Meatballs, back when the world was young), this cottage was (and is). Steve Miller was the music of choice that summer (and the summer before that, and the summer after that), along with Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead, the Traveling Wilburys and the Beautiful South. Us kids would put on the tunes and listen to the beats of our adolescene fade out of tune, one note at a time.

And yet, sometimes there was stillness; sometimes the music was gone. I remember, vividly, sitting on the dock one morning with my friend Mike, the two of us reading our paperback books as the waves leisurely lapped the sides of the dock, begging to be noticed. The dads were probably out fishing; the moms where most likely inside, cleaning up after breakfast. I read my copy of H.P.Lovecraft's strange and horrifying tales of depravity (purchased because there was a recommendation by Stephen King on the cover -- if King blurbed it, I bought it, period). Mike read the novelization of Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers. (In those days, the reality of the world, the harshness of the world, was still a source of innocent, escapist fun, and we revelled in that make-believe terror.)

Out on the water, the first boats of the day, towing anxious skiers ready for the fun to begin, occasionally sliced the silent morning in two, but that was fine; that was what summer was for, after all. A light wind pushed at the water and pulled at the pages of our books. Later that day would come our own bout of waterskiing and fishhooks, campfire and music. Later that summer would come school supplies and autumn shoes, velcro binders and coloured pencils. That was fine, too. Everything had its season, we were learning. You couldn't always stay on a dock. You could learn to appreciate the stillness, though, and we did. We learned.

We sat on the dock, under the blue, feeling the wind, listening to the distant roar of a distant boat, as the waves did what waves do: advance and retreat, rise and fall, collapse and ascend -- almost effortlessly, almost gracefully -- in their own, incremental manner.

CARPE DIEM

Helen, the thirty-seven year old Filipino woman I've been seeing for the past sixteen months, mother of a ten-year old son back home, has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She had her uterus and ovaries removed a few days ago here at Bangkok Hospital. Chemo to follow, probably in the Philippines.

I'm stunned and sad, angry and confused. I have no idea what I'll write about in the days and weeks and months ahead, but this is a very personal, profound journey, and it's not my place to chronicle it here. I thought I was a pretty philosophical guy before. But now.

Let me just say: If you are a woman, or if you know any women, please dot not ignore any inexplicable weight loss or pain in the lower regions. Ovarian cancer is hard to detect, and when it is, it's usually late in the game.

As for the title of the post, it may be cliche, but it's not meant to be ironic. Live for the moments, and the people you share them with, because life can be one cruel bastard at times.