WHY SO SURPRISED?

I didn't catch the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics last week, but the general reaction to the whole spectacle seems to have been: "Wow."

Which is what the general reaction to the opening ceremonies of any Olympics should be, but it seems like this 'wow' could have had another thought added to the end, namely: "Wow -- so this means China is serious, I guess..."

Serious about what? Global domination, becoming a world superpower, ensuring that Asia's rise will keep on rising?

Something like that.

The thing is, I feel like we in the West (even though I'm writing this in the East) constantly underestimate Asia in general, at almost every level.

How can that be? Countless books published on what seems like a weekly basis trumpet China's rise, and India's rise, and yet I feel like there's a still a certain amount of ignorance as to what Asia is all about. What it represents, where it's been, and where it's going.

(Of course, the label 'Asia' is largely meaningless, given how vast a landmass it is, and how varied the various countries underneath that generic label actually are, but we humans like to categorize, so 'Asia' it must be.)

A few months ago while working in Japan I read an interview with an American translator of Japanese, who was raised in Japan by American missionaries. She made an interesting comment, one that I'd never before considered from that particular angle. Westerners, she believes, tend to unconsciously dismiss Japanese ideas and beliefs. This is not to say that Westerners are ignorant of them; one only has to review how paranoid everybody was twenty to twenty-five years ago about Japan buying up American land and companies to recognize that the Japanese influence clearly made itself felt. Yet we tend to look at Japan mostly through the prism of its entertainment, its kitsch, its odd but alluring history. Films like Lost in Translation and The Last Samurai celebrate a Japan immersed in its own foreignness, impenetrable to western understanding. Everything Japanese is seen and depicted as either somewhat goofy, or strange, or funny, or downright weird. (Or else noble and dignified.)

Keeping what that American translator said in mind (whose name escapes me), I think it's not all that much of a stretch to extend her criticism towards the way that Westerners look at Asia as a whole. We take the strange parts, the exotic parts, and fetishize them for our amusement. Everything is either locked in the past or part of some odd, futuristic frenzy. We see the surface and the glitz, without bothering to take the contraptions apart and study the somewhat greasy and ordinary nuts and bolts that make them tick.

This is not to deny how fun the pop culture of these Asian lands can be, or negate what joy sheer entertainment, for entertainment's sake, can truly exude.

But the startled, surprised and amazed reaction to the Olympics' opening ceremony made me think that we in the West are no closer to understanding, or more importantly, anticipating what Asia is up to than we ever were, despite the advances in communications and technology.

My own pet theory? That Canada and America as countries are adolescents, full of energy and optimism to burn, and we're not all that interested in lands with cultures and traditions that were ancient even before we were born. We don't like to listen to our elders, and besides, we're not too interested in what they have to say in the first place. They're up to something, to be sure, these old folks are, but we have better things to do, and more interesting avenues to explore.

There is a big difference between countries and civilizations that are thousands of years old, complete with their own indigenous languages, and those that are mere hundreds of years old, still figuring out who they are and what they stand for.

I have a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach that we will keep being surprised by Asia in the decade to come, again and again, and we will not wonder why we are surprised, which will, perhaps, be the scariest thing of all.

JEEPNEY DREAMS

Coming back to the Philippines from Japan, from a first-world country to a third-world country, I'm constantly reminded in unexpected ways about how much Filipinos love their nation, and also about how so many of them want to get the hell out.

I just saw a jeepney outside on Session Road, the main strip of Baguio City. Jeepneys are sort of pseudo-buses, smaller than a school bus, narrow, and fronted by a facade that resembles the U.S. military jeeps that originally gave these vehicles their names. The drivers of these cheap cabs (that can fill anywhere from fifteen to twenty people, or more, depending on whose hanging off of the sides) often paint the front and the rear and the sides and the tires in bright flashy colours; these are, after all, almost their homes, given how long they spend inside of them each day. (I'm guessing twelve hours, minimum, is a safe estimate.)

So you have many jeepneys painted with American basketball team logos (as the Filipinos are absolutely crazy about basketball), or characters from their favorite action movies, or vibrant images of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary.

You also often spot jeepneys illustrated with flags. The flag of the Philippines, of course, but also the national flags of the countries they want to work in, or the countries their relatives are already living in, grinding away at jobs as nurses and caregivers so they can send home the pay to their poor relatives over here.

Today's jeepney? TORONTO, it read in blue, emblazoned across a beautiful rendition of the Canadian flag, each point of the maple leaf scarlet and clear.

I've also noticed a jeepney around town with a similar design, this one declaring: CANADIAN DREAMING.

So many Filipinos work overseas that they have an official title: OVERSEAS FOREIGN WORKERS. There's a special space for their information on the custom cards they hand out in the airplane, and a special line reserved for them at immigration in Manila. Almost everybody you meet has a relative in Canada, or Australia, or New Zealand, or the United States. Most young people you talk to want to work overseas.

Again, it's not because they hate the Philippines. The Filipinos are probably more patriotic than most first world peoples, because they see the corruption endemic to their society, and it sickens them; it taints the joy and goodness that almost supernaturally emanate from the people themselves.

Realistically, though, money is hard to come by, so many have to go. Somewhere. Anywhere. Anytime an oil rig is hijacked in Nigeria, I know, absolutely know that a Filipino will be one of the crewmen. They will go to the ends of the earth -- and do, every day -- to support their families.

For most foreigners, working abroad is a lark, an adventure, a way to 'find' ourselves.

For Filipinos, working in Dubai or Liverpool is simply an economic necessity.

So, whenever I see these jeepneys, filled with locals squeezed in tight-tight-tight, I also remind myself to stare closely at the colourful exteriors on display, so often doubling as aspirations for a different, better life. They are so creatively celebrating who they are, now, and sometimes hinting at where they would like to be, at some distant, perhaps mythical point in the future.

"WHAT kind of a model, did you say?"

Having taught English in Asian countries for more than a little while now, I've become quite used to talking to total strangers about their lives, their hopes, their hobbies, their jobs -- but I have to admit that today left me a little stumped.

Usually non-native speakers of English are, understandably, shy and nervous talking about themselves in a foreign tongue, so talking about their jobs is a natural conversation starter.

Today, while eating spicy-chicken and rice at Jollibee, a Filipino fast-food staple, two young women asked if they could sit in the seats next to me. (The place was crowded as hell, as Jollibee usually is.) I said sure.

They asked me what I was doing in Baguio. I told them. I asked what they were doing in Baguio.

One was a Baquio resident, studying computers at a local college.

"What about you?" I asked the other one. Turns out she was up visiting from Manila. "Are you a student, too?" (Both looked about twenty-one, tops, so I thought it was a pretty safe question.)

"No," she said. "I'm a model."

"Oh," I said, never having got that answer in nine-plus years of the classroom. (Granted, this wasn't the classroom, and Filipinos are, essentially, native English speakers, so this wasn't a typical ESL experience, but still.)

"What kind of model are you?" I asked. (The question sounded strange to my ears, but I didn't quite know how else to word it.)

"I'm an underwear model," she said.

At first I thought she was putting me on, but no, I soon realized she was serious.

She modelled in Manila, and she modelled underwear. Had been doing so for two years, now.

I found myself stuck. Where do you take the conversation from there?

I asked if it paid well; she said it did. I asked if she wanted to do other kinds of modelling; she said she had. A shampoo commercial.

And that was that.

Usually, simply because it's such an easy topic to discuss, I probe people about their jobs, because it tells me a lot about who they are.

But asking endless questions to an underwear model felt very, very odd. (And I suddenly felt very, very old. And slightly sleazy.) She didn't seem embarrassed, or arrogant; she was matter-of-fact. Not conceited. Almost shy, the way that a lot of Filipinos can seem when speaking to a foreigner.

Even so, what more could I ask? Every avenue open to me seemed to lead either to embarrassment or innocuous questions that would inevitably sound strange, no matter the intent.

So, other small talk was made. About computer schools, and trips to Italy, and boyfriends who are nurses in London.

I said good-bye, and left them to their rice.

I kept thinking: What an odd job for such a young person, especially in a Catholic, conservative country like the Philippines.

How did she get into it? What did her parents think? Is the underwear-industry in the Philippines sleazy? Is it an entry into other, more dangerous areas? How do you train to be an underwear model? Is underwear all you model? Can you make a living just by posing in your gotchies?

Alas, some questions are better left unasked.

(Especially in a family restaurant.)

LAST DAY

Snaps from my Cross-Cultural Communications class.

These students are second-year students, which means they are a heck of a lot more outspoken, funny, rowdy, and unimpressed-or-scared-by-the-foreign-teacher than most first-year students. (Though all were quite enjoyable to teach...)

ONLY IN JAPAN

More than a few Japanese university students have had the habit of sneaking into my classes more than a little bit late -- two, four, ten or more minutes past the beginning of class, grinning sheepishly, bowing their head, waiting for another one of my rants. The first three, four weeks, I said nothing, but time after time, in class after class, students would loudly open the door, fumble for their student card, walk to the front of the room and hold it in front of the sensor pad which would automatically bleep them present, while I hovered in front of the chalkboard, smeared in blue and white and pink powder, trying to remember what I was supposed to be teaching.

Since Japanese university students often seem like children, coddled and innocent, I had to remind them: This is, in essence, your job. You can't be five, ten, twenty minutes late. This ain't junior-high anymore. To which they would nod, nod again, nod once more for good measure, and then proceed to be late again the following week. (My favorite example: a student wandered into one of my classes after six weeks or so, a student I barely even recogized. When I asked him why he never came, he said: "This class is too early for me." It was a one p.m. class. He said it took him two hours to get to school. When I asked him where he lived, he said Fujisawa, which coincidentally happens to be where I live, and it sure as hell doesn't take two hours to get to school; one hour, door to door, tops. I nabbed him head-on. I told him if he missed any more classes, even one, he would fail. He nodded. Then asked: "Have you ever been to the Yukon? I was there last summer. So cool!" Cue the sensei's sigh...)

So today, exam day, I had a different student rush into class thirty minutes after class started. I had given his classmates some study time; the exam hadn't begun.

"You can't be thirty minutes late on exam day!" I said. "If the test had started, you'd have missed most of it!"

He was seated by now, smiling and nodding, and I noticed his shirt for the first time since he'd hurried into the room.

It was white, with big, bold, bright red letters streamed across the front: "SORRY I'M LATE!"

I laughed, my rant cut off mid-stream.

"Did you wear that because you knew you were going to be late?"

He smiled, and nodded, and smiled again.

I pointed it out to the class.

Everybody roared.

And I had a minor epiphany: Only in Japan.

Everybody always says "Only in America", but this was one of those moments that seemed quintessentially Japanese. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it was the image of this student in his little apartment, rushing to gather his things, realizing he'd never make it on time, deciding that he'd better wear his "SORRY I'M LATE!" shirt to ease whatever steam I would be sure to blow off. That strangely impenetrable sense of Japanese humor mixed with the obligatory politeness of the culture. He probably figured I'd be talking at the front of the room when he walked in, and then I'd see his shirt, and all would be forgiven.

And he was right. It was.

I thought back to the past eight weeks, as I learned what it was like to teach thirty-plus students in a class, in a Japanese university, five days a week. I remembered the speeches my Writing class had given earlier this week, and how I'd planned to write a separate blog on how good they were, how confident, how assured.

Thirty students talking about water polo, and partying in Mexico City, and why smoking is terrible for you, and how homestays in New Zealand and Canada and Eureka, California changed their lives forever, and how Christian rock is the key to salvation and a really rockin' night, and why volleyball is a great sport, and why one student's South American mother is her personal hero for having had such a difficult life. Anyone who thinks Japanese are homogenous should have sat in that class and listened to teens on the cusp of adulthood expressing themselves in a foreign tongue about what mattered to them most. It made the whole semester worthwhile, those speeches did. I don't know why. I had similar sentiments teaching university students in Cambodia a few years back. Maybe it was because I'm only a decade and change past where they are right now. It seems fresh, and familiar. Or perhaps it was simply because the students revealed themselves to be who and what they are: good, funny, curious, inquisitive, eager young adults.

And that shirt, to cap it all off.

So, yes, only in Japan would a student wear a "SORRY I'M LATE!" shirt with such casual, good-natured zeal.

Me in my suit, he in his shirt, with a classful of laughs. A sunny day, in a foreign land, with summer in full swing.

There are worse ways to make a living.

SNUB YOUR DESTINY

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is ostensibly a business book, yes, about how unforseen events change our lives in ways that are impossible to predict, let alone manage, but he chooses to conclude his cheeky analysis with a couple of passages I found surprisingly, well, moving.

'Black swans' are those cataclysmic societal and economic events that nobody could have predicted: 9/11, the rise of the Internet, Pauly Shore's career, etc. (Everybody thought all swans were white, until black swans were discovered in Australia -- an event nobody expected, but one that nevertheless happened.)

The entire book is a challenge to conventional thinking; it's sly, cheeky and even laugh-out-loud funny at points, but it can still get a little technical for a moron like me, who dropped out of Grade 10 Accounting and never looked back. (Only because a) I didn't need the credit and b) the teacher reminded me of Jon Lovitz. I love Jon Lovitz, but the resemblance was seriously uncanny. The fact that I didn't understand anything he was teaching? That didn't help either...)

I was therefore pleasantly surprised by this passage, which is right around the corner and across the street from my own out-of-the-way philosophical alley:

...My classmate in Paris, the novelist-to-be Jean-Olivier Tedesco, pronounced, as he prevented me from running to catch a subway, "I don't run for trains."

Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to catch trains, I have the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you're seeking.

You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.
Quitting a high-paying position, if it is your decision, will seem a better payoff than the utility of the money involved (this may seem crazy, but I've tried it and it works). This is the first step toward the stoic's throwing a four-letter word at fate. You have far more control over your life if you decide on your criterion by yourself.

Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop's fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior disdain and rejection of the grapes is even more rewarding. Be aggresive; be the one to resign, if you have the guts.

It is more difficult to be a loser in a game you set up yourself.

In Black Swan terms, this means that you are exposed to the improbable only if you let it control you. You always control what you do; so make this your end.


Since the whole book is about how so much of life is beyond our control, I love the fact that he reminds us, near the end, that we can, at the very least, control what is within our grasp; we can attain 'a true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior', if nothing else. We can choose to watch the herd go by and instead determine our own path, if we so choose, if the herd is headed somewhere we do not want to go in the first place.

And there's more:

...all these ideas, all this philosophy of induction, all these problems with knowledge, all these wild opportunities and scary possible losses, everything palls in front of the following metaphysical consideration.

I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff, or a rude reception. Recall my discussion in Chapter 8 on the difficulty in seeing the true odds of the events that run your own life. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.

Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don't be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth -- remember that you are a Black Swan...


An absolutely brilliant way to tie things up, I think. An entire book detailing how erratic and unpredictable life is, filled with Black Swans awaiting us at various undefinable points in the future, and yet, here we are -- each of us, together, Black Swans one and all, improbable beings that somehow managed, against all the odds, to be born, here, at this time.

Think of the size of space, and the width of the universe, and the mass of the earth, and what would not have happened had your particular parents not met on that particular day, or not made love on that specific night.

And yet somehow you emerged, more or less intact.

Somehow you endured, up until this very moment.

Black swans await us at every turn, certainly, but there are trains we do not have to run to catch, and destinies we can shift and tilt according to our will.

BLONDES SELL BETTER THAN CANCER

Having recently read 23 Days in July, a book about Lance Armstrong's epic win in the 2004 Tour De France, thus becoming the first person to ever win six Tours (followed by a seventh the following year), I checked the internet to see what recent news I could find surrounding Armstrong, and I came across two items that highlight the vast difference between where we're going and where we should be.

The first is an article in the New York Times, wondering if Armstrong's serial dating is harming his image as a cancer spokesperson:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/fashion/22lance.html?ref=othersports

The second is a clip of Armstrong speaking about leaving the hospital after having completed his cancer treatment. His doctor told him about the 'obligation of the cured', which Armstrong took to mean: Hey, you're cured. The doctor burst his bubble by telling him that he didn't know if Lance would last another month, or year, or ten years. (And the doctor still doesn't know, as Lance points out -- a testament to the uncertainy surrounding all cancer survivors.) But Lance had an obligation, if he so chose, to tell his story, so others would benefit.

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=5FG9ekKMAGs


I don't know if Lance Armstrong is a serial womanizer. I don't know if he doped and drugged his way through all of those Tour de France triumphs. I don't know if he strangles kittens at night, or is mean to waitresses, or secretly covets illicit contraband, or if he is even a nice guy.

I do know that he is a passionate, eloquent speaker on cancer. He knows his shit. He tells his story. He doesn't sugarcoat his own survival, acknowledging that he doesn't have cancer, but he doesn't not have cancer, either. He is sincere and moving and articulate about what cancer is, and does, and the priority that needs to be put on cancer funding and research.

And here we have a culture fascinated with the fact that he seems to have a thing for blondes.

What worries me is that Western society seems to be sliding...somewhere. I'm not sure where, exactly, but that's what it reveals itself to me as -- a slide, a descent, a slimy, slippery slope that leads us to the baser parts of our inner selves. The internet seems to make everybody junior-high again at heart, eager to hear the latest gossip about anything and everything, always, as much as possible.

Cancer is one of the most serious things in a very serious world. Whenever I hear the word, I cringe and die a little. So to see one of the disease's most prominent foes slandered for ludicrous, adolescent reasons makes me think that even when faced with a fatal disease, we all still want nothing more than tabloid glee, a momentary, pop-culture recess from reality, rather than withstanding the necessary pain of examing something that has detail, and depth, and meaning.

People who've been touched by the disease couldn't give a flying fig what Lance Armstrong does or does not do in his free time.

He is not a hero, nor a saint, and whether he did, or did not, take any illegal substances during his record-breaking run at the Tour de France will forever be a legitimate issue, but for his work in cancer awareness Lance Armstrong at the very least deserves exclusion from the People Magazine mentality that has been steadily sucking the life out of us for the past few years.

He deserves it, yes, but so what? I have a feeling he'll be a staple of the tabloids for some time to come.

Or as Clint Eastwood so succintly put it in Unforgiven: "Deserves got nothing to do with it."

Nobody deserves to get cancer, either, but they do.

And blondes sell better than cancer.