Surrendering to Air: An Excerpt

I have a new book out! It’s called Surrendering to Air. Although I hope anyone who’s followed my writing would feel assured that it’s written with care, as an assimilated Philadelphian I would never expect anyone to give me their money or shipping address without first seeing the goods. As such, here’s an excerpt.

In 1884, the parents of eight-year old Mamie Tape enrolled her at the all-white Spring Valley Primary School in San Francisco.¹ Joseph and Mary Tape were Chinese immigrants during a decade of cresting xenophobia that saw anti-Chinese riots and murders in sixteen California cities.² When the school administration denied Mamie entry into the school because of her race, her parents sued. The Supreme Court ruled that the denial violated Mamie’s right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment, and that she should receive an equal education under the law; however, the victory was short-lived. Although the court had ruled Mamie was entitled to an equal education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” which upheld segregation through the 1960s still applied. In the wake of the court case, the superintendent of San Francisco schools expressed a fear that his district would soon be “inundated by Mongolians,” and the state legislature rushed to pass a law sanctioning the building of separate Chinese schools.³ Mary Tape was outraged, but despite her lifelong efforts, Mamie would never enter an integrated San Francisco school as a student.

As often as Mary Tape is remembered, it is as an activist and a hero who fought for desegregation. But this isn’t true, exactly. She didn’t advocate that the barriers of privilege come down, so much as that her family be allowed inside their walls. “My children don’t dress like the other Chinese,” she wrote in an impassioned letter to the local newspaper. “They look just as funny amongst them as the Chinese [dressed in Chinese clothing] look amongst you Caucasians”.⁴ Though we can extrapolate her feelings about her Chinese neighbors, those feelings are less important than the opportunity she squandered for collective action alongside other Chinese immigrants, and perhaps an even broader coalition — that the legal mechanism used to exclude her was the same one upholding the segregation of Black people was, I fear, a point of solidarity lost on her.

It is a ruthless and difficult calculation, determining how best to argue for granting yourself humanity at the expense of others. But with the hindsight of history, Mary’s appeal to the wardens of power — to close the doors of opportunity behind her — seems not to be ineffective: just early. On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court once again made a ruling with the stated intent of uplifting the Asian American community, striking down affirmative action in Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) v. Harvard. The specifics of the legal landscape have changed drastically, but the topography of SFFA’s views on inclusion are the same as Mary Tape’s: the problem with these racist systems is not that the systems exist, but that they as individuals are unable to benefit more substantively from them.

Like Mary Tape, the plaintiffs of this case are misguided in their desire to hoard exclusivity. But their common central fear is understandable, if not admissible. What unites them across a century of history is the fear that identifying as Asian will shrink the horizon of their possible individual identities. Alex Shieh, a Brown University undergraduate, says “I think that the color of my skin, the way that I look, that’s by far the least important way that I can contribute to the Brown community.”⁵ In a country that views Asians as foreign invaders or unemotional robots, it often takes more effort to dispel this bigotry than to distance ourselves from the racialized masses. Historically, the benefits of transforming ourselves in the image of whiteness have been substantial. The triangulation of race that uses Asian identity as a wedge between whiteness and blackness means economic mobility is within reach for us, and may even have been achieved by some of our family members. The hard work and psychological compromise it takes to achieve this mobility sometimes disguises, for those who accomplish it, the unreality of its broader promise: the so-called American Dream. Anecdotal evidence that economic mobility has been allowed for some Asian Americans does not imply that this economic freedom will be extended to everyone, or that it is sufficient to live a fulfilling life; when the promise of the Dream is violated, as it often is, it can lead to the type of individualistic clawing for leftover scraps of humanity that SFFA and Mary Tape practice. 

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the Dream is that, within its framework, the validity of our existence hinges on realizing a version of ourselves that is Good Enough for someone else. And when one’s identity rests on being Good Enough, it is a death, of sorts, to fall short of these standards — say, to be one of 96.8% of applicants rejected from Harvard.⁶ The version of our lives in which we achieved sufficient esteem is gone, leaving us entombed in a decaying snake skin shed from a live body which grows, counterfactually, beyond us. This grieving of a lost self is not experienced solely by Asian Americans, nor is it enacted solely by white supremacy. But it is both unique enough to Asian Americans and universal enough within our communities to have a clinical name: racial melancholia. Derived from Freud’s conception of melancholia as a pathological version of mourning, racial melancholia is a remembrance of loss so persistent that our identity becomes trapped in a cycle of that remembrance.⁷ To bury the wrongdoings and generational losses accompanying immigration can be healthy; to bury one’s hopes for oneself along with them is an all-too-common tragedy.

It would be hard to construct a figure more melancholic than Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh).

Order a copy of Surrendering to Air to read more about Asian American history, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and the cinema of acceptance.

Here Be Dragons

When humans don’t know something, we invent it. Before the 17th century, European maps contained drawings of sea monsters in areas white people had yet to reach. Pictures of such animals appeared commonly on maps throughout European history. Dragons represented the sinful and fantastical, mainly in Asia — one map included a picture of a dragon over Asia with a caption explaining that the area was populated by “men who have large four-foot horns”. Likewise, elephants covered the interior of Africa, which British geographer James Rennell presumptively declared “meager and vacant in the extreme”.

As European understanding of science and geography grew, pictures of fictional monsters slowly disappeared, replaced instead by practical navigation guidance and pictures of ships, indicating that the unknown had been mastered. But the symbolism of these monsters would remain, their effect as propaganda solidified; in one 1516 Portuguese map, King Manuel rides a sea creature off the Southern tip of Africa, symbolizing Portugal’s control of the seas.

It’s tempting to believe that these geographers’ assigning of fantastical qualities to other parts of the world was inevitable, given the limited European understanding of geography at the time. “They just didn’t know back then,” we say about every period of history that came before us. This is a comforting worldview, because if the lack of knowledge held by those well-meaning but unenlightened folks made their mistakes unavoidable, then surely ours are as well.

For better or worse, this idea is not true, and it never has been. Take Jonathan Swift, writing a century before Rennell dismissed out of hand the idea that the continent of Africa could be “similar to the others; rich in variety; each region assuming a distinct character.”:

So, Geographers in Afric-Maps

With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps;

And o’er unhabitable Downs

Place Elephants for want of Towns.

Swift recognized at the time what is now obvious with hindsight: that these geographers, and the European populous in general, were “insisting on the barbarousness and barrenness of those regions about which [they had] little or no knowledge”.

Some may argue that in the age of satellite mapping, the regrettable human tendency to fill in the gaps of our understanding with inaccurate and dangerous fantasies has been conquered — that we can finally set the record straight by appealing to an observable, objective reality. These people have never been to West Philadelphia.

Because there is a type of person here, usually but not always white, who can tell you the exact point at which West Philadelphia gets “dangerous”. They will tell you with great confidence never to venture past this point, usually between 42nd and 49th Street, and only with further questioning will they admit that they have, in fact, never been past this imaginary threshold of danger, or even within two blocks of it — because, after all, it’s so dangerous. It’s the type of circular reasoning that has spiraled out of their passive, unquestioning exposure to propaganda; the fact that they are no longer able to identify the root of their racist belief does not prevent them from clinging ever closer to it.

In the racist imagination, Philadelphia at some point transitions from a residential zone to a military one, the people becoming universally more violent and undeserving of rights. “We just want to send a clear message to the thugs and criminals and gun-bearing freaks over in Philadelphia who live in a society of lawlessness,” said Camden County Commissioner Louis Cappelli this summer. Five hundred years later, in the self-declared “Land of the Free”, this man and so many others continue to “[insist] on the barbarousness and barrenness of those regions about which [they had] little or no knowledge” — it is immaterial to them that these regions are accessible by less than an hour’s commute.

What’s sad is that there is, of course, danger in Philadelphia, and the people exposed to it most are exactly the people these racists are afraid of. Those living in neighborhoods with high rates of gun violence work harder than anyone else to end it and protect their families from it, but face the steep uphill battle of systemic disinvestment. It is an irony too great to bear that the long-term effects of disinvestment cause those in power to cast moral judgment on its victims, who they perceive as unworthy of future investment.

This is one of the many great failings of the ‘racial consciousness’ achieved in 2020, following the state-sponsored murder of George Floyd. Though many of us may have questioned our biases, realizing that our neighbors didn’t adhere to the stereotypes we had invented, not enough of us struggled with the implications of why these stereotypes were invented in the first place. The lesson white Americans still have yet to learn, en masse, is that such stereotypes are false not only in the specific, but in the general — that there is not a single person who embodies the negative version of Blackness, or whatever type of foreignness, we construct in our minds. Moreover, these stereotypes exist, not because they are true, but because the specific falsehood they perpetuate is useful to those in power. When the government is selling weapons for dragon combat, it’s in their interests that you believe in dragons.

The truth, then, is hard to come by. At least, that’s what I’ve told myself this week to cope with the genocide occurring in Gaza. Right-wing Israeli government officials in power have used white phosphorus to suffocate civilians, shut down power to prevent them from accessing medical care, and bombed those who tried to escape. They have directly stated that all Palestinians are terrorists, compared them to animals, and made good on their threat to withhold aid to citizens. They have painted all Palestinians as homophobic, taking advantage of barbarous stereotypes to justify their genocide, and erasing the experiences of queer Palestinians.

“These fawning Israel loyalists have likely not once stepped inside the barbed-wired walls and fences that encircle Gaza,” said Andrew Mitrovica. Once again, in our unwillingness to learn more about the experiences of others that are readily available, we have created a fantasy to reinforce our ideas of who is deserving of suffering, and who is justified in exercising power. It is almost unbearable to witness, as millions die undeserved deaths in the name of upholding this fantasy. It would be unbelievable that the American public could allow such a tragedy to unfold, paid for by our taxpayer dollars, were it not so clear that our entire country was founded on the upholding of such fantasies, such stereotypes, created so long ago that we’ve forgotten they were never true.

Though they may seem real to us, growing up as we have been surrounded by propaganda that encourages us to believe them, the fantastical creatures in our psychic oceans are based on nothing. To be moral in this world, it’s imperative that each of us examine the stories we’ve been told, the fears we’ve been primed for, and question whether they have any basis in reality, or whether they serve the purpose of elevating some people as more deserving of humanity than others. No hindsight will save the 45 Palestinian families entirely gone from this Earth, after God knows how many generations. No attempt to plead ignorance will save us from the consequences of our actions. I beg of each of you — don’t allow the maps of our minds to be filled with presumptions of danger coming from those who need protection most of all. There are no dragons, but for the most vulnerable among us, the fire is very real.

Growing Up

“Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed.” – Maya Angelou

My students ask me, as often as they feel like conspiring to get out of doing their classwork, why I became a teacher. My answer is always a variation on the same two themes: I like kids and hated every other job I tried. This answer satisfies their inquiries — that I like kids is, I hope, self-evident through my daily interactions with them. And that work sucks is a fundamental truth already known to them at 14, in theory if not in practice.

They haven’t ever asked the natural follow up question: what is it about working with teenagers, who vacillate between being creative and loving and selfish and mature and exhausting and gracious and feeble and brilliant, that I find more tolerable than working with more mature adults?

Teenagers, after all, can often be selfish pricks. Almost all of my students have stolen Jolly Ranchers from my ‘secret’ candy drawer and lied about it to my face. Yesterday, I organized a trip to the YMCA for them to play basketball, and afterwards bought them all a drink at the corner store. None of them said thank you. I laugh this kind of stuff off and forgive them for it every day, without having to think about it too much, because I love them, and because they’re young and still have much to learn about how the world works and what type of life is worth celebrating, and because a lot of them were thirsty today and being thirsty makes people act in silly ways that you forgive them for, if you love them.

Jordan Neely was thirsty. He had a lot of other shit going on in his life: his mother was killed in a domestic violence incident when he was 14, he suffered from schizophrenia, he had been living on the streets for a couple of years. But I keep coming back to the fact that he was thirsty. And he was murdered for it.

He was disturbing a subway car, because he was thirsty, and a former Marine put him in a chokehold for 15 minutes until he was no longer alive. During this time, no one came to Jordan’s aid, although two people bent down to assist the Marine in murdering him, and one person recorded it. Everyone else just watched.

I can’t imagine everyone on that subway car had experienced the degree of suffering that Jordan Neely had. But all of them had probably been thirsty before. All of them had probably had someone buy them a drink before, because when someone you love is thirsty that’s what you do.

There are, of course, different types and levels of love. To buy your student a drink because it’s a hot spring afternoon requires only a love of proximal kinship that, I’m certain, most of us possess. To buy a stranger a drink for that same reason perhaps requires a greater and more abstract degree of love, one which it pains me more of us don’t hold in our hearts, but which I’ve developed the cynicism not to expect from people.

But the minimal love required to intervene during the 15-minute span of a public lynching, to look at someone suffering and understand that they should not be murdered for their thirst, that they are human with basic rights, thoughts, and desires that transcend your own comfort — this is a love I had the naïveté to believe we as a society could muster. (I’m not sure why. There is little historical evidence for the ability of white Americans to see every person as equally human — our ancestors gathered in public squares to watch lynchings as entertainment. Somehow I thought we were better.)

———-

My students sometimes bully each other. I try to name it when I see it — “you’re being a bully right now”. After much consideration, this is the language I’ve landed on. I like that it requires them to hold responsibility for their actions, while also implying they can at any point shed this identity in favor of a more loving one.

It’s less easy for me to forgive my students for bullying than it is to forgive stolen Jolly Ranchers, because to see them hurt each other with such callousness brings up my whole journey of searching for belonging and all of its messy detours. But I still forgive them — again, because they’re young and will grow and deserve as much grace for their mistakes as I received and continue to receive from the people who love me.

But adults bullying each other? I don’t have time for that shit. I realized yesterday that this is the reason I’ve hated so many jobs working with adults: it pains me too much to see so-called grown-ups exercising the same lack of compassion, patience, and grace as a literal baby. And make no mistake — every single person on that train car was a bully. To look at one of society’s victims of structural violence and to impose further interpersonal violence on them for their crime of existing is one of the nastiest things I can think of. Those people were other things too, perhaps accessories to a murder, but it’s helpful to me to understand them, primarily, as bullies.

Because they’re not alone. So many of us pass by people experiencing homelessness every day, worried more about our own inconvenience than their suffering, and would not have had the courage to stand up against someone with more power hurting someone who, society tells us, we don’t have to love. So many of us are bullies, because we live in a society where we are incentivized only to extend the recognition of humanity to certain people. To paraphrase Dr. Angelou’s epigraphical quote, so many of us need to grow the fuck up.

I’ve thought of Dr. Angelou’s quote often in the context of dating, where people hurt each other because they’re unwilling to do the work of healing themselves. Only this week did it occur to me that her quote equally speaks to the ways we hurt each other through our passive complicity to violent systems. Would a nation of grown ups, who understand the weight of their actions, allow the solvable problem of homelessness to continue? Would they sit and watch as someone who needed help was slowly murdered before their eyes?

I like this framing of an otherwise helpless issue because its mandate is, first and foremost, internal. I hope to God I would have helped Jordan if I were on that subway, but that’s something none of us can know. But I do know I’ve passed by some of the men who live outside on my block this week, waving them off because I was having a bad day and didn’t want to be inconvenienced. I know that I can’t sit here and condemn others for not having grown up, without understanding how much growing up I have to do myself. This, I think, is the only thing any of us who look at these incidents of senseless violence can do to feel sane. Although I will continue to vote, and protest, and speak with conviction, I’m also so very tired of waiting for anyone else to change. And besides, to demand anyone else change must first beget inside ourselves a greater conviction to do the true kind of growing up that Dr. Angelou identifies — to take responsibility for the space we take up, and to recommit every day to an understanding that every person is worthy of that same space.

Rest in Peace Jordan. You were worthy of so much that we failed to give you. I’m sorry.

Eternal Inauthenticity

The city of Bhaktapur lies thirty minutes east of Kathmandu by bus. Too independent in culture and spirit to be considered a suburb in the American sense, it further maintains its own sense of identity by proclaiming itself the Cultural Capital of Nepal. While this sort of slogan reeks of touristic opportunism (1), Bhaktapur’s claim is actually quite legitimate. Its history dates back to the 700s, and it served as the political capital of the country from the 12th to the 15th century. Formerly enclosed by walls, the city center continues to feel self-sufficient with its menagerie of buildings–marketplaces, temples, guest houses, local dwellings, seemingly everything except zoning offices–stumbling atop one another in the kind of intimately hectic organized chaos usually reserved for an extended family’s Christmas gift unwrapping.

By happy chance, I reached Bhaktapur during the observation of Tihar, the five-day festival of lights better known further south on the subcontinent as Diwali. If the historicity of the place wasn’t already evident from its aesthetic, it became forehead-smackingly obvious in the jubilant atmosphere. Housefronts shimmered with flickering lights draped from their rooftops; market squares bustled with activity from sharply dressed families buying celebratory food and goods; patterned turmeric powder was spread aside walkways in cheerily-hearted designs.

It was in the midsts of this atmosphere that I took a lovely walk, observing the ancient temples and diversity of peoples found in the area. I can’t humblebrag my way out of this, the foremost benefit of traveling–it was exciting. But lately I’ve begun to notice within myself that that excitement tends to occur on a couple different levels, and ones that I’m not altogether comfortable with. There is Level 1: the visceral reaction that stems from so much foreign sensory stimulus. All well and good. But atop that, there lies Level 2: a sense of material excitement at not the experience itself, but the opportunity to convey it to others (2). This layer of experience is one that all of us feel, and while it’s not necessarily ill-intentioned, it is inherently selfish, in that it moves us from being an onlooker in the story to being the subject. When we recount our experiences to people, or even imagine ourselves doing so, they are no longer happening around us, they are directly happening to us. We are quite literally making ourselves the center of the story. And look, the effects of social media on our collective psyche are at this point as well-documented as they are boring; what’s important here is how they accentuate the pre-existing human defense mechanism to combat loneliness by shifting our viewpoint to be more self-centered.

Once we’ve decided that the world is happening to us, we start to self-select for evidence that supports this theory. As I was meandering around the open-air shops, slipping between motorbikes and fruit carts on a narrow, crowded brick pathway, the dense alley opened up to a lively square. Vendors perused the edges, and at the far end stood a temple, but the center of the square was mostly taken up by a large, circular crowd with a hum of excitement emanating off of it–the type that implies some Cool Shit is going down. A few dozen paces away from the crowd, I could see the center was occupied by a group of about 40 synchronized teenage Nepali dancers, dressed in a mixture of traditional cultural garb and casual sweatwear. “Wow, what a cool thing that’s happening,” I thought at Level 1; this was immediately followed and superceded by the Level 2 thought: “wow, what a cool thing that’s going to have happened to me”. I was going to get to see some traditional dancers doing something incredibly unique, and although I was nothing more than a passerby, and even that by luck and happenstance, surely it would say something about my worldliness and the value of my experience that I had been there for it.

It was only when I got within a few steps of the crowd that I could hear which song they were performing to: I Like to Move It by Reel 2 Real, a song that would most likely be known to kids the age of the performers as performed by King Julien in Madagascar.

This was obviously surprising and hilarious, but I also felt a sense of disappointment that the music on display hadn’t lived up to my expectations. Penguins of Madagascar is on Netflix, I really came halfway across the world just to see something similar to what was available on my couch?

Why was it so important to me what the kids were dancing to? What did I think was going to happen? I was, I suppose, both expecting and hoping for something authentic.

Authenticity is something I’ve heard every single person I’ve spoken to while traveling concern themselves with. For all of us, seeking authentic experiences, and avoiding their inverses, the dreaded touristy joints, is a major part of travel (3). This is fitting on some level, as the point of being abroad is to experience places and people different from those you know. But in a globalized world, with societies sharing more and more touchstones every day, we tend to accentuate those elements that remain different out of proportion to the objective reality that confronts us. Nepali dancers get down to Dreamworks soundtrack joints. Many South Africans I met during my time in Cape Town said their favorite place to eat was McDonald’s. But I’m unlikely to mention either of those things if you ask me about my time in those countries: they don’t fit the narrative that most benefits my image as an experiencer of the unknown.

While this search for authenticity in most cases simply results, for us, in some misplaced stress during a vacation, the impulse to decide for ourselves which details of a place are real can have some seriously negative impacts. Many travelers hold the view that Cape Town “isn’t really Africa”. And while CT is certainly unique in some cultural ways from other parts of Africa, those parts are also different from each other in a myriad of ways that don’t disqualify them from some intangible sense of Africanness. The only thing truly “un-African” about Cape Town is that it’s highly developed. Or in other words, not poor. The implication being that poverty is a condition inherent in being African.

The great Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie experienced this when she presented a story featuring financially secure, educated Nigerian characters to a professor, who promptly told her the story “wasn’t African enough”. Many of us use authenticity to confine cultures to similar boxes, even if we don’t realize it. A study on Yelp found reviews of European restaurants that quoted the establishments’ authenticity were linked to higher star reviews than average. Meanwhile, “authentic” cuisine from countries such as Mexico or China? You guessed it, lower star reviews.

This bias of ignorance is the very dangerous problem with Level 2 thinking, and with seeking out, through our subjective viewpoints, an objective reality. And while we should be aware of this all the time–we never know someone’s whole story (4)–we must be especially cautious when we’re traveling. After all, we’re in someone else’s home, and will probably end up violating innumerable social norms just by existing in a foreign place (5). The least we can do is not dictate their humanity to them. Because when we rewrite the stories we observe to place ourselves at the center we are, in fact, dehumanizing those around us. Taking arrestingly vibrant, three-dimensional people and reducing them to flat, monochrome sketches so that we can re-shade them with colors of our own choosing and display them in the gallery of our story as feats of our own artistry.

I don’t mean to sound accusatory or self-righteous here. This is not a case of trying to separate “good” travelers from “bad” ones. It’s more about the recognition of the harmful mental pattern all of us fall into at times–casting our gaze upon others to judge only whether they’re sufficiently playing their role in our story or getting in its way. I catch myself doing this all the time, not because of some malicious intent, but out of the insecurity that comes from feeling inessential. This condition can worsen when I’m abroad because I am definitionally inessential, a stranger in a strange land. Perhaps this is why we’re always in such fervent pursuit of an unattainable authenticity when we travel; in running towards it, we attempt to escape from the fundamental truth lingering inside us that we are the ones who, by virtue of being in this place, are inauthentic.

This is an uncomfortable realization, but as far as I can see it’s the truth, and the only measure of autheticity with any legitimacy reflects inward: any space we are in as tourists or expats would be more authentic without us in it. This doesn’t remove our right to be in that space, but it does mean that any valuations we make of it are as unsound as they are superfluous. The story is, quite simply, not about us. And perhaps the only authentic emotion to feel in a place that doesn’t belong to us is sheer gratitude at how lucky we are to be an observer of it.

What’s funny is that for as much time as we spend attempting to elevate ourselves beyond bystanderdom, wearing a cloth of appropriation to convince ourselves we are integral to its fabric, the role of observer can be even more beautiful in its own right if we merely accept it and appreciate someone else’s clothes instead of worrying about how they fit us. Had I not been worried in Bhaktapur about seeing something that matched my expectations of traditionalism, I may have been able to appreciate what was in front of me: Nepali teenagers dancing to a Jamaican-influenced song by a Colombian-American and a Trinidadian, as made famous by an Israeli-Englishman in a movie about Madagascar. The problem with searching for authenticity is that it assumes we know enough about the world to understand it–an impossibility, as the teeming organism of humanity is far too complex for us to ever fully grasp. But the real world, in all its inconvenient messiness, is always more authentic, and more beautiful, than the ignorantly neat version of it we hold in our heads. And if we embrace this, the sublime and manifold uncertainty inherent to living in this world, it can be, as King Julien knew all along, quite moving.

———-

(1) Delaware, the state where I attended school, deemed itself “The Small Wonder” on signs posted at its borders. Its miniscuosity is self-evident to anyone who’s ever driven the length of Route 1, but unless I missed a Gabriel García Márquez novel about corporate tax exploitation and underage drinking in desodden backyards, I don’t think anything I saw during my four years there could be deemed particularly wondrous. Roll Hens tho.

(2) I meet a lot of people abroad who frquently preach and claim to live by the Travelers’ Gospel: spend money on experiences, not possessions. Yet conversation with those most dogmatic in this belief can, with the speed and entitlement of a trust fund kid hitting on girls at a bar, become dick-measuring competitions about who has the Most Travel Experience–suddenly, with no anecdotal foreplay, someone’s whipping out their college trip to Guatemala; now they’re showing you Instagram photos of their second time in Thailand, a fate worse than unsolicited nudes. In these quests to legitimize both the quantity of one’s experiences and their superiority to a monetarily equivalent bundle of possessions, said experiences end up feeling very much like, well, like possessions.

(3) Of course, all of us who are tourists do touristy things. I too took a photo at the Eiffel Tower when I was in Paris. But many people, to defend their pursuit of authenticity, establish a funny defense mechanism where they undermine these experiences by proclaiming them as touristy before even doing them–as if recognition of the affectation demonstrates some internal authenticity compass. It’s the same phenomenon that leads men on cruise ships dressed in Hawaiian shirts to “joke” about how much they’re going to drink and gamble on their cruise: if they demonstrate awareness of the behavior, then they must be in control of it.

(4) The only possible exception I will make to this generally useful principle is the Kardashians. Those motherfuckers have devoted their lives to public scrutiny in exchange for receiving unlimited riches and half-baked gospel albums recorded in their honor, and I feel completely comfortable in assuming they have no hidden depths to their charcters that they have not shared with the general public.

(5) I have been abroad now for over two years, and I shudder to think about all my fuck ups during that time: wearing shorts in a temple, trying to haggle over a fixed price service, mispronouncing people’s names, mistaking black/Asian tourists for locals (or most horrendously for wait staff), failing to teach my students competently because I was unable to communicate an idea to them. For some reason it’s an accepted adage that there’s no wrong way to travel, but I honestly feel the opposite it true: there’s no right way to travel, and we’re bound to make mistakes. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t travel, as mistakes are an opportunity for learning and growth, but it also doesn’t remove the personal responsibility of trying to be a tactfully engaged and considerate human being–if anything, that obligation must increase exponentially.

The Trees Have Their Own Damn Tongues

The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect the positions or viewpoints of the Peace Corps or the United States government.

Seasons in Liberia don’t change cyclically. Being located around 3°N, her foliage doesn’t have time for deciduousity to the extent of its Northern neighbors; temperatures stand as steadily as the mighty palm tree heads that sprout unwaveringly year-round from her overgrown jungles. Instead, prevailing winds work an oscillating dimmer switch of precipitation, leaving heavy rainfall during “summer” months and aridity in the “winter”. During the former, Jesus’s act of turning water into wine would be highly welcome; in the midsts of the latter, it would be helpful if his miracles came equipped with logically valid converses (1).

But miracles are in short supply here, something that should be obvious to anyone who’s ever glanced at a briefing of the country in international news. It’s become something that’s readily apparent to me as I enter my second year teaching. Living a year in a place has a nice poetic value–experiencing a full oscillation of the seasons–but I’ve found my true productivity value has skyrocketed as I’ve moved past that benchmark. Being able to line up my experiences from a year ago abreast with where I am now, a la temps-saut, has been invaluable. And although the leaves don’t change colors (2), I’ve found the best way to measure time and development is still seasonally. Because the problems in the education system here are sizable, they’re systemic, and unlike the seasons, they’re cyclical as hell.

The difficult thing about many of these problems is that they are rooted not in villainy or the faults of one party, but in numerous little factors that pile up to seem insurmountable. Students come to school late, so teachers come late, so students come late, ad infinitum. Teachers never properly achieved literacy due to interruptions in education from the civil war, so they inadequately teach students, who become the teachers of tomorrow and pass on their functional illiteracy to their own students. Like most issues, everyone involved can lay claim to some percentage of the blame, and thus in the veritable chicken/egg problem of assigning this blame, there’s always someone else to whom you can pass the buck when things run afoul.

On bad days, it can all be overwhelming. To perform the simple act of doing your job, when no one else is doing so, can seem futile. And there are an abundance of excuses at the ready for when what seems like inevitable failure comes to pass. These issues are difficult to address and are absolutely damaging the well-being and livelihood of my Liberian students, a group of hilarious, kind-hearted, hard-working young adults who deserve so much more. Peace Corps service is often described as planting a tree you never get to sit under the shade of, and I ferverously hope this is the case–that my contributions here are in some small way helping to improve the futures of these kids.

But what if they’re not?

Australians introduced their native species of acacia trees to South Africa when colonizers moved to the region. Africa has its own species of acacia, so the Australians assumed their acacias would grow well in the soil. They did–too well. Several types of foreign acacia trees are now officially listed as invasive species in the country, crowding out other native foliage and proving harmful to local ecosystems. These Australians committed an all too common crime of foreigners; they wanted to help people whose system and environment they saw as inferior, but ended up doing irreperable damage.

It makes me think of the Lorax, who claimed to speak for the trees because the trees have no tongues. But in this case, I’m claiming not to represent inanimate plants, but living, breathing human beings; this is a much stickier moral issue.

It also makes me think of Katie Meyler.

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/longform/more-than-me-investigation
The above article is long and depressing, but it’s something you should read if you have time. Meyler’s organization, More Than Me, committed heinous acts of abuse cover up that have rightfully shaken and angered many Liberians. In her efforts “just to help”, she abused the trust given to her by her students, their families, and the Liberian government. All of it is awful. And it has me and many of my immigrant friends (3) here questioning our roles. Because while the abuses themselves are extraordinary, the system, or lack thereof, More Than Me had in place which enabled them is all too representative of many norms in foreign aid. Katie Meyler thought that anything she did would be better than the education currently available. But she failed to follow the principle to first do no harm, and is absolutely accountable for the harm she caused. While the instinct to help is noble, if it’s not paired with the proper experience, diligence, and respect for the people you’re helping, it is simply not enough.

The most damning part of the whole article comes when a Liberian asks whether he could open a school in Brooklyn, have these same abuses occur, and have people say he was “just trying to help”. He doesn’t answer the question, because he doesn’t have to.

I’ve been thinking about all of this a lot recently. And while it’s impossible to ignore the development disparity between America and Liberia, I don’t know if that necessarily means I need to be here. Because the thing about all the problems I mentioned earlier, the enormous challenges facing this country and its people, is that they’re not all that complicated. Liberians don’t need me or anyone else to explain their problems to them; everybody here innately understands them by virtue of living through them their whole lives. And they already know the solutions as well, in an abstract sense: better schools, roads, and health care. No, Liberia doesn’t need anyone telling them what to do. They just need people to do it. They just require good old-fashioned, boring work and accountability.

My school is more functional this year than it was last year. And it’s been cool seeing the institution’s slow but steady growth, as more students have been coming to school more regularly and learning more. While many people deserve credit for this improvement, a majority of the thanks has to go to my friend Milton, who was promoted to Vice Principal this year. What is his secret? What has he done to combat a generation of systemic educational challenges? Nothing more, and nothing less, than his job. He comes to work on time, most days a little early. He’s a good planner and delegator; he has enough experience that he knows the typical challenges a school will face at certain times of the year, and he assigns people to address those problems before they occur. And most importantly, he holds his employees, myself included, responsible for doing their work diligently and in a timely manner (4). This has had a massive effect on the teaching staff, which in turn has positively impacted the student body. Is it perfect? No. But it’s better. And really the enormous, macro-level goal of development comes down to nothing more than a bunch of individuals committing to being better at their jobs every day.

It’s funny, because a part of my motivation for joining Peace Corps was to escape traditional work and do something more meaningful, but what I’ve found is that there’s nothing more meaningful than simply doing your job well. And while I like to think I do my job well here, there’s absolutely no reason a Liberian couldn’t do the same job equally as well. I’d argue that even if they don’t do the job as well, it might be more valuable to the country, because they’re building capacity that will remain in the country, whereas I will leave after two years and take my knowledge with me. Being a teacher is hard, and it feels weird that I’m getting acclaim for my “sacrifice” of being here for two years when people like Milton are working at least as hard as me, for less money, and will continue to do so long after I’m gone. So is my being here still helpful to people? A lot of days recently, it hasn’t felt like it.

Yet I’m still here. Frankly, I’ve thought about leaving. But I’m here. Partly due to Newtonian laws of physics, but mostly because the response to failure can’t be not to try. The More Than Me failures should absolutely serve as a referendum on larger aid practices, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we should pack up our bags and leave; personally I still feel compelled to stay and help my neighbors. But in addition, I am more compelled than ever to hold myself accountable in my efforts to help. To think deeply and responsibly about what I’m doing and who it’s affecting. To avoid telling people what to do, and instead working to help them do what they already know they need to. And most importantly, to hold myself accountable in my mentality–in how I perceive and convey my interactions with my friends, students, and coworkers, not as me teaching them, but an exchange of ideas. Because to dig into my bag of cliches that are absolutely true, I have learned far more from all of them than they have learned from me (5). Liberia has a lot of problems, yes, but they don’t need me to save them. They need a lot of people working, doing their small part to make society better, and if I can effectively and responsibly be one of those people, I’m more than happy to help.

It’s the beginning of dry season here in Liberia. And just as it is in America, each season brings a fresh new set of weather-related issues. The rains have just let up, and already it’s starting to get unbearably hot and dusty. Every day brings new challenges for people who have seen more than their fair share of them. And amongst all of it stand those palm trees, grounding the jungle surrounding my town as a constant presence. As I move into year two of calling this place my home, I’m continuing to nurse my own tree. They tell me it’s one I’ll never sit under the shade of, but frankly, I’m hoping no one else has to either. There are too many Liberians who are more than capable of planting their own trees, trees that will root up to provide better shade than mine. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned here, it’s that I don’t speak for Liberians or their trees; they have their own damn tongues.

———-

(1) Wine production actually being more consistent throughout the year. And, funnily enough, coming from the aforementioned palm trees. Yes, roosted in the tops of those trees lies naturally fermented “palm wine”, a substance extracted not dissimilarly from the tapping of maple syrup. Trees will yield about a gallon of palm wine a day, which needs to be harvested twice daily, for a span of about three months. This has interesting effects on the drinking culture–the limited quantity turning palm wine into almost a contraband substance, and the fixed harvesting schedule turning heavy drinkers, known worldwide for their fickle deference of action, into the epitome of routine clockwork.

(2) Alright footnote readers, I’ll level with you. This whole tree metaphor is actually overstated. There are in fact some decidious trees here thats leaves change color and drop, and although proportionally their impact is actually sizable, one truly doesn’t notice it here compared to the ceaseless sea of green. But yes, fine, there is some seasonal tree change. Frankly, I’m just banking on the fact that none of you are willing to fly over here and strip me of my poetic license.

(3) Recently saw someone on the internets ask the interesting question of why people who come to America are “immigrants”, but Americans who move elsewhere in literal caravans are “ex-pats”. Why don’t we see them as the same thing? (Note: the answer to this question actually isn’t that interesting–it’s racism. But it was something I found valuable to think about.)

(4) He’s also one of the funniest people I know, wryly satirizing Liberian power structure even as he harnesses it to improve our school. One of my favorite jokes of his came when I told him I would bring something to his house, and with a knowing smirk he told me “Nathaniel, I’m the VP now, and that means I don’t have a house any more. I have a compound.” I’m hoping some of this humor translates cross-culturally, but if not just know it’s a really good joke.

(5) I’ve had many friends and relatives tell me something along the lines of “you’re doing so much good over there”. And while I immensely appreciate the love and support, I would ask that if you’re one of those people, you try to reconsider that mindset in the future–the assumed positive effect of foreigners here kind of being the problem. Maybe instead ask me about all that I’ve learned from my Liberian friends while here; I would love to share some of their vast wealth of knowledge/jokes.

I Got 1776 Problems, Being Rich Ain’t One

The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect the positions or viewpoints of the United States government or the Peace Corps

It’s hard to think of two people more successful than Beyoncé and Jay Z. As musicians, celebrities, and cultural icons, they’ve maintained immense relevance for the entirety of this millenium. You don’t need me to tell you about them because everyone in the world already knows about them on a first name basis. (In texting friends about the release of their collaborative album, all I had to say was “jay/bey dropped” to immediately convey understanding and the proper level of excitement).

It’s also hard to think of two people who talk about success more than Beyoncé and Jay Z. Jay Z’s been rapping about it since Reasonable Doubt, and as Beyoncé’s forayed into rapping more and more recently, she’s surpassed her husband in braggadocio (1). Some examples from Everything Is Love:

“Hang one night with Yoncé I’ll make you famous”-Bey, Apeshit

“It’s disturbing what I gross”-Jay, Boss 

“24 karat faucets”-Jay, 713 

“No need to ask, you heard about us. Already know you know about us”-Bey, Heard About Us 

I think you get the point. Both artists are acutely aware of their social, cultural, and financial succeses. And for many people, they are defined solely by those successes. Their names are shorthand for the kind of exuberant lifestyle and celebrity that’s so sought after in American culture. This is true even here in Liberia, where many of my students ask if I can introduce them to Beyoncé (2). The belief is that the Carters and celebrities like them live blessed, perfect lives we can only approach asymptotically, but if we somehow did reach their level of fame and fortune, it would be nothing short of perfect.

But we know that isn’t true. “I got real problems just like you,” Beyoncé tells us on “Boss”. Recently, both artists have given us intimate, masterful albums documenting their marital strife. They’ve been going through some shit. And although being rich and successful probably doesn’t hurt in dealing with personal issues, I don’t know if it helps all that much either. Stripped away of all the external trappings that so effectively conceal it, each person’s soul is equally vulnerable, and those deep issues of the soul, so visceral and painful, are the ones that money can’t solve.

Yet there’s a certain segment of the population which is unable to empathize with their problems. “Well at the end of the day they’re still rich,” the thinking goes. And I get it. It’s easy to look at someone who has significantly more than you and see their problems as extraneous. After all, you’re dealing with the same shit without a vast fortune at your disposal. Maybe celebrities should just be happy with their success and shut up about their pithy problems.

This same attitude towards success can easily be grafted onto international, macro-level thought. “Development”, the euphemism we use for the success a country experiences economically and in standard of living, obviously varies greatly between different sovereignties. And I don’t think I have to tell you which country is perceived as the Knowles-Carters of nation-states. Life in America, to people all over the world, is an ontologically unknowable existence. Everybody here in Liberia wants to “go America”, whether on a scholarship or by playing the DV (3). And the underlying assumption is that once you go there, problems cease to exist, giving way to grass and checking accounts that are permanently greener.

As a result, conversations shedding light on some of the problems in America are some of the hardest to have. Because of course we have problems. Oh boy, do we have problems. For any Liberians who were able to migrate to America, they would enter as black immigrants in 2018–not exactly a permanent vacation. And personally, one of the hardest things about Peace Corps is how little my friends and neighbors are able to understand challenges I try to describe to them. “But you’re still in America,” they say, as if that can mitigate death, sickness, or poverty.

But obviously Liberians have their own, immensely significant problems. I really hope I’m not coming across as bitchy here, or giving the idea that “Well, Liberia doesn’t really have it that bad!” The two situations really aren’t that comparable, because our problems as Americans are, by definition, first world problems. And thus, the thing I’ve learned in talking about our different cultures is that your tone is the most important thing. Inviting comparison between our two countries’ issues inevitably turns into complaint brinksmanship, like two disgruntled elders in a nursing home comparing health ailments. There’s a way to say “hey, my country has problems and so does yours and they’re really not comparable and also I like your shirt” that remains dignified and empathetic to the challenges of Liberians while also shedding light to others on the imperfect experiment that is America. I’m just starting to learn how to respectfully have these conversations, through some pretty embarrasing instances of trial and error. Mostly error. So much error.

And here, like in almost all facets of life, we can take some cues from Beyoncé and Jay Z. Among their many skills is a careful PR handling of their public perception. The image they construct for themselves as celebrities represents exactly what they want us as a public to see about them–nothing more and nothing less. Yes, Lemonade and 4:44 were harrowing personal statements. They also made for great drama and ensured the continuous relevance of both artists; essentially, they were an excellent career move (4). But what’s so great about Everything Is Love is that is, thematically, the total opposite from those two albums. It’s a flex, a victory lap, two reconciled billionaires enjoying their happy, wealthy lives. Beyoncé and Jay Z aren’t afraid to tell us about their problems, but they also recognize that, yeah, their lives are pretty fucking sweet. And in their music, they tell both sides of that story. Had they made another album about their problems, there probably would’ve been diminishing returns (see: Views). In that sense, Everything Is Love is a fun change-up. But EIL would have lacked the cathartic joy it provides had we never gotten a window into those problems in the first place. Jay and Bey know exactly how to balance talking about what they lack with an appreciation for what they have in excess.

In talking about America, I’ve been trying to strike that same balance. I do still believe America is great, despite ever-mounting evidence to the contrary. And I tell Liberians about that. I tell them about our idealistic vision of a place where all human beings are created equal. I tell them about the American dream, which the Carters so well represent, that anyone with a dollar and a dream can make something of themselves. I tell them about how sometimes you get to run up the down escalators if the mall security foolishly fails to dispatch a guard to monitor the area. But I also believe that America has a lot of problems. And I tell Liberians about that too. I tell tham about institutional racism, sexual abuse, authoritarianism, and DJ Khaled’s failure to go down on his wife.

Like Beyoncé and Jay Z, I tell both sides of my story–yes, I and my country are very privileged. But we still have more than a few skeletons and Becky-with-the-good-hairs in our closet. My only hope is that I can learn to balance that duality and have those conversations anywhere near as artfully as those two generational artists. In one respect, I’m already ahead–at least you don’t need a fucking Tidal subscription to access my cultural observations.

———-

(1) The hardest flex on Everything Is Love is “If I gave two fucks about streaming numbers would’ve put Lemonade on Spotify”. Jay Z hasn’t successfully given that few of fucks in a bar since Black Album.

(2) The list of American musicians commonly known to Liberians consists almost solely of early 2000s rap/R&B stars and, disappointingly, Justin Bieber. Many people think I know all of these musicians, which I probably don’t discourage by fabricating tales of weekly brunches with Mariah Carey and Pitbull. Most people’s taste skews solely towards poppier, bouncy production, leading people to tell me Kendrick Lamar “can’t really rap” and that Nas is “too noisy”. Liberians can be wonderful people with a diverse range of thoughts and beliefs, but sometimes they’re just wrong.

(3) Migration in Liberia is a funnel geographically and an inverted funnel population-wise, with America being the final depository for human movement. Everyone in my town of B– wants to move to Zorzor, the neighboring city. Everyone in Zorzor wants to move to Monrovia, the capital, and everyone there wants to move to America.

(4) Some people take issue or find it insulting to the artists to imagine these two truths coexisting, but to me it just further shows Jay and Bey’s mastery of the celebrity domain. They recognize that nothing they do as public figures can be truly devoid of careerism, but they’ve found a way to make that careerism personal. The only other recent example that’s been as successful at balancing the two is Drake’s “God’s Plan” video, a clearly cynical marketing ploy that totally didn’t make me cry, shut up I’m not crying you’re crying.

You’re Killin Me, Small Nuances

The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect the positions or viewpoints of the United States government or the Peace Corps.

There are a few things that, for some reason, everyone feels qualified to have an opinion on. Economic policy, morality, and Christopher Nolan movies: all of these are fairly nuanced issues that everyone seems to think they have the answers to. And we get it, you took Micro 101 in college and have, like, totally figured out the ending to Inception. But to me it’s always seemed both conceited and banally reductive to imagine you have all the answers to anything. 

The reason why these fields, and many others, are subject to so much armchair expertise, is that they have fairly concave knowledge curves–i.e. it’s easy to learn a lot very quickly, but the additional learning that indicates mastery of a field is hard-earned and takes a lot longer (1). However, that additional mastery is crucial towards understanding the nuances and forming a complete opinion about something. Yes I’m talking to you, random dads at barbeques who argue with my mother about economics. I’m sure you have a basic understanding of the principles of supply and demand, but no that is not the same thing as her PhD in the field.

In living abroad, I’ve noticed much the same kind of learning curve in adapting to a new culture. The big things I picked up fairly quickly (it’s hot, people eat rice). But even now, after almost a year here (2), I’m  realizing new, small things that are crucial to understanding my friends and neighbors.

Here’s one I figured out just the other day. There’s this phenomon I’ve seen where Liberians will take almost any phone call they receive, regardless of how important a situation they’re in. Teachers will walk out of meetings, people will interrupt conversations, students will take calls during my tests. And most of the time they’ll just say “I’m busy right now, call me later.” That couldn’t have waited?? You had to interrupt everyone else to leave what was for all intents and purposes an inbox greeting?? For a while, I thought it was incredibly rude, something on which our cultures simply differed. But recently I realized the cause, and it’s rooted not in cultural ethics or values, but in cell phone plans. You see, Liberian cell phones don’t come with pre-existing phone plans. Instead, you have to purchase plans by buying “scratch cards”, small perforated lotto-ticket style scratch-offs with a 14 digit code. You type this code into your phone and then choose a temporary phone plan–the most common plan gives you three days of unlimited free calling to other Liberian phones. But these scratch cards are 150 Liberian dollars, a fairly large amount of money for most people. Some people can’t afford them at all. So if someone is calling you, you know they have unlimited calls, so it’s no trouble for them to call back within the next three days. You might not be able to buy a scratch card in the near future, so you can’t call them back, and they probably won’t buy another one for a while. That means if someone calls you and you’re unavailable, you might not hear from them again for months. But if you just quickly let them know they should call back later in the day, it’s no skin off their back. 

See how long that paragraph was! To explain a small issue that took me ten months to notice!

Here’s another one my friend told me about last week: gas. Almost all the vendors here water down their gas in plain sight of their customers (3). And no one seems to care. Even worse, given a choice between pumped, pure gasoline and watered down, roadside gasoline, they prefer the latter. This confused me for months, until a fellow Peace Corps friend (shout out Rockey!) explained the cause. In a neighboring country, vendors were actually selling fake gasoline. The chemical test developed to determine whether the gas was real left the product red. So the information diffused to Liberia that red gas was better, even though fake gas wasn’t a problem here. And when vendors realized watering down gas turns it the same shade of red…well, capitalism did the rest.

What’s crazy about these small, localized realizations isn’t how much they’ve changed my perception of Liberia. It’s how easy it was for me to live here for months without any idea of the root causes behind these things I was seeing every day. And it makes me wonder how many more of these small, perfectly logical explanations are out there that I have yet to observe.

It’s no exagerration to say I could probably live my whole life here without understanding everything–as it is, I only have two years. I’m certainly going to try to learn as much as possible in that time, but I think the more valuable lesson I’ve learned from this concerns my mentality. Most of the traveling I’ve done has been short term: one week at a resort in Mexico, two weeks touring Western Europe. These kind of trips don’t provide nearly enough opportunity to understand the cultures I’m entering. And that’s ok! As long as there’s an understanding of all the things I don’t and never will know about those places. It’s ok for me to know about a topic or have experiences in a place and still admit there are things I don’t know about it. It’s ok for me to have seen Inception seven times and still be open to other people’s interpretations. Because the more time I spend in Liberia, and the more I live, the more I realize I don’t know. And to know that I don’t know is almost the most important knowing of all. Ya know?

———-

(1) I took a bartending class once because I was 19, bored, and had a weird, anachronistic vision of the class being held in a speakeasy.  The first thing the teacher told me is that 4 out of 5 drink orders would be either a beer or a drink whose name is self-explanatory, such as a vodka soda or whiskey coke. But to be a bartender, you had to be prepared to concoct the drinks that would comprise the 1 out of 5 specialty orders. According to my teacher, those 20% of drinks took over 90% of the effort to learn, but one would be remiss to call oneself a bartender if they didn’t know them. Although in my opinion, he was remiss anyways for not holding his class in a speakeasy.

(2) As always, the most cliched sentiments prove to be the most accurate, because holy crap has time flown here.

(3) Backing up even more, most gasoline isn’t sold out of gas stations as you know them; that infrastructure doesn’t exist here. Instead, enterprising individuals routinely drive flatbed trucks full of empty barrels into the city and fill up on gas, which they water down and sell out of glass jars.

Another Teacher Walks Into My Class…

Teacher: “As we know the student government installation is this Friday. We’re looking for students with talents to perform for the program. Who here has a talent?”

*Almost every one of the boys’ hands go up*

Teacher: “And no, winning an eating contest is not a talent.”

*Every single hand goes down*

It’s good to know that some things transcend culture.

Christmas o menos

The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect the positions or viewpoints of the United States government or the Peace Corps.

Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? The arguments have raged since John McClane entered the American consciousness in 1988, and it’s one of those debates that generally just consists of both sides yelling their opinions at the opposite party; rarely is someone swayed. It’s easy to see why the film’s in/exclusion in the Christmas canon can be so important to people. Christmas is a deeply personal holiday, and each individual has an expectation, ingrained from childhood memories, of what constitutes a proper Christmas. There’s a point every December, after putting up the tree, baking cookies, or seeing a large snowfall, that you think “OK, it feels like Christmas now”. And what Christmas feels like doesn’t change. It’s a holiday deeply rooted in traditions–if you put up your lights a certain way last year, you’re going to do it the same way this year. And if you didn’t consider Die Hard a Christmas movie last year, you’re certainly not going to this year. Thus, the Die Hard question is actually a rather important one. At its heart, it’s asking how much you can change about Christmas–a holiday deeply rooted in familiarity–while still calling it Christmas. This is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot here in Liberia.

Christmas is a major holiday in Liberia. A majority of citizens identify as Christian, and their brands of Christianity run along about the same spectrum as American Christianity–there are devout weekly churchgoers, casual, more private worshippers, and those who are only Christian by heritage (the concepts of agnosticism/atheism aren’t really formalized). So yes, they celebrate Christmas. A school break is built around December 25th. People use the week to spend more time with family. Neighbors will wish you a happy holiday. But as far as similarities go, that’s about it.

Anecdotally, I asked my friend Prince how he would celebrate his Christmas. His response, verbatish: “Well, we will go on the farm and find an animal to slaughter. The we will bring it back in town, and look for wood. When we find the wood, we will cook the meat with plenty rice. And then, we will celebrate and dance.”

It’s easy to thumb through our personal/cultural index of Christmases and come to a conclusion: that doesn’t sound like Christmas. None of the things that make the season so wonderful–the presents, the decorations, the music–can be found in the Liberian iteration of its celebration. Additionally, that celebration isn’t even much different than the average day here. Although slaughtering an animal and cooking extra rice is certainly a treat, and dancing makes for a fun evening, none of those practices are immensely special or especially unique to Christmas. So if Liberians aren’t doing anything recognizable to me in their Christmas celebrations, and if they’re not even doing anything all that different from their normal routines, then how is that still Christmas? If Die Hard doesn’t have any recognizable traits of the Christmas season, then how can it be a Christmas movie?

Die Hard may be a Christmas movie, but it’s certainly not the best Christmas movie. That honor goes to A Charlie Brown Christmas, Charles Schulz and Bill Melendez’s 1965 animated classic. The climax of the film comes when our titular blockhead is at a low point, after experiencing the consumerism, greed, and selfishness that can come with the holiday season. “Does anyone know the true meaning of Christmas??” he frustratingly inquires. Luckily, Linus has the answer. Shakespearianly taking center stage, he recites a passage from the Book of Luke, reminding Charlie Brown of the religious roots of the holiday. But although the text of the resolution is religious, the message doesn’t have to be. What Linus was reminding Charlie Brown of is that celebration is a state of mind. More important than the specific Christmas traditions is your personal reason for finding meaning in them, whether it be religious, humanistic, or familial. Thus as Charlie Brown walks by the same bright, consumerist Christmas decorations that bothered him earlier, he’s smiling, because he’s remembered what Christmas means to him.

My friend Prince isn’t celebrating Christmas in any way I ever have. But that doesn’t matter. Celebration isn’t about the how, it’s about the why–a conscious decision to decide something is special. And although trees and lights and gifts can add to that, it’s easy to mistake the means for the end. Now when I think about Prince’s Christmas evening, I envision something similar to the end of Charlie Brown Christmas: something simple, but to which no amount of material goods or traditions could add happiness. I’m trying to take my Christmas cues from Charlie Brown, Prince, and any number of my Liberian friends who will spend December 25th happy and thankful. I hope they have a Merry Christmas. I hope you do too.

And in case my metaphor wasn’t clear, Die Hard is totally a Christmas movie.

Rice, Rice, Baby

The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect the positions or viewpoints of the United States government or the Peace Corps.

Chances are you take food for granted.

It’s ok, so do I. It’s kind of impossible not to, being from a developed country. Because the byproduct of every one of those developments, intentionally or no, is to put more steps between the average person and their food.

At first, all humans just grew their own food, whether through farming or husbandry. Then as societies grew bigger, specialization of jobs emerged, and the average person did stuff besides growing food, and traded with the people who grow food. Then we invented money, and instead of trading for food directly, we traded for money, which we used to trade for food. Then we invented Taco Bell, and instead of trading money to people who grow the food, we traded money to Taco Bell who got the food from people who grew the food.

Besides asserting that Taco Bell is as large a sociological breakthrough as jobs and money (it totally is), the point of this is that when we talk about a job “putting food on the table” in the US, we mean it in a relatively figurative fashion. Whereas here in B–, the farming town where I’m living, if someone talks about putting food on the table they literally mean they are going to their family’s farm to get food, harvest it, and carry it back to their table. If they have a table.

And yo, let me tell you first hand–that junk is not easy. Farming is done, like most things here, by hand, and it’s a year round endeavor. You have to clear the jungle with your machete in February, then burn the debris in March, then plant your crops in May, and harvest them in October. In between, there are any number of on-farm tasks to complete. And most people’s farms are between one to two hours away by walking, which they do both ways, every day.

Most of this effort is in service of rice. Like many places in the world, rice is the staple crop in Liberia, to the point where Liberians will semi-joke that if they haven’t eaten rice today, they haven’t eaten. It’s kind of funny pondering rice’s ascendancy to the main harvest crop on the planet–frankly, it’s hard to grow and isn’t all that substantive nutritionally. But this entire culture and many others center around the short-grained carbohydrate, subject to its seasonal whims, swampy inhabitance, and prickly, backbreaking harvesting. Maybe that’s part of the reason Liberians have such a strange sense of pride about eating rice. Unlike me, with the many steps between the origin of the Taco Bell Twelve Pack and my mouth, the rice my neighbors are eating, the source of so much sweat and blood, is an immediate validation of their work, the direct fruit of their labor.

What’s both amazing and slightly saddening about this is that farming isn’t what you do if you can’t do anything else. It’s what you do even if you’re doing something else. All the other teachers at my school have farms. My friend who worked in a high government position but is now retired has a farm. The chief of one village nearby has a Masters degree in physics, but he has a farm. Due to the economic situation of Liberia (which is a whooole other topic), it’s hard to escape the agrarian based roots of the country.

But from my perspective, it doesn’t seem like farming is something from which people necessarily need escape. There’s something very blue collar about the mentality of people living here, and in an alternate universe where Springsteen was born Liberian, he’d be writing songs about the work ethic of these farmers, and the ways they find to fill the gaps in between making their livelihood with a wonderful array of life–there’s no turnpikes or alleys here, but operas and ballets are indeed being fought, in a literal Jungleland.

Because while living in my farming community, I’ve been impressed by how much effort my neighbors devote to farming, but I’ve been even more impressed by how devoted they are to their community. There’s a cultural custom, which was weird to me at first, that if you’re eating, you invite anyone passing you to join. “Let’s eat,” you say, and they’ll reply thanking you and declining the offer. At times it can feel perfunctory, but its intention is wonderfully humanistic–despite the hard work you’ve put in to harvest an insufficient amount of this unsubstantive carbohydrate, you’re willing to share with your neighbor. And your neighbor, recognizing that you’ve worked hard and are probably hungry, politely declines.

It’s this friendly attitude, so visible in so many facets of life here, that I hope remains intact as this country is developed. Because although there are a myriad of ways it can improve, it would be a shame to lose the great qualities its people already possess: an ability to overcome hardship with a smile and help their neighbor do the same. On rare occasions, if it’s a close friend, I will accept offers to join someone for a meal, and I’m never disappointed by the company. This country has stories to tell; all you have to do is stop, eat some carbohydrates, and listen.