A Month on the Beaches of Koh Payam

After a month an a half on a relatively remote island in southern Thailand I found myself with Tryg in Bangkok wondering exactly how one comes to a place like this. After all, I didn’t plan on being in Bangkok 5 months ago when we set off for asia free of trajectory and started wandering. I can honestly say I never planned to go to Bangkok ever in my life, it was to remain a Timbuktu, Transylvania, or Emerald City, mythic in its scale and remoteness. But when your intention has no direction all destinations are possible; In fact in such a situation where one makes no plans, each happening begins to feel intended, or at the very least miraculous. Here I am in Beijing, here I am in Shanghai, suddenly I find myself in a rural hospital, and now a Buddhist temple. I’ve gotten good at riding the currents of this trip becoming aware of the fact that I am part of the whole ocean and these waves were heading towards me long ago.  I find myself being able to accept what comes and flow with it on towards what ever ends it offers me.

Ian swings on the beach.  Another perfect sunset over Burmese islands and the Andaman Sea.

Koh Payam, the island off the coast of Ranong, Thailand, was absolutely incredible - at first. Me and tryg arrived there with Liisa, our Finnish friend from our first week in Beijing who had decided to join us for a little while in the tropics. We arrived on the island by ferry from the main land and took motor bike taxis to our hut made of weaved bamboo pieces right on the white sand of the beach. Though it was too hot in the middle of the day – 95 degrees usually - to do anything but go swimming, that was more than enough to keep us occupied for a while. Tryg built spear guns out of sticks, bicycle spokes, and rubber tires to be used while snorkeling around the truly razor sharp coral reefs just a 3 minute walk from our front door. Inland was covered in jungle, cashew orchards, and coconut trees. Wild dogs roamed around in packs that you could hear at night fighting raucous yelping turf wars. We explored the little shops and restaurants around us in the cooler evenings and woke up each morning to a chorus of a hundred different tropical bird calls each beautiful and unique. In all we paid about 5 dollars per person per night, and I could not believe how someone like me, with as little money as I have, could afford to come to a place that seemed like it should be reserved for millionaires and honeymooners. I was awash with contentment.

Texture of a jackfruit. 

This changed slowly. Within 2 weeks Liisa left to return to school in Beijing, and me and tryg moved into a cheaper place away from the beach with nicer cabins. Like the huts before we only had electricity after 6 pm, and no Internet of any kind. The heat was absolutely stifling during the day and I’d started getting eaten alive by the mosquitoes. In the beginning I stuck to a workout routine that I could maintain within the confines of the cabin, because the sun was so intense I couldn’t bring myself to go running. But mostly, we settled in for a long stay with books and pod casts.

Kink-tailed cat.

The beginning of my downfall was the mosquitoes. I have a stronger reaction to them than most people I know and it becomes almost impossible not to scratch them. I do my best but in those hazy moments between sleeping and wakefulness I find myself completely lacking in self control and scratch my legs to ruins. They became bloody and eventually, my right leg got infected. I did my best to take care of it but when I started feeling sick and found my lymph nodes were starting to swell I had to start taking my emergency antibiotics. Though the leg eventually healed and I redoubled my efforts to resist scratching, my moral would never return to it’s full force. Each day became exactly like the last, waking up without a goal or a reason. I was running low on money and wanted to have some to spend when Lupin came to meet us in Hong Kong, so I was eating mostly just musli cereal with only one real meal a day from the restaurants on the island. As I said it was too hot most of the time to walk much during the day, or go exploring, and even when I did force myself to go out there were only 3 roads on the island, all of which I’d already walked down many times. I read 4 books in the month we spent on the island. I listened to close to 50 podcast including Radio Lab, All Songs Considered, The Splendid Table, America’s Test Kitchen, and a few others. I found myself sitting in the chair on our porch staring mindlessly into the trees simply waiting for our time on the island to end. I became numb.

The biggest, meanest, gecko on Koh Phayam. 

In the middle there was suddenly hope for some way to pass the time. Tryg had found a hidden beach down a jungle path that was covered in sharp rock. The first day I went we brought the fly rods we’d been carrying with us since Portland that we'd yet to use and for the first time in 5 months tried fishing. That first day was beyond fun. Tryg caught a massive squid - over 3 pounds - on "The Pram Rod", which he won in a rock paper scissors contest before we left the US. I caught a much smaller squid accompaniment, all within an hour.. That night we had a massive feast. The owner of our cabin turned the one big squid into 5 different dishes, then made a few dishes of his own and we ate with the staff. When we tried to pay for the extra food they’d given us they refused “when you are here you are family” he insisted.

A friendly guy I met out in a jungle hut.

The next day we caught nothing though, and same with the day after that. For days we returned to the beach to hangout and fish, but in time the hike didn’t feel worth it to me and I would spent the last 2 weeks sitting on the porch or walking aimlessly around the island by myself.

One of the many flying lizards on the island.  They had quite a glide ratio, and amazing maneuverability. 

When finally we left and found ourselves in the massive city of Bangkok I felt suddenly like I could accomplish anything. Despite the boredom and incredible act of mental endurance involved with doing nothing at all for a month, it left me also feeling powerful. I was so happy to be in Bangkok. I knew that I was feeling something that you could only feel after traveling for 5 months, a simple awareness of the world and your place in it, and joy in knowing that. I loved that I was somewhere so unlikely, I loved that I was doing something so intense, I even loved the experience on the island, as miserable as it was, because that much quiet time to yourself it's self teaches you a thing or two.

Young pineapple.

Travel, I decided, even with all it’s inevitable suffering, and in fact because of it, is an incredible thing, it makes me feel stronger and more capable than anything else I’ve ever experienced. Our last night in Bangkok we laid our air mattresses out on benches in the airport to sleep. With my hat over my eyes to block out the fluorescent lights I soaked in steady confidence.  5 months ago I wasn't sure if there was a reason to go on this trip.  I wanted to focus on my education, on building my career, I was worried this was a waste of time, but in the airport as I noted all the anxieties and self doubts that had evaporated in these past 5 months I was so thankful I'd continued, because every challenge, every inner tumult, was worth the way I'd now begun to feel. 

A Teaser - New Post Coming Soon!

Maia has landed in Hong Kong to spend some time with Ian and Tryg, and I have volunteered to take care of the blog while she is visiting. Due to technical difficulties, I received Tryg’s images, but not Ian’s text. Since they will be on a train and out of touch for the next 3 days, I thought I would offer up a teaser image planned for the soon to come post of their latest adventures.

From what I understand, the guys have been hanging out on a secluded island for the last couple of weeks. I don’t know about you, but after seeing the pics I am looking forward to hearing the story!

Enjoy!

Gary

Faces of Shanghai

Arriving in the bustle of Shanghai I had the itch for a new lens. Such cravings are nothing new, and I generally ignore them, but I was in China to photograph people, and the part of me that likes toys was especially vocal about the fact that I did not have that perfect lens. I needed something fast, which is slang for a lens that allows in a lot of light (the f/ stop), in order to get that appealing look of only a little bit of the image being in focus (the eyes), and the rest turning into a creamy blur. After three hours of haggling, bluffing, and arguing in Chinese (thanks to Ian) in the largest camera store I’ve ever seen, I walked away with lens I wanted. It is a Sigma 30 mm f/ 1.4 and I’ve loved it since that day, using it far more than the rest of my (more expensive) lenses.  

Upon getting the lens, I went on a two-day binge of portraits throughout the huge city. No one interesting looking escaped my request for a photo (though many refused) and I got some cool shots from my boldness. This blog is a compilation of my favorite images from those first couple days in Shanghai.

Ian and I are temporarily stuck on a tropical island in the south of Thailand, reading feverishly and awaiting news about our futures. A “normal” blog is sure to follow, once we get back to civilization and real computers.

Tryg

Laotian Infatuation

The mountains outside Vang Vieng.

I’m sitting still on a stone bench on the edge of a courtyard in the middle of Luang Prabang. I’m still because it seems like the thing to do in such a place. Behind me young Buddhist monks between the ages of 8 and 17 are bathing in the cold water from a well they are draining with a bucket. It’s warm out, as always, and humid. The papaya tree has only one ripe fruit and the coconut trees near by have already been stripped of everything edible. I’m angry about the tourists. 

I see more tourists in 15 minutes on the street on the other side of the courtyard than I have seen in all the three months I spent in China combined. You’re most likely to hear people speaking French around here because at one time, like many parts of Southeast Asia, this was a French colony, and so a lot of the locals still speak the language. The reason I’m annoyed at the other foreigners is not just because there are so many of them, though that was an unpleasant surprise when we first arrived here. It has much more do to the fact that a lot of the tourists are either very old, or very young. It seems to be half a retirement home and half a spring break destination, which seems to negate all the trouble it took to come here. You see I was pretty proud of the journey, up until I arrived in Luang Prabang and found more white faces than locals.

We left the Jade Roo, our home for the past month and a half and the best hostel I’ve ever stayed at, the afternoon of January 27. The bus we took first, from Dali to Jing Hong in southern Yunnan, was filled with deaf Chinese people. The whole 12 hours or so was almost completely silent, something nearly unheard of in most parts of China. The people, speaking in sign language, were all young, probably either teenagers or in their early twenties. (After all this time it’s still hard to tell how old Chinese people are, but I feel okay about it ’cause Chinese people seem to have the same trouble guessing my age.) The only sounds I heard for the most part came from when someone somewhere on the bus would succumb to motion sickness, yak into a plastic bag, and then toss the bag out the window. We woke up at 1 am when we arrived in Jing Hong. With no place to go, I asked the driver if we could just sleep on in the beds of the sleeper bus and he agreed. 

When morning finally came, it revealed a tropical environment green and vivid. A papaya tree grew just feet from out bus. Palm trees where everywhere. It seemed that every open patch of earth was completely covered in life. Plants grew on top of plants so the trees were dripping with orchids, vines, and ferns. 

A tree full of epiphytes. Ah, the tropics.

Though I would have loved to have stayed a few days in Jing Hong, our expiring visas pushed us onto the next bus, and we took off for the southern edge of China. It’s strange walking across a country border. One minute you’re defined as a traveler in China, and the next your designation changes and you’re something different—but because there is a ten-minute walk down a jungle-y dirt road after leaving China and before arriving at the Laos visa shack, there is a good chunk of limbo-like time where one doesn’t know quite what they are. The most adventurous I ever feel is in these fuzzy periods where everything I know is behind me, and everything in front of me is an unknown. Nothing has ever been as much of a mystery to me as it is at this particular moment.

To say I knew little about Laos would have been some record-setting understatement. Not only did I know nothing about the culture, food, or geography; before I crossed the boarder I would have been hard-pressed to point out Laos on a map. I didn’t know how to say hello or thank you in the local language. I had no guess whatsoever what might be considered rude, what the local religions where, what the exchange rate was, or even what the money was called. I’ve never walked so blind into any situation in my life, and I’m proud to say I was only mildly panicked. 

The little border town just inside Laos was the kind of place that would be wiped from the face of the earth without a trace in less than a year if it weren’t for the people there carrying out the bare minimum upkeep. Walking past huts made of mud with metal sheets for roofs, we found ourselves remarkably without a plan. There were a group of van drivers offering rides to the nearest town but they were charging incredible sums of money even by American standards, and there was no kind of bus station anywhere in sight. We reached the edge of the town without any Lao money (called Kip) and still no idea of what we were going to do. Finally we were able to change money with some guy we met who was running a little soda stand, and with nothing else to do we started walking down the road.

In retrospect, I guess we assumed we’d eventually find a town or a village, but this only shows how little we knew about the place. Looking back on it now, we were probably a good 30 miles from the nearest village, let alone a city with hotels or guest houses. The sun was pounding us and the jungle was dense on all sides with banana trees and flowers the colors of panic buttons glowing all around. 

Finally, a covered flatbed pickup truck broke the silence, and we stuck out our hands to wave it down. In the cab were the driver and a largish Chinese lady who just happen to be going to the city we’d heard was a viable destination, Luang Prabang. The driver said he could take us to an intersection where the bus to Luang Prabang would drive by. We’d have to chase it down, but then we’d be set. So we jumped in the back of the truck and took off.

The intersection truly was in the middle of nowhere. There was a Chinese restaurant and a couple of huts. The Chinese woman that had become our travel partner was proving to be a little more grouchy than we’d initially guessed, and I found myself not completely trusting her when she gave us advice. Nonetheless, we bought some food and began doing nothing. 

Local fruit.

It was about two hours before the bus arrived, then left without us in it. The driver shouted that the bus was full as we chased after it. The sun was setting as Tryg was calling dibs on the wooden bench in the Chinese restaurant for the night. Neither of us were in particularly bad spirits though. In fact, generally we don’t get too stressed about anything while traveling unless there is something we have to figure out. In this situation, since there seemed to be nothing we could do, there was no reason to panic, so we didn’t. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before a van drove by, which the Chinese woman waved down. We put our trust in her because we had no other choice, and we climbed aboard and took off through the jungle. 

The drive was beautiful through winding dirt roads that rose and fell through the mountains. We snaked along a small enchanting river most of the way. Tryg and I started talking about the possibility of buying a canoe and floating on a paddling trip for a few days through the denser parts of the jungle. 

Coming around one bend we came across a broken-down bus full of people waiting in what remained of the day’s broiling sun. The same bus, in fact, that had passed us by just hours before as we stood on the side of the road. Everyone there seemed to be contemplating a night on the side of the road as we continued on our way.

To this day, we still don’t know what town we arrived four hours later after the sun had gone down. We checked into the worst accommodations we have yet experienced in Asia, just across the street from the bus station, and started walking through the small town looking for a place to eat. We noticed quickly how many foreigners there were. Not tons, nothing compared to what was coming, but enough that we felt out of place. We’d gotten used to being unique over the past months, and so it was strange to see so many travelers in such a random tiny town. 

The next morning we woke up early and caught the first bus heading towards Luang Prabang. The ride was as beautiful as ever, with mountains that would shoot as straight as pillars out of the forest, reaching four of five thousand feet into the sky. Lush green plants covered every peak, while we were surrounded on all sides by stark sheer cliffs.

The colors of the morning market in Luang Prabang.

Here in the courtyard a few moments ago, a monk set to beating a low muffled bell. At the same time birds have been stealing bits of stale bread as hard as pebbles from the offering plates in front of the golden Buddha statues. A cat makes a last-ditch effort from behind the Buddhas, scattering the birds in a single pounce as the young monks in the shower house respond to the bell, dressing in their bright orange robes and walking towards the center of the complex where a temple colored in black, gold, red, and silver dominates all the other structures. The birds are carrying the bits of food they’ve stolen up to the roof of the temple and dropping them so that it bounces down the tiles, sounding like a muted xylophone before falling to the ground amidst a flurry of chasing finches. I hear the monks beginning to chant inside, which gathers the nearby tourists like months to peer inside the temple. I haven’t seen inside yet, but I am more interested in watching the masses collect, and I think it would be a pity to become one of them too quickly. 

When we arrived in Luang Prabang we couldn’t quite fathom the crowds. It seemed more like southern California than a city in SE Asia. White faces and bright blond hair flowed everywhere. Everyone wore expensive clothes and designer sunglasses; the locals sold posters, statues, and other tourist bait, which filled streets as far as we could see. Somehow in the middle of SE Asia, in a country I’d barely ever heard of, we’d found a thriving resort town on the banks of the Mekong River.

A celebratory swim in the river after a long trip to Luang Prabang.

We arrived in Luang Prabang at noon, and within two hours we were checked into a room whose windowless walls, ceiling, and floor were all covered in the same dark stained hardwood paneling. We left to walk around this odd Caucasian bubble and soon found ourselves swimming in the fast currents of one of the two rivers that flank Luang Prabang, turning it into a tropical peninsula. 

The monks are still chanting. It’s been close to an hour, and most of the tourists have gotten bored and left to peruse the night market as the sun dissipates leaving the courtyard empty. I’m sitting very still just listening to the harmonies vibrating in and around me. After a few days I’ve gotten better at finding these quiet pockets. It’s a very small city, maybe a mile and a half across, but there are at least five different temples within it, each hidden away so that you might not notice them as you walk by. 

It took very little time to discover the city and head out on excursions to other local villages. We were looking for a boat that we could buy, and had so far we had only heard incredible prices of three million kip (approximately 375 dollars) for a motor-less canoe. 

Choosing dirt roads over paved ones, we found ourselves in a minuscule collection of huts, where we played a game of Padonk with some local men. This, as we learned, was a French game that has become popular amongst the Lao people in the last few years. I’ve mostly heard it called bocce ball in the U.S. The game consists of throwing heavy metal balls at a small red ball at the other end of the court. You are trying to get your team’s balls to land as close to the red ball as possible. It’s similar to curling, though the people of the other team will try and knock your balls out of the way. Whoever is closest to the red ball after all the metal balls have been thrown wins the round.

I’m not exactly sure why, but drinking is an integral part of Padonk. You must finish your drink before taking your turn, and your cup will be filled with beer again the second you put it down.  This means that after a few hours both Tryg and I were drunk, along with the other men we were playing with, and we had all become the best of friends. One of the men could speak English, while another turned out to be the chief of a local village. 

We mentioned our plan to boat down the Mekong River and the village head quickly advised us against it. “It is not the right time of year,” the English-speaking man translated. “The water is too low, so there are many dangerous rapids.” For the sake of our livers, we left soon after that, giving everyone big hugs and promising to come back the next day. 

Assessing boat options with the idea of a long-term trip down the Mekong.

The monks have finished chanting so I’ve stood to leave the courtyard. I’ve been sitting for hours on that stone bench, so my tailbone is sore, and the monks exiting the temple look at me as if one of their statues were running away. I’m hungry and tired, and since Tryg has the only key to our room and I have no idea where he is, I start walking. 

It’s warm tonight, as it is every night. It feels like nighttime after a long hot summer day. I look at a few of the things being sold in the market, listen to the foreigners around me complaining about this and that, or marveling at this or that, or proselytizing about this or that. I walk to the river, saying no to each man who offers me a boat ride down the Mekong. Geckos swarm around the streetlights, toads hop down the road and get killed by little girls on motorbikes. Coconut trees sway in the warm wind, and the sound of the river rapids roll up from down below. I walk for hours in the dark; it’s a nice night for it.

Playing an impromptu game of sepak takraw in the cool of the night. Vientiane, Laos. 

Things You Should Know

Ah, the allure of fire.*

After the crazy traffic, food sanitation, and hospitals, a man swinging 
around a string of firecrackers doesn't even register as moderately dangerous.

Chinese New Year: It’s like Christmas, New Years, and the Fourth of July rolled into one, 
with really cheap fireworks (all of which are legal). The next morning there is literally 
a carpet of red paper covering the streets from the millions of firecrackers.

There is so much I wish I’d shared with you about this place. I’ve gone off on tangents about the nature of the Chinese mind, and I’ve been distracted by my adventures in the hospital, my terrible Christmas Day date, and my chance encounter with the Chinese film industry. But I’ve been negligent when it comes to explaining Dali. Maybe it’s because it’s so incredible and I know that anything I write will fail to capture exactly why Tryg and I have chosen to stay here so long. But there are things that I really need you to know before we leave.

I want you to know intimately that there is a moment that happens right at sunset, if the weather is just right, when there is a tiny gap of blue visible between the mountains and the clouds. If you watch as the sun descends unseen behind the overcast sky that small patch of blue will soften in color to deep purple, then to amber, and then bright orange, until suddenly the sun itself will appear in that minuscule window of space, and massive rays of light—as clear and real as if they are the tangible condensation of something sacred—will erupt across the valley. In that moment the snowy mountain peeks are set metallic, shining like polished brass in summer heat. In this moment of light, the ego melts in acceptance of temporal perfection, and draws the people watching together in communal love for the place that they are.

An unusually wintery day along Er Hai Lake.

Did you know in Yunnan marijuana grows like a weed all over the farmland where farmers produce fresh highly-inorganic vegetables all winter long? In Dali all the houses are white with murals neatly placed in the corners of the walls. The temple halfway up the mountain is the best place to get vegetarian fried noodles, while in town there is a Buddhist buffet where you can eat as much as you want for around 80 cents. But you have to eat everything on your plate or the nun will stand disapprovingly beside you, refusing to let you go till you’ve finished every single grain of rice. 

Unusual flora of rural Yunnan.

Sometimes on a clear calm day a gust of wind so strong you can stand sideways against it will rip down from the mountains and then disappear, leaving a clean street and crowds of people rubbing the dust out of their eyes. 

I want you to know the people here. In such a small town I never walk through the streets without running into friends. I know the juggling Italian clown that regularly drops his balls in the middle of otherwise impressive shows. I know the male Chilean modern dancer with long curly hair who moves to cello music on stage like a worm plumbing the earth for a beat. There is the Australian/Colombian couple who have been traveling the world for two years from South America on their way back down under, keeping a blog of their adventures. I know the English brewer at the Bad Monkey Bar who I play Monopoly with on Saturdays, along with Jane, the former co-owner of the Jade Emu hostel. There’s Steve the American tea tycoon, Simon the muscle-bound ex-British Air Force backpacker, Richard the out-of-work biologist, Lewis the anthropological filmmaker. For a while there was Jack the pot-smoking writer who was never found away from the sun that shone on the third floor, and Adrian the Scottish mother of two teenagers who could turn heads while sunbathing on the terrace. The whole city feels like our own private mansion, with all the people in it making up a strange churning family of comers and goers that seem destined to converge on this little village in southern China.

In Dali there are two alternate universes.  The western tourists arrive at the hostels with backpacks intending to climb the mountains, see the temples, experience the local culture and enjoy a relaxed artistic existence. The Chinese tourists check into their hotels and head off to take pictures with their point-and-shoot cameras while riding huge fifteen-seat tourist golf carts, or being herded through the city by tour guides dressed in outfits imitating the ethnic minorities of the area.

BAMFs by night.

An unexpected subject made for a much more interesting photo.

Tomorrow we are leaving China.  We will explore Southeast Asia starting with Laos, possibly continuing on to Thailand, Cambodia, or even Vietnam—but we will return to Dali when we get tired or run low on money. This is the place in Asia where we will always come home.

It’s been a while since I thanked everyone who reads this regularly, or irregularly. We love hearing from you guys when ever you make the time to write comments or emails and I love that people somewhere in the world care about what we are doing. I hope you all are making it through the winter OK as we head off to the tropics.

* Note: The first photo in this post, captioned “Ah, the allure of fire,” is not my photo. It was taken by our good friends Kris and Andreas, an Australian and a Colombian, who have been traveling and blogging for close to two years. Read about their adventures at 2sporks1cup.com

Women dancing in the Dragon Festival on Day Two of New Year.

Faux Military Manifesto

(This blog post was written while I lay in bed with a fever.  It's certainly a very different blog from the ones I usually write but I like it a lot, I got the ideas I write about here from all the books I've been reading since coming to china, school lectures from college, and conversations I've had while traveling.  Forgive the weird formatting as I had to upload the blog myself this week from a very crappy computer with an old server that couldn't really handle the blogger uploading program.)

Part 1

Liisa + tea + diffused window light + slingshot.  A still life. 

Nietzsche was a mild anti-Semite. Not your KKK extreme kind of racist, but the low-burn kind of bigot who would write letters about how much he loved those crazy Jews despite the fact that thousands of years ago they were responsible for the tainting of Western civilization with a flawed moral code.

Nietzsche said that before the Jews, the whole world worked basically on the same moral principle—that the strong will rule over the weak. The strong created the rules that most benefited themselves, and created a culture where the weak accepted, followed, and in fact upheld those rules. In this society what was valued was power, strength, and dominance over your enemies. You wanted to display your abilities and demanded that others respect you. These values became the values of the people so that even the slaves valued such traits because they benefited too from such a society.

Ian enjoys his military dress-up.

If you want an example of this moral system in modern times, consider the military. A general makes the rules,and the foot soldiers carry out their orders. To step out of line is not simply to incur the wrath of your commanding officer, but also every other soldier of any rank. Mutiny threatens the structure that, in battle, every single participant from strong to weak depends on to survive. And even in a successful mutiny, the structure of the military system is not changed—only the leader is removed. The most recent example of a society in western history that still employed such a social morality is the ancient Romans, who had a strong caste system where in superiors ruled over merchants and slaves and the merchants and slaves supported their masters as a rational act of self-preservation.

While Nietzsche did not like this “master morality,” he believed that what replaced it was much worse—the slave revolt, he called it. It was not a military revolt, like every empire has faced, only to be replaced with an identical form of morality exacted by new masters. Instead, the Jewish slave revolt was a philosophical one based on the tenant that strength was weakness, and humility was power.

It was a small revolt, quiet and ridiculous, so that none in power paid it much mind until that greatest of revolutionaries stood up and declared that “The meek shall inherit the earth!” and the meek listened, then the merchants listened, and the aristocrats and even eventually the emperor listened. After Jesus, the champion ofslave morality, came quiet chaos.  In time we came to believe one should be meek, yet strong. We believed we should be proud of our accomplishments, while Pride became a deadly sin. In us was born the conflict of ancient morality from the Romans and every society before them, mixing with the “irrational” morality of Jesus the king of the Jews.

As the Church rose in power and the Christian influence rivaled the states in which they existed, moral chaos battled in the hearts of society.  Eventually there came the idea that there may be no right answer to moral questions; there was ambiguity. But even more than that there was the recognition that within the state there were two powers: the government and the church. This meant that people would never again hold the belief that one person or political party should have universal power.

In 1215 the barons of England brought King John to (as I imagine it) a huge rolling green field. In the center of this moor was a table, a chair, and a piece of paper. Surrounded on all sides by the lords of his kingdom King John was forced to sign a document that would later become the Magna Carta—the first document that limited the power of a monarch to exact unlimited power against his subjects. This document is believed to be one of the most fundamental tenants of all English and Western laws that came afterwards.

Men and women carrying double loads of bamboo down 2,500 feet of mountain, every day, to make brooms.

Of course those Baron lords were simply trying to secure power for themselves, but they seized on a moral philosophy, rather than simply some new dictator, as a battle flag for their revolution, and that has made the difference in our society today.

What this all comes down to—the idea that I had today that flooded my head with these old lectures from school and the words of old books read long ago—is that in this chaos is the POSSIBILITY of greatness.

Nietzsche did not like the oppressive morality of the masters from ancient times—and even more, this son of a strict Lutheran pastor despised the irrational morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but even this staunch atheist seemed to believe that a societal conflict born of opposed morals was necessary for what might come next. He believed that a man of superior moral nature—who could in fact transcend morals and go beyond good and evil—could only develop through the chaos of  moral systems that regularly defeated each other.

Now to be honest I could never fully understand Nietzsche’s description of this moral superiority that he called the Ubermench. The Ubermech is not the next Jesus, and he is not the Buddha or some other religious figure. As best as I can tell, the Ubermench is a philosopher who thought hard enough that he was able to realize the flaws of all morality, and actualize that realization fully in his life.

If you ask some scholars, they think that Nietzsche believed himself to be this moral master. If you ask some Nietzsche fans, they will say that the fact he eventually went insane and spent that later part of his life starring out a window is proof that he really was this moral master. But really I don’t care much about what or who Nietzsche himself thought the Ubermench was, because I’m talking about societies here: Chinese society, and Western society.

Women working their vegetable plots in Cai Cun.  Monoculture planting has yet to catch on in rural China.  

I do believe in the inner conflict described by Nietzsche. I think every day or every moment we wake up and have to decide if we will be the general or the Buddha; Malcolm X or MLK. And I think this constant quiet question of what is right—and the fact that in some deep place we know that there may not be any right—means that each of us is, in some way, a confused philosopher.

We have this critical prospective because our society breeds conflict. The American revolutionaries didn’t envision a streamlined clockwork nation. They imagined a system of checks and balances with forums for competing opinions to not only be heard, but to be shouted, exclaimed, and screamed with anger and passion and love. The gears were made to grind loudly so that no one would forget to oil them.

And now we’ve finally gotten down to the main point. You see, as a result of all this chaos I have freedom. Not unlimited political freedom, as the powers that be will always try to limit political freedom for what they say is our own good. And I don’t have that much personal freedom anymore as our litigious society has sued our rights away little by little preventing us from so much as crossing the street against a flashing red hand. But I do have unlimited intellectual freedom to explore this uncomfortable chaos of mind. Freedom beyond what societies have ever been able to offer before. I am safe, I have food, and I have conflict on a daily basis. It’s painful, it’s scary, and not everyone wants to pursue this freedom of our free-minded society. But what’s more is that not everyone has access to it.

I think the way I think, know the things I know, am the person I am because I was born rich. Of course, rich is relative. In the US as a kid I was middle class. Not even upper-middle class, just middle-middle class—but even that gave me money, high standards for education, a belief that I was entitled to respect and good things from life. That meant I demanded those things from my teachers, doctors, and government when I knew they weren’t doing well enough. I got to go to college and to China because no one told me I couldn’t. I am lucky, and because of that good luck I get to sit down and wonder whether I am stronger when I punch someone, or when I don’t.

But this gift of moral dilemma has, until very recently, been mostly absent from China.

The Asian equivalent to Jesus was Siddhartha, the Buddha. The wealthy-born prince, trained from birth as a warrior, developed a philosophy in many ways identical to that of Judaism in its opposition to the classic master morality. It was an ideology of love, peace, and nonviolence.

In China, though, Buddhism did not have the same effect as Christianity had in the West. Though there were thousands of monks all over China, as there continue to be today, their teachings were largely confined to the monasteries, and Buddhism never accomplished anything near the level of political influence that Christianity had in Rome and beyond. The ideas never took hold in the greater populous, and there never developed the split of power. The idea that society should be anything other than a top-down streamlined system never formed except
in a few relatively ineffective spurts (such as the 1912 revolution and Sun Yat Sen).

The view from Dali University - looking East toward Er Hai lake.

In any revolution, the middle class manipulates the lower class to band against the upper class. The middle class generally promises things will be different when they come to power, but it almost never is, and it certainly never was in China. Even when the long-held dynasty system was abolished, and was followed by a series of different governments, including those of foreign invaders, the system of top-down rule was fully intact. So when the communists took over claiming to be a government of the people, it did not mean a democratic government where the people had a say in the direction of the government—it more accurately was exactly the same as what every revolutionary had said before in China: that now the government would really work to protect the people even though it was the same top-down dictatorship that China had always experienced historically.

In 1989 the Tiananmen protests were staged by students who wanted the right to have control over their government. But since the bloody conclusion of that protest there have never been anything but quiet whimpers for reforms of that kind. Instead, the call of the people has been for greater economic progress. The Chinese people generally do not desire or understand the value of a split government. Many would say they do not want to vote, or at the very least do not want everyone to vote, because to empower the uneducated rural Chinese would, in their minds, be a massive step backwards for their society. Control over your government is not a right, it is a privilege, and one that the Chinese seem content without, for the moment.

After all, there are people here who are happy simply to have food, and for the decline in poverty. People have disposable income that they are proud to flaunt because, while they have their own appearance of humility, it is not the same as ours, where we believe we should legitimately be ashamed of our strength or wealth. When complimented on their wealth, the Chinese make only a feeble attempt to deny the praise while internally beaming, and making no attempt to hide their affluence.

The friendliest man in Wa Se, a small market town on the west side of the lake.

The lower class during the Cultural Revolution, which happened only 60 years ago, were eating their children. I’m not being metaphorical. There was a small village in China where the local corrupt officials (as all officials in China tended to be then and continue to be now) were hording grain rations for themselves. The people reached such a profound level of starvation that a few families began killing and eating the daughters. When that wasn’t enough food, one man even began trapping and eating the children from neighboring towns.

When he was set before the firing squad for his crimes, the young men charged with his execution, who were themselves locals, could not fire when the man shouted “I could not help it, I was hungry!” These young men could empathize with him. Empathize! There are people alive in China today who still understand hunger so strong that it voids all your humanity and turns you into pure beast, leaving you with only a need to survive. And yet there are people from the West who can’t understand why these people with their full stomachs, new shoes, and the chance at an education don’t set fire to their “oppressive society” and demand political rights that have never been a part of their culture at any point in their history. Nothing is simple here. This is China.

Part 2

A few days before New Years, a woman named Jasmin came to Dali looking to stir up trouble.  She walked through the red metal double doors of the Emu bar and closed the distance between us quickly. A white face, it seemed, was all she was looking for. If I’d known better I might have smelled trouble on her lips as she offered cash for services rendered. In another life, I imagine she might have done the same job—looking for bad men in bars to do dangerous things—but tonight she was offering work as legitimate as you’re likely to find in the Chinese West. She needed soldiers for an old army and they had to look the part. 

“You wanna work?” I called drunkenly to Tryg, who was drunk at the bar. “Sure!” he said, and that was that. 

That night Jasmin picked up one other young man, a Colombian guy named Andres that I had not yet met. The next day would be long.

Ian, Simon and I prep for a scene of clapping in an indoor studio.  They claimed my neck was too white.

They dressed us in old oversized rags—a poor excuse for uniforms, but what can you expect from freedom fighters on a budget? We stood around in the sun waiting for our orders, but none seemed to come. We played cards and ran through our drills till we were hungry and tired. Jasmin had promised us food, and when none arrived, she tried to buy us off with slices of bread she pulled from the mess in her purse. Those old rations served us poorly, though, and by the time lunch arrived, we inhaled the rice and meat like it was our last salvation. 

War is hard, but pretending to be at war is just boring. Every once in a while there was a shout, a call to silence, so as not to ruin the audio take, ignoring the fact that this would all be dubbed over later. Tryg was the only one of us with lines to speak “Halt! This is a restricted area, sir! You may not enter, sir!” The rest of us were made simply to hold guns at attention, or to fiddle with fake radios in the background.

Jasmin’s job, it seemed, was to make promises, but not necessarily to follow through.  Dinner was assured and denied.  We were told we could go home, then told to redress in our uniforms to do one last shot that then got canceled.  She seemed to make arbitrary decisions on her own without consulting the director.  By the time the day was done, as we sat around a recreated Burmese town on a peninsula in the middle of the lake, we were done playing soldier.

The television show we were filming was set in WWII. The British, Americans, and the Chinese were apparently defending the border of Burma from the Japanese. If you see war epic on TV in China, you can be assured that the Japanese will be the villains, the British cold and merciless, and the Americans loud and arrogant.

We went again the next day for what was promised to be a much shorter shoot—this time to a film studio in the mountains above the city. I was promoted to general, while Tryg went AWOL from the British army in order to become a high-ranking American commander. Today our job was to clap. The entire scene was a Chinese general giving a speech to reporters. Our job was to clap for him, a task we did quite well for about three hours. Each different shot required us to stand at attention, with lights in our eyes, or at our backs, or to the side, with the camera zooming in or panning across, or staying still at the back of the room. Solemnly, we applauded a speech that we could in no way understand. 

In two days Tryg and I had made enough money to pay almost our full month’s rent at our hostel, the Jade Roo. The next day I climbed a mountain, and the day after that Tryg and I and a group of 15 or so other hostel people (along with Liisa, from Beijing, who visited us for a week) built a barbecue and cooked Mexican food. Tryg made the tortillas from scratch. After that we went on a bike ride along the lake. Somewhere in there I destroyed everyone in a Monopoly tournament, and at some point was destroyed by everyone in a pool tournament.

An average morning out my front door.  Steve and Bastian jamming on the guitars, Patrick listening with a faty, Adrianne and Lisa playing cards, Simon doing squats, and me creepin' with the camera.

People have been asking me what I do every day in Dali, and I honestly don’t know that I do anything every day. I rarely make plans, but have never been bored here, not for a second. There is community, activity, and adventure constantly, if you ever want, you should definitely come visit. 

Finally, check out the “People” page ’cause there’s a new profile up for Gary, the guy who’s helping us out with photo processing.

See ya later,
Ian