Sally had a rough existence as a kid. Her clothes were dirty. She smelled. She wasn’t particularly bright. I think everyone made fun of her, including me. More than a few times, she erupted in tears.

She’d talk matter-of-factly about her mom being on welfare before she realized there was shame and stigma connected to it. She learned that fast.

I had a comparatively blessed existence and didn’t realize not everyone did.

I wish I could go back in time and be better to Sally as a kid. She needed someone to be better to her back then.

I reconnected with Sally about ten years ago through social media, and I’m at least happy that happened. We were able to catch up. Cyclical poverty was having its way with her, the way it does in West Virginia. Her husband died in his 40s, leaving her with two kids and lots of back pain that doctors couldn’t figure out. She was still living in Fairmont, trying to make ends meet. I was at least able to be kind to her as an adult.

I was thinking about her this week and realized I hadn’t heard from her in some time. Lots of people are on and off Facebook. She hadn’t posted in a couple of years. I assumed she was busy with life.

I searched for an obituary and didn’t find one, but I did find the obituary for her husband, which mentioned her and her kids. Then I found one for her father, which also mentioned her kids—and said that Sally had preceded him in death.

I don’t know exactly when Sally died or how, but I’ve been thinking about that little girl in Fairmont, in the dirty clothes, who hadn’t yet learned all the things she was supposed to be ashamed of.

Mostly I’ve been thinking about how badly she needed the rest of us to be kinder than we were, and how I can’t go back and give her that.

I’m glad, at least, that life gave me another chance to know Sally and be better to her. I don’t know whether that meant much to her, but it means something to me now.

I didn’t understand what was happening when I was young. When I did, it was decades too late to do anything about it. That’s one of the cruelties of getting older.

I’m sorry, Sally. You deserved better from us.

I’m not the most woke person on the planet. I don’t examine every jot and tittle of popular culture through a prism of race, gender, and sexual orientation. I’m not generally inclined to go looking for identity politics where none were intended.

I am a few things, though. I’m Italian-American, and I’m gay.

Italians have an expression: Dire pane al pane e vino al vino. Call bread bread and wine wine. Call things what they are.

If you’re reading this, you probably know what Disney and Pixar’s Luca is about. Two boys who are secretly sea monsters conceal their true identities so they can venture into human society together. They live in constant fear of being discovered. When exposed, they are treated as dangerous and unnatural. One eventually betrays the other by revealing his secret, then risks everything to stand beside him.

Director Enrico Casarosa insists that Luca is an innocent story of childhood friendship—a relationship formed before girlfriends, boyfriends, and romantic feelings complicate everything. More broadly, it is a familiar Disney story about concealing one’s true self, finding acceptance, and learning to tolerate difference.

All of that may be sincere. It may even have been the filmmakers’ conscious intention.

But Luca is explicitly thirteen. The film deploys the narrative machinery of the closet so thoroughly that denying its LGBT themes feels more strained than recognizing it.

In a movie about two boys hiding what they are, Disney is hiding, too.

Will it play in Peoria?

Disney is forever cautious with any subject that smells political. Its family audience includes millions of socially conservative parents—people highly alert to anything they perceive as political indoctrination, “forced diversity,” or an intrusion into their authority over what their children learn about sex and identity.

After the racist backlash against Kelly Marie Tran in Star Wars, you can’t tell me audiences don’t sniff out and bitch about diversity.

So, from a marketing perspective, why say something is gay if you don’t have to? You’ll make more money from a broader audience if you encode it as gay, collect the praise and emotional resonance, and reassure parents it’s only a story about friendship.

But let’s call bread, bread and wine, wine, shall we?

Luca is a gay movie.

When I finished Luca, I messaged my childhood friend M — , who had watched the film with her two young daughters the night before.

“Tell me if Luca is a gay movie, or if I just want it to be,” I wrote. “I say it is.”

A few minutes later she wrote back, “It’s super gay. It’s about two boys whose dream is to run away together riding on a Vespa.”

That, reader, is all you really need to know, sea monsters notwithstanding.

Still, the more we digested it, the gayer it became. There is a coming-out scene in every meaningful dramatic sense. Not only does Luca come out, but he watches his friend change on the beach. He goes back home and tosses himself onto his bed, exhilarated by having been out and having met someone exciting who is like him.

There were scenes of jealousy triggered by a girl that any gay boy who was ever 12 recognizes; there’s an outing that smacks of internalized homophobia; there’s a hand-drawn picture like the one I drew of me and my best friend in third grade.

M — pointed out that she cannot recall a “running after a train” scene that was not a romantic convention. John Wayne never ran after a train like that for another man.

You could argue Luca is about innocent kids, and not about romance or love.

Yeah? The first ten minutes of Up were about innocent kids, and we saw where that led. Disney knows perfectly well how little screen time it takes to establish love.

Luca’s ending reflected cowardly writing.

I hated the ending of Luca. The boys were in love. They needed to end up together. Or — if the film is echoing Roman Holiday — Casarosa should have clued the audience in from the start that love was ill-fated and impossible for bigger reasons.

Instead, one boy went to school, and the other became a pescatore. The class and educational divide, if not the distance, hints at a murky future between them.

I’m trying to think of the message my 12-year-old self might have taken from this film. It’s okay to fall for your best friend — to dream of adventuring forever with him and for a while to have a yin to your yang — but summer eventually ends and you’ll end up on a train with a girl, off to start your “real” life without the person you really want at your side.

Che palle. What bullshit. That is the ending a corporation writes when it wants gay people to recognize themselves while assuring conservative audiences that nothing queer ever actually happened.

I’m sick of allegory. It reminds me of Hollywood during the Hays code. All gay boys have in the mainstream, mostly, is allegory, because nobody ever wants to SAY for certain their male characters are gay.

Gay kids need some things to be clear, and they need to see that some things work out. They need gay characters, and they need those characters to be funny and kind of awesome and ultimately get what they seek. They need to see that life after coming out can be adventurous and fun and accepting.

The running-after-the-train scene left me cold for this reason. It would have kicked me in the nuts if I knew for sure the boys were in love but could not be together for big reasons. All I had instead was another insufficient allegory. All I can truthfully say is, “he ran after his good friend to say goodbye.” That’s bullshit, because that isn’t all that happened. I can hear the missing notes, and you can, too.

Moloka'i is the color of rust. The dry wind blows and carries the volcanic dust, and the dust comes through screens and stains clothes and floors and sidewalks and roads. It's beautiful. Beautiful, and ancient. The dust is two million years old in Moloka'i. It's had time to think, and it doesn't care if you like it or not. The 'āina was here long before you and will be here long after you, and your terracotta-stained shoes tell its story.

ii.

Cars on Moloka‘i are old, like many things here. Fifteen. Twenty. They keep running because they have to. There are no glass showrooms with balloons and banners and Toyotathons. Buy new, and you ship across an ocean, and the ocean makes everything cost more. So people repair and replace, buff dents and make do. On an island where the longest drive is an hour, why shouldn’t a car last forever? Even the wealthy drive rusty cars with peeling clear coat. It’s the same rust that dusts your shoes and stains the roads, and like the dust it doesn’t care.

iii.

There is only one fast-food restaurant on Moloka‘i—a Subway tucked into the Friendly Market in Kaunakakai. Absent are golden arches and green mermaids, red-headed burger girls and Whoppers junior. There are no malls, either. The movie theater shows one film at a time on one screen. They do sell Raisinettes.

It keeps the island from becoming another strip of asphalt and LEDs. Instead, there are plate-lunch counters and mom-and-pop shops, one-off stores where the owners know your name, and grocery stores decorated with deer heads that bear the names of the original proprietors. You eat what they cook, you buy what they have, and enough is enough.

iv.

There are no resorts on Moloka‘i, with luaus and hula spectacles and infinity pools. You come across the channel by boat, or fly in a Cessna Caravan, but there are no cruise ships or highways or tour busses.

Much of the land is contested, they say. There are arguments about what to do with it. Meanwhile, it resists being bought. Built over. Branded. That’s something rare not only in Hawaii, but in the United States. It was here before you, and it will remain.

Three years ago, my husband suggested we relocate from Philadelphia and even convinced my 78-year-old mother to move, too. She made the move two years ago.

And so, here we are: living on a tiny volcano rock in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean.

Although this transition unfolded over several years, it still feels like it happened in the blink of an eye. I wake up disoriented sometimes, thinking, Maybe I’ll drive to Gettysburg this weekend or I should head down to Ocean City, or I need to go to the Vietnamese grocery store today. Except, the Vietnamese Grocery Store in my brain is now farther from me than Philadelphia was from Paris, France.

The weather and daylight throw me off. Being closer to the equator, summer doesn’t stretch long and hot, nor does winter arrive dark and frigid. Instead, it’s perpetually 83 degrees, sunny, and punctuated by warm showers. Nights are breezy and comfortable. It’s mid-December, yet in my mind, Wildwood, New Jersey, still basks in summer. With no clear seasons, time feels slippery—like July never ended.

One of my favorite quirks of living here is my Hawaii driver’s license. It feels special, like a collector’s item, and I love flashing it around.

People always want to talk about how expensive milk is in Hawaii. I wouldn’t know—I don’t buy milk by the gallon. But groceries, with some clever couponing and bulk-buying, aren’t as expensive as I feared. Rent and utilities, on the other hand, are brutal. I can’t see myself retiring here.

Our two-bedroom apartment doesn’t have central air or heating—and it doesn’t need them. My electric bill is about the same as it was in Philadelphia, but there I ran my AC 18 hours a day. Registering my car here costs $500 annually, compared to under $100 for two years in Pennsylvania.

Still, in 20 minutes, I can be on a gorgeous beach, eating sushi, and watching some of the most spectacular sunrises on Earth. Trade-offs, you know?

Back in optometry school, my classmates would see ads for jobs in Hawaii and daydream about working there. It always felt impossible with student loans hanging over us. Even now, with my debts paid, I wouldn’t be here if my family weren’t. That’s the real reason most people don’t uproot their lives: it’s not just about money—it’s about connections.

I miss Philadelphia. I miss my friends, the subway, the energy of people bustling on the streets, the late-night sirens, and the wonderfully weird characters downtown. But here, it’s quiet. I’m less stressed. It’s a good pause—a waypoint before whatever comes next. I’m not sure what it means for future travels. I’ll be going fewer places because it costs so much to live here… but the other side of that coin is, where else would I want to go if I’m living in paradise, already?

Last summer, I left a writing seminar early to head to West Virginia to visit IB and his wife, Rebecca. We couldn't remember how long it had been since we had seen each other. 15 years, at least. We reminisced and ate and talked at length about getting older and how we might live out the latter half of life.

I was 15 when we met, and he was 34. Thirty years on, we were definitely older. It didn't seem that way, though. He was as I had always known him: funny, wry, highly intelligent, curious, and living in a house with elements he and Rebecca designed and built. That’s what I remember best about IB: he could build, repair, or invent damn near anything.

Some history: In 1992, IB’s mother, Mary Bell, took a shine to me and hired me at Microsystems, a small computer store in Buckhannon. It was IB’s venture, and Mary ran the front-end. She was in her 50s, then.

Mary was a shrewd businesswoman, a beautiful pianist, and a voracious chain smoker who filled Microsystems with clouds of tobacco smoke. IB was in and out selling computers, networking, programming, and inventing a first-of-its-kind CNC controller that would eventually afford him the ability to retire early and sail the Caribbean with Rebecca.

In January 2005, ten years after my last day at Microsystems, my dad died. Mary came to the viewing. She invited me back to Microsystems to work at my original wage that summer. I was by then a doctor, but agreed without hesitation. The store needed a fresh coat of paint.

The plan never materialized. Instead, I went to Mary’s funeral. Like IB, she was in her 60s when she died suddenly. It took the piss out of me.

I visited IB and Rebecca a few years later at their house outside Buckhannon. We reconnected and toured Microsystems and saw Mary’s empty desk in the front room, just as I remembered it. It helped us to mourn and remember her together. He introduced me to Patrick O’Brien novels and gave me a souvenir of Mary’s—an enormous ashtray the size of a hubcap with a letter “B” in the middle.

On that occasion, IB told me he would die young. I didn't believe him, but it bothered me because he was usually right about things. That night, he had some friends over, and they stayed up and played music. He was an amazing trumpet player.

By 2022, IB had long since sold Microsystems and moved to Morgantown. He renovated and rented properties through Air BNB in his so-called retirement. Mary had been gone nearly two decades, and few people remembered her or the computer store as it had been in the late 20th century.

Microsystems had a revolving cast of characters and regulars, most of them old, most of them gone. There was a D-Day vet, George, who would break the filters off his Marlboro reds and smoke with Mary while he learned the internet.

Dr. W—, who was in his 70s and walked with a cane, would venture in on his morning perambulations to drink coffee and mumble nonsense to Mary. His teeth appeared to have been pried from the mouth of George Washington. His bulbous nose sprouted hair. Mary would see him coming through the large divided-light window in the front of the store and hide in the back. That the store smelled like a fresh cigarette gave away her presence, and he would sit in a chair in front of her desk and wait until she returned.

At Christmas, we'd make hot wassail in a crock pot and put out Christmas cookies for customers, though I'd consume most of the bounty. I'd decorate the store and spray artificial frost on the front window. On Christmas Eve, I'd go to the store and clean it top to bottom with Murphy Oil Soap. I don't know why, but it was my tradition.

IB would lament that he was paying me to drink wassail and decorate instead of repair computers (or, on one occasion, the toilet), but Mary refused to let me go because I made her laugh.

Last year, IB and I remembered customers and struggled to remember others, and laughed over the details.

IB lost his brother at a young age, and a daughter when she was in high school, and we both lost Mary together, and something about all the loss forged a connection. Now, I’ve lost IB. I wish I could visit and talk to him about how much it sucks.

IB was always doing or reading or engaging with something interesting. I have no other friends who used to go hang gliding and replaced it with sailing. When I wrote a lousy short story about sailing, he was the first person I turned to, to assess the technical details.

He was not only a friend, but my last connection to some of the most formative memories of my youth: my first job, Mary, Buckhannon and its denizens, and a mutual love of Pink Floyd.

Some might look at his obit and say “65 isn’t so young.” Yet, it is if you’re IB. I mourn the loss of the voluminous knowledge and intuition he brought to this life, and I mourn his being and presence and losing a friend. I simply can’t believe he’s gone.

If you’ve been living under a rock, Taylor Swift is a singer-songwriter who first gained recognition in the mid-2000s for her country music style and “relatable” lyrics. Born in 1989 in Reading, Pennsylvania, Swift moved to Nashville, Tennessee at age 14 to pursue a career. She released her self-titled debut album in 2006, then moved from country into pop and continued to gain popularity with subsequent albums, including "Fearless," which won Album of the Year at the 2010 Grammy Awards. She’s clearly a talent, morphing between genres and relating to her fans on social media.

Swift’s audience is mostly white. I can’t be the only one who’s noticed. A Google search for “Taylor Swift and Whiteness” would, I’m sure, give me a trove of think-pieces. In Philadelphia, however, where there are more Black people than white people, watching tens of thousands of white women and gay men descend on South Philly was weird.

I’ve been giving Swift more attention on Spotify, lately, to understand why her star is so big, and it makes sense in my head. 

I grew up “away from big-city problems” in a white, rural American town not too different from the upper middle-class Philly burbs where Swift’s fans live. There’s something comforting about the themes she sings about. Essentially, they amount to either “the problem is you” or “the problem is me.” Sometimes she asks whether the problem is you or me. She also likes to remind people it’s over. Occasionally, she sings about how people make her feel good.

Compare this to Beyonce’s lauded 2016 album Lemonade, a song cycle about her decision to remain with husband Jay-Z following his infidelity, told in a generational and racial context.

The Millennial and Gen-Z intelligentsia love social issues. They praise works that center non-white creators, in part to atone for older generations making people of color personae non gratae. They tweet for hours about representation in the media.

This makes Taylor Swift an uncomfortable subject. There’s no subtext to her songs. She does not sing about structural inequity or generational trauma and does not sing about families or communities in crisis. After the deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd, Swift doesn’t use her platform or fame to spotlight inequality or social issues. She doesn’t talk from the stage about house bills on trans issues, racial inequality, climate change, or veganism. 

Instead, she leans into her middle-class suburban privilege and centers herself and her relationship angst. What galls her detractors is how popular she is—how relatable the hordes of white suburbanites find her low-stakes pain and candyfloss. They, after all, are the stars of similar soap operas and relationship dramas and want to center and legitimize their pain—not ruminate on letting others tell stories centering the generational trauma of the marginalized.

I get it. In small towns and suburbs where the black kids play football and the white kids march in the band, people want songs with all the gravity of sitting atop the hood of a car and breaking up with the soccer captain for looking at other girls.

More socially-conscious listeners, though, wish she’d use her platform to advocate for change. I have difficulty with this take, too, because it’s useless. Lizzo recently spoke in favor of trans issues at her concert. What good did it do? Did any of the attendees register to vote or write their representatives, or did it just feel good to be seen?

About 20 years ago, top-40 pop absorbed hip-hop and country music became the soundtrack of “American whiteness.” Swift came from a background of country music, but didn’t stay in her lane, and now here we are, not sure what to do with her and hating that she’s so famous.

I like her at a core level, because she’s what pop sounded like when I was a kid. Many hoped music evolved in the 21st century, but the free market has suggested otherwise.

I had a memory of going out with her and my uncle on a lake in North Carolina on a pontoon boat. Someone was lighting fireworks on the shore.

“Did we do something like that 10 years ago?” I asked. “It’s been bugging me for months. I think it’s a memory, but it feels like a dream.”

The memory was scarcely more than a vapor. Nothing bracketed it or anchored it to reality, but there was one other detail: in the same memory, a lively older woman sat on a porch, her back against a blind rolled down to keep the sun off her shoulders.

Something strange has happened to time in my 40s. Are my memories fading? Or have I stopped recording memories in acute detail?

There are other wispy memories I've recalled recently, many involving old friends.

Oliver invited me to a beef and beer at an old VFW. It was a rugby fundraiser. I don’t know when. There was a PowerPoint with pictures of his rugby team, but I don’t recall the food.

Victor Roehm visited me in Philadelphia before either of us had gray hair. We ate at… Penang? I think? It had been a long time since I saw him. Now it’s been even longer. That memory floats in a cloud, like meeting Lauren Ross Busterna around that time at my favorite coffeehouse. Lindsey Godwin once visited me. She had a baby with her in a seat. Or was that my cousin Andrew with the baby? Or both? Was that at my current house? Or my old house in South Philly?

Or did it happen at all?

What I find disquieting is that until about 2010, I could place my life on a timeline. I could remember things that happened and when. With another 13 years behind me, though, it’s become mush.

I’m not a cognitive scientist, but I’ll take a guess at what’s happening. I would guess a young brain is primed to take in and record new information and new experiences all the time (and, when you’re young, every experience is new).

I’d also guess that “old experiences” don’t write to memory very fast—even memorable ones. By age 46, meeting a friend I haven’t seen for a decade for coffee, as wonderful as it is, is not a novel experience.

When I was 38, I went to India. The country threw me completely off-guard. I remember much of it vividly - perhaps because it was all new. Most of life for a decade until then had not been. Likewise, I recall my first trip to Bangkok much better than subsequent trips. Neither experience was as vivid, however, as my trip to Europe when I was in high school.

And so, on my 46th birthday, I’m now like Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional optometrist who became “unstuck in time,” zapping from one period of life to the next and trying to make sense of where I am, when it happened, and what it means.

It's not bad. It’s forced me to live in the moment a little more like my dog Winston, who enjoys his bone with no memory of the past or worry for the future.

And yes, Aunt Pam confirmed we did go out on a pontoon boat on July 4, many years ago. The woman in front of the sunshade, however, may have been a dream.

Share The Bag May Not Inflate

“Sensitivity readers” or “authenticity editors” are a recent phenomenon: they’re proofreaders assigned to make certain a work does not misrepresent historically marginalized people.

Publishing houses will replace Fleming’s 1950s-era use of the n-word with capital-B “Black men,” and Dahl’s narrative will point out that the bald witches in The Witches are not evil because they are bald, lest a young girl suffering cancer or alopecia feel “othered.”

Arguments against such re-writes are sometimes difficult to make: how can anybody advocate for the n-word to remain in print, for example? At the same time, retroactive editing feels dystopian.

Social media erupted last year when a woman published a list of “problematic authors.”

“Problematic” is a 21st-century catch-all term for anything a modern progressive might find offensive: racism, sexism, ableism, jokes about fat people, jokes about femme men, jokes about sex work, transphobia—jokes about women who lost an eye to a stray golf ball at the Ryder Cup.

“Problematic” is pretty much my entire comic repertoire when I have a few drinks in me and only my friends are listening.

She published her list as a table. Here’s an excerpt:

Readers have a right to give their opinions about books and what they find troublesome and delightful. They have a right to share those opinions and call bad opinions into question.

I have unsavory questions, however.

The author of this list is a 20-year-old woman who came of age when people build social capital online by calling out injustice. Not only might she feel Emily Duncan is a racist who dismisses incest survivors, but it isn’t a stretch to suggest she wants other 20-something authors to notice the person she is: someone who calls out injustice and won’t sit quietly while Duncan goes about her craft.

While perhaps her goal in creating this list was altruistic, I can’t imagine she’d have done it if she thought nobody would give her some measure of credit, authority, or power.

Two different thoughts often confused

There are two concepts I see circulating in discussions about representation in literature, especially in the realm of Young Adult and children's fiction. People speak of them as one.

The first is that marginalized kids don’t see themselves represented in books, and we need more books about marginalized kids, ideally written by marginalized writers.

The second is that some writers are toxic and misrepresent marginalized kids who, in turn, see themselves as a misrepresentation. Such writers should be shamed, called out, and, if not corrected, shunned—definitely not promoted. People beholden to this line of thinking may feel William Shakespeare, mysogynoir, is not someone teachers should force Black students to read.

I’m a fan of increased representation. I enjoy reading different stories from different people and cultures. I like authentic stories the same way I like authentic food. Just as South American food is better from a South American restaurant with a South American staff, stories of South America are better from South Americans.

I find the second concept, misrepresentation, more complex. History is full of misrepresentations and gross caricatures. If books simply spelled out truths, I might fight about misrepresentations. But, they’re also a reflection of the author and their world—their time, their location, and their prejudices, thoughts and feelings. I read a book like I might read an opinion. Every story is a perspective.

I don’t get twisted in knots about Joseph Conrad’s representation of Africa in Heart of Darkness. I don’t read it as an authentic depiction of Africa, but as the perspective of Africa from a colonial Englishman at a certain period of time. A woman indoctrinated with Lost Cause ideology wrote Gone with the Wind. Ayn Rand’s childhood made her mentally unstable.

I’m not sure we can fight harmful representation any more than we can keep people from having feelings or opinions, but the attempt has turned into a million-dollar cottage industry of proofreaders who offer to view an author’s work through the prism of their own “lived experience” with an eye toward what a marginalized reader might consider a misrepresentation capable of damage.

There's no degree needed to be an authenticity reader, but it's easier and cheaper for publishers to hire them than to staff their upper ranks with marginalized people. It suits the industry to pretend sensitivity is important. They can pretend they've done due diligence without having an actual marginalized person giving them any pushback at meetings or threatening to take their corner offices.

Behind closed doors, many people acknowledge the whole system is bonkers. Kids book publishing is left-coded, though, and wrapped in identity. People are afraid to challenge anything promoted as a step forward. Publicly call into question sensitivity readers, and by extension you're calling into question a marginalized person’s pain, centering the dominant caste, perpetuating hegemony, and erasing lived experience.

I once read from a prominent YA agent who suggested a conference compensate her extra for the “emotional labor” of reading a book she found problematic before speaking about it on a panel. That's where we are.

Sticks and Stones

Representation is the key to progress. I like to say I can fall in love with any character with a compelling story, and when you're in love with someone, you'll stop at nothing to assure they have a better life.

Fighting misrepresentation is a bit more complex. The depiction of Black people in Live and Let Die isn’t the same thing as a pancake syrup named after a minstrel character. An argument to maintain the original is not the same as a silly argument to preserve a statue of Jefferson Davis so we can “learn from our mistakes.”

Instead, books are perspectives: good, bad, troublesome, and everything in between. Just as the Hays Code from 1934 to 1968 stifled filmmakers’ voices in pursuit of a brand of uniform moral purity, so, too, does editing books past and present to insure innocuousness—albeit for a liberal rather than a conservative audience.

Perhaps we’d be better off teaching kids resilience. Throughout their lives they’ll encounter bad opinions and bad ideas, and there won’t always be an adult to make injurious material go away. There is some value in tropes about sticks-and-stones.

I hope that out of this morass a popular story breaks through that is so vulgar and heretical (and profitable) it breaks the system and begs for competition, much like foreign film did to the domestic market in the ‘60s.

As long as popular publishing remains tangled in left-leaning identity politics, however, we won’t see change on its own. People convince themselves they’re doing the righteous work of social justice by editing and curating rather than examining who has power, who deserves it, and why.

An empty carriage with huge rear wheels rolled past on the cobblestone street. It was January, 2003. Humid, but not hot, and misty, having rained a little earlier. Now, the rain was gone and people were out, and the horse and the carriage went past on the shiny cobblestones, and the streetlamps caught the mist and I was talking to John 1,200 miles away.

“I can hear it!” he said, excited to hear the horse. That’s what I liked about John. Such a simple moment, but we were both having fun with it. It was a novelty, being able to carry a phone as I walked around New Orleans. I think we both recognized it, because it was not of our childhood.

“Mr. Watson! Come here! I want to see you!”

Lots of new tech had come to market in the new millennium, beyond a phone I could use to talk to John from the Faubourg Marigny. I had an Olympus digital camera that required no film. I still printed my photos from New Orleans, and in a twist of irony lost most of the digital files but not the prints, which I later scanned.

I also installed XM Radio in my car and could listen to uninterrupted commercial-free satellite music from Philadelphia to West Virginia, south through Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi on my drive to Metairie, where I lived for four months. BPM was my favorite station. XM 81. Who Da Funk. Groove Armada. Narcotic Thrust. t.A.T.u. “Shiny Disco Balls” played when I parked my car in the casino garage one night.

Harrahs was brand new, and had posters touting 8x odds on craps. I always parked there. If I played the slots for a half hour, they’d give me free parking. I’d play the nickels as slow as I could, have a drink or two on the house, and end up spending about four bucks on parking for an entire day or night in the French Quarter. One night, I even scored a pair of Hornets tickets that way.

I was 25.

Vieux Carre

Sometimes I’d go to the French Quarter with my roommates, Heather and Aaditya and Denny. Aaditya and Denny worked with me—we were interns at Memorial Hospital, which later, during Hurricane Katrina, became infamous for euthanizing patients.

Nights in the quarter were unremarkable in that they lived up to stereotypes and stories told over and over by tourists—like when Aaditya bought a skateboard from a teenage runaway. He short-changed the kid, bad, which was sad because the kid was only about 14 and probably needed the money. He cruised back and forth on the board in Jackson Square in front of St. Louis Cathedral.

Tourist stories—beads and tits and whatnot—happen all the time. They are boring.

The French Quarter is different when you live near it as a resident. I spent a fair amount of time trying to get to know it outside its reputation. Early Sunday mornings were my favorite, when they hosed the vomit off the streets and everything was closed up and quiet, and everyone partying was sleeping it off and criminals were too tired to burgle and steal. I’d park at Harrahs at 7 AM, play the nickel slots until 7:30, and explore. Sunday morning was a good time for XM channel 84, Chill.

Philadelphia had a gayborhood—an urban center where I found a pretty sizable community of friends. New Orleans, though, was different. All the bars with the rainbow flags were in the Quarter, and tourists swamped the Quarter, and everything was fun but nothing was lasting and I wanted something less ephemeral, even then.

Coffee

I studied for my optometry boards at Cafe du Monde in Metairie, where I lived. Later, I discovered CCs, a coffeehouse chain like Tim Hortons on Veteran’s Boulevard. It was more conducive to reading and working. WiFi wasn’t yet a thing, but CCs had ethernet outlets under the tables, and customers could bring a cable.

New Orleans is where I became a coffee drinker, in part because of hours spent at CCs. What’s strange is that while half my brain acknowledges that hooking up an ethernet cable at a coffee shop is an ancient relic of a bygone era, the other half sees it as having just happened, as surely as I remember parking my Saturn SC2 out back by the dumpster. I cannot imagine life without coffee and have twenty years of stains on my teeth to prove it, but I still did not drink it daily, then, which is impossible to fathom.

I got to know the roads pretty well between the city and Metairie, Metairie and the airport. When I went back a few years ago, little had changed but everything was again unfamiliar. Funny how memory lets us remember waiting at CCs to pick Denny up late at the airport, but not the road to the airport itself, which I knew so well.

I wandered to many touristy places alone. City Park. New Orleans Museum of Art. Blaine Kearn’s Mardi Gras World. The Cabaldo and the Presbytere. Cemeteries and Confederate statues.

From Lafraniere Park in Metairie, I talked to my dad on my phone. He was envious of the pleasant weather I was having while he froze further north. On that day, he was healthy and well. Two years later, he died. I still remember that call, talking and watching birds fly overhead and people feeding the ducks on the ground.

At least a dozen other vignettes haunt me. Tours of plantations and Chalmette Battlefield. Nights at a coffeehouse called the Neutral Ground on Danneel St., next to St. Vincent dePaul Cemetery No. 1. Days at an ophthalmology practice. Evenings at a gym with a smoothie shop beneath it. I was ten pounds lighter than I am today, and in the best shape of my life.

I left about a week before the big Mardi Gras parades, but was able to attend one of the smaller ones, and it was big enough.

Just before leaving Louisiana, I bought a Yamaha Clavinova—a full-size electric keyboard—from an old man who had recently lost his wife. He cried when it went out the door. It had been hers, and I drove 1,200 miles back to Philly with it stretched between my back seats and my trunk. A year later, I pressed the button to turn it on. There was a crackle and a wisp of smoke, and it never worked again.

I remained an XM customer for another ten years. I still miss BPM, but now all the music’s different.

The air smells of diesel and durian and incense. Being out on the narrow, uneven, broken walkways and streets with scooters and vendors and buses exhausts me. 

Hotels are an oasis. The dollar is strong and labor is cheap, affording superior experiences at unreal prices. Nobody expects a tip, because tips do not sustain low-wage workers like in America. When you tip, you mean it, and it makes people feel they’ve done something exceptional to deserve it—the way tipping is supposed to work.

Every country is similar, and every country is different. Religion plays a large role in these differences, whether it’s Buddhism (Indochina), Catholicism (the Philippines), or Islam (Malaysia and Indonesia). Colonialism has made unique imprints, too. The French occupied Vietnam, and the bread is fantastic. Singapore and Malaysia have echoes of Britain, and 320 years of Dutch rule in Jakarta contributes to its fascinating, collapsing architecture.

Regardless of who colonized what part of Southeast Asia (except maybe for Singapore) western European “order” never took hold. A former traffic circle in Yogyakarta is now a chaotic, loud intersection. It’s a perfect metaphor. Were it a circle, traffic would flow. The problem is, a smooth flow doesn’t feel right, here.

I imagine European masters yelling about order, discipline, and “civilizing” the inhabitants. It’s not that the inhabitants are uncivilized. Somehow, everything works. It simply works in its own way, and on its own time. 

We had not planned to meet Ardi’s family until we did. A trip to his school reconnected him to friends he hadn’t seen in 15 years, and a series of spontaneous reunions followed. 

Ardi has a friend named Ardi. At 2 in the afternoon, they decided they could not meet. Two hours later, they sat together at a Krispy Kreme, chatting happily about high school. Plans change like the weather, and spontaneity is a part of life.

What makes Indonesia different?

Indonesia is ancient. In the 19th century, Eugene Dubois discovered hominid remains on Java that were a million years old. At various epochs in history, it belonged to other countries or kingdoms, its geographic boundaries always in flux. The Indonesia we know has existed only since 1945. 

In Indonesia, I smelled far less incense than I’m used to smelling, and saw more minarets and prayer rooms than in other regions of Asia. While I might compare it to Malaysia, Malaysia was a British interest, and the Dutch governed differently.

The food is remarkable. The depth of flavor created with always-fresh spice is unlike anything I’ve experienced outside India. Ingredients like jackfruit, tempeh, glass noodles, sambal, and peanut sauce are unfamiliar to most Americans. It’s impossible to recreate the flavor in the United States. Noteworthy, too, are the number of restaurants owned by women. They brand their businesses with their photos, and they’re locally famous for their cooking. Their families continue their businesses long after they’re dead.

Remnants of Dutch colonialism remain in the food and beverage sector, too, but wane with passing time. In Malang, Toko Oen purports to make ice cream in the old Dutch style from a colonial Dutch storefront. The place was empty, dirty, and unfriendly. They were out of Spekulatius ice cream. The fading menu was the most wondrous thing about the place. Ardi remembers its heyday, a quarter-century ago, when lines ran out the door and people could not find seats.

Nearby, a beauty shop beneath a chipping facade provided orthodontic service. For a few hundred bucks, the owner fit braces alongside fake nails and hair extensions. For an instant, I considered coming home with a full set of bright-white veneers. Then I remembered an article I read about people going to Turkey for dental cosmetics and eating soup the rest of their lives. 

A museum in Singapore, A museum in Indonesia

At the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, there’s a tremendous wing containing Indonesian historical artifacts. It’s an immaculate, curated display. “If this display were in Indonesia,” said Ardi, “nobody would care. The lights would not work and broken cases would house the artifacts.”

He was correct. The museum in Singapore created a sense of pricelessness. Museums in Jakarta have holes in the floor, displays with no lights, and artifacts covered in dust. There’s an ongoing argument in the museum world about whether well-resourced nations should display or return priceless artifacts taken from other lands. I see the root of the argument but have no simple answers. Yet, I don’t want someone to curate and preserve old Batavia. A lack of maintenance adds to its charm and the feeling of a bygone era crumbling into the past. 

Indonesia’s greatest museums aren’t the indoor types full of relics behind glass, anyway. Borobudur and Prambanan, two religious sites built by different dynasties in the 8th and 9th centuries, stand as testament. One is Buddhist, one is Hindu, and both exist in a now-Muslim nation. Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in the world; Prambanan the largest Hindu temple in Southeast Asia second only to Angkor Wat. As historians study them, both sites reveal new secrets. Etchings under ash. Buried relics. It’s living history.

From a train that traversed Java, I watched farmers working their rice fields. Scooters raced up and down rural streets. Tiny villages had grand masjids and monuments and cenotaphs. At a tiny station, a group of schoolkids on a field trip watched the trains come in and out and waved. A trip between Surabaya and Yogyakarta is about $16 in economy class. Many of the kids waving may never leave their villages to make the journey. People packed and unpacked boxcars in quick-time. The trains kept to schedule.

As we checked into our early-morning flight home, the clock struck 5:35. A chime sounded from the PA system, indicating an announcement. A muezzin sang the adhan—the call to sunrise prayer. When he finished several minutes later, the chime sounded again, as it might to bookend any other airport announcement.

In short, that’s Indonesia. Busy. Dirty. Developing. Equatorial. Wonderful.

I spent a couple of days in Morocco when I was 11 years old. And, I spent a little time in Malaysia in 2017. This is the first trip I’ve spent considerable time in a place where 87% of the population is Muslim.

I’m pleased to report it’s like anywhere else.

Sometimes, when we’re taught about religion in school, we learn about things in their purest form. For example, if learning about Christianity, a student abroad might learn that Christians attend church on Sunday, and that Easter and Christmas are important and why. They’d learn the role of Christ, the resurrection, and about Paul and the early church. They might walk away with the impression that all Christians, therefore, attend church every Sunday, or practice the faith in a devout, conservative manner.

Those of us in the United States know the matter is more complex. Different people have different faith interpretations. Some people do not practice but still celebrate the holidays. Evangelicals interpret the Bible literally and go to megachurch every Sunday in Florida. Mainline protestants do not. Lapsed Catholics feel guilty. Sometimes church is community, sometimes church is religion, sometimes it’s both.

Why, then, have I always assumed the Islamic faith, practiced in places like the Middle East and Indonesia, generally mirrors my 12th grade world history textbook?

What I learned vs. what I experienced

One of the first things I learned about Muslims is that they’re expected to pray facing Mecca five times daily, and they’re serious about it. There’s a call to prayer from a minorette atop a mosque. It echoes through the city. People in the streets or in shops stop whatever they’re doing, wash their hands and face and feet, and prostrate themselves while reciting chants. On Friday, they have a big prayer, bigger than all the others.

What I experienced was quite different. The most devout Muslims were perhaps out of sight in mosques or musallas five times a day, but the streets remained packed with people. And, it wasn’t just tourists or atheist intellectuals ignoring the call—women wearing conservative dress and headcovers continued shopping and using ATMs and drinking tea.

So, just as different Christians practice Christianity in different ways, so, too, do different Muslims. Some pray five times a day, some fewer, and some only on Friday. Some pause and sit on a park bench to pray rather than gathering in a mosque and bowing. Others wait until they get home.

Post 9/11, I feel political leaders of the West promoted the idea that Muslims marched in lock-step, millions at a time indoctrinated to hate. They faced Mecca and knelt and chanted the same chants, hearing the same diabolical lessons from Imams who burned the American flag.

In Indonesia, I got the sense that few people actually prayed during prayer times. I wondered if many Imams are as upset as American pastors that nobody comes to worship like they used to. The call to prayer—the adhan—blasts through the city at prescribed times, but eventually I felt it was like the ringing of church bells on Sunday rather than marching orders to chant. The call is beautiful. It marks time and gives some order to the day.

The musalla

I have come to love the musalla. Analogous to a hospital or airport chapel, they’re small prayer rooms found in every public space—every hotel, every theme park, and every train station. They usually include places to wash before prayer. If you’re devout and you can’t make it to a mosque, this is the next best thing.

One at the Yogyakarta train station even included a sign indicating the “holy boundary,” which filled me with a sense of wonder. If I kept my feet outside and leaned past the boundary, might something happen? I did not dare find out.

Anyway, it’s funny how ignorance works. You don’t know what you don’t know and think what you think until it clicks differently. My Muslim friends don’t all pray devoutly, five times a day, even if they identify strongly with their faith. Perhaps I thought it had something to do with living in America. I don’t know why I expected something different in a Muslim nation, especially from people wearing shilyas and khimars and hijab. Religion is only one small facet of life, even here.

I’m trying to reconcile what I see from my window with American cultural conversations. Here, in the villages, people my age look twenty years older and wear a life of back-breaking labor on their faces. Back home, somebody is insisting J.K. Rowling’s words are violence and that Twitter makes them feel unsafe; that books about queer families have no place in school libraries, or that the only solution to gun violence is for good guys to arm themselves.

Who’s a good guy? I don’t know. To the best of my observation, it’s the guy in the rice paddy who’s swinging the the plough and will live and die doing it to provide for the basic needs of his family.

A small-town station. Ruins and remnants of European colonization, decaying since 1945. The rain puddles on uneven concrete and reflects the blue-gray stucco.

America purports to be a land of equality. It does a mediocre job of it, which conservatives refute, but better than most places in the world, which liberals deny. In America, some people have access and privilege and generational wealth; others do not because America was never built to give them access or privilege or generational wealth. And yet, when I’m in a developing nation, I have a grinding notion that most Americans don’t understand equality at all—that if our nation had to share its wealth or stature or privilege with the people in the fields or villages of places like Indonesia, we’d balk as a people united.

“I have it hard enough without having to share my money. My time. My access. My privilege. My platform,” they’d say.

“Acknowledge your privilege, America,” I might reply, “what are you doing to make things better for them?”

You’d fast see the platitudes and the lip service and the promises to do better, but the quiet desire to keep things as they are. Privilege ensures a level of comfort and ease. Like an airport lounge, if everybody has access, it’s no different from the shitty waiting room where some guy is picking his toes and screaming kids race around an exhausted mom with a neck pillow.

Meanwhile, where are the people at the top? The crazy rich Asians who really do have the wealth and privilege? They’re not on my train car. Like the wealthy in America, they live out of sight, happy that members of the educated middle class “have difficult conversations” and leave them alone to fly on private jets and buy expensive shoes and art—happy they’re the envy of the poor and middle class and have funny movies made about them; happy that the torches and pitchforks remain stored for another day.

We scream at and blame and fight with people who listen. Nobody can access the rich to make them listen, so we scream at each other. When there's too much daylight between the two political camps, we scream at the members of our own tribe.

In liberal America, educated minorities ask educated white people to examine their privilege and stop centering themselves and step back and share access. Educated white liberals twist and navel-gaze, bow and scrape and try to solve the riddle of looking like allies while getting everything they want.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos. Meanwhile, Donald Trump. Meanwhile, companies run by educated millennials police preferred pronouns to pacify their activist workforce. But higher wages? Not a chance. Pronouns are free.

Here, there are no preferred pronouns and nobody spends time on what J.K. Rowling or Joyce Carol Oates says on Twitter. They don't spend hours debating who gets to write a story about whom and with what level of cultural competence. I can afford to buy my way out of the discomforts. I like it here. I want to stay.

Am I the bad guy? The good guy? The privileged? The marginalized? What if I don’t “use my voice” and “speak out” and simply do as much as I can with the resources I have like the farmer in the field, sometimes in the service of others, sometimes in the service of me and my family? What then?  

We continue toward Jakarta. Here, the flatland disappears and the rice paddies become stepped; water runs off the crooked mountains in the distance.

Do the creeks flood? Does the land slide out from under the people here? Do they lose life and property? And if so, does anybody notice?

The legacy of the British race and class structure lingers on, though the current government seems to take measures to address it. Most Singaporeans I encounter prize life in a pluralistic society, and most of the ethnic neighborhoods the British carved out now exist as mixed-race cultural heritage areas. One thing I find interesting is that none of the British colonial government buildings exist today as government buildings. They all remain, repurposed as art and cultural museums. It’s a nice way to preserve history without preserving a sense of colonialism.

An aspect of Singapore that makes it tick is de facto one-party rule allowing for long time-horizon planning. The city grows in an orderly, methodical way over decades, without labor issues or political party changes that scuttle ideas of past administrations. In addition to building buildings, Singapore is also building land, importing sand from abroad and using it to increase its square mileage.

Little India

Time Out Magazine recently ranked Singapore’s Little India as one of the coolest neighborhoods in the world. This was not originally a British-conceived area for Indian people (that distinction goes to now-defunct Chulia Kampong). Rather the nearby river was attractive for raising cattle, and the neighborhood sprang up around it.

Little India hosts a variety of Hindu temples and market stalls and the former house of Tan Teng Niah - a Chinese villa built in 1900. Indian food replaces Chinese food at the hawker centres.

Much of the architecture is British Colonial, making the area resemble Mumbai. While we were there, the area was abuzz preparing for Diwali. It’s vibrant and colorful and worth a few hours of your time.

Chinatown & Buddha’s Tooth

Chinatown, Singapore is a much older enclave with a rich history. It’s vibrant and busy and smells of Hainanese Chicken Rice and temple incense.

At the heart of modern Chinatown is a relatively new temple, completed in 2007, built in the style of the Tang dynasty. It houses a relic: one of the Buddha’s teeth, allegedly found in a collapsed stupa. That the tooth is 7.5 cm long calls into question whether it was actually one of the Buddha’s teeth. If so, he had extremely long teeth.

The Thian Hock Keng temple is far more authentic than the Buddha tooth temple. Established in 1839, it’s dedicated to Mazu, the Chinese Sea goddess. Mazu’s blessings were important as merchants, sailors and traders moved between Singapore and mainland China in the 19th century. It feels old, but for the Coca Cola vending machine by the front door.

The Jewel

Just before the pandemic, Singapore opened the Jewel—an egg-shaped shopping and nature complex with a massive vortex water fountain in the center. Photos don’t do it justice, but it befits a city that goes out of its way to impress and amaze, like a tasteful Las Vegas.

So what are my conclusions?

• Singapore is new. It’s younger than the United States, which itself is young.

• Singapore is extremely wealthy, and it shows. Its public spaces are immaculate. There is no litter, there are no visible homeless people, and if there’s poverty and crime, it’s hidden and unadvertised.

• Singapore’s wealth and change happened suddenly, the bulk transpiring after the Second World War and within the lifetime of many older residents.

• By some accounts, rule-of-law is draconian, but it’s no China or Russia. One-party rule has been beneficial, though many younger Singaporeans wish it were more progressive and wish the minority political parties had more power.

• Finally, Singapore is a little bit dull. Drama is rare. Sure, you can flout wealth like a crazy rich Asian, or buy stuff, or stay in an amazing hotel—but it’s so clean and safe I was never gripped with a sense that something extraordinary might happen.

The only way I know it’s October is because the Starbucks menu has pumpkin spice lattes, even here.

We started our day not at Starbucks but at Bread Talk, a Southeast Asian bakery chain that Ardi loves from his childhood. After picking up subway fare cards, our first official stop was Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum.

Trade Routes, Shipwrecks, and Opium

The Asian Civilisations Museum is one of the four major Singapore museums, often eclipsed by the National Museum and the Singapore Art Museum. If you grew up in the United States and don’t have a good working knowledge of Asian history, it’s a fantastic place to begin. If you love maritime history, you’ll love it even more.

The museum tells of Asian civilisation (indulge my British spelling, will you?) through trade routes and shipwrecks. Religion, food, and language all spread through sea trade. In fact, the museum is filled with artifacts and objects d’art pulled from the bottom of the sea. Some of the artifacts, found in waterproof ceramic containers, are in such good condition they look freshly minted.

A small section talks about the opium wars and the role of opium in establishing the British Empire in the late 1800s. It’s a period I’d completely forgotten about, if I ever learned much of it at all in the United States, and I look forward to studying it further.

Something that grabs me while looking at thousands of years of trade in a broad context relates to our 21st-century conversation about cultural appropriation. My thoughts are incomplete, but for thousands of years, civilisations have stolen, appropriated, bartered, and built upon each others’ designs, goods, and cultural elements. It seems silly that we might be asked to stop now, and that certain design elements, relics, and music “belong to” only one particular group when the wind literally spread these things from east to west and back again.

On Hawker Stalls

Singapore is famous for its hawker centres, or hawker stalls. I’m a bit skeptical about their great reputation.

A hawker centre is, for most intents, a food court selling Chinese and Halal rice, dumplings, and noodles. Quality varies. I’m sure some of it is outstanding, but I haven’t found it. Most of it is on par with the indie Chinese restaurants at my local mall. Ardi and I grabbed some chicken with rice our first night here, and it was unpalatable.

And yet, I had some of the best iced tea with honey, ever, yesterday. And, it’s great fun breaking bread with the locals, who eat at hawker centres as a matter of routine and, I’m sure, know the best stalls.

Hawker stalls are probably most famous for being a source of cheap eats in a city that’s expensive. They have large picture menus that don’t mean much. Order three things, and the chef will likely tell you that two of them aren’t available, and a fourth option is better than the third.

Singapore Botanic Gardens: A UNESCO World Heritage Site

At the far end of the Orchard Road shopping district in Singapore you’ll find Singapore Botanic Gardens, one of only three gardens designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the only tropical garden to bear that distinction. It’s over 160 years old.

The tropical plants I know from the garden center at Home Depot apparently also grow in the wild in the tropics, and when they do, they become magnificent.

The botanic gardens grow on 200 acres of land, so we were able to explore only the main attraction, the National Orchid Garden.

I’m not a flower person, and I was impressed. I’ve never seen so many orchids growing in every direction. Hell, I never knew there were so many types of orchids—some growing to the sky, others so small taxonomists have to use magnifiers to identify them.

Ardi is a flower person, and was both delighted to find rare flowers and disappointed I did not know the taxonomies of plants like he did. “Did you learn anything in school?” he asked. The answer is, apparently, no, but I need to study the opium wars before I can memorize the genus and species of orchids.

Transit is different from travel. Transit involves standing in airports and sitting on planes. Travel, while inclusive of transit, also involves the food and social media posts of sites other than airplane wings.

Ardi and I just took our first long-haul flight since COVID shut the world down in March, 2020. Like a bookend, it’s the same flight we took in in December, 2019 - our last international trip before the pandemic.

This time, the flight was several hours longer. Japan Airlines flight 7, from Boston to Tokyo, is now a 13 1/2-hour voyage. In the past, we’d fly over the arctic. This time, we made a gentle course correction not far north of the arctic circle, just south of Richard’s Island near the Peel River in northern Canada. In doing so, we avoided Siberia and Russian airspace.

Air territory conflicts are curious to me. There’s nothing in Siberia but vast, empty, frozen land, and nothing in the sky.  In the past, flying over Siberia filled me with loneliness. Nevertheless, we’re at de facto war, and back to 1988 flight routes for the foreseeable future. If it isn’t disease complicating travel, it’s conflict.

Our course took us just north of Hooper Bay, where I worked for a week as an optometrist in my youth, then over the Bering Sea. We traversed St. Lawrence Island and turned just before crossing the International Date Line— the Russian border—until it was safe to cross into Tokyo.

We were not in Tokyo long enough for North Korea to launch a missile over our heads before we boarded an 8 ½ hour flight to Jakarta, Indonesia. Finally, after an overnight stay in an airport hotel, we boarded a two-hour flight to Singapore.

Our original intention was to go to from Jakarta to Bali, but Denpaasar flooded. Singapore did not. We’ll spend three days here, then continue on with our original plan. I’ll share further details later.

For now, I’m back in Southeast Asia, a region of the world I love. There’s incense in the air and the smell of Nescafe in the morning, and the food tastes like it didn’t come from a massive industrial complex.

Until I have real stories to tell about the world, I’ll leave the following observations from the past 48 hours:

• John LeCarre’s The Honourable Schoolboy is an amazing read, albeit deliberately paced. I’m going to steal some plot elements for my next book.

• I’m reading it on the Kindle app on my phone. I love it. I set the margins to the width of a column, the print really big like a copy of Foreign Affairs, and rather than page flip I can scroll with my thumb. It’s sublime, and has increased my reading speed and comprehension by probably 15%. I like physical books, but this is joyous.

• Speaking of physical books, I brought three outdated copies of my book that I’ll scatter through the region. I already left one in a reading nook in Soekarno Airport in Jakarta. I’ll mail a sticker to any reader who finds it.

• I’m absorbed in a subtitled Korean drama called Reply 1997. It won many awards in 2012, and I can see why. I like it for a few reasons. The characters are roughly the same age I was in 1997. The dramatic points are universal and human. Even though there are tons of inside jokes and cultural references I’m missing because I’m not Korean, I appreciate they’re there. It has so far made me both laugh and cry. You can stream it for free on Prime video.

• Finally, TikTok doesn’t work. For a time the app was telling me there was no internet connection. Now, I cannot sign in at all - locked out with no recourse. Is it a regional issue? I don't know. For those following me on the Tok, I’m sorry. I won’t be able to update. You can still find me on Instagram and Facebook as cartergoesplaces and on Twitter @CTLiotta.

Now: Singapore.

Gorbachev is a hero to the West. A series of summits with western leaders - most notably Ronald Reagan - made him part of the tapestry of my childhood. In the popular conscience, he worked with Reagan, brought McDonald’s to Russia, and ended the cold war.

In Russia, he was less popular - especially with people like Putin, for whom the USSRs demise remains a bitter historical note.

Of course, reality is nuanced and memory is rose-tinted, but Gorbachev’s death comes at a fractious time in history. Russia invaded Ukraine. Comity has vanished, not only between great rivals but between America’s political parties. McDonalds no longer operates in Russia. Vladimir Putin is not a leader America should court. Even if he were agreeable like Gorbachev, our citizenry is too polarized to agree on the value of the moment.

What strikes me hardest is that a man who once loomed so large on the world stage and changed the course of 20th-Century history is about to be buried without honors as despotism surges around the world and in our own backyard. The future of liberal democracy is uncertain. The firehose of falsehood is as powerful today as it was in Russia in the 1980s. It’s a moment opposite what Reagan and Gorbachev dreamed, and his death feels like a tragic metaphor.

On the whole, of all the things the US Government spends money on, I’d rather this than, say, nuclear warheads. It’s money going to, by-and-large, good people who aren’t billionaires.

And yet, my feelings are complex.

I was fortunate enough to have parents who saved and covered my undergraduate tuition. A medical education left me $120,000 in debt (cheap for med school by today’s standards, but a whole lot more than $10,000).

Over 18 years, I paid off my debt, bits at a time. I did it by being cheap, but I also did it by not having kids, driving the same car for 11 years, sharing the house I owned with students, and by leveraging my advantages (I have an educated, healthy family that never needed money for food or emergencies, for example).

Ten grand is substantial, and I wish part of the cut was mine. I’m not bitter it isn’t. I’m grateful I could pay off my loans, and I’m happy for the relief the debt erasure will bring some people.

Still, I wish I’d deferred my payments rather than paying off my loans so I could get a cut of the money, which can go to anyone making less than $125,000—including me. Read that again. It’s nuts.

Who needs relief?

When we talk about who needs student loan debt relief, a polarized America paints unique pictures.

The right frames the debt crisis from a personal responsibility angle. Whiny hipsters major in queer studies at expensive New England schools, rack up debt, and then yowl when they can’t pay their bills in the real world.

The left talks of student loan debt from an angle of social responsibility: people of color become social workers and teachers, buy crayons for their kids in under-funded classrooms, and struggle to pay more than the interest on their loans.

Only about 20% of Americans hold student loans, because only 35% have college degrees.

Half of student loan holders have $20,000 or less to pay, 33% have less than $10,000. The remaining seven percent of people with federal debt owe more than $100,000.

80% of Americans have no college loan debt, and we’re asking all Americans to subsidize a small over-educated minority. The “subsidizing majority” includes a lot of poor black and brown and working-class people.

I wish millionaires, billionaires, and big corporations bore a disproportional brunt of the burden.

A further subset of people are crying for higher education to be free. While I agree with this in principle, it would be tough to get 65% of Americans who have no interest in college to pay for it. And, in a capitalist society, paying for education is a way we buy into higher social castes. Americans—especially those in the educated classes—will never simply let people in, or give “free degrees” value. It’s pay to play, baby.

Share The Bag May Not Inflate

Follow Your Dreams?

The promise of America is that you can succeed at anything and have anything you want if you love what you do and work hard at it. We ask seven-year-olds what they want to be when they grow up, and seldom discourage them when they reply. It later comes as a terrific shock to people when they love humanities and can’t find employment to pay their debts on the other side of college. It feels not only like America has failed, but that they, who love feminist studies so damn much and can’t do anything with it, have failed when in fact they have been misled.

For time immemorial, people in many careers (art is the default that comes to mind) have struggled to eat. Only recently, however, have we added debt to the struggle. The simple truth is, unless you are of privilege—with connections, with subsidies, with parents who are helping pay your undergrad degree—you most likely cannot follow your bliss and succeed in certain fields and should not pursue them without a cost/benefit analysis.

Basic financial literacy would help tremendously. I get perturbed when people take out loans without understanding the terms. Many in repayment don’t understand compounding interest, the difference between deferment and forbearance, and the impact of an interest rate—they simply want to go to school and they take the money however they can get it.

I’m reminded of parents who tell their kids to disregard the financial impact of having a baby because “if you think about how much a baby will cost, you’ll never have one.” In fact, most people would do well to consider the financial impact of both babies and college.

Forgive as Christ forgave

I see two themes circulating on social media right now. I see neither as helpful.

The first goes something like this:

“Just because you had to pay loans doesn’t mean you should be upset when others get relief.”

Sure, you should be happy that struggling people find relief. I am. I’m also upset that I didn’t get a cut. It’s a bit like saying “don’t be mad you didn’t get presents for Christmas—be happy for all the children who did.” It doesn’t work that way.

The second goes something like this:

“The Bible speaks of debt forgiveness. If you believe in the Bible like you say, you should like this proposal.”

This is a barb aimed at Evangelical Christians, having everything to do with cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy rather than the fitness of Biden’s loan program. It doesn’t work because people think with their hearts, not with their brains. People only know what they feel to be true. Throwing the Bible in peoples’ faces to own them isn’t helpful, because it insults people who are already mad rather than adding substance to the conversation.

What Might Be Helpful?

I am no economist, but if I were designing a loan forgiveness program it might

• Target high-need degrees that historically do good for the nation but lack decent pay (teachers, social workers, low-level health care workers, those working in high-risk neighborhoods and with high-risk communities.)

• Find funding through a wealth tax, corporate tax, or increased tax on investment income and dividends

• Be available to people with legitimate financial need

• Include subsidies to help first-gen college students and kids from poor and marginalized backgrounds, single-parent homes, or the like afford college.

A blanket ten grand to people making under $125,000 seems arbitrary. It stands to let too much money go to the wrong people, like me, if I had just continued to stretch my debt rather than pay it off.

Over the past months, I have spent weekends consumed by memories.

When my father died 17 years ago, he left me with a Rubbermaid crate of memorabilia - report cards, yearbooks, scout manuals, diplomas from junior high to law school, award certificates, and photos of lost loves.

My dad achieved much in 58 years of life. The son of a night-shift steelworker, he was an Eagle Scout, then followed his brother to college, went to seminary, and later attended law school.

When I was born 45 years ago, my mom saved everything. Newspapers from the day I was born to the day I graduated high school; finger paintings I made her for Mother’s Day, which she dated and put away in crates; my preschool diploma (I’m a bachelor of rhymes, apparently); notes from teachers expressing how bright I was; and at least a hundred cards from friends and parishioners welcoming Carter into the world.

My dad’s memories are not my memories. His yearbooks don’t conjure nostalgia like mine. Even his degrees are not who he was, but a product of who he was.

My memory boxes tell a different story. My mom kept them as a record of my young life, but I see them as her memories more than mine. Each time Mrs. Murray, the gifted teacher at Watson Elementary, wrote to say Carter is bright and capable of great things, she beamed. How could she possibly trash notes of such praise?

I don’t know most of the people who sent cards of well-wishes at my birth. And, for two decades they’ve sat in waterproof boxes in my basement - not because they’re important to me, but because I always felt they were important to my mom.

Prisoners of sentiment

It’s easy to become prisoners of sentiment—for old love notes and Boy Scout manuals to force us to buy new bookshelves and boxes—to create museums for the dead, and make ephemeral moments permanent parts of history.

Yet, it seemed odd that for 17 years my dad has been a pile of ash in an urn somewhere, while his elementary school report cards continue to exist, preserved in my basement.

I spent a few months carefully scanning almost everything (Staples has a large document scanner for oversized things like diplomas). I preserved the PDF files in the Google Cloud. I kept one small filebox of unique things I wanted to carry a bit longer, and mailed things to people who would appreciate them. Then, this morning, I gave everything that remained a Viking funeral over a campfire.

It was cathartic. The good wishes and sentiments, accomplishments and records are now, like my dad, part of the greater world. Trees and grass will grow from the ash. I am absolved of the responsibility of curating them, and I know, somehow, as I grow old and face my own mortality, that those things are where they should be: in memory, and part of the universe.

I still have my diploma, too. I remember Betsy Levier being at the school, passing out honor cords, and I have a few remembrances of project graduation that night.

What I don’t remember is the day I graduated—what I did that morning and afternoon; who I was with; what time I showered or got dressed. Surely I awoke and ate breakfast and occupied myself until evening. But it’s gone. Gone, too, are most memories of the summer between high school and college.

What did I do? Evan Smith and I would have worked together at Microsystems. I would have spent time at the airport finishing my flight training. I remember getting my pilot’s license. I got a new car that summer. A Saturn from Bill Kelly, an old dealer with lots of aftershave and a ring on every finger.

I attended church camp one last time in 1995—my pal Conor Knighton was my roommate—and I have some memories of that. But, I base most of my summer 1995 chronology on what I was likely doing, not on concrete memories of doing these things.

In my memoirs, I have a copy of the Record Delta, Buckhannon’s hometown newspaper, from the day after graduation. There’s a large photo of almost all my friends: Matt, Karl, Mike, Eric, Jeff, Ryan, Josh, Becca, Cathy, Megan… but not me. To be fair, Minda isn’t there, either, so we were probably off somewhere, up to no good. But, seriously. If that were the only picture in existence, I’d wonder if I was even there.

As I grow older, entire years of my life become muddled like this. Abstract. Vague. I wish I were the sort of person with the discipline to keep a daily journal. Then again, maybe what remains - the feeling past epochs evoke - suffices. If I could recall every detail, it might only clutter my brain like twenty pounds of shit in a ten-pound bag.

I was frustrated in the summer of 1995. Ready to be in love, but unable to find it; ready to go to college but too lazy to want to make new friends; done with central West Virginia and bored with the familiar, but frightened because I was unable to see into the dark past the headlights.

That’s okay. I later learned you don’t have to see past the headlights. To paraphrase E.L. Doctorow, a person can make an entire journey without.

Quebec is both a province and a city, just as New York is both a city and a state. So, it helps to be specific when one says they are going to Quebec. Ardi wanted to go to Quebec and focus on Quebec City. I was game, and here we are on our first international trip since the lockdown.

This is New France. Speak French.

The first thing one notices about “New France” is that they’re serious about speaking French. The issue has become a cultural lightning rod I can only liken to the “this is America, speak English” movement in the U.S. - though as an English-speaking tourist, I never once felt unwelcome.

Apparently, the province of Quebec is Canada’s red state. Elected leaders like speaking French. They wish to preserve a clean, quiet, educated, culturally European environment, and they don’t want to adulterate Quebec with immigrants, many of whom are brown, most of whom speak English as a lingua franca.

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A recent law passed demands all businesses with over 25 employees transact their business only in French, subject to government audit of emails and recordings. It makes French proficiency a requirement for high school graduation, and gives new immigrants 6 months to learn French so they can conduct business with the local government.

Quebec is exclusive in hopes of preserving its “unique culture” - a white, European culture that, ironically, displaced indigenous people starting in the late 1500s.

If I lived here, I’d side with more inclusivity, but it doesn’t escape me that what drives people to Quebec and makes it “nice” in the eyes of most tourists is that it’s homogenous. People come to Quebec for fleurs de lis and pains au chocolat served by white women who speak French in dulcet tones.

What’s nice is, it isn’t my issue. And, the issues I live around, like the racism spawned by the transatlantic slave trade, police brutality, school shootings, climate denialism, COVID denialism, and so forth, don’t seem to exist here among quiet mornings and huge croissants.

Thoughts on the major attractions

Quebec city’s major attractions are Old Quebec with the landmark Fairmont Le Château Frontenac, the Citadel, and Montmorency Waterfall about 25 minutes from the tourist district.

Old Quebec is pristine. Every turn is a photo op. Elegant churches line peaceful streets; there are musicians and stores with poutine and crepes. On weekends, sailboats overtake the St. Lawrence River. I averted my eyes from the Frontenac Hotel, because it was too expensive to view even while passing by. We stayed at B&B La Fontaine in Old Quebec, and as a tourist I would recommend staying in the old city. It’s walkable and there are tons of food options.

Share The Bag May Not Inflate

The Citadel, still an active military compound, is a worthwhile visit, but not much happens inside. Constructed between 1820-1850 to fend off U.S. attacks from the St. Lawrence River, the Citadel never saw action. The hour-long tour is something to do but devoid of much excitement. More interesting? Walking around outside the Citadel and taking in the stunning city views.

Montmorency Waterfall is an easy half-day trip. A suspension bridge allows tourists to walk over the falls within meters of the chute, and a cable car transports people from the top to the base and back. Well-maintained boardwalks lead social media whores to the best vistas for selfies. The easiest way to get there is the 800 bus. Vendors sell round-trip tickets at most tobacco shops and newsstands.

Usually I like to pepper my travel writings with dramatic anecdotes: an elderly person having a heart attack at the airport; a teenager choking on a cheese curd; someone falling down. There was relatively little drama on this trip, for better or worse - just good weather and charming vistas.