Archive for August 2010

A subway ride in Beijing

I rode the subway today back to the Westin hotel from Beijing's Capital Museum.  The subway was fairly empty by Beijing standards.  Most seats were taken and some people were standing.  At one stop some seats empty out and a family of four gets on, a grandmother, grandfather, mother, and son.  They head for an empty seat.  The child, a plump five or six year old, plops on the seat ahead of his grandmother.  His mother hurriedly tries to shush him out of the seat.  His grandmother stands closet to the seat, but the child is bewildered.  The mother starts talking sternly to her son.  People are starting to stare.  Such disrespect of one's elders in simply unacceptable here.  Then again, he is only a child, does he know better?  He squirms and pushes back against his mother.  One of the men sitting across from this situation looks up at me.  Sheepishly, he smiles.  The subway car is observing a middle class family losing face, and there is a white man aboard.


The mother, using a combination of stern words and pushing, eventually convinces the son to move.  His grandmother takes his seat.  And just like that, the commotion settles and all returns to normal:  passengers are staring into space, talking to each other, reading.  The child has stopped crying and started gawking at me.  He is their only one.  And unless they pay a hefty penalty, he'll remain the only one.  And his now-flustered grandmother, who probably usually feeds him candy and spoils him to tears, is now thinking, however briefly, that this might be a good thing.

Haggling in developing countries

I am in a developing country and a guy tries to sell me something.  It's usually a drink, a watch, sunglasses, or something similar.  I get quoted an obviously-inflated price.  The guy wants to get as much money from me as possible.  He gauges how much I would spend, based on my skin color, my clothes, the way I handle myself.  


On the one hand, I should bargain him to death.  I should quote some ridiculously low price, then we go back and forth, I pretend to leave, he drop the price further, and finally we agree to the exchange which, as the Lonely Planet suggests, is typically 7-10 times less than the starting price.

On the other hand, I should give him as much money as possible.  This is a developing country, they need money.  So much of American charity goes to developing countries.  But it's usually far away and some of it goes toward administrative costs.  Here is a person in a developing country, so what are you waiting for?  Empty your pockets!

Of course, reality is more complex.  Developing countries don't need money, they need smart investments.  Simply giving away money feeds a cycle of dependency.  Many people paying too much for an item inflates its price for others. Perhaps it distorts market forces by falsely inflating demand; although perhaps not if you planned to buy the item anyway.  And paying an haggled-down price still gets me the money and gets the seller profit -- or else he likely wouldn't sell. 

Maybe the confusion I feel about haggling with a merchant in a developing country can be resolved with a premium I pre-commit to pay for anything I buy.  I would haggle down the price, then pay the agreed price plus the premium.  A guilt premium, perhaps?

Right shoulder up

A great article about Japan.



"Three years ago, I saw a television program about a new breed of youngster: the nonconsumer. Japanese in their late teens and early 20s, it said, did not have cars. They didn't drink alcohol. They didn't spend Christmas Eve with their boyfriends or girlfriends at fancy hotels downtown the way earlier generations did. I have taught many students who fit this mold. They work hard at part-time jobs, spend hours at McDonald's sipping cheap coffee, eat fast food lunches at Yoshinoya. They save their money for the future."

Sun Tzu and a watch

I enjoyed browsing the Beijing Antique Market at Panjiayuan Street today.  I made two great purchases, a knockoff watch and a copy of Sun Tsu's "Art of War" printed on a wooden scroll.


This is the closest approximation of the wooden scroll I bought:  http://yeschinatour.com/china-guides/chinese-culture/art-of-war-sun-tzu/

I cannot find an pictorial approximation of the watch.  The watch face and mechanism are enclosed in a glass orb and bound by a bronze band.  A linked bronze chain is attached to the band on one end; at the other end is a small bell with four small linked chains instead of a bell.  The glass has several scratches; a thumb print is visible on the inside of one of the glass hemispheres.  To change the time, the hemisphere with the mechanism has to be removed.  The face reads:  "Woumei / Made in Swit-zerland 1882." Google in China has not shown me any evidence that this watch is real.  It is probably fake.  The Swiss watchmaker in Harvard Square will know for sure. 

Jakarta

Jakarta appears more developed than Saigon, and certainly more
developed than Thailand and Cambodia. Where Saigon has endless
streams of motorcycles, or motos, floating down its well-paved
streets, cars sit on Jakarta's roads, stuck in an eternal traffic.

Jakarta's malls have both real and knockoff products, which is a
welcome change from Thailand and Cambodia. In those, although real
branded clothes, watches, and electronics exist, they are much harder
to find and most tourists stumble only on the knockoff Gucci, Prada,
and iPhones. The largest and nicest of Jakarta's malls has only real
products, and they are sold for only real prices. In some cases there
is a 10-20% discount off the price I would see in the US. But sales
and discounts seemed rare, or perhaps this was not the season for
sales.

Jakarta has a noticeably smaller contingent of white people -- both
expats and tourists. Every country in the Mekong delta, it seemed,
was swarming with tourists. Additional evidence of this was the
vibrant tourist-based economy that I saw in Thailand, Cambodia, and
Vietnam. In Thailand there is of course the famous red light
district, which serves white tourists and, according to my depressing
book on sex slavery, many Japanese men. In each of those countries,
motos and tuk tuks stood ready to ferry tourists to any location for a
price well above the one they would charge locals. Streets in Phnom
Penh were lined with stalls of food for tourists; further from the
touristy roads, much cheaper noodle stalls catered to locals.

Jakarta is the most Muslim of the countries I have visited on my trip.
Yet this fact is much less apparent than I expected it to be. Every
third woman, it seems, is wearing a head scarf. Every tenth, or maybe
every twentieth, is fully covered with a black head-to-toe burka.
Calls to prayer sound five times a day, mostly annoyingly at 4:00am.
These calls sound different from the ones I heard in coming from the
minarets in Israel. Yet they are also very beautiful. I was woken by
the early call to prayer this morning, and stayed up listening to it
as it faded and was replaced by the rhythmic prayers of the gathered
congregation.

Overall, I really enjoyed my stay in Jakarta. One thing that stands
out, unfortunately, is the amount of time I spent stuck in traffic;
taxis are needed to get everywhere, and traffic often grinds all
movement to full stop. Perhaps I am more sensitive to sitting in
traffic because I grew up in Atlanta, where gridlock is a fact of
life. But in any case, Jakarta seems to struggle with this problem as
do most developed cities.

On the road

(I wrote this on, and immediately following, the bus trip I took from
Phnom Penh to Siem Reap.)

The Mekong Express Limosine Bus ambles down a worn, rocky road
southward toward the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. I am listening
to David Lanz on my iPhone, typing on my Lenovo netbook, chewing a
granola bar. After I finish typing, I return to my copy of "The
Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan. I am wearing a polyester shirt
from the Harvard Coop, old shorts from Target, a Swiss Military Hanowa
watch. One hundred dollars rests in my wallet.

A family is riding with me in the back. The father is reading the
Phnom Penh Post, an English paper in the format of a large black and
white magazine. Sometimes he mouths the words; perhaps reading
English does not come easily to him. To his right, next to me, his
seven year old son is asleep, his stomach full of the fried crickets
his mother bought for him on the street market during our last rest
stop. Fried crickets are a Cambodian delicacy, the father tells me,
smiling. (The crickets are collected by securing a blue bug light to
a pole, tying a bag under the pole, and leaving the entire contraption
in the ground overnight. Dozens of blue lights illuminate Cambodian
roads at night. The crickets are then collected from the bags and
fried whole -- head, appendages, body.) A young, trendy-dressed girl
sitting to his left cringes as she sees him put a cricket in his
mouth. Crunchy!

The trendy girl is a sight. She is wearing Gucci glasses, has
straight brown-colored Asian hair. (Our guide near Seam Reap told us
that brown highlights are popular in Asia; even little kids in the
poor floating community I visited earlier dye their hair to make it
look like white people's. Another popular change is calve reduction.)
Her phone is white, slim, stylish. Her orange shirt complements her
hair and her tight brown pants with chaotically-strewn streaks of
white. Her shoes are open-toed in the front, closed, leathery and
high up in the back. This entire attire would cost hundreds of
dollars in the States, perhaps more -- and people would pay it. But
east Asia, knockoff HQ, is swimming in brand-name product that did not
pass factory quality control, or passed QC and made it to the street
vendors due to factory overproduction or theft.

What an unfathomable generational divide separates the two passengers
sitting next to each other on this bus! Years back, as the last
American helicopters were lifting off from the American embassy in
Hanoi, the Cambodian communist resistance was entering Phnom Penh and,
in one of the largest social experiments the world has ever seen,
marched the entire population of the capital into the fields in an
attempt to create an egalitarian socialist community. Religion,
class, elites, status, party were all eliminated -- as where the
people. A quarter of the Cambodian population was slaughtered.

Perhaps this dad's father was there, like many fathers of his
generation -- the reason so few 50, 60, and 70 year old men are found
in Cambodia. Perhaps his father wore glasses or had other apparent
markings of intelligence; if so, he would have been marched to one of
the 350 killing fields. If he lived in a village outside the
capital, he may have survived; Pol Pot's reach extended there slowly
and controlled it briefly. If the father had a simpler life, he may
not have been marked for the killing fields. In either case, his
impact on the upbringing of his son - the man who sits next to me -
was so different from the impact that the father on this bus has on
the child curled up snoozing next to me.

And what contrast the trendy girl presents! So geographically
proximate to, and yet so far removed from, the poverty of the floating
villages that hug the Tonle Sap river. So generationally proximate,
and yet so indifferent to, the near-extermination of her people some
30 years ago. Her clothes, probably bought at 5-10% of their American
price in Cambodian markets, announce, perhaps form, her identity.
Nobody on the bus is dressed like her. The tourists on this bus may
dress with her level of style in New York or London; here, they donned
trekking backpacks and North Face garb.

The trendy girl and the family interact very little. The girl is lost
in the music coming from her music player, perhaps a knockoff iPod.
The father is reading the paper; the mother is fretting about the son,
straightening him each time he threatens to fall off the seat in his
slumber.

I wonder about their son. He sleeps now, his stomach full of bottled
water, crickets, and peanuts. I wonder if he will become a man who
forgets and is forgotten by the communist revolution of the Khmer
Rouge. What will it mean to him when he is 30 years old that his
grandfather's generation was nearly wiped? How will he connect the
now-ruling People's Party in Cambodia to the Pol Pot regime, to the
failed experiment of forced eradication of class? Will he value
intelligence? Books? Democracy?

In Phnom, my hostel buddies and I sip beers at a pub. A young girl
approaches with a cart of books. Can you read, my friend asks. Just
the titles. What about in Khmer? Sort of. Would you like to learn
to read English? Yes! Buy my book, send me to school! This is a
well-rehearsed phrase we've heard from several kids in Cambodia. A
friend buys Chandler's history of Cambodia. The money, the girl says,
will go to her mother. The profit she makes will go toward more
books, toward food for the family. Little will be left -- too little
for schooling. But perhaps not. Perhaps the girl will take interest
in her wares and learn to read them, rather than taking interest in
the knockoff Gucci and DG clothes in the markets. Perhaps the father
on this bus, mouthing English words in the Cambodian newspaper, will
read the paper to his son, teach him to read, send him to one of the
international schools here. Perhaps together they can help undo the
systematic elimination of intelligence that occurred in Cambodia just
three decades ago. I have hope.

Siem Reap

Siem Reap, a Cambodian town just north of the Tonle Sap river that exists only to support tourism to the nearby Angkor Wat, offered me incredible lessons in backpacking. My host, owner of the Two Dragons hostel, is one of the expatriates in Siem Reap, and one of the few Americans expats here. Most other expats are French, a bizarre aftereffect of French colonialism. (Another aftereffect is the delicious butter and lemongrass flavors of French-infused Khmer food.)

The effects of the US recession have been felt strongly here in Siem Reap. American tourism sustains much of the economy of the town and the neighboring Angkor Wat. Decline in this tourism has been only slightly offset by increasing tourism from rapidly developing Asian countries and by tourists from European countries with favorable exchange rates. Most tourists that I have seen came from Korea,
China, Germany, and the UK. Other tourists who I've met were an older couple from Perth in Australia and a Italian girl studying in Cambodia. Hostels run by Cambodians are also owned by them, and have been compensated by putting off repairs and hiring more family members. Foreigners cannot own land in Cambodia, so hostels owned by expats sit on land rented from Cambodians; they have suffered more. Two hostels shut here in the past five months; many others have been strapped for cash.

Hostel rating sites seem to dictate the hostel market here. My hostel owner tells me that "he knows for a fact" that the hostel owner across the street pays an English-speaking person to write favorable reviews of his hostel on Tripadvisor.com. A trend common in Vietnam, he says, is writing bad reviews for competing hostels. Websites like Yelp, Amazon, and eBay have addressed this problem by letting reviewers rate each other, rate other reviews, and promoting frequent and quality reviewers. I guess this trend hasn't caught among websites for hostels.

A floating community


Kampong Phluk, Tonle Sap River, Cambodia, taken August 2010.


As the earth turns closer toward the sun, the ice caps of the Himalayan peaks melt and icy water trickles from the mountains into streams which turn into tributaries to the Mekong River. The meek Mekong awakens, bulges, and its now-mighty current hits the Tonle Sap Lake full force; the lake rises, and with it rise the floating houses, boats, and livelihoods of the Kampong Phluk community.  And the men fish.  And the children swim to class, to meet their friends, and home.  And the women patch the houses.  And the earth turns again.