When Elvis sings “I’m just a hunk, a hunk of burnin’ love,” I’m ready to sign up for U.S. citizenship right then and there. Only a country of genius could produce that kind of art. Nevertheless, America needs to get out more. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist , has recently discovered that the world is flat, that Indians are smart, and that other countries have workers and telecommunications infrastructures as sophisticated as the homeland’s. Perhaps we foreigners can even produce glib essays for a tenth of Friedman’s wages (as long as you pay us in Euros).

Eight years ago I shared H1-b visa gripes with Indian engineers in Times Square, while we worked to fix bugs with the Hyderabad colleagues who lived twelve hours in the future. The older IIT engineers, who had gone to graduate school in the US, acted as cultural brokers for the delegations that went back and forth between Hyderabad and Broadway. We could have told Friedman what was coming, if we’d been at the right cocktail parties.

Gokul, my colleague and running partner then, went on to MIT graduate school and now runs Google’s AdSense program. We’re neighbors again, in a region where fully a third of start-ups were founded by immigrants, including Google. Eight years on, at a time when USCIS has made it much harder to come here, we could now do just fine or better where we came from. The next generation of Gokuls can start their empires at home, and that’s why the US Ambassador to Ireland has had to tour the universities to beg Irish students to take up summer visas to visit the US. They’re not interested.

The Hmong have a phrase, hais cuaj txub kaum txub, which means “to speak of all kinds of things.” It is often used at the beginning of an oral narrative as a way of reminding the listeners that the world is full of things that may not seem to be connected but actually are, that no event occurs in isolation, that you can miss a lot by sticking to the point, and that the storyteller is likely to be rather longwinded.

“In New York, freedom looks like too many choices,” Bono sings. When I moved there I was shy about ordering the plainest deli sandwiches and confused by the flashing Don’t Walk signs that made people run. I had no visa, and it took a month or two to find work at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a proud literary publishing house I’d never heard of. I filled Jiffy bags with reviewer’s copies, and cut out the assessments that were sometimes granted in response. I filed the reviews in moldering folders—Kincaid, Jamaica; Nadas, Peter; O’Brien, Edna—along a corridor where Mike Hammer might have rented an office. I was paid in hardbacks, which I rarely read. It’s a rule of mine: never read anything bigger than your head.

Eight years later, I arrived for my last shift at another volunteer job on a freezing New York night. Between calls I flicked through People and US Weekly and worried about Brad and Jen. My shift partner, whom I didn’t know, read for a while too, and then slung his feet up on the desk and fell asleep. Because he was handsome, and wore yellow socks, I sneaked a look at his book to see if he was worth waking up.

It was The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. At Farrar, Straus & Giroux I’d packed a carton full of review copies and sent them around the country, but I’d decided it was too worthy to bother taking home (and I lacked the enterprise to sell it). Who wanted to read an epic about a Hmong toddler’s epilepsy, and the clash between her refugee community and the doctors at a Californian county hospital? I wasn’t sure what a Hmong was, even, and in any case I was preoccupied with Princess Diana’s funeral.

Since then I’ve visited a Hmong village in Laos, a day’s walk from the nearest dirt road. At sundown, when the villagers went to the river to bathe decorously under sodden sarongs, I slipped on the muddy bank and fell in, and cried. For dinner they killed a rooster—a precious rooster—and fed me the boiled head. I eyeballed this baleful Pez dispenser and made a show of fake humility in handing it to the teenaged monk who was my guide. Pon lit up. It was the end of Buddhist lent, and for over a month he’d eaten nothing after midday, and no protein at all. He sucked the rooster’s tongue like a lover, and then crunched through to the brain. I swallowed gritty gizzards. The villagers gathered in the doorway to watch the feast in silence, though they didn’t eat. Afterwards, someone made coffee, pouring the whole packs of Nescafe and sugar I’d brought into a kettle of river water and boiling it to syrup. I sipped mine, until Pon pantomimed that there were only two plastic tumblers and no one else could drink until we finished. We unrolled mats on the earthen floor, feet pointing towards the door to keep bad spirits out. I lay awake in a coffee buzz while underneath the stilted house the men hammered a coffin for somebody dead, and got raucously drunk on laú-laú moonshine.

I was an ungracious guest, frustrated that I knew so little and hung up on details. How much money should I offer the head man? Which one was he, anyway? How would I tell them I needed to go to the toilet? Why were the children scared of me? Why wouldn’t these people build better shacks? Were the men opium junkies? Were they really this dour? Oh Jesus, was that a leech?

I didn’t know how to begin.

Nor did the people in Anne Fadiman’s wonderful book, which my new friend hand-delivered to San Francisco last month. Both Hmong immigrants and locals were baffled and helpless. The Hmong didn’t want to be on welfare in Merced, California. They wanted to be back in their villages in Laos, where ‘pig-feeding time’ marked sunset and sunrise. The local taxpayers wanted them back home, too. Kissinger’s adventures in Laos had been kept so quiet that most Americans neither knew nor cared that Hmong tribes had been recruited to fight a private war for the CIA, and had been kicked out or slaughtered when the Americans lost 1975. Their path to America was traumatic, involuntary, and took a great deal longer than the Orderly Departure planes that left them stranded as homegrown traitors. “It was a kind of hell they landed into, “ said Eugene Douglas, Reagan’s ambassador-at-large for refugee affairs. “Really, it couldn’t have been done much worse.” Both sides expected gratitude, and got resentment. The Hmong had little left but their culture, and no interest in giving it up to become American.

That’s not an immigrant approach that America is prepared for. Think of the graffiti in Rio: “Yanqui go home—and take me with you.” America defines us so thoroughly that I could arrive in New York as a full-grown adult and feel at home except at the deli counter. But the Hmong had stayed apart so successfully that they were confused by toilets, and canned food, and electricity, and money, and hospitals. American doctors were known to steal body parts, without which souls couldn’t rest. (For their part, the doctors saw their Hmong patients as ungrateful and “non-compliant”.) It would be hard to imagine the scale of their bewilderment, except I remember it first-hand, stumbling in that river and wanting desperately to go home.

Fadiman begins with a description Fish Soup, as told by a Hmong student at Merced High School:

To prepare fish soup, he said, you must have a fish, and in order to have a fish, you have to go fishing. In order to go fishing, you need a hook, and in order to choose the right hook you need to know whether the fish you are fishing for lives in fresh or salt water, how big it is, and what shape its mouth is. Continuing in this vein for forty-five minutes, the student filled the blackboard with a complexly branching tree of factors and options, a sort of piscatory flowchart, written in French with an overlay of Hmong. anecdotes about his own fishing experiences. He ended with a description of how to clean various kinds of fish, how to cut them up, and, finally, how to cook them in broths flavored with various herbs.”

To tell Lia Lee’s story, Fadiman makes a fish soup of her own, winding through Hmong history and culture, the American War, immigration policy, western medical training, anthropology, welfare reform, a changing community, and a family. Like Tracy Kidder, or a Hmong fisherman, she watches and waits, and unfolds her tale with startling delicacy. In puzzling out a catastrophic clash of cultures, she looks for answers rather than blame. Along the way, she changed medical culture and won the National Book Award. It’s beautiful. Read it if you can.

I used to work in the Bertelsman Building in Times Square. It was the headquarters of the BMG record company, and P. Diddy—he was still Puffy then—had offices on the floor below us. Once he got meeting locations mixed up and ended up on our floor. Our gentle receptionist, Paulette, wouldn’t let him in.

This was shortly after he’d been hauled up for punching out a record executive, and his ‘roids were still raging. He leaned over the desk and yelled at her to find the meeting room NOW. The office manager scurried out to see what was going on. They argued briefly. Puffy threatened. Steve told him to leave immediately or he’d call security. I’d like to have seen the confrontation: our slight little hippie with center-parted hair, a handlebar mustache, and tie-dyed shirt ordering Puffy and his people to get out. It’s a mark of how nerdy we were in that software company that no one recognized him, even while his remix of Sting’s creepy stalker song was number one. Afterwards his people sent please-don’t-sue flowers.

A few days ago I stepped into the elevator at work next to a tiny woman bundled up in what looked like a black duvet, speaking to a friend in…Swedish? Not Swedish. I picked out bits from the lilting: “hurdy gurdy gurdy…Public Enemy…” The clear, girlish voice was familiar, but it took me four floors of sideways glances to work out that it was Bjork.

That morning I’d started a book that had been on my wishlist ever since my friend Max told me it was his favorite novel: Halldor Laxness’s Independent People. Max has great taste in everything but women, and sure enough, this is a gem. It’s an Icelandic novel about sheep. If you deserve to read it, that won’t put you off. Iceland’s storytelling tradition is as strong as Ireland’s, and this book is reminds me Liam O’Flaherty’s Aran Islands stories. It even starts with Columcille, an 8th century Irish missionary. Battling the elements is good for art.

The introduction to my edition says that “Self-Standing Folk” would be a better translation of the title, and in Bjørk I see Laxness’s people. It takes self-standing folk to wear that swan dress to the Oscars. (It’s in the Met’s Costume Institute now.) It takes self-standing folk to have her quirky perspective on human beings. Her Debut album was the soundtrack to my college years. Tiny and scrubbed, she still looks like a college girl years after the rest of us have had guilty thoughts about Botox.

Maybe if I’d had Independent People in my pocket instead of on my desk, I would’ve told her how much her joy meant to me. But Bjørk’s been known to punch out stalkers, too, and I didn’t want to interrupt her chat. We got off the elevator and walked down Broadway side by side. I silently wished her extra warmth, along with her duvet and her stripy tights, against from the New York winter.

I’m trying to give up reading for a week. Last month I tried to give it up for two weeks, and failed, so I aimed lower. It’s an experiment in soft addictions. Three days in, after countless slip-ups, I’m at the bargaining stage. Does Slate count? Slate doesn’t count because it’s on the internet and I’m at work, right? Reading at work doesn’t count. Look, I have a sandwich in my hand. What about Apartment Therapy?

Slate counts. I stuck a Post-It on my computer that says READ in a big circle with a line through it.
“What’s that?” said Peter, who likes to catalogue my eccentricities. I told him my theories on soft addictions. There’s another Post-It just below it that says BITE with a line through it. It’s about chewing my fingernails, still a major food group though I’m 32 years old.
“And you’re not going to bite me any more, baby?”
“Bite me,” I explained.

I notice the text deprivation most on the subway, where some day I’ll get shot for staring at people. I get interested in certain faces, and I can’t seem to listen in properly without staring, too. A book is protection against this reckless habit.

Without one, I set my iPod to my Bill Clinton Makeout Soundtrack for the Q Train ride home. The other headphone clones don’t seem compelled into the little shuffly dances I do when I have private music. Not that it mattered. Last night no one looked at each other. They nosed into their books, or stared carefully into space. They all looked drained, and it’s only November.

The King is right. “We can’t go awwn together,” I wanted to implore them, “ With suspicious minds.”

This opening to Brenda Maddox’s wonderful biography of Nora Barnacle made me check the publication date. The book is just sixteen years old, but her ferry port description—confirmed by my own memories—meshes more closely with Nora’s Ireland than today’s. It is rooted in a time of Donnelly visas and IDA ads pimping Irish graduates at Shannon Airport. From one-way Sealink to Ryanair jaunts, Ireland has travelled a ways.

Vicious Circle, by Arlene Hunt.

From last week’s Irish Sunday Independent:

Arlene is from the same town as the two sisters who were among my closest college friends. Their little two-up, two-down house in Ranelagh was, and still is, headquarters for the kitchen-table chats over red wine that take up so much time in college. Arlene wasn’t a student—she had a baby to look after—but she spent many hours there too, her elbows on the yellow check tablecloth. At nineteen, she was unadorned and extraordinarily beautiful. Her life had no safety nets.

I heard occasional updates about her in the years between. Things went badly. Then life seemed to work out. Her relieved hometown friend told me she had found a job on a stud farm, made plenty of money to take care of her daughter, had found a lovely bloke. She moved to Spain. Later there were rumours of a book deal.

Back in Ireland in December, I heard that her name turned up in one of the hard-boiled crime reporter’s books that sell so well there. This one took a prurient look at the Dublin sex trade. In Hodges Figgis, I flicked through the chapter on Arlene, and it was clear the writer admired her business sense as a self-employed sex worker. Though the writing was flat, I heard the earthy girl from the Ranelagh kitchen table in the tale of the gárda sting operation that finally busted her.
    “Ah, go fuck yourselves,” she said to the guards. I laughed out loud. A stud farm. How she must have enjoyed that little private joke on her double life.

Now Arlene is back in Ireland too, doing interviews to promote her first novel. She’s telling her own story, reclaiming it from the mouths and pockets of the journalists. Though I hardly know her, I feel proud of her. She made it. She’s telling the truth. That’s not easy.

Via the Writer’s Almanac, whose daily emails come with two links: “Listen” (a Real Audio file) and, more promisingly, “How to Listen”.

Alice Stewart was a doctor and a scientist who was one of the first practioners of a new post-war discipline, epidemiology. For what became the Oxford Study of Childhood Cancer, she drew up questionnaires, recruited volunteer interviewers, and assembled by hand enormous amounts of data about thousands of children. Her methods were unorthodox. She started the questions from conception, not birth. She tracked forward, from a healthy population, not backwards, from the sick. She did what none of the lofty, eminent men of her day had thought to do: “I asked the mums.”

She asked the mums. She gathered data, a beginner’s mind, and one brilliant statistician. With little funding, and sometimes active hostility in place of support, she and George Kneale coaxed stories from her facts and figures. Fifty years later, that data is still talking.

The most famous of her many discoveries was the link between x-rays and cancer, though it took decades for her findings to be accepted and for shoestores to stop x-raying for fit. Her later work on radiation and cancer was systematically squashed by the nuclear industry. Epidemiology, with its thirty-year studies, is a science for the long-lived. Alice was working right into her nineties, fighting suppression by powerful lobbies. As consolation for the Nobel Prize she may have deserved, she won the Right Livelihood Award, the “Alternative Nobel” awarded in Sweden. The British Embassy in Stockholm did not even take her out to lunch.

Her theories on leukemia epidemics were grounded in her background as a working doctor, not an academic. She realised, for example, that antibiotics had unmasked the true incidence of leukemia. It was the healthiest children who succumbed to leukemia, early doctors often noted. Leukemia dramatically compromises the immune system, so long before the disease visibly manifests, these children used to die of minor infections. When these infections were cured by antibiotics, they lived through long enough to develop cancers of the blood.

Her childhood cancer data also turned up a peculiar finding: twice as many children who died of leukemia under six months old were born between January and June than between July and December. Yet these periods are climatically the same in Britain—both half summer, half winter. The difference, she noted, was whether a month-old child was surviving into warmer or colder weather.

Alice, true to her name, looked the mirror image of this information and thought about SIDS deaths, which occur more often in winter.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) kills between 6,000 and 7,000 babies a year in the United States alone, or between 2 and 3 cases per 1,000 live births. Nobody knows what SIDS is, or why it’s on the rise. What is known is that it happens more often in winter than summer and that it occurs mainly between four and six months of age.

Bob Cringely’s account of his son Chase’s death from SIDS two years ago is hard to forget. As a parent he desperately wants answers:

Well, here is the theory of an extraordinary scientist who doggedly proved herself right so many times while she was alive. It seems to me, as laywoman as they come, to show all Alice Stewart’s practicality, intuition, and good science. Why is nobody testing this? For her memory, and for Chase’s, I’d like to think that someday someone will dig out those journals and try.

Reference: All Alice Stewart excerpts are taken from Chapter 15 of The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation by Gayle Greene. (Many thanks to Alice’s granddaughter, Elly, for lending me her copy. )
See also “Our Brilliant Careers”, a 1996 documentary on Alice Stewart produced by Channel 4.