“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”—Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Welcome to John Wayne International Airport. The current Homeland Security threat level is Orange. To enhance your safety, and to avoid transporting dangerous goods, please do not leave baggage unattended. Please report suspicious or unattended packages to law enforcement personnel.”

“We have a high degree of need to protect structure.”—San Diego County Fire Chief, on NBC News

Anaheim, California should be paved over, if it weren’t already. We’ve been going there weekly for six months, yet my friend J. and I still get confused between the 57 North and the 55 as we leave the airport. Our plasticky rental cars get no respect on these freeways, which crawl with wide-arsed vehicles that are probably bought with the profits from p*n*s enl*rgement spam. We cut them off through incompetence, and get cut off in our turn. Who cares? It’s not as if they’re human.

With names like “Hotel Drive,” “Convention Drive,” and “Airport Way,” the streets round here don’t even try. We can’t get a purchase on the geography, so we learn to swerve into U-turns. We drive past Christian superstores, Disneyland hotels, and PetCo chains. Cell towers and bulldozers and parking lots. We look forward to our few landmarks: Fritz That’s Too, our favorite strip-joint, or Mr. Stox, an early 1980s power restaurant straight out of Caddyshack. The memory of dinner there makes us laugh every time.

We drive by strip malls and theme malls and self-styled anti-malls, where the women have padded lips, new breasts, and pale hair. It’s the opposite of camouflage—without them, you disappear at thirty. Their daughters wear skirts that my friend G. describes as “two inches from the good stuff.” Surrounded by modifications, I’m struck by how human beings are hard-wired for facial pattern recognition. I catch myself staring at people in Starbucks queues, searching for symmetries and flaws, trying to tell what’s been altered. Cosmetic surgery is unsettling, in the way that shaved eyebrows are unsettling, and I fantasize that some Hallowe’en the whole population of Orange County will wear t-shirts printed with their first driver’s licence photos, for easy comparison.

Our usual hotel is full, and we call this one the Willy Loman Memorial Marriott. Instead of room service, there’s a communal mini-bar at front desk—a fridge with a tray of tiny liquor bottles, Lean Cuisines, and frozen burritos. At 10 pm, J. knocks on my door and holds up a miniature Dewar’s scotch and a Snickers bar. “Dinner,” she says, my organic, vegetarian friend. “I just wanted someone to witness it.” We make up German words to describe the feeling of opening the door to a lousy hotel room: Hiltonschmerz. Scheissekarpetzgeist.

At breakfast, men eat pallid eggs and make notes on their PowerPoint decks with cheap hotel pens. They’re already in meetings, and it’s just past dawn. Soon they’ll waltz to the ballroom to show the numbers at the All-Hands, while their colleagues doodle. Their company name is pegged up on one of those old-fashioned event boards. They sell drug testing solutions.

John Wayne swaggers at the entrance to his own airport—cast in bronze, bow-legged, a life-sized 12 feet tall. Those security announcements loop on the intercom, full of robotic warmth, while we line up to be searched and have our hummus confiscated. At the departure level, two fat cops on Segways roll past a wall of windows that frames a dark orange sky. The Santa Ana bellows is still blowing on the wildfires to the south, and we can smell the smoke even in the sealed terminal. The air is itchy and thick.

“Keep your hands up! Don’t touch anything. “ A woman sprays Purell on every surface near her son, murdering bacteria, while he asks where I’m going. He’s five, and his name is Miles. He holds his hands up patiently and kicks his light-up sneakers. “M-I-L-E-S, Miles,” he says, mumbling the last letters as she swabs his mouth.

J. and I soothe ourselves with trashy magazines for the plane ride home. The sales clerk at the airport newsstand is a friend by now, and every week we discuss Britney Spears. While J. counts out the dollars for People she asks her a question. Something innocuous; about weekend plans, maybe. However it comes up, the woman answers that, well, at the moment, she’s homeless. She lives in her car, sometimes sleeps on friends’ couches. She’s hopeful that something will turn up soon.

Behind us, there’s a line of tired people waiting, without much interest, to find out if Brad really has walked out on Angelina this time. Or was it the other way round? Everyone wants to escape.

Rural Supply Store, Los Gatos (all photos by Tim Vetter)

Drearier than the prospect of fourteen hours at the mercy of America’s worst airline is knowing that Atlanta, and not home, is at the end of it.

Atlanta has given the world Delta Airlines, soda-pop, and 24-hour televised war, and perhaps this business vigor is why it has the busiest airport in the country. That means 45 minutes of kick-shuffling a laptop bag through the lines at Immigration, then sighing through more queues at baggage claim and Customs. And that doesn’t mean you’re free to go. Atlanta takes its Homeland Security hospitality seriously. If you arrive on an international flight, you and your bags must be rescreened after Customs, even if you’re connecting only to the taxi rank. They take your luggage, brusquely, and wave you to another Tensabarrier maze.

We passengers have just arrived from Tokyo, Delhi, or Madrid, and we don’t understand who has our bags now and where we are going. The minimum-wage security staff at the end of the maze can’t fathom why we are so stupid.

“Four more lines. Four more lines! Keep moving. Keep moving down. Keep MOVING,” shouts a guard, dragging people out of the main queue to the empty security lines nearby. We are bleary, our bodies still belong to tomorrow, or this morning, and strangers have taken our stuff. We look bewildered and pissed off. We have the money to go to Tokyo. No wonder she hates us.

The suitcases have been sent to another carousel, a jolting train ride away. One-footed, we strip off shoes, belts, and jackets, scrabble to get laptops into gray trays, and watch as our little bottles of airline Evian or mouthwash get confiscated. In the strip-lighting, after hours breathing recycled air, we’re as gray as the trays. There’s nowhere to get dressed and repack. We hop in half-laced shoes and clutch our bits and pieces, as the trays back up because we’re in the way.

“The current homeland security alert level is Orange,” blare the announcements, demanding that we keep an eye on Unattended Packages. Baby soldiers sit against the wall, tethered by the too-short cords of the public phones. There are always soldiers milling around this airport. They stick together and don’t say much, a class apart from this air-conditioned bubble world as they wait for their flights to German bases. Most, of course, look far too young and small. Everyone says that. But many more look too old; bone-tired and wobble-bellied. A gray-haired soldier leans against a camouflage backpack embroidered with his last name, and reads Fiasco. I am too ashamed to smile at them and wish them safe return and recovery, though I do it silently.

Beside the second baggage carousel, a tiny girl skips and sings.

“Too-morra, too-morra,
I love ya, too-morra,
Betcha bodda dodda
You’re ownee a day a-way…Mommy, what’s next?”

I hope she’s right.

It takes another hour for my bag to arrive, on the wrong carousel. Hours later, I call Ranger Tim from The Four Seasons, greasy-haired from massage oil, with room service on its way and a laptop downloading a week’s worth of emails cheeping for attention. It’s been ten days since we talked, and I miss him. He was out at the chicken coop.

A year ago, Tim rescued a young rooster wandering at the side of the highway near Los Gatos. Now the rooster lives in a fine house at the ranch, safe from the coyotes and the mountain lions. He’s sleek, and he crows proudly, but we’ve worried about his enforced celibacy. (Maybe it’s easier to feel sympathy for a rooster than a road warrior.) We enquired into girlfriends for him. You can order chickens over the internet, and once in a while people put them up for sale or adoption on Craigslist And the Santa Cruz mountains are home to little farms that supply some of the best restaurants in the world, so surely someone would sell us chickens. You can even rescue worn-out battery hens, so that they don’t end a miserable life as dinner on Delta.

Still, we never got around to it. The rooster got no honey, and we got no eggs. Today, tooling around Los Gatos on my green motorbike, Tim noticed a box of chicks set outside the Rural Supply Store. Easter chicks, set out for children to pet. They were three dollars apiece, and he bought three.

“I brought them home strapped to the Puddingmobile, like a Vietnamese farmer,” says Tim. That’s what he calls my old green Yamaha Seca motorbike, which he spends hours fixing up. “They were terrified, but it was good preparation for their next challenge—surviving life with the rooster.”

At first the rooster paid no attention to the three chicks. He stuttered around his cage, indignant at Tim’s invasion. The chicks huddled in a corner, cheeping in terror.

“Then eventually one of them just said ‘Fuck it, I’m getting on with life.’ And she started to explore a little, peck around her. The other two stayed huddled. It’s amazing, these animals don’t know anything, and yet their personalities are distinct.”

The rooster got over his annoyance. He noticed the chicks. He watched them. Then began to show what might pass for paternal behavior.

“He started to peck in small circles, like he was showing them what to do. And eventually they got it, though they’d never seen an adult before. They relaxed. They even started pecking his beak in some kind of feeding behavior, and he let them. He was looking out for them.”

Until his mood turned and he grabbed a chick in his beak and shook it.

“I thought, here we go, the blood bath has begun. The chick was screaming, and the other two were freaked. But then he let her go, and she wasn’t hurt. It looked something like a cat shaking her kittens.” Still, the chicks were chastened, and retreated to their corner. Life beyond the shell is violent and unpredictable, no matter how cute your yellow fluff.

I ask if the rooster realized that these useless, invading bundles represented his shot at passing on his genes. “Depends,” says Tim. “In a couple of months, they’ll be mature. But who knows if he has the foresight to see them for the bodacious pullets they could turn into if he leaves them alone?”

He watched as social equilibrium was slowly restored, at least for now. “It’s like some kind of reality show,” he says, “where three babies get dumped on some single guy, and he’s clueless, and he grumbles, but in his own way he looks after them.”

I haven’t been to the ranch in months. My life is air-conditioned now. The weekends I used to spend there, I now spend working on PowerPoint in Atlanta or Tokyo, or the airports in between. I didn’t miss the mountains in the rainy season, but now that spring is here I crave news from the real world, where the coyotes don’t wait for room service, and the morning is beautiful if you survive the night.

UPDATE: The chicks survived the night. From Tim:

The rooster didn’t harm them, but he didn’t brood them either (I thought, very wishfully he might have a bit of gay motherliness in him). It was turning cold when we got back from dinner at Lupin, and checking in on the birds, I found the rooster up on his roost, nonplussed at the flashlight beam, and chicks huddled in the corner of the coop shivering. Didn’t take me long to decide they weren’t going to survive the night under those conditions. They’re living now in a cardboard box next to the woodstove cheerfully pecking at a random selection of grains from my larder, run through the coffee grinder. They seem to like white grits and rolled barley best; turn their noses up at all forms of daal. I’ll let them try Irish pinhead oats tonight.My plan is to keep them inside for the rest of this week then starting the weekend have them spend days in the chicken house with rooster. In two weeks supposedly they’ll be able to stand the cold on their own.

The Yamaha Seca

Chicks getting ready for new adventures

Chicks get introduced to the rooster

Chicks rescued from the rooster and the cold

My year of chicken bus travel didn’t fully prepare me for chicken sashimi.

I’m still a rube at international business travel, which makes up in interest what it lacks in opportunities for sloth. The locals have to talk to me, for one thing, instead of politely looking past me like the grubby backpacker I still am at heart. Better yet, they get to choose my menu. Instead of noodle stands and Mr. Donut, there are yakitori business dinners, in which a whole, dismembered chicken is served to each guest over a ten courses, starting with chicken sashimi and working through skin, gizzards, liver, and lights to the feet. These were well-bred Japanese chickens, which probably had their own electric backside-washers, just like the Westin. Not one of the skewers tasted bad, but the squeamies made it gruelling. Was it guts or culture that revolted against chicken sashimi? No matter: when a Wonderbread dinner guest loudly Ewwwwwed each skewer, I felt obliged to make a good show. My host was a delightful Japanese man, who had learned English many years ago when a packaged-goods company brought him to suburban California for remodelling as an American marketer. He was a good guide to the equally exotic worlds of Tokyo business culture and giant multinationals, and for him I would stare down chicken faces. It reminded me of Alexandra Fuller’sta struggle to explain in Mozambique that she is vegetarian “…in a part of the world where the opportunity to eat a whole rat is a rare treat for millions of people.” As I dipped a skewer of chicken ovaries into the plump, raw yolk that might have been their last project, my colleague S. quietly passed me her undrunk beer to get it down. That’s teamwork.

The next morning, my hotel room smelled like chicken. S., K., and I swapped slightly hysterical emails about a lunchtime trip to Hermes to check out the new ChickenBirkin bag.

For days, the rain had lashed Tokyo so hard we took to calling it Ty-soon Yamashita, a weather system that warped umbrellas, soaked trouser-legs, and dissolved taxis. But the sun came out on Sunday morning, and after a week of sky-high meeting rooms, corporate sushi, and Heavenly Beds,(TM) I escaped my hotel for several hours before the evening flight back to San Francisco. I didn’t have a map, a guidebook, a watch, or a phone: all burdens lift on foreign strolls.

I’ve heard that “gaijin,” the Japanese term for Caucasian, translates as “pale ghost.” True or not, I take it as an invitation rather than a slur. My ghost floats above obligations, buoyed up by the kindness of strangers. My ghost is curious, fuddled, and peaceful. My ghost is illiterate, and has nothing to say.

Traveling ghosts don’t need temple tours, when the mundane has already become the stuff of exotic little victories: choosing a breakfast, washing a t-shirt, getting lost, or getting home. You can voyage on a subway as well as a cruise ship.

Because I liked the name, I caught the metro to Yoyogi Station, studying the passengers for clues. The streets were hushed, and for want of a plan, I drifted into the conbinis to look at candy and condoms and left-to-right magazines. These 7-11s and FamilyMarts are three or four to a block, and inside strip-lighting burns off the fog of Sunday hangovers. The familiar-strange packages are pretty, but they are lined up with no extra art. It could be Jersey, with smaller beverages and fishier snacks. Outside, the spaces between convenience stores are studded with vending machines selling more of the same: Georgia Coffee, Pocari Sweat, and the medicinal Healthia. In a gaming arcade across the street, a schoolgirl waited her turn as her friend mimicked a melody by pounding fat buttons with two fists. Cartoon-decorated facemasks hid their expressions. The girls were silent, but the dancing game characters were pink and hysterical.

A nice man directed me to Yoyogi Park, the quiet end, where I got my bearings by eavesdropping as an English teacher told his guests that Harajuku was at the far side, down a gravel path lined with trees. I dawdled, filling up on green, birdsong, and crunch after a fortnight of planes, glass, and carpet. At a temple grove, an old man in a grey suit sang loudly at a tree while three companions clasped their hands and looked on. A bridal party tottered out in kimonos, and didn’t look at him.

At the far end of the park, crowds poured out of Harajuku Station, where the gothic lolitas and cosplay tribes show themselves. Think of a Tim Burton version of Rome’s passeggiata. I’d wanted to see them—my office is filled with Tokyophile design colleagues who come here to reload inspiration—but Harajuku seemed to be running on habit and hawkers, like Carnaby Street in 1970. This is the place where kids in elaborate homemade outfits (used to?) gather in hope of being spotted by coolhunters. Now a stout American woman in shorts took a picture of two girls grinning in front of a McDonald’s sign: Jon-Benet Ramseys with pink hair, bought corsets, and bad teeth. Gaggles of them roam the narrow street, their looks as carefully matched within each group as a hit-factory girl band. At first glance, I thought they were all about fifteen, but behind the kawaisa some were almost as elderly as me.

It’s Hallowe’en as I write this, and I’m thinking of the five-year-old friend who insisted on going out tonight as a Dead Cheerleader, with persnickety requirements for each detail of her outfit. Harajuku is like that, with its fruit-fly trends, unfelt punk, and cheerful goth-in-a-box parading. It’s still fun.

In the KDDI Design Studio—a concept gallery for a mobile phone carrier—they bundled me into a Formula One racing car and took my picture. Upstairs, cameras taped two girls dancing to lights that flashed on the floor of a closet-sized room. When the music stopped, they stood awkwardly for a few minutes while the footage was mashed into a personal “Promo Video” that was beamed to their phones. They peered at the screen together to see their transformation into instant J-Pop idols. I half-expected them to shake the phone dry like a strip of passport photos.

In another booth, a medical-looking camera scanned my face to choose a pre-made phone avatar. I hoped to be assigned “Happy Artist,” from a catalogue of lively hairdressers and attentive hostesses, but instead my face was morphed into “Charismatic Shopgirl,” with big manga eyes and red hair. The boys’ catalogue offered a more exciting range of possibilities. On the street, though, things looked different. The girls ran the show, preening and giggling as they flicked through clothing racks in packs, while the boys looked on, in twos and threes, ignored by the Charismatic Shopgirls in spite of their lizard shoes and skinny pants. They looked good, but not as good as the construction workers, with their balloon pants and split-toed shoes.

Nearby Omotesando, the newest of several shopping districts, looks like a fat Fall issue of Vogue turned into a streetscape. You flip past Armani, Christian Louboutin, Dries van Noten, Zac Posen, Paul Smith, and Hermes—names big and small, hot and cool are there, their stores gorgeously staged and hoping to catch the eye in a parade of gloss. In the Omotesando Hills Shopping Center, Escher escalators deliver people up, down, and sideways into luxury. They sell French chocolates, sexy stationery, buttery boots, and slithery dresses. No babywear, homewares, or bookstores break the parasitu spell. We were droplets in the current flowing through the stores.

The parasitu are my Japanese counterparts; single, childless women of marriageable age, for whom living for the moment means carrying their own volume in shopping bags back to bedrooms in their parents’ homes as often as they can. They throng Omotesando, a fuck-me-booted army with cedar-colored hair (though the most stylish among them, instructed by the Korean hair magazines, seem to have gone back to glossy black—and not before time.)

“Watch step,” said a young guard in a beige uniform and gloves, whose only task was to warn people about a two-inch drop as they joined a queue to inspect the latest Sony mobile phones. Hundreds lined up, studying with friends the Sony Style posters that showed a hundred new cover designs—limited editions by musicians, designers, and animators. Watch step. Watch step. Watch step. If they looped around the Tensaguard barriers long enough, they’d get a moment at the display wall where the real phones hung in clear packages, ready to be grabbed. Another guard—a young woman—posted at the other end of the two-inch step, prepared them for the ascent to the cash register, in case the excitement caused a stumble.

No one does this stuff better than Louis Vuitton, the firm that taught Japan about luxury retail. Louis Vuitton started as a maker of gentlemen’s traveling trunks, and to me that brown monogram canvas still looks like it smells of Old Spice and Imperial Leather, like the aftershave kits I sold in Cassidy’s Chemist the Christmas I was 16—but this seems to be a minority view. 94% of Tokyo women in their twenties owns some item by Louis Vuitton, according to the Saito Research Institute. A few years ago, the CEO claimed that 46% of all Japanese women owned a Louis Vuitton product.

What non-essential branded product is owned by 94% of San Francisco women? A Gap t-shirt? An iPod? A tub of Haagen-Dazs? Nowhere close, I’d guess. Though I’d never want a Vuitton bag, my business crush led me to spend a few hours studying their stunning stores (though, characteristically, it wasn’t the clothes or bags, but rather the oversized illustrated company history on the top floor of the Ginza store that kept me the longest, browsing from the era of carriage travel to the NetJets age.) What does it mean when Charismatic Shopgirls and Lively Hairdressers and even Elegant Gothic Lolita are willing to find the money for a $3,000 purse, or ten—and join a quarter of a mile queue for the privilege of paying for them, as they did when the latest store opened?

All week I’d groused that my little team of colleagues and I hadn’t come to Japan; we came to Brandistan, where every experience was mediated and labeled, from the time we rolled out of those Heavenly Beds to the the turn-down service. We trooped around the Apple Store and the Sony Store; and ran through a downpour from Hermes to Louis Vuitton. We drank Coca-Cola beverages and ate dinners conceived by international chefs. In my hotel room, I caught snatches of CNN. Brandistan is an independent world beyond international borders, with its own language made entirely of proper nouns, and its own tribal customs and loyalties. By the end of a five-hour walk, I suspected we weren’t the only ones who lived there.

I’m off to Tokyo on bidness tomorrow. Woo! Thanks to fellows like Marxy, I’ll feel like I’ve been there, even if I never get to leave the Roppongi Hills Mori Sky Studio conference rooms.

1. Why Is Everybody Going to Cambodia?
“Foreign visitors are flooding in – 690,987 paid entrance fees last year, up from 451,046 in 2004. And while there are no official figures as to how much each spends in Siem Reap, the town’s dizzying array of luxury hotels – at least 10 by my count, ranging from the Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor to quirky boutiques like Hôtel de la Paix – testifies to the emergence of a new generation of high-end travelers, who not only demand round-the-clock Khmer massage but are also willing to pay $400 a day to hire a BMW L7 or $1,375 an hour for a helicopter tour.

Cambodia is not alone in its luxury revolution. Since the mid-1990’s, the former French colonies of Southeast Asia have made enormous leaps in catering to tourists who prefer plunge pools to bucket showers. From the forests of Laos to the beaches of Vietnam to the ruins of Cambodia, you can find well-conceived, well-outfitted, well-run hotels that will sleep you in style for hundreds of dollars a night.

Change has come at an amazing pace. Take Luang Prabang, in Laos. This tidy hill town feels like a Hollywood set, with painted lamps glowing in French restaurants and brick walkways brightened by a yellow glow emanating from knee-high terra-cotta pots. Even the bare fluorescent tubes draped over lonely late-night streets do their part to make visitors feel as if they’ve arrived at the end of the world.

But it’s not mere atmospherics they’ve found: Luang Prabang has high-end hotels to house a legion of W-worshipers, with enough bistros and boutiques to keep their credit cards on the verge of meltdown. There are spa treatments to succumb to, and Veuve Clicquot to toast with. This town of just 60,000 people is, almost all of a sudden, a luxury getaway.”
—New York Times

2. How To Write About Africa
Some tips: sunsets and starvation are good

“Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.”
—Binyavanga Wainaina, Granta (via RileyDog

3. From “Questions of Travel”

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
what childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
…

Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?

Continent city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?
—Elizabeth Bishop

Let the Nobs stay up on their hill and the hipsters stick to Hayes: Visitacion Valley is the most evocative name in the city, and as a neighborhood, it’s preserved, for now, by those nose-wrinkling write-ups. It’s the last stop before you leave San Francisco for the cubicles of Silicon Valley. Perched above it, on the San Bruno Expressway, a cocked martini glass invites commuters to stop for one for the road at a Russian cocktail lounge.

Some neighborhood history is written in the streets: the Mexican names, the boarded-up restaurants that used to sell Louisiana chitlins, the Indian Baptist Church, the Chinese and Vietnamese-language dailies in the newspaper vending boxes. It’s half Asian now, and most of the residents were born in another country.

On Leland Avenue—storefront churches, nail salons, and lunch shacks—I dithered over what to eat. Fried chicken or beef pho? It turned out that the Sunflower Blues Cafe, with its improbable indoor picket fences and yellow gingham table cloths, wasn’t opening until next week, though Marcus, the owner, was proud to show off how good it looked already. Everything made from scratch, he said, and healthy ingredients, salads and grilled stuff, though of course they’d do fried chicken, too; no sense being extreme. He’d started his family young and brought them over to Vis Valley from Bayview. They were grown now, though he didn’t look more than forty. He owned a few properties in the neighborhood, and his wife ran the beauty salon up the street. Julia here used to work for her, he said, and Julia was the best. Could I figure out how to get her to come on board with him?

Julia shrugged and giggled, not yet convinced.

At the Vietnamese place next door, my beef pho came with tripe and tendon, and a bush of basil leaves. The fish sauce was given out without asking. I ordered ca phe sua da and thanked the waiter in dredged-up Vietnamese. I was proud, but he was baffled until I gave in and pointed to the number on the menu. The broth was as good as Hanoi, and the decor very nearly worse.

A gnarled Chinese lady, bent low, haggled in the 99 Cent Store. I paid full price for a bottle of Elmer’s Glue, some Chinese birthday cards, hair clips, and a flashing bike reflector.

Up the road, in Portola, there’s an old cinema that’s a Baptist church now. I’m a lapsed-Catholic-aetheist-Buddhist, but even I’d go to a church with a drum kit behind the Hammond organ. A nearby diner looks untouched since the 1920s, apart from the laminated waffle menus in the window. But in keeping with the neighborhood changes, those red vinyl booths and swivel stools are now wiped down by owners who got here from Seoul four years ago. It was closed, on a Sunday morning, and on the store window next door, a poster warned residents to be wary after several recent attacks.

In the supermarket, frogs squatted in their tank, eyelids heavy. Sunday must be frog night, because they were stacked halfway up each other’s backs like toppled dominos. Three aisles over, you could choose from six brands of canned quail eggs, five kinds of canned rambutan, and a fridge full of sticky drinks. In the checkout queue, with an armful of mangosteen jellies and Vietnamese espresso, I almost wept at the sight of a box of durian fruit inside the front door. In deodorized America, it’s stinky, oozy, primal, pheromonal durian I’d like to offer instead of Altoids.

The other day someone asked me if I still had the travel bug. Truth is, I never did, even—and especially—when I wore a backpack for a year. I’m a homebody; at most a reluctant daytripper, and sniffing a durian on San Bruno Avenue is all I need before heading back to my rocking chair to look down over the city.

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.

On New Year’s Day, strong winds at Dublin Airport blew an Aer Lingus plane off the runway and into another parked plane, knocking out two international jumbos from a small fleet. More than a week later, the schedule still shudddered with the force of those flapping wings. My flight was delayed for hours as Aer Lingus borrowed planes from the neighbors to ship emigrants back to Boston, Chicago, and New York.

I sat in front of Jonathan, who was unhappy about the delays. He was 16 or 17 and made like an egg: round, pale, and hairless. He wore a beige knitted hat pulled down tightly like a swimming cap. He was getting over the ‘flu, and wailed as his stuffed-up sinuses expanded in the pressurized cabin.
    “No no no no no no no NOOOOO! I’m getting very angry. I hate it I hate it I hate it. Hurts TOO MUCH. I hate going on an aeroplane.” He pounded my seat. When the baby opposite started to cry, he stuck his fingers in his ears. “Shut up shutup shutup SHUT UP!”

Though he kicked my seat like a metronome for ten hours, I grew fond of this raging bundle of id, who gave the only sane response to airborne life. Why shouldn’t you weep and wail and protest, Jonathan, after being herded like a veal calf, stripped of belt and shoes, finger-printed, photographed, kept waiting, strapped to a too-small seat, and fed ugly food? I knelt up on my seat to distract him from his torment. He lived in Ireland, he said, but he lived in New Jersey too. New Jersey was where he went to school. He was sick and his head hurt. He didn’t like flying.

I had gathered as much.

When we landed at last at JFK, he broke free of his bonds and launched himself into my lap, not bothered by the fact that he would have made two of me. He grabbed a handful of my hair and began to sniff it, then pointed to his meaty shoulder.
    “He wants you to pat it,” said his mother weakly. I had little choice. He sniffed another handful of my hair and demanded another pat.
    “I like you,” he shouted cheerfully. “Are you looking for a husband?”
    “A marriage proposal. Now, isn’t that a grand start to the new year?” said the man across the aisle.

From today’s Guardian, Dan’s account of being ejected from Iran. (See previous entry.)

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