Erkek or Adam?

Bear with me for a bit. (Or don't and just scroll down to JUMP TO HERE below.) I've been learning Turkish on Duolingo for a while.  It's good for vocabulary and some grammar.  There is a listening component that is helpful.  But this is language learning like I had in Jr. high and high school.  It's aimed at teaching through vocabulary and grammar.  For Peace Corps training (and later with the Confucius Institute) we were taught by memorizing dialogues.  

This latter method was much more effective for learning to speak.  We just repeated the dialogues, over and over and over, mimicking native speakers until the sentences were imbedded in our heads. This is how children learn a language.  By mimicking what they hear.  And only later when they instinctively know the grammar, do they learn the rules that explain why they say it the way they do.  There were also substitution drills - where the instructor would say a word and we had to use it to replace a word in the sentence.  For example:

I am going to the store.  

"office"

I am going to the office.  

When I arrived in my town, I had lots of useful sentences that I would roll off my tongue without thinking.  But when I learn the Duolingo way, with grammar and vocabulary memorization, I struggle to remember the rules so I can put a sentence together correctly. 

Today as I was doing my Turkish lesson, I was wondering why they sometimes used the word üzürinde to mean 'on' and sometimes used üstünde.  Googling got me to a Quora page which had several explanations.  Basically they are used interchangeably said one responder.  Another agreed that practically, that is the case, though üstünde means more 'above'.

JUMP TO HERE

Below the explanation of two Turkish words that mean 'on' there was another explanation of two words for 'man' - erkek and adam.  These are also words I've learned and never asked why one or the other. One is longer and uses a story.  One is short and to the point.  

Emre Sermutlu

Knows TurkishAuthor has 613 answers and 1.6M answer views5y

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What is the difference between adam and erkek in the Turkish language?

Let me put it that way, only a small percentage of all “erkek”s are also “adam”s.

Here's a famous story about the concept of “adam”ness. Once there was a boy who was good for nothing. His father, after seeing his attempts for reforming the youth frustrated, said finally “You will never be adam! “

(This is the part that is difficult to translate. The father means “upright man” when he says “adam”, but the boy in his ignorance perceives it as “great man”)

Later, the boy leaves his village and after a lot of adventures, becomes the grand vizier of the Sultan. One day he remembers his father (whom he never visited) and his harsh words. He sends a group of soldiers to fetch him, without ever telling them he is his father. So they bring the old guy in terrible condition, as if he is a criminal.

In the palace, the son proclaims “You said I would never be a man. As you can see, I am the vizier now! “

Which the father responds:

“But I never said you will not be vizier. I said you will not be “adam”. Seeing how you treat your father, I can say you still haven't become an adam!”

Serkan Narin

Bachelor in Language, Marmara University (Graduated 2010)3y

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What is the difference between adam and erkek in the Turkish language?

Erkek is how you are called when you are born with a dick while adam is how you are called when you are not a dick. 

The second answer cleverly gets right to the point.  Though I'm sure having read the first explanation, helped me appreciate the second.  

And I immediately thought that this would be a great way to differentiate between Kamala Harris' newly announced vice presidential running mate and Trump's.  

Now I need someone who knows Yiddish and Turkish to tell me whether my guess that adam is akin to mensch. 

My Body Knows I've Been Shoveling Snow and Peace Corps Recruiter

So, this is what it looked like Tuesday after the clouds cleared after Anchorage's first snow of the year.  A bit late, but it's here.  I'd gotten the driveway and the deck cleared of snow.

Then it started snowing again Wednesday and by Thursday there was over a foot of new snow in the driveway.  Wet, heavy snow.  In this picture I've got some of the driveway shoveled.  

I was going to leave the rest for the next day, but I remembered I'd said I'd go to a Returned Peace Corps Dinner to meet with Alan Yuen, a South African national who works in the Peace Corps office in Pretoria.  The Peace Corps has contracted him and about 15 other foreign nationals to come to the US to recruit Peace Corps volunteers.  The idea, as I understand it, is to let people from countries that have volunteers give their perspective on how their countries benefit.  

So I kept on shoveling.  Got to talk to a couple of neighbors doing the same.  

And the sun even pinked the sky as I was shoveling.  

While I got the driveway cleared, the roads were something else again.  Lake Otis was awful.  Parts of Northern Lights were ok, but parts were a mess.  From Mike Garvey's Twitter account

Garages gonna be repairing a lot of broken axles pic.twitter.com/SS3mZsCVe2

— Mike Garvey (@mpg167) November 11, 2023

 But we made it safely, if bumpily, to the gathering.  

Here's Alan listening to a couple of the RPCVs talking about their experiences and asking how they can help Alan out.  

Then this morning I looked outside and the snow was coming down just as heavily as it did yesterday.  

But it didn't last as long, but it dressed the trees in back in a dreamy white.  

Here's what the deck looked like this morning.  But first I took care of the few more inches that had accumulated overnight on the driveway.

I did part of the deck in the afternoon.  The weather app says there will be some partial sun tomorrow, so I'll finish it then.  

My daughter and a good friend constantly remind me that shoveling snow is one of the best ways to get a heart attack.  Normally I don't pay them much attention.  But we had lots of wet, heavy snow, so I scooped the first six inches or so first and then the other 10 to 12 inches below.  And I took lots of breaks.  And I'm doing fine, though my body is pleasantly tired, no real aches or pains.  

Despite Blog Post Supply Chain Problems - Here's Hamilton and Irma Vep

Blog post are backed up waiting to get through the Panama Canal equivalent of from my brain to my fingertips.  Floating out there are posts on the Unhoused (not a local issue), Nature as a science based replacement for more supernatural gods, and some words about the Fifth Circuit.  All those posts are fairly heavy and need me to think and edit and research more and so they just float there waiting their turn. Unlike the Panama Canal delay, this one is not water related.  The worker is just distracted.  

This week, for instance, my Peace Corps training roommate from 1966 in DeKalb, Illinois and his wife visitor and we're kept  them busy understanding why we still live in Anchorage.  But it's not like we haven't seen each other since 1966.  We've been in each others lives as much as people separated by a six hour plane ride can be.  But it's been a while since they've been in Anchorage.  Their kids were just a bit older than their grandkids are now when they were last here.  

Besides taking advantage of the sunshine on various outdoor adventures their urban bodies could handle, we went to see Hamilton Tuesday night and Thursday night we saw The Mystery of Irma Vep at Cyrano's.  [I'd note this post got partly written and when I tried to upload these pictures, the Air Drop didn't work again - after being fine for several weeks.  This time rebooting the computer fixed things.]

Hamilton was the first time we've been to a big entertainment event since COVID restrictions.  We've been to a few movies, but at times when we were the only ones, or almost the only ones, in the theater.  We were all masked Tuesday as were some of the ushers and a small number of other patrons.  But we learned a family member (out of town) just had COVID and a 50th wedding event in Anchorage was cancelled because two people had COVID.  While I realize that for fully vaccinated people it's not likely to be fatal, a mask is still much less disruptive than being sick for a week.  

I'd found the soundtrack of Hamilton at the Internet Archive and listened casually for the previous week on the assumption that musicals are more enjoyable if you know the music.  And that rap is easier to understand if you hear it more than once and can read the lyrics.  

The ADN had a letter this week noting that a number of Hamilton viewers said they sat next to someone who had memorized the Hamilton sound track and sang along with each song.  One member of our group at one end sat next to such a person.  As the ADN letter writer wrote, "We didn't pay to listen to you."  Maybe they should have a sound proof section for those who want a sing-along experience.  You know, like the churches that have glassed off space for people with crying babies.

But we did have a good time and enjoyed the spectacle.  While there were four empty seats near us, the place was packed on a Tuesday night. (And I suspect the four empty seats were sold, but the people weren't able to attend.)  

The Atwood holds 2056 people.  Our seats were not the most expensive at a bit over $100 each.  So, just to make the math easier, let's assume an average of 

$100 per ticket X 2000  seats X 17 performances = $3,400,000.  

So, 34,000 people will have spent $3.4 million for a couple of hours of entertainment in Anchorage. Most of that money, I assume, will go to the actors, stage people, and the touring company, and various ticket sales agencies.  Not much of it will stay in Anchorage.  Some of the people attending will go more than once.  And some will be tourists, like our friends who were here from Chicago.  

The other theater event we went to this week was The Mystery of Irma Vep at the relatively tiny Cyrano's.   But this is very local theater with local actors and production.  And the price was less than one-third of Hamilton.  

This was a bit disorienting because Cyrano's has moved from its long time downtown location to the old Out North location which also presented performing artists almost always with an LGBTQ link.  I still think I'm at Out North, even though all the plays listed on the wall are Cyrano productions that were presented at the downtown location.  It was sort of like being at a friend's house, except they've moved and another friend has moved in with all their furniture.

The play was a little silly - a British murder mystery romp with two actors playing six, maybe seven parts, including a werewolf and a mummy. The Dramaturg's* note in the program said, among other things:

"The script of The Mystery of Irma Web - A Penny Dreadful  requires that both actors who are cast be the same sex and is a licensure requirement.  Insead of two men, Director Krista M. Schwarting believed that two women could successfully accomplish the same goal."

She also mentioned that the play involves those two actors to make 35 costume changes.  

The opening scene takes place in an English manor.  For the second scene, the stage was transformed with folding doors into an Egyptian tomb. 

While the play itself didn't hold much deep meaning for me, the two actors were excellent, deftly staying in accented character through all those costume changes.  

*I didn't really know what a dramaturg was either.  The program says she was professionally trained in Dramaturgy.  Merriam Webster online says a Dramaturg is a specialist in Dramaturgy.  And that Dramaturgy is:

"the art or technique of dramatic composition and theatrical representation"

That's not terribly helpful.  So I went to Wikipedia:

"A dramaturge or dramaturg (from Ancient Greek δραματουργός dramatourgós) is a literary adviser or editor in a theatre, opera, or film company who researches, selects, adapts, edits, and interprets scripts, libretti, texts, and printed programmes (or helps others with these tasks), consults authors, and does public relations work.[1][2][3] Its modern-day function was originated by the innovations of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, an 18th-century German playwright, philosopher, and theatre theorist.[4]"

OK, so that's one post through the canal.  

Made It To Kamphaengphet Saturday In My Summer Anchorage Biking Trek

Back in May I described my itinerary - Chiangmai to Bangkok - 745 kilometers.  I'm doing this on the bike trails of Anchorage.  The original post gives a bit of background to this  way of giving me a reason  - beyond the sheer joy of being on a bike whizzing through the woods - for this technique.  Knowing how many kilometers I have to cover gets me out on days my body would rather not.  But once my feet are pushing pedals, I'm glad I'm out riding.  There's also a map showing the distances between key points.  

Kamphaengphet is kilometer 445, so I'm over half way.  That's good, because biking season  is also half over.   ( I have an old bike with studded tires for winter, but I don't do long bike rides when there is snow and ice)

This stop is particularly special because I spent two years in Kamphaengphet teaching English as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s.  Below are some pictures from that time - a world much more closely connected to the past than it's connected to the present.  

These are from an album I put together while I was there.  Black and white photos I could get developed at the local photographer shop. The place where people could get portraits done.  But Kodak and Fuji slides had to be sent to Hong Kong or Australia to be developed.  That was minimally a two week process.  I think of my grandkids who probably don't even know about film and are used to seeing the picture the instant it's taken.  (I checked with my oldest and she did not know.)

This picture seems appropriate - me on a bike on the road in front of the school with the temple ruins and the water buffaloes in the background.  My house was on the school grounds, up on stilts, with two other 'apartments'  for teachers in the same building. The soccer field was between my house and this road.  So I had a view of the old temple chedis.  Here's a great link that explains the names of the different parts of Thai temples. My bike was my main form of transportation, though my colleagues had motorcycles too.  Peace Corps didn't let us have motorcycles but at that time the current ban on even riding on the back of a cycle didn't exist.  Peace Corps says the ban came after they figured out that most Peace Corps deaths came from motorcycle accidents.  My experience would have been significantly different had I not been able to ride on the back of motorcycles.  (Sorry for the blur, I didn't take this picture.)

This was one of my students.  Soccer was a big part of school life and since the best soccer field was directly in front of my house, a big part of my life.  It was out on this field that I set up the portable record player/radio that I'd bought when we stopped in Hong Kong on the way and played records in the moonlight when my trunk finally arrived.  I also played soccer there and started my love of jogging running around the field.  And the chedi was always there in the background.  At that time you could walk over and climb up on it and sit and contemplate the world.  Now it's part of a National Historic Park and has a fence and admission fee.

A short distance from the school in the forest were several more impressive temples.  I used to walk or bike over to be alone with these ancient structures - about 600 or 700 years old.  The Buddha on the left was part of a temple called The Temple of the Four Positions.  This was the sitting position.  There was a standing Buddha, a reclining Buddha, and a less common walking Buddha.

The elephants surrounded to top of another temple more in the hidden in the woods, up on a bluff overlooking the River Bing. [Mae Nam literally means mother water, or river and usually proceeds the name of the river.  So sometimes you see names like Mae Nam Bing River.  Which is sort of redundant.]  I'm not sure how many elephants there were all around the temple (It was called something like Temple With Elephant Around it) but there were a lot.  The English book we used had stories in every lesson - stories from British history, US history, and Thai history, so I learned about Thai heroes of various wars against Burma, Laos, and Cambodia.  This temple looked out toward the mountains over which the Burmese army would have had to come.  

There was no television reception in my town.  So 'commercials' were live.  Here's the medicine salesman gathering a crowd with his microphone and cobra.  When enough people showed up, he'd get the mongoose out of the box and have a battle between the leashed mongoose and the well drugged cobra. And then he'd sell all sorts of medicine.  

And this is why I was here.  To teach English to MS 3 students at the boys' school.  MS 3 translates to about 8th grade.  They were fantastic students and we generally had a great time.  Our teacher training back in DeKalb, Illinois had been excellent.  We had 50 minute lessons for each chapter.  Each class would start with about five minutes of pronunciation drills.  There are lots of sounds in English that don't exist in Thai.  There are only about nine final consonant sounds in Thai.  Most English consonant clusters are real challenges for Thais because they don't exist in Thai.   Steve became Sateeb. (There's no v sound in Thai, let alone a final v.  The closest Thai has is a final b.  Other v's become w.)  Then ten minutes of vocabulary - lots of creative activities to get across the meanings without using Thai.  Then we had grammar drills, ideally using the sounds from the pronunciation drills and the vocabulary from that drill.  Then we'd read from the story and ask questions about the story.  Everything in English.  Thai not allowed.  Some of the things they learned best were classroom instructions that got used every day.  Stand up.  Sit down.  Louder please.  Stop talking.  Who wants to read first?   Open your books.  Repeat after me. 

About the kid with the bare feet.  No, it wasn't that he didn't have shoes.  Thais just take their shoes off before they go inside.  So outside the classroom would be lots of shoes.  

This is the old Burmese stupa and temple across the river.  On Buddha's birthday everyone went there and in the full moon, carried candles around the stupa.  It was a connection they had to their ancestors who had done the same thing for hundreds of years.  

So it was exciting Saturday knowing that I'd made it to Kamphaengphet on my summer biking adventure.  While I rode through cool birch and spruce forests in Anchorage, I was imagining the dusty roads, the wonderful people and their smiles, the delicious food, and the temples as they were back in 1967-69.  

This is just the tiniest peeks at my three years living with Thais.  Three years that dramatically rewired my brain.  The temple pictures are here because Buddhism wasn't really a religion, it was a way of life and permeated everything.  A good Buddhist doesn't even kill a mosquito.  And there was a tolerance for everyone.  There were, of course, economic differences among people, but even the king prostrated himself before the great Buddha statues.  I'm using the past tense here because I'm writing about that Thailand back then.  I've been able to spend time in Thailand since then and while the basics are still the same, the gap between the US and Thailand technologically has gotten very small.  Back in the 60s, Thailand was a different world, a different time, from the US.  No longer.  

Today I did another 16.5 km so I'm on my way to Nakorn Sawan.  This is the longer between stops and I remember the dusty red dirt road in the last three hours of my trips back from Bangkok.  Lots of rice and mountains that looked like growths on the mostly flat landscape.  I'd note that all these roads have long since been paved.  

Short Takes - RPCV Joins Alaska SC, Maxwell Arrest, Racism Like Apple Pie, Russian Bounty

Note: Another big COVID increase today.  Click COVID tab above for daily updates on state case counts

1.   Alaska's newly appointed Supreme Court justice Dario Borghesan is an RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) who served in Togo.



2.   Just hearing her name on the news for being involved with Jeffrey Epstein doesn't give you a sense of Ghislaine* Maxwell's role in the Jeffrey Epstein world.   The Netflix series Jeffrey Epstein:  Filthy Rich brings their crimes clearly into the light.  And how well connected rich people can get away with things on a scale 'normal' folks would never even imagine.  Well worth watching.


3.

“Racism is so American that when you protest it, people think you’re protesting America.”

— romy🦋 (@romyreiner) July 2, 2020

This says it all.  But for many people it makes no sense at all.  Which proves the point.**



4.  Did Russia pay the Taliban bounties to kill US troops?  Of course.  Just like we armed and paid the Mujahideen to do the same in Afghanistan when the Soviet Union took over there.  But since Afghanistan bordered the Soviet Union** and the US is half a world away - it's much easier for Russia to do.  But even with the geographic advantage, the Soviet Union was forced out of Afghanistan.


*Throughout the Netflix series the pronunciation of her name was in serious conflict with my natural visual bent.  I'd have done better had I never seen it written.  But this is irrelevant.  She's a seriously evil person and her arrest may bring some comfort to her many victims.

**I realize this is a bit enigmatic for those who don't think of racism as being like apple pie.  If this leaves you scratching your head, just leave a (civil) comment and we can talk about it.

***Tajikistan and Turkmenistan were then part of the Soviet Union.  Today they are independent countries and are between Russia and Afghanistan.

Peace Corps Volunteers Fired, Brought Back Home Without Insurance [Updated]

As an RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) I feel compelled to note here that some 7300 active Peace Corps volunteers were brought back home to the US because of the Corona Virus. So far, so good.  But they were also fired and cut off from their health insurance.  Some were at the end of their two year assignments, others at various stages.

Peace Corps Volunteers don't get paid much anyway so keeping on salary for a few months wouldn't have been a big deal.

Glassdoor says the average monthly pay is $314 for Peace Corps Volunteers.  Their total pay is higher because an amount is set aside as a cash payment when they return to the United States.  There also may be other variables such as pay for housing, but that depends on each country's situation.

These are folks who have been representing the United States as teachers, sanitation engineers, forestry experts, and a wide variety of similar jobs.  They range in age from early 20s to 60s and 70s. Bringing them back and just cutting them off like that in the middle of a pandemic just seems mean spirited.

Here's more from Talking Points Memo - with a detailed report of evacuation from Peru.

[I got this update today that there's money in the emergency stimulus bill for Peace Corps evacuees.

"Late Wednesday (March 25), the U.S. Senate passed an emergency stimulus bill that includes $88 million for Peace Corps. The legislation now heads to the House of Representative for a vote expected Friday (March 27). That’s just the first step in a long-term effort to keep Peace Corps funding strong and support evacuees. That is why we are issuing a challenge to our community to send 100,000 messages to Congress. Learn more
Peace Corps volunteers come into country after learning the local language and training to improve their skills to do serious work in country.  The 'victories' of volunteers are the people they help to improve their lives or the health of their communities or the economic strength of a community.  The statistics are in the hearts of the people whose lives they touched, only occasionally being articulated."]

At the 45th Anniversary celebration of Peace Corp Thailand the Foreign Minister of Thailand told the group that his life as a poor Northeaster village kid was transformed by a Peace Corps volunteer who taught him English in school and got him into the AFS program which had him live with a US family for a year. I had a former student come to me - someone whose life I thought I'd messed up by getting him into a Bangkok school where I figured later, he'd just be a misfit - to say it had transformed his life and enabled him to live a much richer life than he ever could have had I not been there.  The director of Peace Corps in Thailand at that time (45th Anniversary) and the  US Ambassador to Thailand (both former Thai Peace Corps volunteers) each told stories of returning to their villages and finding out that they were still remembered fondly because of projects that had greatly improved the villages.

And this doesn't count all the RPCV's who return to the US speaking languages from all over the world, with a close understanding of the countries where they volunteered.  They bring this knowledge back and it transform how they do their jobs when they get back home and how they inform public debates on local as well as international issues.

Just had to make sure this was noted.

Gramping, Comparing Earthquakes, And Lunching With An Old Friend

Yesterday I took my grandson to the California Academy of Science.

I wanted to do a redo of their earthquake reenactment room.  I'd been there with him before.  I didn't

Earthquake Simulation Room Cal Academy

remember it being very scary at all.  Certainly not like November 30 quake in Anchorage a couple of months ago which shook us back and forth for 30 minutes.

So I wanted to go back and compare it to our recent quake.  Well, it did shake about as much as the quake we were in.  But it doesn't give you a sense of a real earthquake.  It's a small room like in a house, but there are hand rails to hold onto all around.  You know what's going to happen.  There are other people in the room with you.  It shook back and forth mimicking the 1989 quake, and then the 1906 quake.

But this was more like the entertainment of an amusement park ride.  You go there to experience it.  It is different when it arrives announced in your own house or office or elsewhere in your environment and starts up and you have no idea how much bigger it's going to get or how long it's going to last and whether your house is going to hold together.

So, yes, physically, you get a sense of an earthquake in this room.  But psychically, not at all.    We went on to watch the Foucault Pendulum knock over a couple of pegs and then to the rain forest.






There's the several story netted rainforest with lots of tropical butterflies and there are smaller exhibits along the path that winds up to the top.   Like the one that held this bright green lizard.






Then at the top, you take an elevator down and you end up below the water at the bottom of the rainforest.




It was great to be on an adventure with my grandson, just the two of us.  And there were plenty of other grandparent/grand child visitors there too.

Today, after dropping him off at his pre-school we stopped at a great little  hardware store in Japan Town, but they didn't have the Chinese picture hanger I was looking for.  But they have so many interesting things.

A bit later we went for lunch with PK who was in my Peace Corps group.  In fact he was the closest volunteer to my town.  Except that there were no roads between his town and mine.  You had to wander by motorcycle through the rice paddies to connect.


We passed this bear gargoyle on the way to meeting him and his partner.







P was in the hotel business in San Francisco for many years so he took us to a couple places we never would have found.  First, to eat at Belden Place.

From Wikipedia

"Belden Place itself is a one-lane, one block long street running south from Pine Street to Bush Street, parallel to and in between Montgomery and Kearny streets, immediately south of the Bank of America tower. It is roughly between Chinatown and the Financial District.
In 1990, restaurateurs Olivier Azancot and Eric Klein opened Cafe Bastille, the mainstay that set the modern tone for the area. The French, Italian, and Catalan establishments are popular with locals, tourists, and office workers, and are generally considered on par with the city's best casual full-service European restaurants.[3] Notable restaurants in the alley itself include Sam's Grill, Cafe Bastille, Cafe Tiramisu, Plouf, B44, Belden Taverna, and Brindisi Cucina di Mare. Nearby are Café de la Presse (though modest and unassuming, a favorite hangout of the city's political and social elite) and Le Central. Also nearby are the Alliance Française, the French consulate, and the Notre-Dame-des-Victoires Church (where mass is still celebrated in French) and an affiliated elementary school. In the vicinity are several other restaurants, cafes, hotels and other French-related institutions along Bush Street and Claude Lane, another nearby alley.[2]"

 In summer the canopies are gone, but it was a nice day and we sat under the canopy and had a delicious Italian lunch at Tiramisu.  (After the yellow tarps.)








Then to see the courtyard at the Palace Hotel.

From the Garden Court Restaurant website: 

"When the Palace Hotel opened its doors in 1875, the Garden Court was the carriage entrance to this grand hotel. A parade of famous guests visited San Francisco's Palace and stood in awe of its magnificence.
In 1906, following the earthquake, the Palace closed its doors for the first restoration. Three years later, the carriage entrance was transformed and The Garden Court was unveiled. Since its debut in 1909, The Garden Court has been recognized as one of the world's most beautiful public spaces
With its incredible architecture, dome stained glass ceiling and Austrian crystal chandeliers, The Garden Court became the site for some of the nation's most prestigious events. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson hosted two luncheons in support of the Versailles Treaty which ended World War I. In 1945, the official banquet honoring the opening session of the United Nations was held in The Garden Court."

P and I first met at Peace Corps training in DeKalb, Illinois in 1966.  We don't see each other often, but it's great when we do.  

The Road to Sleeping Dragon

I mentioned Michael Meyer's book The Road To Sleeping Dragon in the last post.

Meyer went to  a rural Sichuan province as a Peace Corps English teacher in the 1995.  I'd gone to rural Thailand as a Peace Corps English teacher in 1967.   I'd first gone to Beijing from a year teaching in Hong Kong, twice in spring 1990, with a followup month of research in 1991, and a again a couple of years later when I taught a class on Chinese Civil Service Reform, which included taking the class for ten days to Hong Kong and Beijing.  In 2004 I taught three months in Beijing, which gave me some opportunities to visit Xian and Shandong provinces as well.

So there are lots of reasons for me to enjoy this book, which modestly (and reasonably) states early on that it's not even a

 "book of reportage but rather of mostly chronological impressions, of lessons learned over time.  Although my understanding of China has deepened over twenty years, I can't pretend to be a "foreign expert," as my work permit alleged."

My first choice as a Peace Corps volunteer was China - but there were no Peace Corps volunteers there until much, much later.  Americans were not even allowed to travel there back then.  Thailand was a much easier place to serve.   Meyer falls in love with a Chinese woman which helped his Chinese greatly, I'm sure, and gave him continuing ties to China.

I've enjoyed comparing his insights to my own impressions.  (We both despaired at the decisions to tear down whole neighborhoods completely and replace them with high rise apartments.  Particularly the hutongs.)  He filled in details about other things.  (That the son of Hitler's architect Albert Speer Jr. played a role in the designing of the new Beijing.  The author's role in lobbying for the World Wildlife Foundation for a more natural Panda preservation area. And I enjoyed the short description of his meeting with artist Ai Wei Wei.)

Much of the book feels like it was taken from articles he's written over the years about China.  While following a basic chronological path through his life in China, it does jump around a bit.  But it does hang together.

And I'm also reminded of the wonders of traveling to places unknown, facing daily situations where you have to try new things, take chances.  You have no choice.  And as you do, you discover inner strengths you didn't know you had.  And you expand your known world.

From Early Airport Run To World Cup To China

Our guests of two weeks had a 6am flight, so we left the house a little after 4am.  D's family is family and it was great to have the three here.  Despite having a full house including a four year old and five year old, we got along smoothly, eating well, talking serious and fun, and enjoying the kids and keeping them occupied.  I've got my daughter and granddaughter for a while longer still.

From the airport to home, unsuccessful attempt to get a couple hours more sleep before heading with my daughter to the Bear Tooth to watch Croatia play well in their final loss to France.  When I watched Croatia beat Russia, it was easy to root for the small country over Putin's team.  We say sports transcends politics, but not really.  In international events people get very nationalistic - US media seem more interested, say, in the medal count than in the events.

Then Croatia beat England.   They were now my team.  For a while.  The political backdrop then interfered as I realized Croatia was an all-white team and France had a mix of colors.  Should this matter?  If everyone were equal, and race and immigration weren't tearing countries apart (and I don't doubt Putin, once again, has had his hand in this in Europe as well as in the divisive social media campaign in the US), it wouldn't be a factor.  But if Croatia won, I knew that the white supremacists would be touting how racial purity (and I have no idea exactly what that is supposed to mean and which tests of such purity the Croatian player would pass or fail) had won.  And if France won, those championing the humanity of the those fleeing political and economic oppression would use their victory as proof that immigration made a country stronger.

My compromise was to root for the individual players of Croatia and the French team.

The Bear Tooth was packed this time and when Croatia scored it was clear they were the crowd favorites.  They played hard and seemed to possess the ball much more than France.  They just couldn't maneuver the ball into the net.  France's first goal was a free kick with a boost from a Croatian head that seemed to put it just out of the reach of the goalie.  Croatia came back with a penalty kick goal.   Then the French got another gift - the ball hit a Croatian hand in front of the French goal.  In the second half the French got two more solid shots into the goal.  Croatia managed another goal by charging the goal keeper in what should have been a routine ball retrieval on the goalie's part.  Sports Illustrated has the highlights.  All in all, I left the game satisfied.  Croatia played well and France won.

And when I checked Twitter when I got home, the first Tweet I saw was already claiming the victory by the multi-colored French team repudiated Trump's nasty London comment about immigration ruining European culture.


Home for some brief interaction with my granddaughter who then went with her mom to visit mom's old Anchorage friends.  I napped and then enjoyed the luxury of  just lying in bed reading.  I'd picked up The Road To Sleeping Dragon by Michael Meyer at the library when we took Little J there.  I'll do more on the book in another post.

Tom Wolfe (1930 - 2018)

See Note About the Cover Below*

At the end of my stint as a Peace Corps volunteer, I read Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.  I'm not exactly sure anymore what my feelings were about the novel itself, but I was obsessed by the question:  "Who wrote this?  Who is he?  How and why did he write this?"

From Thailand I flew to Hilo, Hawaii to work at the training program for the next group of Peace Corps teachers - Thai 30.

Early on, I encountered a new trainee with a book called Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.  The title caught my attention.  When I checked it out - I don't remember now if it was on the back cover or just reading the first couple of pages - I realized the book was about Ken Kesey.  This book was going to answer the burning questions that Cuckoo's Nest had ignited in me.

Reading Wolfe is like talking to someone who never pauses - there's no place to interrupt, to say you have to leave; there's just a steady stream of uninterruptible words.   You end up just reading until the end.  Or at least I did.  I probably violated my position as a trainer when I asked the trainee if I could borrow the book.  I don't think I even asked, I think I told him I HAD to read this book.

Here's from pages two and three of the book (online here):

ABOUT ALL I KNEW ABOUT KESEY AT THAT POINT WAS THAT HE was a highly regarded 31-year-old novelist and in a lot of trouble over drugs. He wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), which was made into a play in 1963, and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964). He was always included with Philip Roth and Joseph Heller and Bruce Jay Friedman and a couple of others as one of the young novelists who might go all the way. Then he was arrested twice for possession of marijuana, in April of 1965 and January of 1966, and fled to Mexico rather than risk a stiff sentence. It looked like as much as five years, as a second offender. One day I happened to get hold of some letters Kesey wrote from Mexico to his friend Larry McMurtry, who wrote Horseman, Pass By, from which the movie Hud was made. They were wild and ironic, written like a cross between William Burroughs and George Ade, telling of hideouts, disguises, paranoia, fleeing from cops, smoking joints and seeking satori in the Rat lands of Mexico. There was one passage written George Ade—fashion in the third person as a parody of what the straight world back there in the U.S.A. must think of him now:
"In short, this young, handsome, successful, happily-married-three-lovely-children father was a fear-crazed dope fiend in flight to avoid prosecution on three felonies and god knows how many misdemeanors and seeking at the same time to sculpt a new satori from an old surf—in even shorter, mad as a hatter.
"Once an athlete so valued he had been given the job of calling signals from the line and risen into contention for the nationwide amateur wrestling crown, now he didn't know if he could do a dozen pushups. Once possessor of a phenomenal bank account and money waving from every hand, now it was all his poor wife could do to scrape together eight dollars to send as getaway money to Mexico. But a few years previous he had been listed in Who's Who and asked to speak at such auspicious gatherings as the Wellesley Club in Dah-la and now they wouldn't even allow him to speak at a VDC [Vietnam Day Committee] gathering. What was it that had brought a man so high of promise to so low a state in so short a time? Well, the answer can be found in just one short word, my friends, in just one all-well-used syllable:
"Dope!
"And while it may be claimed by some of the addled advocates of these chemicals that our hero is known to have indulged in drugs before his literary success, we must point out that there was evidence of his literary prowess well before the advent of the so-called psychedelic into his life but no evidence at all of any of the lunatic thinking that we find thereafter ! "

I think I gave the trainee his book back the next morning, so my abuse of power was short-lived.  (Whoever I borrowed it from, thank you for having it and letting me read it.)

From Acid Test I went on to Radical-Chic and Mau-Mawing the Flak Catcher.  I suspect that The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby was next and then The Right Stuff,  then Bonfire of the Vanities and I think the last one I read was A Man In Full.  

So, Tom Wolfe, thank you for giving me great reading pleasure over the years and for shaking up the worlds of journalism and novel writing.  Here's a recollection by Paul Elie from The New Yorker of editing A Man In Full.

*The image is from Bookazon.  It's a much later edition than the one I read because it mentions The Right Stuff which didn't come out until 1978.  I know I ran across my own copy recently, but with all the mess here (the workers finished up today, but there's still plenty of stuff piled up in the downstairs bedroom.  I'm hoping much of it leaves the house rather than coming back upstairs), I couldn't find it.  Besides, it might well be on a book shelf in my mom's house in LA.  Or maybe it was really The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby that I saw.

Trump Nominates Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Jody Olsen To Be New Peace Corps Director

Here's from an email I got from The National Peace Corps Association:

"President Trump has nominated Josephine "Jody" Olsen to become the next Peace Corps Director. 

If confirmed by the Senate, Olsen would become the 20th person to lead the agency.Olsen served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tunisia from 1966 - 1968 and was Togo Country Director from 1979 - 1981. She was nominated by President George W. Bush to serve as Deputy Director of the agency and later served as Acting Director. 

“We applaud President Trump for nominating Dr. Jody Olsen to lead the Peace Corps,” said National Peace Corps Association President and CEO Glenn Blumhorst. “As a returned volunteer, country director, acting director for the agency—and highly engaged member in the Peace Corps community—Jody knows the Peace Corps experience and the people who have served as well as anyone. Jody's commitment to education and social work and her decades of leadership are a perfect match for a 21st-century Peace Corps poised to grow and improve. We encourage Chairman Corker and his Senate colleagues to move swiftly to confirm Jody as next director. America and the world need the Peace Corps now more than ever. We're excited Jody has the opportunity to lead it."
Click here to read the White House announcement on this nomination. 

A co-founder of the NPCA affiliate Women of Peace Corps Legacy, Olsen was a featured contributor in the Winter 2017 issue of WorldView magazine, writing about the rise of women in leadership roles in the agency and in international development. 

"Today 62 percent of Peace Corps’ 7,300 volunteers are women," Olsen wrote. "Over the years, each group of female volunteers has motivated the next group, and each generation to the next. This extraordinary group of approximately 125,000 females spanning 56 years of service are giving back to families, communities, states, and nations in ways not possible without the Peace Corps experience, one contribution at a time.  

"Today, women’s roles are stronger than ever, particularly here in the United States. Is there a need for further attention of Peace Corps women on behalf of women and girls? Yes. The issues faced by women and girls still need our support…Some of the issues might look overwhelming, but the Peace Corps experience has taught us to work with whatever situation we find, a person, a family, or community." 

Click here to see the list of all previous Peace Corps Directors."