Monthly Archives: February 2011
As I Prepare To Close Shop I: My East Lansing Existence in Rough Draft
These days, I am like the old shopkeeper back home who fascinated me when I was a kid. As my stay in the US approaches detonation period, I find myself tidying things, sort of doing the accounts for the day, and preparing to close shop.
I already had a mental list of which things shall go to a give-and-take program, which shall be shipped home, which shall go to the recycling bin.
I have only moved two times in the course of my stay in the US. Earlier, I scoffed at the idea of moving because packing and unpacking isn’t fun. But after my first move, I realized that the hardest part is not the whole gamut of packing and unpacking but the process of fitting all the invisible remnants of years of existence and be off that easy.
My stay in the US is not something for the record. Before I came here I had a short list of places I wanted to see which included a trip to Grand Canyon and a visit to a Navajo settlement. Yet, I have not done any one of these. Whenever a trip to beautiful Mackinac Island gets in the way of my exams or papers, I chose the latter without regret.
I’ve only seen a few places–LA from my plane, Appalachian Ohio in a conference, Chicago in a one-day-tour, New York last summer. So far, my greatest adventure was going interstate driving with a friend from Alabama to Louisiana, then Mississippi and getting lost in the backwoods of the south…at night! And just for laughs, we trusted the GPS to bring us to our hotel only to be directed to the middle of some prairie where a burned-down, desolate hotel stood. That’s not probably a lot. I have no tangible mementos of my trips either because if there’s one type of courage I lack in life, it’s having my pictures taken in public.
I have not also met that much people. I have my circle of Filipino students and academics; research teammates; professors; and except for a Taiwanese, Egyptian, Pakistani and Korean friend, I did not venture far beyond. Most of my classmates are acquaintances. I pretty much kept my distance; they pretty much kept their distance.
Perhaps I am a new phenomenon to them as, by certain counts, they are to me. What I learned from my stay in a foreign country is no matter how you came prepared, there are bound to be a number of differences in people’s ways and that difference is what makes the experience new and interesting.
I would miss East Lansing when I leave and the beauty that comes with the seasonal changes. East Lansing in the fall is spectacular. It turns into a big refrigerator in winter. It becomes a blooming garden in spring. Then, it transforms into a bright, hot and bustling town in summer. I am trying to make the most of it these days for there is nothing like it back home. There’s no winter, no fall.
And yes, despite the fact that the American food serving size still amuses me notwithstanding the quantity of food that goes to waste; despite the fact that college girls milling around the campus with supersize soda glasses in their hands make me even more determined not to drink one; despite the fact that college girls who display such a deep love for the word “like” talk about their boyfriends or complain about something in buses makes me want to seal my mouth even more; despite the fact that I am still stunned to see really, really big people everywhere; and despite the fact that I occasionally hear a group of individuals make unpleasant remarks about other people and make me want to knock some sense of cultural sensitivity into their heads, I believe that it is unfair to judge a culture, a group of people, based on just a few quirks that you’ve seen in people who happened to intersect your path (by whose standards of judgment besides?). We can never fully understand the ways and experiences that shaped the realities of every group. And whether as a foreigner or local, we’re better off remembering that.
Thumbs Up for Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo
Steven Galloway is a Canadian novelist who was nominated to the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award for his debut novel Finnie Walsh. He followed this with Ascension, the story of a 66 year old Romanian immigrant, the events in his life that led to a famous reputation as a tight rope walker in an American circus, and that incomparable sense of freedom and self-awareness that he felt when he is up there doing a task not all of us have the audacity to even say “I want to try.” And then, within the interstices of his world are pictures of the rich and intriguing Romany culture and the struggles of its resourceful and resilient people—a novel which was translated in 12 languages and earned him a nomination for the BC Book Prizes’ Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
Galloway is back and this time with a powerful third novel entitled, “The Cellist of Sarajevo”—a gripping work of fiction which has in its heart the war that torn the beautiful city of Sarajevo in the 1990’s, and the lives of ordinary people whose everyday struggle not to waiver in the face of war was their ultimate battle.
Inspired by the story of Vedran Smailovic, a cellist from Bosnia Herzegovina who was known for playing Albinoni’s hauntingly sad Adagio with his cello during the Serbian forces’ siege of Sarajevo, Galloway took a lump of clay and fashioned a narrative where his cellist would stand as a peripheral character in the middle of the war-torn city and yet, would become a reminder of both its former glory and what it would become when the wounds of war and suffering are healed. Every 4:00pm for 22 days Galloway’s cellist sat on a stool in the middle of the crater where a mortar created an impact and with eyes closed, seemingly oblivious to the carnage around him, he would play the Adagio, each day for each of the 22 individuals who were killed as they lined up for bread that afternoon when the mortar hit the spot.
As the narrative unfolds, three individuals, Kenan, Dragan and Arrow, would emerge from the rubbles of war whose 3-dimensionally woven lives will make us grieve, and in grieving will make some of us indignant towards war and all that it stands for. Kenan, Dragan and Arrow’s lives would never intersect, but like some of the cobbled streets of Sarajevo would traverse across the city, at times stubborn and straight, at times curved and yielding in order to weather obstacles. But, ultimately, they would lead to that point in the city where what the cellist stands for—reason, respect for human dignity and hope–remained pure and untouched by the ravages of war.
In Kenan, Dragan, Arrow and the cellist, Galloway showed us a new meaning of resistance.
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Post Script:
I am including an interpretation of Albinoni’s Adagio here.
Marriage Survival Kit – A Repost from the Philippine INQUIRER
(An advance take on Valentine’s Day.)
What makes a lasting marriage? I do not know. I’ve only been privy to one relationship in my entire life—that of the two individuals from whom I owe my DNA. What I heard from other people is that there are no hard and fast rules in marriage. What works for one couple may not work for the other. There is no debate here over what is more effective, which is more superior, there’s not even a “Chinese” vs. “Western” style (a la Amy Chua, if you know what I am talking about). The effectiveness of a particular “approach” to keeping the union of two people would depend on the personalities (and maybe the circumstances) of those involved.
Gilda Cordero-Fernando, a contributor for the Philippine Inquirer ruminated on the question too and found that “it’s still a kiss-to-kiss basis.” She stitched together different views about keeping marriages work from different people (ranging from docility and being traditional to being revolutionary and unconventional). In the end, you are in-charge of your own paintbrush and with it you paint your own picture. You just have to “muddle your way through, swim and scramble, climb and roll tumble, twist and turn, and slash and burn! You’ll get there.”
Below is the link to the Full Article:
Marriage survival kit – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.
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Photo from: https://www.jenniferedlin.com/about.html
