Border Child and Pride

Note: I usually write these posts a week in advance, but I think it would be strange to put up a post given recent news without addressing the deaths and injuries that resulted from the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. I wrote a post about this kind of thing a while ago that pretty much covers my thoughts on the subject, but I'm sure I'll write more about this in the future, since I ran out of ideas literally years ago.


I have two caveats before I begin this post. The first is that I was vaguely bothered while reading Border Child that the author isn't Mexican. Also I was bothered that I was bothered by this. The book is superbly written. The prose is spare and no words are wasted. But I couldn't shake the feeling that people should be very careful when writing stories about people whose voices are regularly silenced. I'll refer to a Q and A session with Saint Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, where she answered the following question:

Q: How would you suggest one should write of a culture which is alien without cliche or stereotype? I am male, 50 and white and would like to write about a young Bengali girl. The responsibility feels huge; do you think the task is insurmountable? 

A: I think the first question is: WHY do you want to write about a young Bengali girl? There are still wonderful stories to be told about 50-year-old white men. If it is feeling insurmountable, perhaps that's a sign.

I can't imagine that's the response he wanted. I think he probably wanted to be praised for using his elevated status as a white man to tell the story the right way. I know a guy like that. Then someone else speaks up:

Q: The advice given to the white male writer who wants to write about a Bengali girl is very short-sighted, in my opinion. It will only ensure that we have more books about middle aged white men and no books about disadvantaged Bengali girls. Is that what we want? 

A: It's unfortunate that you seem to assume that if a white middle-aged man doesn't write about a Bengali girl, then the story of Bengali girls will not be written. There are in fact many Bengalis who can write about Bengali girls - and it probably doesn't feel 'insurmountable' to them. And 'disadvantaged Bengali girl' is a very troubling way of framing an idea of a story. It already suggests that this character will be seen through the lenses of her 'disadvantage' alone. People are people. 'Disadvantaged people also have agency, and dream, and think, and desire. Sometimes how one frames a story determines whether or not we will see the fullness of a character.

I think about this exchange a lot. There's a lot to digest there. The idea that the only people who can tell stories are older white men is absurd, but an alternative didn't even occur to either the person who originally asked, or the other one who chides Adichie (which I feel like is something one does at one's own risk). I don't know a lot about publishing, but my assumption is that publishers deal with opportunity cost as much as every other business does. Every book published by a publisher means another book can't be published. For every book a white man publishes, a Bengali author with maybe a less recognizable name or fewer literary connections may not get the nod.

So that's not an insignificant thing. I think that makes intuitive sense to most of us. The other concept is more interesting, though. I have to chew on that one a little. When someone of privilege writes the story of someone they consider to be "disadvantaged," they're running the risk of writing poverty porn. Writers all want to elicit a response from readers, and making us feel sad and maybe a little guilty about how comfortable our lives are is a pretty easy one. The shame of it is that we forget about the beauty.

Later in this post I'm going to show you a video of Guatemalans who live in a garbage dump. That video is intended to raise money to bring food to those people. It seems like a pretty decent reason, and seeing the kids getting their care packages is genuinely heart-warming. But it's probably pretty important to point out that there is more to these people than where they live. If we're watching videos like that because it makes us feel something, it's worth analyzing that feeling. Because I read a lot about horrors, poverty, and oppression, I have to explore what drives that and if it's healthy.

"These people need their story told," I think, after watching a video about horrible living conditions. And I'm right, in this hypothetical situation. "And I'm the guy who should tell it," I say, blowing it. In fact, I'm not. I could go embed myself in one of their families, live among them for years, and still never know what they are going through. I'm there as a tourist, as some kind of anthropologist. Their lives are a curiosity to me. I can leave any time and everything I look at is going to be through the lens of someone who has something better to go home to, and some potentially lucrative end to my self-inflicted suffering. How much better would it be to hear the story from the viewpoint of a person who has lived there, whose grandma lived there, who was raised to believe that there is no other option?

I argue that it would be much better.

So that's the first thing. I can't say I ever got over it. But I still loved Border Child. The other caveat is that I lived in Mexico for two years as an LDS missionary. This gave me a unique experience that simply living in Mexico couldn't provide, but still it was just a tiny experience. I didn't live in tourist areas surrounded by white spring-breakers or ex-pats. I lived in tiny houses and apartments in Mexican neighborhoods. And I spent much of that time in Mexican people's homes. I saw what I would consider extreme poverty. I saw people who lived in dumps. I lived there long enough that I got used to it. I got to know some folks very well, and reading Border Child felt very real to me in that sense. There are moments where the author's camera lingers a little too long on the "disadvantaged" part, but the characters ring super true in their context and I felt value there.

So now you know where I'm coming from. I have slightly more knowledge about the subject than the average white person who grew up in a Utah suburb, but a tiny fraction of knowledge of someone who grew up in Oaxaca. Michel Stone ostensibly knows more than I do (maybe?), but still hasn't lived it. We'll take that with a grain of salt moving forward.

OK, now that I've written a whole post worth of preamble, let's get to the patented observations mixed with mildly annoying humor I'm known for.

First, watch this video:

Adam Ruins Everything is a TV show that is meant to be entertainment and often oversimplifies things, but the discussion about alpha wolves is pretty much right on. If you need further reading, read David Mech's peer-reviewed article here. Like it says in the video, Mech's book, The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, has been for decades the main source of the myth of the alpha wolf. When the author himself rejects his previous writing, that should probably close the book (in this case literally) on the thing.

That's what science is: using the best available hypothesis until something that better explains the facts comes along. "But what if that science doesn't fit the worldview I already have?" you ask. Well, first of all I'm flattered that you are reading this, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, but I'm afraid that the answer is that your world view is probably wrong. Sorry about that. Also to the Provo guy (Brovo) who keeps calling guys who actually have girlfriends in spite of somehow also respecting women "betas," maybe hold off on the nomenclature until you've observed the same wolf pack for 13 years before typing up your Instagram diatribe.

The reason I bring this up is because while reading Border Child, I kept thinking about Breaking Bad. We all know Breaking Bad, right? It's where a total beta male regular guy with a steady job with benefits and a pretty amazing wife learns to be a real alpha by alienating his entire family and almost certainly directly causing the deaths of hundreds of drug addicts along with a handful of colorful underworld characters along the way. We're shown what a tough guy he becomes when he beats up teenagers in a mall.

The motivation here is that Walter (his name is Walter) gets diagnosed with lung cancer and I guess his teacher insurance doesn't give him good enough benefits to cover the very best doctors. Never mind that some quick research shows that White would have had access to BlueCross Blueshield, which has one of the highest ratings in the country, but OK, got it. We've got to get the chemistry teacher dealing the blue stuff. Further research tells me that Walter really wanted to make sure his family was taken care of if he were no longer unable to support them, which honestly dovetails better into my point anyway.

So forget the insurance part (except that apparently New Mexico teachers also have access to very cheap life insurance, forget all of it!), we all know what Walter's real Achilles heel is: pride. That's what makes this story your very typical Greek-style tragedy. The hero has a fatal flaw. Even in spite of multiple opportunities to have someone else help him financially, he stubbornly insists on doing it his own way. Then, when he has plenty of money, he keeps on going. At the end, we realize the truth: providing for his family was just what he told himself. He tells his wife, "I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really... I was alive."

I think most of us agree that Walter is the villain of the story. If the tale were told from Skyler's point of view, or even Jessie's, he would be an unmitigated trashcan fire, albeit one with a complicated and interesting back story. But because we see everything from his eyes, he's a tragic hero who we root for, even though for most of us there was a line somewhere where it was no longer possible. Even at the end, some folks stayed on Team Walt long enough and passionately enough that they sent death threats to the actress who played his wife, who, I feel I need to reiterate, is not really Skyler White.

Why? Oh, because he's a badass. Whee. Warning: very bad language ahead.

Here's another cinematic "hero" who is actually made of used kitty litter. This "are you man enough," "brass balls," "You see this watch," waffle makes me want to barf. And yet this hyper-masculinity "nonsense," as Ed Harris correctly calls it, is consistently touted as inspirational. This guy is acting like hard-selling properties to people and then manipulating them into not being able to get out of the sale when they are allowed to sit and think about it is real work. This is the kind of video Provo guys would quote when trying to whip up excitement about selling security systems to old people who don't know better at Vivint like it's some kind of noble pursuit if they weren't so afraid of swear words.

When I started Border Child, I thought I was getting into something similar. The story follows Hector and Lilia, a young couple in Oaxaca, Mexico. Their village is poor, with few opportunities, so Hector leaves his wife and baby at home to make the journey to the United States. He ends up in South Carolina where he gets a good job, and promises to bring Lilia and their baby girl, Alejandra, to meet him. Lilia's grandmother--who raised her-- dies, and Lilia, grieving and lonely, hires her own coyote to take her across the "linea." In the process, 2-year-old Alejandra is handed to a woman who promises to take her across and meet at an agreed upon location. Lilia arrives and Alejandra does not.

Years later, after being deported for stopping at a car accident to make sure their friend was OK and then being questioned by police, Hector and Lilia are trying to rebuild their lives. They have an adorable little boy and a little girl on the way, but they never stop searching for Alejandra. On the back of the book, it says "they receive an unexpected tip that might lead them to Alejandra, and both agree they must seize this chance, whatever the cost."

There's a point where it looks like we're going down the inevitable fictional path where Hector starts out doing small jobs, then illegal jobs, and we worry that when given bigger opportunities, he'll forget why he started in the first place, Walter White style. It's the kind of thing that might have made for an interesting, but infuriating book. You'd get that old "don't go into the basement," feeling from watching a scary movie, which is fun and thrilling but ultimately forgettable. You can't respect the character that runs down the stairs, knowing that there isn't an exit, instead of out of the door.

Hector is humble, though. Humble to the dirt. Humble in a way I remember a lot of Mexican men being. In his sphere he is quietly competent. If he hadn't been deported, he'd be foreman at his job in the US. If he hadn't left Mexico, he'd also be foreman and sit in the air-conditioned truck while the rest labored. He's kind and diligent and knows his value. He's forgiven his wife and loves her. Basically Hector rules. But he's also a little broken.

He prayed God would give him the ability to protect her from all the evil in this world. As a younger man, Hector's thoughts had only skirted the edge of contemplating evil. His youthful naivete and hunger to experience the world had kept such considerations at bay. Now he often considered the horrors happening every day everywhere, tragedies unfathomable to him as a younger man. He looked across the aisle where the girl and her brother seemed to slumber, somehow, in peace. He prayed for their safe crossing, and that their uncle was better equipped to protect them than Lilia had been at protecting Alejandra.

Various other characters come in and out of Hector and Lilia's life: there's the village midwife who calmly dispenses wisdom, and the priest, who learns of an orphanage where Alejandra may have stayed. It's in the city of Matamoros, where he learns there are hundreds of men, women, and children who live in the local landfill. Here's a real-life report:

The air along the canal and inside the dump is gritty with black soot, smoke and particles. The soil is dark grey and dusty. Clouds of flies, gulls, crows and grackles swarm around old and new piles of rotting garbage, sickening sour smells emanate from all sides.  When a fire burns, the eyes sting and it becomes more difficult to breathe. In this environment, some 150 men, women and children work daily to collect recyclable materials that they then sell – most frequently to a middleman elsewhere in the city.
 Many of the female workers wear makeup and jewelry, even though by the end of a shift, hands will be black and clothes completely stained. Some of the workers wear gloves; others sort trash with their bare hands. Frequently, evangelical missionaries visit the dump, bringing food and pamphlets to the workers. Ambulatory taco vendors visit the dump to sell food and soft drinks. There is no place to wash hands and no constructed lavatory or outhouse. Workers create staging areas where they gather to eat and bring the recyclables or food they’ve collected and where they park vehicles, if they have any, and rest in the meager shade. They sift through mountains of trash for glass, carton, plastic, metal, food and anything else that might be useful. The workers tie the collected goods together, binding them for transport with salvaged plastic bags, ropes and pallets. They pile their goods onto bicycle carts, in the beds of dilapidated trucks, in wheelbarrows and on their backs, hauling them precariously down the long road to town. 

The priest, knowing how poor his own village is, is nonetheless humbled by the circumstances he learns about just south of the Mexico-US border where crime is rampant and people live in landfills. We're presented with an extremely poor village where there are no opportunities, but at least it's not the dump town, right?

On his walk home he thanked God for the beauty around him, for the goats grazing on weeds in the cemetery, for a squealing piglet and the chickens he passed in the old widower's yard, for the bountiful sea and the fruits and vegetables available to him. His people were not wealthy by any standard, but this community could eat food they grew and caught and prepared. Only the poorest among them asked for handouts, and even then, the village took care of these people. He prayed for the children of the dump, and wondered how such a thing could be.

This isn't a new thing, by the way, or unique. As it is apparently my duty to alert readers to something terrible that is going on in other places on Earth, it turns out that living in landfills is a pretty common thing for people all over the world.



Anyway, that's bad, huh? That's probably not a way people should live. It's pretty scary that fictional Alejandra could be in that situation. It scares Hector quite a bit.

Even in his daydreams Hector had no ability to protect his family, and that secret knowledge haunted him, vexed him like a dull thorn wedged deep beneath a toenail, its silent infection seeping into his veins.

But remember what I said about Hector. Hector rules. He's going to get to the bottom of this, and for reals he's doing it for his family, because that's all he has. He lived in the United States, he had ice water in a cooler in his truck and could have cold water whenever he wants. He considers telling his coworkers in Oaxaca about this but doesn't think they'll believe him. He had a sweet little girl and a wife who wasn't always in mourning about her decision, and who he didn't sometimes blame in spite of himself. They were young and in love. Looking at his life now can sometimes make him want to fall apart. But he doesn't forget. There is a moment where he's promised riches, but also he sees a glimpse of the attendant horrors. He doesn't go in the basement.

Lilia is tough as crap, too. She goes through her own journey, even if most of it takes place in the same room, it's pretty harrowing and inspiring as well.

Guys, when I finished this book I just bawled and bawled. I loved these fake people because they felt like real people. Good job, white lady. And good job, white me. Let's all give ourselves a pat on the back for just getting it so hard.

Bad Romance and Toxic Relationships in Pop Culture

That's how the worst year of my life starts--in a Mustang with steamed-up windows, with a beautiful boy who cries. - Heather Demetrios, Bad Romance

I've heard black-capped chickadees my whole life, but it wasn't until I was an adult that I even knew what that noise was. It's something I generally associated with mornings in the summer. Most of the time people say it sounds like they're saying "cheeseburger," but when I looked it up I saw that some folks think they are saying "hey sweetie," which I greatly prefer because that is definitely what they are saying, especially to me. Because there are some days when I could use it (this is all of the days).

Chances are pretty good that you've heard them, too. You either immediately knew what I was talking about, or are about to watch this video and say, "THAT'S WHAT THAT SOUND IS." It's so ubiquitous, but because these are forest birds, they like to get way back into the trees, so like the opposite of good children, they are almost exclusively heard, but not seen.



I think birds are great and bird songs are also great. But like virtually every opinion I've made on this blog, it's probably not the predominant one. Like all good opinions that I have and you don't (yet) but will because I am very persuasive, birdsong takes a little bit of work before you get it. The best example I can think of is when Cypher is showing Neo the code in The Matrix and he says, "You get used to it. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead." This is gross, of course, but it works for this analogy.

There is a drastically different experience of lying in bed on a Saturday morning with nothing to do and the cat, who is convinced that she is literally starving to death, is locked out and it's light outside but it's still cool and the blankets are all in a mess but, like, a perfect mess, and you're awoken by screechy birds. It makes you want to run around and just put your finger on their little beaks and say "shhh. Could you just, for one second of your useless little unimportant bird lives, just be at peace? Do you really need a mate, bird? Does this world need another thing that eats bugs and makes noise and poops on cars and can fly and then does nothing but rub that fact in my face? WHY CAN'T I FLY, GOD. WHY."

Then you're awake and the covers are suddenly itchy and your cat has picked the lock somehow and is in your face and there's a note on your pillow that says that your wife has left you and you just know that it's all that bird's fault. And you really need to pee. Listen, we've all been there a million times. You won't see this on any report because it's not true, but it's a known fact that 80% of marriages end because of Saturday morning bird nonsense. Look it up.

That experience is way different when you can see the code, and by which I mean you know what you're listening to. Suddenly your yard is this frickin wildlife reserve and it's full of these wild animals that grace your presence for a few hours every morning, living this life that doesn't need you. There's something holy about that. If you've been hiking or camping and had a moment where you watched a deer or bear (from a distance) have a morning drink from the lake, or an osprey stoop and dive into the water and emerge with a struggling fish and then calling out like a red-tailed hawk like in the movies, you know this moment. That there's a whole world that exists apart from this one in which we're all very stressed about our jobs and relationships and whether or not we'll score a Super Nintendo Classic.

With a little knowledge and practice, you see wildlife everywhere. You hear it everywhere. And that thing that bothered you and ran away wives 3, 5, and 6 (and husband who was number 4) is now meaningful. It doesn't sound like noise, it sounds like blonde (house finch), brunette (chickadee), and redhead (you'd think this would be red-naped sapsucker but really it's just the neighbor who sings a lot). It's pleasant, then. It's like if you don't know a foreign language and think the teens at the mall are making fun of you in Spanish, but later when you know Spanish you still don't know what they're saying because slang is hard.

This can go both ways, though. I imagine that if you work for the CIA you look around you and think, nobody else knows how close we are to catastrophe every minute of every day. Or if you're an ecologist and look at every landscape and imagine it scorched by fire or overtaken by weeds along with the family cabin. You camp and look around at the beautiful forest and wonder how long it will hold up to a rapidly warming earth and put a smile back on and play your hand at cards around the picnic table.

I guess what I'm saying is that knowledge is always good, but sometimes it can ruin the things you love. For example, if you take some training about emotional abuse it will ruin virtually every romantic movie and TV show subplot. I mean there's the easy ones, like Twilight, that are basically an instruction manual for unhealthy relationships. Like, teen girls should be pretty suspicious of guys who are three years older than them showing an interest, let alone centuries. If a guy's only real redeeming quality is that he has a driver's license and half of a mustache, that's pretty weak sauce and girls his age see right through it. Imagine if he's lived through the entirety of US History and he thinks that 16-year-old you is "so interesting."

So Edward watches Bella sleep, pretty clear red flag there. When 50 Shades of Grey guy (I think is name is Gary?) lies, controls, and intimidates 50 Shades of Grey girl (Darlene?) a lot of us recognize it as very unhealthy. I mean, those books sold more copies than every book I've read combined even if you only counted women in my church ward, but there are zillions of think pieces about it. In most cases you take away those guys' money and suddenly it's a very special episode of Blossom, the one about protective orders.

Something in me is dimming, something that I already know I can’t get back. But you’re worth it. You are. I will tell myself this for several more months. And when I realize you aren’t worth it, it’ll be too late.

But the more you learn, the more skeeved out you get about the so-called "cute" romances. Like Ross and Rachel on Friends. Like Belle and Sebastian The Beast. Like Rick Grimes at the end of Love, Actually. Danny and Sandy from Grease. Even Snape. We think Snape's love is so pure, but it isn't. Snape's love is obsession without consent. It's romantic because we don't have to watch Lily Potter live every day of it, every day at school with him watching her from a distance and staring daggers at her boyfriend. Lily made her choice, Snape. Your pining isn't sweet or tragic. It's gross. Dumbledore is gross, too. Instead of helping a man in pain work through it and realize the thing that he thinks he lost is something he never had in the first place, he instead exploits it, wafting it in front of a broken man's nose like a carrot in a Bugs Bunny cartoon in order to get what he wants.

The thing that's so creepy about all of these relationships is a very simple prediction of how they would turn out if they actually worked in real life. We rarely if ever get to see it play out, because it's bad. The kinds of guys who pine over a woman who doesn't love them back see her not as a human being, but as a possession. Often they don't actually spend enough time with them to know them for anything other an an idealized fantasy they've built up. If they got together, there's no way she could ever live up to that standard, and so he starts trying to mold her into that through control and intimidation.

I looked through my blog posts, and while I've talked quite a bit about physical domestic violence, I've rarely talked about emotional abuse. This is a shame, because multiple studies show that emotional or psychological abuse has longer-lasting impacts than physical abuse, though it's barely discussed in the media. And, as we can see with only a cursory glance at pop culture, it's often glorified.

Once you've had some training on it, you see the warning signs everywhere. The old cliche where a woman is complaining about something a man is doing and he grabs her and kisses her hard. At first she struggles, and then she submits and it's very romantic. Yeah. That doesn't happen. Or the public serenade. Or the climbing of the fire escape or roof and appearing in someone's window. Stranger Things rules, right? But Jonathan taking pictures of his crush through her window without her knowing it is not cute and it's not sweet and it should land him in jail. I was at a live performance of The Music Man and during the Marian, Madame Librarian song, the joke was that he kept tricking Marian (The madame librarian) into dancing with him against her will. It was for comedy! The Music Man is one of my favorite musicals ever (Is he starting to memorize jokes from Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang? Are certain words creeping into his conversation? Words like "swell" and "so's your old man"? If so my friends, ya got trouble!) but still it gave me a bad taste in my mouth.

We put up with a lot of these things because we're rooting for the couple and we know they're going to end up together and really let's just get on with it. And big romantic gestures are fun when you like the person to begin with. The problem is when you don't. In these cases they are bad and we should not do them even if the movies tell us to. You don't bring flowers to a first date and you don't give elaborate gifts to someone who you don't know. Nobody gets to skip straight to boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife or whatever. You work on that.

When Robin Hood the fox competes in a contest to win a kiss from Maid Marian (who is also a fox in more ways than one, you guys), he's the only one who isn't creepy in that whole competition. Prince John is a creep for even suggesting it, and what's the deal with that turtle who is clearly a married dad getting in on that? That only works because they already like each other. "Hey, remember me? We were kids together. Will you marry me?" Man, I love that movie.

Anyway, I had this problem, you guys. This post is for teen me. I watched Can't Hardly Wait, and I was like, "this is about me." I had these epic crushes that lasted for years and imagined that graduation day kiss. But unlike the movies, this one didn't have a main protagonist that everyone was rooting for. Everyone was on their own and doing the best they could and the girls I crushed on actually got to make their own decisions about life and I wasn't in them which is totally how it should be.

I don't let it bother me that you sang that song to me last Christmas because it's not yours and you can't have it.

Wow, this has gotten long. Here's the book I read: It's called Bad Romance, by Heather Demetrios. It tells a deeply convincing story of an emotionally abusive high school relationship, based on the experience of the author itself. The story is told in retrospect, in which a scarred and cynical Grace tells her story to her abuser. No longer in the thick of it, she recognizes the warning signs, which at the time she saw as romantic.

She's obsessed with Gavin, the school rock star, who manages to be attractive in spite of wearing a fedora. Every girl wants him, and Grace is astonished when he chooses her. When he gets jealous, she gets it, and it makes her feel special that this guy loves her so much that he wants her all to himself. Even when things get bad, he'll pull a grand gesture and win her back. Always there is the threat that if she leaves him, he'll kill himself.

People who make each other this unhappy should break up. Duh. But right when I think I'm going to do it, something good will happen. Something that reminds me why you're my soul mate, like convincing the person who runs the mall's audio to let you sing a song for me, live, during one of my shifts.

Grace hates it at home, where her controlling stepdad keeps her and her mother under his thumb, her mother in turn taking it out on her. She calls her stepdad The Giant, because his footsteps terrify them and his voice booms.

He's an accountant with a business that costs more than it makes, but his true calling, I think, is acting: he's so very talented at pretending to be a good person.

If the story were told from the in love version of Grace, the one who only saw the good in Gavin, it would read like half of the romantic teen fiction (I'm told) is out there. He sneaks into her room when she's asleep like stupid Angel always did on Buffy. He watches her at school even after he's graduated. He writes songs for her and takes her on surprise trips. When he plays shows, every girl in the audience wants him and he singles her out special and sings just to her. You could see girls on social media pine for their own Gavin.

But Grace knows better now.

I wish I could warn every girl you're going to meet, tell them that your hotness and sexy songs and enigmatic smile aren't worth the cost of the ride. I wish I could put a warning label on you.

Demetrios clearly wants to counteract the messages teens are getting. She wants to teach the warning signs. In the back of the book there is a list of resources and her own story. But it's not a very special episode of Blossom. For one thing these teens swear so much, almost as much as real teens. And Grace still has fun. Her friends are great and funny and this book isn't as dark as it sounds. I think teens should read it, even though it can be pretty adult sometimes. Dudes especially should read it, both as a warning of what not to do and a warning of what to watch for. Emotional abuse isn't just perpetrated by men against women. It happens both ways. It's good to see the warning signs in your partners and yourself.

Also, learn the bird calls. Trust me on this one.

You're a maze, all high edges and endless loops. I can't find a way out, can't see where I've been. It's all running, lost in the dark of you. Trapped. Everywhere I turn is a dead end. I keep winding up back where I've started.

In the Shadow of the Banyan and Lit Snobbery

I heard noises outside, the hums and drones of night creatures. An owl hooted, and another answered, telling each other an endless tale amidst an endless banging of hoes and shovels, the earth being smashed. When you hear an owl, so they say, death is nearby. But owls were always hooting in Democratic Kampuchea, and when someone died, they went as quiet as people, afraid to speak up, to cry out loud. I had learned not to be afraid of owls or other night creatures. Animals are not like people. If you leave them alone, they won't hurt you. But people will, even if you've done no wrong. They hurt you with their guns, their words, their lies and broken promises, their sorrow. - Vaddey Ratner, In the Shadow of the Banyan

Holy smokes this post is off to a bad start. First of all there were maybe five paragraphs of me being very snooty about the different kinds of book readers there are, which may have had decent jokes in them, but is not the kind of humor that I want my blog to be about or for me to be about in general. Then I tried to embed a Facebook post that has resulted in the HTML being all messed up on this thing which makes me think that maybe I should have stuck with that multimedia major that I had for the first semester I took in college.

That's weird to think about, that I was going to school briefly to be a web designer. If I'd done that I probably never would have taken a literature class, which means I wouldn't have learned how to read more deeply, and this blog wouldn't exist maybe. Or maybe it would but it would be about something that's actually useful like, "did you try to embed some code into your blogger post and now it's all mucked up? Well you've come to the right place and that right place is Howie's Kode Klub featuring Scorpion From Mortal Kombat So That's Why The K's."

I also bet that I wouldn't have been introduced to nature writing and in turn introduced to environmentalism and in turn introduced to the art of going camping for work. That all sounds like bad stuff but also maybe I'm rich in this scenario? I'm honestly not sure. Do I know any rich web designers?

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that instead of Howie's Kode Klub (featuring Scorpion of Mortal Kombat who says, "'Get Over Here,' and Enjoy This Quality Kontent" in the masthead for a while until I'm sued) it's Howie's Book Club. And instead of providing valuable advice to web designers instead it's providing no advice to nobody. But hey, at least it looks unprofessional.

I've often said that I quit my creative writing degree program because it was making me hate two of the things that I held most dear, reading and writing. Unfortunately, it wasn't making me love 'rithmatic either so I was in a pretty dark place. I think in retrospect this is partially true. I started to hate writing because of the bizarre standard writing was held to in a college literature class. And I started to hate reading because the list of great writers and works was tiny and narrow. It really messed me up. It took me years before I could read for fun again, and even then there was a tiny voice wearing patches on its sport jacket that would constantly question my reading choices.

That's kind of what this post started out being about, but then it veered into some weird territory where I made fun of bookstore nerds, who I said "fetishize buying books over reading them, and when they might accidentally trip and fall onto a book and actually read it they spend all of their remaining time on message boards talking about their 'book crush' and how casting totally messed up because the guy/girl they cast is just so wrong for the part, probably because they had to cast a real human being."

I'm glad I didn't make fun of bookstore nerds. Like I said before, it's not what I'm about, and it's not what this blog is about. It's not up to me to decide what books should be read or written or what unhealthy relationship is being portrayed as romantic (more about this next week), or how little I care about the conflicted half-elf who spends half of his time loving both a human woman and an elf woman at the other half in a tavern. All I want to do here is talk to you about the book I read and also about what a mess I am sometimes and eventually get very very famous. That's it.

I want a very specific kind of fame, though, which is the kind where people only say good things always and nobody ever looks up my address and sends me bombs. Luckily I'm not a woman saying highly controversial things like, "maybe in video games the goal sometimes shouldn't be torturing women." If you don't like what I say in these posts, maybe don't send me bombs? Thanks.

Huh, after reading that post I don't think I want to be famous after all. Just rich. I just want to be so rich because of my blog but also not famous at all. I just need one very wealthy person to read it and then send me a check for ten million dollars. PayPal works, too.

Anyway, here's the thing about books that I learned and kind of had to unlearn when I was an English major, which is what this part of the post is supposed to be about before it became about becoming rich and not famous: books can and should be about important things. 

The thing I wanted to embed in my post but could not was this. Since I can't embed it, you're going to have to go look at it which I know is a hassle but it could be worse: you could be starving to death in a Cambodian death camp (this applies to a lot of situations). If you didn't click on it even though I asked you to do so pretty nicely, it's a series of parody book covers, many of which are the kinds of books I read in college classes. I can add a couple to the canon, including The Universe Doesn't Care About You So You Might As Well Do Whatever You Want, Two Hundred Pages of Descriptions of Fly Fishing. And my personal favorite, This is Basically A Summary of a Textbook About an Eastern Religion that I Read Once in College and Wedged Between Very Sparse Narrative.

As far as I can tell these are all books for people who are above the petty squabbles of day-to-day life and prefer instead to read a story in which nothing happens to terrible people as they drive across the country and do drugs and say things like "transcendent" in reference to like a hot dog. I don't get into politics, man. It's like, I'm more interested in the universe. They say this because they're still on their parents' health insurance or don't have some genetic disposition towards disease so they don't have to think about it much. Or because they aren't more likely to get prison sentences for the same crime that a white person would get like a medal for, just because of their skin color. Or maybe they don't live in a country in which having the kind of education that lets you spend all of your time reading about university professors who have affairs with their students and learn a little something about existence on the way would lead to a death sentence.

"Raami's story is, in essence, my own. I was five years old when on April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge stormed into Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh, and declared a new government, a new way of life." That's what we read in the afterword of Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadow of the Banyan. I'm not going to try to summarize the revolution and subsequent genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, but this article does a decent job of it. The upshot is that in a country with a population of approximately 7 million, somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million were murdered by a Communist regime bent on restarting civilization. That's 21 percent of the population.

No one saw through the coded rhetoric of solidarity and brotherly love to a deeply indoctrinated belief that anyone could be the enemy. At first the enemy was the intellectuals, diplomats, doctors, pilots and engineers, policemen and military officers, those of rank and reputation. Then the enemy was the office clerks, technicians, palace servants, taxi drivers, people with mok robar civilai--"modern professions"--which would include almost everyone at the temple, as the majority of us were from the city. those who didn't lie and assume a new identity were called and brought out into the open, like rabbits forced from their holes.

In the Shadow of the Banyan doesn't try to summarize what happened, either. In fact, Pol Pot is never named. Instead, every nefarious deed, every murder, every bit of torture, is perpetrated by The Organization. Young Raami, limping because of polio as a young child, has her brace taken and thrown away. "The Organization will cure you," she is told.

Raami is a princess, though by the time she's 7, royalty in Cambodia doesn't mean much other than general respect and never having to worry about money. She lives a very comfortable life in Phnom Penh, where she is loved by her poet father, doting mother, and multiple servants. The revolution outside of the compound gates is an annoyance, but doesn't effect anyone in the family personally until one day a servant goes missing.

Things go downhill from there.

The family is uprooted from their life in the city and resettled in a small village. The Organization has declared all city life to be immoral, and point to the lives of rural rice farmers as the only way to live. The intent was to return to a purer society untainted by Buddhism and imperialism. Which, let's be honest, that sounds kind of nice. Everyone working with their hands, sweat of their brow, all of that. In fact, Raami kind of likes the life when she settles into it. There is satisfaction in farming and floating the rice patties, catching fish and crawdads.

But let's also be real. While Raami lives the peasant life with a very grandparenty couple, what's really happening is a transfer of power and wealth. People unhappy with who is rich and powerful overthrow the rich and powerful and whoops I guess they're the ones with all of the resources now. Funny how it works out that way. It's almost like being rich isn't the immoral thing, it's the fact that the rich are not you that really gets stuck in your craw.

Things get worse, as these things often do. There are work camps and family members taken in the middle of the night. There are executions and torture. There is unspeakable evil and unbelievable kindness. All of these we see through the gradually eroding innocence of a young girl who walks with a limp and makes mistakes sometimes. Mistakes that have profound consequences, but you guys, she's just this tiny sweet little girl and nobody should be put in these kinds of situations. We watch as her father sacrifices himself for the family. We see the decisions her mother makes to keep her children alive.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating. 1984 is a good book, but also I think it's pretty much useless. It purports a scary, alternative future in which things that have happened in real life all over the world happen to white, Western people instead. Can you imagine the horrors? Or like how scary is it to imagine that the things that systematically happened to black women for hundreds of years in the United States suddenly happened to adorable blue-eyed Elizabeth Moss?

What if instead we read the story of a woman who lived through the real-life horrors of a radical Communist uprising in Cambodia? Big Brother isn't staring at you through the TV, but your neighbors are watching your every move. Especially the children. Let's say the wife of one of the town's leaders thinks you're too pretty, that the leader's eyes linger on her too long. Turns out that you went to university (whether you did or not), which means you have no place in this brave new world. Let's say you wear glasses, or "look Vietnamese." You could be sent to S-21, a prison that held up to 14,000 people, 12 of whom survived.

Clap along with me: The. Reason. This. Is. Scarier. Is. Because. It. Really. Happened.

Instead of saying, "this is just like 1984," when a hypothetical President of The United States questions a judge because of his race, or pushes for torture of political prisoners, or mocks war heroes, or builds the least-educated cabinet in 24 years or fabricates lies whole cloth in order to stir up anger against a certain ethnic group or leads a group of teenage kids in a chant of his name for no reason other than to prop up his pathetic ego when the news makes him sad, say "this is just like the countless other charismatic leaders who slowly eroded the very fabric of a nation that was built to protect us against someone just like him."

Heck, it's happening right now in Poland. It's happening in Turkey. Nations previously considered free and democratic turn authoritarian all the time. Vladimir Putin faked a terrorist attack in order to seize power. And he murders his political opponents. That all happened in my lifetime. It happened after I graduated from high school. He's neat now, though. A real leader.

This gets packaged up in different ideologies. Whether it's communists claiming to fight for the workers against the rich who secretly pull the levers, or a good old-fashioned manipulation of the downtrodden to blame their fellow man who looks or talks a little different; a bunch of rich old guys who can't stand to see a kid get lunch for free. What it all boils down to is too much power in the hands of someone with too few morals and a bunch of uneducated young kids with guns in their hands and a higher purpose in mind to do their bidding.

"They're not the same men you studied philosophy and history with in France... Nor are they people whose daily struggles and aspirations you've tried to capture and convey in your poetry. They are children who've been given guns--power beyond their years."

In the wake of this godawful tragedy, when almost a quarter of a nation was murdered because of things like wearing glasses or knowing French, the United States took in about 150,000 refugees. Kids who had starved nearly to death, mothers (mostly mothers because men were more likely to be murdered), rape victims, torture victims. They've had a tough time. Because everyone with an education or skill applicable to life in an industrialized nation was murdered, they integrated slower than other groups. Because they had PTSD, they sometimes had behavioral problems. Their rate of poverty is higher than other ethnic groups, and the crime rate is higher. The US has started sending them back. Sure, you say, if someone flees their country and commits a crime, they should go back. But c'mon. 47% of the Cambodian and Laotian (communism again) people deported under Obama had nothing worse than a traffic violation on their record.

It's worse now, because of course it is. A refugee who came to the United States at the age of 8, who was arrested and served time at 14 for gang related violence, but who has spent the rest of his life with a clean record as a barber, is slated to be sent to a country he barely remembers. Thanks a lot, Bill Clinton, way to "strike a mighty blow against terrorism." If traffic violations are terrorist acts now, we should fill Guantanamo with all of the people who speed on my street (no really, let's do this.)

Vaddey Ratner came to the United States at 11. She lived in a Minnesota low-income housing project knowing no English. In 1991, she graduated as class valedictorian. We're lucky to have her. There was a lot of fear of communism in the 70s and 80s, that somehow the people fleeing Cambodia would bring the very same kind of philosophy that ruined their lives here is laughable. Right? It's almost like amazing people come from all over the world and there isn't really anything holy or special about being born within imaginary lines on woefully distorted wall maps.

Anyway, In the Shadow of the Banyan is like a national treasure. We should be honored to have it available to us, and you guys should read it. All of this political stuff is my own reaction to it, none of it is in the book. The book is just an amazing story of survival and if you want to read it like that, that works, too. I'm no literature professor. Thank heavens.