Nineteen eighty-three (Karen told me on the phone)—now, that was just one perfectly crummy year. It was the year in which Karen was denied tenure at the University of Pennsylvania and was finally divorced from Ted. She found herself a lectureship at the University of Wisconsin, and it began to snow in October. Her grant applications were denied, one after the other, all through the fall, and without a grant, how could she do fieldwork? If she couldn't do fieldwork, what would she publish? If she couldn't publish, how could she get the hell out of the Midwest?
Thirty-four was a lonely age: hardly a month passed now without seeing something in Ethnology or Man from one of her classmates at Berkeley; her ex-husband had been awarded tenure for a series of papers in theoretical anthropology that he had completed without ever leaving the library. The man, she knew very well, had an expired passport. The closest he had ever come to a primitive society was France. Theory! Don't get me started on theory. All anyone does these days is theory, and if you're not a theoretician, don't even bother to look for a job. Whatever happened to old-fashioned fieldwork? Learning languages?
Had she mentioned that the snow began to fall that year in November? She was getting these weird little lines around her eyes, no doubt from all that tropical sun absorbed while doing all that apparently useless fieldwork. Every morning Karen went to her office to sift once again through the field notes she had collected while preparing her dissertation, hoping to find some nugget so scintillating that, her nugget having been published in Anthropos, a university far, far to the south would call her; then the slow drive back home in her Ford Pinto with that bad smell of burning rubber, which meant that pretty soon she'd have to ask her parents for a loan, through the snow to her rented house with its formaldehyde kitchen floors and fake wood paneling. She was supposed to be an intellectual, but at night the only thing she felt the energy to do was watch Dynasty; and she found herself speculating more often and with more honest curiosity on what was going to happen next to Alexis and Blake Carrington than on the sexual mores of the indigenous peoples of the southern Philippines. She was starting to consider law school.
But, Karen said, it had not always been like this. Not at all. Karen and Martiya had been roommates in graduate school, and although both professed a certain blasé world-weariness, the truth was, nobody had ever gone into the field more excited than they. They were both keenly aware that they were students of a student of the great Malinowski, and in their little apartment, directly on the wall of the kitchen—rental deposit be damned!—Karen had hand-lettered with a felt pen a quotation from Argonauts of the Western Pacific: "To grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world." That was what you were supposed to do. That's how innocent they were.
Karen and Martiya regularly held dinner parties in the little apartment on the north side of campus, dinner parties packed with a dozen anthropologists all chatting feverishly about this so-incredibly-cool thing that name-your-primitive-tribal-people did. Karen made spaghetti with clam sauce. Joseph Atkinson would sit cross-legged on the floor like some loquacious Buddha, his bald head gleaming; and just to tweak their professor, Karen and Martiya would often invite another professor from the department, Arthur Samuelson, to their parties as well. Samuelson always sat on a chair. Samuelson was a student of the great Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski's longtime rival, and the rivalry had descended through the next scholarly generation. It was thrilling to watch Atkinson and Samuelson spar. Because of her upbringing, Martiya felt she had a tribe of her own to discuss, and she never hesitated to throw herself into the conversation; but Karen could only rely on the published work of others, and she stayed silent, longing for the day when she could speak authoritatively as the mistress of her own people. She hadn't worried in those days about tenure or publications, and indeed would have considered such things only status markers within the particular tribe of academic anthropologists. That's not why they were in this business. No, Karen and Martiya were convinced that when they finally got out into the field, it would be a liberation, a way to shed the scaly skin of self.
And it was.
Karen said that the field was just what she had hoped for. Karen was from such a small town in Texas that when she finally came home from the Philippines, they interviewed her for the local newspaper and asked her why she had wanted to go and live with a tribe of nomadic boat dwellers in the islands of the south Philippines. "You mean other than because it's incredibly fun?" Karen said, almost babbling. "I guess because it pays off for your psyche. It pays off for your psyche when you are able to tear down your own system of belief. You've got to undo your preconceptions about the world, about who you are, about yourself, about community, about everything. Because when you study a foreign tribe, you've got to leave your world behind, you have to be totally open and empty, which is—almost impossible. I mean, you're trying to get into another soul. But it is also a great deliverance. It's the best chance you can have to know who you are." Karen was quoting Joseph Atkinson, but she meant every word of it.
Fine, fine words, to be sure—but, then, the only hard part of jumping off a cliff is hitting the ground. Until then you're flying. Three years in the Philippines, two years grinding out the dissertation, a few years in a tenure-track job which doesn't pan out, a bad marriage—bad! there ought be a whole new word for what it's like to be married to Ted—what they don't tell you in grad school is that the free and open empty feeling when everything about humanity seems like grist for the anthropological mill is just temporary, that it's on loan and goes away, and when it goes away, it's gone. Then throw a divorce into the mix, and step just slightly off that pedestal from hot-shot student under hot-shot adviser at a hot-shot university to lecturer with limited publications at a second-rate school—and watch how fast a career in anthropology no longer seems like a liberation but like a trap. Karen in 1983 read over that quotation she had given to the El Paso Deacon-Herald, and she simply couldn't believe how six years in academia had changed her. No wonder Martiya had decided to leave it all behind. Karen sometimes just wished that she had had the guts to do it too.
Karen and Martiya went into the field together in the same year, the fall of 1974, both twenty-seven years old, and, if anything, had grown more intimate at a distance. They exchanged lots of long letters, just to have the pleasure and relief of telling someone all of their strange new emotions; and although Martiya was in northern Thailand and Karen was in the southern Philippines, they felt as if they were going through the same immensely painful, immensely wonderful experience of first fieldwork together. Reading Martiya's letters, Karen started to feel as if she knew the Dyalo, and knew all the people in Martiya's Dyalo village. After they had been in the field for fifteen months, the two women, yearning for flush toilets, splurged and bought tickets to Paris for a three-week vacation. The whole time they were in France they talked tribe. Then they went back to their villages and exchanged more letters.
By the time Karen and Martiya got back to the States—this must have been 1977, three years or so after they left—Karen was really involved with Ted, and Karen and Martiya didn't live together again. Naturally they stopped writing each other—they lived just across town—and suddenly they were farther apart than when they had been in remote tribal villages, across oceans. They saw each other in the halls of the department, or met once every week or two for coffee, then once a month, then less, and by the time that Martiya did the unthinkable and bought herself a ticket back to Thailand, Karen was already at Penn, and she only found out that Martiya had gone back to Asia when a letter in Martiya's neat sloping handwriting, return address Thailand, arrived in her departmental postbox, the first letter from Martiya in almost a year.
For about four years, from 1979 to 1983, Karen and Martiya were only in vague contact. Karen was in Pennsylvania and Martiya was back in Thailand. There were one or two letters a year. Then came Karen's divorce, and losing the job at Penn and the move to Madison, and one evening as the wind
whipped down from the North Pole, Karen, feeling very, very alone, wrote a long letter to Martiya, seven single-spaced pages, double-sided, complaining about those snows which started in November, and the long nights watching TV and eating ice cream straight from the tub. Something about Wisconsin made her feel fat, she said, in every sense: gross, heavy, immobile, sluggish. Three weeks later, Martiya replied, inviting Karen to visit her in Thailand over winter break—
And in any case (Karen said, still on the telephone, my ear aching now), oh my, she had been talking for hours, she had to go, but she'd tell me more when we talked again, and I was so nice to listen to her yak, but, listen, the reason why she was calling was, last fall when she got her new condo, she'd just put everything into the storeroom—books and papers and notes and twenty-three years' worth of Ethnology; and one of the very best things about talking to me had been that it gave her an excuse to go down there and put a little order into her stuff. She knew she had Martiya's old letters somewhere, because she really was a packrat, and it had taken a little time, but in the end, she found a sheaf of old letters from her classmate and friend. She couldn't find all of the letters, chiefly because Ted never sent them to her and the lazy bastard probably still had them in storage, but she did find a bunch of them down in the basement, mainly from Martiya's first year out in the field. She stayed up all night reading them and chuckling and remembering, and man, was that a long time ago, first fieldwork. It's like nothing else.
Karen sent the letters priority mail; about ten days later a fat manila envelope stuffed with hundreds of photocopies arrived. It was fortuitous timing, because the next day Rachel and I went on vacation. I took the letters with me.
When Rachel had accepted the job at the school, Mr. Tim had mentioned that one of the perks of the position was the fabulous vacations. "Oh, my!" he said. "You will go everywhere!" Now, for the Thai New Year, Mr. Tim, good to his word, was taking his lover to tour the romantic ruins of Angkor Wat. Others were headed to Burma, to Laos, to Vietnam, to China. Mr. Robert was headed to central Thailand for a two-week course in Vipassana meditation; he would spend his vacation learning to hear the sound of his heartbeat. Even our neighbor, Baiyom, was headed back to her little village a half day's journey to the south, where, she announced, she intended to do nothing but eat and fart.
Rachel and I rented a houseboat in the floating village of Pak Nai.
It was a wonderful vacation. The banks of the river marked the boundaries of a national park, in which only a few of the hill tribes were permitted to settle, and so the whole village floats midstream on bamboo rafts: perhaps two or three dozen huts, the market, the temple, a typical Thai village. In the mornings, we awoke just after dawn, dove off the porch of our houseboat, and cavorted like river dolphins in the sparkling waters; then we climbed into our canoe and paddled off to the floating market and bought mangoes, finger bananas, and bottled water for breakfast. The policemen, pants rolled up to their knees, sat on the edge of their houseboat flopping their feet in the cool waters and saluted us as we cruised by. Could there have been a greater pleasure at the height of the hot season than to dive off the front porch of our rented houseboat and hear the hooting of the kiss-me birds greeting the full moon? Or a sweeter memory than dawn, when we were woken by the serene paddling of the monks, stopping by our houseboat to collect alms?
During the days, I read Martiya's letters to Karen Leon. I had them in a three-ring binder. "Dear Karen," Martiya wrote; and "Karen honey," and "Hi Kit-Kat!" I lay out in the sun and read letters about Martiya's boring dreams, and letters interpreting Karen's boring dreams; then letters describing Martiya's Dyalo hut and letters about Dyalo food; letters describing how hard it was to learn the language. The correspondence was of necessity one-sided, because Karen didn't send me her responses. The letters covered the better part of a year, September 1974 until August 1975. Each eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch page was the photocopy of a slightly smaller unlined stationery sheet. Each letter was dated: some letters were written on consecutive days, other letters were separated by as much as two weeks. Most of the letters were about three to four pages. There were fifty-three letters in all.
We had been in Pak Nai for about two days when I conceived the idea that we move there.
"No, I'm serious," I said. "We could stay. I'd sell an article every couple of months, we'd be fine. We could have kids here, they'd grow up speaking perfect Thai and swim like fish."
"When they got to be teenagers, we'd just build them a houseboat of their own, because they'd be such pests," Rachel said.
"Exactly."
I should have left things there, but the more I thought about the idea of living in Pak Nai forever, the more excited I became; it was something about Martiya's letters that made it seem like a swell idea. Another day passed, and I presented the idea to Rachel again.
"Seriously, why couldn't we stay here?"
"Because we'd go out of our minds after about two weeks? Because my family lives ten thousand miles from here? Because your family lives twelve thousand miles from here? Because there's not even a telephone here? Because we wouldn't have jobs? Because we wouldn't have money?"
"But we'd have a great time. We'd learn terrific Thai, we'd really, really figure these people out, not like in Chiang Mai."
"I don't want to spend my life floating."
"Rachel," I said, "I've thought it over and we really should move to Pak Nai."
She gave me that look that women give men when they want to have a serious discussion. She said, "I don't want to move to Pak Nai. I'm twenty-eight years old, and before long, I want to marry and have children. Then I want to raise my children in a normal house, not far from their grandparents. Do you want these things? Because I do, and they're not going to happen in a floating bamboo hut."
That's when I dived into the water to forestall further discussion. I didn't mention my plan to live in Pak Nai again. By the time we went back to Chiang Mai, I was sunburned and thoroughly sick of the place, anyway: there wasn't anything to eat there but fish, and I was dying to check my e-mail. I thought that maybe one of the Walkers had written to me, or Karen Leon. Maybe she'd found more letters from Martiya.
TWO
DYALO VAN DER LEUN
ABOUT FIVE MONTHS after her arrival in a Dyalo village, Martiya, in a letter to Karen Leon, admitted something dark and terrible—that she was beginning to feel a little like Eskimo Kathy. She was referring to a story told and retold in the Berkeley Department of Anthropology. "You know about Eskimo Kathy, don't you?" the grad students had asked each other; Kathy, the grad students whispered, was just like us once, before she went off to study the Eskimo.
The story went like this. Kathy was a delicate little thing, hardly bigger than a child, who had dreamed of living with the Eskimo since the fifth grade, when she wrote a report entitled "People of the Snow" for social studies. When Kathy went off to realize her long-standing dream, she chose the most isolated, northern Eskimo village she could find, where the Eskimos still lived as Eskimos. There she explained to the Eskimo chief that she was just a child in the ways of the Eskimo and finagled herself an invitation to share his family's igloo for the winter. She settled in; the sun went down, not to return until the spring; the last boat left until the warm weather would liberate icebound Eskimoland; and Kathy discovered that she didn't like her Eskimo family. It was as simple as that, really. Some human beings just don't like each other. The Eskimos yammered about the stupidest things, and they would not stop yammering. The Eskimo had four hundred words for snow because it was all they ever talked about. Nobody had ever told Kathy that an igloo was so tiny, and the Eskimo chief smacked his lips maddeningly as he ate his boiled fox and seal blubber stew. And what was worse, Kathy overheard the wife of the Eskimo chief admit to her sister that they did not like the clumsy, ugly kapluna either. "She is so stupid!" the Eskimo chief's wife said. That really rankled, after Kathy had spent all those hours building rapport with the chief's wife by patiently learn
ing to sew real Eskimo muqluqs. Kathy had thought her muqluqs were very nice. She didn't think she was stupid. She thought, Let the Eskimo chief's wife try taking the GRE.
There were seven months of subzero temperatures still to come, and outside the igloo's tiny port, absolute Arctic darkness. Dark daybreaks yielded up dark mornings; it was dark at midday and the afternoon was dark, too; she took her afternoon tea in darkness, and then what was dusk to the south was here just more—darkness; dark twilights preceded dark evenings; and then the nights were very, very dark. Kathy became desperate, and she hit on a plan: she would have the Eskimo make her a little igloo of her own. She would decorate it just the way she liked, and she'd cook her seal blubber outdoors even if it was really cold, so the igloo would never smell bad. She began to dream about her igloo at night. But her proposal only made things worse, as her Eskimo host refused her very reasonable idea. Nobody declines the hospitality of an Eskimo chief! She could sleep on the glacier like a seal, if she wasn't happy in his home! The offended Eskimo chief now refused even to speak to the anthropologist, and made a gesture so offensive that the anthropologist would not speak to him. It was only December. The graduate students never knew just what happened next. Kathy never talked about it. She came back to Berkeley the next spring only long enough to empty her apartment of its possessions. She chain-smoked, having run out of cigarettes in Eskimoland in mid-December, and muttered something about it being much, much colder in the North than everybody thought.
Isolated by her linguistic incompetence, often only mildly interested in the people, and increasingly plagued by a desire just to be alone, Martiya, after five months in a Dyalo village, began to dwell obsessively on Eskimo Kathy's story. Martiya arrived in Dan Loi believing that because of her childhood in a Pipikoro village, because she had been a curious and excited traveler, and because of her sensitivities to indigenous peoples as a student, she would find anthropological fieldwork easy; or if not easy, then compellingly interesting. She was wrong. It was not easy and only intermittently interesting. This discovery was a crushing blow to her ego: her father had warned her in his mild way before leaving that she might not find fieldwork wholly to her liking. Piers had said that the best fieldworkers were those with small, discreet, camouflaged personalities—people not entirely unlike Piers van der Leun himself— and Martiya was always a presence. "Daddy!" Martiya had said very loudly in the Brazilian café in Berkeley where they were eating lunch.
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