The Best Travel Writing

by James O'Reilly

  Only some of us. Chopin was certainly born like Aphrodite on the forehead of a god, Pablo Neruda with a pen in his hand, and Sean Connery with a dozen bullets in his mouth. But the rest of us around the common table—according to Korea’s sexual education theme park—arrive on a precious dime-stick to the soundtrack of a few graceful “uggghhhs” our mothers’ sputter as our butter-colored heads pop out like those cotton tufts you get when you blow wishes into dead dandelions.

  In America it takes until late middle school for a kid to figure out on his own or over a parent pep talk session that he’s not the same raspberry-drop he thought he was when his mother was twenty-six spewing out blood and chunks of Venice and that he did not simply sprout out of a tummy or fall down the chimney, compliments of a stork and FedEx.

  So Room Two includes a wall with the stage of life appropriately beginning with the alphabet then a first date in the park, marriage, a queen poster-bed from a Salinger paperback, a middle-aged cliché couple with kids seated all around the dinner table, and a smiling couple with either Alzheimer’s or dementia because their synthetic enjoyment of the end is all too capitalistic with their five brown bags in wrinkled arms under wrinkled smiling faces trawling through the final hours of what we might call an “appropriate reality.”

  Then we have the giant pregnant doll prop with one of those sonar handguns so you can find the embryo tumbling underground. But while the tour guide is pointing out the knot of skin on the x-ray screen, one of the kids is up there banging the baby detector against the mother’s stomach like he’s taking a sledgehammer to a sidewalk and I’m thinking it might be time to cut out all the taekwondo and “Power Ranger” films.

  And that’s not even the end of Room Two. We’ve still got the doll in the corner and her oven packed, perky nipple self, her belly bloated, her conservative smile with another-Bush-won-the-White House-again type serenity and a little baby doll that pops straight out of her chute. The doll even wails when it breaks the surface while the tour guide goes through the labor stages. In the end she has all the kids practice labor pain and moan like the world’s about to be stapled to a giant ice cube and then encourages them to run around with those Kevlar pregnancy vests and maternal attire making play out of a harsh natural necessity for species survival.

  I ignore it all and shove myself deeper into the wall, but the absurdity is inescapable. The labor sounds and vests—boys included—are already far too much. Then a minute later they’re all oohing and awing at some picture the tour guide is pointing to of a husband death gripping his screaming wife, hollering like it’s some kind of Wimbledon exhibition match, and ignoring the creepy nurse who’s standing near the ball-pitch with a face like Edward Scissorhands literally yanking the child out head first with hands like those claws in those machine games with cheap wristwatches and samurai DVDs for prizes.

  And here comes the cherry, the final straw, the Fat Man, little Mick with his beach ball eyes and I know what’s coming and I try shimmying down the wall and acting like I have no idea he’s there but—

  “Teacher, teacher you pregnant before?”

  Room Three.

  Titled: “Take Care of the Baby Room.”

  Come Room Two and I’m done.

  But this is the room where all the kids get to play make believe. Ironic because we let children play grown up and act like it’s fun. Then when we’re twenty-whatever paying taxes, we cry and wish we were twelve again with no worry in the world but what the best color is for the unicorn on page twelve of our elementary work book. If there’s any one thing I could fix in the world it would be that. Let a child be a child because one day you learn Santa Claus was all a big lie and people spend more money on bombs and bullets and coke and ice cream than feeding and clothing all the poor and homeless in the world and colors run down white walls and always end up a soft charcoal black and you never get to live in that kind of Lethe state of being ever again.

  So I’m standing there caught all up in these Bukowski-type thoughts when I catch the far wall covered in sepia tone shots of breastfeeding. It’s all nipples, chomp, mother, child, and—

  “Teacher, what that?”

  Jameson is wearing the most serious face I have ever seen in my life. It is a presidential capstone look, a pallbearer look, a hybrid cross look of concern and a sincere desire to understand what is really going on.

  “Uhh.” I shuffle through words and try to avoid Jameson because he’s going back and forth from me to the pictures and I leapfrog into the first explanatory lecture I can think of. “You know the milk you drink and put in cereal, well—”

  Leapfrogging was a terrible idea. Jameson’s face goes from manila to Merlot in a nanosecond. I scramble to correct.

  “No, not that, no. The milk you drink and put in cereal comes from cows, the udders, you know, well women have—”

  Jameson has got a solar flare for skin at this point and the situation is beyond awkward and I decide it’s probably best just to chuck the woodchuck in the river and move on.

  “Look, let’s just go to the next room Jameson.”

  “Okay teacher.”

  He whispers and grabs my hand like I’m walking him out of a nightmare.

  Room Four.

  Titled: “Look at the change of the body …”

  When I saw the English translation above the doorway I thought, my God, there’s no way they’re going to show the balls dropping like depth charges into plastic bags and all the hair and hair and hair sprouting like rice paddies. Oh no, was I ever more wrong. They showed them everything.

  The tour guide gripped the first doll like a chalupa and unwrapped him and poked and poked and the kids let out a muse call while she muttered in Korean so I have no idea what transaction actually went down. Then she started on the girl doll and I nearly fainted …

  Next, we get to doll set number two. Teenage years. She’s got a tangerine set and he’s got yams and all these kids are still too young to color in Greek mythology but, my God, cover them in all the sexual hocus pocus you can fit into a whip cream pressure bottle.

  And BAM!!!

  Doll set number three. She’s got peach trees and open thighs and all the kids are in a rocking chair of hysteria and the guide is yanking off the wooly weevil heart boxers of her mate and his knob straight clocks out with this hazel wreathe that needs a desperate shave and I’m standing there trying not to puke and the Korean teachers are looking at me like what, what and I’m trying to explain that you can’t judge the States based on “Sex and the City” because we’re a prude, virgin society compared to you and your dolls and your open lingerie shops next to McDonald’s play places and …

  “Keychain, keychain.”

  I pop out of my color book fantasy and roll straight down a cotton candy hill into the arms of some bloated, over-the-hill Korean lady who’s standing in front of my table with a rack full of cheap light up key chains. She’s got a look like she just got a pox shot in the eye and I’m left there—pen in hand like a cutlass—wondering what the hell I’m supposed to say or do.

  “Want keychain?”

  I peruse them, I peruse her, and I want nothing to do with her random, Christmas blitz colored neon key chains and her cell phone holders so I politely shake my head and shoo her away.

  Now I need more booze. I order another beer, another pitcher as a matter of a fact, to drown out the absurdity of this moment, but I’m a toppling hypocrite because I drift into this crazy idea that I should get an octopus and keep it in a rubber kiddie pool in my bathroom and feed it sardines and beer and Skittles and call it “Spaghetti” when suddenly another old lady stumbles through the front door and hands me a note with butterscotch English reading:

  ‘Help me. I live with eight blind people …’

  Although I can’t find the logic in me to swallow the supposed fact that she lives with eight blind people, I figure giving her the rest of my Won will be far better spent by her than by me in this bar.

  Lesson Fourteen: Re
mind yourself every morning of how lucky you are to have the things you do.

  After my charity act, I slide on rubber gloves and slip into the wet sock of what is and what should be and try to ease myself back into the absurd memory of this wild theme park.

  Room Five.

  Titled: “Pretend, pretend.”

  It’s another grown up room where kids dress like soldiers and shoot one another and play lawyer and exploit one another and the dull ones with pebble scab brains have no other choice but to cook or clean or cook and clean and pay plastic bills and look out plastic windows and suck down plastic pills and don plastic fashion and plastic this and plastic that.

  Yet amid my cynicism, I can’t help but laugh when I watch Susie and Bandit shuffle over to one of the play houses hand in hand. I’d give anything to film it and turn it into a miniseries with “Our House” as the theme song.

  “Bandit, I make breakfast.”

  “Rice and banana?”

  While the usual Korean breakfast revolves around a main dish of rice, Susie decided to get a bit exotic and shovel all the plastic eggs, toast, and bacon out of the drawers and onto the table.

  “Eggs, toast, and bacon!”

  While Susie is absolutely thrilled, Bandit turns spiked lemonade sour.

  “I don’t want it.”

  Lesson Fifteen: Complain to a dog. Sulk in the mirror. Holler at a cashier. Never do any of the above to the one who cooks your meals.

  “You work and eat nothing.”

  Susie turns away, launches her nose into orbit, and stuffs her hands on her hips. Bandit lingers, mouth half-cocked and ready to do what he should and apologize, but that boy pride keeps the punch spiked and tells him to pivot and storm out the door. He makes it maybe three steps out of the house before he realizes he has no office to run to and although consciously he will never admit it, subconsciously he knows he will never win.

  So poor Bandit wheels around and walks back inside the house with his shoulders slumped forward, his demeanor broken. Susie, having known this would happen, hasn’t moved an inch since he left and all she has to do is stand there and wait while Bandit whispers a broken sorry in her ear and gives her a tiny hug.

  Room Six.

  Titled: “What is abortion?”

  …Dead serious. The tour guide leads them in a sing-song so they can remember what abortion is all about and I’ve never been more happy in my life to have no idea what someone else is saying because the hand motions and dance are enough.

  I’m simply left sitting there wondering if they know whether or not that aborted clot of flesh is actually a living, beating, breathing, thinking human being that one day would go to school and dream and love and feel and sit on a curb with oak eyes soaking up the moonlight as it drowns out this city.

  Something also tells me there is a serious value issue in humanity when death and destruction can be put so easily into kiddie tunes like frosting on cake.

  Ashes, ashes, we all fall down …

  Room Seven.

  Final Room.

  Title: “Sexual Predator.”

  I’ve completely checked out by now. I’m done. I’m cashed. They’ve got some nut dressed up like a wolf up there pretending to be a sexual predator. It’s definitely a spot on performance because everyone knows all creeps run around with coyote masks and Mr. Rogers’ sweaters.

  But it’s not the pitiful show that grinds me this time, rather the fact that we actually have to educate our children on the caveat that comes with talking to strangers and what to do if a sexual predator comes because there are grimy, dirty, filthy, for some reason still living bone shop flesh bags that possess the nerve and perv to do that shit.

  We exit the last room and break out of that sexual healthcare Chateau d’If and lead all the kids upstairs to a playground on the roof. But even with the fresh air and sparkling glue sun, my mind is still doing cartwheels from that entire experience.

  “Teacher, did that scare you?”

  I look down at Jameson and he’s still wearing a look of grave concern and while generally I would never admit to a kid that I’m afraid I’ve got no other choice. What just happened was beyond terrifying.

  “Yes Jameson it scared me.”

  I pat his head as he takes a sip of his water bottle and gives me this flat smile of envelope reassurance.

  “Me too.”

  “More beer?”

  “No, no, check please.”

  I pay up, close shop, and rock out of the bar. The moonlight floods the concrete like honey and milk and melting satin and I’m caught up in the faces of my neighborhood. The single father in his box hole flat behind plastic panes throwing his daughter up in the air, wearing his heart in his eyes and on his sleeve and he’s far, far away from all this and all that. Then there’s the old couple in their laundromat sharing a bowl of noodles with matching chopsticks and coral blue button ups watching “South Park.” There’s the dame on the curb out front who dreams of Broadway and tucks the dandelion necklace she got from some English boy she sold her heart to one summer long, long ago in the back pocket of her riveted jeans. And there’s the middle-aged men slouching in their plastic chairs up the street, scuffing up their shoes on the pavement, tossing hanger wire vulgarity at one another between long drags and swigs of soju. There’s the kid who dumped his college fund to rebuild his father’s old pizza joint back up from scratch while the old man lies in bed upstairs slowly dying from cancer and the writer in me is trying not to bum himself out because we’re all dying together and it’s beautiful and tragic, beautiful and tragic.

  Lesson Sixteen: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”—Aeschylus.

  A.E. Baer currently straddles Kabul and Washington, D.C. as a security contractor; before, he “roughed” it in Thailand, Vietnam, and Korea as a freelance writer and ESL teacher. His work has been published in Ditch, CWLJ, and Scars with one act plays produced in both New York and Atlanta.

  ANGIE CHUANG

  Six Syllables

  The gap between being an outsider and belonging can be much narrower than we fear.

  In Kabul, we napped every afternoon, a two-hour siesta that made up for rising before dawn with the mosque loudspeaker’s first call to prayer. As with most things in Afghanistan, naps were easy to enter, difficult to get out of. The soft breathing of the women beside me kept time; their headscarves lay neatly folded next to them and their black hair tumbled over their pillows. Late-afternoon light filtered through gauzy curtains. The slide into sleep was liquid, unknowable.

  Waking was another matter. The women tried to rouse me gently: A soft nudge on the shoulder. My name, in Pashto-accented English, as if murmured through cotton batting. By then the nap never felt right, like I had gotten either too little or too much sleep. A dizzying chemical taste in my gummy mouth reminded me that I was on malaria pills. I always forgot where I was. Was I really in Afghanistan? Or at home? Where was “home,” exactly?

  In Pashto, “home” is not a single word, but four. There is a word for home that means “house,” another that means “country,” still another that means “birthplace,” and a fourth that means “homeland.” No wonder that I had begun to feel—in a land that had endured invaders, occupations, war, and the displacement of its people, many times over—that feeling at home had become elusive. The dissonance between home and homeland had been written into the very language.

  I had traveled here from my own home at the time, in Portland, Oregon, with members of an Afghan immigrant family I had befriended there. Just as the Shirzais had welcomed me into their own house in the fir-lined hills alongside the Willamette River, their relatives in Kabul—particularly two young women named Nafisa and Nazo—had made me feel safe and nurtured from the moment I arrived in this compound-style abode. The sisters-in-law had attended to my every need and treated me like one of their own. Nafisa had mournful br
own eyes and a naturally downturned mouth—except for when her husband, Nazo’s older brother, was around, in which case her face turned all coy and giggly. That, in turn, would make the unmarried Nazo roll her green eyes and tsk-tsk at her sister-in-law. Nazo had wild curly hair that was always escaping the confines of her headscarf, or chador. The two were inseparable and I, joining them, became one of three: We cooked together, stayed up late talking, and laughed until we couldn’t catch our breath.

  But outside the home’s walls, I felt very different. The city was hard on the senses and psyche, a swirl of dust, diesel residue, odors from the open sewers. Amputee landmine victims and dirt-caked, sickly children begged on every street corner; widows in filthy blue burqas silently extended hands out from under the veils. High school-aged boys, giddy with post-Taliban freedom, harassed women in the streets: Marry me, beautiful. Please marry me. Even the catcalls still had oddly fundamentalist overtones.

  The disorientation of waking from lariam-riddled naps, in a place that felt startlingly unfamiliar all over again, made me wonder what I was doing in Afghanistan, with the Shirzais. I wanted to be more than a hanger-on or a war tourist. I hadn’t come to Kabul to gawk at the destruction and misery of a quarter-century of war. But why was I here? And why could I not, just once, wake from a nap and know where I was?

  Then one day, I did.

  It was a voice, not Nafisa or Nazo’s, that brought me out of sleep that afternoon. It was faraway, male, chant-like in cadence. It got louder, then softer, then louder again. He sang the same six syllables over and over again. What was he singing? Why had I not noticed this voice before? It sounded utterly new yet completely familiar at the same time.

  I had forgotten to wonder where I was. It didn’t matter now. Nafisa and Nazo stirred, looked at me quizzically through sleepy eyes. Somewhere between quietly getting up, wrapping my headscarf around my head, finding my shoes in the pile outside the bedroom, tiptoeing across the courtyard, and cracking the courtyard door open to sneak a peek, the thought—Oh, right, I’m in Kabul—flickered across my consciousness. The voice grew louder. He was coming around the corner. In time with the chanting, cart wheels squeaked and strained. Something made a whipping sound, like sails in the wind.