The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  He clenched his lip. He said, “They have too many children. They will take everything. This country should be for real Myanmar people.”

  I looked again at his Western-style hiking boots; I looked at his face, his South Asian–looking face. Three foreign backpackers, small in the distance, walked through the valley. Like the rest of Myanmar, he had been waiting a long time, with increasing impatience, and had sacrificed much—moving to Mandalay to mix bricks, leaving family and girlfriend behind. Now, guiding tourists to Inle Lake, he presumably felt himself achingly close to his goals. But could he already see, I wondered, that his goals were not quite being realized—and likely would not be? All this dislocation—and for what? I remembered his comment yesterday: I think the world is changing very fast. Alone in the hills with a tourist who’d gone mysteriously quiet, an event boding ill for his professional success, he had reached for another assertion that, like I am Burmese, like I am a Buddhist, had a solidity to it. We have a problem with the Rohingya. In his pocket, his phone bipped. Perhaps a TripAdvisor notification. An ancient-looking farmer walked past us, carrying a full basket on her back. His phone bipped again. “It’s about defending the Myanmar culture,” he said. At this, I was entirely silent. One more uncomfortable silence. I could almost hear him say it: We are silent. But he didn’t say anything. His face was stony.

  We walked toward a rocky hillside—the last ridge. Now Thomas did something drastic. He took out his phone and put on music. It was, of all things, the pop song “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz. In this moment of stress, it was American pop he had turned toward. Thomas clearly knew the lyrics, the ridiculously Californian lyrics. They rang out in central Myanmar. “I fell right through the cracks.”

  We were approaching an enormous construction site. A luxury resort was being built. I saw my chance to use a bathroom. We entered a world of wooden scaffolding, pouring concrete, gaping muddy holes in the earth. The scaffolding looked precarious. I found a beautiful modern toilet—which was not yet working. A sign warned against use. Another wooden shed it was. Sitting there, I had an impulse to take my own advice: I attempted a silence. I found myself listening to small birds, tiny rustlings, a wind. Then, those sounds were extinguished by a cement mixer’s guttural chug. Then I heard, faintly, Jason Mraz.

  The final ridge. Another blue-black cloud. Another rainstorm approaching. I zipped up my jacket, but Thomas’s was still hanging at the silent old man’s homestay: he had nothing to protect himself. I looked at him. His face was now without anxiety; it was the face of a stoic, settling in for protracted discomfort, protracted disappointment. He got out a plastic bag, carefully wrapped his phone up in it. The last thing we heard before he turned off his pop song was: “well open up your mind and see like me.”

  ALICE GREGORY

  Finished

  from The New Yorker

  This past summer, as Austrian glaciers melted and Swedish forests burned, the Swiss Air Force, which exists to protect a nation that hasn’t fought a war in 500 years, was tasked with supplying tens of thousands of gallons of water to herds of parched cows stranded in Alpine pastures. Meanwhile, in Glion, a tiny village roosting high above the city of Montreux and accessible by funicular, it was already above 70°F by 8:30 a.m., which is when classes begin at the Institut Villa Pierrefeu.

  To Viviane Neri, the school’s headmistress, the heat wave engulfing Europe came as a pleasant surprise. “We haven’t had a summer like this in a hundred years,” she told me. “It’s quite lucky.” She smiled and gestured graciously toward Lake Geneva, which, like the sky above it, was an oversaturated blue, as though photographed on expired film. Several women, some as young as 18, others in late middle age, could be seen scrambling, chamois-like, up the terraced hillside. An email, sent by the school a few weeks prior to their arrival, advised the women to “dress in good taste,” and they had interpreted the cryptic guidance with remarkable consistency. Their appearance—blow-dried hair, dry-clean-only dresses—suggested an abundance of wealth and time, both of which are de facto prerequisites of admission at the Institut Villa Pierrefeu, where the summer course lasts six weeks and costs an average of $30,000.

  Housed in a traditional chalet, built in 1911 for a Dutch baroness, the institute bills itself as the last finishing school in Switzerland. The prosperous canton of Vaud, where IVP is located, was at various times home to Charlie Chaplin, Zelda Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, and Vladimir Nabokov; it was also a sort of capital for establishments where, as Muriel Spark wrote in her final novel, The Finishing School, “parents dump their teenage children after their schooldays and before their universities or their marriages or careers.” In the 1920s, Lausanne alone boasted 45 such schools. Their advertisements in the Swiss Monthly, a long-vanished periodical dedicated to horoscopes and the autobiographies of amateur alpinists, ran amid ones for “dietetic specialties” and “colonial goods.” Some promised pastoral luxury (“large gardens on lake shore”), others a pedagogical focus on domestic science and modern languages. Unaccredited, expensive, and, typically, family run, Swiss finishing schools took the place of men’s university education for many wealthy Western European women with matrimonial ambitions. “It’s the same as the watch industry,” Neri’s son, who tends to the school’s business matters, has said. “If you want the highest quality, you stick with Swiss.”

  Institut Alpin Videmanette, whose alumnae include Princess Diana as well as her sons’ nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, closed in 1991, and Château Mont-Choisi, attended by France’s former First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and, reportedly, by Princess Elena of Romania, shut in 1995. Le Manoir, the alma mater of the British spy Vera Atkins, is now the world headquarters of the multinational food-packaging company Tetra Pak. The real estate these schools sat on was valuable, and the feminist movement all but obliterated demand for their offerings, as the domestic talents once suggestive of elegance and good breeding began to look more like instruments of oppression. Why learn how to run one’s home like a corporation if suddenly it was possible to run the corporation itself?

  This change was perhaps responsible for the discretion that is a hallmark of IVP, where one student told me that she was hiding from her friends the fact that she had come. Students spoke to me on the condition that I use only their first names, in keeping with the policy at IVP, which forgoes last names entirely. Like Switzerland’s military and banking strategies, IVP’s devotion to privacy borders on the neurotic. Though invited to spend a week attending classes, I was scolded on more than one occasion for photographing the chalet’s interior, for recording lectures, and for attempting to ascertain basic biographical facts about the school’s students, a group that Neri claims has included the daughters of presidents and prime ministers. For the most elite, true discretion is achievable. Neri will sometimes coach the daughters of sheikhs within their own palace walls.

  Toward the end of the 1970s, Neri said, IVP’s primarily European students were largely replaced by women from Latin America, India, the Middle East, Japan, China, and Russia. (A few years ago, one alumna, the art-collecting daughter of a Moscow oligarch, penned a widely mocked etiquette column for the Russian edition of Tatler, in which she advised her readers against hiring Filipina staff.) Of the 29 students present when I visited, one was a Canadian CEO and another an American mother of five; there were six young Chinese women, a few lawyers from India and Australia, a Nigerian chemical engineer, a marketing manager from Dubai, a Harvard Business School graduate from Honduras, and a handful of university students from countries that included Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico. The only three Europeans were an 18-year-old aspiring fashion designer from Portugal, a former Emirates flight attendant from Romania, and a Ukrainian cryptocurrency investor currently living in Singapore.

  The women, many of whom had attended MBA programs, were there not to learn how to make money but to acquire the gestures of having inherited it. The pursuit of such a goal might strike us as anachronistic, but the archetype of woman as family ambas
sador is as relevant as ever. During my time at IVP, Ivanka Trump’s name was never mentioned, but, in the students’ preemptive smiles and refusal to talk politics, it was impossible not to feel her presence.

  When I arrived at the Institut Villa Pierrefeu, a recent thunderstorm had stranded the receptionist in Paris and also disabled the area’s internet, which enhanced the school’s atmosphere of secluded obsolescence. Neri apologized for the mayhem as she led me into the house, which had parquet floors and a marble staircase. “See?” she said, pointing to a formal dining room, where the table was already set for lunch. “Everywhere is a classroom.”

  Neri, who has run IVP for nearly half a century, accessorizes with silk scarves, pearl earrings, and navy pumps. She speaks as fastidiously as she dresses. Averse to extemporaneous talk, she often apologized, more to herself than to me, it seemed, for going “off track.” My entreaties for her to continue along whatever conversational rail she had found herself on were always met with refusal. “No, no,” Neri would say. “I’m off track.”

  “Ah!” she cried, as we made our way into the sitting room, which was outfitted with gilded mirrors and Oriental carpets. “I told the girls not to put them this way!” She approached a celadon sofa and rearranged a series of neatly aligned pillows into a more spontaneous configuration. “We’re not in the army, after all.” She proceeded to lead me upstairs, tsk-tsking at a descending student, who, apparently, should have given me the banister.

  The idea of IVP’s curriculum is not, necessarily, to train women from developing countries in the mores of Western Europe but to expose students to the oddities and taboos of one another’s nations. In addition to learning how to clean marble, address a dowager duchess, and serve a luncheon, the students attend lectures devoted to the customs of 20 countries. In a 90-minute class on Nigeria taught by a Cordon Bleu–trained Canadian chef turned etiquette coach, I learned that, at a formal dinner in Lagos, appropriate topics of conversation include Benin bronzes and the local film industry. The Biafran War, it was emphasized, is best avoided. In a class on Mexico, we were warned that marigolds, red roses, and silver all make for inappropriate gifts (marigolds are morbid; red roses are lusty; silver, mined locally in Mexico, would fail to impress). As Neri says, “It’s better to learn from us than from your mother-in-law.”

  IVP offers classes throughout the year, but the summer faculty who were there when I visited included an Austrian florist, a Guatemalan etiquette consultant, and a former Nestlé communications director with a self-proclaimed passion for the work of the controversial social psychologist Stanley Milgram, known for his experiments in obedience. A man named Siegfried, who used to supervise mining conglomerates in Burkina Faso but whose business card now bears the name of a Zug-based private-equity company, was also hanging around. Neri casually explained his presence by saying that she was thinking of adding a class the following summer on the manners of Francophone West Africa, and Siegfried, a friend of her son’s, might, she thought, be capable of teaching it.

  One afternoon, John Robertson, a butler formerly employed by the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, who had just arrived in Europe after a seven-day transatlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2, gave a lesson on how to hire and manage staff. He wore monk-strap shoes, creased trousers, a blue-and-white-checked shirt with French cuffs, and a hat, which he removed upon entering the classroom and placed upon a coffee-table book about Alnwick Castle. The wall behind him glinted with small reflections cast by the many crystal-faced watches present in the room. Robertson began by outlining the “ten functions of a household,” which include security and groundskeeping. “Believe me,” he said, referring to household administration, which he recommends leaving to the butler, “this is nothing you want to be involved with.”

  Robertson’s raised eyebrows and perpetual half smile gave him an ironic appearance. He stressed the importance of having clearly defined domestic preferences that together would add up to something like self-knowledge. “How do you like your bed made up?” he asked. It sounded like a rhetorical question, and nobody answered. “Well, if you don’t know, then your housekeeper is going to do it however she learned how,” he said. Robertson provided the students with sample questions to ask a potential butler (“Where do you place the oyster fork?” “Can you make me a Martini straight up?”). A gardener should be able to tell you his favorite seed catalog, a housekeeper her preference among vacuum-cleaner brands. It would be wise, he said, to quiz a potential housekeeper on how she might clean, for example, a hardwood floor without stripping it of varnish. “Because it’s not just the cost,” he said with a sigh. “It’s the inconvenience.”

  Neri herself teaches a handful of classes. In one, on international titles and forms of address, she expressed outrage that once, at a press conference, President Obama had called the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, by her first name. Students learned that, when in Asia, one should never write on another person’s business card, and that, rather than provide one’s own at the beginning of the meeting, they should offer it at the end. Italy, Libya, and Afghanistan are all examples of countries with pretenders—individual aspirants to a long-toppled monarchy who must be addressed accordingly. Neri then walked the class through the 25 levels of peerage in the United Kingdom. “This is the type of thing you need to keep updated on,” she said.

  It was difficult to imagine such knowledge being remembered when the time came, if it ever did. But the women scribbled notes furiously, their Cartier bangles clinking. Later, by the pool, Toki, a 23-year-old from Nigeria living in London, insisted, gently, on the curriculum’s utility. “People notice,” she said. “I think most likely they wouldn’t say anything to you, but they’ll leave thinking, Wow, she’s really refined.” The Canadian CEO, with whom I spoke the following day, expressed a similar sentiment, though more anxiously. “There are unspoken rules in business and in life,” she said. “Our success is based at least a little bit on how much we violate them.” She paused and then added, “This is a very safe place for me to practice.”

  Her attitude was echoed by the instructors at IVP, who tended to present the outside world as a place of unrelenting menace, of career-ruining faux pas and ego-bruising mistakes. To believe them is to see life, like the surrounding high-altitude landscape, as precipitous. Pastry is “deadly” for carpets. Lilies, with their impolitely strong fragrance and orange pollen (“worse than saffron”), are to be avoided, as are, at cocktail parties, candles, which Neri described with a pained reverie suggesting personal experience with dozens of Savonnerie carpets disfigured by hot wax. “Unless,” she added, “you’re at the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.” Her students dutifully recorded the comment, failing to recognize it as a joke and interpreting it instead as useful advice for the type of person who might plausibly host drinks at a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

  Neri, who believes orange juice to be an “unimaginative” mixer (she prefers kiwi), explained that cocktail parties are “an efficient and economical way of simultaneously returning multiple favors,” and asked if anyone in the class had ever organized one. Vidhi, a 25-year-old lawyer from Nashik, India, had thrown one for the opening of an art exhibition curated by her sister; so had Christine, the mother of five, for the teachers at her children’s school in Minneapolis. Neri nodded approvingly. Daniella, the Honduran Harvard graduate, said, “Yes, I have. For my birthday!” Neri, aghast, raised her eyebrows. “Wow,” she said, appearing stricken. “I’ve never heard of that.”

  For the next hour, aided by diagrams and charts projected onto a screen, Neri proceeded to offer a litany of forcefully worded warnings. The table for the buffet should never be near the bar; the two are to be kept “as far away from each other as possible” to facilitate mingling. Hired help might be illiterate, so one should be certain to instruct staff verbally rather than with a printed schedule. A cocktail party for a hundred, hosted at the chalet, in Neri’s estimation would require two coatroom attendants (who, upon receiving a fur coat, should
affix the ticket number inside the garment rather than on the fur), at least two valets, an elevator attendant, two people working the kitchen, two for washing up, one maître d’hôtel, and six—“absolute minimum!”—waiters. The host ought also to notify the local police a few days in advance as to the potential for traffic jams, and hire two security-staff members. “Why do we need security here, anyway?” Neri asked, correctly divining the question that had been running through my head. “Isn’t this supposed to be a safe country?” She paused for what seemed like 10 full seconds. “Gate-crashers.” Tight security, she added, is especially necessary in the summer—“because people will come through the French windows, as you can imagine.”

  Neri added that one should plan to provide, among other things, two “surprise breads” and approximately 600 hors d’oeuvres. As for drinks, 30 bottles of champagne should suffice, but, along with some nonalcoholic options, one must also have on hand 4 bottles each of whisky, gin, and vodka “for the men who don’t like champagne.” Neri then accelerated the slide show, presenting a procession of structurally unsound canapés and encouraging a discussion about whether each appeared too large to be eaten in a single bite, as a canapé should be. Most of the tightly cropped photographs did not include forks or wineglasses, so it required some imagination to assess their scale. Before class let out, Neri invited the students to come to the front of the classroom and practice holding, in one hand, a cocktail napkin, an appetizer plate, and a champagne flute. “Come, come,” she beckoned. Mila, a 30-year-old who grew up in Guinea-Bissau, bravely volunteered. Neri showed her how to pinch the stem, palm up, between her ring finger and pinkie, slide the plate between her thumb, index finger, and middle finger, and then tuck the napkin under the plate and over her middle finger. All this was to be done with the left hand, leaving the right available for introductions. Mila absorbed the demonstration attentively and glanced up at Neri for a nod of encouragement before attempting the feat on her own. She aced it on the first try. “It looks more complicated than it is,” she said.