For the 2010-2011 Fulbright, I proposed spending time in Nanjing China, studying Tang and Song classic poetry and working with contemporary poets and artists.  My goal is to write these poems that draw from classic Chinese verse to capture part of the the modern world, hopefully exporting Westward the ideas that are significant to Chinese intellectuals today.  Here are the two samples I’ve finished:

Traveler’s Night
after 旅夜書懷 by DuFu

Sawtoothed, seemingly frozen,
The beachline and its grasses
In moonlight like combed snow
Twist with the force of wind and tide.
There’s my boat, as if abandoned,
A silhouette where the stars drop
Studding the hull while that lone mast’s
So-as-not-to-tip is awash in a sky
As fearsome as hail.  And the moon.

Stretched long by the river, it
Tries to drain into the ocean,
Leave its deep-space missives
High above.  Its sonar older than
Sea and ship and their hollowness,
Older than depth and emptiness,
So infinitely older than words for those
Or for cold-cutting starlight
That washes the field ghostly and
My ship.  And too, this brain of mine,
Washed all white.

And what sort of word-count
Sums up a man?  What’s easiest
Never changes, our ships are title
And stature, our mast’s been staked.
Mariners long sick with the North-star
Shortness of heart, spirits wan, eyes
Captured by the way a book’s pages turn
Frosty in moonlight (which they don’t,
really, not at all).  What could
The moon add to this, then,
Other than the old its age-old
edict of “DRIFT FOR ME,
.                                            DRIFT…”

I’ll add only the wilt by the water,
The blank echo of the hull.  All else -
The miles between this world
And that, the distance of Heaven
and Earth, already it’s full measure taken,
Whose notches are the bright rows
Of a million beached sea gulls.

Wayfarer’s Midnight Mooring

Moon’s down.  Now you look at its absence
In the blue-hued reaches above the dark city skyline
And fill with the sound of a single crow’s cawing.
Through blind alleys, down markets steel-shuttered
And still, sleepless as the frost-full sky, you
Move past car-lights not long since died.

The river maple seems stiff with autumn’s pall,
The riverwalk uneven and the river like coal slag
Are made for first frost’s ether, but the maple won’t
Bend.  Streetlights wink a certain road ahead and seem
To promise destinations though there is none, since
The possible stretches in all directions but that one.

Suzhou forgotten this could be, the haloed skyline
missing the moon.  Somewhere in the dark above the river
Could be that cold, cold mountain temple and that
Trembling could be the bell settling from the toll
Before this icy silence.  Tableau after tableau,
These empty streets line up like glass-eyed dominos.

The frost-streaked sky, trees like wire-lines, the circling
Falcon of time returns to your hanging hand with nothing.
On ruinous bridge you wait for someplace to go.
Just below I’ve moored my boat, and wondering at the tides
That travel through the city, watch for where
The moon had stood on my journey through the wild.

This is just a short excerpt of a full article now available on Eclectica.org.

The walk back to the resort was 3km long. All around me the dry banana trees sweltered, their broad leaves whipped to strips by the wind and hanging limply. I had just passed a brick bunker recently repainted and emblazoned with the slogan “Working Harder for Better Power.” It was such a strange thing to contemplate, the power company deciding the best message to give was “We’ll try harder.” It sounded like something a deadbeat dad would say.

The same site was repeating itself: towering green, weeds tall and thick as a wall of smoke, the air heavy with the smell of baking grass. Borneo in August.

All that green in sunlight fuming

I had come to see the apes of the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, but found instead an observation deck packed with sunburned shoulders and expensive cameras on tripods. Ecotourism is huge on Borneo, a fact I’d not known. Another fact unknown to me was how well-known the centre is in the UK, where a high-profile charity secures the pounds and pence that keep Sepilok open. I watched two apes fish chunks of banana from a plastic drum far out on a feeding platform, the crowd gasping whenever one of them slipped into a lazy swing to fetch a fallen morsel, then left.

That had been in the morning, but now I was walking back from the highway that connects this forested back road with Sabah’s vast plots of seemingly unpopulated farms and light industry.

Around a bend, I could see a long building. Wallless on one side, I made out low tables in its shadowy interior, and someone seated. The sign said in English Ming Ho Industries, but the Chinese lettering underneath included the word for “shop.” Coming up the driveway, I could see shelves of goods inside. As I walked in, I interrupted the conversation of the man I’d seen seated and the woman behind the counter. Passing by, I noticed another man had laid himself across the line of benches, napping. They were all Asian, which I didn’t notice until later, but in Malaysia should have immediately taken note of.

I walked to the cooler at the back of the store, and they resumed talking. I heard the woman say in Mandarin “He looks so sweaty!” Bringing a cold bottle of Plus100, a curiously carbonated energy drink, to the counter, I asked her in Mandarin, “Do I really look that sweaty?”

Thin, tan, hair pulled in a tight pony tail, she gaped at me. “Huh?” She didn’t seem to want to choose any language to answer with, so just said a second time, “Huh?!?”

I repeated the question, and the man at the table started shaking his head animatedly, “TingBuDong, TingBuDong” – ‘I don’t understand what your saying.’

“I’m sorry, I must have an accent because I live in Taiwan,” I said, giving them a chance to save face by changing the topic. They started asking questions: How long have I been in Taiwan, why could I speak Mandarin so well, the usual barrage I could expect from everyone, taxi cabs to call girls. We started conversing comfortably, all of us shaky at times, chancing here and there across a gap in our Mandarin. It was none of our native tongues.

When the seated man praised my Chinese, I said any average Malaysian is far more impressive with the variety of languages they can speak.

“I want you to listen to what I’m about to tell you,” the woman said, leaning her narrow torso over the counter to stare at me. “The Malay, you know, people from Malaysia, aren’t like that. They can just speak Malay, and a little English. Some can’t even speak that! It’s the immigrants that are really multilingual.”

“Sounds like America,” I laughed, trying not to look uncomfortable at the subject of ethnic differences. “Or anywhere, really.”

“You’re right!” she said, “The Chinese are no better. They only speak huayu,” the term Malaysian Chinese use for Mandarin. The word Mandarin speakers use for the language is different everywhere you go. In Taiwan, we call it guoyu, the national language, and in Hong Kong it’s called putonghua, common speak. On the mainland, I hear it called baihua, white words. The word she chose, huayu, is harder to translate. It references China’s formal republican name. It made me think of exile.

She turns to the man at the table and tells me he’s Cantonese. Before he can add anything more on the subject of how different we all are, a tall white man, tank-top soaked with sweat, hurries to the counter and begins speaking the owner in fluent Malay. As she gets him his order, he tells me his name is Colin and that he’s working at the Rainforest Research Center across the road. He’s here studying a specific species of tree that’s been all but wiped out, save patches of protected land around Borneo. He points out one of his trees in the distance, it’s spindly trunk rising far above the canopy, alone in the blue sky. It’s branches stretch out unevenly, sparse like dry-brush clouds in a Chinese ink painting.

Colin's trees of particular interest"We work on ecology, replanting the sections of forest that have all been logged out, and on the Heart of Borneo project."

“The what?”

“The Heart of Borneo project is where Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei are working to link the protected areas in central Borneo together in one continuous ecological zone.” The effort would ensure 200,000 square km of forest would remain safe. The WWF website boasts that it is the “only place remaining in Southeast Asia where tropical rainforests can still be conserved on a grand scale.”

“Sounds difficult, politically.” I wondered what the shop owner thought of Indonesians or the Bruneian.

“Right now they’re just mapping the territory, so that’s a ways away still.” He was impatient for his change, and I could tell he wanted to leave, but I kept asking questions to keep him. I told him I was here working on a story about the Orangutan refuge, and he responded with the same unimpressed air I’d gotten the whole of my trip.

We talked about the shop, and the owner (whom Colin had introduced to me as Ms. Zhu) interrupted occasionally in either Mandarin or Malay to ask what’d just been said, grasping at the thread of the conversation. Colin mentioned his Dad spoke Mandarin, and would sit out here drinking beer and talking to Ms. Zhu all night.

“Does your father work at the rainforest research center as well?”

“No. Occasionally I need to go back to England to do part of my research at my university, and at those times my parents come to take care of my wife and daughter.” I looked at him skeptically. “My wife is a non-citizen, even though she was born right near here in Sabah.”

“Huh?” I said, and Ms. Zhu laughed.

“Well, you know that citizenship in Malaysia is traced by the bloodline…” I shook my head. In my research online, the closest thing I found to a discussion of citizenship was a note never to bring it up. “Right, well, the way it works is, if your parent is a citizen, then you’re a citizen, too. But if your parents aren’t, then even if you are born here and spend your whole life here, you aren’t one, either. This can go on for generations, obviously.”

“What about your ancestor’s countries?”

“That’s what makes it really complicated. See, my wife’s parents are Filipino, but since the Philippines still claim Sabah legally belongs to them, they have no embassy here. So, there’s no way for her to get a passport to leave and come back, or even register as a citizen. She can’t go anywhere.”

“So, wait, she just falls through the cracks?”

“Not just her. There are 1.4 million other people, actually. None of them can leave Sabah. They have no nationality. It’s a big issue. Of course, there are many people who say they can get them citizenship, papers, a passport. Mostly they just take your money and then nothing happens.”

“So they’re non-citizens, or, what, citizens of no-where?”

“They’re citizens of here, obviously.” Colin prickles at my comment, and in that moment I can see in him the trace of long, frustrating debates in humid wood-paneled rooms.

I finally let up long enough for him to excuse himself. He grabbed two large, sweating bottles of Plus100 and jumped into a worn-looking blue pickup and drove clamorously away.

I turned back to Ms. Zhu. We talked about the place, Colin’s father, the weather. I finished my drink, and bid them good day.

As I walked, I imagined how Ms. Zhu would explain the situation Colin finds his family in. I should have asked about her passport, and the Catonese man, too. But the next morning, I flew out, back to my own life in Asia.

The concept of foreign nationality never much mattered to me, nor does it seem to matter to most of the expats and traveler’s I’ve known. But I can’t even imagine the strangeness of being born into expatriation, affiliated with a people you’ve never known, kin to a country you’ve never seen. How impersonal identity can become.

In smokey bars, I have a habit of telling a quote from the movie Casablanca. Rick’s just been bidden by the French police captain to sit and drink with the two SS officers that arrived in Morocco that morning. In the background, foreign nationals of a dozen countries are drinking, gambling, hooking up and getting grifted. Everyone is stuck in the same burning desert limbo. The Nazi, removing a note pad, says sharply, “And what, Mr. Rick, is your nationality?”

Rick’s face is a total deadpan. “I’m a drunkard.”

Captain Renault speaks quickly, trying to smooth over Rick’s unflinching response. “That makes Rick a citizen of the world. ”

Miles of inscrutable forest

Now on Eclectica: Tourist Trap - January 2010

I was stuck in the eco-tourism spot called Sepilok, home of the Orangutan Rescue. It’s a terrible fate to be broke in a tourist zone, but one that brought me closer to the actual substance of the place, its rhythms and attitudes. This piece details some of the people I met on the edge of what we call a wonder.

Read the full text article at Eclectica Magazine.

Read an excerpt, Citizen of the World (around 1,600 words).