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

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 in 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.

Part 1

This massive shrine complex shared the block with our first Ryokan.

The first night, we stayed at the Three Sister’s Ryokan Annex.  Essentially a bed-and-breakfast, the ryokan has been a Kyoto mainstay for centuries.  I spent a morning in Taipei online and on the phone working the details out.  I tend to just land in a city and see what I can find (very often love hotels).  When we rolled our luggage over the thin carpet and down a tight, crooked hallway, the uneven ways different sections of the flooring seem to have been hitched together really made me think “Annex.”  But the guesthouse, hidden from the street by a typically Japanese garden path, had its charms.  Outside our room, with careful hands they’d filled the patch of grounds that held the water pipes and air conditioners with bushes and spritely plants, making the space into a simple Japanese garden.  Where the rain gutter emptied, a stoney pond would fill and flow below a little bridge.

Without knowing it, I’d hurriedly picked a upscale ryokan from internet reviews that happened to be in one corner of the block occupied mostly by the enormous Heian Shrine and it’s expanses of public gardens.  Our ryokan was tucked just behind the massive concrete retaining wall that contained the parks and ran right up to the road.  The forest canopy hung just overhead and as we trudged with our luggage the coolness of the dark interior poured down.  I took the above picture that night, before we knew what the Heian Shrine was or realized that we were sleeping in the crook of its side.  So much Kyoto right away.

The Hakusasonso Pagoda

The next day, on the way to the first UNESCO site we were to see, the Ginkakuji, we stopped by the Hakusasonso Villa, former home of famous gibon-painter Kansetsu Hashimoto.  The website boasted a five-stage garden, but in mid-summer, the lush greens we found were pretty neglected and sprouting disorderly.  Meret took solace, though, in learning first-hand that Japanese tourists amble, get in your way, and in general putz even when at home. Everyone was busy taking their personal best shots at garden pictures, thirty or so people crammed in the garden of a former artist trying to look past one another.  Tripods on the stone bridge and close-ups of blossoms.  The museum, a small space with perhaps twelve of the great artist’s rough sketches, galley copies, and unfinished works, was a real disappointment.  The stone pagoda (above) was the highlight despite being at the very entrance.  Also pictured is a young Japanese guy, who kicking the moss and milling around, refused to get out of my shot of a stone lantern.

A lantern tucked into a corner of the garden, and Oblivious-san doing his thing.

The former residences were first temple halls. Now, they're UNESCO-groomed and empty.

The Ginkakuji is one of Kyoto’s biggest tourist attractions - the impressive mountain villa was once the retirement home of the 8th Muramachi Sogunate.  For a Zen temple, the buildings are impractical.  It was a common practice to convert an aristocratic villa into a Zen temple after their death, and Kyoto is studded with grand mansions reimagined as a final karmic booster shot to help ensure the military man wouldn’t reap the rewards of a life of politics and end up reborn as a bedbug, earwig, or stubborn case of ringworm.  The main feature of the Ginkakuji is the Silver Pavilion, pictured here under construction.

Ginkakuji's Silver Pavilion

Ginkakuji's Zen Sand Sculpture

The most striking thing about Ginkakuji is the sand sculpture, which achieves a near-epic definance of nature in the way only Zen can pull off.  Over the field of ribbed, cured sand, hornest had dug dozens of burrows, and were swarming noisily just abpve the surface, circling looping [aths around one another over hole after hole.  It had the feeling of a cloud of flies attacking a table cloth at a picnic.  The sand they dug out wet was brown and made a striking contrast.  I'm pictured making notes in my book.

Your Author, Authorin' Stuff

At Ootoyo-Jinju, a Shinto shrine, we prayed to the mouse and monkey spirits for wealth, but in a misunderstanding, I ended up getting an excess of spare change rattling around in my pockets instead of the vast wealth I’d expected.  An inexact art.  Here’s Meret drinking lucky water while holding a bottle bought from a vending machine down the lane from the temple, which is a special tourist moment and pretty much priceless.

Meret Drinks of the Sacred Well

The temple itself was really more a village of shrines, each very house-like with gates and fences.  To ring the bell and pray, you need to step into a personal interior.  In Taiwan, Taoist shrines are sticky with incense grime and made from bits of the tile and plaster that goes into the apartment buildings.  Inside, the Taoist idols have bright plastic faces, and along with their gold-threaded brocades and wigs made of real hair, have a slightly creepy lost-in-the-attic-at-night feel.  At Ootoyo-Jinju, moss was growing over the mouse’s worn granite claws, seeds were stuck in the letters of the milestone, and trees leaned against the wooden houses.  The impression was of the natural world entirely apart and exceptional from humanity.

The main shrine, to the mouse, at Oootoyo-Jinju

The first 24 hours in Kyoto, discovering its canal-side paths and fields of slate-grey temple roofs, defined the city for me later.  Cool for June, the streets and shops all neat and well-in-order.  A city at peace.