While hovering over a strip of islands so small they aren't bothered to be named on the informational flight map, the man next to me translates his Vietnamese paper.
"See this guy. He's a good guy. He's a doctor and he's going to jail," he points to a picture of a man flanked by soldiers. Summing up the situation he says, "Communists stupid!" He spits more than says the words.
He generously shares mandarins and homemade sweets with me throughout the flight. He not excited to sit for 14 hours and, as the only other person in the row, I'm his only target for conversation.
He starts one by interrupting my typing. He tells me he has seven years worth of prisoner of war stories.
"You can write that!" he gestures to my screen.
I've been trying to write a blog entry for weeks, and used the flight time to try and hammer it out. He has mistaken me for a professional writer. I kind of like that.
"Bang bang bang," he explains further, firing an imaginary gun, "they capture me."
His accent is so thick we make ourselves understood mostly in hand gestures. He takes me to be Australian and thinks my parents are crazy for choosing to live in America.
"Nice place to work, visit, but I never live there."
He arrived in Australia by boat. I think he explained that he made two attempts. I lost part of the conversation while I imagined getting back on that tiny boat knowing the hair-raising journey that lay ahead; unsure if you'll be turned away again. That is, if you reach your target. The seas in that area aren't forgiving. You wouldn't want to try a third time. Luckily or unluckily, my comrade in air was able to use his history as POW to pass immigration.
"I write a story on paper, they let me in. That's it. Simple."
He continues to expound on the stupidity of communist countries, proudly pointing out there are only four left. He gestures wide, encompassing his unseen countrymen:
"We have our freedom!"
He has lived in Melbourne for nearly 30 years, but clearly kept his ties.
"How many pages that be?" he asks, pointing at my unorganized paragraphs on the screen, holding his fore finger and thumb apart just enough to hold 200 pages.
"Too long!"
He laughs at his own joke. He goes back to his reading. I go back to my typing.
I feel like I missed an opportunity in not using the 14 hours to chat with a man so interested in sharing his experiences. I should have asked questions and showed interest and encouraged his monologue. But ten hours into my 32 hours of travel, and not having slept the night before, I just couldn't muster the hand gestures. Not to mention that I just finished reading Every Man in this Village is a Liar: An education in war by Megan Stack. I'd had my fill of war stories.
Stack relates her role in reporting on various Middle East conflicts from 9/11 to the bombing of southern Lebanon in 2006. She was adventurous, disillusioned, disheartened, and in danger. It is an intense read. One account follows her as she dodges bombs on a coastal road south of Beirut. The journey ends at a village that was only seconds ago laid to waste. The town was strewn with injured, dead, and dying. The damage is so bad the red cross can't move the ambulances to those in need. They crawl and stumble over the glass and rubble strewn streets. The journalists' professional facades fail and they run to help the inhabitants, mostly women and children who, Stack implies, were intentionally encouraged to stay put by political entities set on making their cause stronger.
After reading this passage, I lifted my head from the pages to take a break from the immense pressure this description lays on you. The happy weekend travelers who shared my train car were on their way to Melbourne to visit family and friends.
"Thanks grandma," I heard, and,
"Tickets please!"
People going about their everyday business completely oblivious to the fact that we had just escaped a war zone.
They probably are oblivious, I thought cynically. How many people here know someone who have ever remotely dealt with these sorts of issues?
I thought back over the people I've met who fit the category. Stories of amazing life struggles. Most of which are not "stories" as in they happened in the past, but are "stories" as in developing plot lines. People who accept miserable compromises to gain a slight advantage. People who have no other choice than to make due. Some, like my Vietnamese friend on the plane, will find a way out. Others will be exactly where they are today.
For the rest of their lives.
These are not nameless people on heart-wrenching TV commercials. These are people I know.
This is essentially Stack's message as I understand it: America's political actions are affecting real people. She helps us to know them like she did, so they are relatable individuals instead of faceless grouped entities.
* * *
My previous blog never came together because I couldn't make it anything other than what it was - a complaint-fest. My problems are slight and seem selfish to even mention as compared to those I'm trying to describe, but for the sake of elaboration, and because it was nearly finished, I will:
In perusing the Heywood DSE records, I learned that blackberries bushes are hunted down and exterminated with pesticides. That's right: good, sweet, tasty, fun-to-pick-on-a-lazy-summer-afternoon blackberries are a weed. This was yet another example of things that I think about as "good" or "innocent" but are problematic for Australia. Not just a problem, but actively harmful: i.e. causing extinction.
I became fixated on this realization. Think about it for a minute: you are in a place so totally foreign that anything you recognize is hurtful; anything familiar is imported, a stranger, and in some circles, highly unwelcome. This realization begins to weigh on you until you start to think that you too are a weed, a stranger, an unwelcome thing. After all, you are just another immigrant in a country that simply cannot support a large population. You are part of the problem.
What can you possibly do to counteract your "immigration footprint", you ask? Maybe be the best at what you do professionally…?
"Then I will be contributing, right?" you may think hopefully.
Well, any job you take is an opportunity taken from an Australian citizen. Any child you mentor, any volunteer activity you pursue, ANYTHING you attempt, will be done with a different view of the world. Not that those views are wrong, but they are decidedly wrong for Australia. And in a country that is still struggling to find its unique identity (and save it's flora and fauna from foreign invaders), you are only mixing the pot.
I just learned, literally two seconds ago, you can't compost fruit because you encourage the habitats of parasitic insects like the European wasp. I cannot describe the frustration at learning that something you think is a good habit is actually bad. Everything has to be re-learned. Everything!
Unfortunately, complaining about this subject didn't seem to make a very good blog. Especially while reading Every Man. Stack devotes a chapter in the book to describing a similar "I'm such a foreigner" feeling. This made me feel less alone, but not particularly better.
* * *
The difference between Stack's experiences of hardship and those of the people she describes is that at the end of the book, she changes assignments. Her war time experience was temporary, while the people she met cannot leave. It is their home. Even if they manage to leave, they are foreigners not by choice, but by displacement.
Us travelers by choice, we strangers in foreign lands, we choose to be where we are. You can get close, gain an understanding, but you can never know the country or the situations like those who live with it everyday. You cannot understand the endless, continuous, weighing struggle to put one foot in front of the other while having mud, proverbially or actually, slung in your face.
For my part, I was reminded, with a swift kick in the pants, that anything I face pales in comparison.
Stack makes no pretense at having an explanation for the mayhem she encountered. One desperately wishes that she will end with some nuance of hope for the future, but she does what journalists do: presents the facts, albeit with a more personal view than generally allowed in the newspapers. But it's her perceptive and comprehensive view of reactions on the ground that provide a captivating narrative. Really captivating. Raw reporting without the impersonal angle; the people she knew, the things she perceived as she saw it. I didn't sleep for days as I hung on every written word.
Everyman in this village is a liar: An education in war
Megan Stack, 2010
Scribe Publications
ISBN-13: 978-0767930345
