A Triptych of Thoughts

On Writing, Discourse, Travel, and More

Featured image: Jérôme Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1494 – 1505

Women’s Work

There’s a certain set of unspoken, generalized expectations governing women’s writing, centered mainly on the themes and topics that characterize so-called women’s fiction (the question of why there isn’t an equivalent genre known as “men’s fiction” has been tackled elsewhere, but suffice it to say, women’s fiction is a legitimate, important, and influential part of the current book market). There’s no concrete definition of women’s fiction, but like pornography, you know it when you see, or rather read, it. Chick-lit, but more ostensibly serious and meaningful. Romance, but more ostensibly feminist. Women are expected to write uplifting stories of empowerment, of an inspiring, phoenix-like rise from the ashes of their marginalization. Women’s stories are expected to have happy, karmic endings, the villains vanquished, disarmed, receiving their just desserts courtesy of the newly-empowered protagonist. The characters fall along a clear binary; there is good and bad, the good only slightly more complex than the bad, which deserves nothing more than a caricature of its motivations, the real why behind the evil left unanswered and unexamined.

But an in-depth interrogation of darkness is not the exclusive domain of the masculine. Women can write about war and dictatorship and torture and murder and every other expression of the worst humanity has to offer. Women can examine the psyches of terrible men, either out of mere curiosity or a desire to deconstruct and expose. We can even tell their stories, channel their voices through us. We can write ambiguous endings. We can let our villains off scot-free. We can write humans, in all their complexity, not stale and static archetypes. We can—and should—be free to explore all the messy nuances of the human condition, not just as women writers, but as writers, period.

We're All Living in Amerika

Every so often, one hears or reads comments praising New York City for being wholly unlike any other city in the world. “Nowhere else can you find [fill in the blank here]." From corner stores to global cuisine, according to some, New York City is unique among world cities for having these things.

I love New York. I’d live there if I had a reason to (cost of living is too high to not have a reason right now). But in these attempts to appear enlightened, the interlocutors inadvertently betray a certain insularity and parochialism inherent in much of American culture. Georgian food outside of Georgia? Go to any major city in the former Soviet Union. Surinamese food outside of Suriname? Amsterdam’s your place. Corner stores? Berlin has them, though they’re not called bodegas. My own neighborhood in Dubai, a bubble within a bubble, boasts various types of Indian (north, south, and everything in-between), Pakistani, Russian, Mexican, Japanese, Filipino, Lebanese, Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese cuisine (among others). Rats, unfortunately, are also a feature of most major cities around the world. These purported quirks of New York are more common than the proponents of the city’s unparalleled uniqueness would like to think.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel like a detached outsider looking longingly at New York’s cultural offerings. Because while other cities, American and international, do have scenes of their own, none can really compare to that of New York. So perhaps both things can be true, that many Americans do have these insular and parochial attitudes that conflict with a certain cosmopolitan self-image they wish to project, but that New York itself can also be quite unique. Just not in certain minor and fairly inconsequential ways.

Socialism With Colonial Throwback Characteristics

I recently returned from my seemingly annual trip to Southeast Asia, where I escaped the worst of the Northern Hemisphere winter. Thailand was beautiful as always (shout-out to Chef Rock in Panwa, Phuket, and his amazing mac-and-cheese) and George Town, Penang (Malaysia) is a place I have to return to for a longer period of time. But Laos gave me the most to think about.

Sleepy and landlocked, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic is surrounded on all sides by neighbors famous and infamous. I expected similarities to Cuba, the only other communist country I’d visited and as such, a natural point of comparison. And while there were some similarities, most notably the clear orientation of the local economy towards tourism, what struck me most was the fact that, at least within the highly-developed touristic center of Luang Prabang, the only traces of communism—the idea, the system—were the obligatory red flags, emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, hanging from every quite freely-operating commercial establishment. In Cuba, you were made acutely aware that you were in one of the world’s last socialist states; not so in Laos. Outside of the touristic center, though, on the road to the airport, things got stereotypically communist fast—an elaborate factory façade decorated with Party and national flags, a cemetery presumably for fallen Pathet Lao fighters and Party members. The airport itself that sold hammer-sickle flag pins, thick pamphlets detailing the country’s economic program, and curiously enough, a book in German about the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But when you walk the streets of the historical center of Luang Prabang, you feel as if you’re in a French colonial Disneyland. French tourists, old and young, fill the bars, restaurants, and shops, perhaps drawn by the enduring myths and mystery of l’Indochine française, a novel or travelogue they read once, stories from family and friends. The architecture spans the 19th and 20th centuries, much of it impeccably refurbished, well-deserving of any and all UNESCO designations. The ever-present French conversations, the interior walls decorated with old photographs and magazine covers. It’s easy to imagine that you’ve stepped back in time, and it’s this very sensation that brings the tourists, and most importantly, their money, to a country as poor as Laos. It’s socialism sustained by a certain misplaced nostalgia, however inadvertent, however latent, however unintentional.