Last night I went to the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand for a talk on the changing diplomatic power of China. At the Q&A at the end, an older man walked stiffly to the microphone and introduced himself as from Richmond, Virginia. Now, it is rare to hear an American accent in Bangkok, and a rare pleasure to hear a Southern one, and I grinned as he drawled his question ("Ah perceeve theah is a lot of A-rabic unrest in South Asia. What does China think about all this?" Blink, blink. "I don't think they do.") and then was pleased when he sat down next to me, presumably too tired to walk all the way back to his seat.
After the talk, I turned to him and said, "So you're from Richmond?" hoping to hear a little bit more of that accent. Needless to say, he was delighted to talk.
It seems he "made a bit of money on a piece of land" and has been traveling the world. At 71, he's staying in the youth hostel in Bangkok, so I wouldn't say he's exactly going the gourmet route, and I admired him for taking off on his own and exploring. (He's been in Bangkok a month because he loves the street food.)
He also has so many of those lovely qualities of Americans -- earnest curiosity, assumption that everyone will like him, utter candor ("Ah tell you, ah'm not what ah used to be. Not just my knees...[thumps head] mah brain."), and a don’t-know-a-stranger willingness to engage.
About ten minutes into the conversation (my broken arm was a big hit: "Did your boyfriend do that to you?" ha, ha...ha?), he returned to the question he'd posed to the speaker and lamented he perhaps hadn't explained himself very well. It seems that he had lived in Egypt and Morocco twenty-five years ago, and since then he'd been alerted to the "Arab problem."
Islam was a violent religion, he said, and Arabs [nevermind the conflation] didn't have any respect for anyone but their own kind. He couldn't walk down the streets without getting hassled: everyone wanted to have sex with him. Because it costs something like $40,000 to buy a wife, many Arab men couldn't afford to get married until they were in their thirties; until then, they did it with each other. However, my friend assured me, he never let anyone butt-fuck him.
Deep breath. My American instinct (because I'm as American as my friend, with all the same no-problems-here characteristics) is to see his perspective, empathize, try to tease out what's honest conflict and what's bigotry and cant. But my own biases and suspicions have already kicked in: I begin to hear in his voice not the charming soft slur of the South but hundreds of years of racism and abuse. I hear it when he says "the Arabs" (he might as well be saying "the Blacks," or worse), and I hear it when he praises China for lining up anyone accused of stealing and shooting them in the head.
I am also experiencing feminist rage. Yeah, how about that, not being able to walk down a street without getting hassled? And what about $40,000 to buy a wife? Can we just take a minute and think about what it must be like to be a woman, a piece of property?
My friend sees I'm flustered. "Ah didn't mean to upset you," he says. "You're pretty."
My superficial analysis -- a theory I've applied to other American men of the same generation -- is that my friend experiences the world as revolving entirely around him. The "Arab problem" is derived from his personal discomfort; on the other hand, China is not a problem because my friend enjoyed his previous visits there so well. "You go to these 'English corners' and sit in a chair. Pretty soon, all these Chinese students from the university sit on the floor all around you, and you talk for an hour." (Ah, yes, you're the center of attention and everyone wants to speak your language. God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.) "At the end of the hour, I point to the prettiest girl and say, 'let's have lunch.' The next day all the guys say to me, 'how did you do that?'" It is good to be king.
But then I think, shit, isn't this the doctrine of feminism: the personal is political. Women often take their personal experience and then extrapolate it into a social concern; however, I might add that ideally this scenario works when the solution is for the common good, not the convenience of the individual. My friend admitted that he, too, needed a break from America: "Our government doesn't do a very good job anymore. They let dogs bark and people play their stereos all hours of the night. I had to get out because I couldn't sleep." My gut reaction is -- great, you're a fascist. My real reaction is, I don't know how to answer this question: where does my liberty end and yours begin?
Interestingly, for all our differences (there was no doubt by now we were on opposite sides of more than the Mason-Dixon line), he was better adept than I at acknowledging them and moving on. "I had to leave America, too," I said. "I couldn't live in the same country as George Bush." "Now isn't that interesting?" my friend said -- and he seemed really to mean it. It was interesting, but not worth getting all hot under the collar about.
I also was struck by how I didn't have the language to respond meaningfully to him. I am so used to talking to people who share my viewpoint that I'm startled to come across someone who has another, and I haul out my own cant and propaganda to counter. "Ah do believe yours is the majority view," my friend said when I started in on Iraq. He seemed nonplussed to be in the minority; he also seemed to have heard everything I was saying before. We didn't even have a foothold to start a meaningful conversation.
After an hour, I stood up to go. He was disappointed -- he didn't get too many opportunities to speak English, he said, and he liked me -- "a real lady athlete" -- and invited me for a drink. I said I needed to get home. "Husband?" he said. "Girlfriend?" The anger flares: my personal life, to say nothing of my sex life, is as none of his business as his was to the Arab pedestrians in Morocco. But of course he's not trying to be rude; he's trying to show some gentle affection and perhaps be a bit flirtatious, because he'd like the company and he is, after all, a stranger alone in a foreign city. I'm pulled in diametrical directions: sympathetic to my friend's sincere intentions but intolerant to their expression.
Which I guess is the nub of my disquiet this morning, still thinking about our conversation. I am intolerant. Not of the people and culture in other countries -- I do great with Thais and my international friends -- but of my own. I take offense easily, and I experience a kind of waterfall of white noise when I pick up on anything that strikes me as homophobic, racist, sexist. Trapped in my own generation and gender, I can't stand for any of the rules I recognize to be transgressed. (Is this the same as railing against barking dogs and loud steroes?) And I am burdened by the weight of my country's history. There is a line Humbert Humbert says in a poem to Lolita -- "Lolita, qu'est-ce que j’ai fait de ta vie?/Lolita, what have I done to your life?" -- that I think of whenever I encounter other Americans abroad and we are confronted by even the slightest suggestion that race and ethnicity might matter. America’s history of slavery and subjugation continues to reverberate, and it makes me squirm even in 2007, even in Bangkok, even in conversations that are ostensibly about something else.
