Clearing Brush - or - Pirates of the Caribbean 2

            I’ve spent hours in our garden since we’ve returned, clearing brush, as George Bush used to call it, pulling out the giant weed plants that have sprung up since we left. (Note for the next year abroad: black plastic cover.) It’s about the most intellectual thing I can muster up right now, though I have a deal of work to get started on, and I have managed in quick spurts to do things in my office at school.

            Everything is very familiar here, almost as if I lived here for eight years already. I recognize people, and places, and I know my way around completely. But I haven’t remembered how to be here, quite. It’s slightly disorienting, because I have a routine I struggled to lose that I need to acquire again, even as I also work to hold on to some of the perspective I gained in Indonesia. I haven’t lost any ambition, I don’t think, but I hope I’ve lost some of the angst about it. Perhaps my reluctance to commit to re-entry has to do with a concern that the whole ocean of my previous life will surround me as soon as I dive in. So I’ve just been dangling my feet, sometimes pulling them out and retreating to the garden if the water gets too unwelcoming. There, I watch the weed free places grow, taking spatial satisfaction in doing work that I would have, two months ago, paid someone $2 a day to take care of, and my body is sore, from squatting and pulling and lifting and digging, those physical tasks I was protected from as an expatriate elite in a servant culture.

            Seamus the other day described return as like Pirates of the Caribbean 2 – “the first one was so great, and you get so excited about the second one, you build it up, and you think about it, and you rush out to see it, and it turns out it just isn’t as good. It’s a little disappointing.” I wouldn’t describe my return like that – I don’t feel disappointed, for example, in the same way Seamus is feeling, because Laura and I have been welcomed home by our friends with enthusiasm and curiosity, and I am glad to be here, but I understand the sensation of strangeness, when you return to a place that you know and it turns out things have shifted a little, but you can’t pin down how.  Those shifts must feel a lot larger for my kids.

            People talked about reverse culture shock as a phenomenon of return from a year like this, and I believed it, but I didn’t know what it meant. It took me far longer to get my sleep back to its neurotic normal rhythm this time, so that was part of it. There is nothing like a sense of disgust at American excess (unless I eat the whole meal) or disdain at how we do things here. It’s a more personal experience than culture shock in Indonesia was: there, it was simply a sense of exhilarating displacement, a lack of clarity about how to physically move around spaces I had to map from scratch in my head. There was discomfort and uncertainty, but of course there was, because nothing was familiar. Here, I am in a place I supposedly know how to be in, and where everything is familiar, and it feels like it should be normal to be home. And so far, it isn’t quite, though the sensations are becoming less strange and more pleasant as the days continue, two weeks after return, as the garden becomes cleaner, as the piles of garden waste grow, as friends aren’t surprised to see me again. I know this place, and to be honest I can’t pin down, quite, what makes it feel so weird. But I feel it in my body.

            I’ve connected a little with a group of Middle Eastern students who are part of a program at MSU I used to help organize – I delivered a lecture to them on Monday, and met with them on a couple of other occasions; they are smart driven students from parts of the world that will need them to be on, now, as sweeping changes move across the Middle East. A Bahraini student was expelled, just as her course of study was completing, because she protested against the royal family. An Egyptian student stood in Tahrir Square in Cairo, helping edge out Mubarak. A Yemeni student complains because no one is paying attention to the 5 month long revolution against a president who has been an ally to the United States in the “War on Terror,” a phrase I can only type in quotation marks.  And of course sitting in the middle of it all is the Palestinian-Israeli quagmire. Talking to them, in my bucolic, green, spacious, wealthy home city, reminds me of how deeply connected my life is to the lives of these students, to the lives of my former students in Indonesia. Perhaps that is the basis of my sense of displacement upon return; perhaps I brought those spaces with me, and I am trying to understand them, overlay them on this space, recognize them together, try to figure out what those connections are. That’s a long project, and it will happen again when I step into a classroom, or go to a conference, and at times and places I cannot even anticipate.

            I need to go clear some brush.            

Home

We've been home for week now, though I have been away again, four days in DC to help next year's Fulbrighters get ready for their year, something we didn't have last year.It was quite pleasant, with a coincidental overlap with my brother Duncan, who was in DC on Tuesday, and whom I hadn't seen for two years.
I got stuck in Denver last night, because my plane sustained hail damage, not a bad deal because my parents live in Denver, so I spent the night with them. Now I'm at the airport waiting to board.
We had the most marvelous spontaneous greeting after we arrived home last Thursday. Word got out that we were back, and within an hour Seamus was off with friends, Graham had a gaggle of friends going through his new treasures, and Laura and I were drinking one of the many beers that showed up with our greeters. It was great, even after 26 hours of travel and ridiculous jet lag.
On Tuesday I gave a 3 minute address at the Indonesian Embassy, during which I was actually heckled by the Indonesian Ambassador. (He yelled out, after I greeted the crowd in Indonesian and thanked him in particular, that he had no idea what I just said. It was quite funny). I realized, as I helped prep next year's grantees, that I had a lot to say, and a lot of ideas about the process and about getting around in the country. When I spoke at the Embassy, I plugged the work I hope to continue doing writing workshops in Yogyakarta, as well as just praised the program.
There is no doubt micro-diplomacy like this works, and works well. As I said n my talk, my children will be lifelong lovers of Indonesia, and I'll never see the world the same either. I'm wary of using words like 'transformative' - maybe I'm too cynical - but it's a different world for me in some ways. On a small level, when I am driving on a road where the speed limit is 25 miles an hour, and it's a wide road, and there are no other cars, I have to study the speedometer the whole time or soon I'm at 40 miles an hour, my instinct from Indonesia to make up for time I have already post or am about to lose. And everything engenders visual flackbacks: the water cascading down the side of the highway after a DC downpour brings up the road, outside our house, when it would become a river.
Last night I went to dinner with my parents and my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew, Cupcake, and I ate the entire plate I was served, a massive hamburger and French fries and onion rings, for reasons that are not clear to me, except for old habit. It was quite gross really, enough food for 2 or 3 people, at the portions I've become used to, and it helped explain the general girth of my fellow citizens, which is one of the first things you notice upon return. I felt sick for about 3 hours.
I'm so glad to be home though, I can say that much. And I think I'm over jet lag. But the reverse culture shock, I suspect, has only just begun. My plane, it appears, is boarding. Mari.

Fourth of July

We're in Siem Reap right now, the home base for Angkor Wat tourism. We got robbed on Saturday, at the main place, Angkor Wat, lost a pile of money, but recovered quickly because the atm card showed up, and because the place is spectacular, giant beautiful temple after giant beautiful temple, evocative and amazing even with the hordes of tourists everywhere, and the people hawking.
     We've been three weeks on the road now, after leaving Indonesia, two week in Vietnam and one in Cambodia. Funny thing about travelling like this, after a year in a community like Salatiga, is that it seems like a rock skipping across the surface of a very deep pond, only it never sinks. As soon as we arrived in Hanoi, it felt like we were on a tourist program, and everything felt a little pre-ordained. You have to work hard, in a place like Vietnam, to not get sucked into the program, but the program flattens everything. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me after living for a year in Salatiga, where there were no tourists, ever. I learned a lot about Vietnam, and now about Cambodia, but very little about Vietnamese or Cambodians. Of course I cannot speak Vietnamese or Cambodian (I could never speak Vietnamese, I am convinced. Impossible to hear those tonal distinctions), so that makes it harder. Still, it has been incredible to visit these places, and I am really glad that we had this opportunity.
    We leave here on Wednesday morning, fly through Singapore, pick up our bags and my machete there, and leave from Singapore at 6 AM Thursday morning, home home home. We'll be back by Thursday afternoon. It's a strange thing to write that, like I could make dinner plans in Bozeman for the weekend (this is not a hint, by the way. I don't know if I will be able to move when I get home). It's just so odd, so surreal, to think about home, about Bozeman, about our life there, about how things just get turning again, cycles, habits, frames of mind. I can't wait to see my friends again, and I'm even ready to get back to my job, but I also am not sure what any of that means.
     I will write more in this blog after I get home, more reflections about returning, about the year, about the things that I have learned taking my family away. As it has been before, I will write it mostly for myself, to process the experience. Only I have loved that people have read this too, and it has changed the way I write it, and I never thought I could sustain a blog, or enjoy writing one, and I loved it. So if you are one of those people who reads this when I write it, or check it every now and then, thank you. I have been grateful for the chance to share this year with you. I don't know what it looks like as a narrative arc, from this end. Maybe someday I'll read the whole thing again, and see. I don't know if anyone will care about what I have to say, once I get home. In any case, thanks for reading this far. It's a lot of pages, and if you'd seen it in book form I don't think you would have picked it up. So I am glad that I tricked you.
    Today, the fourth of July (they have the fourth of July here too, but they don't capitalize the F), we are taking a break from temple hopping, which we've been doing in the jungle heat for two days, and will do again tomorrow. We slept in, we'll do some laundry (i.e. have someone else do our cleaning), wander around Siem Reap a little, eat some more food (Cambodia does meat really well), ride bikes, maybe go to a silkworm farm, just stuff like that. I hope you have a lovely Fourth, or, if you're not in the US, a good fourth. See some of you soon. See the rest of you when I see you. If you're in Indonesia, I miss you already. If you're in the United States, I can't wait to bore you. Trust me, we will be insufferable companions for about three months, and if I were you, I would avoid me. Cross the street if you see me coming. Pretend not to be home when I stop by. Maybe this is old habit already. Soon, though, one of you will be saying, as I launch into another paragraph about Javanese neighborhoods, "Well, better let you go."
   I better let you go.