On Leaving London

Call of Europe

During my retreat at Holy Cross Abbey, I had picked up a wonderful index of all of the monasteries and Catholic guesthouses throughout Europe, listed alphabetically. Since then I toyed with the idea of continuing my meditation on this old continent of wine, culture, and rich history. Of course, the deciding factor was resources and I was running out. Like a good market researcher, I hunted the airlines and websites until I found a roundtrip ticket to London for $550 (including tax)...

Now I have distant family in London, friends in Paris, and vague acquaintances in Switzerland and Germany. This was the time to turn on the charm and invite oneself into the warm households of those folks whose company would surely be delightful if I actually knew them. Undaunted, I propositioned them and got an invitation for respective visits in Surrey, Chantilly, Zurich, and Hamburg. Travel is the ultimate motivation and I have since learned that I appear far more likeable than I really am.

So I took the overnight flight from New York to London, and I emerged groggy and slightly bewildered as I set foot on British soil at 6pm. My aunt Thai, actually my mother's cousin, was situated in the suburb of Surrey outside of London so I took a bus and then the train to her home. Then I dragged the inordinately heavy duffel bag down the interminable four blocks from the train station to her flat. Yes, that's the fatigue talking. Surrey was a quaint town, with pubs, a barber shop, photography studio, and a store which sold refrigerators and ovens. Aunt Thai's place was two stories up, situated between a wine shop and a mom & pop grocery, the only entrance was up ladder-like stairs in the back.

I arrived at 10am. The door was answered by a congenial gentleman named Nigel, who informed me that Aunt Thai had to go to work. However, she had left guidebooks, maps and handwritten notes welcoming me in a graceful, girlish scrawl. Nigel showed me the spare bedroom and a neatly made bed, upon which I promptly collapsed.

Postscript: On Leaving India

Some countries you regret leaving; some nations you can't wait to leave, and others make it so complicated that you consider yourself extraordinarily fortunate to be able to depart. Such was India. It was not a function of airline procedure or security protocol or airport architecture. It was simply the way things were.

Take check-in for example. Our tour group arrived early and waited in line behind twelve people, eight foreigners and four indigenous Indian men. Piece of cake, right? Wrong. When the Indian folks reached the desk, they promptly plunked down approximately 15-20 passports each. In flurry, a crowd of families, sari-garbed women and children rushed to the front of the line. The reality was that each man represented a clan, all in all totaling to nearly 100 people who wedged their way to the front, irrespective of those they pushed on the way. When I asked the desk employee about this, she looked at me like I was crazy. Apparently, this was standard operating procedure.

Then there were security checks, which happened immediately after check-in and also right before the gate. When we tried to put our carry-on baggage through the second security check, half the passengers were sent back outside the first security checkpoint. Evidently, a sticker was supposed to be tacked on the luggage during that process and it was haphazardly neglected by half the staff. No matter what, you had to return to get the sticker or they adamantly would not allow boarding.

True, India was gorgeous and interesting and heartbreaking and squalid. But after being cut by 100 people and running back and forth across the airport like a flustered lunatic, next time it would be India the DVD.

Foray into the Amber Fort

Then a truly traumatic thing happened. My camera broke!

It happened at Fatehpur Sikri, the capital built by Mughal emperor Akbar in 1570. It was a vista of sandstone palaces, with the most adorned and luxurious quarters reserved for his Hindu wife. (For you movie buffs, this is the story of Jodhaa Akbar played by the incomparable Aishwarya Rai.) I remember that every pillar in every corner of the Hindu sanctuary was a work of art, exquisitely carved semblances of warrior gods and ripe goddesses. Moderate buildings with high, rounded ceilings were intended for his Muslim wife, all facing east towards Mecca. And for his Christian wife, structures so short and bare, it seemed almost a hovel by comparison and an anomaly in the midst of all this wealth. Guess old Akbar did not think much of Christians.

Maybe it was the karma of the place, the fact that it was abandoned for lack of water shortly after completion and has never housed a soul since. Maybe that is how all tragedies begin. I asked a lovely couple from Georgia, Doug and Cheryl, to take my picture. In passing the camera back and forth, it somehow wound up crashing on the red sandstone ground at the most inopportune angle so that the lens was permanently open and disabled. (And it was a new camera too).

I was in shock. Doug and Cheryl were so sweet and conscientious that they offered me the use of their camera throughout the trip, offered to take me camera shopping despite our limited time in India. We ended up becoming friends and the accident was forgotten, even though they mailed me a check to replace the camera after I returned home.

Onward to Jaipur, otherwise known as the Pink City, and India’s city of gems. We rode elephants (a blatant tourist trap, but what the heck) up the hilltop to the Amer Fort and Natasha complained that she was constantly molested by the mahout and rickshaw pullers as she got on and off various means of transportation. Of course, her bosom baring blouses were the culprit and the beautiful Russian shrugged, admitting she did not own any other clothes. Not even when she was asked to cover her flawless flesh to enter a Hindu temple.

Quite honestly, the Amber (Amer) Fort was the most astounding architecture I had ever seen. Home of the Rajput Maharajas, it was a dazzling amalgam of Hindu, Mughal, and even Arabic influences. Upon entering, it was a vision of pale rose sandstone. The interiors were an intricate complex of courtyards and halls. There were entry doors embossed with gold and silver leaves, marble and sandalwood colonnades. In the Sheesh Mahal, Hall of Mirrors, thousands of mirror mosaics reflect and refract light from a single glittering candle. Each hall and corner unveiled a new wonder, a fantasy of architecture that words could not convey. If there was ever place to mourn the loss of a camera, this would be it.

Except I didn’t. I felt oddly lightened. I enjoyed the sheer visible beauty in every moment and experienced it fully, instead of trying to find the perfect distance, angle, and lighting for a photograph. I didn’t realize how much of the moment I had missed and how much pressure I felt before in trying to document the moment. I was liberated from all that, and Doug & Cheryl kept on flashing their digital cameras so I wound up with a gorgeous collection of photos nonetheless.

Sometimes, the loss of an old habit is the beginning of a new freedom. I have never felt compelled to take photos since. The experience and the memory have satisfied me enough to forego the physical reminders.

Yet, the final flavors of India were in the colorful bazaars of Jaipur, known for its jewels and hand-woven carpets. The air was utterly unbreathable, dusty and reeking of cow dung. A young mother carrying an infant was begging by the entrance. She had lost some teeth, even though she could not be more than twenty. She reached out and her touch was light as a breeze even as she implored my charity. Then she touched her shoulder, showing diseased and ruined flesh.

Shame on me, but I shrank back in terror, wondering if the disease was contagious as I fled back to the tour bus. I was so terrified that I did not remember to give the poor girl any money, although Anh Quang (couple from DC) informed me that she probably belonged to some gang that would take all meager rupees she managed to get anyway. My heart broke as I thought about her dual paths to doom; the young mother would be beaten if she failed in begging, but getting those few pennies did not mean she and her baby would eat.

That was the very essence of India; it shocked you. The sheer beauty of its architecture and ingenuity of its people overwhelmed your senses that such creation could exist. Yet, the sloth, the suffering, and the callousness of the natives also shook your very core, as the elites did not bother to look twice at those rotting in filth and disease.

India: Heaven and Hell: Part II

India is like a jungle: raw, wild, and dangerous, particularly if you are a woman. My friend Shrubhra, who grew up in Delhi, said that her hometown had the highest rate of crimes against women in the country and that India had the highest number of offenses against females in world. Yet, there were unexpected bursts of sweetness, like papaya and mango, seeds of love and longing.

Enter the Taj Mahal, signature of India, and memorial of love by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his much mourned third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died after the birth of their fourteenth child. An exquisite wonder of white marble, it combines Persian, Turkish, and Indian architectural elements into a mausoleum of undeniable of Muslim origin.

I watched the face of the tomb soften with the dawning of the day; blue undertones predominated in the early rising, and the beckoning warmth of red and yellow highlights as the sun climbed higher in the sky. Marble is mobile, fluid, and expressive. The Taj unfolded its own symphony of light. Despite her death, Mumtaz Mahal left her legacy.

Beside me stood my mother, and another couple from our tour, watching, fascinated by this fantastic structure even though the guide talked endlessly without releasing us to much desired free time. Renegade that I was, my wanderlust kicked in and I stalked off, exploring the angles of the mausoleum in the allotted hour. The others followed and the couple was close behind me. The woman was Filipina, smooth as wood and luminous as water. The man was tall and pale, a handsome German with a hardy stride who only had eyes for his wife.

On the ride back to the hotel, the wife introduced herself as Andrea and proceeded to tell me their story (upon my shameless prompting, of course). She was actually nine years older than he, she said a bit cautiously, and they had met nearly two decades ago in the Philippines when she was going to school and he was backpacking. They rode on the same bus, and he never noticed her. Fast forward fifteen years later, and they met again at a wedding in Canada and retraced their adventures to the first time they crossed paths. They became friends and at first she could not believe that he would be romantically interested in her due to the age difference. But he was. So much so that he moved from Munich, Germany to the other side of the world to join her.

So it was love, she admitted, and she had not thought such love was possible for her. Her eyes mirrored her husband’s with the same sentiment that drove Shah Jahan to create an epitaph for his beloved.

It had been a long time since I thought of love. Sometimes I don’t allow myself to imagine it, because not all love stories end happily. But when it does, it is like finding heaven in another person, and you follow it until you are lip-locked with the divine.

India: Heaven and Hell: Part I

My first exposure to India was Suneeta, an eloquent fourteen-year-old high school sophomore who became my best friend. I admired her velvety voice, voluptuous curves she couldn't hide even back then, and skin of cinnamon, strangely immune to break-outs. Her home smelled of curry and strange spices and tumeric, and she told me that she worshipped innumerable gods. There was a god of learning and fireplaces, of nourishment and rain. She even told me the essence of Hinduism: man was part animal and part divinity; when we die, the divine essence that is us joins Nirvana (God), while the animal aspect perishes with the body.

Fast forward fifteen years and I was sojourning to India with my mother, a tour group, and dozens of enthusiastic Slumdog Millionaire fans. Seated beside me on the plane was Natasha, a Russian beauty in the Old World European style of Isabella Rossellini and Nastassia Kinski. She had eyes of Egyptian jade and she was so breathtaking that many mistook her for a supermodel. Refined as she was, she was the very antithesis to my first glimpse of India.

At first glance, the land of India was squalid. My luggage arrived covered with dust merely from riding along the baggage claim. We befriended another Vietnamese couple because our red suitcases were similarly soiled and we were brushing them off with identical expressions of disgust.

Aside from the highways, many roads were comprised of dirt and cows roamed as regal creatures from sacred lore. Men urinated freely in the streets and dirty, ragged children chased each other among piles of rubbish, their laughter conveying a far happier existence than a nation plagued with depression and anxiety. Women sauntered in the flamboyant hues of magenta and cobalt, saris that were brilliantly beaded, covered the squalor like curtains before a stage.

Then I saw small, dilapidated huts within a block of majestic mansions, and cow dung littering the sidewalk. India was a shock to my system, as I realized that the affluent passed the starving everyday without taking a second glance. The caste system teaches that the untouchables belonged in their pitiful situation, that they deserved their unceasing poverty and the brahmin were conditioned to ignore them, since they had no role in the alleviation of the suffering. This was all due to karma, the untouchables had committed evil in prior lives and were relegated to this doom, while the higher castes had elevated themselves through good and moral deeds.

There was no sense of social responsibility, except for the altruistic foreign organizations and folks like the Albanian Mother Theresa to help the poorest of the poor.

I thought this was a semblance of Hell, a world where the poor lament their fate as inevitable and the wealthy did not care. Perhaps this is closer to America than I realized.

Meeting Lan Cao

If someone were to ask me about the person I most wanted to meet, living or dead, my answer would be unequivocally the same: Lan Cao. Unknown to American pop culture compared to the Bachelorette or the Kardashians, my heroine is somewhat of a celebrity in Asian-American literary circles.

She wrote the first novel about the immigrant experience from the Vietnamese perspective, weaving folk legends and war-torn memories of a divided nation with a young girl's coming of age in America. Monkey Bridge. I first became acquainted with her work back in 1999 and was immediately enthralled with her lucid prose and the transcendence of her words: bridging gaps between generations and realities, in essence telling a universal story for all of us hyphenated Vietnamese-Americans.

Daughter of the venerable South Vietnamese general Cao Van Vien, Lan is a woman of many talents. By day, she is an accomplished attorney who is currently teaching international and business law at the College of William and Mary. By night, er…early mornings preceding the dawn, she writes.

As fate would have it, we were acquainted. Her late father worked intimately with my grandfather back in the days of the Republic of Vietnam, and my mother actually remembered Lan in the French-run convent schools proper young girls attended back then. So we were both daughters of a fallen dynasty.

After a long email correspondence, I stopped by her home in Williamsburg. A beautiful woman opened the door and introduced herself. She resembled Vera Wang in her sheer elegance and simplicity. An equally exquisite little girl of eight or nine stood and stared at me unabashedly, as if she had no conception of fear. Lan kissed her, and introduced her daughter Harlan.

I was a bit tongue-tied and quite awed, but Lan chatted as if we had known each other for years and in many ways, perhaps we had. Recently returned from a trip to Vietnam where she and Harlan assimilated back into the native heritage, she spoke of letting go of the anger for the political regime in order to embrace your roots. It boiled her blood to see the Communists desecrate old monuments and symbols of Southern Democracy. Yet, she couldn't hate the land or the people, and the motherland continued to call to her in a mysterious way.

There was a liberation in Lan that I hadn't realized. In fact, Harlan's surname is Van Cao, an amalgam of her parent's surnames as surely as she is a melding of their flesh. She encouraged me to follow my heart, my writing, and to never be satisfied with the conventions of others. She also gave me the most useful advice about men and romance. How well a man treats a woman when he is courting her is not important; all men look deceptively charming and considerate. How he treats the woman that he leaves is profoundly more telling about his empathy, compassion, and true capacity to love you.

Harlan took to me, and guided me throughout the house, as it consisted of many rooms and I feared getting lost on the concise journey from the dining room to the bathroom. Dinner with them was lovely and her husband was a prestigious law professor, so prestigious that he seemed a pillar of contemporary legal and intellectual thought. I was intimidated, but he was so human and down to earth that I understood why Lan had fallen in love with him.

Then I returned to the Marriott, to the parking lot where I was camping out in my rental car, since I ran out of hotel points. I was poor and unemployed, remember? Well, Lan and her husband wouldn't have it. She called me and Harlan left me a message imploring me to come back to spend the night.

And I did. I spent the night in their spacious home, with the entire west wing all to myself.