There are feathers in my toilet. Have you ever discovered something simple that made you rethink every decision you’ve ever made. I flushed the toilet; new feathers and water replaced the old feathers and water. I turned on my shower. Please, no. . . feathers coming out of my shower. This can mean only one thing. A bird somehow, some-way made my rooftop water tank its final nesting place. [Emergency Recall]: Flashbacks of washing my hands, taking a shower, cleaning out my coffee cup, and NO! NO! you did not rinse your toothbrush off with that dead bird water.
The fact that there are feathers in my toilet confirms that this life in Myanmar is fiction. My story in Asia is so unyieldingly, unceasingly alien that it makes this life feel like a separate reality, when compared with my seemingly non-fiction American narrative. It doesn’t help that the transit between these two realities is so rapid, so final. I crawl into a metal capsule with wings and the next day I’m on another planet. I stay there for months. I crawl back into the metal capsule with wings, I’m back, and everything is just about the same. There is no transition, no continuity between these realities. There is nothing that binds the two narratives into a coherent whole. It makes it difficult to communicate with friends and family across this fiction/non-fiction divide. If Bilbo Baggins travelled to Quincy, IL upon his return from Middle Earth, I imagine that he would also find it hard to relate? But we have to start somewhere on this unexpected journey. So here it is, an update from fiction: a non-sensical, rapid-fire exclusive from down the rabbit hole.
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I live in a place they call the Golden Land. I supervise a brilliant and beautiful team, none of whom speak English as their primary language. I wash my clothes in a bucket in my shower. I have a retractable metal gate in front of my door. I eat inflated balloons of flatbread every morning for breakfast. Lizards run around on my walls and one fell on my back once. Birds routinely fly through my house and do laps around my front room and kitchen. In the evenings, rats are so frequent on the street that I actually kicked one just by walking. My money is all colors of the rainbow.
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The streets are dusty, the sun is scorching. The tea is sweet, and ants crawl on a single wall of my bedroom, not the floor or the ceiling or the other walls. Everyone works out barefoot at the gym. My neighbor sells gems and he put a garnet stone in my hand worth $10,000. I live in my office/apartment. I don’t have a refrigerator, a hot water heater, a TV, an oven, a microwave, a couch, a bed, a dresser, or a closet, but I have a safe. I eat fried rice, steamed rice, coconut rice, rice noodles, and sticky rice. Everyone in this place cares deeply about politics and elections. People I know are arrested for protesting the government.
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I spend my time trying to form strategies to help people heal from their mental, emotional, and spiritual scars. On the weekly, I interact with commercial sex workers and men who have sex with men and children who are infected with HIV/AIDS. We sit on small carpet squares barefoot surrounded by posters of cartoon condoms smashing HIV monsters. I can’t understand a word that these people say, but their tears, laughter, and mannerisms speak loud enough to remind me why I am here.
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I live in a place where monks in red robes roam, where monkeys hangout in trees, where dogs and rats rule the street, where it doesn’t rain until it floods, where people wear white paste on their faces, where gold pagodas pay homage to impermanence, and where military dictators hide behind democracy. A land where there is such a thing as an extremist monk, but not such a thing as Starbucks. My water comes from a tank on the roof, and my living room came furnished with a shrine area for me to honor my favorite deities. A two course meal with a drink costs a dollar, just outside of a place that a coffee alone costs five times that much. High-speed internet does not exist, but if you order tea, they bring you two cups. The floor of this bus is made of wood. The new year is in April, there are only three seasons, and there are feathers in my toilet.
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It isn’t really fiction, but it will feel like it when I leave; that’s why we love it. Welcome to the Golden Land.
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