In Indonesia, my friend Rachel lived in a house with other girls, Indonesian and foreign students. Every guy in the neighborhood tried to get in their collective pants. Rachel could and once did allow this. The Indonesian girls would have been shunned by their mothers, and these same men.

In Thailand, there are no gay men. There are plenty of lady-boys, who are more or less accepted and known as kathoey. The kathoey are sometimes also transexual. The straight tourists are shocked by this; the gay tourists offend the locals. 

Our differences expose us.

Write something, win a round-trip ticket to anywhere. Really. The 2009 Writer’s Travel Scholarship is now accepting submissions at Equivocality.net. This short-form writing contest, now in its fifth year, is open to all writers and aspiring writers. Entries must be 10,000 words or less and can be fiction or non-fiction on any topic — we’re not looking specifically for travel writing.

Submissions accepted through April 30th. Full details here.

I think everyone needs to get out and see the world, especially those who are inclined, for whatever reason, to tell someone else about it later. Write, and go forth!

I’m in Kathmandu and thinking of you. I visited the Swayambhunath temple this afternoon, up on its hill overlooking the valley. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful, and it opened me up in the way only real beauty can, cut through all the jaded traveler in me. I haven’t been home since we worked together a year ago – you know that. It will be time for me to return to San Francisco soon. But what I wanted to talk to you about today is the two little boys that accompanied me to the temple and back.

You know how it goes – they sort of attached themselves to me and the one with better English elected himself my guide. Which is fine; they were lovely kids, very bright and very entertaining and fun to play with. They especially appreciated when I made monkey noises to scare off the touts trying to sell me prayer flags and singing bows. So we went up the 365 steps, and I stood on the terrace at sunset and marveled at the completely splendid Stupa, and the panoramic view of this ancient Pagoda city being eaten by its own slum suburbs. When we began the long walk back from the temple, it was very dark. Kathmandu has blackouts for three hours every afternoon.

I knew it was coming. They were shy about it.

“Excuse me, can you buy me some milk?”

“No.”

“Some milk, only.”

“No, sorry. I know this one.” You too, my international friend, you know this hustle. The milk powder turns out to be strangely expensive, and the kids sell it back to the shopkeeper later.

Some chatting in Nepali among themselves. A few minutes later, “Some food?”

“You’re hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should go home. You are children, go home and ask your parents to feed you.” I  wanted so badly for the world to work this way.

“Okay… we need also kerosene.”

“Again, this is your parents’ job.”

“Kerosene is very expensive.”

“I know that.”

I must admit I don’t have your patience, Jenafir. I don’t have your lifetime of practice with compassion. Every day I try to give at least a smile to all the desperate people who ask me for help; most days I fail. It gets to me.

“Look. Are you my friends or are you beggars?”

“We are your friends!”

“Then stop begging from me.”

“Please help us. We are hungry.”

“That’s it. I’m leaving.” And I walked away. I sure showed them a lesson. It felt terrible.

I calmed myself, turned around, motioned them over. I asked them to sit with me on some steps as night fell. Unhealthy dogs wandered in the street, and a kerosene lantern glowed red inside the shack across the road. Still no power.

“Listen,” I began, “what do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to do?”

No answer.

“Do you want to, um, build buildings? Or be a policeman? How about flying an airplane, would you like that?”

It took a long time for him to answer. I had to repeat the question, give more examples.

“I want to be shopkeeper.”

“A shopkeeper! That’s great… but, are you sure? You sure you wouldn’t rather be an airplane pilot?”

“I don’t know how to fly an airplane.”

“No. But you can go to school and learn.”

A flash of a smile. That’s all I wanted. Just for a second I wanted him to believe that he could be whatever he wanted. I don’t even know if it’s true, but I wanted him to believe that.

“You can learn anything you want,” I pressed on, probably uselessly. “You can choose to be anything you want.”

Silence.

“So why do you choose to be a beggar?”

“I am not a beggar.”

“You keep asking me for things without offering anything in return. That makes you a beggar.”

Silence.

“Will your parents be angry that you did not get money from foreigners today?”

“No.”

“Do you do this every day?”

“No. Only it is finished school exams now. Sometimes we have holidays.”

And that was it. The two children chatted amongst themselves but wouldn’t speak to me further. I told him I was going if he didn’t want to talk to me. He wouldn’t meet my eye. Did I shame him? Did I go too far and crush that spark I hoped I saw?

I walked off into the gloom, over the unpaved unlit roads, dodging rickshaws and bicycles and scooters, with that same old fury. Furious with the world, with him, with myself for handling it so badly. Empty and opened and full of ache at the same time. Realizing that I know very little about communicating with children. Wondering what you would have done, my friend. Wondering, again and always, what might actually make a difference in their lives. Wounded to see a spirit so young already crushed. Wondering if they would ever burn like I was burning right that second. Beginning to cry in the dark.

There are four official languages in Singapore: English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil. This reflects the four major peoples who came to populate the city-state: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and colonial British. Every citizen of Singapore is issued a piece of government ID (the National Registration Identity Card) which has one of these races printed on it.

Does this discourage people from having mixed-race children?

Singapore twists the Asian brain.  Just about every other Asian country is uni-cultural, at least according to the mainstream narrative. The Japanese people live in Japan and speak Japanese. The Vietnamese live in Vietnam and speak Vietanamese. The Thai people live in Thailand and speak Thai. Etc. This makes identity really easy — except if you live in Singapore, and there’s no Singaporean race, no Singaporean language, no ancient and venerable Singaporean hertitage. Blood and place and language and culture used to be inextricable, but we can no longer use any of these things to define one another. Fortunately, it says what you are right there on the card. I don’t think this is a particularly good idea.

On the surface of it, in a black and white world, it’s always this easy. (Oh, for simpler, purer times!) It’s especially helpful to have someone whom you’re not. I’m a Hindu, you’re a Muslim. I’m Kurd, you’re Turk. Indian vs. Pakistani, which is ridiculous because, as one Indian put it to me, “we are the same stock!” But they’re different! They’re Pakistani!

And yes, race. The thing about skin color, nose size, eye slant is that it makes this all obvious. But we don’t need obvious. In fact we make obvious when it’s lacking. The key to us versus them is that you have to be able to tell at a glance whose side they’re on. Hence different color uniforms for each team, but also scarification, clothing, jewelry… we laugh at the primitive Africans for their tribal scars, but the Latino in the sharp suit pulls out his iPhone and casts suspicious glances at the Latino in the cap and baggy pants. Something makes us clump together, gravitate towards standard behaviors. No one really wants to run as an independent.

Granted, the Hutus and the Tutsis do look different, at least sterotypically. But after centuries of intermixing, there can’t be such a thing as a pure race. That young boy, naked in the abstract, could be either. He doesn’t definitively have Hutu or Tutsi features. How then did the Hutus know who to kill, in Rawnda in 1994? In practice it wasn’t a problem. So powerful was identity that everyone simply knew who was who. There were Hutu families and Tutsi families, and not much in between. Small villages share common knowledge, and every day the message is reinforced. He lived in the Tutsi part of town. He sat with the other Tutsis at school. It’s not something you can disown.

Sometimes I think the best thing about big cities is the obfuscation they offer. In the big city, my Mongolian friend does not have to be Mongolian when she doesn’t want to. Of course, this horrifies her mother.

Because it’s also about tradition. You are a ___ because your father was a ___. You come from an ancient and proud line. Sure, other castes might look the same, but are they really? Blood matters. You can see it in horses. Never trust a Capulet. Predestination: who you are was written before you were born. It’s good to have clearly labeled places, categories that amputate differences. You can spell it out with letters, said the Brahmin to the Dalit.

I am of the strong opinion that printing race or religion on identity cards holds humanity back. And if you think that’s radical, technology is going to make it worse. Just wait until changing skin color, eye color, height and countenace is as easy as lipstick.

1. The developing world is dirty, and it smells. Stepping off the plane in Bangkok, that very first time, I was assaulted by the air, some rich humid mix of curry and diesel and flowers and shit. Garbage lines the streets and rings the fields around every town; men routinely piss on the streets, and few cities have public trash cans.

2. The people aren’t white. They’re brown or yellow or black; they have thick Semitic eyebrows or delicate Asian eyes or wide African noses. And everywhere you go — Africa, China, India, Russia — darker skin means lower socioeconomic class, even if the comparison is  between lighter and darker castes or tribes  within the same country. Light skin represents wealth and power at all scales of humanity.

3. Nothing works properly. Houses are cheaply built and products cheaply made, but it’s more then frugality. Nothing is expected to work properly. Doors and cars and lights that could be fixed with a moment’s handiwork remain broken forever. The trains are hours or sometimes days late, when they’re running at all.

4. The people don’t speak English. The signs aren’t in English, the menus aren’t in English, and the newspapers aren’t in English. You are suddenly and catastrophically illiterate. Surprise! There are other alphabets. Sleeping children dream in foreign languages.

5. In many places, no one else can read either. They never got much schooling. Things that we take completely for granted — such as germ theory, arithmetic, or the very concept of sexism — are undiscovered countries to much of the world. Without writing, “facts” can only spread from person-to-person through an endless game of broken telephone.

6. Holy shit television everywhere! They don’t have clean drinking water, but they have a TV. Every year China turns out millions of small TVs and VCD players that run off a car battery. I’ve seen satellite dishes nailed to trees in the middle of the jungle.

7. The whole world has phones too. There may not be reliable electricity, or any electric service at all, but there’s definitely a cell tower nearby. And these supposedly backwards, poor people often have advanced phones which also serve as MP3 and video players, because a phone is the household’s one piece of expensive consumer electronics. The internet is going to reach the rest of the world first through phones.

8. Terrible plumbing. The indisputable signs of rich industrialized society are hot and cold running water, faucets that don’t drip, drains that don’t reek, and all the infrastructure required to make this a reality, from aquaducts to sewage treatment plants. Much of the rest of the world shits into a hole and drinks from the river, and providing clean water and sanitation might be the number one thing that could be done to reduce world poverty and disease. But some days I wonder if that’s all beside the point, because of the hot shower.  Among all the niceties of civilization, the hot shower is the luxury I miss most strikingly when I’m living somewhere where the houses are made of dirt.

9. Safety has a different meaning. It’s wrong and small to say that life is cheaper in poor countries — we rich don’t cry any harder over our dead than anyone else — but the citizens of developed countries accept a lot more risk than we do: ungrounded wiring, firetrap tenements, working without hard hats and welding without goggles. At the same time, what a rush to be to choose your risks for yourself! Oh to ride on top of a moving train!

10. Yes, they’re poor. Figures such as “living on two dollars a day” are somewhat deceptive, because the cost of living is incredibly low in poor countries, and two dollars might well buy you all the daily rice you could want. Even so, it’s not nearly enough for a life, and a huge fraction of the world’s citizens are living literally day-to-day, scrounging for their basic needs. This sucks deeply in a way that it’s very hard for a middle-class child to imagine. It’s also worth remembering that imported mass-consumer items (such as housewares and electronics) are already sold at near-zero margins in the industrialized world, meaning that the basic material objects of living often aren’t any cheaper in poor countries. When I walk down the street in Dakar I carry in my backpack a laptop worth two year’s salary.

11. The structures of society are suddenly visible by their lack. The government is probably unstable, there is little or no public health system, and public servants might have to be bribed to do their job. Scams are widespread because there’s no contract law and no courts to prosecute petty crime. You get used to handing policemen cash on the street, and the price of a visa depends on who’s at the window taking your money. I once bought insulin for a desperate diabetic; he begs for it every month.

12. Their culture is different, their culture is the same. I have been consistently astonished at how values differ between cultures. Depending on where you live, the most important thing in life may be hard work, religion, family, honor, or freedom. But by showing us what can be different, travel also clarifies what is the same in all humans; and although it seems terribly easy for people to be pompous, greedy, and cruel, universal human nature seems also to be kind, imaginative, and generous.

I had a long conversation with a young man on the train from Chennai to Calcutta. He’s a college student, studying for his BCom like so many others, so that he can start a business. We, two young men with 40 hours to kill, got to talking about women. He told me with a lopsided grin that he’d had a number of girlfriends. But he wouldn’t marry any of them. They weren’t the marrying type. His wife would be a virgin.

To this man, and many others I spoke to, women basically fell into two categories: sexual and reputable. It’s the old dichotomy: Madonna/whore, wife/slut, good girl, bad girl. Of course, the bad girls are more sexually desirable. And I’ve just discovered some careful research that confirms my perception of their perceptions.

First, researchers reviewed the “sex books” available for sale in Bangalore:

A study in Bangalore on 60 college-going young men revealed that nearly all of them used these books as their first exposure to sex and their main source of information on it … The contents of 11 different Kannada sex books were reviewed, and the quality of information and key messages in them assessed. The 25-60-page booklets cost between Rs 10 and Rs 50 each. The quality of paper was poor, the photographs and printing smudged. Except for the covers, they were in black-and-white. They carried no information about the publishers. … The staple fare in all the books was sexually explicit photographs, mostly copied from Western magazines. There were also stories, not linked to the photographs. … Most of the stories seemed to suggest that women were intrinsically dangerous and needed a man’s control to keep them in check.

Then they interviewed the students themselves, who had presumably learned about sex through this material, and found that

[the students] seemed to subscribe to the classic Madonna/Whore dichotomy, which the sex books also seemed to reinforce. They believed that a girl/woman was either “good” or “bad”. Good girls/women were those who were like “sisters”, who did not wear revealing clothes, were “innocent” and did not overtly interact with men. Bad girls/women, on the other hand, tried to attract men by wearing revealing clothes and being “free” with men, and they were cunning and scheming. Those from rural areas were more likely to be “good”, while those from the “city” were more likely to be “bad”. While “good” girls/women deserved one’s respect and “protection”, “bad” girls had to be taught a lesson.

It’s hard for me not to see this as sort of sick, not to mention a lot less fun than having a girlfriend who is both empowered and sexual. But then, these are cultures where it’s difficult to talk about sex openly. In a word, if sex is bad, how could a sexual woman be good?

In light of my experiences overseas, the Western World seems to me like an awfully sexually liberated place. At least among my peers – all the way from high school up to the present moment – it was just expected that women would have, and want, sex. And that was fine, and my male friends and I all hoped that we would marry extremely hot women a have lots and lots of post-marital sex with them. Although we all sniggered at the idea of sleeping with a virgin, no one I knew seemed to think that she would make a better wife.

Granted, these attitudes are not universal; in America, the Christian Right comes to mind. Still, it’s worth remembering a fundamental point: the American sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s simply never happened in most of the world.

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