APRIL DISTRACTION

What is going on? I ask myself, as I realise that once again I have been absent from this blog for two weeks. The answer is busy-ness. Why should that stop me writing? After all, one can always make time for things, even if it takes extra effort.

The answer is I think that writing, communicating ideas, requires first some clear time to develop the ideas. In other words, I am not making enough time for reflection.

And the result is a little sad. Not only am I not getting renewed enough to write here, but I am also a little scattered and disorganised in other areas.

All of which, in turn, makes me understand that good memory, good travel, good writing, and good relationships all require the same thing: enough time and consideration, reflection and attention. When I am rushing around (most recently to give a talk at Cornell, then to write a couple of small articles, then travel to San Francisco for the IACP conference and to give a BURMA demo; then travel back to Toronto to be on a panel at the Terroir conference; then give an interview and two BURMA talks this week), I have no "still pool" in my head or heart for reflecting, assessing, contextualising. This is not only not good, I think it is dangerous in some way.

For without time to reflect and remember, it is too easy to lose track of what is important. I find I am rushing to meet my commitment to give a public talk or whatever, and thereby neglecting friends or failing to tune in to them.

But I firmly believe that it is our relationships with family, friends, and even casually met strangers, which are the most valuable contributions we make to ourselves and our society. And so if I am so focussed on the next task that I fail to lift my eyes or turn my attention to the human landscape, I am failing in some important way.

As I write now, I am fighting back intrusive thoughts and anxieties about my "to-do" list. "Get down!" I say to it in my mind, as I might to an importunate leaping puppy. "Let me be present to these thoughts and not distracted!" It's a bit of a struggle, for sure.

And now, to yield for a moment to thoughts of the to-do list: It includes the small bits and pieces I need to take care of before I leave on Sunday evening to go to Georgia, that is, the Caucasus. I fly in to Istanbul, then the following day to Tbilisi. Can't wait.

And I sure hope, as I spend my two weeks there eating and looking and photographing, and engaging with people, that I can retrieve a sense of focus, so that I can give the trip, and the people I meet, the honour and attention they deserve.

Please wish me luck.

AND A NOTE ON BURMA: The Burma book was honoured with the "best culinary travel book" at the IACP awards this week in San Francisco. I am thrilled. It has been nominated for a James BEard award too. That result we'll hear in early May, in New York. The other two nominees are remarkable solid popular books: Maricel Presilla's Gran Cocina Latina; and Yotam Ottolenghi's book Jerusalem. It's an honour to be nominated with them.

SPRINGTIME POSSIBILITIES, & A SWEET TREAT

I feel full to bursting with ideas and thoughts. That’s partly due to my once again having left a large number of days between posts and writing here. But it’s also perhaps because it’s springtime, with sharp light and new energy, and fresh thoughts, all of them seeking expression.

I’m caught with a lot of possible entry-points. One of them is my aunt’s birthday a couple of days ago, that took her to 91. She’s not in a place where she can appreciate it, having slipped into some verison of dementia a few years ago. And yet she lives on, walking and eating and responding a little to smiles and simple stimuli. Another is the distracted place I find myself in, with projects that take my thoughts in opposite and complicated directions. 

I am giving a talk on Burma at Cornell, another quite different demo-talk at the IACP in ten days, also on Burma, and yet another in Toronto on April 11. In between there is a story to write that takes me back to a butchered moose. And as a backdrop, I am waiting around until Nou-Roz (Persian new year) is over, so that I can hear whether or not I have a visa to Iran. If I do, I then need to sort out travel arrangements, including the finding of an appropriate “manteau” or light overcoat, the basic decorum required of women along with a head scarf.

This is not a complaint, quite the reverse. I am just trying to describe the kind of time travel and geographic and idea disorientation that sometimes grips me. It’s like a kind of drug trip or stoner experience. And that would be fine – “just enjoy it by letting go” – except that I also need to be solid, straight, focussed, in order to meet some deadlines and not mess up.

Still, it’s all fun too, that life can throw up all these sometimes contradictory messages and rhythms. It’s a learning and adapting process.

This evening I went to see a film. And it, the fact of it, was a huge reminder that it’s valuable if we can push ourselves beyond the boundaries of what we know and into taking chances and risking ourselves. The film is by my friend Kathy Wazana, and called THEY WERE PROMISED THE SEA. It’s a documentary that looks at the exodus of the Jewish population from Morocco after 1956, and especially in the early 1960’s despite their reluctance to leave, and the deep unhappiness of their Muslim neighbours to see them go. The picture of Muslim-Jewish neighbourliness and collaboration in daily life, including music, is powerful.

Kathy took on the film project even though she had never made a film before. Yes she had help and advice from friends and professionals. But the fact is, she embarked bravely to make what is a wonderful powerful and persuasive film, just because she felt it should be made. She has unearthed an important and unacknowledged part of Arab-Jewish history, and has made everyone the richer.

***

I wrote the above last Sunday, and now here it is already Friday. I’m back from Cornell, about five hours each way with the border wait-time (under half an hour), and stimulated by the conversations and interactions I had there. It is a treat to be with people who engage seriously with ideas. There were religious studies people, rice scientists, a government studies person, Southeast Asian specialists of other kinds…there at my talk, and a dinner the previous night, because they have an interest in Burma. I felt very welcomed, very lucky to be there.

Still no news on the Iran visa. And that means that I will probably end up using my April travel window to go to Georgia instead. Each starts with a direct flight to Istanbul (Turkish Airlines flies out of Toronto, so lucky). And Georgia gives visas on arrival, thank heavens, so that last minute planning should be OK.

In this mishmash post of the fragments on my to-do list, I should mention too that the BURMA book is headed into a second reprinting. I'm thrilled that people are finding it accessible and engaging. This time I’ve been able to make some some corrections and tweaks, which feels good. They come from new understandings I’ve gleaned about beans and peas, the dried ones that are cooked and eaten for breakfast in Burma.

And finally, last, but not least, I owe a recipe for my simple skillet cake to a reader who wrote to me several weeks ago, because I had referred to it in my “Global Pantry” column in the April issue of Cooking Light magazine. Here then are instructions, in a shorthand version of the recipe:

The cake is shallow, and not hugely sweet, so it gets eaten at all hours of the day and night as food rather than sugary treat. I usually put chopped apples on top; you can leave it without, or top with cooked rhubarb, leaving out most of the wettest juice, or with berries... It's a very forgiving cake. That's the point.

 Preheat the oven to 400 fahrenheit. Oil a wide cast-iron skillet (9 inch or 10).

In one bowl beat ¼ pound softened butter with 1 cup sugar (I like to use brown) until smooth, add 1 cup plain yogurt and beat a little (you can instead use canned coconut milk - my Global Pantry suggestion - with the juice of 1 lemon, an acid for the baking powder to work with), then whisk 4 eggs in a separate bowl and add them. Add a dash of vanilla if you want. Set aside.

In another bowl combine 2 cups flour (I use a mixture, usually 1 cup whole wheat pastry floour and 1 cup some blend, or else all-purpose or whatever you want), ½ teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon baking powder, generous cinnamon, a dash or more of powdered cloves, and stir.

Whisk the wet again and then add to the dries and stir just until everything is wet.

Pour into the greased skillet, and if not topping with fruit, sprinkle on some brown sugar for crunch.

Put into the top third of the oven.

If topping with fruit, put in the oven and let cook while you core and slice four or five apples (I leave peel on, or partly peel them) or pears, or either with a few frozen berries… and mix in a bowl with a little brown sugar or maple syrup, and perhaps a squeeze of lime or lemon juice if you want.

After 15 minutes lower the heat to 385.

If topping with fruit, add it now: take the skillet out, gently strew the fruit on top, staying clear of the edges, and put back in to finish baking.

The cake will take 50 minutes, not quite an hour. Check it at 45 minutes…the edges will be starting to pull away from the sides. Do the skewer test, to make sure the centre is cooked.

Take out and let stand for ten minutes. Run and dull knife around the edge to make sure there are no sticking places, then place a large plate over and turn over, so it sits out on the plate. Use a second plate to turn it over, so it is fruit side up.

(If you didn’t use fruit, you might want to leave it upside down; you have a smooth surface if you want to ice it…; that said I usually prefer to have it right side up).

Happy spring, Easter, Passover, Holi, and Nou-Roz to all…

THOUGHTS AS WE MARCH INTO MARCH

Here it is already March 1. Lots of birthdays around this time, including my lovely mother-in-law Ann (Feb 28) who died over twelve years ago, and my father Adrian (Feb 29) who died in 1969 at a too-young age. There are lots of still-alive people, close friends and some relatives too, to celebrate as well, but they should probably remain anonymous…a lovely collection.

The turn into March feels momentous every year, perhaps a little like the turn into September. It’s not yet the end of winter, but the promise is there, of springtime and renewal.

Of course I am writing all this with pictures of winter and spring in my mind’s eye that don’t at all match what I see out my window. For I’m in Chiang Mai, where it’s already hot, with a haze from stubble-burning greying the sky and thickening the air. On the other hand, this dry season blending into hot season is also, like winter, a kind of dead-plants time, that will end with the “spring” that early rains bring, greening the ground and the trees.

Meantime the first durians have appeared in the markets, a little stenchy in an inviting way, and mangoes and papayas are showing up too. Yum. Every season has its disadvantages and its compensations. I’m inclined to focus on the compensations, especially the seasonal foods, for they need to be appreciated while they’re available.

And I leave here on Tuesday, so my awareness of the glorious fruit that I’m about to miss is acute!

Toay I dropped by Akha Ama coffee for a cup of some of the best coffee anywhere (no, I know I’m not an expert, but I have to say it…) and there was Lee, the man who started it all. He’s Akha, young and loaded with creative imagination and energy, and some years ago he persuaded his family and his village to start growing coffee commercially. They’re doing very well. I can only imagine the strain and effort it took to persuade the village to embark on all this. After all, the Akha haven’t survived for centuries by being pushovers or flighty adopters of each new thing that comes along. Instead they have been tenacious survivors, brilliant and thoughtful agriculturalists with a rich material culture.

And now here they are growing world class coffee in Northern Thailand.

I wonder what this will all look like in five years…

I stopped in for coffee because I was in the area, having pedalled out to Niemenhamen soi 13 for a meeting at the best Friends Library. They are the sponsors and arrangers of my two BURMA book speaking events tomorrow. The afternoon session is small, at the Library (which has very little space). In the evening there will be more room – it’s at Documentary Arts Asia. Garrett of the Library and I met today to talk about room arrangements, food (he is doing most of the cooking, with help from friends), and the timing of the events.

It was hard for us to get focussed on those details, since we had so much else to talk about, mostly centred around the current crises in Burma – the war in Kachin State and the ongoing Rohingya situation in Rakhine (Arakan) – and the seeming failure of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to be effective or even speak out with any clarity, about either. There seems to be a problem, and perhaps it’s to be expected, that the qualities that made her strong and dynamic as a persecuted opposition leader in a kind of internal exile are not ideal for dealing with the complex realities of ongoing politics. A leader needs people who argue and disagree with her/him, and needs wide-ranging discussion. She also needs a team to deal with the day to day practical details, handlers of various kinds. But Saw Suu apparently refuses to have handlers. And a leader needs to develop sophistication and strength in a team, so other people can carry part of the load and develop necessary skills. This also seems not to be happening.

It is heart-breaking to see how let down by and mistrustful of Daw Suu the non-Bamar peoples of Burma have become. It weakens the country.

Of course there is often let-down after the first euphoria of success or freedom or election. But this is deep distrust and dismay. It makes all of us who worry about Burma feel great concern.

So if you are interested, I suggest that you read news from the Irrawaddy and from Mizzima. Both are independent papers, published outside Burma.

I hadn’t intended to write about all this. It is a subject people talk about amongst

themselves, but not out loud in public much, not yet.

Instead I had intended to write about the people I saw today at the Haw market in Chiang Mai: the older Shan woman who works at the soup place I like, who walks awkwardly on legs a bowed from malnutrition in her childhood and yet works non-stop; the young women of various kinds in their platform shoes teetering through the market; the Muslim woman by the gate with a wooden leg and a baby, waiting for alms from passers-by without asking or even looking up; the mountain-grown vegetables green and bursting with life; the many languages, most opaque to my ear, though I recognise northern Thai, Yunnanese, other Chinese, Shan, Burmese…  It’s a rich brew, every Friday morning, this market opposite the mosque. There are stories and stories, I am sure.

And like most things in life, all I can do is look inquiringly, try to tune in, and know that all I am seeing is the surfaces of things. For each of us has our own story and perspective, and how much of anyone else’s can we hope to understand?

A SENSE OF WONDER & BELIEF

The gecko in the corner of my room high up near the ceiling has just given another chik-chik-chik-chik-chik, loud and percussive in the predawn quiet. He’s interrupted the silence several times in the last hour, as I’ve been lying half-awake here in my corner room in Yaunshwe. When I first woke, it was just after four. I looked out my  window and saw the almost-full moon in the western sky, red from the smoke-haze of the season, like a planet from another world. And then it slipped behind the high hills that rim this valley, and was gone.

Now it’s 6 am and in the distance I can here the putting purr of boats, the early ones heading down the river to Inle Lake. They’re going to pick people up and bring them back to town and dry land. Or  else they’re heading early to Indein, the place where today’s largest five-day-market takes place. Tomorrow the market is here in Yaunshwe. I’m sorry to have to miss it: we leave by plane tomorrow morning to get back to Rangoon.

Yesterday’s market was by the five buddha temple in the lake, so everyone who was there had come by boat: the P-O from their hillside villages (down to the shore by ox-cart or on foot, or in a crowded open-backed truck, then onto long black wooden boats); the Intha from their houses in/on the lake, houses on stilts or on small carefully built islets of hard-earned dirt. The market was large and airy. 

I’d been before, in 1998 with my kids, but at that time part of the market was a “floating market” with people on boats selling soups and snacks and trinkets. There’s a photo in Hot Sour Salty Sweet that I took there, a man’s tattooed hand holding a bowl of soup…  But when I arrived and saw no floating market I started to doubt my memory. Was I losing it? Was this the same place? But then where was the floating market?

When that kind of memory-doubt strikes, it’s always a relief when I learn I am not crazy…things do change after all, and in this case they have. Too bad. The floating market was lovely.

++++

The above was written while I was in Burma, at Inle Lake. Now it’s a couple of days later and I’ve flown, via a night in Rangoon and a last dinner there with my lovely Burma food tour group, back to Chiang Mai. Here there is more reliable internet, and an easy space to get rested and re-organised. Travelling with a group of people, and moving every two or three days, leaves little time for reflection. And so once again there has been a long gap between posts here on my blog, for which I apologise.

Full moon day on Monday ws a big deal in both Rangoon and here in Thailand, maha budjia day. I went to Shwedagon early on Monday morning with three other people, walking east from our hotel for about ten minutes. Our destination gleamed gold in the dawn light high on a hill ahead of us. Up the long set of steep steps we went, after leaving our shoes at the bottom, expecting to find the calm atmosphere of an early Monday morning at the top.

Wrong. It was intense, peopled, celebratory up there. There was a buddha procession all lined up on a red carpet with fantastic musical accompaniment, a sequence of cymbal, deep conch horn, louder blare and drum that was oddly compelling. The buddha was gold and calm looking, being carried on a small palanquin by white-clad young men. Troupes of nuns were standing watching in their pale pink and vivid orange robes, shaved heads smooth and rounded. And monks of all shapes and sizes in dark red were walking or standing, crowds of them.

I crossed through the procession as it stood there, then joined the clutter of people who were walking slowly around the giant gold chedi. Behind me I heard the procession start moving. What a wild morning scene it was.

I stopped at the dragon (Saturday-born people’s) shrine to make offerings of water (pouring cupfuls on the buddha and on the dragon) and to drape onto the buddha the jasmine flower garland I’d bought on the way up. And then I rejoined the crowd, slowly walking on the cool marble, looking and wondering at it all.

Every time I am at Shwedagon I notice at least one new-to-my-eyes thing; the place is so full and complex that one can only take it in a bit at a time. On this last visit I “saw” for the first time a standing buddha, slender, atop a platform. The statue was gold, graceful and very pleasing. But that appreciative response made me pause.

For each thing I look at at Shwedagon I see with my western foreign eyes, not with the eyes of a “believer”. And so my first and primary response is an aesthetic one. I am drawn to a statue or drawing or mural or tilework, or I’m not. But if I were a simple believing buddhist, surely my first reflex on seeing that buddha statue would be one of awe and worship; would aesthetic judgement enter my reaction at all? It’s the same question that arises in Europe, when we see a, say, medieval wooden carving of the Virgin. We make a judgement about its beauty, its line and feel, and are also impressed by its antiquity, however it looks. Surely the peasants and others from the era in which it was created would have had little or no aesthetic response, but instead one of worshipfulness…

And this brings me to the article that came out about a week ago concerning the repair and renovation of a temple/gompa complex in Nepal’s remote Mustang region. There’s a controversy about the work that is being done (funded by foreign donors). The foreigner who is in charge began with an attitude from his training, which was to preserve what was there, in however dilapidated a state. But he changed once he had spent a lot of time with the villagers and monks. They wanted frescoes repainted and brightened, renewed and restored, not just conserved.

There’s been a large dispute. The man in charge said his view had changed because he had come to realise that the villagers’ needs and point of view should come first. He had decided that the western art-conservation approach was not appropriate to the situation, which involved a living much-used place of belief and worship, not a museum piece.

And so when I see bright neon lights sparkling behind a buddha figure at Shwedagon, or garish new paint at Wat Bupparam near my place here in Chiang Mai, I try to put my head in the place of the worshippers, rather than staying locked in my place of aesthetic judgement. It’s especially when the judgement is negative (“why did they make this so ugly?”) that I feel I need to put my imagination elsewhere, to try to understand another point of view, another way of seeing and relating.

When my aesthetic response is positive - that excited appreciation of something lovely - it cannot be repressed, nor should it be I think. It’s the feeling I had when I first saw the charming marble reclining buddha in a temple at Sagar, in southern Inle Lake. There’s a sense of delight and wonder. Time stops. And that response is not far from religious, is it?

OUT & ABOUT IN RANGOON

It’s Saturday evening in Rangoon. People are out and about drinking and doing karaoke, eating hotpot out on the sidewalk, or just strolling in the warm air. What then am I doing sitting inside typing on this keyboard?

Well I think I’ll move to a small café nearby, so I can have a snack and a beer as I write this. But I do need to be writing, for life is about to get a whole lot busier in less than twelve hours. A good friend named Min is coming by for breakfast at 8 tomorrow morning, then I have some further research for an article to do mid-morning. And after that there’s the move to the Summit Parkviw Hotel, where I will meet the Burma immersethrough food group tomorrow afternoon and head out with them before sunset to Shwedagon and then to supper.

It’s strange to be here as a tourist and yet at the same time have a rather full work agenda. For over three  years I made regular trips to Burma to do work for the BURMA book. And during that time I was rather single-minded, with a sense of urgency, on every one of those trips. I avoided local ex-pats and also anyone who was “connected”, not wanting to lean on anyone, or be a parasite. I needed and wanted to find things out for myself (for better or for worse!).

Now that work is done. I have the tour work coming up of course, but I have also had almost a week of hanging around in Rangoon. And that has produced all kinds of interesting encounters with ex-pats, Burma specialists, and others. I have learned a lot of gossip, and heard about deeply interesting Burma-based research in linguistics, agriculture, and more. I’ve also seen an incubator kitchen in action and heard other food-related projects being explored in talk.

Some of this stuff is entirely new, a product of the changed political and social landscape here. Some of it has been going on in one form or another for while, but I have not known about it because of my wilful avoidance of ex-pats and connected Burmese. I have no regrets, I have to say. Hearing now about exciting ideas and projects in Burma is like watching the desert bloom after never dreaming it could rain a drop.

And at the same time of course, this energy and forward movement is happening in a fragile place and space. There’s still fighting in Kachin State, and huge perhaps never-resolvable tensions and hatreds in Rakhine State. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was at the photo exhibit I went to late this afternoon after the book launch party. She was there as its patron and as a judge in a photo competition. The press of people wanting to see her, photograph her, get a whiff of her fairy dust, was a little dismaying. It’s natural I suppose, this elevation of a remarkable person to icon status.

But it can’t really be doing her any good, can it? Like everyone else, she is only human, and the strengths that saw her through isolation, harsh choices, and house arrest, may not be ideal attributes for a leader who needs to build a strong political party. Do people dare to disagree and argue with her? Is she getting tough talk form anyone?

I sure hope so. For the isolation of a person who is idolised is a dangerous thing, and it must also be so lonely in some ways.

Here I am coming to the end of these thoughts. I never made it out to a café. Instead I am sitting in the charmless lobby of the Eastern Hotel, sipping beer between sentences, and listening to the casual chat of the guys on staff. I love the sound of human voices speaking a language that I don’t understand. There’s the comfort of voice without the intrusion of meaning. What more can a tired person ask for?

The sound of other humans reminds us that we are not alone. And the absence of comprehension leaves me free to think my own thoughts, shape my own sentences. What a pleasure.