The moon has fattened, but I wanted to check timing so I’ve just come from looking up the full moon calendar for 2012. There’s still another day plus to go: the moon is full in this (Toronto) time zone sometime after 4 in the morning on March 8. Now that date means International Women’s Day to me and to many. But the fact of its being a full moon day this year gives it extra heft and radiance. In Thailand it’s a special buddha day called Magha Puja in the original Pali, a day for honouring the Buddha. This year the holiday is on March 7; banks will be closed and there will be special candlelit processions at the wats/temples.
I started thinking about the timing of the full moon a couple of days ago when I went out in the early night and found the moon hanging high and bright in the sky and surrounded by a wide perfect pale circle of light. Yes, sometimes there’s a nimbus around a full-ish moon. But this was quite different, for the circle had a wide radius, and looked like a perfect line of white light bordering, encircling, the top of the sky’s dome.
All I could think of was that a slight mist in the air could have created enough water molecules to give a reflective surface for moon rays to bounce off. The steadiness of the circle was extra-strange because there was a strong north wind blowing little torn scattered cloud fragments south at a great rate. And so, though I (and Dom came up to look too, and was equally amazed, so I knew I wasn’t hallucinating) searched around for a practical explanation, I was left with just a lovely feeling of wonder and amazement.
That’s as it should be with these rare events, don’t you think? And in this modern era of scientific explanations, how lucky to stumble on the unknown and the seemingly miraculous. To be visited by a sense of wonder after childhood is one of the great blessings or treats that we can experience I think.
And speaking of light and light effects, I have just been going through the photos I made on my last trip to Burma, including some of the wild light effects at Shwedagon. I wrote here last time of the fairy lights around temple edges. Well seeing them on the screen was a reminder of just how fantastic the effects are, especially right after sunset.
I’m going to take another small (about a hundred images) batch of photos with me in JPEG format, on a stick, when I head to NYCity on Thursday. (Included in them, apart from Shwedagon and streetscenes etc, are shots from Aung San Suu Kyi’s speech in Myitkyina, with the excited crowd; so great.) I’ll be spending time at Artisan looking at the latest version of the book and trying to help with photo allocation.
There’s a tricky balancing act required: large photos are lovely, but with just those, the book can feel lumpy and stiff; on the other hand too many shots can make a book feel messy and jumbled. I’m hoping we can have photos that run large and also some smaller drop-ins to give rhythm and life at unexpected moments. Susan Baldaresini has done a brilliant job of designing the recipe pages: they are so elegant and clear, truly cook- and reader- friendly. They’ll be imitated for sure once the book comes out. I can’t wait to see all this.
And then the second galleys will come roaring to me in about three weeks, and will need to get dealt with and sent back within a week. That’s the scary part, the moment when there is no more chance to catch and correct errors or tweak things. It’s kind of like finally diving out of the plane on a sky-dive I imagine, nauseating, and then suddenly exhilarating because you’re floating free.
I want to talk about a delish quick supper improv from this evening. There are three things that Tashi loves, but his brother doesn’t: sweet potato, celeriac, and bacon. This evening, Dom being out, I chopped some bacon, heated it then poured off a lot of the fat, then added a pinch of turmeric and chopped celery root and chopped sweet potato. After a little frying, I added some cumin, and some powdered cloves, then water to just cover. With the lid on, it all simmered and cooked together for fifteen minutes. I added some leftover cooked rice. It absorbed the extra liquid and the whole thing was like a pulao. It needed a squeeze or more of lime juice to balance the sweet. And it was rich, for sure.
The bacon-root veg “pulao” was a good pairing with simple masur dal with cauliflower (added to the spices - nigella, fenugreek, mustard seed - and oil that tempered the dal, and then cooked to tender in the dal). A drizzle of chile oil on top of each serving, and more lime juice too, gave a last brightening kick.
It’s freezing cold outside, so there are no fresh herbs in the garden; it would have been extra-delish with some fresh coriander leaves or chopped mint on top.
Spring is only two weeks away – can’t wait.
Showing posts with label Myitkyina. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Myitkyina. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
NEWS FROM MYITKYINA OF PAIN, & CELEBRATION TOO
Nine days ago, on a Saturday night, I wandered around Shwedagon in more of a daze than usual because the intensities up there - golden statues, people praying, sounding gongs, chatting, walking, making offerings, pouring water on their day-of-the-week animal, and more - were multiplied tenfold, it seemed. As the sky slowly darkened after sunset, the temple festival lights came on. Usually at night the dome is floodlit, but these are different. They’ve been put up for the huge temple festival at Shwedagon at the end of the month. Imagine little fairy lights, the kind of Christmas outside lights that some people in the northern countries use to outline the edges of their windows at Christmas time, and then in your mind’s eye drape them around the outlines of temple roofs and chapel openings each strand a brilliant green or an intense blue or purple or yellow or red or... You get the idea. It was gaudy, kitschy, fantastical.
(On my second walk around the circle of the dome an older monk stopped to talk with me After I’d answered his question about where I was from I said, “And isn’t all this amazing?” and he answered, “I don’t like all these lights; too much!” )
Two days later I was in Myitkyina, in Burma’ s farthest north state, Kachin State. The crowds and the celebrations of Rangoon felt far away, for the army has been attacking villages up there for the last six months or so, and fighting with the KIA (the Kachin Independence Army) after a ceasefire of seventeen years, despite a call from Burma’s president Thain Sein to stop fighting. As several people put it: “The army is out of control”.
There are small camps for the IDP’s (Internally Displaced People) who have fled their villages; they now number over 65,000. It’s an ugly situation, with no resolution in sight. The churches in Myitkyina and area are working to get supplies of blankets and food to the IDP’s who are out in the countryside; other camps in and around town are being supported, with shelters, basic food supplies, and blankets, by UNHCR and the World Food Program, as well as local churches and temples.
I stayed at the YMCA where I’d stayed three years earlier on my first trip to Myitkyina. The same fabulous staff still work there, and it’s a good place to meet other foreigners who have a special interest in Burma, and to learn the latest news. This time there was immediate good news amidst all the bad details about the fighting and the IDP’s: Aung San Suu Kyi was coming to Myitkyina. Unbelievable.
The day she arrived the town was buzzing, and whenever she was driven somewhere the small cavalcade was led by guys on a motorcycle shouting out and waving a red NLD flag atop a long bamboo pole. She spent most of the day visiting other towns, then in the evening dined with the heads of the churches to discuss the IDP situation and the fighting. I waited outside her small hotel just behind the Y to see her when she returned after ten that night. After a long gruelling day, she still looked full of life, saying a few words and touching hands with each of the young people who crowded around as she walked up the hotel’s front steps.
The next day she gave a big speech at the Manau grounds, where the Kachin new year festivitites take place each January (except this year, when they were cancelled because of the fighting). I went out early on my rented bicycle to find myself a good spot. There was a decorated platform, some flags and bunting, and no visible security. People started to stream in before eight in the morning until suddenly there was a crowd. And it roared as she got out of a van and walked up onto the podium, dressed in traditional Kachin clothing, and began to talk.
At the time I could just pick out key words: democracy, Panglong, Bogyoke Aung San (her father)... Later I learned that she’d talked about national reconciliation, the need to negotiate a settlement with the army, the need for a “Panglong for the twenty-first century”, a reference to an accord with the major non-Bamar groups (except the Karen) that was reached before independence; her father Aung San was the man who achieved that. Every once in awhile there’d be a call out or comment from the crowd. And each time she’d respond to it, sometimes making people laugh with a quick retort, other times with a longer reply.
One call-out was a “it’s been so long since you were last here!” She answered with a “well I was under house arrest for a lot of that time” and then went on to say that they, the people of Myitkyina, know what house arrest feels like because their situation is similar, with the army and police checking on them, and no freedom to go where they want freely. ‘We are all citizens of this country and we should all have the same rights, the same respect,’ was her message, along with a reminder that democracy involves responsibility and hard work.
Afterward the van carrying her, standing up through the roof and easy to see, drove at a snail’s pace across the field toward the road, the crowd thick all around and reaching up to her. She reached back, bending to each side to touch people’s hands, and again and again..more and more...
And so there was celebration in Myitkyina.
AND ABOUT THE DAM: I went one day up to Myit Sone, the place where the two upper branches of the Irrawaddy meet to form the great river. It's the site of the proposed Chinese dam, or series of dams. Those have been suspended for now by President Thein Sein. The Chinese, not just the companies involved, but also the government, are incensed. Perhaps this is part of the explanation for the continued fighting in Kachin State? Maybe they want to destabilise this reasonable liberalising president? Hard to know.
In the meantime the confluence area is beautiful. I feel so lucky to have seen it, been out on the river there, seen the gold panning along the river banks, etc. There are signs of the dam prep: dormitory buildings all in a row on the far bank, and walls of concrete high up on the cliffs and banks to stabilise the future walls of the future reservoirs. This is set to be a huge project, with a giant lake, that could alter and destroy the water balance and the agriculture of central Burma. Let's hope Thein Sein survives as president and the dam project stays on the drawing boards only.
(On my second walk around the circle of the dome an older monk stopped to talk with me After I’d answered his question about where I was from I said, “And isn’t all this amazing?” and he answered, “I don’t like all these lights; too much!” )
Two days later I was in Myitkyina, in Burma’ s farthest north state, Kachin State. The crowds and the celebrations of Rangoon felt far away, for the army has been attacking villages up there for the last six months or so, and fighting with the KIA (the Kachin Independence Army) after a ceasefire of seventeen years, despite a call from Burma’s president Thain Sein to stop fighting. As several people put it: “The army is out of control”.
There are small camps for the IDP’s (Internally Displaced People) who have fled their villages; they now number over 65,000. It’s an ugly situation, with no resolution in sight. The churches in Myitkyina and area are working to get supplies of blankets and food to the IDP’s who are out in the countryside; other camps in and around town are being supported, with shelters, basic food supplies, and blankets, by UNHCR and the World Food Program, as well as local churches and temples.
I stayed at the YMCA where I’d stayed three years earlier on my first trip to Myitkyina. The same fabulous staff still work there, and it’s a good place to meet other foreigners who have a special interest in Burma, and to learn the latest news. This time there was immediate good news amidst all the bad details about the fighting and the IDP’s: Aung San Suu Kyi was coming to Myitkyina. Unbelievable.
The day she arrived the town was buzzing, and whenever she was driven somewhere the small cavalcade was led by guys on a motorcycle shouting out and waving a red NLD flag atop a long bamboo pole. She spent most of the day visiting other towns, then in the evening dined with the heads of the churches to discuss the IDP situation and the fighting. I waited outside her small hotel just behind the Y to see her when she returned after ten that night. After a long gruelling day, she still looked full of life, saying a few words and touching hands with each of the young people who crowded around as she walked up the hotel’s front steps.
The next day she gave a big speech at the Manau grounds, where the Kachin new year festivitites take place each January (except this year, when they were cancelled because of the fighting). I went out early on my rented bicycle to find myself a good spot. There was a decorated platform, some flags and bunting, and no visible security. People started to stream in before eight in the morning until suddenly there was a crowd. And it roared as she got out of a van and walked up onto the podium, dressed in traditional Kachin clothing, and began to talk.
At the time I could just pick out key words: democracy, Panglong, Bogyoke Aung San (her father)... Later I learned that she’d talked about national reconciliation, the need to negotiate a settlement with the army, the need for a “Panglong for the twenty-first century”, a reference to an accord with the major non-Bamar groups (except the Karen) that was reached before independence; her father Aung San was the man who achieved that. Every once in awhile there’d be a call out or comment from the crowd. And each time she’d respond to it, sometimes making people laugh with a quick retort, other times with a longer reply.
One call-out was a “it’s been so long since you were last here!” She answered with a “well I was under house arrest for a lot of that time” and then went on to say that they, the people of Myitkyina, know what house arrest feels like because their situation is similar, with the army and police checking on them, and no freedom to go where they want freely. ‘We are all citizens of this country and we should all have the same rights, the same respect,’ was her message, along with a reminder that democracy involves responsibility and hard work.
Afterward the van carrying her, standing up through the roof and easy to see, drove at a snail’s pace across the field toward the road, the crowd thick all around and reaching up to her. She reached back, bending to each side to touch people’s hands, and again and again..more and more...
And so there was celebration in Myitkyina.
AND ABOUT THE DAM: I went one day up to Myit Sone, the place where the two upper branches of the Irrawaddy meet to form the great river. It's the site of the proposed Chinese dam, or series of dams. Those have been suspended for now by President Thein Sein. The Chinese, not just the companies involved, but also the government, are incensed. Perhaps this is part of the explanation for the continued fighting in Kachin State? Maybe they want to destabilise this reasonable liberalising president? Hard to know.
In the meantime the confluence area is beautiful. I feel so lucky to have seen it, been out on the river there, seen the gold panning along the river banks, etc. There are signs of the dam prep: dormitory buildings all in a row on the far bank, and walls of concrete high up on the cliffs and banks to stabilise the future walls of the future reservoirs. This is set to be a huge project, with a giant lake, that could alter and destroy the water balance and the agriculture of central Burma. Let's hope Thein Sein survives as president and the dam project stays on the drawing boards only.
Monday, February 20, 2012
TO MYITKYINA, FOR ANOTHER LAYER OF UNDERSTANDING
It’s hard to admit how much the shape of my days is affected by technology, but here goes: I am in Rangoon, a fascinating, rapidly changing, seedy place that has been shaped, both built and battered, by war and politics and colonialism and commerce. But now there’s decent internet access, wi-fi in my hotel, and I have my laptop, so that means...
It means that I get up early to get internet stuff done before the connection slows to bogged-down around 9 am, and then stay up late to catch the other end of the day’s good access. And that set of bookend timings of being indoors means that I miss the best light in the morning for photos. I am not getting rested and sleeping in (the usual only-possible-excuse-for-missing-morning-light). I am online.
How wasteful and stupid, I think to myself. But does that mean I shift gears and break pattern? It seems not, from my first three days here.
What is the urge then, to go on reading online from the links that come in on Facebook and Twitter? For that’s what keeps me here. It’s not a wild cruise through the blogosphere or the net, but a quite limited set of excursions, most of them initiated by some posted link. Part of it is that I hate to miss out on anything. If I don’t click now on the link I see on Twitter (and I follow well under 100 people, so they’re quite carefully selected and generally put up fruitful interesting links) I will lose it, never find it again, as the next tweets come in by the dozens and more. That’s one urgency. Another is the pure pleasure of having all this access to the diverse mysteries and curiosities out there in the world. I feel greedy. I want to see and know them all - yes an impossibility I know, but that’s the impulse.
And so in Rangoon for three days I have closed myself away from life in the street and in the teashops for hours at a time, and instead been awake to the e-world, or at least a sampling of it. (I admit that I've also been out every late morning to late afternoon eating huge meals at various places around town, with a good friend. Maybe my computer time is just necessary to digestion??)
The olden-days equivalent of screen-time I suppose is having my head in a book. I did that for years as a kid, was chastised for it by my mother and frowned at for it by her father my granddad, an extremely judgemental guy. Even that didn’t dissuade me, it just made me hide, find a corner to tuck myself into where I could read and hopefully not be discovered.
Another explanation then, that covers both the book and the electronic situations, might be that all this is an escape. It’s a way of not being stuck in the present with all its demands to pay attention and cope. But wait, I find myself thinking, when I am traveling I am choosing exactly that: the demands of the daily unknowns of travel, and the thrills too. If I close myself off, I miss out on the serendipity of travel, and the wonder of it.
Perhaps I’m just tired and needing a break?
I wrote all that earlier, and it seems to have acted like a purge. I spent almost the whole day out and about, with no thought of the internet, I started with an early morning excursion to Bothathaung Temple, by the river, and the action down there. Every morning commuters arrive in long narrow boats from across the river: school kids in uniform; labourers; young women working in service industries, selling clothes or washing and cutting hair, for example; young men working labour jobs; and a collection of others that are hard to place. They come striding up the wooden planking that links the dock to the river’s edge, shirts white and crisp, ready for a new day. It’s a great sight, with the golden dome of the chedi at Bothathaung gleaming behind them in the morning sky.
And as for the rest of my time here, I now have a plan: I fly to Myitkyina in the far north of Burma tomorrow, leaving at noon. I have four days there. I went three years ago, and I want to see how things are there now. In the centre of the country people are now so much more at ease and optimisitic about the future. They feel free to talk and have discussions, and to talk openly with foreigners because of the huge changes in government policy since last summer. But in Kachin State there’s been fighting between the army and the Kachin Independence Army. Many people have been displaced, and villages burned and fields destroyed, and many deaths. The army was ordered to stop, and did not. All that is down the road from Myitkyina, towards the Chinese border mostly. How will town feel?
Markets and teashops are the best place to judge the feel of a town. Food does link us all, daily. And on the food end, I have a very practical interest too: I want to cross-check my memories of Kachin dishes and make sure of some details, for the book.
It will be a lot colder there than steamy Rangoon. I’m glad to have a wool cardigan as well as a shawl to snuggle into...and some books to read on the cold dark evenings.
It means that I get up early to get internet stuff done before the connection slows to bogged-down around 9 am, and then stay up late to catch the other end of the day’s good access. And that set of bookend timings of being indoors means that I miss the best light in the morning for photos. I am not getting rested and sleeping in (the usual only-possible-excuse-for-missing-morning-light). I am online.
How wasteful and stupid, I think to myself. But does that mean I shift gears and break pattern? It seems not, from my first three days here.
What is the urge then, to go on reading online from the links that come in on Facebook and Twitter? For that’s what keeps me here. It’s not a wild cruise through the blogosphere or the net, but a quite limited set of excursions, most of them initiated by some posted link. Part of it is that I hate to miss out on anything. If I don’t click now on the link I see on Twitter (and I follow well under 100 people, so they’re quite carefully selected and generally put up fruitful interesting links) I will lose it, never find it again, as the next tweets come in by the dozens and more. That’s one urgency. Another is the pure pleasure of having all this access to the diverse mysteries and curiosities out there in the world. I feel greedy. I want to see and know them all - yes an impossibility I know, but that’s the impulse.
And so in Rangoon for three days I have closed myself away from life in the street and in the teashops for hours at a time, and instead been awake to the e-world, or at least a sampling of it. (I admit that I've also been out every late morning to late afternoon eating huge meals at various places around town, with a good friend. Maybe my computer time is just necessary to digestion??)
The olden-days equivalent of screen-time I suppose is having my head in a book. I did that for years as a kid, was chastised for it by my mother and frowned at for it by her father my granddad, an extremely judgemental guy. Even that didn’t dissuade me, it just made me hide, find a corner to tuck myself into where I could read and hopefully not be discovered.
Another explanation then, that covers both the book and the electronic situations, might be that all this is an escape. It’s a way of not being stuck in the present with all its demands to pay attention and cope. But wait, I find myself thinking, when I am traveling I am choosing exactly that: the demands of the daily unknowns of travel, and the thrills too. If I close myself off, I miss out on the serendipity of travel, and the wonder of it.
Perhaps I’m just tired and needing a break?
I wrote all that earlier, and it seems to have acted like a purge. I spent almost the whole day out and about, with no thought of the internet, I started with an early morning excursion to Bothathaung Temple, by the river, and the action down there. Every morning commuters arrive in long narrow boats from across the river: school kids in uniform; labourers; young women working in service industries, selling clothes or washing and cutting hair, for example; young men working labour jobs; and a collection of others that are hard to place. They come striding up the wooden planking that links the dock to the river’s edge, shirts white and crisp, ready for a new day. It’s a great sight, with the golden dome of the chedi at Bothathaung gleaming behind them in the morning sky.
And as for the rest of my time here, I now have a plan: I fly to Myitkyina in the far north of Burma tomorrow, leaving at noon. I have four days there. I went three years ago, and I want to see how things are there now. In the centre of the country people are now so much more at ease and optimisitic about the future. They feel free to talk and have discussions, and to talk openly with foreigners because of the huge changes in government policy since last summer. But in Kachin State there’s been fighting between the army and the Kachin Independence Army. Many people have been displaced, and villages burned and fields destroyed, and many deaths. The army was ordered to stop, and did not. All that is down the road from Myitkyina, towards the Chinese border mostly. How will town feel?
Markets and teashops are the best place to judge the feel of a town. Food does link us all, daily. And on the food end, I have a very practical interest too: I want to cross-check my memories of Kachin dishes and make sure of some details, for the book.
It will be a lot colder there than steamy Rangoon. I’m glad to have a wool cardigan as well as a shawl to snuggle into...and some books to read on the cold dark evenings.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
SPRINGTIME PLEASURES & PRESSURES
We're now past that big signpost April 1. Thirty years ago I started working as a lawyer in Toronto, for a firm now called Sack Goldblatt Mitchell, doing union side labour law. April 1 seemed like a good start day. Loved the people I worked with. That first year was hugely stressful; I doubted myself a lot and didn't dare tell anyone. Of course I discovered near the end of my first year, from a friend I finally confided in, that almost every lawyer in her or his first year of practice has these doubts and fears. it's not easy, doing things for the first time and feeling like huge errors lie in wait to ambush you!
Maybe all that stress is a good lesson for the rest of life, as in, nothing ever feels impossible again...or, "if I could do that and survive more or less mentally healthy, then I can figure out how to survive other things that life will throw at me..." You get my drift.
Warm weather has reappeared, though still with chilly temperatures at night. My friends up north say the sap has started running again (for awhile it got too cold and the flow stopped). I last wrote here on Friday, the day before I headed north for a cross country ski and lively supper with friends.
The ski was magic, with warm sun, melting snow but enough to cover the forest floor as I slithered along a stretch of the Bruce Trail. Shadows were sharp-etched on the snow, rabbit tracks and the odd fox or coyote track too showed that the still of the forest hid life of all kinds. By the time I turned and retraced my steps/glides/tracks the air had chilled a little, so the tracks, slightly melted in the sun on the way out, had re-iced. My trip back was much faster! - zippy and thrilling at times. I had one small fall and one near catastrophe as I slipped and nearly fell into a small rivulet I was trying to cross. No harm done, and that shot of adrenalin warmed me in the cool and gave a fun little edge to the end of the ski.
What is it about the pleasures of adrenalin? Of course I don't want that edge all the time, but the odd shot is a treat and a trip. I suppose it's like any other drug: harmful in overdose or over an extended period, but a real pleasure, sometimes a guilty pleasure.
I have written a little about this before, mostly because of bicycling. Now that the season has started for me (I am NOT hardy or agile enough to cycle in heavy snow) I'm reminded of the pleasurable edge I get from bicycling in the city. It's a rush to be so alert, so pushing myself. And I find it really satisfying too. A friend tells me it's the guy in me. Not sure if that's a full explanation! But there's certainly a competitive edge to it, me against the world? It's fun, completely fun, and leaves me speedy and exhilarated.
I just finished reading a remarkable wonderful history of Burma, written by U Thant's grandson and called the River of Lost Footsteps. He's a historian, raised Burmese but mostly in the US, so he tells the story from a Burmese perspective, but also set in a wider world context, and starting from the region's the earliest history, rather than just with the colonial wars. It's too easy to explain things in terms of just the last hundred or hundred and fifty years; doing that puts the analysis on the wrong track. I had had inklings of this truth, but reading the book gave me such a good perspective.
Burma has been a crossroads, and is certainly a geographical crossroads, but at the same time there have been periods of isolation and closed-offness. Now, with the full panorama to contemplate and digest, I have a better idea of the whys and wherefores.
I think I want to do some recipe retesting this week, to reground myself in the concrete, and to give myself time to take a distance from the history book. Only then will I be able to figure out what to say as background for the cookbook. Why do any of it? you ask. After all, for example, what italian cookbook deals with the history of Italy? So why do I feel compelled to engage with historical and geographical and cultural details??
Well because I think there's an interplay between history and politics and culture. And to understand the food culture of a place and a people, it helps to have a context, a wider and deeper context. We assume that people have a context for or knowledge of Italy or France (maybe we're wrong! Who was Cavour anyway? I can imagine someone asking, and why should I care?) and that therefore we don't need to be explicit about the historical and cultural background.
Southeast Asia is far away from North America and the western world. To the extent there's knowledge of Burma, it's mostly of the colonial and post-colonial kind, falsified by a focus on the immediate, perhaps, seen through a post-colonial lens, and usually filtered by non-local interpreters. I guess in a small way this Burma book will make me part of that cavalcade of outsiders writing about Burma. That's why it feels important that I anchor it in the specifics of food and then give it a framework that goes beyond the culinary and into the human landscape past and present.
One of the dishes I'm looking forward to working with this week is from the Kachin. It's unusual and hauntingly good, made of cooked small chunks of beef that are then pounded with spices and dry-fried. It's hard to describe, but not difficult to make. The end result is a deeply flavoured tender semi-pemmican, not a powder but in aromatic pieces. The Kachin, who are based in the north of Burma, Myitkyina being the capital of Kachin State, use herbs such as Vietnamese coriander and sawtooth herb in their cooking, and have many dishes that rely on steaming.
By the way, if you are heading to Rangoon, go have supper at Myit Sone, a Kachin and Shan restuarant near the Children's Hospital. (Myit Sone means confluence, for Myitkyina lies on the irrawaddy River just south of the confluence where its two source rivers emerge from their mountain trenches and join to form Burma's most important river.)
This post has somehow strayed from adrenalin and skiing and cycling to a restaurant recommendation in Burma. Oh well! Better than my dwelling on taxes, which is the other task that needs finishing. I've got a good start. I figure another day's work and then an evening to type things up, and I'll be ready to see the wonderful accountant who actually does my taxes.
Such a pity that the arrival of spring coincides with coercion, isn't it? There are exams when we're younger, and now there are taxes! But then I think to myself, what other time would be better? And there's no answer!
Maybe all that stress is a good lesson for the rest of life, as in, nothing ever feels impossible again...or, "if I could do that and survive more or less mentally healthy, then I can figure out how to survive other things that life will throw at me..." You get my drift.
Warm weather has reappeared, though still with chilly temperatures at night. My friends up north say the sap has started running again (for awhile it got too cold and the flow stopped). I last wrote here on Friday, the day before I headed north for a cross country ski and lively supper with friends.
The ski was magic, with warm sun, melting snow but enough to cover the forest floor as I slithered along a stretch of the Bruce Trail. Shadows were sharp-etched on the snow, rabbit tracks and the odd fox or coyote track too showed that the still of the forest hid life of all kinds. By the time I turned and retraced my steps/glides/tracks the air had chilled a little, so the tracks, slightly melted in the sun on the way out, had re-iced. My trip back was much faster! - zippy and thrilling at times. I had one small fall and one near catastrophe as I slipped and nearly fell into a small rivulet I was trying to cross. No harm done, and that shot of adrenalin warmed me in the cool and gave a fun little edge to the end of the ski.
What is it about the pleasures of adrenalin? Of course I don't want that edge all the time, but the odd shot is a treat and a trip. I suppose it's like any other drug: harmful in overdose or over an extended period, but a real pleasure, sometimes a guilty pleasure.
I have written a little about this before, mostly because of bicycling. Now that the season has started for me (I am NOT hardy or agile enough to cycle in heavy snow) I'm reminded of the pleasurable edge I get from bicycling in the city. It's a rush to be so alert, so pushing myself. And I find it really satisfying too. A friend tells me it's the guy in me. Not sure if that's a full explanation! But there's certainly a competitive edge to it, me against the world? It's fun, completely fun, and leaves me speedy and exhilarated.
I just finished reading a remarkable wonderful history of Burma, written by U Thant's grandson and called the River of Lost Footsteps. He's a historian, raised Burmese but mostly in the US, so he tells the story from a Burmese perspective, but also set in a wider world context, and starting from the region's the earliest history, rather than just with the colonial wars. It's too easy to explain things in terms of just the last hundred or hundred and fifty years; doing that puts the analysis on the wrong track. I had had inklings of this truth, but reading the book gave me such a good perspective.
Burma has been a crossroads, and is certainly a geographical crossroads, but at the same time there have been periods of isolation and closed-offness. Now, with the full panorama to contemplate and digest, I have a better idea of the whys and wherefores.
I think I want to do some recipe retesting this week, to reground myself in the concrete, and to give myself time to take a distance from the history book. Only then will I be able to figure out what to say as background for the cookbook. Why do any of it? you ask. After all, for example, what italian cookbook deals with the history of Italy? So why do I feel compelled to engage with historical and geographical and cultural details??
Well because I think there's an interplay between history and politics and culture. And to understand the food culture of a place and a people, it helps to have a context, a wider and deeper context. We assume that people have a context for or knowledge of Italy or France (maybe we're wrong! Who was Cavour anyway? I can imagine someone asking, and why should I care?) and that therefore we don't need to be explicit about the historical and cultural background.
Southeast Asia is far away from North America and the western world. To the extent there's knowledge of Burma, it's mostly of the colonial and post-colonial kind, falsified by a focus on the immediate, perhaps, seen through a post-colonial lens, and usually filtered by non-local interpreters. I guess in a small way this Burma book will make me part of that cavalcade of outsiders writing about Burma. That's why it feels important that I anchor it in the specifics of food and then give it a framework that goes beyond the culinary and into the human landscape past and present.
One of the dishes I'm looking forward to working with this week is from the Kachin. It's unusual and hauntingly good, made of cooked small chunks of beef that are then pounded with spices and dry-fried. It's hard to describe, but not difficult to make. The end result is a deeply flavoured tender semi-pemmican, not a powder but in aromatic pieces. The Kachin, who are based in the north of Burma, Myitkyina being the capital of Kachin State, use herbs such as Vietnamese coriander and sawtooth herb in their cooking, and have many dishes that rely on steaming.
By the way, if you are heading to Rangoon, go have supper at Myit Sone, a Kachin and Shan restuarant near the Children's Hospital. (Myit Sone means confluence, for Myitkyina lies on the irrawaddy River just south of the confluence where its two source rivers emerge from their mountain trenches and join to form Burma's most important river.)
This post has somehow strayed from adrenalin and skiing and cycling to a restaurant recommendation in Burma. Oh well! Better than my dwelling on taxes, which is the other task that needs finishing. I've got a good start. I figure another day's work and then an evening to type things up, and I'll be ready to see the wonderful accountant who actually does my taxes.
Such a pity that the arrival of spring coincides with coercion, isn't it? There are exams when we're younger, and now there are taxes! But then I think to myself, what other time would be better? And there's no answer!
Saturday, March 7, 2009
PRECIOUS CONNECTIONS ACROSS TIME
Once again the tech-whizzes at the local email place in Rangoon have patched me up so I can try to post. Why bother? you might think, since tomorrow I am due to fly to Bangkok and Chiang Mai, where email etc is very accessible. But it seems so wonderful to be able to blog from here that I want to take advantage.
Just heard that Beyond the Great Wall has been nominated in the International category for an IACP cookbook award. Great news! But at the same time of course it feels a little remote right now...
I got back late yesterday from the extraordinary town of Myitkyina, in northern Burma. It's amazingness doesn't lie in its architecture, for it was mostly flattened by US bombs aimed at dislodging the Japanese, who had successfully invaded Burma all the way to the north by 1943. Instead, of course it lies in the human landscape, a mix of Kachin (itself a broad category that covers different cultures), Shan (ditto), Chinese, Burmese, people from many parts of the Indian subcontinent including Gurkhas from Nepal, and I am sure others...
The town sits on the west bank of the Irrawaddy River, low with large sandbanks in this season. There are hills in all directions. People arrive by boat and motorcycle and bicycle and trishaw, and on foot to come to the busy market on and near the high river bank in central Myitkyina. I can't write about the food right now: I don't know enough, for one thing, and for another, my head is still too freshly dazzled by it all still. Later, later!
On my last day there I met a Kachin man who is one of the seven remaining Kachin veterans of the BFF, Burmese Frontier Forces, who fought a guerilla war against the Japanese with the help of a few British and also some gurkha troops. He is now eighty-four years old, lean and straight as he rode up on his motorcycle, with swift sure movements and a very clear brain. He said he'd just been recruited when the British retreat from Burma began, and so his war was entirely fought in the hills, while the towns were occupied by the Japanese. It's impossible to imagine what all that was like. I could just admire his liveliness and sense of self-respect, and his tenacity.
Later that day I got a ride to the airport with a man named Mohammed Khan, whose father had travelled from Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan, to Dibrugarh, in Assam. He'd begun with the British Army, but then was passed along to the US 10st Battalion to be a driver of supplies as the Burma Road was being built. The jeep we were driving in had been his father's jeep, still in lovingly good repair all these years later. Mr Khan's father died only two years ago, aged ninety.
When I think of these stories, brief glimpses of another, very difficult time, it makes me realize that the most precious thing we have are the stories, the shared web of experience. Time passes, people and place grow and pass away, but we keep them alive, and keep alive our sense of connection to them, by telling each other stories, weaving narratives for ourselves, whole cloth in which to clothe ourselves and our children.
Just heard that Beyond the Great Wall has been nominated in the International category for an IACP cookbook award. Great news! But at the same time of course it feels a little remote right now...
I got back late yesterday from the extraordinary town of Myitkyina, in northern Burma. It's amazingness doesn't lie in its architecture, for it was mostly flattened by US bombs aimed at dislodging the Japanese, who had successfully invaded Burma all the way to the north by 1943. Instead, of course it lies in the human landscape, a mix of Kachin (itself a broad category that covers different cultures), Shan (ditto), Chinese, Burmese, people from many parts of the Indian subcontinent including Gurkhas from Nepal, and I am sure others...
The town sits on the west bank of the Irrawaddy River, low with large sandbanks in this season. There are hills in all directions. People arrive by boat and motorcycle and bicycle and trishaw, and on foot to come to the busy market on and near the high river bank in central Myitkyina. I can't write about the food right now: I don't know enough, for one thing, and for another, my head is still too freshly dazzled by it all still. Later, later!
On my last day there I met a Kachin man who is one of the seven remaining Kachin veterans of the BFF, Burmese Frontier Forces, who fought a guerilla war against the Japanese with the help of a few British and also some gurkha troops. He is now eighty-four years old, lean and straight as he rode up on his motorcycle, with swift sure movements and a very clear brain. He said he'd just been recruited when the British retreat from Burma began, and so his war was entirely fought in the hills, while the towns were occupied by the Japanese. It's impossible to imagine what all that was like. I could just admire his liveliness and sense of self-respect, and his tenacity.
Later that day I got a ride to the airport with a man named Mohammed Khan, whose father had travelled from Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan, to Dibrugarh, in Assam. He'd begun with the British Army, but then was passed along to the US 10st Battalion to be a driver of supplies as the Burma Road was being built. The jeep we were driving in had been his father's jeep, still in lovingly good repair all these years later. Mr Khan's father died only two years ago, aged ninety.
When I think of these stories, brief glimpses of another, very difficult time, it makes me realize that the most precious thing we have are the stories, the shared web of experience. Time passes, people and place grow and pass away, but we keep them alive, and keep alive our sense of connection to them, by telling each other stories, weaving narratives for ourselves, whole cloth in which to clothe ourselves and our children.
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