death by noodles
i once heard a story about a grad student who was so poor, all he ate was instant noodles. every day he ate instant noodles for over a month. and then he died from a heart attack.
i’m reminded of the story on day 3 of my instant noodle spree. now that i think about it, i’m pretty sure he ate ramen for every single meal, whereas i’m just eating it for lunch. for the third day in a row.
faithful readers would note that i don’t really update much or talk about ghana as much as one might expect. well, here is an update: i won’t be in ghana much longer. i quit my job and am heading back to the states in a short time. overall the job just was not for me – my project fell apart, i was working by myself as opposed to in a team, and i had no contact with the lead researchers. but even knowing all those things, quitting was probably the biggest, scariest decision i’ve had to make in my life so far. i’m very excited to have made it, and to realize that i’m growing up, that the decisions i make are ultimately mine, and i’ll have to deal with the consequences. the agency, the responsibility is exhilarating.
so what to do from here? on one hand, i’m slowly tiring of the poor student life. but on the other hand, i feel like i haven’t fully delved into this faux-pas-verty living. or rather, i haven’t really extracted the benefits from being young and having nothing to lose. it’s not like i have a high paying job, or bills to pay, or a family to feed. so why not dive headfirst into the frenzied world of the bohemian bourgeois (bobo) for a little while, while i can still stand it?
then of course, the tiny voice in my head that remembers stuff from econ class screams, “what about the opportunity costs? what happened to discounting the future? investing in today pays off tomorrow. but investing in being a bobo will not.” ideally i’d find something that can conjoin the two like freak twins. or i’ll just get one out of my system and choose the other.
i’ll be relocating to new york city while i figure all of this out. i’m excited to choose the next steps of my path, knowing that they could potentially lead to a long a fruitful career. but i also know that no decision i make now has to dictate the course of my life if i don’t want it to. i have many options. but…
i wouldn’t say the sky is the limit for me, not anymore. i know myself better than to say i could be anything. for me, my potential is more like the sea. if i pick a time and place, and i trust that it’s right, i can settle in and sink down, and just sink there, until i’ve hit the bottom. even if it’s miles deep. the problem is that i’ll swim to the surface if i think sinking – or the prospects of where i’ll land – isn’t worth it. why i might do so is becoming clearer to me. either i don’t enjoy the fall or i don’t believe in the outcome. so for me, i realize my greatest strength and weakness – that i’m able to accomplish anything that i truly want, and i’m unable to do anything i don’t truly want.
anyway, i will see you folks soon. i miss you.
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love at first sight
first off, i offer my deepest apologies for my absence the past few weeks. although you may get the impression that my life here is too busy or my work too important to sit down and write a bit, that is not the case. what happened was i stopped reading, which means i can’t hijack someone else’s style and i’m not being inspired to think very hard. but before i begin my post, here are some of my recent highlights:
- yesterday i met with someone in my partner organization who is helping us with my study. we had a nice convo about how to better design the study and tried to get the ball rolling on piloting it. forgive me for the vagueness, and i’ll get to the point. on my way out, i gave him a pat on the back and thanked him for meeting me. to which he replied, “oh, no problem chris. i love you,” and then quickly, “i mean i love your study, it’s a good study.” i think it’s safe to say i have a love-hate relationship with that organization.
- my house has been without running water for about a week now. my roommate and i were ill-prepared for this common inconvenience because our house is equipped with a well and a water pump, so even when the main line has problems, we are on our own oasis of flowing water. what an incoherent mash of imagery. see what happens when you stop reading?
anyway, we were ill-prepared in that we didn’t have tons of water stored up to wash our clothes or take a bath. i guess i could have taken this as a moment to learn about the hardships of poverty, but instead i went out and bought 20 packs of drinking water and started using that to bathe. it may sound extravagant, but really it’s like 3 cents for each 500ml pack. i’m getting used to the idea of bathing in pure, filtered water and i think i’ll upgrade to dasani or voltic bottled water, even if the water pump gets fixed.
- for some strange reason, men in this humid, tropical, dusty place tend to wear black slacks and a thick starched white oxford shirt. i was (again) ill-prepared for this level of formality, especially since i’m coming from california, which is ridiculously informal. so i went out the other day with a friend to buy some cloth to get turned into some nice slacks. first of all, we went to the central market in accra, which was packed full of people who apparently think all asians are jackie chan. actually i fully expected this, and for the most part i’ve been impressed by the cultural sensitivity displayed by ghanaians so far (a guy pushing his wheelbarrow at the bus station yelled at me, saying, “hey! korean! move!”).
anyway, pants. so we went to this nicer cloth shop, where this old guy was impatiently trying to sell me some cloth. i asked for charcoal cloth and he showed me something that to me looked navy. “navy??” he said, incredulously. “this is pure charcoal. are you colorblind?” at that moment i knew i would buy from this guy, someone who clearly cares more about cloth than customers. fine with me. i bought a bunch of cloth and tried to shake his hand. i thought he’d shake my hand too, but on my approach he kind of swatted my hand away. i can’t tell if it was a missed high five, or a gtfo.
ok so now onto the main post. do people even like long entries? this is going to be long.
so i went through a phase, and maybe am still going through it, when i believed in love at first sight. people say you can’t really “love” someone unless you know them for a long time, but i think they’re just talking about a specific kind of love. the love between a married couple of 50 years is probably much less exciting, but much deeper and more rich than the love of a newlywed couple. by committing to a relationship, love evolves on its own in light of the ups and downs that exist in every relationship. it’s like wine in oak barrels. as long as you just keep the wine in there, it will age, become more refined, even if the aging process isn’t always quick and easy.
but is love the aged wine? is wine not wine before it’s aged? o chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? love in all phases of love is love. and if you’re committed to it, love will age just fine no matter what you’re starting with. so, by that logic, you might as well start with what you like the most, with whoever you’re attracted to most at first sight. granted, i’m excluding the real but marginal cases of drunks, abusers, druggies, and people of the like. you see someone that you like and you go for it. and you make it work from there. way leads on to way, and before you know it you’ll be enjoying a nice long life of contentment and joy.
this of course is all bullshit. people want the best, not just for themselves now, but the best in light of what their plans for the future are and consider factors like their future kids and careers. here in ghana, it’s not a question of whether or not you want to have kids. the purpose of relationships is to have kids, and when you enter courtship with someone, you have to make sure they are physically, financially and mentally stable. which means that if you have a crazy uncle or an alcoholic cousin, someone may not want to marry you for fear that your kids will have acquired the crazy or alcoholic genes. in this context, love at firsth sight is utter foolishness.
david brooks wrote an interesting column about how texting has increased promiscuity and has essentially promoted an entire network of hookups. a guy will text 5 girls in a night hoping to hear back from a few of them. he gos to whoever is the hottest, but he makes sure he has a backup girl in case everyone else is already hooking up with hotter guys. as awesome as all that sounds, he condemns this generation as being unable to form real relationships and instead relies on instant gratification as facilitated by technology. i think people have been promiscuous from the dawn of man, but the point is taken – people have more choices now and they want to choose best. they hedge their best choices against safer choices (the backup girl). when considering settling down with someone for good, there’s always this lingering thought that maybe someone else would be better, and my life would be better, and that there’s something wrong with how i’m living now. i think that’s a recipe for failure no matter how great the relationship is, and i think that’s the age we live in.
i guess as a reaction to that, i formed this idea that no relationship is perfect, and each relationship gets better with time and commitment. if all these aspects of relationships are “given”, then you might as well make the one choice u can make. that is, pick the girl who you find hottest, who you are so attracted to so that, even though all that will fade in time, you can at least enjoy this first, immature, grape-juice love while it’s there to enjoy. so even though it’s foolishness, maybe i still believe that love at first sight is the purest form of love. it’s love before committing to the natural process of refinement and struggle, which then takes over to turn pure love into true love.
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Read here one guy’s take on SF.
but if you don’t feel like reading the entire thing, pretty much this is a guy who moved to san francisco a few years ago and works in the tech industry. the essay tries to be balanced, but overall, in his view, the negatives of sf outweigh the positives. a few points:
Month after month, San Franciscans gather for festivals and parades: Pride, the Folsom Street Faire, LoveFest, Bay to Breakers, and so forth. The privileged fill the streets, dressed in gaudy costumes, embracing any excuse to celebrate their sexuality, their liberal views, their comfort with alternative approaches to life and social structures. Were San Francisco taking care of its own, creating an environment in which everyone had access to the same comforts and opportunities, I would encourage such celebrations every week. But, as liberal and libertarian as I am, I think there’s something disturbing and solipsistic and fundamentally broken about a place that seems to value a different way of life over better quality of life. It is this that I object to most strenuously about San Francisco.
and:
There are some things about the city that are harder to put a finger on, too. While people in San Francisco are endearingly open-minded, all too often they’re self-centered, passive aggressive, and cold. As above, it’s easy to meet people through work or a common interest, but harder to meet random friendly strangers. Rarely in San Francisco has a kindness been done to me by a stranger – offering directions when I look lost, for example.
if you’ve had a conversation with me in the past two years, then most likely you know that i hold a grudge against californians. even though this article just speaks to life in san francisco, i think the themes persist throughout northern california – indifference veiled as permissiveness, valuing a culture/mindset/trend/gimmick over common decency and, above all, a dogmatic adherence to being self-centered. but, like he says, it’s hard to put a finger on how these themes manifest themselves.
when i first arrived in san francisco, i was struck by how cold people were to each other. i was sitting outside a small restaurant and across the street i saw a middle aged man, taking large strides as he walked uphill towards another restaurant. when he got there, he stopped in front to chat with a cook or dishwasher, a bit younger than him, who was sitting on the stoop. the two apparently knew each other. the first thing that struck me was how loud the older man was speaking, loud enough for me to hear across the street even though the cook was just a few feet away from him. “i’ve been doing a lot of rowing in the morning,” he said (shouted, more like). “it’s a great, great way to start the day.” the cook said he’s been trying to go out to row. “what time do you wake up?” the older man asked. “9:00?? that’s way too late. see, i get up at 6am.”
at that point i said to myself, san francisco is a place for someone who is older, someone who is set on his path, someone who doesn’t give two shits about other people but wants to proclaim his progressive and interesting lifestyle to whoever will listen.
after a little while i was introduced to the mission, and the people there, the hipsters, this strange group of individualists who were ironically homogeneous across different ethnicity, gender and age, and i became even more disillusioned by the culture in san francisco. if you can call it culture. to me it was a cheap parody of the beatnik era, or the hippie era, or some previous era when things may have looked the same but were more innocent, or more genuine, or at least original.
over time i gave up trying to be friends with californians. what i mean by that is, i gave up being vulnerable, open, personable, interested. in fact i’d say such values are looked down upon in many circles in california. maybe, to them, to ask for someone else’s opinion on a matter means you don’t have one yourself. my honesty would either be dismissed with empty quips or judged based on some superficial value (example – me: “i gotta say, i’m a big fan of wendy’s.” some hipster girl: “ew, really? do you have any idea the carbon footprint of their food, they ship their tomatoes all the way from china, what a waste, blahblahblah.”).
i was standing outside an ice cream store with a friend in sf, and a girl was there waiting for the bus. we were all lingering there for a bit before we struck up a conversation. she was on her way to her roommate’s office to pick up a key because she locked herself out of the house. i suggested getting some ice cream while she waited cuz it was delicious and the day was hot. she went in and got herself a scoop. my friend and i weren’t waiting for the bus, but we stayed there chatting with the friendly stranger for a while longer. after she finished her ice cream, and still waiting for the bus, i suggested she light a cigarette and the bus will magically appear, a phenomenon that prematurely ends the life of many a good cigarettes. we laughed, and talked some more. she said she just arrived to san francisco from brooklyn and planned to stay here with her friend for awhile. and then the bus came and she left.
and so it went, a moment to add to a body of evidence: if i met a friendly stranger in california, if i had a conversation that was at least not disingenuous, if i shared a meal with someone or spoke highly of someone, you can guess that he or she was not from california.
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today was a different kind of day.
it started out as most days have started out: me, waking up to the cries of some demon possessed rooster about an hour before my alarm, contemplating coffee but the press is dirty and i don’t want to clean it, trying and failing to get on the internet, maybe read some bolano (gotta keep up with the hip sf literary crew, right?), maybe go back to sleep, etc etc.
i ironed my shirt. that’s different. i bought an egg sandwich on the way to work today, but that is pretty normal.
i guess i should skip to the part of the day that was different from the rest, the part where i wrestled a 90 pound asian girl.
so for a while now, kofi, my african american brother (i know… there is so much wrong with what i just said, but it’s true) has been really into brazilian jujitsu. bjj, if you will. he used to try out his new moves on me when i was just a scrawny middle schooler. now that i’m a young man (but pretty much the same size), he’s taken it upon himself to recruit me to New Breed Jujitsu – Ghana. i missed the first two sessions, first citing jet lag and the second time skipping to go to this african animation film screening. so tonight was my night (i’m the third one on the top).
kof picked me up and off we went. we met at an office building. the room was big and all of the furniture was pushed to the side making it extra spacious. in the middle of the room were mats, where i would soon get my ass beat over and over until i thought i was going to die. but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. i put on a gi (think karate uniform) that smelled of old sweat. no matter. we started off with some warm ups – running in circles. simple enough. then running sideways.. okay. high knees. butt kicks. jumping jacks. while running! then we got on the mat. sit ups, tick tocks, weird crab movements… i was sweating like crazy, and my sweat was mixing with the old crusty sweat on my gi. there was no turning back.
then tj, the nicest instructor in the world, showed us how to get out of a “guard”. a guard is when a person is on his back and his legs are wrapped around the other guy’s waist, who is on his knees. i’m trying to think of a sexual position that it resembles but no name comes to mind. anyway, the goal was to break free from the guy’s legs and eventually destroy him with a submission move. i say “him” but when we started practicing, i was paired up with tj’s girlfriend. it was a natural pairing – in fact we’ve spoken before about how we’re both skinny and how we are always trying to gain weight. anyway, so there i was practicing these bjj moves on her, sweating profusely all over her (poor girl), putting her in arm bars and submission moves. of course she also practices the moves on me. we go back and forth and i slowly learn some of the moves.
so maybe i oversold the whole wrestling with a 90 pound asian girl. after learning some more techniques, we started sparring, first kof and me. five minute rounds. think about that. imagine holding your breath and running as fast as you can… for five minutes. so kof and i start grappling, him in his controlled and efficient movements, me like an unbroken stallion, a really small, weak stallion, flailing and grabbing at anything i could to not get choked out. but inevitably choking out happened. we reset. same result. the seconds dragged on. i eventually started tapping out before he even started choking me. by the end of it i thought i was going to collapse, barf, or die. all three, actually. it was bad.
somehow kof kept going on, match after match, not forgetting to breath, moving when he had to, finding positions to rest. he even almost got tj before time ran out. i don’t really remember what happened after that. i was dry heaving, had cotton mouth, couldn’t feel my limbs… you get the idea.
why subject yourself to this, chris? well it all goes back six years ago, when a young asian boy straight out of high school visited his african american brother in ghana. he was walking out of an ice cream store, happily eating his chocolate ice cream out of his little plastic cup. and then some punk ass dude comes and barrels through him from behind, without saying sorry. in fact he turns around and demands that the little asian boy say sorry. the little asian boy was at first angered, mad, and wanted to defend his and his people’s honor. then he realized that his big african american brother was not paying attention to the entire scene, and that he was on his own. and then he profusely apologized, crawled into his african american brother’s car, and never mentioned the story again. until NOW. I AM THAT ASIAN BOY!
so the story ends, and the day ends, and i will retire into blissful sleep, and i will dream bizarre and thought provoking dreams (like mine from last night…. i dreamed that i traveled back in time, and i saw this girl named andi who i knew from college, but she was much younger, and i told her i loved her, and that she had to remember me when i go back to the present and she’ll know me because i will have a specific digital camera, and when i went to the present i tried to buy that camera but my parents didn’t want me to buy that model. and i was really sad, and then that damn rooster woke me up!) and tomorrow will be a new day.
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details
these days, the details seem a bit hard to grasp. i resort to lists, mundane recollections of whatever details remain, hoping that they will add up to a memory that i can hold on to and say, this is what i did. so that is what i’ll do.
- i just ate two bananas, finishing what was left of the 5 bananas i bought several hours ago. bananas here are sweeter than in the states, so even though these were still a bit green, they were nice.
for some reason i always tend to miss the banana ladies when i walk to and from work, but luckily today she was there. i walked up, not forgetting to smile, and asked how much they were, and asked for 4 of them. there was some confusion. i asked how much they were, and she asked how much money i had. i laughed – i thought buying bananas would be an innocuous transaction, but she was going for the hard sell. anyway i felt bad for laughing, so i ended up overpaying for the bananas. unfortunately, knowing that i overpaid for them somewhat diminished my enjoyment.
- intermittently, i go to my couch and read a few pages from my book, the savage detectives. it was highly recommended by leo, yes you get a direct shoutout, so i hope you’re reading. each time i go back and forth i notice something new. i’m staying in a guest house which is pretty far from the street. the first time i got up, i saw three men standing outside the gate of the house opposite mine, which was a bit strange. i’ve never seen them before, and before you all start calling me a racist for suspecting that they were up to no good, i’d say it was more the influence of the book, in which a family is held under siege by a pimp because they are housing his prostitute. speaking of which, there are lots of prostitutes on my street at night. i may have already mentioned that to some of you.
the second time i got up, which was just now, it was pitch black outside. i can’t even see the main house, which is only 20 feet from the window. the night is kind of mysterious and exciting and scary… kind of like when i’d watch tv at home as a kid, watch tv all day and night would come without me realizing it, and i’d only realize it when switching programs, that split second of darkness making me see that everything was dark, outside, inside, everything.
mysterious, exciting, scary, dark… that pretty much sums up the savage detectives. it’s funny. not the book, but its effect on me. the book is about young latin american poets. as i’m reading it, i kind of wonder in what world poets could take themselves so seriously, that their poems would land them in jail or influence people or even politics. in the book, the characters would say in passing something like, “we spent the night talking about the state of latin american poetry, well into the morning.” anyway i found it hard to believe that poems could be so influential. but as i write this dreary post, i see that i’m just channeling the author, roberto bolaño, writing in his voice.
- on my way to work yesterday i bought an orange at a stand. while the young girl was cutting the orange, an older girl was teasing the guy sitting next to her, who was trying to send a text on his phone. “when are you going to marry me?” she asked, waving a hand in front of his face. i asked him why he hadn’t proposed. “she is always bothering me,” he said. ” i ask her to go away, and she stays. if i marry her, she will never go away.” we all laughed. today i walked by again and the older girl was there. i asked her if he proposed yet. he said he hadn’t. she asked where i lived, and i said nearby. she asked if she could come over. ! isn’t that a bit forward? i should have said thatat the time, but instead i just made up an excuse for why that would not be a good idea (do i even need to make an excuse?). (how does one punctuate a sentence if it ends with a question mark in the parenthetical phrase? like this?).
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Some Poverty Action
Somehow, I arrived on time in Ghana with all my luggage.
I remember very little about the details of my last trip to Ghana 6 years ago, so I’m feeling a lot of deja vu (great movie) quite a lot these days. (These days – I’ve just been here two days!) Eventually the memories come back. Like right now, as I munch on Nature’s Valley peanut bars in my temporary house, I remember eating airport-bought Krispy Kreme donuts alone at Kof’s house because I didn’t know where to eat a proper lunch and didn’t feel like exploring. For me, the first two weeks of being in a new place are wrought with many fears – the fear of the unknown, of my unpredictable bowels / unreliable access to toilets, of being alone or having no friends… but the most crippling fear, the fear that keeps me from finding lunch, is the fear of looking stupid. Of being THAT guy, the stupid foreigner who requires special attention and disrupts life for everyone else. It’s a stupid fear because by default I look and am out of place. If I could rid myself of one fear, it would be this. But I don’t beat myself up too much because I know that fears disappear, usually within two weeks. Hence the two week supply of Nature’s Valley peanut bars.
For my first day at work, we had a two hour staff meeting to go over budgetary and managerial procedures. In other words, a two hour battle with jet lag as we (they) discussed topics that I know nothing about at the moment. Then I went to a meeting with the microfinance NGO that I will be working with to implement our study to understand the sensitivity of demand to interest rates. I then hijacked a meeting with the National Insurance Commission to talk about weather insurance (my specialty! not.)
In these past few days, I’ve encountered several stark contrasts that make me think. There’s the big needs for some kind of development in Ghana, significant poverty problems and issues that must be addressed. And then there’s IPA, with our very academic and “marginal” approach to understanding the problems, issues, needs and solutions. I’m not talking about Sachs vs. Easterly here, big push vs. one-step-at-a-time development. I wonder why development even exists, why the world cares to solve other people’s problems, especially when, like Obama implored, Africa must solve her own problems. If after a trillion dollars of foreign aid, after imposing globalization (by which I mean in this context, the unequal interdependency between big and small nations), the solution is to say “you must do it yourself,” then maybe we should tell ourselves, “let’s leave them be.” Not out of resignation or frustration, but out of… well, honesty. What people went to the United States to say, this is how you should do it. I think Americans prided themselves on doing things the American way. What international body instructed Europe how to amass wealth – really, Europe was too busy amassing wealth from colonizing the international body to take advice from it.
Forget protectionism. Putting up tariff walls won’t really solve problems any more than understanding the price elasticity of microloans will. There need to be serious domestic incentives for Ghanaians to invest in Ghana. I really don’t understand enough about Ghana or international development to say anything more. Except that I do believe that those two concepts are often represented by people who have opposing interests or lack the deep understanding of both concepts needed to disentangle Ghana from whatever mired her.
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Tags: development, fear, food, ghana, microfinance, western influence
Step Into The VOID
In high school me and my close friends made a band. I was the only one who was half decent at an instrument, so needless to say we sucked. We couldn’t even decide on a name. I kept calling us “Every Girl’s Dream” which, now that I look back, sounds a bit sexually ambiguous. My friend wanted to call us Aden’s Jamboree, which I thought at the time was just straight up… well, gay. Maybe we were all questioning our sexuality a bit through our band names. Just kidding. Anyway, I wrote a song about new beginnings, about how the triumph of humanity is that there is always a tomorrow, and no matter what we are today we can always change our paths and, more importantly, change ourselves. Unfortunately, when my merciless siblings listened to it, they couldn’t stop making fun of me for this line: “Step into the VOID and see what comes my way.. my way.. MYY WAY.. MYY WAYY!!”
Anyway, as the song goes, I am “stepping in tomorrow to find a better day” as I depart from.. well, the academic world, my parents house, California, the USA, my friends, fast food… to live in Ghana for the next few years as a researcher, learner, interested individual, etc. Going back to Ghana is something I’ve always intended to do, and in a few short days (and after a few long flights), I will land in Accra to start my new job.
So this blog is going to serve multiple purposes. First and foremost, I will use this blog to update my beloved friends and family, and you random stalkers, on the goings-on of my life, my thoughts, observations on culture/food/music/people, everything. Secondly I’ll use this blog to muse to myself about how lonely I am and how much life sucks, so as not to depart too far from the original purpose of blogging: hardcore emoting. Lastly, and most importantly, I’ll use this blog to let you, the reader, interact with me and others by soliciting your thoughts, comments, jokes, insults, whatever they may be. I’ll try to make this blog as interesting as possible but ultimately it is you, the reader, who will make the blog real lively.
With that I will say goodbye for now. Unless I have some major flight issues (which, given my brother’s nightmare experience on Delta is a true possibility – I’ll be packing my carry-on for an overnight stay), I will be in Accra on Wednesday morning, and the next you’ll hear from me on this blog will be from Africa. Adieu!
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Tags: beginnings, california, high school, musings
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