Don’t go looking through your cookbooks for this one, trying to find what comes after masala, trying to figure out just how this guy might mix and mash a single metaphor for public consumption without resorting to various linguistic chutneys and high-flying adjectives that might be seldom used and therefore perfect for describing the indescribable, the little upward-flowing diverticula of consciousness and lapses in synapses that occur when a sentient being becomes caught in the cross-fire between his responsibilities and his desires, his past and his future. No, samadhi is meditation, pure and simple, hopefully, and more than a little appropriate considering my own Asian leanings, precariously toward the horizontal, and the birthplace and birth race of my wife. Every people get the religion they need I suspect, and meditation founded in Hinduism and grounded with Buddhism, certainly fills the bill. If anybody needs to stop the internal dialog and take a chill without taking a pill, it’s them, and by extension me. It could have been disastrous, after all, taking my copper-toned slanty-eyed succubus of a wife home to meet the homies after years of whisperings and wonderings and educated guesses gleaned from the pages of National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. Of course most people don’t know the difference between Thailand and Taiwan, so facts tend to be half-baked at best, three minutes in the microwave of public opinion, stir, then serve liberally, for Mississippi at least, with ketchup, as in catching up with the present. She charmed them of course, just like she charmed the pants off me seven years ago. The Asian dragon-lady image is the stuff of downtown Hollywood after all, not Thai Town, and anybody who has tasted the forbidden fruit of inter-racial Biblical knowledge knows that those fetching displays of exotic product are much more likely to have a stuffed animal lying on the bed back home than whips and chains or pipes and papers.
Broken English itself can even be charming at first byte, full of wild gesticulations and broad non-grammatical vocal inflections full of heartfelt if inarticulate meaning, washed down with frothy smiles. That shit gets old of course and there’s no substitute for correct grammar, something few Asian immigrants over the age of thirteen ever accomplish. It’s a female thing, the old-fashioned type, climbing ladders and accomplishing through wiles and intuition what she lacks in vision and technical expertise, gaining more by standing under than by understanding. That’s not the history they teach in books of course, full of wars and conflicts, generals and majors, general snafus and major disasters. It’s the history of cultural drift, following paths of least resistance and imitating successes, long before anybody thought about writing it down and claiming credit. The Industrial Revolution may have had its heroes, but the Agricultural one didn’t, just people following their instincts and their neighbors, to better pastures and a better future. Governments notwithstanding and frequently falling, Asia is more a continent and culture of accommodation than enforcement. That’s what’s held China together for millennia, the culture in continuous transmission, outlasting and even absorbing hostile governments. That’s the basis of ancestor-worship, essentially time-worship, dedication to a lineage extending back into time immemorial, all converging on a single point presumably. If many cultures pride themselves on their individuality, Asia prides itself on its conformity. It’s a female thing, the old-fashioned type, favoring compromise and conciliation over conflict, the perfect breeding ground for either Buddhism or Communism; take your pick. Asia’s pretty cool, but can become stifling and over-stuffed, silly and superstitious. It can become full of itself and full of IT, the smell of decay overwhelming.
So can Mississippi. If LA reminds my wife Tang of Bangkok, then Mississippi reminds her of Chiang Rai, my home of birth reminding her of hers. I guess there’s some poetic justice there. Her parents didn’t come from there originally any more than mine came from Mississippi. My grandmother was born in Harlem back when it was full of German immigrants. They came south for opportunity and land. Tang’s probably did the same, except north, and from Lampang. Ironically while Chiang Rai is relatively prosperous nowadays by Thai standards, Mississippi still lags in most standards of US development. That’s not all bad of course. Land prices in Mississippi and Chiang Rai are similar right now. Wages are not. If anything Mississippi is more beautiful, probably the greenest place I’ve ever seen, including Brazil and Ireland. It has its problems of course, not the least of which is a crime rate in Jackson that must rival that of Johannesburg in creativity, if not sheer numbers. The latest fad is car-jacking. The thief pirates your car while you’re still in it. That way the engine’s running and you can open the door for the new recipient of your old car. It saves time that way and you get to inspect the sidewalk. That somewhat mitigates the circumstances of the other major problem: a police-state attitude toward law enforcement. If that only applied to the mugger fuggers of course then no problem. But no, it applies to me. They wait on the highways at night like fishermen monitoring a pole for any slight wiggles in an imaginary line which represents your trajectory from the immediate present into an indeterminate but well-defined future. They can help you with that; no meaningless infinities allowed here. Ever had a gun held on you by Bozos in Blue talking like the characters on ‘King of the Hill?’ I have. I’ve got a witness. It ain’t pretty. They had the wrong guy. Imagine what it would’ve been like if I’d been the right guy. Imagine infinity.
Mississippi has come a long way since ‘the nigra problem’ and its attendant bifurcation of society into rednecks, blacks and so-called ‘nigger-lovers,’ i.e. me and a few others with errant DNA. There were also a few ‘Uncle Toms’ but they usually didn’t last long. It’s truly gratifying to see blacks and whites working together at all levels of public service and if they aren’t mixed together at all levels of society, that’s mostly an economic problem, not a racial one. White flight to the suburbs didn’t start in Jackson nor will it end there and many blacks are counted in those numbers also. As a friend says, “every murder in Jackson means six new residents of Brandon,” my old country home and now suburb. Still old habits die hard and some whites just don’t know how to act around blacks as equals. Mexicans have arrived in heavy numbers also, presumably doing many of the jobs that blacks used to do, or as the president of Mexico once famously said, “even blacks won’t do.” Old habits die hard. Thais are routinely scared of black people and excess body hair. It’s as much esthetic as racial. Thai women spend millions trying to whiten their skin and pluck those pesky underarm hairs religiously. You heard it here first. They’re scared of ghosts, too. As for Mississippi, the few Thais there pretty much got the run of the place. There’s only one Thai restaurant in Jackson so sales are good while the food is uneventful by Thai standards, ditto with Mexican food. Good things take time. Coming back to LA is like landing in Bangkok for Tang, Thai Town a half-way house for recent immigrants. She can even speak northern Thai dialect there, eat Northern food, and talk Northern gossip. I can even be an ex-pat in my own country of birth, hell of a deal. It saves on flight costs. It’s a way of life, crossing borders in minds if not on maps.
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