My life is one long crescendo, eventually leading to what, I don’t really know. I just know it’s accelerating at the same time that my body succumbs to gravity, in inverse relation to the square of the distance from the source. By some quirk of fate I find myself attached at the hip to a Thai girl in America, my name on her visa and now on our marriage license. I used to wake up in Thailand and ask myself rhetorically, “What am I doing here?” Now I wake up in America and ask, “What is she doing here?” It’s not just that these are the vagaries of marriage and togetherness, though they are, it’s just that this face has never been a part of this landscape. Marriage is a life sentence, a life chapter, a life story. They’re there when you need them; they’re there when you don’t. So now we find ourselves in the country of her dreams, the legendary America, much discussed but little known. There are Thais in Thailand who make their living doing nothing but being experts on America. That doesn’t even count the far greater number that make their living being English language go-betweens between the local Thai culture and the big world outside. Has anything really changed that much since Suzy Wong charmed the socks off viewers and the drawers off dressers, or the sailors in ‘Sand Pebbles’ waxed existential about ‘shacking up with a Chinese girl and opening up a bar’? Apparently not much. GI bars line the streets of Bangkok and Pattaya long after the war’s over, and well-heeled refugees from modern western countries find themselves washed up on the beach there in some version of its immoral equivalent. I can’t denounce it since I’ve done it, though I couldn’t denounce it unless I’d done it, either, so let’s just split the difference. Do what you have to do to make it through the night, but don’t sign any contracts under the influence or under duress. Loneliness deserves a remedy, but if you want a wife, then find a good girl. That’s what I did. Marriage is not subject to negotiation, and compromises should be with your partner, not your God.
Thais love to travel, but I’m not sure they ever really go anywhere, since they usually take all their friends and family with them. For Thais traveling in Thailand it’s not a question so much as to how many people will travel as to how many vehicles. Then when the caravan starts off people start piling in so that you don’t usually even know how many you’ve got until you get there. Houses or rooms get rented and people flop just about anywhere, thirty people going to one famous site after the other, sitting down to eat all together and flopping in piles at the end of the day. So to travel in America is a totally different affair for my wife. It’s as much about the other as it is about each other. For me that means culture, history, art, science, and religion. For Tang that means the bus driver, the maid, the guy with the tattoo, or the girl with the pierced something or other. For her the world is comprised of people and everything else is an intervening and seldom entertaining vacuum. Usually that means her family and friends Taen, Jiap, Tik, Nuay, and countless others with whom she’ll frolic like a puppy till the sun goes down (or comes up), funds permitting. However much my friends and family mean to me, my life simply is not about them. It’s about experience, both internal and referential, or external and infinite. Fortunately that world of people extends to strangers, so they become the other for my wife and many typical Thais. This is where we find common interest, so I find myself chatting up the maid about her Navajo origins and so forth, all to be translated to the delight and amusement of my wife. She’s still trying to learn the difference between Native Americans and Mexicans, why the one speaks good English while the other doesn’t, or may or may not speak one of several different native languages. They want to know about her, too, because truth be told she could pass for one of them and they both know it. They just need to know the details. Fortunately Tang’s openness and lack of pretentiousness takes over where her command of English leaves off and she manages to communicate with smile and innuendo what she lacks in perfect grammatical inflection, where others of greater skill might clam up in self-consciousness at their imperfection.
So it is against this psychological landscape that we toured the Navajo and Hopi reservations. Fortunately the physical landscape is a bit calmer and more inspiring, for it is nothing if not vast, and that’s much of its appeal. So we start off on I-40 to Winslow, and then go north from there up to Second Mesa, I giving speeches on the similarities and differences between Navajo and Hopi, both historical and cultural, while she dozes unceremoniously. Fortunately there were ceremonies at Moenkopi, so that saved the trip from being no more than a tour through a past of John Ford westerns and missed opportunities. Moenkopi is the Hopi part of Tuba City, an otherwise Navajo town and far from the Hopi ‘rez’. They may have more ceremonies just to remind themselves of their ‘Hopi-ness. This is a situation not unlike that of Hano on First Mesa, a Tewa village on the Hopi rez. The famous village of Old Oraibi was interesting, a 1000-year-old village still intact and inhabited, but the dances and ceremonies are the main event, and unless you’re a tribal member, these are hard to schedule. Fortunately we got to Moenkopi right on time, right as they were finishing one ‘set’, so got to see the next one in its entirety. This was an eye opener for Tang, for although they’ve all heard the legends of ‘Red Indians’, they never realized that those people might look very much like themselves. They certainly dressed differently, though, at least for the ceremonies, costumes not unlike those used a century ago. Many in the audience were dressed in their Sunday finest, too, and standing on rooftops for a better view. This was just like I saw in the same place some eight years ago, as if nothing had changed in the intervening time except that I’m older, hopefully wiser. After some time of dancing, soon they’re giving away food and provisions, presumably to emphasize the unity of community and the religious obligation to donate of one self’s time and possessions. I scored some yeasty bread in the shape of a flower blossom.
America holds many treasures within its boundaries, often overwhelmed by the predominant consumer culture and overlooked by its own inhabitants. Much of this is in the form of Nature, with such phenomena as the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone rarely matched and never excelled anywhere else in the world. But America has ethnic wealth, too, in the Native culture still extant and the African culture transplanted, among others. Though often reviled and frequently mistreated, these people are Americans too, and more often than not proud of it. The dominant white culture should be proud of them too.
