I'M GETTING A REPUTATION AROUND HERE

I brought scones to my morning class yesterday as prizes for an exam prep (sugar is in hot demand among students at 10am). When I arrived at my afternoon class, a second plate of scones in hand, someone had written this on the chalkboard. I looked at the board, the students looked at the scones, and laughs were had by all.

And then they attacked the scones like hungry wolves and left me for dead.

HOW LIVING IN DENMARK IS LIKE LIVING IN CHINA

When I arrived here five months ago, it was not as a tourist, but as a migrant. A tourist has the luxury of operating in a bubble, protected by hotels or guidebooks, rarely expected to know how much bus fare is, or how to find the post office, or where the grocery store is hiding the goddamn chocolate chips. A migrant looks around with different eyes, trying to figure out how things work, trying to adjust to how things feel, constantly reminding herself ‘this is my life now.’

I remember thinking then that I should write things down because any anthropologist worth their salt knows that new sights, sounds, and other various phenomena become normalized by your brain at lightning speed and what is first strange quickly becomes commonplace (of course this is not true for everything – I still find Danish door locks totally weird). I am obviously not worth my salt, because I was so busy manically nesting and wading through bureaucracy in those first few days that I didn’t write down a thing.

I definitely like the climate here, and the bike lanes, and the concern for human well being I see reflected in national policy, but some of the things that make me happiest are those that remind me of my life in China. I love that I can roll home on my bicycle in the wee hours feeling perfectly safe, that I can be confident that no one is carrying a gun, that my laundry room is full of drying racks, that it wouldn’t occur to someone here to sue another for not warning them against doing something stupid. The similarities are not many and they’re definitely not obvious, but I see them every day. I know Chinese people living in Denmark and Danish people who’ve been to China, and they don’t seem to share my feelings, but then they didn’t grow up in the United States. The fact is, America is a global anomaly in many ways, both good and bad, and by comparison much of the rest of the world has much in common.

Home is a word with so many overlapping meanings and ideas crammed into it that I wish I could carve up its territory and divide it among other words. I’d like to call America my homeland and ideally not have it sound like I’m imagining myself at Ellis Island. Are you still allowed to have a homeland when you can fly back there in a day? I think so. I know America, in a sense it’s still really all I know. I know myself as a citizen of a young nation, I know to admire ambition and innovation, I know how to recognize a ‘bad part of town’. I know the presence of police, and that they’re there to protect you, except when they’re not. I know the logic of grocery store organization, the limits of acceptable behavior at a baseball game, and to expect a happy ending. Back in the homeland my mind can turn off while my body crosses streets and calculates the acceptable distance to establish between a stranger and myself. I feel at ease there (except for the guns), but also a little listless. Obviously I wouldn’t have the life I do if I didn’t like the heightening of the senses that comes with newness and unfamiliarity.

Seattle is my hometown, obviously, because it made me, with all its liberalism and passive aggression and lurid topography. But I need another word: homelets? homebergs? homettes? For me home is present-tense, the place where I feather my nest, but most of the places I’ve lived are still fragments of home, places where I’ve spent some time, put down some shallow roots. I’ve left a little part of myself in all those places (they’re where I keep my horcruxes, after all), and when I go back to visit I’m greeted with the ghosts of former selves – a not unpleasant feeling.  Maybe those places are just time machines – whether they’re dorms where you lived in college, the house where your ex-boyfriend used to live, or far-flung foreign cities. We carry places and people with us, but there is no doubt that the spaces themselves preserve some of our feelings and memories – it’s one reason it’s almost painful to be in parts of Seattle that have been so transformed over the last decade. 

Hmmm, this did not take the direction I had intended. But I’ll leave it like this, and try to lighten up the mood with a handful of silly observations.  

How Denmark is like China

Litigation is rare

I almost wiped out on a patch of ice in my courtyard tonight. The florist must have watered his plants there today and left a little pool. "I didn't know that was there -- someone could slip on that and die!" I thought with a panic. Then I realized that to be warned that water turns to ice would be even more infantilizing than reading the signs like "Do not jump over railing" and labels like "Warning: coffee hot" designed to deflect lawsuits in the US. I concluded that I enjoy being treated like an adult.  

The legal drinking age is 18

In both China and Denmark kids can legally drink right around the time they actually start drinking! Mind blowing. It certainly helps that most of them aren’t driving cars.

Few non-nationals enjoy the national spirit

My supermarket has more than a dozen different varieties of licorice schnapps and another dozen varieties of shooters combining licorice and pomegranate, licorice and pepper, and so on. Unless you’re someone who loathes licorice, you’d probably take any of these over the everclear with a floral bouquet that is baijiu, but I still get sentimental about that terrible stuff.      

Racial homogeneity

It sometimes feels as if there is even less diversity here than in China, but obviously in China I lived in a ginormous city and here I live in a tiny town so that skews things. I do think Americans tend to forget that despite all the ongoing problems with racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, we are a thoroughly multi-cultural society, and that is a rarity in this world.

People wear fur!

From a materialist point of view it’s just animal skin, and I’ve seen plenty of that made into apparel, but I’ve been enculturated to imagine only bloodthirsty Cruella DeVilles would wear brand new fur. In China I often saw fur scarves and vests and trimmings, here it is more common to see substantial fur coats, whether on young fashionistas in Copenhagen or on tiny little old ladies here in Odense. This national linkage is economic as well, as a series of creepy posters at the CPH airport constantly remind me

A blanket for every body

As far as I’m concerned this is the most brilliant idea America has never considered. Here’s how it works: you have a bed that two people sleep in and each one has their own blanket. This does not preclude snuggling, but it most certainly cuts down on sleep-disturbance-fueled resentments. Brilliant! This probably says something about American ideals of love and partnership but I’m too lazy to think about that. Here's a traditional kang bed from a hotel in China I once stayed in featuring a neat pile of blankets and pillows.

Automobile logic does not dominate

You might contest this if you’ve ever been stuck in a Beijing traffic jam, but that’s precisely the point: most of the world’s cities weren’t made for cars. Both China and Denmark heavily tax automobile purchases and licenses, though in China this is contradicted by heavy investments in the car industry. This also means…

People walk to get places

I bike much more than I walk here, the opposite of China, but in neither place have I ever felt like a hobo trying to get somewhere public transit won’t take me. One illustration of this I enjoy: use google street view most places in the states and you see mostly cars, use it here and you almost always see people.

This is a pedestrial street so it's technically cheating but you get the idea.

The streets are safe, even for women

I love strolling around a sleepy city. One of the hardest things to get used to after coming back to the states from my longest stretch in China was that I could no longer step out my front door at any hour. When I came home late I was on hyper-alert on that block-long walk from the bus stop to my front door. I’ve never experienced street harassment in either China or Denmark either. Once more I suspect there is a bigger story here about gender relations and power, but it well exceeds my point, which is merely that the feeling that as a woman you are a target is not universal (though it persists in far too many places).

Conservation is standard practice

Companies and local governments in the US like to loudly praise themselves when they step up their conservation efforts, and I’m sure that’s for the best, but ways to save energy and water are built into the structure of life in many places, simply because it makes sense. In China, Denmark, and lots of other places, refrigerators are small, toilets all have two different flushes, dryers are few while clotheslines and racks are many, and the lights are never on in stairwells and hallways unless someone is in them (in China lights are almost always noise activated, here there are switches near most doors that turn the lights for a minute or so).

Funny English signs

Although the Danes’ English is exceptional I still find things to amuse myself with. These salons are my two favorite local examples

"Fancy Hair makes people"? In the sense that consumer choices are constitutive
 of our conceptions of individualized selves I cannot disagree with that.

Of course the Chinese are way ahead in this arena. I dug back in the archives for some classics

And if you still doubt the similarities I see in these two homelettes have a looksee here. Apparently naming your restaurant “Mr. Pizza” is practically a cultural universal

THE LIFE OF ZELDA

She may look fantastic on a bear-skin rug and prefer her food and drink served in cut glass, but Zelda was not to the manor born. Two years ago she was delivered to me at the mansion on Beacon in a heart-printed harness by a man who found her leaving the Tacoma Mall through the automatic glass doors. Which makes perfect sense. Zelda is a creature of elegant bearing and high standards, but she’s also a disgusting animal with no sense of the right time and place for public grooming and a preference for barfing on bedding. 

These are both the same cat

It's easy to imagine her strolling disdainfully out of a mall she regarded as beneath her and happily taking advantage of the first sucker that smelled like central heating. Zelda adapted rapidly to mansion life, particularly the part where she had half a dozen beds containing warm bodies to choose from each night. I worried before I moved here that after the polyamory of mansion life I would not be enough person for her.

I worried too that uprooting her so suddenly then putting her in a small, dark bag for 20+ hours for the journey here would be too much trauma. Was it was right to risk the mental health of an innocent animal? Did cats have nightmares? Would she ever forgive me? Luckily, whatever brainspace exists in those tiny skulls, not much of it is devoted to long-term memory. A few days of rest and a thorough sniffing of her surroundings and Zelda was just as imperious as ever

Zelda seems very happy here, even more so then she was in the mansion. She’s more mellow and affectionate and still just neurotic enough to be amusing. The square footage of her domain has shrunk, but she now has access to far superior views, and I believe she has found her life's purpose in monitoring the life of the neighborhood.  

From one side of the apartment she can look out on a relatively bustling street, from the other our building’s courtyard and bike hut. The windowsills are broad and I’ve covered their cold tile with wooly fabric so she stays cozy.

Street-facing window

Courtyard-facing window

Bike hut with pretty bike

Zelda belongs to the school of thought that everything she can see is within her jurisdiction and her responsibility to monitor. It's not easy to keep track of all the goings-on outside of either window, and I sometimes find her galloping anxiously across the apartment from one to the other to investigate a new sound. I didn’t realize until I arrived here that my apartment was on the first floor, not the second, and was a little disconcerted the first time I made eye contact with someone standing up inside a bus from within my living room. 

Don't worry mom, I have blinds

But for a cat it doesn’t get any better. One night I noticed Zelda was pressed against the window, purring loudly, and when I came over to investigate found that she had locked eyes with an attractive man at the bus stop. I wonder if he’s ever come back. Does half the neighborhood have a private relationship with my cat? I kind of hope so.

From the other window she flirts with the florist. When it was warmer outside I would take her out on her leash while I hung my laundry on the clothesline and the florist would come over to pet her and make the Danish “meow” sound. He stores his sidewalk display on shelves along the courtyard entry overnight and when she hears wheels rolling on concrete in the morning and evening she scurries over to observe.

It’s not all neighborhood watch. Everyday there is much sleeping to be done, and it must be done in many different places. On the windowsills, on the couch,

in the fruit basket,

 

camouflaged in the closet,

or when she's feeling traditional, on one of my two beds. 

When I work from home, which I do about once a week, she takes full advantage of any horizontality, and I squeal at the cuteness and hold my book up higher to protect myself.

And when I leave in the morning, rolling my bike out of the hut to the gate, I usually see her snake-green eyes and black silhouette in the window, and I wave goodbye.

So in conclusion, yes, you should bring your cat to Denmark. But only if she's awesome.

SONS & DAUGHTERS OF FALLEN and ASCENDANT EMPIRES: LET US EAT TURKISH DELIGHT TOGETHER

I was at a conference of Asianists last week in the Turkish capital of Ankara, a sprawling, smoggy city full of concrete, cafes, cars, and stray cats. We met on the conference of METU, the local center of the ongoing protests the international media has studiously ignored. Clearly, the international media has not recently dined near the campus, where the smell of tear gas might disrupt their after-dinner stroll.

Middle Eastern Technical University (METU) 

One of the many campus cats

Candy-colored chairs in the conference area

My hotel was fancy

I went to Turkey for the first time more than a decade ago, on a short backpacker circuit with a friend. We were delighted by what we saw of the country: the strikingly beautiful people; the otherworldly landscapes of Cappadocia and Pamukkale; the insanely inflated currency (1,000,000 lira was downgraded to 1 in 2005); the Roman ruins and modern cities.

At the time, as a full-grown partly-college-educated American human, my knowledge of Turkey was mostly limited to the following: it was famous for its baths and bathrobes, it had been a part of the Ottoman Empire (which I knew of primarily a one-time rival of the Austro-Hungarian Empire); it contained dervishes; Istanbul was [once] Constantinople.

Street sign in the city center

The national oil company has a really weird logo

Some Turkish graffiti, and in English "I love Peter Pan"


No idea on the historical context, just can't resist a statue of a lady with a book

Istanbul was (and I'm sure still is) grand by any name. It was dizzyingly beautiful evidence of a history I knew nothing of. Hagia Sophia was one of the most impressive examples: built 1500 years ago it had served as a Greek Orthodox church, a Roman Catholic church, a mosque, and now a museum in a secular nation. The walls bore material scars of the centuries, layers of different faiths under different rulers.  

I spent a day in a fog at the museum, trying to take it all in: Anatolians, Byzantines, hellenization, Mongols, beyliks, the Silk Road, the Ottoman fricking Empire ruling huge swaths of the ancient world for 500 years. It sounds trite but it really was one of the first times my consciousness of human history expanded beyond Cleopatra, the Renaissance, the British Empire, and the American Revolution. The world expanded all around me like so many exploding universes. 
 

Pointed at the ice cream case and hoped for the best, ended up with a sundae featuring caramel and chocolate ice cream atop berry and coconut sorbet. No regrets.

The sundae purveyor

 Flags bearing the image of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey and "father of the Turks"

Anitkabir, Atatürk's mausoleum and memorial museum. 

At the conference last weekend in Ankara I learned even more about the Ottoman Empire, the Silk Road, and the "idea of Asia." I was one of a handful of anthropologists among historians, political scientists, and international relations-ists, as well as one of a small minority of Americans among Indians, Chinese, Kenyans, Turks, and a few Europeans. In the academic circles I typically run in I often talk about China with specialists from the U.S., Europe, and sometimes China, but at a conference like this you could hear about China from a Turk, Vietnam from a Japanese, the Philippines from a Chinese, or America from a Bengali. You only ever see other places, cultures, people through implicit comparison with the places, cultures, and people you know, so as someone curious about crossing the chasms of understanding between us I always find it exciting to see things through vastly different lenses. 

I cannot resist ornamental nationalism

Or child provocateurs

Or nationalistic children

I had dinner on the second day of the conference with an America couple who both study Indonesia, and we talked about how strange it was to hear the way several of the conference's keynote speakers (for some reason we had five) referred matter-of-factually to the decline of the American empire and end of American hegemony. These statements were not laments, and they were far from the focus of the speeches. These were mostly historians, with long-range views, and they were merely noting that we were coming to the end of one of many dozens of eras in human history where much of the globe was dominated by one empire, region, or nation-state.

 An elegant old couple and some respectable-seeming young dudes outside the mausoleum proper

Details...

(It was dark inside the mausoleum so I didn't take many pictures. The enormous marble coffin inside is just for show. Atatürk's earthly remains are actually in another coffin somewhere under Anitkabir. In the museum, a guard stands watch next to live cam footage of the coffin surrounded by flags and fresh flowers.)

 

 Found a nation, get your face on a necktie!

The next day I explored the old city a bit and visited Anitkabir, where a friendly security guard checked my bag and asked me where I was from in the United States. "Washington the state, or Washington the capital?" he asked, and when I told him he proudly recited memorized facts: "the capital of Washington is Olympia" and "the state was founded in 1889." I smiled, a little sheepish, told him he knew more of its history than I did. 

Anywhere an American goes in the world, aside from, perhaps, North Korea, they will meet people who know far more about their native land than they can reciprocate. We blushing hegemons have a difficult time understanding how it could be any other way, or at least I do. I'm deeply worried about my nation's political and economic systems and also deeply angry at our eternally nefarious and murderous foreign policy, but I'm also, I have to admit, a little frightened about the end of American empire.  

After getting a few millenia of historical context I confess I'm feeling a little better about things. I might even be feeling optimistic about what's next.

Around the park surrounding the mausoleum

Views of the city from Anitkabir

Kocatepe mosque

TURKISH DELIGHT

(actually I've never liked it)