Servicing at the DMV

She just got her hair styled last night, and some of her colleagues, all women, of course, complimented on it. She felt that superficial satisfaction. She doesn't take coffee in the morning; for her, it's an afternoon ritual to counter the fatigue that inevitably accumulates around 3PM when two more hours are left at this branch of the Connecticut DMV. Her eyes are tired, but it was already Friday, and although the office was open the next day, she would have it off.

She logged in to the computer. She could sense the joy and desperation from the growing line of people having some business with a driver's license. But she didn't care. Her facial expression changed no more than any other time in the twelve years she had worked here. She knew her place, which is to say, she knew she was above everyone here in the room on the other side of the counter. At the DMV, she learned very early on, human beings were equalized in the fairest way. Regardless of one's social status, income level, connections, or looks, everyone had to wait and go through the hellish processes involved at the DMV. At the same time, on her side of the counter were the demigods that looked down on the equalized human creatures and at best pretend to smile and pretend they were the servants working for a government that served these beggars of services.

The computer was going through the process of logging her in and revealing forms for her to type in when was ready to dish out the services requested, or besieged, by the populace before her. She had seen many different people. This was one place where you get the best sampling of people in the state of Connecticut. Or at least, in this corner of Southern Connecticut, where there were rich people, lots of poor people, and an endless supply of people with funny passports because of the universities in the area. She had learned to speak sternly but clearly to anyone who didn't understand English well, most of whom were Latinos. She had learned to avoid looking annoyed when someone was translating what she was saying to Spanish to someone who seemed clueless about anything and everything in this country of hers. She had, in essence, perfected the art of indifference.

The first customer was a teenager looking timid and dwarfed by the confidence of his mother. He hardly spoke and when he did he was barely audible; the mother, in essence, was a translator for the speaker of a language from a different age group. She could tell what they were going to ask by noticing the envelop and form in his clasp. But she didn't want to say more than she had to, and let the people speak for themselves. She heard someone in the line thanking God that another window opened up. True, for nearly half an hour now, on a Friday, only one person was working at the counter, which was why the line kept growing. There really were two colleagues, but one got sucked into the twilight zone looking for lost records regarding this little old woman who was the cause of the disappearance of 50% of the workforce for the license line. The colleague that seemed to be looking for the little old lady's lost records was a tall, nearly completely bald, old man two years from retirement. He had for the last couple of weeks been clutching a walking stick wherever he went. She never felt pity for him. He was a man of questionable ethics, hit on her ever since the beginning, subsided a bit, but then resumed with greater ferocity after she finally divorced her abusive husband who left her with no children (thank God!).

After taking the photo of the reticent young man, she asked them to wait and then resumed her swivel seat in front of the old computer. She paused, knowing, again, that the next person in line was feeling triumphant that finally it was his turn. She let that triumph implode in its own hollowness before telling him to approach the window.

Then there was a loud woman. There would always be a loud woman. Nearly every day, or at least every other day, she would hear some loud woman, sampled equally among all races, income level, social status, etc. Today's sample was a divorcée. It was never hard to know their life story because these loud people were too used to trying to get everyone's attention. She was talking to a soft-spoken woman with an African accent. She could tell the accents by now, having so much experience associating accents with passports. The permanent bags under her eyes seemed to be weighed down by the experience of these sort of trivialities. She briefly looked up to see what peace breaker it was. While the room is never quiet, it always sustained a base level of noise that was low and even enough to become background noise. No one laughed particularly loud, no complaints, and there were many, were particularly audible. People mumbled, cursed internally, but normally the atmosphere was doldrums of helpless sheep following orders. But that quiet status quo would often be pierced, broken, thankfully temporarily, by people like the woman in front of her. She was telling the African woman, but really the whole room, that she had just gotten a divorce, that she was relieved, very happy, happy to have gotten rid of a loser who was abusive, obsessive, and that he got a lashing from the judge, which he clearly deserved, especially having threatened her. She heard everything, just as the whole room heard everything. There was a sign at the counter clearly stating that once at the counter, a customer couldn't be using the phone. She thought the same restriction should be applied to loud talking, except that it should be pasted at the entrance doors.

The divorced woman was her next customer. And again, the woman redeclared that she was divorced and started talking again about what a relief it was. But the DMV lady, who had gone through a far worse divorce process, had no patience for her and her loudness. She simply said, in a tone honed over the years to pierce the imbecilic hearts of every human being, "I just want to see your license." She said so with those tired, baggy eyes, with a voice that had made itself known and fizzled in the crowd called humanity for the past forty-seven years. She would have liked this loudmouth or anyone else to notice that she had a new haircut. But she knew that the world didn't work like that. Her haircut, for her, meant a turning point. It was the first time she treated herself to something beautiful since her divorce many years ago. She knew it was a turning point; in fact, she made it a turning point. But no one noticed, and while she had no more bitterness left to squeeze out of her frail heart, she simply grumbled a bit.

She looked up at the divorced woman, and while telling her which forms to fill out after having her picture taken, she observed her. She then concluded that, like all the people in the room, this woman was insignificant. Her story, which she so proudly tried to share with the world, made her even less significant. She saw the hollowness in her, for all she saw was a casket, a coffin, of a soul that had died at some point for reasons she didn't care to know. And when she was done with this worker ant of the colony, and had her sit down with other ants, she returned to the computer. This time she really didn't care about the next customer. She simply sat there, looking at the screen, and saw her name on the top-left of the screen. She nearly wanted to cry seeing that name, her own name.

A Tango Class

What am I doing here. This man stinks, not just in the deficiency of his skills, but he literally stinks. If you're dancing tango, something so close, why won't you at least shower. He really smells like a block of funky French cheese. And I don't know what he is doing. He isn't clear. He stoops. He lowers his chest as if I were supposed to go down on my knees. He doesn't know what he is doing.

And the people. There are so many people, most also stink literally and figuratively. I am lost. I am tired. I am swimming in a sea of imbeciles who are here for the same reason of loneliness. Yes, I admit it. I came here because I am lonely. I came here because I just saw my ex yesterday by chance through the window of a cafe - in fact, the cafe right next door. He didn't see me because he was busy talking to some tall blond tramp, though now that I think about it, maybe she was a redhead. My heart sank when they held hands, right in front of me! Maybe he did see me.

Maybe I am lonely because I have been going home alone to an empty apartment for the past two and a half years. Other loners, like most of the losers here, at least have a cat or even a fish, but I am allergic to cats and I have no energy taking care of an aquarium. I am a mess. I complain a lot.

The man that has iron grips around my little hands seems frustrated. I can feel it in the vapor of his stink, the vapor of his eyes, the vapor that forms his sighs. He pushes his glasses up a little and then tries again to do this movement. What am I? Just a machine for this man, for men in general, to satisfy some goal. I am a tool and at the end of the day, I just find myself alone, sitting alone while others dance or sitting alone in my living room reading a book about someone else's loneliness.

Oh, there's another place I sit alone. I sit alone in my cubical at work. From around 10 in the morning till about 6 in the evening, I sit in front of my flat screen attached to my laptop and wiggle my finger on the keyboard and mouse for hours, with a lunch break that takes place in the exact same seat except that the finger wiggling involves some food grabbing. I never remember what I eat by evening comes. It is usually that memorable.

Twice a week I leave work and go straight to tango. Yesterday was to what is called a milonga, basically where I sit at a restaurant table and sulk because no one is dancing with me. Today is not so different. I dance with these imbeciles during classes but during the practica the same thing happens to me as in the milonga.

But I still come. I don't know why, really. I blame loneliness. I blame the repulsiveness of loneliness, so repulsive that I would rather drown myself in humiliation than be alone at night with my laptop (again) or feeling sorry for myself in the story of a bad fiction. If only I could get out of this trap, I wouldn't have to be here, be with this moron in front of me that treats me like some operable machine on which the right combination of button pushing would produce the right effect from this lonely robot he is maneuvering.

I sigh. I am sad. I feel sorry for him, too, nearly as much as for myself. I think about chocolate. I just want to have some chocolate. There's a guy here to comes every week at the end of this class with some baked goods, most of the time chocolate. I am waiting for him. He is one of the best dancers around here, but he never even so much as look at me, forget a smile, and definitely forget an invitation to dance. I try not to care about snobs like him, but I can't help feeling humiliated by his ignoring me completely. I eat his food, isn't that a compliment? Isn't that a way to connect? Not for him, I guess. He's not even attractive; how is it that he pays attention to all these women who would, in the real world, be too good for him. The world isn't fair, I guess.

The music is done. Time for more instruction. The machinist lets go of my lonely body. Muscles on my arms, which must be undoubtedly all red, slow relax. I can breathe now. This man smiles but I refuse to smile back. He violated me and he expects some sort of approval in the return for his doomed effort. He pushes his glasses up again, and looks away because he can't stand my stern look. I know I am not as cute as some of the girls that have a lot less experience than me but get the attention of all the best dancers. I hate this. I hate myself, even if I know it's totally irrational.

The instruction for the next sequence is finished, and it's time to rotate partners. Who's next? Maybe one of the good dancers. Maybe even the chocolate boy. Maybe I just need to relax. Maybe I just need to smile, at least pretend to smile. I know I never smile, but with this heavy heart and this stifling air of life, how can I smile? Any smile would surely come out as obviously fake. But I can do it. I can find a reason to smile. I read it somewhere that everyone can smile, genuinely. They just have to find that joy in their hearts.

I bid a silent farewell to the machinist that had mutilated my arms, and I welcome the next, new partner, a new beginning. But he is empty. He doesn't have form. He is merely an amorphous bag of more humiliation, false promises, and an emissary of life's mockery. He is the space that has been rotating around the dance floor. We are missing one man. That's always the case. Actually, the normal case is that there are always far more women than men, even in class. It's not fair. There are many things that aren't fair for us women about this dance. But I am here. For some reason I am here.

Just so for once, I could be held. I know it's cheesy, especially since most guys here can't dance, can't even hold a woman right. I am squeezed. I am tortured. But there's no point to all this. It's all my choice to be here to be tortured, to be gripped so violently. And yet, somehow, even with the insurmountable rage I still prefer some touch than being completely alone. And I am completely alone now. The music starts again, and I have no one to hold me but the nearest chair to sit through this round.

So I sit. I wait.

Prickly Gift

His left hand in his pocket, his right hand holding his gaunt backpack slung on his right shoulder, his upper-body leaned forward of his hops, his legs rapidly moving as if he needed to get somewhere quick, the man in the huge glasses on his face was lost in thoughts. When he got to his little, rusty bike that had seen many owners on its worn-out seat, he paused a little, then with his right hand he let lose the bag and it glided down his right arm. That way he was able to go through the outer pocket in search of his bike key. It was one of many keys on that massive chain of metal, making as always a familiar sound that reminded him of the little importance he carried in his profession in which he had access to many important rooms, even if they were just classrooms at the university.

After unlocking his bike and putting away the lock that had no lock holder to return to on the bike, he towed the biked to the intersection where he looked left and right with some small but noticeable degree of anxiety. It isn't that he was troubled; he has always been like this. He had been living in this university city for nearly three years, but he had never made any real friendship. There were many other Chinese scholars in the university, and a growing number too, and often people see these scholars in large groups, frolicking, chattering, sometimes bickering, though without knowing their language the others often don't know if they are angry or just playing. But he was never part of this or any other group. The only people he spoke to were his supervisor, his collaborators every now and then, and of course, his Mother. He talked to his Mother nearly everyday. They more or less alternate calling each other at the same time every evening when he just got out of work and she was about to start her day on the other side of the planet.

And that was what he was about to do now. He was going home, to his little apartment near what they all warned as the bad neighborhood. And when he got there he would lock his door, put his bag down, turn on the home computer, check the sound, and call his Mother. He was, as it was usually the case in China for people of his age, the only child, but unlike most families of single child under the single-child policy, his family lacked a father. The old man died when he was quite young, but he remembered him as old. So since high school he had spent his years with his Mother and the books. Not having even Chinese friends is a phenomenon that dated back beyond his arrival here. So that was the predictable future that awaited him at the end of his 12 minute bike ride up the hills on the road that separated the university from the shoddy neighborhood that was dark in all the ways he could think of.

"Dark" not only in the dilapidation and gloomy aura of the neighborhood, but also of the skin color of the people there. He didn't always live alone. In fact, to save money, as his financially astute Mother had advised him before he even bought his first ticket to the United States, he roomed with as many people as it was possible. But quickly things got sour; he was simply not sociable enough for most people and he found them as annoying as they had found him. Against his Mother's wishes, which caused immense pain in him, he decided to get a place on his own. The cheapest place within the university "safe" zone was on this road that formed the outer boarder. He often felt like he was biking down a walled border, something he had seen in the newspaper in some places in the world where human beings are collectively walled in by some other government. But he was never interested in politics, especially not of other countries.

He was interested in physics. And often he would be thinking about it, the equations, the problems he faced that required absolute silence to have any chance of find the solutions to. More than a few times he nearly got hit by cars while biking up the hill thinking about the problems left unresolved in the day. But today his mind was somewhere else.

He noticed the buildings around him as he was biking up. He noticed the texture of the walls, the colors that make up what he had always thought was solid color surfaces. He noticed that, just as physics would predict, things closer to him appeared to move faster than the things farther. Simple physics. He also noticed how hard it was to bike up this hill that he had been biking up for the past two years since living alone. Through his huge glasses he had gotten from China while in graduate school, he could see the colors of the little leaves coming out of the naked branches on this warm, spring evening. He imagined the wavelength numbers for that particular green, even though he was not an optics physicist. He was, certainly, a proud physicist, one whose lack of proficiency in the English language more than made up by his ingenuity when they considered him for a fellowship here at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, whose physics department has few competitions known to mankind.

And his mother knows that and often told him how proud she was, and then she would get all weepy about how proud his father would have been. After years of the same pattern of words he had gotten desensitized by those words or the tears he couldn't see over the phone. And lately he would dread hearing it again when he called her. But now, on this late spring, warm evening, he wasn't thinking about his mother either, or her repetitive, predictable melancholy and self-pity.

He was thinking about a dead cactus. It was on the window sill of his small office where a chalkboard was still in place instead of the dry-erase board found in nearly every department of the university. And surrounding the dead cactus is the mess of his papers, journals, scribbled equations, and notes. Only the bookcase of thick books bore any resemblance towards order there. The cactus, when it was alive, did not express order, but something more intangible for him. One day he sat for more than an hour staring at the cactus. It was very small. It sat on a pot the size of a Yolait yogurt container, and that pot is a shiny silver metal pot. The cactus itself had a green trunk just a little taller and thicker than his thumb, and on the top is a big, round red bulb of a flower.

He was now using his right hand to help his right leg pedal up the hilly border road. He had never had to do this. But for some reason he felt a need to. At least his body needed to. His mind was too focused on the cactus. The poor prickly cactus. It was now totally unrecognizable from when it was alive. It was bent over like an old man too tired and weak to prostrate himself. The vivid green body was now a sad, sickly jaundice yellow, and the glorious red that had once defined its pride was now a rotting, shrunken knob like a raisin but covered with moldy substance. He noticed it today. The transformation was fast. It started looking sad a few days ago, but within two days it shrank and collapsed under its own weight. But he had done nothing, just watched the inevitable death. He was silent when he watched it, but he tried to forget about it when he was busy solving equations for an upcoming paper.

"Don't water more than once a month!"

He hadn't been keeping track, but he knew it had been less than a month since he had last watered it. And yet, he was afraid it would die from dehydration now that winter was gone and spring was here to make plants open up their pores and let air go through. He wanted the cactus, so innocent and cute, to live forever, but it died in his hand ending a four-month relationship.

He said nothing much except, "Thank you." He wasn't sure if he even said more than those two words. He wasn't used to someone giving him all this attention, not a woman, and even less, a black woman. She was from Kenya; he knew because she told him he was going back to Kenya and was selling things or getting rid of them. She had had this little cactus plant for nearly a year and she wanted someone to take care of it.

She talked a lot that one encounter.

He was shocked that she was talking to him. He was at some large garage sale organized by an entire apartment building in the heart of the scholar community, away from the peripheral where he was living alone. He was looking for a bargain though he wouldn't be ready to bargain at all. But then a very peculiar but charming voice grabbed his attention. Through his huge, thick glasses, the man, who had never combed his hair in his life, hardly shaved during the year, and still had visible scars from his puberty years of acne, saw a smile like he had never seen before directed at him. Her skin was dark but had a beautiful bronze luster, her hair was straightened and reflected a glitter in the cold wintry sun. But what he found most beautiful was her face, the acute lines that defined her nose, her cheek bones, as if all was just a context to pay homage to her amazing, big brown eyes. Her teeth, as shown so obvious in the smile that caught him by surprise, were perfect. She introduced herself to him, though he didn't say anything when shaking her soft hands. He had never looked at a black woman for so long and was very curious to see how different she was from the phantom black people that roamed on the other side of the road and often trespass into his neighborhood in troubling raids. He had never actually seen any of these trouble makers, but he had overheard and read stories condemning them and the rest of the lot. But now he was standing in front of and looking at a black woman from a country he wouldn't be able to locate on the map. She was warm and enthusiastic about talking to him. She was obviously very excited to go back home after three years here. But she was in a hurry so she got to the point of getting his attention.

She showed him the cactus plant. He had never seen something so small in real life. She said she thought he might like a plant. Why? He didn't know, he didn't ask and didn't wonder. He was drunk in the attention given to him. He didn't want to talk but for that moment he wanted her to talk the entire time, even if he didn't understand every word she said because she was speaking very fast and with a slight accent that he was unfamiliar to. When she asked if he would be interested, he nodded.

He never saw her again. It was just those five or seven minutes of a man listening attentively and a woman speaking very quickly. But he thought about her every day for the past four months, especially when he was looking at the cactus, which he carried and walked to his office one day instead of going there in his usual style of biking. He placed it on the sunniest spot because he thought about the desert, and sometimes Africa, which was for him a sunny hot place. They never exchanged any contact info, so he couldn't hear from her or write to her about the cactus. But everyday since she put in his hands the little plant with her dark hands with pink palms, he had thought about what to tell her that day, and imagined what she would say in return.

But today it was a devastating day. He sat there for ten minutes, watching the frozen, death state of the cactus, and his whole existence went blank. He had walked out of his fleshy shell and into an infernal where his soul, his mind, his heart had disintegrated into vapor. He had no one to tell this to. He didn't have her, and his Mother never learned about the cactus, let alone the exotic woman who had given it to him in a casual manner that he considered the most intimate he had ever felt. He was able to blank out his mind for so long before he had to go out into the enclosed courtyard to which his window faced. There he sat for half an hour, smoking his own thoughts, trying to taste them before wasting them.

And now he was biking home, again. And yet, he felt sorry for himself, more than any other time in his life. He felt utterly lonely with his own preoccupations. He felt his whole body was a dead weight, even his glasses now seemed to bear down his mind, flattening his bike tires even more. He looked around him a little more. He noticed the bolts and naked steel rods on a building the wealthy university was putting up with its nearly bottomless endowments. The true, internal nature of this building before the facade was to be put up seemed so sad and raw to him. The rough surfaces, the yellow hues of the rusty rods, the chaos clearly visible to any passerby, all seemed immensely tragic and realistic to him. He felt like this building that was receding from his vision, he felt incomplete, abandoned, and worse, his skin had been ripped away and the thirty-five years of sadness completely exposed to the elements of the world that had never shown any unattached sympathy for anyone.

He stopped by the curb, and started to rub the dull surface of the handlebar of his bike, feeling with whatever faculty left in him the surface of one of the few things that had stayed with him, this broken old bike.

Dream Come True

The wedding was flawless. He brought stood there at the altar, turned around almost theatrically, and saw his bride, that beautiful woman he had been with for four years, walking down in equally theatrical manner. Or maybe she was doing it for real, maybe she was really excited, really loving, really looking forward to this day, this moment.

He looked at her with his blissful eyes, but strangely, now that he thought about it, twelve hours later, he could almost not recognize himself. Was that really him there, standing there, extremely happy? Happy about what?

It was a flawless wedding. All his friends and family seemed genuinely happy about the event. Exactly as he had always imagined, they were standing outside the church main door, receiving congratulations, just like in the movies. And there were the photo shoots, just as he had always imagined. But strangely, now that it happened, it felt more like an anti-climax than the culmination of his life's desires. During that ten year hiatus, or more like reluctant exile, from dating life, he had imagined every detail of the wedding. And just about every detail had been realized that day, just 12 hours ago. Flawless not only in the organization, thanks to a well-paid wedding organizer, but also in how all the players worked in the scene that was the anti-climax of his life so far. He danced with the bride. Oh, before that, he cut the cake with the bride. They were smiling together. They fed each other a spoonful of the rather tasteless cake. His premonition of his own wedding forgot to include a good cake. It was a showy, elaborate cake, but still, it was nearly tasteless. Mostly whipped cream and some hint of substance.

There was a dance. Yes, he remembered, there was a dance. How he had longed for, imagined incessantly, about a dance during that exile, that hiatus. And here he was, in his expensive tux dancing with a woman of beauty no less than the one in his imagination, though somehow, his heart wasn't throbbing for her at the moment, but rather, throbbing for the realization that his hopes were being realized. He saw her then dancing with her father, the one who had "given" her away. So romantic, supposedly. But no. Something was wrong.

Castle Night Part II

He could not keep his eyes closed. The eyelids were shaking and tiring themselves out. He opened his eyes again and saw that the praying mantis has moved up a few inches. He could see that there was this giant insect of some sort a few more inches further, in the striking distance of the slightly larger mantis. The stalking has been happening the entire night, presumably. From this mattress on the cold floor he could sense the tension.

But the tension wasn't just from the sloth drama on the medieval windowsill. He wanted to sit up, stand up and shout.

"Did you hear that Korean guy complaining? So funny. They didn't have a bed for him and he was crying to that chick from Hamburg. She's a hottie."

How was it that he understood them? Two German guys talking to each other on their comfortable bunk beds while he was down here on his mattress. He was in disbelief when he understood them. His two years of college German was for this moment, the moment of humiliation. As much as he loved languages, it was the first time he wished he hadn't taken German.

But it might not have mattered. He might have guessed what they were saying just by the snickering tone of their words. Just as he was very paranoid about those two guys, one being bald, in the S-Bahn. They had followed him into the car. They seemed not to be paying attention to him, but he didn't care; he was too busy being invisible. It was hard to be invisible when you're carrying a huge backpack that was twisting your body and you look different from everyone, even the many Turks in this country. He nearly ran out of the car when the door opened to his station, and he breathed a sigh of relief when he realized those two possible skinheads weren't following him.

When he emerged from the S-Bahn station, he was engulfed with darkness and cold rain. He was frustrated. He was nervous. He was scared. The map in his guidebook was hardly useful without much light. Danger was still lurking.

A castle. It must have stood out like a sore thumb in this quiet residential neighborhood. He shouldn't even need a map. But he gave up and spent another funny coin on calling the hostel. They told him how to get there, but the voice of a human being in this darkness was enough of a reassurance. They were not closing yet.

"Yeah, they messed things up. They put too many people in that room and there was no other free bed."

He said all this in heavily accented German. The pretty girl from Hamburg was listening attentively to him. Her attention nearly brought him to tears. She bought him a coke because the last of his funny German coin was used in that last phone call. He couldn't remember if he had thanked her; he was both exhausted by fear and shocked by her generosity. He didn't remember seeing his snickering roommates walk past, but they must have to know what they had talked about. He must have looked like a pathetic little Asian man next to a tall, tanned, blond young woman. He thought so, and his heart throbbed even louder, his anger and shame deepened.

But the shame had already been there. The disappointment. The helplessness. That last phone call wasn't the one made outside, but made after he had arrived. He was feeling extremely lonely when they told him he could only sleep in a mattress. Why him? Why do these things always happen to him? It didn't seem right. And in the throbbing anger of his stupor on this cold bed, he realized he should have complained, staked his claim on his rights, whatever they were. But Asian people never complain. He felt his anger about to burst out through the millions of pores of his skin. He opened his eyes again and saw his left hand forming a tight ball, a nasty grip, over a section of the thin bed sheet they had given him.

"I am not coming to join you."

That was all she said. They had broken up, just before he had arrived in Cologne. There wasn't anything surprising about this. They were supposed to meet in Cologne and resume their trip after she got sick in Zurich and sent him off.

"I am so stupid. She sent me off because she didn't want to be with me."

He felt the chill of the outside reborn within the cavity of his fleshy body. It was June and this country had the chilliest reception yet. He hung up the phone, his last two D-mark used up on this futile and blistering long distance phone call. But he felt fortunate to find a listening ear that could tolerate his broken German.

And yet, now, it all seemed undone. The snickering sound of those two Germans still rung loudly in his heart even though the only sound around, outside his fleshy body, was the tapering rain. The rejection, the confusion in the cold darkness, the mockery. Oh, the mockery. How could they call him a Korean?

He thought about that Hamburg girl with the small blue eyes and long blond hair and super fine skin. He felt even smaller, his pride shrink and pulled everything that was his identity into a small mass. He pulled the sleeping bag up his neck a bit more; the chill, be it from the inside or out, was tormenting him. He looked up and watched for fifteen minutes the slow movement of the mantis going up the nearly immobile insect. After the prey was crushed under the raptorial legs of the predator. After that he felt his left hand letting go of the piece of cloth, and he was lost in thoughts while his emotions subsided. The night finally had entered his exhausted body.

Castle Night Part I

His heart was racing; he could hear the throbbing of his temples. With his eyes open he could see some of the details in the dark room. He noticed again the huge praying mantis that had been crawling slowly along the windowsill. It had been stalking something, but he hasn't noticed what, exactly. He tried closing his eyes again but the sheer heat emanating from his temple, his violent heart, was overwhelming, as if he were sitting in broad daylight inside bus station in some poor tropical country. He could even feel his hands shaking from the throbbing of the arteries running down those limbs. He swallowed a breath, but he could feel the warmth of the exhale.

It was probably nearly two in the morning. He was lying on this mattress of shame. He just noticed his teeth had been grinding from the cauldron of anger deep in his soul. His mind was still being battered by that blizzard of words, words he wished he could utter, unleash onto those imbeciles sleeping on nice beds, elevated from the cold hard stony floor where his mattress of shame laid under his still body that encased his increasing restlessness. He wanted to tell them, in their now despicable German language, all these things, but most of all, he wanted to tell them "I am not Korean!"

It was cold. The window was slightly ajar and that was probably how the insects had crawled in and onto the cold floor. He could hear the rustling of the branches outside, the occasional droplets of the subsiding rain. He had to walk through that rain carrying his huge backpack just an hour ago.

He was angry now but he was afraid earlier. Under the weight of his backpack he arrived in the Cologne train station later than he wanted. Then he had to search for the S-Bahn that, according to the guidebook he held with his life to, would take him to this exotic youth hostel inside an authentic German castle. He had imagined crystal chandeliers, hallways of red carpet and lined with knight's armors. He imagined something like the interior of castles in movies like Robin Hood. But before he could arrive in the fairyland he had to get there. It was late and he was nervous. He wasn't even sure if there was a bed. So he called in from the train station and made a reservation.

How did the trains work? It was his first time here in Germany, directly from Paris. Was there a token to buy? Were there machines so he didn't have to talk to anyone who might not understand his college-level German? He was scared. The station was not very populated; people were mostly at home already. After finding the entrance to the S-Bahn he had to take, he bought the ticket and got on the platform.

He figured out that he had to change trains at some point, and that "some point" was on a deserted platform. It was dark outside, completely dark. The sky had already been wiped out by rainclouds and he could hear, standing there with his backpack stacked on his shoulders, the increasing frequency of the droplets hitting the roof of the platform.

He became nervous. It was nearly 11PM. How did time disappear so quickly? He wanted to be somewhere safe. His heart was racing. He was in Germany. Weren't there skinheads in Germany? There were. He was an Asian standing on a platform somewhere away from civilization in Cologne. He noticed two people got on the platform. How torturing were the minutes that were passing. He was startled; one of the men had a bald head. Was he just balding or did he shave it? It was 1994, skinheads were supposedly everywhere in the eastern part of the unified country, angry, angry at many people, but especially people like him, a different race. He got even more nervous. They paid no attention to him, but he wasn't looking at them. Having grown up in the rougher times of New York City, he learned not to invite attention with any staring. While it was easy to be invisible if you are an East Asian, he had gotten the attention of trouble before, without ever looking for it.

The twin lights of the S-Bahn train were visible, giving him some reprieve from the nervousness.

Shivering at a Bus Stop

My nostrils was closing up, it felt. It was some insane single-degree temperature out here (in Fahrenheit, of course). The wind wasn't even blowing, but the air was insuperable. I waited for the free shuttle that would take me down this long road, through downtown, and nearly in front of the giant box called my office building.

A Chinese woman stood in front of me, craning her neck so she could see if the shuttle was coming. The huge road in front of us shot straight through the flat landscape of this little university town. So from this vantage point we could actually see if the bus was turning into it.

Still nothing. My feet were losing their feelings. I wasn't sure if I still had my ears; they seemed to have disappeared like the leaves of autumn, a distant memory. And in the meantime I was standing here, behind this Chines woman who still prefers to take the shuttle than the bus.

Chest Expander

The old man sits there, slumped, on the old bed of his son. Next to him, a four-spring chest expander. It is his day off, Tuesday. The rain is tapering off. He can no longer hear the drops bouncing off the windowsill outside this little tiny window of this little room on the second floor of their humble home. The bed hasn't been used for nearly a year now. His son came back for Christmas but only to visit and then drove straight back to his dorm. Last week the old man finally took the sheets off, washed them, and stowed them away. Now he sat here, on raw mattress, he gives off a deep sigh. He is already in his early fifties but he has only started losing hair this past year. The toll of old age is taken very quickly. The lines on his face multiplied within the past few months, and even his eyebrows have begun to gray.

The room needs a fresh coat of paint. The ceiling paint is already peeling. But he and his wife can't afford it now that they have to contribute whatever they have for his tuition. But he isn't thinking about the paint, or any money. He usually frets about money because they are a poor immigrant family and no amount of hard work seems to bring enough money. He is grateful that his mother-in-law was also chipping in. But he isn't thinking about that either. He is sitting there, very still, more still than the windless outside, which is a small pedestrian street so no sound of car could be heard unless someone is honking from the street at the end, which itself is not a very used street. This is an immigrant community in the outskirts of an immigrant borough of New York City. He isn't thinking either about being an immigrant.

He is just thinking about his son. The chest expander lying like a corpse besides him is small, still shiny, mostly, only some parts not made from stainless steel are slightly rusted. On the cheaply carpeted floor lies the box from which he had taken out the expander.

His eyes, below those long, graying eyebrows, are nearly shut. But he is fully awake by the emotions that he is also trying to hold back. He wonders why his son doesn't call, and that when he calls him he always sounds very annoyed and short with him. He never complained, but the weight of the hurt has been growing.

He rubs his knuckles, which are also getting drier, permanently, after each winter, especially after the winter that had just passed. He remembers being younger. He remembers the days when he was taking his son to different places, both in the old country and here in the frightfully new one. He remembers giving his son a million pieces of advice on how to be a man. In reality, he realized now, he was trying to have someone listen to him brag about things he had no one else to tell to. But that is all right, because that's one of the reasons we have children, to expound our ideas on them, who are just blank sheets of paper waiting for the strokes of our pens. He isn't sure if he had been selfish, but he is seeking secretly, but as customarily, a reason to explain his suffering. He had suffered from starvation, humiliation, and all sorts of inhuman fears, but the most poignant and present pain is from his son. They've lived together for 18 years, and in this 19th year they had been apart.

A crow swooped in front of the tiny window and croaked. He is awaken from the pool of his own self-pity. He notices the old, small TV on his left. His son no longer watched TV in the living room during his four years in high school. He always ran up to his room as soon as coming back from school. What he did up here no one knew, but the old man knew he watched TV sometimes, not much. He knew because when he came up to notify him that dinner was ready, sometimes he heard the TV running, sometimes it was completely quiet, sometimes on the phone. Those four years, he understood little by little, had already started the distance between them. The curtain had been drawn between them, and he no longer knew anything about his son's life, not his friends, his girlfriends, not even his grades. Therefore it was an immense relief to him that after nearly four years of being in the dark about his sons school performance, his son showed him the letters of acceptance to all the Ivy League schools.

But somehow, that was just one star shining in an otherwise pitch dark sky. He wanted to connect with his son all those years that he only could verbalize to himself now that had already pushed his son away. That was what the chest expander was for. All his son's life the old man told him how to be strong, how to never cry, never let small things get in the way of a man's ambitions, never settle for less. He tried to get him to read stories about heroes, men who could defeat nature, and other examples of virility. But it was obvious that his son could only excel in school, which was paramount to his future but, as he had asked his son one day, "What if you're in an earthquake, how will you lift yourself out of the rubble?"

So one day he decided to make his son physically stronger. He bought him this chest expander from the humble store where he worked (and got an employee's discount).

"What is this?"

"You grip one hand on each handle and just pull," he said as he demonstrated.

He had worked in various manual labor jobs over the years they had lived in this country. Though he was past his primes, past being a middle-aged man, he had enough muscles on that shrinking body to easily expand the four springs to the length of his arms. And he did so effortlessly, though part of this was theatrical to show the teenager what a man should look like pulling the expander. After he slowly let the expander return to its resting position, he noticed, to his dismay, that his son was not impressed and showed little enthusiasm. It was the same lack of enthusiasm he found when he urged his son to take up swimming because "What if one day you fall in the river or the sea?"

He was exasperated. He wanted to make his son try it in front of him, to extract that enthusiasm as he saw fit. But he knew he could no longer do that. The blank sheet of paper on which he had scribbled his ideas about the world is no longer blank and whose scribbles were no longer only his. He realized when his son started his first days in high school that he could never make his son do anything anymore.

So he smiled, as he often did to diffuse any awkward situation, and reminded his son, "This is all you need to get some muscles on your chest. That way you can fend for yourself if someone tries to beat you up."

Yes, someone did try to beat him up. That day when his son returned with a bloody mouth he was heart broken and infuriated. Being an immigrant was the lowest class in America, he believed, and all the more reason to be physically stronger. He never forgot his son's face that day, and the pain he had to endure the weeks after as the wound inside his mouth slowly healed.

He put the chest expander back in the box and handed to his son. They never look at each other in the eyes, as the tradition dictates, but the teenager thanked him. But the old man doubts that the boy had ever even taken the thing out of the box. He found it in the closet inside the box, still wrapped in the cheap paper. He had taken it out just now and caressed it, as if it were something alive, letting the box fall off his tired knees. And then he let the chest expander rest by his side.

But now that the crow had woken him up, he takes another look at the chest expander. He touches it again and the coldness of the stainless steel startles him. As if he were an automaton, he gets up, leaves the box on the floor, the cold metal piece on the naked mattress, turns off the light, and closes the door behind him, shut.

Airport Wait Part II

She took the escalators down to the baggage claim area where the exit to the bus stops was. There were lots of commotion at the time, no doubt passengers from at least one flight had just arrived and were busy waiting for their baggage. Busy waiting, she thought. Waiting is such a passive behavior and yet she sensed the kind of tension in the area that only busy people could emanate. She looked at a few faces. These were Americans, mostly. Her people. They had just arrived in the Spanish capital and many seemed to be on their first trip, their facial expressions a mixture of eagerness, fear, and fatigue. But the way their were dressed, that American lack of sense of fashion or refusal to build one, betrayed their nationalities. And besides, as she got closer, she could hear their prideful American accent and unabashed loudness. She was used to them by now. She had traveled around the country for two months and while it wasn't one of the most popular destinations for middle-aged Americans such were most the passengers here, she had encountered many just by hearing them from behind her.

She wasn't being critical, as she often had been. On the contrary, she felt suddenly a longing to go back. She was going to return soon, but now, hearing their accents, some of which sounded very Southern, as was her background, made her feel homesick for the first time. She didn't miss her mother or brother or the rest of her family, per se, but just the desire to be back in that familiar setting gripped her suddenly.

Then she found herself standing in front of the exit, and for a split second she saw her reflection on the glass door right before it opened automatically. She looked weary. She had just seen her ex-fiancé leave. She had just spent the last four days with him, oh four days so full of drama, and the weight of that drama, of that encounter, had taken an obvious toll on her face. She hadn't slept much those four nights, and none the night before this dreary day. When the glass doors opened and her reflection disappeared into the space outside, the wind brought not only the chaotic honking sounds of the Barajas airport traffic but also the relentless heat.

An elderly lady walks past her, excusing herself, with a little girl in tow, who was staring at her while being dragged out to the heat and noise. She looked at the girl's angelic face and felt an upsurge of tenderness and self-pity. She suddenly felt an acute hatred towards her ex, and while she understood that it wasn't fair to blame all her troubles on him and their failed relationship, she couldn't help it. She felt her face reddening, hot like a cauldron smoldering with a desire to run back, dashing through the security check, to gate 23, past all the whining children, even whinier adults and fat Americans and sulky Germans and annoying Brits, past all those unnamed faces, and grab his neck with her hands and choke him to death, squeeze out the life of the demons that were now taunting her.

How dared he just drop in like this. She had ignored him the whole two months, ignore his emails, the pleads and nuances within. He just wanted to be free after the end of their engagement. She came here to get over the rage and disappointment and the abysmal pain from that end, from the cause of the end, the cause being even more emotionally unbearable than the end itself, which was more of a relief. He had betrayed her, had such a long affair, but it wasn't even about the affair. While the betrayal was painful, she was in some ways relieved because it would, as it did, precipitate the end of the relationship. She knew he wasn't the right person for her, even before the engagement had been made, but somehow she couldn't get out of it.

The two months have been useful. She had spent most of it in the south, in the rolling red and golden hills of Andalusia, where her love for food was satisfied with every encounter with a tapas bar, where her Spanish improved dramatically, where her desire to live the moment was fulfilled at the expense of slowly shedding off this painful episode. She was alone most of the time, and when she was chatting with the locals, she felt even more at peace. There were the usual young men who tried to smooth talk her; there were the elderly men and women who wanted to be sincerely helpful; there were others who just wanted her to listen. She has always been a great listener.

"You're a great listener, you know."

How dared he said that to her this time! How dared he try to connect to her again!

After all this. "Después de todo," in her mind it came out naturally.

"Permiso," said a voice. She was woken up. She was still standing in front of the door that had been open to her for a while now. She turned and saw an elderly couple pushing their cart load of luggage followed by young Northern European backpackers. She realized a whole herd of passengers were coming out this door. They all had big smiles on them, while she was still enraged.

How about a dash through security, to Gate 23? How dare he give her a hug and a kiss on the cheeks as if he had done nothing wrong.

But the neck she really wanted to wring was her own. She was powerless these four days. She didn't get angry. She was sullen in the beginning, not really taken aback, not really surprised, just sullen that he had flown what he considered a romantic and heroic flight from Moscow, where he was staying for the summer, to Madrid.

"Moscow to Madrid, almost like James Bond movie, don't you think?"

How dared he smiled while uttering such insolent words! He had his right arm around her, but she didn't shake it off. Was it because of some hidden comfort in that familiar embrace, in that familiar scent, a familiarity that did not get obliterated by the warm sun, the cheap tapas, the cold beers, the delectable wines, no?

In front of the security check, he hugged her. Kissed her on her right cheek. His stubbly chin left that familiar feeling on her smooth face. And then, he said something else. She was so enraged that she found her body walking to the nearest bench and sitting itself down.

"I am so sorry. I hope you forgive me."

They didn't talk about the break of the engagement those four days he had robbed from her. She talked about it with herself, in the dark hours in bed, next to him, who was sound asleep. She was boiling in her own rage in bed, cursing herself for being there, cursing herself for being so weak that she couldn't just kick this dead body off her bed, off her life, throw it out the window after cutting it up into pieces using the scimitar of her rage. It was the last week of her two-month adventure here, two months to seek closure, and he showed up.

Last night she felt she was about to explode, but what she ended up doing was quietly peel of the thin sheet from her body, and carefully lifting her body so she could go tot he tiny bathroom, where she turned on the light only after closing the door behind her. Then once she found a spot on the floor, she turned off the light again, laid herself on the cold ceramic tiles and cried without uttering a sound.

That little girl who was being dragged out by the elderly woman before, who was staring at her.

"She looked like me."

And then she started crying. Not on the cold ceramic tiles of a bathroom of the sixth floor of a elevator-less cheap hotel off Gran Via. But in Terminal 3, inside the baggage claim, of Barajas International Airport. She imagined that little girl fifteen, twenty years later, having to cry herself to peace on the ceramic tiles of a foreign land because she was too weak to handle her own rage. That little girl wouldn't deserve it. She was a little blond girl, with chubby face, blue eyes, just like her, except that now her hair was mostly brown, with one or two strands of white.

No one really paid attention to her. The passengers were busy waiting. The dark-skin janitors were milling around, some talking to the security people, who seemed just as bored. Every now and then that same glass door in front of which she was standing for some time would open to let people in or out. Its movement followed by or preceded with the sound of the outside. She remembered one other time she was on the ceramic floor. She was in utter pain. Her insides were twisted and she wasn't sure if it was food or something else. She was on her knees, her face resting on her hand that were touching the cold ceramic floor of her studio apartment. And next to her was her boyfriend, who would be her fiance, then her ex-fiance, then the demon that had descended from Moscow. He was caressing her back, comforting her after having called for an ambulance. His words were soothing. Though she never thanked him for that moment, or staying with her through the ordeal that proved to be harmless but unknown, she didn't forget it. She didn't forget it just twelve hours ago when she was lying on cold ceramic tiles again, which made her rage and pain even deeper.

"Pull yourself together."

That was what her dad had told her so many times as that facsimile of the little girl who had been dragged out by the elderly woman. She always had to pull herself together, not really for her own sake, but for everyone else's. Sometimes she was grateful that her father never treated her like a girlie girl, but rather imposed the same demands a father would with an only son. But still, life was so much harder for her, being a woman who had to take care of everyone, striving to be the best in the world for everyone else's sake, sustaining strength for lifting the weak around her. Now, she had to do the same pulling-herself-together act.

"I am doing this for myself."

She dried her eyes. She noticed how wet the crumpled tissue paper was. It was weird to see her own tears saturating this white piece of dry paper. Without further thoughts she shoved it in her jean-pockets and then lifted her body up. The clock in front of her said 5:34PM. His flight has just pulled out of the gate.

"Maybe it would crash and kill him."

She released a huge sigh after this final curse. She looked behind her, to see if she had left anything on the bench. Why was she sitting there? It was silly. All this was too silly. "Qué tontería!" she muttered. She walked out with two American passengers, who were talking about something really insipid about what they read in their guide books. But she didn't feel critical; she realized that people do infinitely more stupid things than making insipid comments about a city they had never seen but were taking the opportunity to explore.

She realized she would be back in a few days to this airport. Instead of spending the final week in Madrid, she only had three days left. She tried not to think about it. Having oriented herself a little with the signs around her, she headed towards the metro, resuming her exploration for liberation.

Shared: Happiness

If I am alone. I am alone in the wild, like that young man in Alaska who died of starvation totally alone, without the comfort of his sister, the opportunity to forgive his parents, the ability to see the people he connected with again, if I am alone.

I have been alone. There's something very sobering about being alone in the wild. The world around me envelopes me with beauty that I have for myself and can't share with anyone. That's a dilemma I understand the young man had faced. When we are in society, with other people, we are prone to hurt others and be hurt. We can treat one another with utter, unspeakable brutality, and yet if we are alone, we have no one to share our emotions, no one to listen to, no one to be listened to.

Everyday when I am with people, living among them even if I am not interacting with them, the relationships that I build can weigh on me. I end up caring about the most unimportant matters and dream of unshackling myself from the fetters that are these relationships and be alone, in the wild, where my destiny is only in the hands of nature and my own hands. Harsh as it would be, and I have had occasions to taste the mercilessness and danger of nature, the harshest experience is to be alone, I think. To learn about life, to discover its values, to draw conclusions about life, and to do all this all alone. That's why so many of us are stuck to the Internet, to build these connections that might be important to us without weighing us down, tying us to a place when our hearts want to go somewhere else.

So I have sat alone in many deserts, on many mountain tops, listening to the waves of many seas, and the feeling of freedom and desire for connection face off in dramas I still can't understand. In the movie, one character said, "To forgive is to love, and to love is to connect with God." God, as in that which is around us. Love and happiness somehow go hand in hand, and at this stage in my life, I suddenly can't find that connection between the two. It's hard to really love if there isn't a human being to love. It's possible to love nature, to love its beauty. I have even fallen in love, that feeling of falling in love, when I was this foreign visitor in nature.

But I couldn't touch that nature the way I would want to touch another human being, a parent, a sibling, a friend, a lover. And if I were dying from starvation, or panicking from fear, nature's beauty wouldn't bring me solace the way a human would.

But what human? That's the problem. Nature has its own ways, and never the fickle way, never the betrayal. I don't know why. But with people, it's harder to say. It's harder to count on. The man in the movie felt he had been betrayed by his parents, by the life he hadn't made for himself, and that by running into nature, he was seeking a rebirth. And me? I sit in my house that sometimes feels like a shackle. I have a job that makes me feel I am not doing what I truly want. And I have to deal with friends and family that don't always feel like the anchor I wish them to be.

But the message is always about love. And therein I will need to find the answers to these dilemmas.

Airport Wait Part I

How long had she been washing her hands. She wasn't sure when she realized it must have been long. She didn't have some psychological disorder. She just had forgotten that she had been washing her hands. She wasn't really washing her hands, she then realized. She had just been leaving her hands under the warm water. She woke herself up and moved her hands away from the water and then used them to shut off the water. Then she reached under the paper dispenser and waited for the paper to come out.

"Good bye, then."

Still in her head. Still so clear. But why not. She had just heard herself say that thirty minutes ago. Or something like that.

One piece of paper came out for her to rip off the machine. She meticulously wiped her hands clean until the paper had shrunken with the absorption of the water.

"Good riddance," she muttered again, and with that she angrily crumbled the wet paper towel and cast it into the nearest trash bin.

Then she walked out, not looking at the mirror; it was too soon to reconnect with herself.

Snow in Spring

The sun was shining. The radiant light bouncing off the white petals almost glistened the ground. A waiter, understandably frustrated, was sweeping the white petals off the outside seating section of a slightly upscale restaurant in downtown. Snow on this warm day as the trees slowly bid farewell to spring with the release of their petals and coated themselves with green buds.

The lone customer of this restaurant was sitting with his sunglasses on, watching the waiter fussing over the futile attempt to clear the area of the white, glistening petals. He wondered why the man should bother. The trees above, like some formidable god, would continue, with the help of the Wind God, to rain the petals down. The waiter is a stocky Hispanic man in his late thirties, his only emotion the frustration of finding the spot he had just cleaned repopulated with petals. The customer is slightly amused, then took another sip of his Malbec, the favorite wine of this South American Nuevo Latin Fusion restaurant. He wasn't planning on getting food. He just wanted to be in the sun and watch the petals fall gracefully and carpet this corner that was quiet now but would turn into a mad house when the clubbing people come and do their superficial things. He wasn't one of those; he had walked down this street during clubbing time, but never joined the scene.

He was now here just for the sun and the wine. He had just returned from a place far away, far from here, far from where that Malbec had come from, far from where this stocky, frustrated man had come from, and wherever he had come from, despite the certainty of drama and hardship, was nothing compared to what he had witnessed and got involved in. He tried not to think about it. That was why he was here, drinking wine, which he hadn't touched in the past two years, watching races of people he hadn't seen in equal amount of time, except in reflection pools every now and then. He saw himself in the reflection on one of the large window panes; funny, he thought, how he had to do so much to even get a mirror. The late morning breeze brought down a few more petals onto his metallic, shiny, clean little table. One fell into his wine, and the whiteness instantly suffused with the crimson tone of the foreign wine. He looked at it and lost in thoughts. He remembered being by the Ganges the first of many times. He wasn't there for holy reasons that many of people of his race and cultural background had come. He had seen none of those at that segment of the Ganges. He remembered the funeral pyres, the corpses covered in white, the people, the mourning as well a the spiritual, walking along the river, and sometimes the white covered float of the dead returning to Mother Ganges. He saw the white petal in the blood red wine, and he was no longer there at the corner in this North American city in front of a South American Nuevo Latin Fusion restaurant.

His phone rang, startling him. He was back. He took it out and saw a familiar name. People's names feel even more familiar when you haven't been connected to them for a while. A smile as radiant as the sun shining above grew on his face and he slid the phone open and started talking. It was a longish conversation, one of many about his return, about making plans to talk further, and after he hung up, sliding the phone back to its compact position, he looked at the phone. He remembered trying to get a phone for his washerwoman. She had no residency permit in the city where he lived, and living in a hut meant no permanent address to obtain such permit that would not only allowed her to get a phone but also send her children to public school. On the other hand, she was able to steal electricity without anyone knowing because she was more or less invisible. The purchasing of the phone was a strange drama. He couldn't even now, even having thought about it more in the long flight back, if she was trying to manipulate him, to take advantage of his good will. His thoughts about the poor had been shaken immensely. His understanding of human beings now became the murkiest in memory. His perception of his status in this world were thrown into the center of a hot but ambiguous debate. In the end he bought a phone for a woman who had shown him immense hospitality but also showed no qualms in exacting the best phone he, not she, could afford.

He realized now that his wine was over. He waved at the waiter who was by now standing with his broom leaning next to him on the wall. He was taking a break. The waiter was to get him the check while he was to take out his wallet with a credit card. The social hierarchy here, which he had been so used to that he hadn't even noticed, became so obvious to him now. He had gone through a life of extremes in too many levels to even think about now, and now he found himself very sensitized.

Smiles among the Grapes

I remember that afternoon in the vineyard. I was just a little boy, maybe ten years old, but my memory might be betraying me. You know, especially when you were a kid and you want to be older than you were. So I don't know. Anyway, I was among the big green leaves and the vines and that little girl was. The sun was shining happily onto the even happier grapes that were just waiting to be harvested and join a massive incarnation of wine. But I didn't care about the vine. It was cooler being in the shades under the vines. The giggle of that girl drove me crazy and I found myself giggling too.

When I caught sight of her I shouted out, "I got you!" and ran towards her. She just kept running faster. Soon we were out in the open and I saw her again. We were supposed to be with our families at a picnic, but just the two of us we were just having fun. I caught up closer to her and by then we had reached the foot of the old castle. I didn't know who that castle belonged to. Probably no one. I knew it existed but we never got so close. We just fell onto the soft bed of grass and held hands. It was so nice, I remember, holding her little hand and we were just giggling and smiling.

She smelled good, I remember. Some sort of shampoo. Her hair was still golden blond, and her smiles were better than the sun for me. She was wearing a white dress with cute red shoes. There was a bonnet on her head, also red. Her eyes were ocean blue. We were neighbors and we had known each other for a few years now. They moved in from a distant village and our family became friends. We made our own wine and every picnic we shared it with our neighbors. It was very fun.

The castle was formidable. I can remember it clearly. It had transformed somehow when they turned it into a prison during the war. But that day it was like a fairy tale castle for us. We imagined there were flags fluttering above. She said she was Rapunzel waiting for me to climb up her long blond hair. That was when I touched her hair, and her smile disappeared, her face grew a little serious, but then she giggled again and tightened her grip on my hand.

We didn't get in trouble with the picnic. Not really. But I remember I felt that we did something wrong. Because soon after the picnic was over, things started changing. The war had arrived at our doorstep. Young men were sent away and many didn't return. I was still a child and our family was very scared. I remember Dad worrying and praying for the first time I could remember. My sister was talking about how the Germans were rounding up Jews all over Europe and it was a matter of time they did the same. I didn't understand. I couldn't understand why anyone would do that.

But what I understood least of all was our neighbors. They stopped talking to us. They looked away when bumping into us. There were no more picnics. One afternoon people started throwing things at our house, breaking our windows. I was crying but no one in the house did anything. We just all hunched down. I saw the blond girl once, who looked sad, as her mother grabbed her right arm and pulled her away from me. That time she was wearing a blue dress, I remember, almost like her eyes. By then our vineyard had been destroyed by vandals, and soon confiscated, or, as I had understood then, taken away by someone, the new people. And one night, I still remember, I was woken up from my deep sleep by my Mother. We were on the move. Someone was leading us somewhere. I could only take my little bag. We were in a hurry, and I was quite flustered, but I remembered distinctly approaching the house of the blond girl. I imagined, suddenly, that she opened the door and said good bye. Or maybe even we were going into her house. Or at least, in my wildest imagination, she would at least leave me with something because I understood that we were leaving, going somewhere far. I was old enough to understand the dire situation we were in.

But she didn't open the door. No one did, and we were trying to be as quiet as possible. We got on a horse-pulled cart. And from there I bid farewell to the blond girl who was behind the walls of that house I had gotten so familiar with.

I said good bye again when we were leaving our hideout in a barn within view of the castle. That day I remembered the feel of her little hand, the luster of her hair, the blue in her eyes, the smile that surpassed the sun. And that was the first time during this whole ordeal that I cried. Everyone cried, but no one cried for my reasons. I saw the castle, which, like I said, had been converted to a prison by then. Funny how we were hiding so close to a prison. The Germans had already occupied the city, but the prison was still at that point run by the local police. I heard later that it was used to torture people, resistance fighters, communists, though the Jews were lucky enough to be sent to death camps somewhere far away.

I am joking, of course. I have gone through enough painful nights to make such jokes. We were the luckiest ones, having left the country and come to America before getting rounded up. We were the tiny minority. But I still sometimes think about the blond girl. There were times I missed, then for some reason hated her, then wondered about her. Then I forgot about her for a while. Sometimes someone with her name or look reminded me of her. But I tried to get past it. Somehow I felt guilty seeing that I was lucky to have escaped certain torment, if not certain death. Somehow I just couldn't understand why things had to happen this way. I am telling you this now because you asked me about the Holocaust and I just want to say that I didn't get sent to those death camps, and that the hardest thing for me was not understand why that blond girl suddenly was torn away from my life when the only thing we did wrong was my touching her blond hair.

The Inadvertent Snob

It's been said many times by those in the tango scene that tango reflects life, the good and the ugly. And one aspect that stands out very prominently is snobbery. It's not merely about the rich and their desire to flaunt their status via materialism before the humble majority. It's most abstract form is being picky about who you want to connect to based on superficial reasons that are remotely tied to your own perceived capabilities. And so in the money perspective, snobbery is about trying to connect to those wealthier than you but disdain those who are below you, and all the while flaunting that you think you have. And the same applies to knowledge, especially in a specific field.

Here in tango it's not so much about knowledge but simply danceability. By that I mean who can you dance with and how easy can you reject someone, whether actively as a woman or passively as a man who simply does not choose the women he rejects.

The sad thing is that snobbery here isn't done consciously. There is not only a desire to dance with the best people in order to improve your own skills, such as the best excuse may be, or to simply have an amazing and memorable dance, but also to show others that you have been doing well in climbing the ladder of danceability. The best way is to dance with the so-called superstars, much in the same way many hope to be invited to rich and/or famous people's parties and live to tell about it, or have pictures serve as proofs posted on facebook. And so when there are many dancers on the floor the anxiety and desire to dance with the selected few is augmented.

Women would wait impatiently for those on their target list, and reject those lower than them all the while. Men, having the ability to ask, would device strategies on maximizing the number of top-echelon dancers, a scoreboard that could be greatly damaged by a rejection. So while the game is strategically played, many people don't realize and therefore don't admit to snobbery. Avoiding eye contact is one way to filter out and discourage the undesirables.

Like other snobbery, it's hard to tell who really is the upper-echelon dancers. Teachers are easy points, but there are very few teachers at a milonga, and sometimes none. So if you're already in the elite group of snobs for the milonga, you might just dance with one another, whose skills you know. Otherwise, everyone has to watch the dancers. And that's where the resemblance to real life becomes even more poignant. Instead of assuming someone is rich by how attitude and other superficial attributes, in tango, inexperienced people are rooted out by some superficial set of rules to which the people are put to the test. The deciding factors can be complicated, but in general it involves how the dancer looked dancing, if they are cute or handsome, and how they seem to interact with their partner while talking during the break before the next song comes up. These things often don't correspond to the actual quality of the dance, but at the very least, you're dancing with someone that others respect, and therefore they might respect you.

That is how things work in the tango scene. And it can be brutal: people not getting any daces, or horrible ones, or rejections.

Yale Tango Fest

Today is the start of the fourth Yale Tango Fest, and at least here, and the nearby areas, based on the heat measured on Facebook, there's a great deal of excitement. Although by no means is tango hugely popular at Yale or in the host city of New Haven, there is enough of a group of dancers here and in the Northeast from which the festival draws most of the out-of-town people. But the enthusiasm is precisely due to small group of people who take pride in the ability a small town and a small tango community has to draw in great dancers around the region and the country to make such a great festival.

The preparation this year has surprised many and caused some doubts for a few months. There were rumors circulating around that the festival wasn't going to happen for reasons that rumors could not ascertain. Unlike the previous three years, this time even the inner circle of people who have contacts with the main organizers have been clearly out of the loop. And this included the president of the Yale Tango Club, the main sponsor of the Yale Tango Fest. I recall his saying that he gave it a "fifty-fifty" chance that the festival would happen. As the number of weeks dwindled before the usual weekend when past Fests happened, there was increasing anxiety, even some show of defeatism and despair here in this small community, while some people outside, larger communities, like the one in New York City, shrugged and assumed the worst and didn't really care. Many of those are now vexed that the announcement of the festival dates had come so late that they had already made other plans.

So, yes, eventually the announcement came and it drew, in addition to the minority vexation, relief and joy. Some even in disbelief. The last one was by many attendees' opinion the best. And so there was a built-up hope that this year would be at least as good. And this year the number of local enthusiasts had finally starting growing again. But last year's success was not without some dark spots, and they contributed to the silence that had prevailed before the announcement. The all-night milonga last year, although the most successful of all the milongas of all the festivals thus far, ended up causing great ire in the host of the venue: the Yale Medical School. They were extremely angry at how the milonga had left the student lounge, which was adjacent to the ball room, in total chaos and even unsanitary conditions. The school also claimed that furniture was broken. They would never again let the Yale Tango Club host an event in that ballroom again.

Without that room this year's organizers had to scramble to look for a new venue that would be large enough to host all these people. Last year more than two hundred people fit in that ballroom, which was the biggest space on campus. There was probably a lot of negotiations and searches behind the scene, but another problem was that the organizers themselves were busy doing other organizing work prior to this event. How big of an effect that was on the lateness of announcing the even date is not clear. But the delay is not entirely due to a missing venue.

Part of what makes this event so successful compared to others is the main organizer. To give a stark comparison, the other student-based tango event in this area is the Princeton Tango Fest, which had its second one last year. This year, long before there was any whisper of a possible Yale Tango Fest, the Princeton organizers had announced their festival this year, which is in October. This caused quite a bit of chuckles against the Yale Tango Fest organizers whose event usually took place at the beginning of April. But aside from this brown spot, Yale's festival excels in every way compared to Princeton's. At last year's Princeton festival, there was a great deal of confusion over where things were, that included where the schedule was being distributed. There was no introductory information about local area venues for eating and such. Going to a festival you don't just dance but you have to sleep and eat. No such information was provided, whereas at the Yale event there is a sizable booklet for out-of-towners on where to eat and where to get Wi-Fi. But when registration started, there was already information on how to obtain free housing and, if you had money, what hotels were nearby. Lodging for the Princeton event was either someone's couch or a hotel, nearby of which required a car. Princeton, the town, is not conducive to festivals.

Moreover, the crowd is more diverse and the level is clearly higher in the Yale event. Granted, the Yale event started almost two years ahead of the Princeton one. And another factor in this contrast is that the team of nearly two dozen volunteers for the Yale event dwarfs that of about half a dozen Princetonians. The organizer, Tine Herreman, a Yale aluma, is renown for her organization skills. Any volunteer could tell you how efficient, and sometimes brutally, she is in getting things done and reaching goals that in the end optimizes the experience attendees have when parting.

The comparison isn't merely to an event of a fellow Ivy League school, but to many other festivals. Most festivals have great teachers and DJs, but they lack information and answers to questions. They are often in a city that required cars to get around else you would feel trapped. Moreover, many do not cater to students and other not-so-wealthy young people, who form a disproportionate, and perhaps even majority part, in the better echelon of dancers in the North American community. The best festival is one where the attendee can do a lot more than just dance; socializing is a big part of attending a festival, and if that is curtailed, the experience is not optimal.

This afternoon, and especially this evening, people from the region are slowly trickling in. This year, because of the lateness of the announcement of the date, I don't expect nearly as many people from far away, especially if they need to take a plane. Moreover, there are more and more festivals in this gloomy economic times when traveling and hotel stays spell big expenditures for the tango enthusiasts. Nevertheless, I hope the energy will be there like last year's. Those who are flying in or coming from afar will come today. The New Yorkers have the luxury of hopping on a train tomorrow after some rest tonight. There are many unknowns but the enthusiasm has no diminished. For many Yalies and other New Haveners who had recently ventured into this world of a passionate dance, this weekend should prove to be memorable, regardless of the composition of the visiting dancers.

Warmest Day

I saw him sit down on the damp green grass, and from the smell in the air, the grass was recently mowed. He had a white hat on, matching his white polo T-shirt, tucked inside nicely his khaki pants. He seemed to be suffering, though it was not that hot, just hottest day so far after such a long and miserable winter. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his whole face and neck as if he had just come inside from a pouring rain. But I didn't seem much sweat. It was all psychological.

He was in his fifties, his skin full of wrinkles, but having been in the sun likely quite often, his skill was dark enough to camouflage some of the wrinkles. He stopped wiping for a bit, scratched his forehead a little as he kept his gaze at the children from afar playing around the center of the park.

A sneeze. He was allergic to something. It was still spring, early spring, and the flowers were only slowly starting to reveal themselves. Cherry blossom petals started to flutter around the various corners of the city's neighborhoods. But here, in the center of the city, there were no flowers, and the allergen was some invisible creature brought from afar. He used the same handkerchief to cover his mouth when he sneezed the few times. I wondered if he was going to wipe his face with that same handkerchief, at least fold it.

He sighed, still keeping his eyes on the children from afar. Perhaps one of them was his grandson or nephew. He put the handkerchief back in his left pant pocket, then with a hand on each side of his lap, he propped himself up and walked towards the center where the children were.

Hike over the Gorge

"You're far from home," said the young man. He's a peasant boy, she knew, from the nearby village, most likely. The way he was dressed, the way he smiled, the dark tone of his skin. He has his queue wrapped around his head.

"Yes, but how do you know?"

"You don't have our accent around here."

Around here there were only villages and more villages. This was the southern slopes of the Tiger Leaping Gorge, facing the steep walls on the other side behind which the sun was less than an hour away from reaching its rest. The young man's age was hard to tell since his face was so sunburned and just the sheer labor he had had to endure for undoubtedly most of his short life so far made him older than he must really be. but his voice betrayed his youth, and something else, his light-heartedness. But that was common among peasants most of whom were never educated and never left their villages.

They had been talking for a few minutes already. She was sitting there alone, looking at the other side, the huge wall capped by snow, and the emerald river that had cut open this land into the narrow gorge she was now a part of, temporarily. Her name meant Autumn Jade, and how appropriate, given the color of the river and the colors of the autumnal landscape. She told him his name, but he didn't understand the second part, the part of the jade, the precious gem. He wasn't educated, and his Mandarin was barely understandable. They were in the outskirts of an empire that was crumbling all around, pilfered, subjugated, beaten, crumbling, and so corrupt. Yet, this young man, whose name simply meant strong dragon, had no inkling of anything. He was what he believed he had to be, and asked for nothing more. That was how she interpreted things with peasants. She felt sorry for them. She had felt sorry for them since she was a child growing up at the estate of a landowner whose land was tilted and toiled over by men and women like him and his peers here. The only difference is that over there in the eastern coast the crops were different, but the sweat was the same.

She didn't talk to him much. She was being absorbed by the scenery and in the process forming a poem in her heart. Then he, in his innocence, greeted her. She knew he was young also because he confessed that he wasn't married yet. Peasants married even younger than city people, certainly younger than her when she got married.

Oh, that marriage. What a sham. She felt the hair on the back of her neck bristle just the thought of the arranged marriage. It was so contrary to the independence she had enjoyed so much in the life before. The betrayal she had felt from her parents was still raw, parents who had brought her up to have opportunities that women at that time mostly didn't even know existed, only to succumb to tradition and married her off to someone she had never met until the wedding night. She was able to go to school, where she learned to write impressive poems and essays and stories, and outside school she was able to practice fencing and go horseback riding. She even did gymnastics. And suddenly, once entered the house of this stranger, all that was gone. All she could do was read and write, and then rear children.

Here she was, many days of travel from her home, on the fringe of a country she wanted to change, sitting there, with a peasant boy who wouldn't be able to read her stories, let alone understand her poems. And yet, her blood wasn't boiling this time. The wind, the air, the river, the autumn atmosphere. It was soothing and it inspired her even more to want to change this country.

"The other day we saw people from even farther away," said the young man, who had taken a seat next to her, "They were not Chinese people. They were wearing funny clothes, not exactly Chinese, but almost. People said they were here to teach us about their religion."

"Missionaries," she mumbled.

"I guess. I don't know what that means. But it was a lot of fun hearing them speak our language but talking about something I couldn't understand at all," said the man, spitting to the side at the end of every phrase.

"At least they weren't opium traders," she thought. She looked at the man, who suddenly became self-conscious having noticed her gaze, and asked, "Do you know where Japan is?"

"No. Some sort of sunny place?" The "sun" in Japan was the only word he understood.

She smiled and said, "A land beyond the sea, beyond the eastern coast where I live. I am going to go there."

He scratched his head, looking confused, and forgetting his shamelessness sitting so close to a woman who was obviously married. "Why do you have to go so far? With your family?"

"No," she said, pushing down feelings she had yet to understand, "Alone."

She was confiding this secret to a stranger. Not even her closest friends and comrades knew about this plan. Sitting here under the snow-capped mountains she revealed her secret. The young man became quiet. He might even be shaking, but she was no longer looking at him. She would tell him the reasons, and there were many, but he wouldn't understand. One day, the revolution would come to him, she knew, and things would change forever for him.

"I was thinking," said the young man, as if she hadn't said anything outrageous to him just now, "when I saw those, what do you call them? Missionaries? I was wondering if more foreigners would come. My dad said foreigners are bad. They are trying to destroy our land, steal everything, make us all slaves."

She wondered too, what this land would one day look like. Would there really be so many foreigners here. She would be a foreigner soon, in a foreign land. Japan, she had learned, used to be a closed up country like the one she loved and wanted to change. But now it was a powerful country, full of foreigners and its citizens were found all over the world too. Would her own country break free from the shackles of tradition, bring down the government, and make one that was for the people, not just rich people like her family, but for people like this young man squatting next to her, and to open their minds so they would at least know what Japan was.

She noticed a patch of chrysanthemum not far away, and asked, "Do you use that?"

The young man squinted at what she was pointing at and said, "We make tea, medicine from that."

Across the country they were one people ruled by another people. She wanted to bring the rule back to her people. The poem in her head that started from upstream of the Golden Sands River had now taken form, and like one of the beautiful birds she had seen sitting here, rose into the sky and ascended to freedom.

The young man said he had to get back to work, no doubt on land he didn't own. She took a look at him and thought about her own marriage, her husband she never loved, and children she had been forced to have and had trouble learning to love. This young man was a good person. So was her husband, who never abused him. Men were not the enemies on her quest to liberate not only the country but women, but tradition itself. Those bare hands of this young man was what would get him a wife and then children who would one day take care of him when he no longer could work. That has been the way for thousands of years, but now, she believed, it was time to change.

She bid him farewell, and then she returned to her solitary meditation. This was the last time she would see such beautiful landscape, she understood. From this point on, the struggle would start, however long it would take.

The Physicist

"So what is Einstein's theory of relativity?" asked the middle-aged man with a humble smile on his face, "I mean, can you really slow down time?"

The physicist hesitated to look at him, waited a good second before giving the high school teacher a condescending look. Then he said, putting another book in its place on the shelf for physics study material, "That's very complicated. It's not about slowing down time. It's hard to explain, you understand." He understood that that other middle-aged man, standing in front of him, looking extra ignorant, wanted to tell his son, a fan of physics, what Relativity was; that was what that man said two days ago when he asked him about subatomic particles. The middle-aged high school teacher seemed a little ashamed. He looked away and the light in his eyes, that hope for some easy knowledge, had faded. But that only annoyed the physicist a little.

The truth is he was not a physicist anymore, just as the man in front of him, who was about his age, was not a high school teacher anymore. They were both just employees at a Chinese bookstore in a country they both reluctantly adopted as their new home, having left behind a country where their statuses were different. Back there he was a physicist, though not at a prestigious university and did no special research or published anything worth mentioning, he was, still, a professor at a university. His students were not very inspired and he was, himself, not particularly inspired to inculcate information into those thick skulls. After all, while the country was raising up high rises, spawning new corporations and new money, he in his small city in the Midwest of China, saw no new wealth. And the only glimmer of wealth was through the letters his wife had gotten from relatives in America. And that glimmer, once they had arrived in this country, seemed real but also infinitely elusive. He now lived in one of the biggest cities in the country, and yet he had no friends. The only person he talked to mostly was this slightly shorter man who didn't even go to the universities, let alone teach one. His son was interested in physics, and science, in general, and math, the man said to him. Then why not have him read about it himself, he wondered.

The physicist got over the two-prone attacks of guilt and frustration after not wanting to answer this simple man's simple question that actually had a very complicated answer. Instead, they were quietly putting the books in order on this Tuesday afternoon, where only one customer was browsing through the aisles, probably not going to buy anything. The shame in the contracted smile of his colleague dissipated, and his normal smile returned and they started talking about how the price of lunch was getting higher, and which eateries had cheaper food. Simple things. Then they went separate ways in the relatively large store to attend to their own responsibilities.

His hair was nearly all gray. He now looked more like a professor than ten years ago when he had arrived. His specialty wasn't relativity or quantum physics, but rather, optics. He held a book with a drawing of lens and the tracing of light rays going in, bending inside, and then emerging from the lens. He had seen that kind of cover many times, and every time he got this little feeling in his heart he never really cared or dared to understand. Earlier he went out and bought that lunch that was now twenty cents more expensive than yesterday's. He didn't complain; it was still cheap and his meager salary was still much more than his expenditure, which was exemplified by this two-dollar (and twenty-cent) lunch. His savings ten years ago in China was nowhere close to what he was saving now, and if he had stayed, from what he had been reading, his savings would have actually shrunk.

But something still didn't seem right.

At 7PM they turned off all the lights, locked the doors, locked the gates, and he bid farewell to everyone. He had forgotten about the question about Relativity, and didn't notice the slight change in the facial expression on his colleague's face. He was deep in his own thoughts, more so now than usual. It was a warm, early spring evening in Chinatown. The stench from the seafood stores and restaurants was becoming noticeably intense with the warmer weather and lack of rain to wash away the detritus of this little microcosm of a close-knit immigrant society. The sun had already set but the sky was of a light blue. From the corner of Elizabeth and Canal, where there was always traffic jam this time and most times of the day, he looked up and saw the North Star. He wasn't an astrophysicist, not a quantum physicist, nothing fancy, but a physicist with a dissertation about optics, but he knew enough about physics, not only to make stuff up to patch up little he knew about quantum physics, but also he did know enough to understand the stars, among other things. He could see the drawing on an old blackboard with powdery chalk detailing a problem of light rays between planets and stars that his students had to solve. There were symbols, complex symbols that a minority of the world understood.

He walked over to the fruit and vegetable sellers. Where did they come from? He knew. He had spoken to them. They were mostly peasants from a nearby province from where he had come from. They spoke to one another in a dialect he didn't understand, and their mannerisms were so crude, so low-class, and yet, in this new country, it didn't matter where you came from, what education you got, but as long as you didn't excel in English, you are all the same. The vegetable seller, a woman around his age, with bad teeth and sunburned face, called him "Professor" in Mandarin, in a bad accent, of course. He no longer minded, and he put on a good smile. He had learned to haggle and make jokes with these people who never even finished junior high, he believed. That was the American Dream, he had realized at some point; everyone had the equal opportunity to get ahead of him. He had been here for ten years and he was still a clerk in a bookstore. He would sometimes tell someone in the nearby park where even older people were doing Tai Chi about optics. He remembered sitting next to two boys who were doing their homework outside, and he started bragging about how much harder his problem sets were compared to what these high schoolers were doing.

He got his Chinese vegetables and a bunch of Dragon Eye fruits. Then gave a sigh and continued on. When crossing the street towards the subway entrance, he saw his colleague, who had also bought some groceries to bring back home an hour's train ride away. He called out his name, in the respectable manner, and ran across the street. His colleague was full of surprise and smiles. They decided to take the train together until one of them had to leave. The physicist was also full of smiles now. He wasn't alone with his thoughts; he was ready to tell the tale of what time travel meant in the theory of relativity.