Today I steal photographic thunder from travel writer Janet Brown, author of Tone Deaf in Bangkok and the forthcoming Almost Home: The Asian Search of a Geographic Trollop. Janet told me I could crib any photo that catches my fancy off her F’book newsfeed. It’s lunchtime in Idaho and I’m cribbing away.
Last night I stayed up late in Boise, eating an Asian pear with cheddar cheese and watching Charlie Rose interview Robert Kaplan, author of The Revenge of Geography. Kaplan affirms that in our socially networked world–where on any given day thousands of Malaysian Muslims might gather to foment for Palestine–we are forging new ideological alliances across vast swathes of heretofore aloof territory.
Nevertheless, Kaplan has a quarrel with the Tweeted world: he argues that mountain ranges, space, desert, oceans, coast lines, harbors, matter. India and China are still divided by the high wall of the Himalayas. But now, Kaplan points out, they have the fly-over technology to spy on each other.
Something that hooks me about Janet’s on-the-fly photos is that, at first blush, they could be taken in Metropolitan Anywhere. Hong Kong, Mumbai, Bangkok–who’s to say? But when you look more closely, you see expertly observed signifiers of place: the tuk-tuk radiating from the man’s chest like an exposed heart in Bangkok; the crisp white shoes of Chinese dancers in what, at close range, must be Seattle. (Clues: the retro-gaming store and McKenna campaign posters winking from the backdrop.) Lean in, these photos beckon, things are not exactly as they seem.
In Janet’s snapshots and writing, I glimpse intimacy in a vast landscape. The world may be more claustrophobic, but it is not malcontent.
We take our restless desires and cravings to the Internet, but we also take our curiosity. It is no different in the streets. Janet Brown is the kind of person who goes to Bangkok not to visit the Grand Palace or Wat Pho, but to watch the harum-skarum traffic. Last night on Charlie Rose, Robert Kaplan explained how geography still defines human differences–from the hatchet blade of the Arabian Peninsula to the scattered cowrie shell nations of the Asia Pacific. In the same breath, he also claimed that maps are “somewhat retrograde” because “the map shows that there is still difference.” I disagree. I think the map is a mirror of where we are.
America stretches languorously and touches both the Atlantic and the Pacific. China tunnels away towards its Two Oceans Policy, and has begun to build a port in Burma to access the Indian Ocean. The story of a schoolgirl shot in an unnaturally partitioned landscape quivers on the world’s lips.
I aver that we will never close the deal on geopolitical or ideological concordance. What we are is resolutely different and codependent. We should remember that the Himalayas are real and their snowmelt makes storefronts in New York and Hong Kong. The world abounds in startling transferences.
To read Janet Brown’s Tone Deaf in Thailand is to be reminded.
