Category Archives: bio

News Coverage of the Second Iraq War

I find the news coverage of this war emotionally confusing, when contrasted with my memories. When we returned to the US in 1972, I had my first exposure to television news. At the time, Walter Cronkite closed every evening’s newscast with a list of American and Vietnamese (north and south) casualties – which ran to the hundreds most days, if I remember correctly. I now suppose that it was his way of protesting, but at the time it upset me; I felt he was being callously dismissive of all those deaths. I had a personal stake: my dad had been in Vietnam (as a civilian, with the US Agency for International Development), and could easily have been one of those numbers.

So it feels odd to me that every news source hurries to reports when one or two or a dozen of ours are killed. I want to scream: “It’s a war, people, what did you expect?” I could well be misinterpreting, but I wonder if the Powers That Be, and/or the media, have tried to persuade the American public that you can have a war without any actual casualties on your own side. That you can be a soldier without actually risking your life in combat.

I don’t really even know what I’m saying here, and am very confused about my own feelings. But, for what it’s worth, I’m sharing them with you.

I find it grimly ironic that the American news media are making a big deal over whether or not to show the Al Jazeera footage of captured and killed Americans. I understand the need for delay, of course: their families should not have to learn about it from television. But all this public soul-searching and breast-beating by the news organizations – so that the decision to air or notitself becomes news – is that necessary?

For better or for worse, the Italian media has no qualms: the footage was shown yesterday on TV, and can be viewed on the website of Italy’s major newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera. Apparently the bodies were edited out of this version, but it seems to show the entirety of the interviews.


In Italy, the protests continue, large and small, organized and not. Saturday there was a big demonstration downtown. Ross and I were on the metro when a number of the demonstrators were heading home, with their rainbow peace flags, scarves, etc. (After many visits to San Francisco, I associate the rainbow flag with gay pride. I was confused when I saw the first peace flags weeks ago – it seemed unlikely that so many gays had suddenly come out in our neighborhood!)

One of the protestors was wearing a sweater with a large “Levi’s USA” label. Mixed metaphor?

I wasn’t paying attention to their conversation, until a guy sitting next to me jumped in, saying: “These Americans have it easy against the Iraqis. If they took on the Russians or Chinese, it would be a different story.” Huh? Does he think the US is doing this just to beat up on somebody? Then he added: “I’m a leftist.” Meaning what? That you’re automatically anti-American? But I squelched my combative nature, and kept all these thoughts to myself.

I would have more sympathy with the protestors if I were convinced that more of them actually knew what they were talking about. I am always willing to listen to an intelligent argument on any side of a question. But I suspect that many are anti-war and anti-American simply because it’s trendy and fun to go to peace marches, hang out flags, etc. And, for the schoolkids, it’s a great excuse not to go to classes. But do they really know anything about the issues?


Berlusconi, meanwhile, manages to have his cake and eat it, too. After a vituperative debate in parliament, US airbases in Italy are allowed to be used for logistical support, but not as a point of departure for bombing runs, “because we are a non-belligerent country.” This after Berlusconi’s many eager protestations of support to Bush and Blair over the last few months. Airbases in Germany are being used in exactly the same way.

Here We Go Again: The Beginning of the Second Iraq War

Whatever one’s feelings about the rightness or otherwise of it, war is never a comfortable time. This one in particular is cause for nervousness among Americans overseas. I’ve just received email from the US Embassy in Rome advising “American citizens in Italy to take prudent steps to ensure their personal safety in the coming days. Remain aware of surroundings, avoid crowds and demonstrations, keep a low profile, vary times and routes, and ensure travel documents are current.”

Strangely enough, all this is very familiar to me. In 1984, I made a long visit to my dad in Jakarta, Indonesia, and ended up working in the commercial section of the US Embassy. One of the perks of the job was an Embassy carpool which took us to work and home again every day.

Then the Islamic Jihad issued death threats against US and European citizens in Indonesia (I don’t remember why, if there was any reason other than “We hate you”). The French and British embassies promptly evacuated all diplomats’ families. The US Embassy didn’t send anyone home, but instituted security measures, like varying the times and routes of our daily carpool rides to the office. “Varying times” meant that the car could show up anytime between 6:00 and 9:00 am, and “varying routes” meant that the trip could take even longer than usual. In the event, nothing happened, and after a while life returned to normal, though a year or two later a rocket was fired into the Embassy grounds.

So I am eerily accustomed to this feeling of being under seige, of having to think about where I should and shouldn’t go (no more movies in English at the cinema, maybe no cinema at all). No big change in lifestyle is needed; I rarely find myself among crowds of Americans anyway. A “worldwide caution” also just issued by the Embassy warns of “potential for retaliatory actions to be taken against US citizens and interests throughout the world.” Okay, so I won’t eat at McDonald’s or Burger King — no great loss! (Later: A McDonald’s window was smashed in Milan during peace protests on Saturday, March 22.)

I had much the same feeling of “they’re out to get me” for some time after 9/11, with one big difference: this time, a lot of Italians have it in for me, too. In Italy, as elsewhere in the world, there have been huge peace demonstrations, which the US embassy advised American citizens to avoid: not all the demonstrators would have distinguished between George Bush and Americans in general. There are also a lot of Arabic-speaking and/or Muslim immigrants and businesses in our neighborhood. I’m not sure what to think of them or what they would think of me, especially since Milan was found last year to harbor Al Qaeda’s European headquarters (NOT in our neighborhood).

It’s depressing, this feeling that some people hate me enough to kill me simply because of my citizenship, and wouldn’t bother to find out first what I actually think about things.

And, as is inevitable for Woodstockers, I know people directly endangered by the war: an Indian schoolmate living in Baghdad with her Iraqi husband. Her mother taught me Hindi for several years and was our class homeroom teacher; I worry about her, worrying about her daughter (ironically, her son lives in the US).

Fiction: Ivaldi

I began Ivaldi during my undergraduate years at the University of Texas at Austin. Douglass Parker, a professor of Classics, taught a course in Parageography – the geography of fantasy worlds. The reading list ranged from The Odyssey to Tolkein, and I remember vividly the day Dr. Parker came bounding into class, waving a book and exclaiming, “You all have to read this!” It was Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, just published; that was my first exposure to Italian literature.

The major project for the semester was to develop your own fantasy world, and document it – in some form other than narrative fiction. Some students drew maps and charts and plans; I wrote a guide to the city of Ivaldi.

Throughout the course, Dr. Parker also shared with us snippets (mostly in the form of poetry) from his own created world and the adventures therein of his alter ego, Dionysius Simplicissimus Periphrastes. His documentation was rich and fun, but sometimes short on detail. So in the final exam, which consisted of questions on the world DSP found himself in, we were expected to simply make up whatever we could not have deduced from the documentation. I don’t remember exactly what I said about DSP, but it must have been scurrilous, because I do remember Dr. Parker’s notes on the returned exam: “Lies! Slander, all of it!” But he gave me an A anyhow. <grin>

I’ve been working on this novel in fits and starts ever since, and it’s still not quite finished – maybe about 15% remains to write, and I’ll do yet another revision as I start posting it here (again; it’s been available off and on for years, depending on web server space). To get started, go to the table of contents.

Doug Parker probably figured out long ago that one of the characters is him.

NYT article on the Parageography class

 

Also: how my hero got his name

Largo al Factotum… Why People Think I Know Opera

Those of you who know me from Adaptec/Roxio days probably remember the tag line appended to my every email and newsletter: “Largo al Factotum del CD-R.”

It’s a pun on a line from Figaro’s song in the opera in “The Barber of Seville.” The original phrase is “Largo al factotum della citta'” (“Make way for the do-everything of the city”); I simply replaced citta‘ (city) with CD-R (CD recording), and the line still scans reasonably well.

I thought it up one day (in 1996, according to Google) when I was feeling particularly harried with requests from every direction. I hardly knew the opera, and only a few lines of the song, but I looked up the rest of the lyrics and found that they were indeed appropriate: “Everyone wants me, everyone asks me… Figaro there, Figaro here… One at a time, for pity’s sake!” So a joke was born.

It had a number of interesting unintended consequences. I made some new friends under false pretenses: they got the impression that I knew a great deal more about opera than I actually did. (But they eventually forgave me when they learned the truth, and are still friends. And now I have opera singer friends to help mend my deficiencies.)

Only opera fans and Italians got the joke at a glance. Many people, misled by the word factotum, dragged out their high school Latin (“factotum” is indeed Latin, but it’s used in contemporary English as well as Italian). Others thought of “largo” as it is used in music (“slow” or “wide”), and came up with some very unflattering translations! I eventually put up a Web page with a full translation of the song, and referred people to that when they asked what the line meant. Mike Richter kindly provided the appropriate snippet of (out of copyright) music; the page is long since gone from the Adaptec site, but you can see it, and hear the music, on the Wayback Machine.

(Or you can go here.)

Towards the end of my tenure at Roxio, one customer wrote to me, irate that I dared to put non-English words into my email. Oy, vay – how do you deal with people like that? But, to balance the scales, an Italian sent me the following story:

You have to be careful using the word ‘factotum’ with English-speakers. I told an American colleague that I was the factotum in our office. He looked at me, very startled, and said “Fuck what?”

fucktotum

(No, I did not do this graffito!)

Servants: Household Help in Developing Countries

If I mention that I grew up having live-in servants, many Americans assume that I must have been filthy rich. But, when I lived in Asia, most foreign families there (and many local ones as well) had servants, and needed them for very practical reasons.

Picture yourself as the wife of an American diplomat or businessman or missionary, just arrived in India or Thailand in the 1960s or 70s. You probably don’t speak the language, you may not recognize many of the foods in the market, and you don’t know what they should cost. The market is not an American-style supermarket, with packaged goods stacked neatly on shelves and stickered with set prices: it’s a conglomeration of open-air stalls heaped with produce fresh from the farms, where everyone haggles over prices, and enjoys doing so.

You start at a handicap, however. Your skin color marks you instantly as a foreigner, and you’re assumed to be much wealthier than the natives (this perception is usually correct, by local standards). So the merchants figure you can afford to pay much more than anyone else, and they charge accordingly. You can meekly accept this, paying exorbitant prices for everything, or you can do battle, day after day, whether you enjoy haggling or not.

Or you can hire someone to do it for you.

It’s generally wiser to let someone local do the cooking as well. Basic raw ingredients are different in every country, and someone who has been cooking with them for years will have far more success than you in producing a good meal, at least in the beginning. When we lived in Bangladesh, there were not many vegetables available in winter, except for a particularly bitter kind of spinach. But our cook had been second chef at the Italian embassy, so he knew how to make home-made pasta, and made delicious spinach-filled ravioli. (It’s ironic that I had my first exposure to ravioli in Dacca; I didn’t know then that pasta would become a big part of my life!)

Live-in servants also provided security. House-breaking is common in many parts of the world, and it’s unwise to leave your home completely unattended at any time, especially for foreigners. Again, it’s the wealth factor: everyone assumes (and they’re probably right) that there are more valuable things to steal in your house than others’. So someone needs to be in the house, always. In Bangladesh we had a night watchman, whose job it was to stay awake and visible all night, to deter burglars. When the electricity went out, as it frequently did, he would circle the house, tapping on the walls with a stick and making low hooting noises, to let thieves know that he was alert.

A live-in nanny is a boon to any mother, the more so for women who are raising children in countries not their own, far from the usual support networks of family and friends. And many of these women were not, as you might think, full-time mothers. They were often expected to help their with husbands’ jobs, either very directly (as in the case of missionaries) or in such indirect ways as entertaining. And, yes, entertaining regularly on a large scale is a large job, even when you have servants to help!

So it’s not surprising that many expatriate kids have “native” nannies, and start out speaking a language other than that of their parents; my brother’s first language was Thai. Rudyard Kipling, like many other British children born in India, spoke Hindustani before he spoke English.

The relationship between “masters” and servants in Asia is not like an American employer- employee relationship. Servants become part of the family, and you are responsible for their welfare. They are usually poor and uneducated, and therefore more vulnerable than other members of their own societies – they really do need your help.

In 1985-86, I spent a year in Benares, under the aegis of the University of Wisconsin’s College Year in India Program. Aside from two American-born women of Indian parents, I was the only one in the group who had actually been to India before. (Four years in Mussoorie turned out to be inadequate preparation for Benares, but that’s another story!)

I ended up living in the extra room in the program center, where we all ate meals and had Hindi classes together. Two Untouchable women worked there during the day, one as a cook, the other cleaning.

I don’t remember the incident, but one day I spoke to the cleaner, Durga (pictured above), taking her to task for not doing her job properly. I doubt that I was rude, and Durga simply took the criticism as due; she had in fact been slacking. But some other students in the group immediately labeled me “Memsahib,” implying that I had the same snobbish attitude towards the “natives” as British women during the British Raj in India. Coming from equality-minded Americans, this was no compliment. I lived with that label for the rest of the year; they even gave me a trophy inscribed “Memsahib of the Year” at our final farewell party.

What the other students failed to understand was the reciprocity of the relationship. I had the right to tell Durga to do her job, but I also had an obligation to stand by her when she needed help; Durga and I both knew that. She came to me one day complaining of pain in her eyes. After consulting with our language teacher, I accompanied Durga to the hospital.

We were there for many hours, waiting in various lines and rooms. Durga had never been inside a hospital, and was terrified – she clung to my arm and cried. I was appalled by how rude the hospital staff were to her, apparently because she was Untouchable. I don’t know what treatment, if any, she would have received if I hadn’t been with her. I stayed with her, defended her as best I could, and bulled my way through every obstacle until she was finally examined by an eye specialist, who diagnosed glaucoma.

The Program paid for her medicines, but the story didn’t end there: she still needed to go back to the hospital for follow-up visits. Strangely, the students who had protested so loudly at my giving Durga orders never volunteered to accompany her to the hospital.