Martha Nichols's Open Salon Blog

Why Travel?

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:05:16 -0400

When I started college, I took a plane from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon—Alaska Airlines! how exotic! how great!

As soon as I fastened my seatbelt, I burst into tears. Some of my high school friends had seen me off at the gate, along with my parents and brother. I’d been cocky, chirping good-bye! I’ll miss you! as I eyed the departure gate, ready to dash off to my new life. I wanted that new life desperately. Yet I felt such terror that I couldn’t admit it until I was alone in a window seat.

That’s what travel does, even if a given trip doesn’t symbolize the before and after of a major life event. This week, after returning from four months with my family in Singapore, I’ve been thinking a lot about travel and why I do it.

“I'd love to know how writing in Singapore is different than writing in Boston,” an email correspondent asked me recently. “Your writing, your sense of the familiar/unfamiliar.”

I like this way of framing the question. Getting to know a specific place like Singapore through small details—the hawker stall with the best chicken rice, the scent of durians piled in the heat near our subway stop, the kingfisher gleaming on a cable wire above an artificial lake—illuminates it far better than news reports about no jaywalking or gum chewing.

But from a writer’s standpoint, it’s the inner space I’ve traveled that makes the most difference. Time away from home is wonderful but it can also be an internal rollercoaster—yet here's the surprise. It’s the hard part of traveling that I’ve found most valuable. Good for the soul? Maybe. But what really matters to me now in middle-age is getting a closer look at the mess inside.

I can do this in Boston, too, and sometimes I manage to carve out time and space for that kind of writing. But only sometimes. Travel is a far faster route to developing The Rough Guide to My Unconscious. I leave many of my usual distractions behind. I’m forced to open my eyes and pay attention.

Otherwise, I’ll miss my subway stop, I’ll lose my way—or in losing my way, I’ll stumble on a madrasah in which the boys wear purple-and-white uniforms or a Buddhist monastery right beside a Hindu temple, neither of which I intended to visit, but here we are. My ten-year-old son clutches my hand, and I squeeze him back. He wants water, so we try an unmarked café by the monastery, me cautious, thinking we have no right to be there, wondering if they'll understand my English. But they’re serving tasty vegetarian lunches. They are gruff but sweet. We are okay again. Better than okay.

What I’m talking about is not exactly a guidebook—too organized—but a compendium of unpredictable experiences that hit all my hot buttons:

Ecstasy: Yes, I’m enthralled by the sunset purples and reds, sipping wine with my husband on the Sentosa Boardwalk.
Rage: I hate that jackhammer outside my front door; it’s crashing through my skull.
Terror: What if my son gets lost on the subway? What if I lose my keys?
Despair: I’m trapped forever. I’ll never find my home.

When you go to a new place, you’re more vulnerable. It’s as if a crack of light opens in the clouds, illuminating your inner landscape as well as what’s passing outside. That’s not the relaxation I seek when I’m on a beach vacation. But when I’ve living somewhere else like Singapore, even if I’m on a sabbatical from normality, I’m writing. I have to write. And for a writer, feeling that stark glow within can be as heady as swimming with the dolphins.

These days, I need that sense of vulnerability. It’s the spark for my best writing. It brings back the tears I cried on Alaska Airlines at eighteen, when a kindly flight attendant gave me tissues and orange juice in a plastic cup. It conjures my three-year-old self on my first cross-country flight, charging up and down the aisles singing, “The clouds are moving! The clouds are moving!”

It awakens me to the familiar places in my life, past and present. Just last week, on another plane to California, I’d been wool gathering about Singapore and what we’d left behind, wishing I was still there rather than on this flight to the Bay Area, my childhood home, where I often travel to see my frail parents.

As the plane came down at SFO, I realized that travel can be addictive, allowing you to skate on the surface from one place to another—but then I saw the carpet of yellow wildflowers along the runway, the hills on the horizon, golden with patches of dark green on a hazy late spring day. I felt a thrilling wash of feeling and memory, of love, of grief. I began reinventing everything that used to seem so ordinary when I was a child.

I’d arrived. I’m a traveler in my own life now, and I love it.

Thanks to Arlene Mandell for emailing me such an intriguing query.

Also, see “Can You Capture a Volcano with an iPhone?”, my Editor’s Note to the new issue of Talking Writing, in which I reflect on my ambivalent response to visiting Bali.

Photographs:

• "Everybody" © Martha Nichols: From conceptual artist Lee Wen's exhibit "Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real" at the Singapore Art Museum.

• "My Shadow Self" © Martha Nichols

• "Last Night in Singapore, Sentosa Boardwalk" (below) © Martha Nichols

I Confess: I Hate Shopping Malls

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:02:45 -0500

Shopping malls in Singapore are ubiquitous, inescapable. They insinuate themselves into every level of your being, from the glam marvels of Ion Orchard and Ngee Ann City to the humbler open-arcade affairs that surround even outlying subway stations.

I’ve always hated shopping malls in America. In Singapore, they are so much a part of the cultural landscape that I’ve been trying to enjoy them for what they are: over-the-top displays of consumerism; palaces dedicated to dreams of splendor.

Yet, as the three of us struggled through Saturday night mall crowds recently, lugging shopping bags on the way back to our apartment, I realized I don’t like these malls any more than I do the tackier ones in my homeland.

I’m awed at the Times-Square-like hordes that pack their underground hallways on the weekends. I’m fascinated that cruising the mall is the place for young people to see and be seen: the girls in their high heels and clingy dresses, the boys with their tats and gelled hair.

I’ve been here long enough to scratch a bit under the well-to-do surface of the crowds. Some wear designer clothes or knockoffs, but others are decked in hot pants and lamé. I saw one threesome of women tottering down an escalator who looked like the “pretty one” from New Jersey, her pudgy best friend, and Auntie the Chaperone. The pretty one wore a zebra-striped mini with red rhinestone epaulettes; she kept tugging down the skirt.

(The nervous fussing reassured me, in fact. Earlier in the day, near Boat Quay and some of the fancier tourist hotels, I saw a threesome of what I’m certain were high-priced call girls—dressed in skimpy but tasteful black and stiletto heels. They wore their hair long and plain and glossy. They had the hauteur of models; there was no tugging at tacky clothing.)

"Mall Crowd on Orchard Road, Singapore" © Martha Nichols

On Orchard Road last Saturday, it was just the youthful hordes, though we passed a condom shop or two. It was a gorgeous clear night with a crescent moon. At one point, we saw flocks of chittering mynahs flying across the deep blue sky, roosting in the trees.

But nobody else seemed to be looking at the birds or the moon. We burrowed into the underpass that took us from Lucky Plaza to blocks of glitzier malls on the other side of the road. A bespectacled singer with a mohawk belted out “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” in the underpass—not bad at all and certainly sincere—his open guitar case displaying $2 bills and coins. No one gathered around to listen; he was just another sight to hustle past.

I appreciate air conditioning near the Equator, but in the malls, it pounds at full blast, so icy that I always curse myself for not bringing a sweater. This works for those who wear long-sleeved jackets or dresses with pantyhose, but the arctic level is absurd, like a gauntlet flung at the tropical heat outside.

My ten-year-old son and I have talked about making a kid’s-eye map of the Orchard malls, one that indicates on which level you can cut through to the next building, where to stop at an information kiosk for free mint Mentos, how to find the best bookstore and shrimp chips.

I like approaching this as a maze that needs to be mapped, a daily adventure in which we might come across a Minotaur. But I find all the wealth, the swagger, the environmental heedlessness depressing, too—and disappointing.

"Ion Orchard Escalator in Singapore" © Martha Nichols

I love urban spaces, but I am now craving nature like a junkie in withdrawal. Living in a noisy apartment beside a construction site, I have start filtering my reactions, trying to condense the most positive into pretty images: the green and red lights on taxis, glowing like jelly beans at night; the “Taste of Paradise” lit up on Ion Orchard beside “Food Opera.”

Except not everything can be filtered or prettified. In Singapore, perhaps, the goal is to go the other direction—to break all the barriers of restraint and bad taste. Still, it’s an odd dissonance and a disturbing one, in a conservative land where behavior is constrained in so many other ways.

One Singaporean artist, Boon Sze Yang, has done a series of paintings called “The Mall.” From his website: “Built increasingly beside temples, mosques and churches in land-scarce Singapore (and many other cosmopolitan cities such as New York & London), one might discover a curious convergence of function and form between malls and religious houses.”

Then he goes for the jugular:

“But malls are really soulless temples of consumerism in disguise, a place where we are promised fulfillment and happiness in exchange for our emptiness within. We are mesmerized by grandeur and made to feel inadequate…. Ultimately, malls are really like black holes—they suck you in, and fill their void with our soul.”

I agree. Yet my ten-year-old doesn’t view malls as black holes of false worship. He thinks of those near our Singapore apartment as his backyard.

When I told him about Boon Sze Yang’s paintings, saying they “would look very familiar,” Nick nodded. He likes the familiar. He’s drawn to safety and comfort. Nothing wrong with any of those desires, especially for a boy very far from home. But mixed up with consumer come-ons and the homogeneity of global culture, I say j’accuse!

Just who am I accusing, though? The average Singaporean? Shark-like developers? My own love of comfort? I’m a witness to what I don’t like, but the question of blame is a trickier one.

This post originally appeared in a slightly different form as "I Don't Like Shopping Malls" in "Martha's Singapore Column," a blog where she's tracking her family's adventures during their sabbatical in Asia this spring. You'll find more of her pictures of shopping malls there.

Be Careful When You Say "Exotic"

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 21:02:48 -0500

I know how easy it is to be seduced. I've been in Singapore for three weeks now, and it still conjures all sorts of exotic imagery: heat, jungle, monkeys, pith helmets, temples. There are also the more modern extremes of skyscrapers and food courts—the delights of chili crab and air-conditioned shopping malls in vast underground warrens.

But what I find most exotic here is the altered point of view, one that's not obvious at first glance, because so much of the urban area of Singapore seems like an upscale version of Los Angeles.

Last weekend, my husband, son, and I visited MacRitchie Reservoir, which turns out to be a manicured public park that abuts a nature reserve. I expected something wilder—more exotically jungle-like—and at first was disappointed to see picnickers and pots of bougainvillea.

Once we walked into the nature reserve, however, the jungle took over. And almost as soon as we stepped onto the boardwalk trail around the reservoir, passing a few warning signs ("Don't Feed the Monkeys!"), a troop of macaques hopped from the trees.

My ten-year-old, the young photog, was delighted. The tussling monkeys were no threat, although one tried to grab his leg, until he stomped his foot. "Get away, monkeys! I don't have food!"

I rushed off, feeling just a frisson of fear—exotic, yes?

Later, as we looped back through the jungle, giant trees reached to the threatening clouds above and vines swished down; colorful butterflies and dragonflies fluttered.

Yet, we also saw lots of joggers, out for a Sunday afternoon turn—my first clue that what's really exotic here is not the conventional tropical flora and fauna, but a jungle where white-collar workers go running on the weekends.

Second clue: When we returned by bus to Orchard Road, near our new apartment, the streets were packed. On a Sunday, many ethnicities, races, and social classes mixed on their day off—and, yes, there are firm distinctions between who does what in Singapore—who picks up the trash in the gardens and who sits in cafes with iPads and iPhones—but all are drawn by the glamorous shopping malls.

This Sunday, there were colorful Muslim headscarfs, saris, shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops. Exotic—yes?

"Sunday on Orchard Road in Singapore" © Martha Nichols

Then there were the middle-class Singaporeans dressed in designer clothing. Young Chinese, Indian, or Eurasian women in lacey dresses tottered past Zara and Miu Miu and Gucci and all the other upscale stores in platform heels.

But despite the constant parade of Singaporeans wearing clothes from these shops, every beautiful person in the high-gloss store ads is white.

At the Marks & Spencer near our apartment, a long billboard depicts a line of models decked in come-hither mode, male and female, but each more white and Western than the last.

There's not one Asian face to be seen in these ads. At first, this seemed strange, until I realized an Asian face isn't exotic here. It's the ghostly whites with their pale hair and jewel-like blue eyes that are strange, seductive yet unattainable, a beautiful ideal akin to an exotic bird.

This altered view really struck home a few days ago, when my son and I happened upon a gaggle of blonde white models outside Ion Orchard, one of the big shopping-mall complexes. They appeared to be resting between photo shoots. But one posed for several locals, who were taking snapshots of her unsmiling face with their iPhones.

I've been here long enough that her pale gold hair looked unreal. As did her blanched skin, especially with the tight black sheath she wore. She raised her chin, letting the commoners observe her glacial presence.

I almost laughed, thinking of the picture I'd taken of my husband and son photographing the monkeys. Yet, she seemed far more exotic than marauding macaques or jungle trees.

I wish I'd had my own iPhone camera at the ready. On Orchard Road, I could have captured my first unicorn.

The photos from MacRitchie Reservoir were taken by Martha Nichols and her son.

• • •

This post originally appeared in a slightly different form as "Unicorns in Singapore" in "Martha's Singapore Column," a blog where she's tracking her family's adventures during their sabbatical in Asia this spring.

Come follow her there...at least virtually!

The Trouble with Affluent Kids

Sun, 5 Feb 2012 19:02:01 -0500

A few mornings ago, here's what I read over breakfast in the local paper:

[C]ompared to the older generation..., young adults would rather stick to something that they are familiar with and can handle than take up new challenges. They also lack the tenacity to weather tough times—such as when they are unhappy at work—and will quickly look for greener pastures.

This criticism may sound familiar to American parents, we overprotective wimps who are supposedly raising a nation of passive, shallow, fraidy cats. The thing is, I was reading this piece in the Straits Times. My family has moved to Singapore for the spring, and I'm still culture-shocked enough to wonder whether they do things that differently here—or not.

"Gucci by Day" (near Orchard Road in Singapore) © Martha Nichols

In "The Young Singaporean Adult" by Ng Kai Ling and Stacy Chia, the illustration of a silhouetted young man is tagged with these labels: "risk averse," "easily discouraged," "in a comfort zone," "doesn't think outside the box." The story hook is a recent cautionary speech that Education Minister Heng Swee Keat gave to students at the Singapore Management University, based on "feedback" he'd received from a group of CEOs.

In the article, other experts explain that setbacks are good for the entrepreneurial soul; surviving adversity makes young workers "hungry" (a term that's used repeatedly in this article). But Singaporean youths have only experienced the benefits of a strong economy, the argument goes; most have never had to struggle to make ends meet.

Americans, meanwhile, "learn to make decisions for themselves and take charge of their lives at a younger age," according to one HR director. He also claims that Singaporean parents "tend to support their children emotionally and financially even after they have graduated."

The irony is obvious. Trend stories about kids and parents—and what parents are endlessly doing wrong—are always parochial, embedded in a view of everyday life that's anecdotal and prone to ethnic stereotypes. This story fascinates me precisely because it implies that well-to-do Singaporean parents hover as much as their Western counterparts.

Yet, after observing my ten-year-old son in Singapore this past week, it also makes me wonder if I'm messing up.

It's the conundrum of raising affluent children. That HR director is comparing Singaporeans to Indian and Chinese students, although I'd say this has more to do with economic status than culture—not to mention basic personality.

In Singapore, even in the most westernized of districts, my Asian adoptee is clearly American. Physically, he may blend in; but he runs down the streets and says exactly what he wants, no matter how much we shush him. At lunch yesterday, we joked about this with one of my husband's Chinese colleagues, who wryly observed, "He acts in charge."

So my child already has the entitled manner of a CEO. Except that ten-year-olds are not meant to be CEOs—yet. And I wonder if our own American affluence is wreaking havoc with his work ethic, with his ability to focus on true rewards rather than the instant gratification of glitzy baubles. In those ways, maybe he's just like affluent Singaporean children.

For a kid who loves to shop, the glitz is tantalizingly on display in the wealthier areas of Singapore like Orchard Road, a many-block sprawl of luxe malls that feature everything from Gucci to Salvatore Ferragamo to Starbucks. On a recent Saturday night, crowds a hundred thick, mostly youthful and many in sleek designer clothes—glittery black sheaths and stiletto heels, leopard-skin patterned platforms and mini skirts—jostled in the tropical night.

My son is drawn to this Times Square brilliance mixed with cleanliness and order. He says he wants to retire here—or at least to this Orchard Road version of Singapore. My husband laughs, saying, "Retire? You haven't even worked yet." My son grins—I know that, Dad—but I feel a sinking in my lefty soul.

Every day, I tell him no: No, you can't have your own cell phone. No, you can't eat more candy. No, you can't buy another app for the iPad. It's no no no in this consumer gallery of delights, yet the fact is, we aren't forced to say no by financial circumstances. My husband and I have our own iPhones and computers, and our son watches what we do.

Yesterday, we took a quick subway hop to Little India, a district that's far more colorful and much less swank. Our son didn't like it. He was whiny, and I felt annoyed, quick to think of him as spoiled, pondering those same labels—"risk averse," "in a comfort zone"—until I realized they apply to me, too.

I like the ease of air conditioning, of water I can drink from the tap. More important, I'm slow to adjust to new places, as is my son. We aren't related by blood, but this coincidence of personality sometimes feels profound.

Of course I'm a guilty American mom, susceptible to stern advice. I'm tempted, so very tempted, to buy into this bootstrapping rhetoric. But I also think children become who they are regardless. And for my son, being an adoptee likely fuels his native caution. "Risk averse" takes on new meaning when it's framed without the baggage of business ideology. He's always thinking and processing what he sees, creating the world for himself.

That's why I'm caught between indulgence of his fierce little spirit and tough love. I want him to understand the value of money. I want him to be ambitious and disciplined. Yet, I can't imagine flinging a well-loved child into the cruel world as a learning experience.

At least he won't see me go hog wild at Prada. Soon I'll be dragging him to the nature preserve here, to a temple or two. He's already watched me type away at the old laptop we share, as I'm doing now in the early hours while he sleeps. He often wants to write his own story—and in my book, the impulse to write makes him rich beyond measure.

Come follow me at Martha's Singapore Column, where I'll keep logging our adventures for the next few months.

For a more nuanced counterpoint to this Straits Times article, see "In Defense of Young Singaporean Adults."

Note to Caitlin: Joan Didion Is Not Your BFF

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:01:13 -0500

There’s no doubt that Joan Didion is a lightning rod for women writers of my generation. In fact, she’s been a skinny pole defying the whole big thundering sky of publishing and journalism for the past five decades.

With Didion, you love her or you hate her or you have decidedly mixed feelings about her work—as I do. But until I read Caitlin Flanagan’s “The Autumn of Joan Didion” in the January/February 2012 issue of the Atlantic, I wouldn’t have believed anyone could dismiss her in quite this way:

“Ultimately Joan Didion’s crime—artistic and personal—is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old. Her writing got old, her perspective got old, her bag of tricks didn’t work anymore.”

Her personal crime? Even as a punchy magazine exaggeration, this feels ungracious. I have trouble with Flanagan’s article for a host of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with her pan of Blue Nights, Didion’s latest memoir. Flanagan is right about Didion’s stylistic tics, but she is profoundly wrong about the impact of her later work.

Blue Nights is definitely flawed. It is also an amazing document. In it, Didion grapples with her daughter Quintana Roo’s death in 2005, which followed shortly after the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne. (Dunne’s passing is the subject of her previous 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking.)

Memories of Quintana float in and out of Blue Nights, like lost petals from the leis and gardenias Didion loves. This is not a hard look at how Didion may have failed the troubled Quintana as a parent—Quintana was adopted, which adds another layer—or what went wrong regardless. There's no resolution or simple answer or even much intriguing dirt.

Perhaps that’s a crime for those who want answers. But for me, the lack of resolution feels true. Blue Nights is an accounting of all that matters and all that doesn’t, and how much, in the end, everything gets mixed up. And it is a look at subjects like mortality and one’s own weakness that have never been palatable to American audiences.

Three-quarters into this short book, Didion finally admits that she turned 75 on her last birthday (in 2009, at the time of writing). She adds:

“Also notice…how long it took me to tell you that one salient fact, how long it took me to address the subject as it were. Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.”

Oh, yes. Flanagan’s take on the slow “disaster” of Didion’s career since The White Album makes these subjects now seem more taboo than ever.

Flanagan wants to have it both ways, of course. She acknowledges how much reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem changed her life. At 14, she even met Didion at a dinner party, when her father was chairman of the U.C. Berkeley English Department. At the time, Didion’s star was on the rise. Flanagan describes, via her father, the “madhouse” crush of fans eager to get into the lecture at which Didion presented “Why I Write.”

Few would deny that Didion was and is an odd duck. At that dinner party in the Flanagan home, young Caitlin’s mother sent her out to talk to the painfully shy Joan, who had worn a Chanel suit to a mid-‘70s Berkeley faculty event.

Such anecdotes are entertaining, and if Flanagan had confined her piece to a personal exploration of how Didion has influenced her, I would have enjoyed it. However, she also mixes in far too many sweeping statements like "to really love Joan Didion...you have to be female." Or:

“Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair.”

Flanagan and I are contemporaries, and we both grew up in the Bay Area—but her “us” does not apply to me. Hunter Thompson was my Hunter Thompson. I liked Didion, too, but to reduce Slouching Towards Bethlehem to “flowers in our hair” is just as absurd as reducing Thompson’s work to pig-fuckers and endless drug adventures.

Such gender essentialism has never endeared Flanagan to feminists like me. Lately, most of her articles in the Atlantic seem to be flogging her obsession with the special sensibilities of adolescent girls, no doubt related to her new book Girl Land. Here’s how she applies her mono-focus to Didion:

“Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has.”

Maybe yes, especially in her lighter essays of the ‘60s. But Didion’s genius extends to more than girlishness or her ability to describe designer clothes and curtains. Some of my favorite works by her, beyond The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, are the reviews she’s written in the past decade for the New York Review of Books.

Yet Flanagan writes these off, calling the older, fiercely intellectual Didion “another tired espouser of the most doctrinaire New York Review of Books political opinions.”

She then trains her sights on Blue Nights, claiming that, in chronicling the indignities of aging, Didion complains about her inability to wear a pair of high-heeled red sandals “in the same tone” as the death of Quintana.

This so thoroughly misreads Didion’s use of the red sandals that it’s almost laughable—and it would be, if Flanagan didn’t reflect the current zeitgeist in such a disturbing way.

Didion mentions those lost shoes not because she cares as much about them as her daughter—come on!—but because at the end of this memoir about facing death, she’s circling around all sorts of details receding from her grasp, including words and place names and memories. Didion writes that Quintana once told her, “Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it”—another line Didion repeats in a poetic dance with nothingness.

The last line of Blue Nights refers to her daughter, preceded by telegraphic lines that are poetry, including:

“I myself placed her ashes in the wall.

"I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.

"I know what it is I am now experiencing.

"I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.

"The fear is not for what is lost.

"What is lost is already in the wall.”

We all make personal connections to the artists and pop figures who sparked us when we were young. But for Flanagan, all that seems to matter is retaining the fey Joan of her youth, in her cute little ballet flats and big sunglasses.

For me, Didion observes her own disintegration, yet redeems it, too, through the act of writing. The only “crime” here is the assumption by Flanagan and the larger culture that the youthful desire to live forever trumps the inevitable disruption of loss.

Teenagers may believe the intensity of adolescence is everything. But having just returned from the funeral of my aunt, I will tell you it is not. I will also tell you that I want to face my own mortality rather than ignoring it, and even if Didion has never been my BFF, her latest books are my good companions.