Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Poetry • Spring 2017
He is Blot
it is a name
and down the street
he walks with
his name to a
house of timber
frame with a door
of mirrored glass
that he raps.
The quavering pane
buzzes Blot’s reflected
edges turning
temporarily to mud.
Highest definition
of self then resurrected
an aquiline vision comes
twinkling out of the
stiff staring well at
the front of the house
by the corded bell
he didn’t notice.
His body is many
predated little creatures
he tracks—each
he knows and smiles at
from flight high
over this mirror
his empyrean head
lofts always over
every mirror welling
like quicksilver kettle
holes one after another
sending back Blot
tilting his shades
or Frenching a smoke
or Blot naked
admiring the quilled
vasculature of his
mammalian wings.
The bird of prey
surveying its own
body is the child
Moses fondling rushes
tufting by the bend
awaiting the one
who will take to him
the architect’s own concept
and relish the saw work
the sanding and the
double coat. Blot
craves only an eye
a Cyclops all head
and no body. The
mirror swings suddenly
inward and the
frame blinks a black
lid ruptured by
a silver shooting
pit bull gnashing
artifice to spark
Blot hauled like metal
hanging from a bus’s
underside to the curb
and left possumed in
the dark rush of cars
no taller than bolted
hubs inch-near
in passing
Features • Fall 2009
I.
The writer arrives at the Venice Biennale at about 10:15am. This seems quite good by her recent personal standards—these are somewhat loose after three weeks of mojitos in Rome. But it is not good enough for a hard-hitting journalist. She imagines the Arsenale, one of two venues for the Biennale’s International Art Exhibition, swarming with reporters. Probably they have all been up since six. Probably they have fancy voice recorders and notebooks with expensive French paper. Probably they are being paid.
Everything about this undertaking seems very glamorous. But by the time an efficient Apparatchik at the press office has fixed the *Advocate* up with a press badge—she is now *The Harvard Advocate*’s official envoy to the Biennale, to Venice, to all of Europe!—a packet of promotional materials from the sponsors—Enel, Nivea, Illy—and the *Advocate*’s first tote bag of the day, it is 11am. This is horrifying. But even more horrifying is the crowd of journalists. There is none.
The *Advocate* begins to worry. Perhaps this is the wrong place. Perhaps they have squirreled the press office away next to some adjunct show or collateral event that nobody goes to. However, twenty minutes of aimless wandering through the galleries reveals that the giant warehouse is indeed the Arsenale. The Italian Pavilion, largest of the national shows, is here. So are the Chinese and Turkish and Chilean pavilions. So are individual installations by big-name artists like Pae White and William Forsythe. So is a good chunk of the main international show—Fare Mondi, “Making Worlds.”
Slowly, it dawns: nobody is here yet. Probably all the journalists are hobnobbing at elaborate breakfast meetings. Probably they are sleeping off hangovers so colossal and expensive that the Advocate’s morning troubles seem juvenile by comparison.
Finally, around 11:45am, the Beautiful People start to filter in. The *Advocate* recognizes art critics, academics, some curators. The center of press activity appears to be a temporary outdoor café wedged between the Arsenale and a canal. The *Advocate* stands in line for ten minutes to buy a four-euro can of Pepsi—official soda of the Biennale—finds a seat at one of the tasteful molded-polyurethane tables, and surveys the scene. As one might expect, she sees a lot of black. As one might not, she sees many tote bags of varying size, shape, color, strap length, and fabric quality. Glasses are common. So are blazers. So are the dropped-crotch 80s-style bottoms that the Spanish call pantalones cagados, or “shit-pants.”
The Apparatchiks, who at 11am were huddled in purposeless clumps around the building, have swung into action. They are answering questions, giving directions, requesting contact information. If the Beautiful People dress like upscale vacationers, the Apparatchiks make an effort to look like professionals. Many are wearing (black) suits. They are young. They are bright. They are well turned-out. They cannot afford to be otherwise. The Biennale pays them to be pleasant, and they need the work.
Months from now, in late September, the international art press will circulate a report that 110 Apparatchiks have gone on strike to protest poor working conditions at the Biennale. The strikers will claim that the Biennale manages them badly, offering them only three-day employment contracts and withholding overtime pay. Furthermore, they will allege, they have been laboring under these conditions since the show began.
But there is not a glimmer of conflict, present or future, on anyone’s bright face right now. These three preview days are more important than all the rest of the Biennale, because the visitors are the pillars of the art world. Curators, journalists, academics, dealers, and collectors have assembled, and the valiant Apparatchiks stand ready to shepherd them along. “Making Worlds” stretches before them all. It will dictate tastes and change reputations.
II.
This Biennale is the art world’s crown jewel, an event so spectacularly large, so tremendously expensive, so irrationally important that Venice employs a permanent squadron of bureaucrats whose sole job is to plan it; that participating nations bankrupt their arts endowments in order to stage their contributions; that a full-priced admission to the two main venues—forget the dozens of peripheral shows that dot the city—costs 18 euro per person; that the royalty of the art world brave the heights of the mosquito and tourist seasons just to pay it a visit.
What makes the show such a huge draw? Simply put, it’s very old and very well established. When the first Biennale opened in 1895, it was the only semiannual art show in Europe. Imagined as an event to honor the silver anniversary of Italy’s King Umberto and Queen Margherita of Savoy, it wound up attracting over 200,000 people to Venice’s public gardens for a mostly tame selection—barring one “scandalous” painting of female nudes—of mostly Italian art.
Other nations began building pavilions in the garden starting in 1907. In the 1930s came the first special exhibitions to promote Italian art abroad. And, of course, the Apparatus of the Biennale was differentiating, acquiring layers of bureaucracy—Boards, Secretaries, Presidents, Special Commissions and Groups—tasked with testing the waters and currents of the European art world, keeping the show inoffensive, middlebrow, and a good couple of decades behind the artistic vanguard. Most of the art came from the 19th century until well into the 20th.
Thus was the good name of the city was preserved until 1948, when a tiny revolution, a youthful rebellion, took place within the Apparatus. A new General Secretary, Roberto Pallucchini, was in charge. The dust from the Second World War was settling. Suddenly, the organization realized it had just about missed a crucial half-century of developments in Western art. Pallucchini spent the next five shows scrambling to compile the Greatest Hits of the modernist splinter groups whose influence the Apparatus had been battling. And, just like that, the work of Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, and Piet Mondrian went up.
By the start of the 60s, the Apparatus had caught its audience up to where the rest of the art world was. Somewhere around this time, things shifted. The Biennale didn’t just show art anymore, some prestigious, some not; it became itself a thing of prestige. It became a tastemaker. This development has made the show much sexier, and more social, and more fashionable. But it has also overshadowed the show’s original purpose, which was to give a platform to artists.
A number of unattractive intellectual tendencies have accompanied this shift in focus. The Biennale’s curators have gained power. Supplementary critical texts have become as important to the exhibition as the art. Show concepts are abstract but not illuminating, and depend more and more on art theory. A layperson may enjoy individual works of art at every Biennale, but he or she is unlikely to find the International Show as a whole an edifying experience.
1964: Robert Rauschenberg, a central figure in the development of Pop Art, wins the Foreign Artist prize, earning the Biennale a new reputation as a pioneering show. 1968: Demonstrators protest the commercialization of art; many Biennale artists join the protestors, upending or covering their works in solidarity. 1972: The era of overarching thematics begins with the “Work and Behavior” Biennale. 1980: An entire hall is dedicated to “Postmodernism: la via novissima.” 1982: The big theme is “Art as Art.” 1984: “Art and the Arts.” 1988: “The Place of the Artist.” 1990: The controversial “Aperto” section of the Biennale is closed temporarily after the formaldehyde suspension leaks from one of Damien Hirst’s Plexiglas-enclosed cow carcasses. 1995: “Identity and Alterity.” 1999: “dAPERTutto.” 2001: The critic Harald Szeemann builds an entire show around a single work by Joseph Beuys. 2003: The critic Francesco Bonami breaks up his exhibition into a bunch of little sub-exhibitions with titles like “Clandestine” and “The Zone.” Reviews are mostly negative. 2007: The critic and academic Robert Storr’s Biennale is overtly political, offering a critique of American foreign and domestic policy. Reviews are mostly negative. 2009: Critic and academic Daniel Birnbaum (more on him later) gives us “Making Worlds.” Reviews are mostly negative.
Theme. Thematics. Thematicization.
Art as Art. Art and the Artist. The Place of the Artist. Where is the Artist? Art without Artists.
Text, context, subtext, pretext.
The Zone. The Zone. The Zone.
III.
There is an apocryphal story that, when someone asked Rodin whether he worked from his heart or his head, the sculptor replied, “I work from my balls.” There is a type of curator who also works from his (her?) balls.
But this sort of curator seems to have fallen out of favor recently, at least at the Biennale. Here, the critic-academics have been in charge for quite a while. Biennale curators emeriti Szeeman and Bonami both neatly fit the mold. Daniel Birnbaum—who has a rectorship at the Staedelschule at Frankfurt-am-Main, plus a regular gig writing scholarly essays for Artforum—does, too.
Birnbaum is not the type of curator who works from his balls. Birnbaum is the exact opposite of this type. He and the other critic-academic-curators seem to care very little about instincts, or about pleasure, whether aesthetic or otherwise. (Though Birnbaum does have an awfully cute smile, a smile the publicity people have plastered all over the Biennale’s promotional materials.) The critic-academics do appear to care about theory—a lot—and about curating an argument. Like past Biennale curators, Birnbaum has built “Making Worlds” around a theme that is both complex and vague. He has slotted into this theme some art by midcareer artists, and has padded out the show with abstruse critical statements.
The critical texts that accompany an exhibition like the Biennale lay everything out for the viewer (more or less) explicitly. And so they become the show’s default reading, the one critics use to judge its success or failure. As a consequence, the artist says less—or is forced to say less, or gets away with saying less—than he did in the days when curators had a lighter touch.
In the catalog essay, Birnbaum gives his personal vision for the show at length:
The innumerable translations of the phrase ‘making worlds’ is [sic] simply a conceptual starting point […] the impulse to move away from the understanding of this show [the Biennale] as a museum-like presentation of ready-made objects. This is hardly a revolutionary conceit for a biennale today, but we can still place particular emphasis on its character as a site for production and experimentation, and it is my hope that this exhibition will create new spaces for art to unfold beyond the expectations of the dominant institutions and the mechanisms of the art market.
This is all highly ironic. The Biennale is one of “the dominant institutions.” It drives and is driven by values and fluctuations in the art market. Nobody whose work is commercially undesirable shows at the Biennale, and nobody who shows at the Biennale is commercially undesirable.
To read the forgoing statement charitably, Birnbaum wants to show artwork that is in process, or self-constructing, or aware of its own construction. If this is the standard, then many of the works in the show meet it. If the viewer applies other, timeless standards, then only some works make the cut. In the long, thin Corderie that connects the two parts of the Arsenale, the first pieces are strong—and strongly beautiful. First, a Lygia Pape sculpture, a web of golden filaments, lit to a soft radiance; then a roomful of massive, baroque, gilt-frame mirrors, each smashed with a mallet by Michelangelo Pistoletto. Both works are striking; each echoes Birnbaum’s theme. Pape’s work is constantly being realized by the shining light; Pistoletto’s very visibly bears the marks of its own creation.
But then comes a pile-up. There’s a trite, visually unimpressive lightbox show by Paul Chan; Aleksandra Mir’s “viewer-activated” postcards of Venice; free candy and amateurish anti-imperialist protest from Anawana Haloba; a silly, tree-sized projection of a Bonsai by Ceal Floyer.
“Such rich work! It just keeps on giving!” says a woman with an Adam’s apple.
Among other things, Birnbaum’s promises Biennale-goers “points of visual intensity” and “beautiful objects” in his catalog essay. But these are lacking in the show itself. Few of the works “pop.” And rarely does the viewer experience that vertigo one feels in the presence of truly gorgeous, or joyful, or thought-provoking art. The latter are Romantic standards, perhaps, and hopelessly time-bound; but does this make them any less desirable?
Pleasure-seekers must find what they’re looking for elsewhere at the Biennale.
IV.
If you’d like to understand the Biennale, you’d do well to read the social pages. A lot of major art glossies have them now.
The Biennale’s authority is at least as much social as it is cultural. If you are a prominent (or resourceful) critic or dealer or curator or hanger-on, you attend the Biennale’s preview. It’s like a high-end trade convention. You catch up with friends, spy on competitors, party, chat, fuck, drink.
Of course, if you really have pull, you show up before the preview, while the art is still going up. The editors of *Artforum*, the really wealthy collectors, and the major museum heads all pull this trick. Once you’ve reached the highest class-echelons of the art world, the real sign of status is the ability to skip the preview entirely while the lumpen-elite scrap for tote bags at the United Arab Emirates Pavilion.
You can’t take two steps in the Giardini without running into a bespectacled, be-shit-panted Beautiful Person holding a tote bag. After a couple of hours of careful observation, the *Advocate* develops a Theory of Swag to explain the bags’ appearance. Let’s say that, around 3:00, the Dutch pavilion has a lull. Not too many visitors are coming in. So some enterprising staffer decides to crack into the tote bags. He hauls a couple of cardboard boxes’ worth out of storage and begins to distribute them—maybe to press, along with copies of the promotional materials; maybe to all comers. Within half an hour, the bags—emblazoned with the name of the pavilion—start appearing on the shoulders of the first Beautifuls.
Suddenly, there is a rush on the pavilion. By 4:30, half the guests and a handful of Apparatchiks are clutching at Dutch swag, and the staff is getting ready to pack it in for the day, having drawn most of the preview attendees to their show.
As art has commoditized, anything associated with art has done the same. The reception at the Nordic pavilion is, unusually, selling the swag they have on offer. The most popular item—and the most intriguing, and repulsive—is a canvas bag emblazoned with quotes from Sarah Thornton’s recent, totally uncritical pop-sociological study *Seven Days in the Art World*. The bag’s designer has apparently culled from the book all references to sex acts—plus quotes that have the word “fuck” in them—and screen-printed them on the canvas.
The Nordic and Danish joint exhibition is a crowd favorite, at times so packed that it’s difficult to get into one or the other building. The artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have transformed the pavilions into the homes of two fictional collectors. The Nordic Pavilion “belongs” to the mysterious Mr. B, an ethusiast of (often homoerotic) contemporary art. Handsome young actors playing hustlers lounge around on couches and sip cocktails while the Beautifuls view Mr. B’s collection. The show is quite witty, if gimmicky. It pokes fun at collector culture: at mixed motives for buying art, at the eccentricities of personal taste, at the signification of social status in the art world. Elmgreen and Dragset clearly have mixed feelings towards their buyers, with whom they are locked in a symbiotic relationship.
You could look at how popular these two pavilions are and say that the Beautifuls, as a group, have a good sense of humor. And maybe this is true. But isn’t it funny, after all, that their favorite show at the Biennale is all about them?
V.
The *Advocate* is squeezed into line at the Biennale store with a shrink-wrapped copy of the show’s two-volume catalogue when she feels something brush the back of her neck. She ignores it. The something brushes her again. She turns around. Behind her is a toddler with corkscrew curls. The *Advocate* smiles at him as he thwacks her repeatedly and vigorously on the shoulder with his little fist.
“I’m sorry,” says the man holding the toddler. He is a portly Italian with a long, dark ponytail and crinkly eyes. He is not wearing a blazer, round glasses, or shit-pants. In the crook of his other arm, he too is holding a shrink-wrapped catalog.
The *Advocate* likes toddlers. “Don’t worry about it.” The toddler delivers a left hook to the side of her neck.
“Sorry, sorry.” The man smiles apologetically at the *Advocate* and then coos something at the toddler in Italian.
“Sorry!” says his wife, who is big and soft just like he is. All three of them are wearing bright clothes, felts and velvets, newsboy caps and colorful, rubberized tennis shoes. They look like characters from a children’s book.
“It’s okay!” chirps the *Advocate*. The toddler swings wildly at the air.
The sorries and the cooing and the apologetic smiles continue until the *Advocate* and her new friends make it to the front of the line. The Italian-speaking clerk finishes with her last customer and waves the family over.
They begin an involved conversation. The *Advocate*, who knows only rudimentary Italian, makes out the following:
* **Is there any way to get one without paying?* asks the man.
* **I’m sorry*, says the clerk. *We can only offer a discount.*
* **But I have work in the show.*
* We’re selling the catalogs here, not giving them away.*
The *Advocate* loses the train of the conversation for several seconds. Then the Apparatchik trots off. The artist stands at the counter, waiting. He waits for two, three, four minutes. All around him, the dealers and journalists and curators and academics are shopping. They contemplate books, and pencils, and CDs, and t-shirts that say “Art Loves You,” and posters, and magnets, and tote bags—really nice ones—and toys for their kids, and pins, and housewares, and limited edition collectible trinkets—and they do it with the same look of half-glazed sobriety that they use when looking at the art in the 53rd International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. It’s all the same.
The first Apparatchik returns with a second Apparatchik.
* **You might be able to get one through the national pavilion, but here we’re selling them.*
* You can contact the office directly and see if there’s any way to get one. Sorry.*
*T**hat’s all right*, says the artist, and pulls out his wallet. All parties smile apologetically. The artist pays for his catalog and then signals his wife that they ought to go.
VI.
There is something in the world that allows the Beautiful People to press out weaker but more honest voices. Often these voices are the voices of the artists.
She leaves the Biennale, has dinner, and goes to bed.
But, later that night, something causes her to put her day clothes back on, to slip back out of her hotel and into the quiet dark. She is tired, and her calves ache, but she takes a vaporetto to the main island of Venice. She has not done enough, or seen enough, to justify going to bed.
She gets off at the Arsenale—it’s the force of the day’s habits—and starts walking, after a moment’s hesitation, toward St. Mark’s Square. Bands of tourists pass her in both directions. They seem unusually light and graceful, as people on vacation sometimes do: all talking and laughing gracefully, all clutching each other’s arms lightly, all escorts and charges, all dignified.
Seawater washes onto the promenade at points, and the *Advocate* has to pick her way to St. Mark’s more and more carefully. Little puddles become great sloshing mouths of canal water. They get wider and wider until the *Advocate* can barely jump them.
And she comes to St. Mark’s—where the Beautiful People stay; where they drink their Bellinis, at Harry’s Bar and at the bar in the Cipriani Hotel; where, after-hours, they promenade their expensive linen suits and asymmetrical gowns and round horn-rimmed professor glasses and their shit-pants, and their attitude; where they sip espresso and settle deals and laugh clubbily at each other’s jokes—and the entire place is flooded knee-deep.
The water doesn’t seem to be flowing in or flowing out, but standing, standing deep enough to ruin silk Louboutin pumps and Lanvin suits and Wolford tights. Deep enough to strand all the Beautifuls in their expensive St. Mark’s hotel rooms, while the tourists—and the *Advocate*, and the artist from the shop, and his wife and kid, and all the less fortunate—wheel free in the night air.
The stars in the sky shine down on the water to create a second, inverted sky. The *Advocate* catches the next vaporetto back to her hotel and goes to sleep.
Features • Fall 2015
You don’t have to hold my hand. Drift through these streets like a dog, if you want, disheveled and exhausted, or waft in and out of the space like the smell of paprika escaping from a copper pot in some grandmother’s kitchen, the smell following you down these winding blocks. Allow yourself some mental space to imagine anarchists as hordes of gothic figures blowing down avenues, bat-bearing teenagers with gas masks and blood dripping down their fists, but remind yourself that this is, in truth, your right brain’s delusion. If you sit tight and behave, all you’ll encounter is slices of words on walls; age-old cadavers, horses and rusty rifles long swept away by time; and no unyielding dust to accumulate underneath your fingernails (this isn’t an archaeologist's dig). Stick your hands in your pockets, or stuff your armpits with them, but the day is going to get stuffy and hot, and you should be warned about personal slime.
Run give your name to Nick Lloyd; he’ll check it off in his little Moleskine notebook. Nick is from Manchester, England, but he’s lived in Barcelona for over twenty years, leads Civil War tours, and has just published a book about the city’s anarchist geography, so that should reassure you. It’s nine a.m., dawn by Barcelona standards, and you’re standing on Plaça de Catalunya, the large square at the heart of the historic center. Boutiques are slowly opening; tourists are beginning to populate the streets, eager to start their shopping days early. Nick is drinking coffee from a paper cup with a plastic top. It might feel like over-indulging, but do lean back into the comfort of a guide. Immerse yourself in your true tourist self, relishing in the plastic smell of souvenirs and the giddy self-consciousness of taking a selfie with your brand new selfie stick. This is not your city, but you can pretend. Walk with elegance and style. Smile. Nod. Don’t turn your neck around in the leash.
Take a moment, now, to pretend you’re George Orwell. Inhabit his silky, foreign skin. You arrive in the city in December, 1936, wearing your English bourgeois outfit, to fight as a volunteer in the anarchist brigade. Suddenly, you feel yourself engulfed in a new world:
[In the streets] the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. [...] Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers [...] Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers' shops were Anarchist notices [...] solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves.
You think you’re stuck in an idealist’s fantasy. The city has morphed into a red and black dream, the colors of the anarchist trade union, the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), their huge flags hanging from every window. All shops have been collectivized. Rough, working-class clothing is the only accepted form of dress—as you realize, uncomfortably, noting your incongruity. Social hierarchies have been abolished, and all members of society are to behave as perfect equals. Your assessment is easy and natural: The conflict that has been presented to the rest of the world as a duel between democracy and fascism is, in fact, an anarchist revolution.
Now would be a good time to bite your nails. You might choose to answer your mother’s text, check Facebook statuses, upload your selfie, and remind yourself that at least you’re not a Spanish worker in the 1930s. For Spanish workers in the 1930s, anarchism is a sisterhood, a brotherhood. When the state fails to offer workers proper state education, the anarchists set up cultural centers to offer unofficial teaching. When the urban elite backs an unregulated, capital-driven economic system, the CNT takes to the streets to defend workers’ rights. When a consistently brutal police harasses the so-called ‘criminal class,’ anarchists respond by giving rifles to teenagers, turning the streets into a video-game-like maze of paramilitary traps. They write political pamphlets. They open worker cooperatives, vegetarian restaurants, and popular canteens that allow families to put food on the dinner table. A spider web with no concentric pattern, the CNT becomes the invisible tie that binds the working class together and gives each of its 1.5 million members the right to an identity.
Now, I’m going to tell you right away, if at any point you get lost, or feel like throwing up, please let me know, because I’ll want to include that in here. We haven’t come across the smell of raw meat yet, human flesh decomposing in the midday heat with a throng of flies buzzing around as if they were leaking out of bullet holes along with blood and pus, but that’s exactly how the tour starts. On the square, a flock of pigeons erupts into movement, making a racket as they flap their wings. You jump, but Nick forces you into an entirely different time frame: It’s the evening of July 18th, 1936 (five months before Orwell’s arrival), and the smell of gunpowder still pervades the air. On Plaça de Catalunya dead Franco horses and amateur anarchist fighters lie scattered side by side, anonymous. Barcelona is Spain’s only modern, industrial city and today, you discover, it has become a city at war. The anarchists have allied with their visceral enemy, the police; emerged from their hiding places early in the morning to confront the troops that tried to invade the city; stormed the army barracks by the old port; and won. This is General Franco’s first defeat in the history of the Civil War. The Barcelona anarchists have proved their military valor, their Spanish manliness, and their commitment to defend the Republic—for which they still refuse to vote—against a backward, fascist military coup. Lluís Companys, the President of Catalonia, hands over the keys of government to these new “masters of the city and of Catalonia.”
This is absurd, you’ll cry, because anarchists don’t want control. Any authority and hierarchy is a masked form of domination and exploitation! Good point, but perhaps next time you could raise your hand. Throw out your chewing gum, at least. (It’s not necessary for you to show off. This isn’t a competition.) But the anarchists, yes, ultimately chose war over disorganized revolution. They aligned with the united left parties’ Popular Front government, agreeing to share power with bourgeois republicans. Fast-forward to one year later—yes, I see your hand—and that same government, under communist influence, would declare the anarchist movement illegal, subsequently arresting, torturing, and executing any suspected member. Orwell was forced to flee, with his wife, the republicans he had come to fight for.
Have a sip of water, if you were prudent enough to bring some with you. Don’t give in to the temptation of checking your phone. Nick, in his Manchester accent, is your only god. Latch onto him. If you keep your attention focused long enough, until your goggle eyes grow dry and silence drops inside your mouth, coating your teeth and gums like tar, Nick’s words might begin to wriggle their way into the sinewy fibers of your brain. Nick, now, is reading some Orwell passages aloud, showing pictures on his iPad as you walk through tourist-invaded arteries, but you know that if you close your eyes in the midst of the city’s narrow, gothic streets, your feet will stop to moan. Press your palm against the walls and they sweat ice, like medieval stones do. This is where they burned convents, tell yourself. The anarchists looted churches and displayed ancient relics in the open, for everyone to see that bones are just bones and there is nothing holy about putrefaction. On Plaça del Pi they smashed the ornate rose window, turning it into a gaping hole, stinking of darkness.
Nick, in the meantime, is still walking you around like a well-trained herd. A few tokens of history remain engraved in the city’s bones. On Plaça Sant Felip Neri, you visit the remains of an orphanage bombed during the war by Mussolini’s Italy. In the holes left over by the shelling you can imagine fitting the tiny heads of a hundred ghost children, aligning them one after the other. Somewhere else, on a stone bench, Nick shows you a couple of bullet holes from the battle on July 18th, 1936, but there is no commemorative plaque and the only thing that adorns it is some drunkenly scribbled graffiti. Nick mentions the mass graves that are still being unearthed today, and sometimes buried anew in the silent land of Spanish taboos. He doesn’t lead you to the Barcelona Civil War museum, because there is none. On Plaça de Catalunya, the once-glorious communist party HQ, you discover, bedecked with the faces of Lenin and Stalin, is now the city’s largest Apple store.
America!you cry, as if this were your home. You have reached the end of the tour, and in your bones you feel yourself plunging deep into your yearning for memorabilia, a desire to stop, to possess, to master the fear of letting this one day—an entire day!—perish unnoticed. It is useless to fight this primal urge. Open your map, and find La rosa de foc. (This is Barcelona. Of course there’s an anarchist bookstore.) It’s not a dank cave but a small shop where they sell Civil-War-era posters; books with titles such as Guide of Natural Medicine: Natural Treatments; black T-shirts with obscure anarchist slogans; and a documentary called The Fourth World War(whose back cover does not mention when the third one might have taken place). In their window they proudly displayAgainst Democracy, a pamphlet written by the Coordinated Anarchist Groups collective, which presents, right after the introduction, a Photoshopped picture of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty devoured by flames in a post-apocalyptic landscape. It’s hard to know what Orwell would say to this—after all, he didn’t grow up in a civilization of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Coffees—but they do sell his Homage to Catalonia here, in Spanish and Catalan translations.
Present yourself as an American, and the two middle-aged men who work there will love you. Juan has the grumpy attitude of a disillusioned idealist: He’s the let-me-sit-in-my-chair, I’d-rather-stare-at-you-behind-my-desk-than-chit-chat kind of guy. Antonio is skinny and smiles a lot. An intellectual who’s studied sociology, journalism, social anthropology and linguistics, he likes to blabber excitedly about American cinéma d’auteur. (If you nod and smile sufficiently you’ll avoid the Spanish grammar obstacles and your own sixth-art incompetence.) They’re like an old couple, the two of them. You can imagine them rehashing the same arguments: Remember that time when you got us arrested? and I never said that participatory economics would be a sustainable alternative to capitalism, you’re distorting my wordsor You’re always complaining about old people stuck in their ways but you’re getting old yourself, douchebag. I’ll let you figure out who could have said what.
When Juan offers you a copy of a special edition of Solidaridad Obrera (Worker Solidarity), the CNT’s newspaper—and Antonio jokes: “You probably shouldn’t take that on the plane back with you!”—you know they are both eager to share, with an American, their thoughts on American society.
“It’s funny, because the US is really a country of contradictions,” Antonio begins. “You have Chomsky, whom we even sell here, but then you have all those conservatives… And all those people with guns!” he exclaims, his face a mix of dismay and confusion, as if he could never conceive of such a situation in Spain.
Juan, solemnly, nods.
“You also have small demonstrations, with cardboard signs that you hold up like this, in your hand, no? There’ll be a tiny group of people and they’ll just walk around in circles, right?”
Before you can comment on this colorful vision of politics, Juan has resumed talking:
“Here, in Spain, we have huge demonstrations. Thousands of people in the street.” He indicates outside with a wave of the hand. “These streets, here, filled with people. And what’s the purpose?”
He shrugs.
“Well, you’d hope it would have some kind of effect, wouldn’t you? It’s a matter of hope, at least,” you might try to say.
But Juan is gloomy and leans back in his chair.
“Whether here or there, it doesn’t serve any purpose,” he declares.
Antonio intervenes, amused. He points to his friend.
“He’s an anarchistwithouthope,” he says, a large smile on his face.
Exit the bookstore with the newspaper in your backpack. Still drunk on revolutionary adrenaline, you’d be inclined to look around for hooded aggressors, rifle-bearing adolescents and barricade-building enthusiasts, but on this contemporary Plaça de Catalunya, where people are busy staring into shop windows and letting their ice cream melt all over their hands, instead of anarchists, what you can’t help but notice is the pigeons. You don’t know if George Orwell noticed the pigeons. Were there pigeons at that time? They gather in flocks but they seem always to stray a bit to the side, individually, as if moved by some internal gear-shifting device. They look up at you and cock their heads, asking you a question that they can’t formulate and that they know you couldn’t answer anyway.
“You might want to cover your heads,” Nick had warned you suddenly, earlier in the morning, when you’d reached the edge of the square.
Here’s a new kind of danger, you’d thought. You’d almost crouched for protection. But the only projectiles you could see were on the ground: they formed a carpet of perfectly round, little white mounds of poop.
“This is the shit tree,” Nick explained, in his perfect English accent.
You look up and it’s true: like a dream, the pigeons never went away. It’s disappointing, almost. Shooting off when touched, the pigeons know how to congregate, time after time, stubbornly, like meaty rubber bands. They hide among the branches and wait for you to arrive. Imagine them grinning as you pass underneath. If you’re sufficiently paranoid, you won’t need to look up. You’ll trust that, in Barcelona, even the pigeons have learned the trick: Close one eye, aim, and try to hit your target in the face—barely hopeful but consumed by the creative urge to capture someone, break open a hole, leave a mark.
Features • Fall 2017
I used to wonder what it was like to be my mother, breathless and confused in a maternity ward, three times in a row. To push three defective children out from inside of her; to spend nine months dreaming in intricate detail of the pristine bundle of joy that awaited her, and each time, to wake up to a wriggling pink mass dangling out of a nurse’s arms and think oh no.
My granny likes to tell me that when she came to greet me in the hospital, she peered down into the mess of blankets perched on my mom’s chest and a great big pair of eyes stared back at her. Like Harry Potter’s first impression of Dobby, when he sees those two eyes and nothing else blinking at him through a bush, mine sort of hung there, round and earnest, eclipsing the rest of the infant body she knew must be attached.
This is what she says.
I was an Ohio baby, the first of her grandchildren to be born in the state where her grandparents plopped their Old Country trunks down and never left. So it’s fitting that when she stared down at me and cooed hello, Miss Big Eyes, her subtle midwestern dialect smushed the Miss so it sounded more like Ms., and the g didn’t come out all the way; and thus, I became Ms. Bigeyes.
The Ms. was important to me, because it matched my mom. Well before defects 1, 2, and 3 came along, just as second-wave feminism was coming to a close, my mom made my dad read A Room of One’s Own before he could marry her and kept her last name once he did.
A name that means Ohio like my granny, Ms. like my mama.
And Bigeyes like my dad. My father is a man who disposes of mouse carcasses with studied cool and pats his substantial belly like a good boy puppy and writes all his words in capital letters and compliments other men’s vehicles, but he is also a man who meticulously stitched the head back onto my teddy bear every time her fluffy pink torso went rogue, who gets dizzy after one glass of wine, who stores his toothbrush in a gold lamé dopp kit. And when he took me to see Marley and Me, I turned to look at him during the part where they put Marley down, and his eyes were so clear and shiny and full. And I understood that my eyes are his eyes, just a tiny bit greener, like my mom’s. But that mostly it didn’t matter that he was good at sweating and watching sports; we were Bigeyes and Bigeyes, Jr., and the world looked pretty much the same to us both.
But in the world of this maternity ward hospital room, where cinematic first impressions are the name of the game, I find Granny’s origin story hard to believe. She says the eyes were all she saw, but I’ve seen pictures of baby me. I know what I looked like.
Number One
Number one was my brother, who came out mostly fine, except that his left thigh was covered in a dark, swirly patch of skin. Shaped like an upsidedown Ohio, I used to think, as he massaged gallons of sunscreen into the area, which the doctors said was dangerous if it burnt. What happened was that God pressed too hard with the marker he was using to shade in my brother and colored that leg darker than the rest of my brother’s pale, Ashkenazi skin and was like whoops! My b. But it was chill. This defect wasn’t so bad. The nurse probably didn’t even notice right away; only my mom did.
People didn’t seem to notice it much, either, as he grew up. A leg is just an extremity, after all. I thought he looked fine, was in the clear, until he hit high school.
Meredith tells me that her sister, Lauren, who is in my older brother’s grade, has a crush on his friend, Bobby, and that another one of her sister’s friends is interested in another one of my brother’s friends, but that neither her sister nor her sister’s friends are much interested in my brother himself. According to Lauren, his nose is the dealbreaker. “It’s too big,” she says. “Lauren says that you guys have the same nose, actually, but you carry it better. She thinks he might grow into his, though.”
It’s a lot to process, because she talks fast and I think I am supposed to thank her and there are so many names and degrees of separation, but also because this nose stuff is all new to me. I understand that some noses look different than others, because when I stare in the mirror and push my nostrils up I look a lot like my first grade teacher, which is fun. But the “carrying it well” and “growing into it” thing; the idea of the bad nose/good nose dichotomy–this was not on my radar. I had no idea! Lucky for me that I have friends like Meredith to set me straight.
Further inquiry leads me to the phenomenon of the Jewish nose, which, Meredith again clarifies, I have but not as bad as my brother. Phew. I thought Jewish was just a religion, but it’s kind of cool that we have this genetic thing that we all share. I wish the Jewish nose looked more like Meredith’s, though, so that her sister wouldn’t think my brother was ugly.
I learn later that there are other genetic things about being Jewish, like owning all the money in the world and controlling the entertainment industry. Fascinating. What about people who convert? Do they get a new nose and money when they agree to wear a yarmulke? Meredith does not know the answer to this question.
I never met my grandpa, but based on pictures, I think that this nose that my brother and I share came from him. Apparently, he was obsessed with the Holocaust. In a freakish way. I wonder how he felt about the face-measurement tool the Nazis used. If your nose is too big you’re a dirty dirty Jew and it doesn’t matter that your family converted to Christianity in 1298. His Hitler books fill up four entire rows in our study, but not one bears any trace of underlining, notes, or highlights. When he flipped through these pages half a century ago, was he angry? Resigned? Did he wish his features were just a little less prominent, so that just this once, he could blend in? Or did he feel blazing pride, marked by God himself as a boy with a big fat nose?
Number Two
After my brother, there was me, Bigeyed and 80s-feminist-independent, but the defect crept north north north and plopped down smack in the center of my face. A giant red balloon growing on top of my mouth, puffed full of air but made out of lip, big enough to be a third eye. God was putting the finishing touches on my face when an angel or like wandering soul came by and bumped God’s elbow and God was like NIGEL dude we talked about this you really need to get control of yourself but there I was and there God was and there Nigel was and there my mom was with defective child number two. I’m sure the nurse noticed right away, this time. It is not a thing you can easily miss. I wonder if she gasped when she inspected my face. I wonder if my mom had to nudge my dad to smile weakly instead of the confused sort of grimace he had accidentally adopted. I wonder if my granny did her usual cough and politely said hello, Ms. Bigeyes so that everyone would stop feeling so weird about my face.
I know my lip was disgusting, objectively, because children tell the truth, and before my preschool peers learned that it is bad to point at someone’s face and say “what’s wrong with your lip?” they did exactly that, and after I explained it to the best of my primitive communication skills, they usually stared blankly for a while and then said “well, it’s disgusting,” and wandered off.
The interesting thing about this response is that physical and moral disgust are a two-way street. You see something immoral and you feel disgusted, but also sometimes you see something disgusting and then your brain interprets that as immorality. This is a real psychological thing that I do not know the official name of but is definitely a thing. Let’s call it Sins of the Ew.
Armed with the empirical evidence of my youth, then, I have concluded that had I been born four hundred years earlier, The Puritans would have thought I was a witch. They would see my face and consider it a Sin of the Ew and say TO THE COURT! and then I would get to give a long and dramatic woe is me monologue from the witness stand in my cute Puritan bonnet and everyone would be emotional and the whole town would be torn into pro- and anti-Eliya factions and riots would break out, but due to the fact that I am also left-handed and Jewish and do theatre, three historically wicked characteristics, the consensus would eventually be that I am in the Definitely Satanic camp, and I might end up burning at the stake but gosh darnit if they wouldn’t write my name in their diaries and court records and then hundreds of years later all the historians would be like wow who is this Eliya person she seems like a Big Fucking Deal.
I wonder what would have happened if granny had been honest with all of us when she took a gander at her first ohio grandchild. If she had said something like hello, Ms. Biglip. Maybe we all would have been cool with how my face looked, and I wouldn’t have minded in kindergarten when Rose said I was a dumb girl with a big fat lip and one person giggled and the name stuck. Maybe when she called hey, Big Fat Lip Girl across the playground, I wouldn’t have wanted to keep digging in the sandbox until the bottom fell out. Maybe when Mrs. Hiller heard what Rose was calling me, she wouldn’t have made Rose apologize in front of everyone, and I wouldn’t have stared around with my eyes bursting out of my head, petrified that this public proceeding would only make the name more popular.
In another world, I would’ve smiled and thought that my big fat lip was just like my grandpa’s big fat nose, and that would have been that.
The year I turn fifteen, a Buzzfeed quiz tells me that when a boy stares at your lips, it means he wants to kiss them. I am distrustful of this advice. Clearly whoever wrote this has a symmetrical face. And no witchy inclinations whatsoever. But a few weeks later, a boy is indeed staring at my lips. It makes me uncomfortable, at first, because I am used to people staring at my mouth and I know what it means. But he looks sort of happy when he stares. So I am thinking maybe Buzzfeed was right.
And then a year after that, I am standing in my living room with a lot of adults who have run out of things to say, and a very nice lady tries to make small talk by pointing to a picture on the mantel. What an adorable baby you must have been! she says. And I realize I am no longer Big Fat Lip Girl at all, because all of my baby pictures feature a prominent lip pillow, and I suppose that if the baby in this picture does not have a lip pillow and this lady still thinks it is a picture of me, it must mean that my big fat lip has shrunk beyond obvious notice.
But then I realize that this also means I must respond to her comment, I must correct her in front of everyone, and I feel angry. I wish I had my lip pillow back, I wish for burning at the stake or even Mrs. Hiller in front of the kindergarten class; I wish for anything that would prevent this moment. Can’t she tell that that baby is so obviously not me? Its mouth is medium and its nose is medium and its eyes are medium. I do not want to tell her who is in the picture. I do not want to tell her what happened.
Number Three
Number three was my sister. God was hungover and trying to catch the Sunday game but the remote wouldn’t work and he was also in a big fight with Moses and really he was just so distracted and stressed he would later tell someone, really wasn’t paying attention and he messed my sister up, he messed her up from the inside out in a horrible way. God didn’t say anything this time when he realized what he’d done. He felt bad. Really really bad.
She was born with perfect medium mouth and medium nose. Her name means beautiful in Hebrew and in English. She was picture perfect. Except that her eyes were medium, too. They did not focus, they did not fill with much of anything.
The nurse, this time, did not notice anything was wrong when she inspected my sister. I know this for a fact. My mom tells the story of Bella’s birth delicately, like she is dangling a piece of lint near her mouth and if she talks too loud or too fast it will blow away. But there is a flash of pride when she comes to the part about the nurse, a triumphant maternal flare of the nostrils. Like when Miss Clavelle turned on the light, my mom said something is not right! with my child and the nurse said no ma’am, it’s a beautiful baby girl and my mom said said SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH MY CHILD, MY CHILD IS NOT BREATHING, GET THE DOCTOR. And she was right, of course. Because my mom always knows everything.
I do not know what my granny said when she saw Bella for the first time. Probably a gentle cough and then nothing at all. Silent like God.
Features • Winter 2015 - Possession
Ah remember walkin along Princes Street wi Spud, we both hate walkin along that hideous street, deadened by tourists and shoppers, the twin curses ay modern capitalism.
–Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres.
–Pythagoras
Peacock Princess
The dancers hop around the stage, dressed in polyester costumes, accompanied by the music of electronic lutes. The women are uniformly attractive in their false eyelashes and youth. Most of the men look mediocre, but two tall chiseled fellows keep pushing their way to the front of the ensemble, aware that they’re the stars of the display.
Now the dancers flit their way backstage for a quick change. Soon they’re back, some in flower cuffs that radiate petals from their necks, others in imitations of Miao, Hani, or Dai ethnic dress, beaded, tasseled and zipped up. It’s a production of “The Peacock Princess,” a Dai folk tale that parallels “Swan Lake,” in the largest indoor auditorium in the town of Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province.
The audience is overwhelmingly Han Chinese, and most of them are tourists. The town follows an official demographic policy of “three-three-three”: one-third Dai, one-third Han, and one-third other minorities. The province is known for having 25 of the People’s Republic of China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups. As tourism in China booms, however, more and more Han Chinese flock to so-called minority attractions to watch ensemble performances, tour ethnic villages, and eat and drink.
“Han run pretty much everything,” says a cab driver, a transplant from Jiangsu province. “The local people are too lazy.” After a moment, he reconsiders, “Well, not exactly. The Dai king is still a big shot around here. The government couldn’t build that new airport until he gave the go ahead.”
Indeed, the locals are far from complacent in this business. A tour of a traditional Dai village is often a classic fool’s gold scam. In this case, the gold is silver—a young woman brings a group of tourists into her family’s traditional Dai home, raised on wooden stilts, in an ostensible cultural exchange that ultimately turns into a marketing pitch for fake silver trinkets.
Not that tourists aren’t easily duped. At the end of her spiel, the woman brings out a black velvet-draped table hitherto hidden in a corner. She whips off the cloth to reveal gleaming silver bracelets, belts, cups, and bowls; a king’s ransom in ancient times. The tourists descend on the shiny things like magpies.
The Chinese tourism business is the business of spectacle. The production of “The Peacock Princess” imitates the most lavish of Broadway musicals or Disneyland shows, but without a multi-million dollar budget. It’s no Tchaikovsky ballet. Men in cartoon elephant suits pretend to play fake gourd flutes, while music emanates from speakers. The flute syncing is impressive, but when one player misses a beat, he smiles sheepishly at the front row and continues pretending. The show must go on.
Despite the peacock glitz and glitter of the production, certain movements emerge like jewels from sand. The dancer who plays the Peacock Princess is a slender, sickle-backed young woman. Her white dress billows from her body as she arcs around her prince in uncertain pirouettes. She circles toward him; their fingers nearly touch.
Bread Loaf Bus
A ubiquitous form of transportation in China, next to the classic motor scooter, is the bread loaf bus. Named for their shape, the vehicles are precariously top-heavy and so often tip over that their sale has been outlawed. Many buses, however, are still in service as tour vehicles. Prized for their large carrying capacity, the buses zoom cheerfully down mountain roads. I could swear I’ve seen their wheels leave the ground, but the passengers inside usually provide a heavy enough ballast against catastrophe.
Inside the bus, the tour guide, if he is a good one, is a combination of travel agent, marketing representative, and comedian. Our guide, the son of a Han father and Dai mother, quips trivia about the local culture. I wonder if he ever gets tired of repeating the same stories day after day, but he seems animated, if rehearsed. He’s a thin man with crooked teeth. When he walks down the bus to collect our ticket fares, golden rings slip and slide on his bony fingers.
“This is such a good deal,” he tells us. “If you had bought the tickets on your own, it would have cost two times as much.” We take him at his word.
The passengers in the bread loaf bus are a decent representation of the Chinese middle class. An older father tells us proudly that his children, a daughter and a son, are both enrolled in “international” schools in Shanghai. Two friends, women in their early thirties, trade iPhone photos on the WeChat social network. A family with an adult daughter hardly says a word the entire ride. Two families are accompanied by sets of grandparents.
The tickets in question afford entrance to a Dai Water Festival show. According to our guide, the Dai celebrate the New Year (in April by the Gregorian calendar) with a water fight from dawn to dusk. Capitalizing on this novelty, daily New Year’s Water Festivals have sprung up around the city. Before we make it to the show, we make an obligatory stop at a tourist-centered jewelry store, a common but unadvertised itinerary item on Chinese tour trips. For a commission, the tour guide drops his passengers off at a jewelry store in the middle of nowhere for an hour or so and “encourages” them to make purchases.
We eventually make it to the Water Festival, which takes place in a round amphitheater. Middle-aged local women splash water from a shallow circular pool onto giggling visitors, who stand all around the edges. At one point, a fully grown Asian elephant is brought out, flapping its ears at the arcs of sparkling water landing on its back. Like our tour guide, its feelings about all this are unreadable.
The festival is not one for those in search of authenticity, unless they can find it in the faces of the women selling plastic bags of dried coconut and papaya and sugarcane juice, or the peddlers weaving through the crowd, pressing flower and nut shell garlands into hands, for a price. This is the New Year, rehearsed and paid for, but perhaps no different from any other. Soon the water women are parading around the amphitheater, baptizing us with splashes from plastic bowls.
Mechanical Buddha
A gilt Buddha statue, 49 meters high, looms over Xishuangbanna. It’s the showpiece of the Mengle Great Buddhist Monastery, the largest Theravada Buddhist site in China. 300 monks pray at the monastery daily, but today not a one is to be seen. To reach the Buddha, we take 2,000 steps up a small mountain, interspersed with temple halls.
When we reach the temple at the feet of the Buddha, an angry old man bursts out its doors. He curses the tour guide, stuffs his feet into his shoes, and flies back down the mountain. We raise our eyebrows at his apparent irreverence and step over the threshold into the cool temple.
We soon discover the reason for the old man’s rage. A guide leads us clockwise around the temple, depositing us at successive stations like children at a craft fair. At each station, we are asked in solemn tones to buy commemorative candles, statuettes, or bracelets, items which become successively more costly as we rotate along the temple—all the better to reach nirvana. A woman tries to sell us a lotus-shaped candle for 25 yuan. When we don’t take the bait, she lowers the price to 15. We escape her clutches, and the eternal spiral, by stuffing a ten-yuan bill into a donation box.
Escape leads us to an observation deck, high above the city. From here, everything is a miniature kingdom. Bridges and cars are toys, and the river is a distant ribbon. The Buddha presides over a circular plot of land, a wasted area like some Tolkienesque fortress. Officials plan to one day turn it into a park.
As we descend from the deck, we enter into another hall, occupied by a statue of a sitting Buddha. Touring monks from Thailand snap cell phone pictures. Above them, large paintings depicting Siddhartha Gautama’s life encircle the hall. They start from the entrance and end behind the Buddha’s back, like a continuous comic strip.
The paintings are strange. The usual clouds and halos mingle with weird futuristic imaginings, some downright psychedelic. In one painting, the Buddha is flanked on his left by a metallic city full of steel-blue towers. On closer inspection, floating vehicles zoom between the buildings, and in the sky are what look like flying saucers. On his right is a misty, wooded glen: Between two columns of rocks issues a mysterious blue light.
Following the progression of the paintings, I walk behind the statue. There, in the darkness cast by the Buddha’s back, is a wall to ceiling painting of a demon. His eyes bulge from his red face. His tongue lolls, and horns sprout from his veiny head. I step back quickly, but in retrospect, maybe I should have paid more attention. For if the golden Buddha could hide a demon behind his back, there may very well be an accountant inside his belly.
Market Economy
Any good trip requires an inventory of the food consumed. The complimentary breakfast buffet, an industry standard in China, is vast enough to fill any intrepid belly. Staples include steamed buns and noodle bowls, as well as sliced white bread and pastries. Buffet trays of vegetables—bok choy and potatoes fried to an oily sheen —line a banquet table. A pot of bitter Arabica coffee and a kettle of Pu’er tea, both produced in Yunnan, are nods to the local flavor. The backdrop to all this is the main Xishuangbanna hotel, boasting marble floors and a diorama with real Land Rovers.
Another staple is the convenience shop, though not the chain markets familiar in the United States. Although these small shops sell much of the same goods, they are independent, manned by their owners who sit and fan themselves behind the cash register. The shops themselves are often little more than an alcove just off the street. The narrow shelves, cluttered or neat depending on the owner’s inclination, are stocked with items like mango creme Oreos and Pocky. Each has an ice cream freezer, crammed with mung bean popsicles and ice cream cups. In warm Xishuangbanna, the freezers are insulated with a thick cotton blanket to cut refrigeration costs.
The nocturnal sibling to these shops is the Jinghong night market, which winds under the bridge over the Mekong river. Here, anything imaginable is for sale, from electronics to nail decals to long underwear to real tattoos. But we’re really here for the food, which comprises an overwhelming majority of the market. Fruit juice vendors jostle for space with barbeque stands, which will grill anything imaginable: river eel, cuttlefish, fungus, potatoes, and more. The entire scene buzzes under hot fluorescent firefly lights rigged to generators.
If the night market and the convenience shop go hand in hand, then their natural antithesis must be Xishuangbanna’s only Walmart store, at the anchor of a busy intersection. Entering the store, however, the same variety of goods and foodstuffs are found for similar rock-bottom prices. The only major difference seems to be that the store is air-conditioned and the workers are uniformed in Walmart’s trademark blue.
Land Dam
The winding old road from Kunming (the capital of Yunnan province) to Xishuangbanna to the Yunnan Tropical Botanical Garden will be replaced within the year by a new highway, which will cut travel time in half. The bones of the highway are already laid down. They embrace Xishuangbanna like prehistoric ribs.
The electric zing of steel and concrete can be heard for some time when driving on the old road, but the sound is soon lost among the banana trees, which stretch out as far as the eye can see. The trees are not tall; these bananas are a short, fat variety that must be protected against the cold night air. Each banana is individually wrapped—they look like small sleeping bags dangling from the trees.
Not to be outdone, the rubber trees, like bent beggar men, are outfitted with one wooden bowl each, tied to the trunk to catch their precious sap. Hordes of these odd couples, these stout banana trees and slender rubber trees, march over the mountains. Tourists, rubber, and bananas, in their overrunning glory, are the three mighty pillars which hold up the region’s economy.
The mighty Mekong river shoots through Yunnan province before it curves through Laos, Thailand and Cambodia and reaches the South China Sea. An inflatable boat trip down the river reveals the full scope of the highway project. A series of latticed concrete beams hold back the mountains, which have been scooped away to make way for the road. Eventually vegetation will grow between the lattices, but for now they are bald and empty. The red earth of the mountain bulges through the gaps, as if threatening to burst through. River swallows scream at the sky, and farther down the river, the forest is thick as tree moss.
Our boat docks in a tiny bay. The boatman tells us to get off and take a break as he reels in a fishing net, cast earlier that day. We climb some steps to find construction in progress. In a flat clearing, space has been made for a sandy volleyball pit. Above, workers pour gravel into metal chutes, the sound like breaking glass or miniature avalanches. Thick stacks of bamboo are everywhere. Eventually, this clearing will become a riverside resort.
We snap photos and return to the boat. The boatman has finished reeling his net. “Nothing today,” he says. “But once I caught a fish that weighed a hundred pounds.” He casts out the net again. It whirls and wheels out over the water and sinks into the current. We get back on the inflatable boat, the engine sputters to a start, and we head back toward the city.
Earthly Mysteries and Celestial Spheres
Xishuangbanna marks my third trip with a Chinese tour group. The first was a journey through Qingdao in Shandong province, best known for German influences that culminated in the form of Tsingtao beer, and its official designation as China’s Most Livable City.
The second was through Hainan, an island in the southernmost tip of China. We were plied with coconuts and fried tofu, and stuffed to the gills with seafood. Our tour guide tried to con us a couple of times, bringing us to the wrong hotel and several jewelry stores.
In each of these tropical paradise destinations, there is one constant. Red-beaked seagulls migrate every year from Siberia to winter on the temperate coasts. Since 1985, tens of thousands have alighted each winter on Kunming’s Dianchi Lake, where the local people call them “the winter angels.”
Residents and tourists, gather each year at Dianchi to greet these familiar friends. Parents, who remember the first bold flocks, now bring their children. Carts along the lake sell fluffy loaves of French bread for a few cents per bag. The visitors toss pieces of bread into the sky. With steady precision, the gulls swoop and catch. The cool lake, which rivals Lake Ontario in size, shimmers and reflects their enigmatic flight.
How they found their way across the frigid miles to Kunming is a mystery, but generation after generation they come. They must be attuned to the magnetic stars, to the music of the celestial spheres; when they are startled by some invisible sign, they lift from the lake like spirits. They come, and they leave. Where they go once winter ends, no one knows. What remains only is the hope of their return.
2026