Some sights have delayed reaction times. You see something, and it passes you by; you go: “Oh, hey!” and keep right on walking. Two nights later, you sit bolt upright in your bed and something in your mind clicks about that previous sight.
In Bangkok, I saw about five different men with white gauze patches over their left eyes. The first time, I thought: “Ah, what a klutz. He walked into a lamp-post.” The second time, I chuckled… but for some inexplicable reason, nothing in my mind made the connection between the first one-eyed man and the second. The third time and onward, I wondered if there was a secret Muay Thai Fight Club in which the favoured finishing maneuver was an Ong Bak knee to the left eye.
It was only last night, wandering the lantern-lit night market in Luang Prabang, laos, fully 8 days after Bangkok, that I realized that these men had sold their left eyes to the black market organ trade.
Does anyone else find this creepy? It’s pretty thinly veiled… you have random men, between 25 and 65, all impoverished, poorly dressed individuals in tattered sandals or ghetto bikes, each with a neat gauze patch on the same eye. I’m not sure why I did not see it before, and I cannot believe that the explanations for these one eyed jacks that kept me unthinkingly satisfied before were so utterly inadequate. I mean, really. He walked into a lamp-post? Got hit by a soccer ball? Muay Thai Fight Club? Come on, Sean… your IQ is higher than this.
But no. There is a thriving organs trade in South East Asia… Asia in general. The poor sell their organs in the backstreets to organs merchants for some pissant amount of cash. They go to a clinic up behind a pawn shop, their eye or kidney gets excised, and boom.
I’ve read about this in the papers. Whoo.
We took a two day trip down the Mekong, and we were surrounded by primieval jungle rolling up fog-shrouded highlands the entire way. The forests in BC are all made up of tall, straight trees…. in ranks like tin soldiers, disciplined like an army on parade. Not so the jungles here. It looks like something out of Jurassic Park- unruly, entangled masses of vines, roots, branches, and lush vegetation, through which you could not see past more than two metres. The pictures we have don’t do it justice, and neither will I- but it would not have looked out of place if pterodactyls swooped out of the heights, or if a big diplodocus crashed out of the trees and bent its long neck into the river to drink. We didn’t see any dinosaurs, unfortunately, but there were little Laotian villages perched on the cliffs and shores as we went by… little thatched huts on stilts inhabited by men and women in stereotypical rice-farmer conical hats.
Also, I now have an idea of what animals at the zoo feel like.
I was at a Karen village a few days ago… the Karen are a “hill tribe” people in northern Thailand. Our tour group went up there to gawk at them and take photographs as they painstakingly put together colourful scarves and tapestries on looms that they, on average, sold for two dollars. Each would take 3 days to make. 3 DAYS, and sold for 2 dollars.
As I watched the Karen go about their lives, which now revolved around growing rice for self-sustenance and making souvenirs for rich westerners, I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach. For a while, I could not put my finger on it. Then I realized that these Karen were like animals in an enclosure. I could almost imagine our tour guide putting on a safari hat and bellowing in a ringmaster voice: “NOW! Observe the Karen in his natural habitat!”
But of course, the Karen were not. They were in as fabricated an environment as a submarine. They were in their lands, of course. They lived in their own houses, bore their children, grew their rice. But their world is changing, and the one in which they live is one of limbo. They are an impoverished people dangling between assimilation in the big city, which they must move to in order to gain a proper education as the traditional terrace-farming life becomes increasingly unfeasible, and remaining in their little mountain villages, which cannot endure.
So now the Karen live in a situation that balances the old world with the new. They have their lands and their rice and their arts. But they must now commercialize their traditional lifestyles in order to get more money- hence, they must bastardize their arts to sell them to white people, and they must allow foreigners to trek through the jungles and tramp through their villages, “Ooooing” and “Aaaaahing” at their children, dogs, huts, and lives, the way small children murmer upon seeing polar bears or tiger cubs for the first time.
Imagine. The Karen operate with the outside world through Thai liaisons- Thai tour guides. They themselves know little of it. They don’t understand economics, and they don’t understand the west. They don’t know why hordes of sweating foreigners would want to descend upon them, but someone important has decreed that it will happen and so it does. And they are told to go about their daily lives so that these foreigners might observe them, but oh, by the way, would you please sell them some arts and crafts, put up a Pepsi drinks stand at the entrance of your village, and let them take pictures of you? Yes, we know you’re breast-feeding your baby. Look, those people with cameras don’t mind. After all, it’s perfectly natural. Go ahead, smile for them.
What would a gorilla say if he could speak? Stuck in an false environment that approximates his original home but is just alien enough to make him uncomfortable, then asked to behave naturally, as if that were possible, while large numbers of visibly different beings (us) disrupt his life with loud noises and strange behaviour.
How is this different from the Karen?
It made me damned nervous, and I was relieved when I left.
Also. Funny advertisement in Laos: “Drink like a fish for the price of water.” My god, I LAUGHED. It’s the kind of witticism that can only be constructed by someone with a poor command of English. But it’s brilliant.
Congrats to all of you who have graduated…you must have had your ceremonies by now. How did it feel chucking your hats in the air? Must have been surreal, eh? I demand the following:
Those of you who graduated in science: Develop faster-than-light space travel, or cure cancer. Those of you who graduated in economics: Go fuck yourselves. Those of you who graduated in engineering: sharks with laser beams. I will also accept flying aircraft carriers, or a device that allows me to read minds. And my fellow artsies: go out and change the fucking world.
Cheers to all.
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