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Home and the city

I’ve been working my way through Reportage on Crime, an anthology of Nick Joaquin’s true crime stories. One such piece, “The Lodger,” deals with the demographic shift in Manila brought on by the influx of laborers (and their families) from the provinces.

I don’t have the same intimate understanding of Manila as Nick Joaquin does, which probably helps explain my disagreement with his prescribed solution to the worsening city sprawl:

The area should be cleared; the squalor there replaced with multi-story residences, so that Manileños who have fled to the suburbs may be attracted back to the city. What the city badly needs is people with roots in it, people who care about it, people who look on it as home, not a lodging house.
Joaquin, Nick. “The Lodger.” Reportage on Crime: Thirteen horror happenings that hit the headlines, Anvil Publishing, 2017, p. 154 (pp. 139-155).

This diagnoses incoming workers (and therefore, lodgers) as an affliction. But why should they bear full blame when their arrival has essentially been driven by the dearth of opportunity in their home provinces?

What’s baffling is that Joaquin acknowledges this in “Flesh and the Devil,” which comes earlier in the anthology. Writing about the hellish world of sex trafficking and how so many young girls from the provinces seem so willing to enter it, Joaquin writes:

“[T]hey are still willing to risk their bodies, their honor, their very lives on a trip to the city — and what drives them is despair, utter despair. They act on the desperate hope that they can somehow avoid falling into the usual hell and succeed in making for themselves in the city a life less grim than the slow agony in the barrio.
Joaquin, Nick. “Flesh and the Devil.” Reportage on Crime: Thirteen horror happenings that hit the headlines, Anvil Publishing, 2017, pp. 96-97 (pp. 95-103).

He doesn’t extend quite the same sympathy to the lodgers encroaching upon Joaquin’s old Manila. Even Joaquin’s broadening of his lens, immediately after the quoted solution above, doesn’t push far enough. At best, it glosses over the most salient aspects of the problem; at worst, Joaquin misrepresents the issue:

The tides of commerce that have engulfed so much of Quiapo should be diked; more important than more business are more places where people can live within convenient distances to their work.
[…] The projected multi-story tenement in Tondo is very much in the right direction.
Joaquin, Nick. “The Lodger.” Reportage on Crime: Thirteen horror happenings that hit the headlines, Anvil Publishing, 2017, p. 154 (pp. 139-155).

I have two major objections to the above argument.

First, Joaquin’s statement tags the unchecked industrialization of Manila as the problem without acknowledging its critical flipside: the neglect of the provinces. It’s not so much that Manila is being made into too-attractive an option for workers; it’s that Manila has become the only option — the only place for anybody to go for any hope of a reasonable living — and distended and decrepit for it.

While I do agree that any push for urban development/commercialization must come with the infrastructure to sustain that progress, at some point that ceases to be the main issue. We should all be worried when “development” outstrips the systems and structures that should buttress it, yes. But we should also question the hyper-concentration of investment and opportunity that fuels such metastatic growth in the first place.

That brings me to my second point. The remark about the new Tondo tenement assumes accessibility, which is far from a given. Plenty of tenements could be built, but these don’t come with any guarantee of affordability for the lodgers who make up the problem that Joaquin thinks such tenements will solve.

Even assuming, arguendo, that these places’ amenities consist of nothing more than the minimum living standards required by law, there’s “the greed of the propertied” (as Joaquin himself writes) to consider. The law of supply and demand doesn’t quite account for capitalist hunger, nor the regulation-flouting power that helps feed the moneyed classes.

Which brings us back, in a way, to the Point #1 and some common denominators for many of Manila’s lodgers: a poverty of decent, attainable options, never mind comfortable or desirable ones. They might be choking Manila, but they do so in self-defense: the conditions that created the city destroyed better alternatives and possibilities elsewhere.

Someday, when I’m not quite the same crumbling husk as Manila’s many abandoned buildings have become, I might try to expand this into some sort of full-fledged rumination on the economics of urban housing, dormitory life, fleeting encounters with the Bay Area’s homeless, and the gradual corrosions of the relentless urban grind.

For now, I guess I’ll end this with the assertion that rootlessness isn’t exclusive to transplants. Modern cities have no natives — none comfortable inhabiting the role, anyway.

2019-03-01
The Optimal Starbucks Breakfast
Optimization is the millennial affliction. (There was a trenchant Buzzfeed essay a while back that delved into how this impulse drives our generation to burnout.) Since seeing that insight articulated in plain, stark language, I’ve been more conscious of its truth in my own life.

Take today’s breakfast stop at the local Starbucks. I lived through an everyday manifestation of that optimization impulse, and I have to say, it’s more than a little disturbing in retrospect.

But first, some context:
1. I keep a strict budget that covers, among other things, expenses for food and dining out. This has been a bit strained lately.
2. My Starbucks card needed a top-up if I wanted to buy anything with it.
3. I was 2 stars away from another free beverage.
4. There was an ongoing mobile app promotion that granted 5 beverage stars if I bought 5 lunch or bistro food items.
5. I have been tracking my nutrition lately since this tends to affect my mental health.
Somewhere along the process of taking in all this information, my leisurely weekend breakfast morphed into a quest to make the most of my upcoming Starbucks transaction. The goal was simple: walk away from the counter with food and drink in hand, my budget and nutritional goals intact and my Starbucks card sporting as many new beverage stars as possible.

The one big problem? The only remotely appetizing thing in the display case was a turkey ham sandwich — a breakfast item.

(You could say that there was a multitude of bigger problems with the situation, such as:
1. How much I have apparently started caring about a rewards program that is ultimately designed to reward a multinational capitalist bastion with even more of my money
2. How anybody who simply wants to get out of the house and read a bit apparently can’t do so without digging into their wallet
3. How I was getting a coffee at Starbucks, ye old purveyors of over-extracted coffee, of all places
4. How I was drinking coffee at all despite drinking mostly black tea all week and already getting coffee the night before, even when I know damn well what too much caffeine does to my brain
Or how about:
- 0. How I unthinkingly — automatically — started tackling the whole situation like an honest-to-goodness word problem to solve
I’d agree with you on all counts — just not at the moment that counted, since I was too far down the optimization rabbit hole, AKA Problem #0.)

My mind was running through options and charting outcomes all the way to the counter. There was a mozzarella and tomato sandwich that looked slightly less forlorn than all the other lunch food — maybe I could buy that instead? But it used focaccia bread, which I don’t like, and it would definitely have less protein than turkey. Should I try the new cold brew? But mornings demand a hot drink. How much did I need to add to my card? Which drink would be the most economical and the least offensive to my palate?

I walked up to the counter still searching for the best possible solution, never mind the words to actually convey it.

It’s funny when, where, and how you end up re-evaluating what you know of yourself sometimes. (Tsk. You think you know a person — the only one you even have any hope of claiming to know completely — and then you walk out of the house one day and you’re not who you thought you were.)

Introversion and a constant flirtation with misanthropy have always been hallmarks of the image I have of myself. (Don’t ask me why. These might or might not be relics from my teenage turmoil phase.) And yet! And yet, that fraught morning, I was genuinely grateful to be yanked into small talk with an overly chipper barista.

It was decision time. One way or another, the pursuit of the optimal had to end.

I topped up my card, placed my drink order (brewed coffee, or the most inexpensive way to let Starbucks know you really don’t care about the company’s core product), and then there was no escape. Bend the limits of budget, nutrition goals, and palate to get one step closer to extra benefits from the reward program? Grab what I wanted and rue the missed beverage stars and lost time to rack up rewards?

The barista’s expectant smile started dimming. I floundered.

It was ridiculous. So much uncertainty — and not just mine at that point! Baristas do heroic work putting up with indecisive customers every day, let me tell you. So much mental energy and time devoured by an ultimately inconsequential problem.

To hell with it. In what was probably the most toothless, superficial act of defiance I will ever carry out, I smiled and ordered the turkey sandwich.

The next order of business was finding a spot so I could set down my breakfast and chew over (heh) the disturbing little crisis that had played out in my head. I scanned the relatively empty cafe and, horror of horrors, there was an outside table with a good view of the lake; a stool at a shared worktop with better height; comfortable couches that nevertheless would be better suited for bigger parties; and even more options downstairs.

To think that one can escape the chokehold of optimization with a single, forlorn breakfast sandwich is foolishness. But we Sisyphuses must imagine ourselves happy, I suppose, because how else could we persist?
2019-02-23
On “Death of a Red Heroine” by Qiu Xiaolong

I mistook this novel for a murder mystery.

It is that, nominally: Chief Inspector Chen Cao and Detective Yu of the Shanghai Police Bureau spend their time investigating the murder of Guan Hongying, a national model worker found dead in an obscure county canal. Chen and Yu dig for clues, interview witnesses, mull over theories about what might have happened — all the while insisting, to themselves and their superiors, that the case is a simple homicide.

Don’t be fooled. The case isn’t simple, and its resolution is not the point.

Death of a Red Heroine intertwines Chinese politics, culture, and history, and like the detectives, my mistake was taking all of these as window dressing for the criminal investigation. In hindsight, I’ve come to conclude that it’s the other way around: the dense tapestry of 1990s China (or at least, Shanghai) is the real story here, and the mystery serves mostly as a rod from which to hang it.

The difference emerges when looking at what questions the novel poses. Unlike typical crime novels, Death of a Red Heroine doesn’t dwell on how the murder was committed, nor does it focus on how to solve the case. Instead, the main challenge here is how to put the perpetrator behind bars.

I don’t want to spoil anything, so it’s safest to say that, while mostly unrelated, all the government hurdles and resistance that Cao and Yu encounter find a fitting capstone in the perpetrator’s identity. Yet who the perpetrator is ultimately doesn’t matter either: it’s what they represent that counts. By delving into the criminal’s psyche, many crime novels try to interrogate the corruption and moral failures of the human spirit; here, however, Xiaolong sidesteps the individual to place those failings within the heart of society and the institutions that run it.

What we get, then, is a portrait of the murderer not as an embodiment of the rot that can fester within us, but as another cog in the much larger assemblages of oppression that we can (and do) construct.

With all this set in a socialist China lurching into “modern times,” Inspector Cao’s heroism takes on a refreshing specificity. If the crime and the criminal are an exploration of society’s failings, then Cao (and Yu) is an argument for the fundamental decency that persists regardless. In a country busy remaking itself — and wondering constantly about what it can and should be — Inspector Chen Cao, with his “modern” sensibilities and his classical Chinese literature, speaks to the hope of what China can become.

Is that the China that emerges when the novel ends? The novel knows better than to present a definitive answer, but it still tries for a satisfying denouement. Pick up the book — if nothing else, you’ll have a great time figuring out if it succeeds.

2019-01-30
Hugs From Your Grandma: Favorite Tiny Desk Concerts

I’ve been spending my after-work hours browsing NPR’s rich and varied library of Tiny Desk Concerts. There have been many gems, but even in such fantastic company, the winners of last year’s Tiny Desk Contest stand out:

Tank and the Bangas hail from New Orleans, Louisiana, and they play a luminous mix of rock, folk, soul, funk, spoken word, and—as its own members put it—Disney and anime. I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of description that grabs my interest before I even hear a single note.

Luckily, I listened to their Tiny Desk before I read anything about their influences, so I can tell you from experience that they will move you even if you come in knowing absolutely nothing about who they are or what they’re about. That obliviousness vanishes quickly, too, since Tank and the Bangas are the kind of group you just have to know more about.

There’s plenty of material out there, starting with their debut album ThinkTank, released in 2013. Tiny Desk was obviously just another step in what’s already been a long and celebrated journey, and I’m glad that performance put them on my radar. Time to follow these amazing people and see what else they’ve got in store.

While we’re looking to the future, I’d like to join the chorus of voices dreaming about a collaboration with another artist:

Noname comes from Chicago, and like Tank, she’s an accomplished rapper and slam poet. She released her debut album, Telefone, in 2016. Before that, she captured audiences’ attention with her contribution to Chance the Rapper’s “Lost,” from the 2013 mixtape Acid Rap. Her set for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts demonstrates a gentle, enthralling power that reminds you of how much weight music can hold.

About halfway through Noname’s set, she says, “Let’s heal the world through vulnerability.” What a proposition! It illustrates the kind of earnest, soulful intention that runs through both of the Tiny Desk Concerts I’ve linked here.

In a feature from the Louisiana Weekly, Tarriona Ball, the “Tank” of the group’s name, describes the effect they strive to have on their audience:

“You always want to inspire them in some way and let them know we’re growing together.”

They seem to be doing a damn good job of accomplishing that.

2018-04-18
Rapid-Fire Thoughts: 2018 Read Harder Challenge Update

The Book Riot Read Harder Challenge continues. Since my last reading challenge update, I’ve finished:

#2: A book of true crime

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

I came to this title cold (pun unintended but appreciated). The most I knew about the book was that (1) it dealt with a murder of some kind and (2) it’s indisputably Capote’s magnum opus.

Capote begins by tracing the final days of the Clutter family, but I got the sense that the book wasn’t concerned so much with who the Clutters were as it was with what they represented. The Clutters, in death if not in life, came to embody the stability, security, and trust that their murders ripped from the community of Holcomb; Capote’s careful tracing of the crime’s aftermath strikes me as an attempt to probe what else, beyond the simple fact of brutal and unexpected death, constituted the void that the Clutters left behind.

And then, of course, there’s the other question: what kind of people would do such a thing, i.e., murder a family of strangers in cold blood? I knew nothing of the speculation about Capote’s relationship with the perpetrators, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith; I only learned about those theories while entering a new entry for the book in my Goodreads library. Whether he was friends (or more) with the two is irrelevant, I think; either way, Capote’s depiction of the two comes out a sharply observed, uncompromising dive into these murderers’ psyches and the fraught dynamic between them. Ultimately, it didn’t strike me as a sympathetic portrait; pitying, maybe, in some parts, but even then, Hickock and Smith’s grotesque histories—and their equally twisted responses to those histories—coalesce into a firm, if quiet, indictment.

#3: A classic of genre fiction

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

The Boswell, the Watson, the sidekick or companion—whatever you call the role, the detective’s trusty number two plays an indispensable role in the typical mystery novel. In the Sherlock Holmes canon, Dr. John H. Watson is the reader-surrogate: the regular guy (compared to Holmes; Dr. Watson isn’t without remarkable talents) who puzzles over the unfolding mystery alongside us; the figure who brings in the story’s “human” element to complement the cold, stark brilliance of Holmes; and so on.

So what do you do when the story’s designated Boswell is utterly unlikable?

I never read (or even knew of) the Hercule Poirot books growing up, so my sense of the mystery novel is shaped almost exclusively by the Holmes canon. Going into The Mysterious Affair at Styles, then, I couldn’t help viewing the story through Conan Doyle-tinted glasses. The story itself struck me as having some similarities to Hound of the Baskervilles, both in tone and in the surface details (Hastings off to visit someone in the country, a mystery arising, the detective factoring into the resolution somewhat unexpectedly, etc.). So I couldn’t help comparing Watson’s conduct in that story with Captain Hastings’.

Suffice it to say that Captain Hastings doesn’t fare very well in the comparison. He’s a much coarser character than Watson, and though both have their moments of feeling (wrongly) arrogant about their opinions on the case at hand, Hastings’ petulance and smugness come bundled with a mean streak that makes him nowhere near as endearing as Watson.

My opinion on Hastings aside, there’s something else that makes him a less desirable reader-surrogate than Dr. Watson: Captain Hastings is far less integral to the mystery than Watson was. He feels distinctly more like a sidekick to Poirot than a companion, and that means the reader gets stuck alongside him in the periphery. Hastings, rather than facilitating a reader’s entry into the narrative, becomes an impediment that feels better off discarded.

(Poirot himself, I don’t have much of an opinion about, at least not yet. I like him, but I feel like I need a couple more titles to get a better sense of him—and to have my mind changed about Hastings, I hope.)

#19: A book of genre fiction in translation

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu

I’d been meaning to read this book for years, and having finally read it—I’m underwhelmed. Not by much! The book had an impressive, enthralling start. It’s just that the payoff, and the second half of the book in general, delivered less than what the first half led me to expect. The tight, suspenseful events and intriguing world-building of the first half spiral out into a messier tangle of loose threads and nondescript settings (one big exception aside) later on; the hook loses momentum in the telling.

Maybe the delay between hearing about the book and actually reading it exacerbated the problem; I might have built the novel up too much in my head. Reading various gushing reviews in the intervening months probably didn’t help either.

I’m not sure what I can say without spoiling the novel, so I’ll refrain from talking plot. What I will say, though, is that this book is hard sci-fi: it’s unafraid to incorporate so many theoretical physics concepts into its narrative engine. But it never feels overwhelming.

I’m also inclined to disagree with Liu’s somewhat triumphalist take on science. Liu holds STEM above all other fields, and theoretical science above all STEM pursuits: thematically in the novel itself, and then explicitly in the author’s afterword. Even if my humanities degree didn’t make me feel obligated to object, I still would. Science delivers many wonderful insights, but I wouldn’t say it’s objectively above any other pursuit humanity’s undertaken. Still, Liu’s perspective does make for an intriguing yarn, precisely because it’s based on a belief that’s strange to me.

The novel leaves the door wide open for the sequel, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the series pans out.

2018-04-04
Ode to Joy: Natalie Prass’ “Short Court Style”

The world is on fire.

Or so the relentless news cycle would have us believe. Every hour comes with a litany of scandals, disappointments, and threats to life as we know it. All of us, the headlines scream, are doomed to wail, gnash our teeth, and scrabble at the edge of sanity with the tips of our fingers. With thousands of concurrent dumpster fires, pushing back is imperative—sometimes to the point that stopping for a breather seems irresponsible, if not unforgivable.

But burning ourselves out by refusing any respite from the punishing frontlines of resistance would be a different kind of defeat.

Or so Natalie Prass says. The singer-songwriter scrapped her original plans for her second album after the 2016 elections, opting instead to craft a direct response to what she called the election’s “devastating” results. In Paste Music, she elaborates on her decision:

It [the 2016 election results] made me question what it means to be a woman in America, whether any of the things I thought were getting better were actually improving, who I am and what I believe in. I knew I would be so upset with myself if I didn’t take the opportunity to say some of the things that meant so much to me, so I decided to rewrite the record. I needed to make an album that was going to get me out of my funk, one that would hopefully lift people out of theirs, too, because that’s what music’s all about.

The resulting album’s first cut, “Short Court Style,” is the kind of track that you can imagine drifting in through your window with the soft afternoon sun. Prass layers rich, hushed vocals over equally lush synths and jaunty guitars, somehow capturing that slow warmth that settles in your belly with the first long draught of your late-day mug of weekend tea. The sampled whoops and sharp drumming inject just enough upbeat kick to get your legs swinging under the dining table. It’s joyful and celebratory, but not in the boisterous, bordering-on-hysteric way that doomsday parties tend to be.

Embedded in the track is an assertion at once simple and powerful: In a world where every minute dares us to succumb to bitterness and rage, welcoming happiness—and taking the chance to relish it and dance (awkwardly) along—can be another form of defiance.

Natalie Prass dissects “Short Court Style” in another excellent episode of the Song Exploder podcast. If you’d like to know what the Bee Gees and “Le Freak” have to do with the track, or whose lightbulb moment gave us the song’s standout “whoops,” be sure to give that interview a listen.

2018-03-28