Jason Devitt

I saw the billboard-sized image above at a mall in Kuala Lumpur. It was a temporary front wall for a store that hadn’t opened yet.

Images like this are very common in the West. They mean many things to many people: playful; erotic; pornographic. An impossible standard of beauty that leaves women feeling inadequate, or a commercial image that would be pulled from the market if it didn’t appeal to women. The confident pose of a woman empowered by her own sexuality, or the naive treachery of a girl exploited by a male-dominated fashion industry that seeks to objectify women, et cetera. The consensus is that these images are acceptable, at least in New York or London, and I have nothing to add to that debate.

But travelling through South-East Asia for the last few months, images like this have taken on a second layer of meaning that I find a lot more troubling. While this picture is more overtly sexual than most, the images used to promote fashion and cosmetics in this part of the world are very often the same images that you see in America - images of white women.

As well as all the issues above, which still apply, in South-East Asia these images say - unambiguously - that to be white is to be beautiful. As well as being advertisements for lingerie or perfume, they are advertisements for whiteness. When you do see images of Thai or Cambodian pop-stars, actors, or models in their own countries, you can’t help noticing that most of them are preternaturally white.

I have an especially white wife. Summer is very pale, doesn’t tan, and wears factor 50 sunblock. All over South-East Asia, women come up to her in the street and tell her how beautiful her skin is. Sometimes they ask to have their photos taken standing next to her.

In one of my first posts I poked fun at a skin-whitening treatment for men on sale in Bangkok. Since then I have learned that people throughout the developing world spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on skin-whitening products, and it doesn’t seem as funny.

Of course this goes much deeper than Calvin Klein ads. The Thais for example have long seen white skin as a mark of aristocratic breeding. Some Cambodians mutter about the ignorant ways of the ‘dark Khmer.’ There is a latent racial bias here, but Western companies seem to be exploiting it and sustaining it.

Consciously or unconsciously? Surely most Western brands spent a lot of money finding out exactly how their advertising images are perceived in every market they enter? It’s clear that they are not using exactly the same images that you see in America, because there are almost no black women. No pictures of Naomi Campbell. No Tyra Banks. That makes sense - there aren’t many black consumers livng here. But then there aren’t many white ones either.

When Summer and I arrived in Malaysia, the first Moslem country on our trip, these images suddenly took on a third layer of meaning. As well as the familiar conflicting messages about female sexuality, and the racist overtones that we first noticed in Thailand, images like the one above seen in the context of a moderate Moslem society, where many women choose to observe hijab, call out that Western women are sluts.

If that seems harsh, bear in mind that these and Hollywood movies are pretty much the only images of Western women in Asia; there are no examples of Western female executives or politicians or teachers or priests or soldiers or workers to counterbalance them, just a few ex-pats and travellers like my wife.

Pandering to local prejudices at the expense of Thai and Lao and Khmer women with dark skin is pretty unpleasant. But is it really a good idea for Western companies to portray Western women this way in Moslem countries?

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For Summer and me, the border between Thailand and Malaysia was marked by a drastic change of clothing. In the train compartment next to us, a Thai girl wore kitten heels and short, short, shorts. She got off at the Thai border. At the next stop, her place was taken by six giggling Malaysian girls, in jeans and sweaters and full hijab - scarves completely covering their hair.

I had several thoughts at once: surprise at the sudden shift, after months of travelling through Buddhist countries; liberal disapproval (I wouldn’t want my daughter to dress like that); a memory of a discussion with Summer about whether the hajib, when not obligatory, is or is not oppressive; and underneath it all, a feeling of discomfort. Images of Islam in western media are so bound up with bad news that for a moment I was wary of a group of laughing teenage girls.

***

One night in Istanbul, a man sitting next to me at dinner said: "This city is so cosmopolitan! You can walk down the street and see Turks, Slavs, Serbs, Croatians, Chechens, Caucasians." I stared at him blankly. I wanted to say "Sorry, all you white people look the same to me." But that would have been rude.

Kuala Lumpur on the other hand is the most racially diverse city that we’ve seen so far on this trip. Nationally, sixty-five percent of the population are Malay (almost all Moslem). Twenty-five percent are of Chinese descent, and most of the rest are Tamil Indian. The capital skews Chinese and Indian, with a large dollop of European ex-pats and tourists. Many Moslem women do not wear the hijab. As a model of racial harmony it rivals the bridge of the Enterprise. The government, a coalition of several groups bound together for almost fifty years by their mutual dislike of the minority Islamic fundamentalist opposition, is dominated by Malays but committed to a multicultural society. Summer and I found it very easy to relax there. Malaysia ought to be an ideal tourist destination for mainstream Americans: exotic, beautiful, rich, modern, great shopping, English-speaking, a little conservative, religious. If only they were Southern Baptists.

***

When I was in school, we learned that the history of the world came to a halt with the fall of the Roman Empire, and apart from the scribbling of Irish monks and Magna Carta, it was all nasty, brutish, and short until the 15th Century and the modestly-entitled Renaissance.

In the Islamic Arts Museum of Malaysia, which I recommend for its exhibit on Islamic architecture, history begins in 622 AD, reaches its apex in the 15th century, and peters out with the decline of the Ottoman and Moghul Empires. Following the conquest of Spain, Cordoba apparently became the ‘intellectual center of Europe.’ This was during what we call the Dark Ages, so we can’t really argue with that. In a discussion of the achievements of Saladin, it is mentioned in passing that he ‘came to Egypt to repel foreign invaders.’ This is the only reference to what we call the Crusades.

While all kids should study the history of their own country in some detail, the world would be a better place if they had to have at least a superficial knowledge of everyone else’s.

***

Wahab walks up to me and introduces himself. He is wearing the white skullcap of the Haji, and he says that he is from Kelantan. This is the one province governed by the PAS, the Islamic fundamentalist party. The PAS recently banned Kelantan’s traditional dance, the Mak Yong, ostensibly because of its Hindu influences, but mainly because it is … a dance. The Ministry of Tourism is not impressed. It would be like Florida banning Disney, or old people. This week the PAS introduced a bill in the national parliament that would make it a crime to leave the Moslem faith. (I bet the Baptists would love that.) It has no chance of passing.

I tell Wahab that I am from New York, and he welcomes me to his country. His son studied engineering in the US. We talk about the museum briefly, and he points out that there is no discussion of the schism in Islam between Sunni and Shia, the ultimate cause of the civil conflict now brewing in Iraq. I say that Malaysia seems to have done a great job of managing ethnic differences. He agrees, and explains that if he spoke out against the Chinese or Indian community the ISA - Internal Security Agency - would detain him indefinitely without trial. He says that is what Iraq needs: a strong government.

We may or may not agree with Wahab. So long as the US government is ‘renditioning’ suspects to unsavory allies and locking people up indefinitely without trial at Guantanamo, we are in no place to criticize Malaysia.

The ‘giant stride’ technique for leaving a dive boat.

This week Summer and I learned to scuba dive off the island of Koh Tao, Thailand. This would be worth celebrating under any circumstances, but it’s particularly special for me since nine months ago I did not know how to swim.

Americans are always surprised to meet someone who can’t swim. Australians are shocked. But most Americans have plenty of opportunities to swim when they’re growing up, because the climate is so good. Australians get chucked into a pool at two months, just after they are dangled in front of a crocodile, and just before their first beer.

Though still rare, non-swimmers are more common in Europe, where north of a line drawn from Marseilles to Athens no-one swims in the sea or in rivers without a wetsuit or a psychological problem. Europeans learn to swim in indoor pools at their local school or state-run ‘recreation center.’ The very name suggests that such recreation is forbidden elsewhere.

For various reasons, I still hadn’t learned to swim at ten years old when my family went on a vacation to the Canary Islands. But I was quite happy in the hotel pool, bobbing around in an inflatable life ring. One afternoon I was standing by the edge of the pool wondering how to get back my ring, which had drifted to the middle, when another kid ran up and pushed me in.

I remember the feeling of water rushing into my mouth; I remember the feeling of falling towards the bottom of the pool; and then I remember my dad’s arms around me, pulling me out.

For 25 years after that, every time I felt water in my mouth, I could remember nothing else. I couldn’t remember what the instructor had told me, I couldn’t remember that I was in waist-deep water, or that there was a lifeguard standing next to me. I just had to get out.

The odd thing was, I loved being in the water. A lot of people dislike opening their eyes underwater; I never had a problem with that. But water in my mouth triggered a panic attack.

I worked with multiple trainers, in Dublin, London, and New York. Two of the women I dated were lifeguards. Nothing worked. Either I gave up or they did. Several people suggested therapy. But while I may have an irrational fear of water, I have a perfectly rational dislike of shrinks.

The man who finally got me past my fears was Adrian Ginju, a former member of the Romanian Olympic swimming team and now a private coach in New York. No one had more tricks than Adrian. He kept throwing new exercises at me, new strokes, new challenges: now jump into the deep end, now do a somersault underwater, now pick up your goggles from the bottom of the pool. One day I swam a single stroke, took a breath, and swam another. I was so surprised that I nearly drowned.

After that I tried to swim every day until we left for our trip. It was summer in New York, the outdoor pools were open, and I went to the Asser Levy Pool near my home in the East Village, a clean, pretty, free pool where I was the only white guy under sixty.

It was sheer joy, even though I still couldn’t swim a length. My stroke is not very efficient, and scares small children. Like a man who learns to speak English late in life, I will always swim with an accent.

When we arrived last week in Koh Tao, a little island in the Gulf of Thailand, I had never in my life been in the sea without a lifejacket. I was planning to sit on a beach while Summer learned to dive, but I went out on the boat for a day and watching her learn convinced me to try.

Swimming is hard; scuba diving is easy. At the surface you inflate your jacket from your tank, after which you could fall asleep and still not drown. Underwater you breathe normally, fold your arms and kick very slowly, letting your fins do the work. Scuba divers are not athletes.

The tricky part is adjusting your depth by using your breathing: deep breath to go up, exhale to go down, shallow breaths to stay level. But even this is just yoga without the moving and stretching and downward-facing-dog stuff that makes yoga hard.

However, jumping into the ocean with a steel tank on your back and lead weights strapped around your waist is, for someone who only recently learned to swim, counter-intuitive. And for this reason, and because a small but very agitated part of my brain continued to report all through each of my dives that in case I hadn’t noticed, I was sixty feet underwater and wearing a weight belt, I am not a very graceful diver.

It is beautiful down there. Because we are recent arrivals and come only as tourists, the animals have no particular fear of humans. On land you can walk through a forest without ever seeing an animal; they all hide. But dive anywhere in South-East Asia - or just snorkel - and you can see and sometimes interact with dozens of species as you glide, erratically in my case, over coral landscapes.

For me, the strangest moment comes at the end of each dive. You don’t inflate your jacket and float upwards; you swim up very slowly, so that the air in your lungs doesn’t expand too fast and burst them. Again, it takes very little effort and you breathe normally throughout. But it feels as if you’re falling in slow motion out of the water and into the air. I will never forget this sensation.

***

When my father died three years ago, I took a few things back to New York to remember him by, including some home movies that he had shot on 8mm and transferred to videotape. Just before our wedding last year, I finally got round to transferring the movies again, this time to NSTC-format DVDs, so that I could watch them for the first time.

There was very little footage, an hour’s worth in total, and most of it was weddings and vacations. Film was expensive and we were not rich; going to the Canary Islands was really extravagant for us. I was hoping to see my parents when they were my age, but most of the time my dad was panning over some vista, filming his new car, or following a duck.

And then, completely unexpectedly, my dad appears, swimming alongside me in my life ring. We are in the Canary Islands; it’s the day I was pushed into the pool. I’d gotten back into the pool with him later on. And here’s me again, shaking hands with the boy who had pushed me in. His parents had made him apologize; my parents had made me accept.

Now, 25 years later, having finally learned to swim, having achieved what some Americans call ‘closure’, and with the wisdom that comes with maturity, I no longer wish to accept your apology, you little jerk.

"I hate New York," spat the fat old red-faced German squatting next to me. "I was there once. Once!" He raised his voice and his index finger. "For three hours. In 1984. Ach, I hated it."
 
I love the great cities, New York most of all. I love quiet little towns and villages. All the rest, the mid-size towns, the suburbs and exurbs, the provincial capitals, the regional hubs, the world centers of whistle-making, even the fast-growing, awkward adolescent metropolises that may one day seduce me, can all go to hell.

So I do not like you Chiang Mai, you mid-size town, you capital of northern Thailand, you regional center of wood-carving. I much prefer Bangkok.

This is interesting, because so many people had told me to expect the opposite. Chiang Mai is charming, restful, and picturesque, they said, while Bangkok is crowded, frenetic, and ugly.

True, but irrelevant.

Now perhaps I like small towns and villages because they are charming and restful and picturesque. Or perhaps it’s because I am genetically predisposed towards communities of no more than 120 people, the maximum size of a human settlement for all but the last ten thousand of our two million years on earth, and I cannot escape my nature.

Like monotheistic religions, bottle-feeding, and apple pie, but unlike homosexuality and drug use, cities are unnatural. So the love of cities can only be acquired and transmitted culturally. But that happens quite naturally, so to speak, because since Mesopotamia great cultures have been centred on great cities. 

Bangkok has some of these qualities. The Temple of the Emerald Buddha and Wat Pho would grace any city, and the less famous Vimanmek Palace is of all the palaces that I have seen, hypothetically, the one that I would most like to live in.

I love the layout of Bangkok. Radiating out from the old heart of the city are a dozen or so arterial roads that branch and divide into a network of fine alleys, almost all of them dead-ends. The narrow streets and lack of through traffic mean that Bangkok is made up of hundreds of little villages, some very quiet, each no more than a few hundred feet from a main road. It’s very confusing for the first-time visitor, but for this branching topology Bangkok has adopted a recursive address system, as logical as New York’s grid and much more flexible. A marvellous monorail runs east-west high above the city, and the central shopping area is linked by skywalks at the same level. If there’s anything in the world that you want to buy, you can walk from one soaring mall to the next for several miles without ever descending to street level. 

I loved taking a river taxi along the Chao Phraya, the river that marks the western boundary of Bangkok. The Hudson and the Thames have retired to riverside parks and receational boating, but the Chao Phraya still works for a living. River taxis are the best way to travel north or south, and there are many more warehouses than warehouse conversions. In the alleys along the waterfront there are dozens of small businesses with jerry-built piers.   

Thailand is a vibrant democracy - notwithstanding the strange status of the royal family and the authoritarian style of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra - and Bangkok is the center of that democracy. One hundred thousand people gathered here peacefully last week to demand Thaksin’s resignation. At a time when people elsewhere are rioting over cartoons, both the respect for free speech and the respectful way in which that right was exercised were an example to the world.

Yet I do not really love Bangkok. Most of the construction in the last twenty years has been haphazard and ugly, concrete boxes in the center and strip malls at the edges. The Chao Phraya is filthy and the canals - this city was once called the Venice of the East - are rimmed with slums and stink so badly that people travelling on them wear facemasks. And there is terrible poverty here, whole slum towns under some of the bridges.

But twenty years ago the Thames was biologically dead; now whales get lost in it. Twenty years ago New York was a dangerous place to live; now it’s the safest big town in America. Twenty years ago Thailand was still a third-world country; now it is a middle-income country. One day it will be rich, and one day the people of Bangkok, casting about for things to do with their money, will reclaim their river and canals and their architectural heritage, and throw great new buildings into the sky.

Chiang Mai, however, will still be a mid-size regional capital of wood-carving.