Human History is Always Dying

Posted on 31 December 2020

A traveling band of robbers fell upon our household one night. They were as senseless and villainous as robbers are in fairy tales. Father stood in the door with a pitchfork and shouted to the older children. “Run! Escape! Fly!” The robbers overpowered my father and knocked out his front teeth. They hit my mother, and she fell to the floor unconscious, and they picked up the baby she had held in her arms and swung her against the floor so that she was killed instantly. … The band of robbers carried away all of our belongings worth anything, and partially razed our house. … “We must leave a country where such things can happen,” said my father, and with that I agreed entirely.…

Categories: Environment, Life, Society

Tagged: Africa, budapest, climate change, genocide, history, hungary, life, politics, Russia, world war ii

Intersections

Posted on 16 February 2020

Sometimes the world seems as if it is made up of different planes of being that may overlap, or crash into each other, or may simply stay parallel, not touching. It sometimes jars me to think that my life in Seattle exists in tandem on the same earth as that of a child growing up in the remote Andes or of a yacht-owner in Monaco. These planes of existence sometimes intersect, but geography mostly holds them apart. There are places, though, where the edges bleed and blend, and one of these places is Po Toi. Po Toi is the southernmost island in Hong Kong. And though the Hong Kong you’re likely thinking of is full of towering skyscrapers and crowded with people, this part…

Categories: Life, Travel

Tagged: china, hiking, hong kong, life, modernity, po toi, travel

Questions from Hong Kong

Posted on 10 January 2019

How is the public transportation so good? How is it so cheap? So clean? Why do their buses have seatbelts and ours don’t? Why do I see so many bike share brands and so few shared bikes being ridden? Why do I feel so safe? How is it that I haven’t been sexually harassed? How do they build so high on such steep slopes? Is the slope maintenance environmentally friendly? Why do the street crossings take so long to change for pedestrians? Who are the people behind the dueling Falun Gong/Dafa protest displays? Who would pay over $1,000 USD for a pet fish? Are the caged birds in the market alright? How is the coffee so good here? When did they start serving…

Categories: Life, Society, Travel

Tagged: china, cities, hong kong, life, politics, society, transportation, travel

Across Hemispheres

Posted on 12 November 2018

I walked into the hostel’s lobby, agitated after the most harrowing taxi ride of my life, during which the driver threatened to veer off the mountain road at each bend and then tried to raise the price when we arrived, spurring a Spanish language argument with me. Thus shaken, it took me and my traveling buddies a bit to correctly navigate through the streets of Potosí to the hostel we’d booked. After all of this, I just wanted a bit of security and dinner for the evening. I remember plopping into a chair in the lobby, plugging my phone in to charge, and conversing with a French woman who was traveling through South America solo. We realized we’d met the same fellow traveler at…

Categories: Life, Travel

Tagged: Bolivia, couchsurfing, europe, france, friends, life, nice, potosí, social media, solo travel, south america, sucre, travel

The Stories We Tell and the Stories We Take

Posted on 7 October 2018

Use of the Hammer and Sickle in Former Soviet Territories and Outside These Areas What do you say when someone tells you their father was sent to the Gulag? He came back from the war and off he was sent – Stalin’s orders, to the lager! Z.’s back was to me as she hunched over my bed, fixing the sheets, curling into even less space than her short body could claim. “He came back from the war, from the front, with children’s books in German, because I was studying German, you see?” A German book claimed a life where a war could not. Ghosts occupied every shadow of the apartment. Molotov-Ribbentrop. A siege. Young girls, starving but never quite dead. An unlikely reunion…