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<body id="MyBody" onload="MyBegin()"> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBScript"> </SCRIPT> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mysounds.js">  </script> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mycolors.js">  </script> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBScript"> </SCRIPT> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mysounds.js">  </script> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mycolors.js">  </script> <u> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">WITNESSING THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE WORLD</font></p> </u> <hr> <font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropology and Authoritarian Power Structures</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">An American Autobiography</p> <font SIZE="2"> <p> </p> <p>Whatever the type, there is a deep-seated craving common to almost all men of words which determines their attitude to the prevailing order. It is a craving for human recognition, a craving for a clearly marked status above the common run of humanity. (Eric Hoffer; Between the Devil and the Dragon’ 1982: 269)</p> </font> <p>I have nothing to prove my words that follow except a firm faith in my own basic honesty. I speak for myself and for on one else, and I offer but one possible interpretation, but one eyewitness testimony to the events of my experience. One must pay a price for honesty and openness to one’s experiences. Often it is a price of self-security. Sometimes it is a price of self-credulity—of worthiness and merit in the eyes of others.</p> <p>It is honesty, particularly self-honesty that most dispels the ‘necessary’ illusions of life that sustain our belief in our actions and our worldview. Such honesty rests upon a common ground of human weakness and frailty, and upon a healthy skepticism that while people of the world may sometimes admire a good hater, no one ever loves a chronic doubter or a selfless critic.</p> <p>Witnessing one’s faith in terms available to and relevant of one’s own experience is sometimes the prelude to one’s confirmation of that faith. It is an unveiling, an expose,’ and forging of one’s character in the fire of life.</p> <p>Indeed, all people are, by the achieved wisdom of their lived experiences, ‘authentic anthropologists’ of the world. And anthropology has been a peculiar preoccupation of all of humankind, and an ancient profession of all cultures, to understand themselves in disillusioned ways. The need for professed self-honesty derives from the inability to live well with the deceit and contradictions that normally sustain most of our illusions and our actions. Deceit begets ever greater darkness and deceit, and the path of wisdom lies through the disillusionment that only honesty can hope to bring.</p> <p>There is no human being who is not untransformed by experience and whose pathway through life does not twist and turn in unexpected directions, and who are not, sooner or later, forced to walk in someone else’s foot steps.</p> <p>I witness six different sets of experiences drawn from six different periods of my life. The events, which framed these experiences, were biographically, and historically, real, though the interpretation I now give to them remains my own fiction, my own mythical illusion. The only common theme uniting these six different episodes is my own autobiographical impression formed by these various experiences that is bound together by my existential need for self identity. It is a common theme composed of threads of aggression, authority and authoritarianism, being American and trying to become an ‘Authentic Academic Anthropologist’, and, last but not least, my own obsessive preoccupation with authorial credibility.</p> <p>We are all actors with our parts to play however minor they may really be. And we all have our own voices with which to witness the world.</p> <p>  <hr> <p> </p> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Whether in visible or mysterious garb,</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Buddha is neither one nor divisible.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">If you need to distinguish his aspects,</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Imagine a Lotus blooming in a fire.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">"Buddha" by Dao Hue</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>I do not remember well my father’s face. I remember him walking through the front door. I remember him arguing with my mother. I remember his hairy hands turning the pages while I sat in his lap trying to read with him. I remember his long interminable absences, his unexpected visits in his old gray Plymouth. I remember him working in the garage on his boat, helping him bring his tools. I remember going fishing with him, becoming sea sick, and his catching barracuda, halibut and bass. I remember riding in the car with him on his journeys, and him waiting for me to pick me up after school.</p> <p>One day, the first of December in 1965, I walked home from school to find his car not parked beside the curb. I looked for him and waited. But he never, ever came again. Eventually my grandpa pulled up in his Chevy pickup truck, and he took me silently to my aunt's house on the other side of town. I asked him where my father was, but he was strangely quiet. I was told at my aunt’s that something had happened. My father had a ‘heart attack’ but that’s all I found out from them. Finally the phone rang and then my aunt drove me back to my house.</p> <p>My mother and older sister met me at the door. They both had tears in their eyes as they told me he had died. I said I was told he had a heart attack. They did not say anything. I did not understand death very well at the time, for I smiled in embarrassment, not knowing what else to do.</p> <p>My older brother had red eyes for about three days, and then that was the last time I ever saw him cry in my life. My father had been very hard on my brother, punishing him very fiercely when he neglected his duties like taking out the trash.</p> <p>We then had a big family reunion at my Grandma’s and Granpa’s house. Family came from all over. A big long black limousine with fold up back seats picked us up and took us uptown to the memorial service. The coffin was open, but as we filed by I could not see who was in it because I was too short and I was too shy by the ceremony to ask my mother or sister to pick me up to look inside.</p> <p>We drove a long way to the funeral in a long line of cars. He was buried on a hill at the Federal cemetery in San Diego (Rosecrans National Cemetery at Point Loma). It overlooked the beautiful blue ocean and the gray naval ships in the harbor. The flag that draped the coffin flapped in the breeze, as the soldiers standing on the hill fired their rifles overhead and then folded up the flag into a funny triangle and handed it to my mom.</p> <p>Everyone else left the graveside except myself, my brother and sisters and my Mom. As we stood there in an endless geometric sea of white grave markers, my mother and oldest sister cried. My brother, other sister, and myself went back to the car and waited for them, laughing and joking about their melodramatic mood. Perhaps we were trying to escape from the overwhelming gravity of the moment in our own naive ways.</p> <p>My mother put the folded flag into one of her old trunks by her bed, and I have only seen it once or twice since that day, and only after my request. We only visited the grave once after that, and have never been back to see it since. My father used to take us to Church and Sunday school every Sunday morning, but after his death we never went back to church at all.</p> <p>After that my growing up was mostly memories of playing, being alone, fighting between all members of my family, taking care of my pet animals, television and school. All of these events transpired against a background of the Vietnam War, assassinations, campus protests and racial riots, the Beatles and popular rock and roll on the radio. I remember giving the casualty reports from the second page of the LA Times to my class every morning for current events. I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the six o’clock news telling us "and that’s the way it is."</p> <p>I remember Life magazine with the pictures of the Tet offensive in Hue, the casualties, the Vietcong and My Lai. I remember the neighbor boys next door, down the streets, behind us, all going off to Vietnam and eventually returning. One boy my mother had taught in school had told us that he was a machine gunner in the Marine Corps. Another son of family friends of ours never came back. An older brother of my best friend came back, only to be killed in a car accident a few days later. In my neighborhood there was no ostensible dishonor in serving in Vietnam. It was a lower working class neighborhood of mixed Mexican American and White background, and serving one’s country was an expected and not dishonorable thing to do.</p> <p>My family fell apart over the next few years. My mother worked all the time and went to school at night. My older brother fell in with a bad group of young men, got hooked on drugs, and would come home at night in terrible rages, smashing up furniture and everything. Many times he would be angered with me and beat me up—one time so bad that I was laid up in bed for several days after. He began sawing holes in the roofs of pharmacies and burglarizing them for their pills. He would stash them away in the garage. One day my mother found the dope, and took it to the police station uptown. She asked me if I would go with her, but I was frightened and refused. That night undercover detectives arrested my brother in our living room. We spent the next year visiting my brother in prison.</p> <p>My younger sister became schizophrenic later on, but her strangeness always permeated the household to the point that I was afraid to bring my school friends home to visit for fear of her unexpected behavior.</p> <p>It was only several years later that I had discovered the truth about my father’s death. He had been suffering for several years from paranoid schizophrenia. He spent about a year in Camarillo State Hospital receiving electro-shock therapy. He had attempted suicide one day by slashing his wrists and had taken himself to a hospital for treatment. That day in December 1966, he had shot himself in the heart with a twenty-two-caliber rifle that we used to take target shooting in the desert. I discovered the truth from a school acquaintance who had lived nearby my Grandparent’s house where it had happened, and I later confronted my mother with the question, and she explained to me the whole secret that had been kept hidden from me for so long. The pieces began falling into place, and my memories began making sense. In hindsight I can understand my mother’s reluctance to tell me the truth, as I probably wouldn’t have understood it very well anyway. But it has always fundamentally bothered me that my own family had deceived me when they had been the very one’s to teach me always to tell the truth. Lies, white, gray or black, are still lies.</p> <p> </p> <p>  <hr> <dir> <dir> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Home</p> <p>No color or complexion distinguishes the way</p> <p>Still its message flares up everywhere:</p> <p>Of the thousands of worlds, numerous as grains of sand</p> <p>Which is not home?</p> <p> </p> <p>Thuong Chieu</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </font> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Perhaps it was desperation, or perhaps it was the epitomy of wisdom, that led my mother to move to another part of the city right when I was coming of age and was about to enter High School. In my old Junior High, I was not just the top of the class, but the top of the whole school. I was probably the classic example of an early over achiever in a small, poor school district that has chronically rated some of the lowest reading and math scores in the country. I found conventional schoolwork stimulating, and I was quite the perfectionist and quite frustrated and unhappy. I achieved in spite of the emotional turmoil and desperation of our family life, and perhaps because of it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">My mom had no one else to help us move. I was the only one to help her, and we made many trips across town in our old Plymouth loaded up with our possessions. We did not finish until late at night, and we left behind many things, which we could not carry with us and put into the car or the van of a friend who came to help us in the evening. I had learned to become the little ‘man of the house’ taking care of many of the household chores, the animals and learning to cook and clean up after myself, my sister and for my mom while she worked.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">High school turned out to be one of the loneliest and unhappiest times of my life. I burned out early on in the overachievement syndrome, especially as I found myself in classrooms full of students who seemed to suffer more acutely from the need for achievement and pernicious perfectionism than myself. My mom had landed me in an upper middle class white people’s school, and the common distinction made by the student body and the teachers was between those who came from ‘above the Boulevard’ and those unfortunate few from ‘below the Boulevard.’ I found myself not only ostracized from most social circles in the school, but actually shunned and ostracized from many extra-curricular activities. It was apparent to us, even then, that many of the teachers had a selective preference for supporting students from ‘above the boulevard.’ I found myself the member of a lunch time click who called ourselves ‘the odd ball group.’ Looking back, we shared one thing in common, we were neither academic overachievers and we were almost exclusively from ‘below the boulevard’.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The Vietnam War still loomed in the background, only not so overshadowing as before. It was receding quickly. By the last year of my high school the first wave Vietnamese refugee children made their first appearance in our school—about twenty or thirty of them in all. They were a strange and separate group. I tried to little avail to befriend some of them in PE class. I remember one boy proclaiming proudly that he was not Vietnamese, but Chinese from Vietnam, and that a U.S. helicopter could be shot down with a forty-five-caliber pistol if it was still bigger than the size of one’s thumb.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">By my senior year I was working more than full time as a dishwasher at a local restaurant and a convalescent home, and on weekends I would do peoples yard work and housework. I managed to save quite a lot of money, but could no longer deal very well with school. I ended up getting kicked out of a couple of classes for fighting with other students or talking back to the teacher. Though I ended up having to go to a continuation school at night, I ended up graduating with the rest of the class of ’76 on schedule.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I left high school without any clear sense of what I was going to do next. I remember telling my mom one evening at dinner, in quite serious earnest, that I was bound and determined to leave the house, and all the nonsense, no matter what. I paid cash for a Volkswagen, and soon found myself living alone in a single bedroom apartment in a dusty city in central California, attending a state college full time as a pre-vet animal science major and still working full time as a dishwasher at a Holiday Inn.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I must have been terribly lonely in that strange city, and also terribly confused. One day I found myself walking by a military recruiter’s office downtown and saw a poster of Marines in uniform—it read ‘The Few, the Proud, the Marines’. Next thing I knew I found myself inside, signing all the forms for an enlistment which was delayed only long enough to go home and say goodbye to my Mom. I had a choice of either becoming an enlisted man or of being sent back to college and eventually becoming an officer. I was attracted by the two thousand-dollar bonus then being offered for the ‘combat arms program’ and I remember one officer telling me that he thought I would be happier driving around in tanks rather than humping it with a backpack and a rifle. My mom was quite disturbed and surprised when the recruiter phoned her to congratulate her on her son’s enlistment into the Marine Corps.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I spent a Memorial Day weekend wondering around downtown Los Angeles waiting for the AAFEE’s station to open on Monday morning. The induction process took a whole day, and it wasn’t until nightfall that we took our oaths and made the long and lonesome bus trip down to MCRD San Diego. My first encounter with several mad Drill Instructors even before I got off the bus taught me a lesson I would have reaffirmed many times over during and after my stint in the ‘suck’—what a fool I had been in volunteering for active duty. Boot camp was difficult and purely physical, but it was simple and straight ahead, and it had its affect upon myself and everyone else at the time. It had effectively turned us, in the course of three months, into blindly obedient, boot shinning, rifle drilling mad machines ready to sacrifice ourselves for our country and to kill other people in the process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The effect of this brain washing did not begin to wear off until I actually got to the Pacific Fleet Marine Force stationed at Camp Schwab in north central Okinawa. I spent the entire eight weeks at the tank training school polishing boots, shinning brass, running five miles a day in any kind of weather, and then going out and getting blindly drunk at the army EM clubs. At Okinawa I had a somewhat abrupt and rude awakening to a battle hardened and battle weary Marine Corps line units that were suffering a severe hangover in a kind of ‘post Vietnam’ syndrome. Morale was severely low, field officers were frequently missing and getting drunk on duty, and everyone had a defeatist ‘Fuck the Suck’ and ‘Eat the Apple, Fuck the Corp’s’ attitude. The Lifers were still as Gungi as ever, but Vietnam had left a funny cloud hanging in the back of their minds and a funny look in their eyes. Our tank platoon was put to sea with 3/9, an infamous regiment that had been called the ‘Walking Dead’ in Vietnam and apparently, so the story was told, left calling game cards on the bodies of their Vietnamese victims. They had lost their standards in battle and so were not allowed to return to the mainland—being semi-permanently outcast in disgrace.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">While in the Philippines, the mortar and machine gun platoons we were bunked with aboard the USS Alamo were involved in a tragic helicopter crash in which 37 young marines were chopped to pieces. When the battalion returned from its six months afloat, it began rioting out in the little base village of Henoko. Many of these riots, and a great deal of the fighting were racial/ethnic conflicts, and ethnic relations upon the island, especially between units, was always severely strained. I returned after thirteen months on Okinawa the veteran of more than a handful of fights and small group melees, several close calls with getting killed in accidents, as well as having a friend and sergeant crushed by a tank, and a severe problem with alcoholism. By the time it was out turn to rotate back to the States, virtually everyone in our small platoon was severely alcoholic, no matter whether they were tea-totallers or drinkers when they arrived on the ‘rock’.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I was next stationed at Twenty-Nine Palms, California, for the remaining two and a half years of my active duty. ‘Stumps’ as we called it turned out to be not only worse than the rock, but the very bottom of the Marine Corps barrel. It was as if the Marine Corps had a secret policy of concentrating all their worst misfits in one place. The whole base was more or less isolated from civilization, on the edge of nowhere, and it was run like a minimum-security prison with weekend liberty. Not only were people continuously harassed by the lifers, being rather severely punished for the slightest infractions, but or whole company especially was managed more like a work gang than a proper tank-operating unit. We would come back to the parade ground at evening formation only to hear the meting out of that day’s punishment. Many would receive several hours a night of extra work details, while the rest of the company were frequently ordered to field day the barracks until 9 or 10 at night for someone in the morning forgetting to make their bed well or forgetting to clean out the trash can after emptying it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Whereas alcoholism was the main problem on the ‘rock’, at ‘stumps’ it was the drugs that were epidemic. In my company alone, there was a staff sergeant who was the major cocaine dealer on base, a corporal who was the main marijuana dealer, growing a patch of it somewhere secretly out in the desert, and a private in my own platoon who was the main acid dealer. A cook in our company distributed speed. Almost everyone who did not drink profusely as a matter of nightly routine, at least smoked pot. Few had the character or willpower to resist for long the many foul influences that daily slinked through the squad bay.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">For the most part, I stayed free of the drug influences, although by the end I would not refuse a joint if someone offered it to me. I lived only to get drunk at night, and though drinking heavily, never missed a reveille and always was one of the hardest workers on the tank ramp. We sweat out the beer by the end of the hot day only to be primed for the next round of beer that evening. Because I worked hard, I was soon made a tank commander in charge of my own tank. Our units then were chronically half manpower, and the whole post Vietnam era military was suffering critical manpower shortages. My tank was probably the oldest Vietnam vintage tank left in the Marine Corps. We could never hit anything with it because the main gun had more than twice it’s maximum quota of rounds put through it, and the rifling of the barrel was severely cracked in the middle and worn out. Nevertheless, the tank, though comparatively slow, never broke down out in the field when many newer, faster tanks were having all kinds of problems. When I first got assigned to the tank it was bereft of any of its normal consignment of tools, and had many of its nuts and bolts missing off its track and armor plate. Most of the tools had found its way into private toolboxes in the cars of many of the Marines. Since nothing could be done in that state, I ended up having to become a ‘scrounger’ and steal the tools off of other tanks and vehicles when no one was around. We would leave our orders with guys of our unit who were carrying guard duty on the ramp at night, to find the tools neatly stored away inside our tanks the next morning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Going to the field, which we did on a weekly and monthly basis, was really our only respite from our normal regimen and usual harassment. I came to look forward to the field and took great pleasure in the vast rocky moonscapes of Twenty-Nine Palms. I came to volunteer for any kind of duty in the field I could get, anything to get away from the madness and tedium back on the base. It was this that eventually earned me meritorious corporal amidst a situation in which too many young men turned into hard core drug addicts and eventually into criminals.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I saw the same downward trajectory repeated many times over during my time there. Naïve young men, almost always highly motivated and with a bright eyed future when they first arrive there, eventually becoming burned out, coping bad attitudes, doing drugs, going UA and getting into trouble somehow. At one time, six people in my platoon deserted within one week. Our platoon, already half its normal size, looked pitifully small when represented by only a handful of guys standing in formation. It was hardest then because the guys left over were having to carry on in the usual way with the whole load. Inspections were frequent, things still had to get done on the tanks, all the extra duties were still required of us, and when we went to the field there were only two men instead of four on each tank—a driver and a commander.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It was the tank accident that I was involved in that precipitated my own burn out. We were serving as a target tank for the TOW missile people in pretty rugged terrain. It was at night during a sandstorm. We were filthy from dust from head to toe. We were being hit by the search light of another tank about half a mile off while going up and down a ridge. All of a sudden a huge black hole loomed up in front of the tank, as the driver took a wrong turn going down the ridge. We were flying in space until we suddenly smashed into the bottom of the ravine. I was thrown down on top of the ammunitions inside the tank. Greenly, who was sitting just behind me on the loader's hatch, was thrown out in front of the tank and the tank came to a stop on top of him. I got up in pain. It felt like a thousand pounds had been dropped on me. I looked around and couldn’t find Greenly. I climbed outside and began running around the tank looking for him. Sgt. Perricone, the tank commander, was bent over with some broken and bruised ribs. I got down in front and Hansen, my driver with his front teeth smashed out, told me he saw Jeff fly down in front of the tank. I sent Hansen off running across the desert to get help, while I tried digging Greenly out from beneath the tank. He was wedged in very tightly, bleeding from the mouth, nose and ears. He was moaning softly, but was not yet dead. Finally, I got in the tank, started it up and backed it off him, but it was too late. A week later I was part of a seven men team who delivered a twenty-one gun salute at his funeral.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It had dawned on me then just how much of a man eating machine the Marine Corps really was—its completely impersonal manner in which it processed death. I was just a few inches away from that coffin they were lowering in the ground. Our lieutenant, that night back on base, blamed me for what had happened in no uncertain terms, but he was not sorry about Greenly’s death, only about his soon to fail career in the suck. Just that day before the accident Greenly had confided in me that he was planning to get a vasectomy because he didn’t want his young wife to get pregnant any more. At the scene of the accident, when help finally arrived, it became clearly apparent to me, in a way it had never before been, just how much everyone was acting out their parts, and how false and made-up it seemed in the face of death.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Some time after that a sadistic Staff Sergeant of ours, who hated prostitutes and women in general but loved to play the lifer with us, thought I needed morale up lifting at NCO school down at Camp Pendleton. I was there all of two weeks. I figured out how to earn the minimum number of demerit points in the shortest frame of time. I had earned my corporal stripes the hard way and was too salty to be processed back through another boot camp. All I wanted was to be left alone by the lifers and to wait out my remaining time in the suck the shortest and easiest way possible. I left the NCO school in ‘disgrace’ but happy that I had achieved my goal. Later my sadistic Staff Sergeant confronted me alone inside of my tank and threatened me with court martial if I did not change my attitude to suit him. I told him to ‘fuck off’ to his face and to leave my tank crew alone. He was a coward at heart and would never back up his fierce words with fists.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Later I was called to an unofficial "court martial." They called it a competency hearing and was essentially asked why I had failed out of NCO school and also wanted me to squeal on all the drug dealers in my company. This I could not do. One day, a lifer approached me behind the supply buildings and gave me a pair of lance corporal bars again. I was happy to be back ‘on the other side’ with my buddies. But I was transferred to a new and better-managed company. I spent the last eight months of my active duty in the best platoon I had ever had. All the NCO’s were black and most of the enlisted men were white, and it was the easiest going platoon I had ever seen. Even the lieutenant was pretty cool, though he really freaked out like a baby when it would come to tank maneuvers with live ammo in the field.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I had been changed that last year in the suck. The lifers screwed with me all the time, but they couldn’t affect me in the slightest. Nothing they had I was interested in. They no longer tried to play mind games with me. It was then that I began going to the base library and spending all my spare time reading. I began writing my first manuscript on militarism and military mentality, based upon my experiences. I began looking at the Marine Corps in a different way, as a self-perpetuating illusion, as a ‘social construction of reality’ directed by its own sense of reconstructed history. It was nonetheless very real in consuming the lives of countless young men in service of a higher ‘ideal’ which had no substantive basis in social reality beyond its own legitimated construction. I spent my remaining months sitting on my footlocker in an open squad bay, penning out a five hundred odd page manuscript. During the summer months the First Sergeant became angry at all of us, and crammed the whole company into only one side of the bay, turning the other side into an NCO recreation room. We had our double bunk beds spaced about a foot apart in a long line down both walls of a single large room. The officer of the day could easily monitor all the activity in the whole building by just looking up across all the bunks from one place. We had nothing to do but to sleep in our underwear in fetal positions. One night after light out, the whole barracks began to riot. Someone down on one end began yelling, and it soon spread throughout. The whole barracks was yelling and screaming, and we rampaged through the building, tipping over wall lockers and knocking over racks. It subsided about as suddenly as it began. We picked everything back up and went back to bed.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">During the whole time I sat writing my manuscript, not one person ever came up to me and expressed an interest in what I was working on, though one day, a man who was on legal hold for desertion was left on watch at the barracks while we were in the field for a couple of months straight. One day he locked all the doors broke open all the wall lockers and stole everything he could get his hands on, tipping everything out of the wall lockers. But, though he had opened mine, he left it undisturbed. The last few months I turned into a real ‘shit bag.’ I wore holey, greasy utilities all the time and pulled an unstarched cover low over my eyes. Except for all the shit details, the lifers left me well alone. I was like a zombie on the base, wandering around as if in a daily trance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I left a month early. The company commander took mercy on me and gave me my accumulated leave time. I packed up my sea bag one morning and left an empty barrack while everyone was down on the ramp. I did not say goodbye to anyone. Four rather intense years of my life were suddenly over, and though I desperately needed the freedom and the privacy, it was a severely strange feeling. No more tanks, no more guns, no more lifers, no more weird events. The thing I missed the most though, were the wide vast desert spaces and its utter silence and stillness. The desert had a serene beauty—its summer storms, its winter snow, its spring flowers and gray fall skies, which I had come to love.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In hindsight, after watching the unfolding of the Gulf War on television, I came to understand many of the things that had happened to us back in the desert twelve years previously. The same units I had been in were the same ones bearing the brunt of the action in the Gulf. During the Iran hostage crisis our battalion had formed a special team. We were to fly to a small island in the Indian Ocean and there get ready for battle, brand new tanks that were already waiting. Army airborne and ranger units all converged at El Toro Air Base and we waited around for three days with our battle gear packed, our gas masks, etc. until we were finally flown back to the stumps. We were, thirteen years ago, experimenting with the very tank manouvers desert tactics that were now being employed in the Gulf. We were first field testing the armored reconnaissance vehicles, the desert camouflaged uniforms, the ‘combined arms’ team units that were now being flashed on the television screen live from the Gulf. It is not too much to conclude that more than a decade ago, the Pentagon had set its strategic sights on the Gulf region, and was even then preparing itself for an inevitable war in the desert. Vietnam was a strategic failure, and it took a few years for the military to recover its discipline, its morale, its fighting spirit and its esteem. The pentagon needed a new Strategic Focus-the vital oil pipeline to the U.S. fossil fuel economy—and a new ‘Threat’ to American ‘Security’ to perpetuate its own commitment to the efficacy of force and the threat of violence.</p> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">What’s fairer than the lotus in a swamp?</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Green leaves, white blooms, gold stamens at their hearts.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Gold stamens set amidst white blooms, green leaves-</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">It lives near mud yet does not smell of mud.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">‘The Lotus’</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anonymous (Translated by Huynh Sanh Thong)</p> <p> </p> </font> <p>I got out without knowing what to do next. I had it in my mind to become an artist, and I was committed to getting done with the manuscript I was writing. I ended up renting a one-bedroom apartment not too far from my mom’s house. It was during this time that I just wanted to be alone and not bothered by other people. I was feeling intense ‘separation anxieties’ and it was in this mood that my first collection of poems flowed out almost spontaneously. I began learning the basics of oil painting, a practice that I ended up pursuing for the next five years, elaborating into several different media. Fortunately, in spite of my drinking during my enlistment, I had managed to save about twenty thousand dollars that supported me for the first few years out. I looked for work the first year, but could find nothing. It seemed as though no one wanted to hire a young ex-Marine. I ended up paying five hundred bucks to attend a brief four-week bank teller vocational school. There were four women, a Mexican and myself. Even though I scored the highest on the math test at the end, everyone else was hired even before the school ended except myself. I looked in every bank in the city for the next month, and though banks were hiring, none were hiring me. I began getting discouraged and began increasingly to do my artwork.</p> <p>One day my older sister visited me in my apartment. I remember cooking her some shrimp with red sauce on top of white rice with fresh picked green beans. She herself had just been on the rebound from a divorce. She told me to go back to school, and not to worry about finding work. It seemed like a good idea, and I ended up enrolled the next year at California State University, Fullerton. I moved back home to live with my Mom, as living alone in an apartment without any other income was becoming increasingly expensive. I paid her a small monthly amount for rent and helped her with yard work. The first couple of years at CSU Fullerton were difficult for me. I was an undeclared major and didn’t know quite what I wanted to do with school. I shopped around but was dissatisfied with different departments. Finally I took a couple of anthropology classes, I liked the professors, had good interaction, and I began making ‘A’s more consistently. I realized that anthropology had closely fit the orientation that I had been pursuing in my own writing, and that the alignment may have fortuitous consequences for my intellectual development. I wrote a couple of more collections of poems over the next few years, as well as a couple of more manuscripts on Aesthetic Anthropology and on Irrationality and Normality. I got increasingly involved in academic work, especially in black and white photography in field methods and in video taping and editing, during my last couple of years pursuing undergraduate work. I received the GI Bill for five years, which paid enough during the school year to help my Mom out and to support my other activities in art. It freed me from having to find work so that I could devote all my time and energy to my studies and to pursuing my other interests in art and writing.</p> <p>Towards the end of my undergraduate work I had become increasingly involved in my anthropological studies. CSU Fullerton was a fairly large and impersonal kind of school. It had a very alienating social atmosphere about it. During my time there, four people committed suicide by jumping off the humanities building. Once while I was taking a psychology class on the same floor of the same building that it happened on. The only way of surviving the daily grind was to become basically inured to the social crowding, impersonalness and anomie. I began spending all my between time at the arboretum which offered a sense of tranquility in its relative solitude.</p> <p>I went for an interview to be accepted into the graduate program at UC Riverside, for the following year. The professor who interviewed me made some conclusions about me based upon my record, which were not accurate or true when he told me, but formed the basis of his presumptions about my character. He did not bother to ask me if these things were true or not, since he being the professional anthropologist, must have known better. This was my first, but not last encounter with the kind of fallacious logic anthropologists are prone to—what I have called ‘inferring a probable presence from a definite absence’. Since he knew more about me than I knew myself, and since obviously must not have thought much about me in the first place, and since he ignored any first hand counter evidence I could bring to the occasion, I was subsequently not accepted into his program. It is sometimes true that first impressions are final ones.</p> <p>At the time not seeing any other alternative future for myself in Anthropology, I applied to the Master’s program at CSU Fullerton and was readily accepted. I had already planned my thesis work to be about the Vietnamese refugee culture, because they were such a strong presence both is the school and in the surrounding area, even though I had no real leads for breaking in to the culture at the time. I fortunately participated voluntarily in a health survey of a poor slum area in the city which had a strong contingent of Vietnamese refugees, and it was primarily during the course of interviewing these families that I gained the association, and friendship of a couple of families of boat people. I began my fieldwork even before I officially began my master’s program. By the time the following semester as a graduate student started, I was already well enmeshed in a whole network of Vietnamese refugees. My fifth and final year at Fullerton was my busiest and perhaps most rewarding. I did my anthropology round the clock, and when I was not in school studying I was spending time with the Vietnamese families.</p> <p>I gained entry into the cultural world of Little Saigon via a key informant whom I had met during the health interview surveys. I had given her my telephone number while interviewing her friend, which was not unusual practice. I only made contact with her again when her apartment came up on the randomized list. During the interview I noticed she had taped the phone number I’d given her near her phone. She had three little boys and they lived in a small single bedroom apartment, complete with rats, dirty carpet, bars on all the windows, and kicked in front door. Her husband had left her and she spoke very little English very poorly. She was apparently quite depressed, sleeping many hours of the day, and was suffering headaches and dizzy spells which medical physicians could not properly diagnose. I made a deal with her that if she would help me with my ethnographic work, I would help her go to ESL classes. I finally managed to enroll her in a daily ESL program during the summer months. Her middle son was enrolled in a nearby public day care center, and I baby-sat in the park each day her other two sons. I drove her around, taking her to the grocery store and to buy things at the stores, as well as to visit her friends and families. In this way I began meeting and befriending other Vietnamese and their families, all of whom were caught up in a quite extensive multipurpose, and, so it seemed, virtually boundless network. I did not like visiting her in the apartment, because a local Vietnamese gang was quite active, and we had problems with them a couple of times. A family who was very close and helpful to my informant had earlier moved out to an outlying satellite community about an hour and a half drive from my house. I felt it would be better to move my informant’s family to be near them, and we finally managed to help her to relocate her there. Apartment hunting for these families was especially difficult because nobody wanted large families on welfare. But the Vietnamese had their own networks which seemed to consistently come through at the last moment.</p> <p>I made furniture for her new apartment, and we equipped it pretty well. I was busier than ever at school, as I had my first graduate assistantship on top of trying to complete a year’s worth of course work in a single semester. Everything seemed to click and fall into place, and I wrapped almost everything up by the last semester with very few loose ends. I entered the final summer working on my thesis full time. I completed about the forth version by August just in time for the last deadline. My committee met one morning and signed the thesis, and after that, save for a few minor administrative details, I received my Masters degree.</p> <p>Writing my thesis entailed almost a complete disassociation with the Vietnamese whom I had been involved with on a regular, everyday basis for the preceding year. I could not have finished it otherwise, and I doubt I could have written it while maintaining the relationships I had before in the same way.</p> <p>One of the primary obstacles in doing the background research for the thesis was wading through so much of the recent historical literature on the Vietnamese conflict. Very few English texts on traditional Vietnamese culture and history are available, and among these many are all too sketch and superficial. But the research, combined with my own participant observation, had been a real mind opening and mind-blowing experience. In rewriting a brief history of Vietnamese civilization, I came to realize how wrong the Americans had been ever to have been involved in the war at all, just how devastating our involvement had been for the Vietnamese people and their culture, and how civil war and conflict had been part and parcel of Vietnamese history for at least two thousand years. I had concluded that our acculturative influence on Vietnam, brief but decisive, consisted of ethnocide, ecocide and genocide. We waged a war on three fronts, against a people, their sense of history and culture, and even the very land itself upon which they depended for their autochthonous identity. "One cannot destroy a nation in order to save it." (Arthur H. Westing, Ecocide in Indochina, pg. 61)</p> <p>This viewpoint about our own Amerikan-style presence in Vietnam left me feeling very ambivalent about the Vietnamese refugee community with whom I was becoming increasingly identified with on both a personal and a professional basis. I did not blame individual Vietnamese for who they were or what they did in Vietnam, just as I do not blame the American GI for their trying to make the best of a lousy situation. I only blame the leadership on both sides, and both the American public and the Vietnamese refugee population in general, for failing to take responsibility in the whole affair and to face the realities of the entire predicament.</p> <p>A Vietnamese friend invited me to attend the eleventh annual celebration of the fall of the Saigon regime down at the ‘mini mall’ in little Saigon. I met him there and we had a dinner before the events. We sat in back of rows of chairs in the parking lot. A stage had been set up in front with large flags of the old South Vietnamese Republic. Candles were distributed to the crowd. Speakers came on stage dressed in the military uniforms of the fallen South Vietnamese Republic and these speakers harangued the audience against the communists and against establishing diplomatic relations with North Vietnam. The common belief and desire of these people had been they would eventually return victoriously to Vietnam and defeat the communists. They blamed Washington DC for their own defeat, and felt as if the U.S. government owned them a lot in return. The candles were lit and the crowd marched up the boulevard in a thick strand of people, all the while being harangued by men with loud speakers shouting at the top of their lungs—"no communists in America," "down with North Vietnam," "no diplomatic relations with North Vietnam."</p> <p>It was obvious to me in a way that was not apparent to my poor friend, who had tears in his eyes and was fully caught up in the feeling of the moment, just how fascist the demonstration really was in sentiment and in action, just how well planned and executed it had been by the ‘leadership’ of the Vietnamese refugee community, and just what they had to gain, by means of control, over the poor, dispossessed Vietnamese people in the crowd. The Vietnamese community, with help from CIA operatives, was fully engaged in manufacturing its own anti-communistic, pro-South Vietnamese Republic refugee mythology and ideology which it used as an instrument of control and self-aggrandizement over its own people.</p> <p>I became aware of many subtle contrasts and contradictions within the Vietnamese community—the presence of so much gold in its many shops, the general success and growing affluence of its small businesses in spite of the fact that so many were on welfare and receiving government support. Every family household I had been in, which were numerous was receiving full welfare benefits. At the same time, every household was involved in an ‘underground economy’ of stitching piece work for the garment industry which involved both a great deal of exploitation and a great deal of profit. Every week ‘care’ packages were piled to the ceiling in downtown little Saigon awaiting shipment back to Vietnam. Though the refugee leadership and their supporters wanted no diplomatic relations with Vietnam, their remittances themselves were the primary means of external aid to Vietnam.</p> <p>These were not merely simple goods to be shared by family and friends back home. These items were by the carton—electronic goods, etc.—no doubt intended for the underground market. And the community was much less than tolerant for divergent points of view. One Vietnamese man was murdered in a restaurant for expressing viewpoints sympathetic to the communist regime of Vietnam. A college professor at Fullerton was shot in the neck and killed by a Vietnamese student for similar reasons. I found several pages in different books expressing similar points of view in the library—one a poetry collection by Ho Chih Minh—whose pages had been glued together and marked out so as to be illegible. Exploitation within the community, of Vietnamese by other Vietnamese, was not uncommon practice of getting ahead. A common attitude and contradiction which was revealed by a questionnaire I administered in little Saigon revealed that though they fled Vietnam to escape persecution and for liberty, they believed that America suffered from too much freedom and not enough police protection. This structurally translated into their own political economic sense of structural insecurity.</p> <p>In hindsight, I wished I had done a follow up study of the community or had taken a longer time, as little Saigon subsequently changed in quite dramatic ways. Returning several times in the following years, little Saigon had more than doubled in the number of its small businesses, and had increased substantially in its apparent affluence. I wish I could have followed the trajectories of assimilation and adjustment of the several families I had been involved with—trajectories that became apparent to me only after the fact of my involvement with them. I needed to get away from the Vietnamese though. Though I respected their culture and their people, I really did not like the Vietnamese refugees well. I felt used by them, and did not trust them very well. I felt that many had been deceitful to me in fundamental ways, and I could not reconcile this basic difference of cultural value orientation and world-view with my own need for honesty. These refugees were neither the real nor the legitimate representatives of Vietnamese civilization. Rather they were the ex-colonial cast-offs, by and large corrupted by the Western influences and their own greed.</p> <p>I had finished an ethnography about the Vietnamese refugee, which, I felt, the Vietnamese had little interest in trying to understand. It seemed to me that they were mostly interested in creating their own versions of their reality to suit their own interests. One woman at CSU Fullerton had done an ethnography of the Vietnamese that was basically anti communist and pro-refugee. It gained not only recognition by the upper class members of the Vietnamese elite, but earned her a key post in the ESL program in the state. I finished my ethnography that seemed to me much more honest and realistic, as well as much more involved and professionally written, only to be met with ignorance and silence.</p> <p>I returned to a symposium at CSU Fullerton in 1990. A young man recognized me there and knew of my thesis. He was doing his own research on the Vietnamese, and told me he really liked my ethnography. He took me to lunch at a local Vietnamese restaurant, discussing the Vietnamese, anthropology and other things, and he treated me, since I did not have any cash at the time.</p> <p> </p> <p>  <hr> <font SIZE="2"> <p> </p> <p>Two Wild Geese</p> <p>There: wild geese swimming side by side,</p> <p>Staring up at the sky!</p> <p>White feathers against a deep blue,</p> <p>Red feet burning in green waves.</p> <dir> <dir> <p>Lie Chieu and Do Phap Thuan</p> </dir> </dir> <p> </p> </font> <p>I finished my MA under the wire with the deadline, and I was left in a huge anticlimactic loss at what to do next. The struggle with the thesis, which was a condensation of about a thousand pages into about 250, left me in a state of psychological exhaustion. I don’t know if it was the anger or the exasperation with all the minor typographical mistakes, which never seemed to end. I was also left feeling alienated and distant from the Vietnamese whom had been such a part of my life for the preceding year and a half.</p> <p>I spent the next four or five months working out in my garage, making furniture on order from my family, and working part time for an old retired handy-man who paid me five bucks an hour out of his pocket. On the side I began getting into Van Gough studies, the study of venomous snakes, and I got back into my oil painting on the side. I was giving an Indian woman I had met in school panting lessons once a week. I had given up on the idea of going on in an American University, believing somewhat naively that they were all to difficult to get into. Anyway, I had set my sights on leaving the U.S. and since I wanted to pursue Southeast Asian Studies, I began doing background research into the different countries there. I realized that Malaysia and Singapore had been British colonies and English was still widely spoken there. Besides, they seemed to have a relatively open social tourist policy that allowed foreigners to visit there for extended periods of time. I decided that Malaysia would be my destination. I planned and prepared for the trip several times over—but no amount of planning prepared me for the experiences I was about to have. I had little experience as a traveler and failed to take a friend’s advice to travel ‘lightly’. I bought a ticket for late January, squared away my passport, and said goodbye to my Mom and caught a bus to the airport.</p> <p>The plane landed in Kuala Lumpur about midnight on the same day it left LA half a world away. I was greeted by the "No Dada" and "Death To Drug Traffickers" signs even before debarking from the plane. It was a strange feeling. I instantly became drenched in sweat. I had made no prior hotel reservations and did not know what the going rates were. It was the beginning of Chinese New Year celebrations and many of the decent hotels were booked up. A self-appointed tourist guide offered to take me to the city and to find a hotel for a price. He eventually found me a hotel in the downtown area which was rather quite exorbitant for the area and for the standards. I spent the first weekend with him and his family, as he took me to the zoo, to the cultural museum, downtown and to his flat to eat a curry fish dinner cooked by his Malay wife. The weekend had been on me, and I knew I couldn’t continue for very long at that rate. The dinner at his home was eaten with our bare fingers, a custom which I never got quite used to, and which at the time almost made me vomit my curry rice. On Sunday morning he took me to the train station and I purchased a rail pass which allowed me to travel on the Malaysian Railway System for two weeks. It was a great deal, but I only used the train once during that time. I left half my extra belongings behind with my tour guide/expensive friend—a pair of shoes, a couple of books, a small brief case and some other odds and ends. I never saw the man or my things again, and still had two bags full of useless junk to struggle with.</p> <p>The train headed north to Penang. I might as well have been the dark side of the moon as far as I was concerned. The trip took more than eight hours, and did not come rolling into the Butterworth station until about ten o’clock at night. I made the acquaintance of the ex-Police Chief of K.L.—an elderly Sikh gentleman. We talked for a couple of hours and he told me to check into the YMCA on Burma Road in Penang and he warned me to stay away from drugs.</p> <p>The worst thing one can do is to enter a strange city in the middle of the night. One is shocked by a cascade of lights and a continuous cacophony of strange noises and smells and feelings. I did not realize that Penang was on an island and that the train let me off at the Ferry. I followed the crowd loaded down under my bags, sweating profusely in the humid night air. We swept along a wooden walkway and into a large deck area with rows of benches. I did not realize I was on a boat until the gate closed behind me and I settled down on top of my bags only to feel the rocking motion beneath me. We got off on the other side about twenty minutes later, and we swept down more wooden ramps to descend into a busy crowd of anxious waiters and shouting trishaw drivers and porters. For five Malaysian dollars, a young Tamil porter carried both my bags to his trishaw. I asked him if he could take me to the YMCA. He said of course, and I, in blind faith, jumped in for the ride. The cool air was refreshing, but it was a very thrilling experience to be riding headfirst into the oncoming headlights of cars. We stopped in front of the New Asia Hotel and he said that this was the best and most reasonable place in town (he also worked under commission by the hotel manager). He carried my bags up the steps to the second floor, and I ordered a pint of Malaysian Heineken beer and settled in under the ceiling fan of my sparsely equipped room. I had never been in a Chinese style hotel before, but I might as well have landed on Mars. I though I had really done it this time, but had extremely mixed feelings of ‘Old Asia’ excitement with the sudden realization of what a clumsy fool I must have been to come so far to the edge of nowhere.</p> <p>The next day was spent getting lost in the midst of the city on y own foot walking tour. I found various temples and kong si’s and I was propositioned by an overly friendly Indian homosexual. I witness a heroin transaction with a young drug addict who was following me around the city. Finally, having gotten lost, I found another Tamil trishaw driver who rode me back to the hotel.</p> <p>The first ten days or so was beset with an incredible loneliness, alienation and tremendous, almost paralyzing culture shock. One early morning while happening by the gate of a Kong si a young Chinese man noticed me and tagged along. He made himself my unofficial tour guide and we traveled everywhere in the city together. I paid him only a small amount, but did not trust him as I found him going through my bags and helping himself to what was inside. He was biding his time, waiting for the moment to set me up and get my money. One day on the street he was behaving very strangely toward me, and I hailed a taxi and told him to take me to the police station. I told my tour guide who would not leave me alone to get in. As I turned around he vanished into the crowd. I had had about enough of traveling, and was extremely disoriented and depressed. I checked into a rather luxurious downtown hotel across the street from the police station and stayed there for two days. I planned to leave Penang that Monday, and to leave Malaysia as soon as possible, as it seemed to me that all anyone wanted from me was my money. I met the bartender in the hotel lounge and we began talking. His command of English for a Chinese person seemed surprising to me. I told him I was leaving the next day and he agreed to take me back to the train station. The next morning he met me with his car and his young wife. I ended up touring the island with them, and as they seemed friendly enough, they invited me to come and visit their home.</p> <p>I ended up staying with this Chinese family for about a month. I paid them a little money for rent and food, and they were quite friendly to me. This is where I met Rosie, who was boarding with them. The son who had first invited me turned out to be quite untrustworthy. He too was intending to set me up for some kind of scam, and the father warned me about him. Once he realized I was on to him, it is as if I no longer existed. I moved my things down to the bedroom on the end where Rosie was staying. Rosie worked during the day, and we would go out on the town at night. She told me about the son and the family she was staying with, how they were not to be trusted and had, in the past, ripped her off as well. She lived with them because she had no other family and could not afford to live alone. Before I left, I bought her an electric fan that she could never afford with her small salary, and a little gold pendant with her initials on it.</p> <p>I flew back to KL and then back to LA I had been all of six weeks in Malaysia, and besides bringing home a couple of boxes of ceramic gifts and souvenirs, I had little to show for my journey.</p> <p>I spent about two months back in California. I was in utter limbo. I wrote another collection of poems, but did little else. I wrote back to Rosie almost everyday, and I really missed her. One day I wrote to her and proposed marriage by letter. Almost two weeks later she called me by telephone one evening and told me yes. I made arrangements to return to Malaysia, better prepared than before. The trip went smoothly and without a hitch the second time around. I checked into a small Chinese hotel near where Rosie was staying with the family, without realizing I had checked into a Chinese style brothel. Rosie came and visited me there each evening and we made arrangements for our marriage. There were a few legal formalities, mostly a matter of money and fees, which had to be taken care of first. A friend of Rosie’s helped find me a room to rent for five Malaysian dollars at the Lee Kongsi. I stayed there for about a week. The family that Rosie had been staying with became hostile, as they didn’t want to lose the means of income that Rosie provided for them. Rosie’s friends from work really came through for her, while the family she was staying with began spreading malicious rumors about town about me. I became a confidence trickster, a California abalone diver and a CIA operative. One day I rented a taxi and we drove to their house. Rosie took me in and we gathered up her belongings, loaded them in the boot of the taxi and left.</p> <p>We ended up renting an old style house in a nearby village. It was a nice big place with a big compound behind it, backing a jungle on a hill, and it cost all of one hundred and fifty dollars US a month to rent. Getting married in a civil ceremony, beneath a low ceiling fan, we had a no frills, no honeymoon wedding. We settled into our new home while Rosie went to work everyday. The possibility of employment in Malaysia was zero, and even though I had married a Malaysian citizen, I gained no visa or passport privileges or residency whatsoever. I talked with all kinds of civil Malay authorities and learned that the best I could do was to put up a thousand dollars bond for a year long visa that precluded my working there. If I had married a Muslim woman, things might have been a little easier, but I was married to a Chinese woman, and there were already too many Chinese women in Malaysia.</p> <p>We went to the U.S. embassy in KL and applied for Rosie’s residency in the U.S. It took about four or five months to clear up the administrative paperwork, and we need to have affidavits of support signed and completed by my family in the states. This processing was not completed before my own social tourist visa had expired, and I ended up having to exit the country twice, and almost a third time, and re-enter for a one month extension. I was getting worried because each time was proving problematic to get any extension at all, as the immigration authorities would always wonder what I was doing in Malaysia. We spent one weekend in Singapore that was an interesting escape, and one weekend in Hatyai in southern Thailand that was interesting in another way.</p> <p>I ended up staying about seven months in Malaysia. Rosie worked much of the time while I purchased some hand tools from cheap side downtown and making furniture from wood. Malaysia is a strange country. There is a political repression and almost a social paranoia of persecution about it. One had the very real feeling that the police could walk into your home virtually anytime, and arrest you under almost any pretext. One did not speak too loudly or freely in public places, and always took care what one said and who was listening. The tension between the Chinese and the Malays is very strong and apparent. The Chinese are much more industrious and entrepreneurial, the Malays devoutly religious. The discrimination and political persecution of the Chinese by the Malays was fairly blatant and open. Though the Chinese were economically prosperous and largely independent, the Malays had gained political dominance and controlled everything in a very systematic way. No Chinese or Tamils went beyond the equivalent of the twelfth grade, while Malay students who were poorly qualified were sent abroad to the U.S. to continue their schooling. Housing, government jobs, even businesses were under control by the Malays to the systematic exclusion of the Chinese and Malays.</p> <p>On the other hand, Penang proved to be one of the most fascinating cities on earth. It is known as hawkers’ paradise and as Pearl of the Orient. One can witness well the cycle of seasons in the year round calendar of religious celebrations. Chinese New Year consisted of all night vigils by Chinese storekeepers, who burned up huge mounds of paper in the streets, set out huge tables of roasted pigs, ducks and other Chinese delicacies for the Gods, and who lit off multiple strings of dynamite sized firecrackers. Thaipusam was a Tamil celebration in which the kavadi is carried by many men, women and children with hooks in their skin, shoes of nails, spines and needles through the cheek. The streets flow with coconut milk from all the coconut smashing done in payment to the gods for good fortune. Wesak Day is the equivalent of Christmas, and it went on at the Buddhist association next door to the Lee Kongsi while we were staying there. We made the rounds of countless temples, the Sleeping Buddha, the Thai temples across the street, the Kuan Yin temple where we had offerings made for our marriage, Kek Lok Si temple set against the hillside with the huge white statue of the Goddess of Mercy. Then came the month of Ramadan and Hari Raya Puasa. The Christians have several shrines of local saints—a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Anne. The most interesting temple is the Buddhist temple of a thousand and one steps, which almost no tourists know about and which is frequented only by a few Chinese who are willing to make the climb up Penang Hill. Rosie’s friends took us there a couple of times. It is by far the most peaceful and serene place on the whole island—free of the squalid hubbub of the city directly below it.</p> <p>The action on the streets of Penang is fast, cheap and dirty. It is an old, out of the way Chinese commercial city, that has changed little since the pre-World War II days of the British. There is an excitement about the place—the morning Chinese markets, the fish markets, hawkers and their stalls. It proved as cheap and more convenient to eat out than to bother buying food and cooking by the charcoal stoves at home. And came to know the city by knowing where the best food was to be found at the most convenient times. I never cared for Malaysian society, but I grew accustomed to and quite fond of the little city of Penang.</p> <p>I became quite the old Asia hand. I got to know Penang very well by walking around it almost everyday. On our periodic trips to KL, Singapore and Thailand, we would meet each time a young American tourist headed up to Penang. We would serve as their tour guide and treated them quite royally, showing them the sites that tourists do not normally see. I missed being with Americans, talking American and it is this, which lead me to make these acquaintances. We never took advantage of these people, and they kept in touch with us when we returned to the US I think they immensely appreciated someone taking the time and care to help them in the city and to show them around a little. I also missed drinking milk while I was there, and grew quite thin. The soy bean juice and coconut milk, while quite delicious, did not prove to be adequate substitutes for my raving for milk, which I never really got over.</p> <p>Renting the house, I bought a young black dog from the caretaker of the Lee Kongsi where we had first stayed. The dog was kept permanently on the end of a short chain out in the open. It had worn a little brown spot on the lawn, and I would find it there day and night, rain or shine. I ended up buying the dog from the man for few Malaysian dollars, and an ang pow of a pound of sugar for the old man. He was quite delighted to receive an ang pow from a young white man. The dog was quite difficult to deal with. So long on a short chain, it proved uncontrollable and hyperactive in our compound. I spent a few days trying to mend the fence to prevent him from escaping. It had ticks and I found some tick bathe at the local RSPCA that was just down the street. The dog liked me, but could not keep down or from biting me in the leg. It was near wild and proved too much for me to deal with everyday. I ended up taking him down to the RSPCA where he would be put away. I listened to him howling all night, and the next day, walking back from town, I happened by the front gate of the RSPCA to find the dog shooter with the doors of his van open. I sensed something and went into the compound and found the stiff black body of the dog with its head wrapped in bloody newspapers. The Tamil shooter told me it was a beautiful dog. I agreed while stroking its flank. I left with tears in my eyes. I will never forget the look the dog gave me when I first carried it to the cage at the RSPCA—as if I had forsaken its loyalty. It rained very hard that day, and I felt utterly depressed. It was as if the Gods somewhere up in Heavens had been angry with me and was scolding me with the thunder and lightening in the afternoon storm that had been sent.</p> <p>That evening we decided to go to a movie in town to cheer up. While waiting at the dark bus stop two young men on a motorcycle came riding straight up to us. The man on the back was about to snatch Rosie’s purse. I poked out my umbrella with its metal point like a bayonet and caught him in the elbow. The backed off and came on us again very aggressive. One was edging closer to Rosie, putting his hands on her. I interposed myself between him and Rosie and grabbed my Swiss pocket- knife I carried in my pocket. I pulled Rosie behind me, who was frightened into panic, while we retreated into the darkness. The strangers had taken off their helmets and were intending to bash us in the head with them. Passers by just ignored the whole scene, and no one was getting involved. I became very angry with Malaysia and Malaysians. Just then a police car happened by and we waved them over. The two motorcyclists took off in a hurry. The police gave chase. We waited and the police came back and took us to the police station where we filed a report. The two guys had been active in the area for a while—they had slashed a nun at a nearby Catholic cancer hospital while trying to steal a necklace off her. After that incident, I never felt comfortable anywhere in Malaysia again except when in the company of other people and in well-lighted places.</p> <p>  <hr> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Buddha body is omnipresent.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Each sentient being beholds it</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Through aspiration and Karma relation</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">As it dwells eternally on this seat of meditation.</p> <p> </p> </font> <p>We arrived back in LA in August of that year. Rosie wore her traditional kebaya and sarong on the airplane. We had a hard time in customs, and were met outside in the lobby by my Mom and sister who were carrying balloons and candy. After half a year in Penang, LA suddenly seemed like one big, endless, crowded freeway. We did not know what we would do next. But soon my brother propositioned me to help him construct a dental office for him, as he had finished dental school a couple of years previously, was already tired of turning a huge profit for other dentists, and was anxious to strike out on his own.</p> <p>After quite a bit of conflict over how to do it and who would do it, during which I quit more than once to leave him stranded. I finally convinced him that he didn’t need to pay a contractor shark thirty dollars an hour and that we could do it ourselves. I ended up working almost everyday for the next six months. I did virtually everything—plastering, framing, dry-walling, electrical and plumbing installation, lighting, purchasing, building much of the office furniture, shelves and counter tops, helping to install the wall to wall carpeting, hanging all the doors, all the painting and finishing touches. It turned out quite nice. I even made nice oak and walnut picture frames for his diplomas, which he hung in his front office. I worked mostly alone, with Rosie sometimes at my side to assist with the more tedious tasks. I finished this job in January of the following year, and had earned all of about a thousand dollars for about six months full time work. I begrudged my brother for having promised to pay me four dollars an hour and for only really paying me only about fifty cents an hour, but I did it to help my mother who was bearing most of the costs of the materials for the project, and whom I owed a few thousand dollars for the trip to Malaysia anyway.</p> <p>Once that ended I began seriously looking for a job with my Master’s degree for the next five months. I went back to visit the chairperson of the anthropology department at CSU Fullerton to get his advice. He told me to look for federal government jobs. I ended up knowing how to do it on my own. I looked not only at federal level, but also at the state and local levels as well. A Master’s degree is something which nobody wants to hire and pay for—one is either ‘over qualified’ for many kinds of jobs, or ‘under qualified’ for the really good jobs. It was a difficult time for us as we had little money and no future in a big expensive city where money was everything. I followed every possible lead for jobs I could find. I became aware of how much there were screens of obfuscation, especially at the municipal and state level, which got people involved in long extensive examinations, lines and interviewing, but from which very few if any jobs were actually forthcoming. It seemed like an elaborate, systematic scam to keep the jobless preoccupied with filling out forms and standing in lines in hopes of some minimal job, when there were actually few real jobs to be had that weren’t going to people through insider networks. I ended up compiling a large notebook on getting jobs in various sectors, in teaching, in government, business, international and giving it to the Chairperson of the Anthropology department so that other students would not have to go through the troubles that I did in compiling information on relevant jobs. It was a notebook complete with the federal job application forms, numbers and addresses for job listings and for community college credentials.</p> <p>I became increasingly depressed and not finding anything while spinning my wheels. Rosie entered a regional vocational training school in the early summertime and was quite happy in her schoolwork. I had sent an application to SUNY Binghamton Anthropology program while filling out other job application forms without much farther thought of it. It had been sitting inside the top drawer of my desk since 1986 and it seemed just like a shot in the dark. "Why not" I asked myself. I had forgotten completely about it when in July, I received an acceptance letter from this anthropology department. The best I had managed to find in the way of the job was as a ‘recreation director’ at a senior citizen’s center way across the city. It was all of seven hours a week and paid four fifty an hour. It consisted of sweeping up and picking up the chairs and tables after the old people, and doing typing for a young woman in charge who was still working on her BA in social sciences. I worked with a young sixteen-year old Chicano gang member who was given the same job more than full time. He lasted on the job shorter than I did, getting busted by the police for ripping off the cafeteria storeroom. The time and pay made it hardly worth the time, hassle and amount of gas driving across town. It was during these months that I built a deck for my Mom in her backyard, as well as helped to finish another one for a friend. I also got into buying cheap furniture at the local thrift shops and stripping out and refinishing them.</p> <p>Without much to lose, we packed up our little VW bug that I had refinished, the same one I bought brand new in 1976 and had only driven it for less than a year myself, and drove to New York in time for the Fall semester at SUNY Binghamton.</p> <p>I found the anthropology department to my distaste the first week there. It was unfriendly and alienating. I had no support and spent the first year there sitting out in the hallways. Towards the end of the first school year, I was working in the empty conference room when the chairman happened by the door in the hallway, looked in at me, and told me they would have to find an office for me. I only laughed, thinking he was a day late and about a dollar short. The first semester was the hardest. We were living miserably in a small run down single bedroom apartment. The slumlord was only interested in money, and failed to fix anything. The plumbing from the bathroom upstairs leaked severely into our only closet and the water made its way to our bed. I grew less and less patient, and we finally moved to a much better place on the edge of town.</p> <p>I befriended a couple of people that first semester. One was a British social anthropologist who was interested in what he called ‘human behavior’. He early on warned me about the department and told me he thought I would be better to transfer to another school. He himself hated the politics of the department. He saw it having gone downhill over the years, the very people whom he himself had brought into the department were now stabbing him in the back and withdrawing departmental support for his students. The department was very cold and had a ‘closed door policy’. People were chronically whispering and looking over their shoulders. I also befriended another professor there, a socio linguist from Edinburough and Singapore who was on a one year contract there. He also was quite alienated and ostracized in the department, and quite lonely there. People did not like him because he had cerebral palsy and people found him strange. He delighted that my wife was Malaysian Chinese and we developed an almost instant friendship, which lasted well beyond Binghamton. We had many dinners, many beers and many talks together,</p> <p>I did not like the school, and was quite ambivalent about remaining there. There did not seem to be any place for me or my interests in the department, and very little support or charity from anyone. The students were extremely competitive and even viciously so. I only knew and liked a handful of students there; many made an obvious point of ignoring me and my wife and even of venting their open hostility towards us.</p> <p>The second semester proved to be the best one there. I made the acquaintance of another professor, a cultural anthropologist. Rosie began baby sitting nearly full time for her two young children. Everyday I would make the long drive to and from her home to pick up and drop off Rosie. With a little income, and better relations in the department, I became more productive. I wrote four manuscripts during the spring and summer. It was also during that second Spring semester that I decided to do an ethnography of the anthropology department for the field methods class. I was met with mixed reactions by both students and faculty. Many faculty were absent and ignored what ever was going on. Many students initially expressed enthusiasm for the project. My social anthropology professor warned me against it, saying it would not be a good thing to do. I ended up interviewing about forty people in the department, about a third of the whole department.</p> <p>Several aspects became apparent to me. First and foremost was the utter multiplicity and complexity of viewpoints and attitudes. Second was the degree to which such attitudes and viewpoints were largely a function of the individual’s relative positionality within the department and the larger context, and of the individual’s own distinctive biography and background experience. Third was the distinction between what people were telling me and what they may actually have been telling me. By and large most people wanted to present a positive image of themselves to me. An interesting aspect is that about 79% of the students reported an upper middle class background, and 79% were white, non-foreign and from the northeastern United States. I interviewed about 50% men and women, and about 79% of the men reported that they did not believe anthropology to be a male dominated field and about 79% of the women reported that they did believe anthropology was male dominated. People on either side of the coin had reasonable rationalizations for their beliefs. Virtually everyone I spoke with made ‘sense’ when set in context to their own background experiences and rationalizations. I came away from the study concluding that people for the most part tried to present to me their best side during the interview, and were interested in hiding aspects of their own character which they themselves believed might detract from their anthropologicality. There was also a clear dichotomy between people who were critical and negative about the department and those who believed that the department, though maybe having some problems, was really a good place. Those of the former group tended to report particular instances and more specific complaints of unfairness or discrimination, while those of the latter group tended to be more general and nonspecific, and more ‘ego-centrically’ focused upon their own situations and values. The tended to see themselves and the department in which they were situated in, in a more unproblematic and unquestionable way.</p> <p>Everyone was expecting me to publish, at least within the department, my results, and many expected my results would focus upon a set of specific suggestions on ‘how to improve the department’. My main objective in conducting the study in the first place was descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Because I genuinely felt that some of the information may be harmful for some, as well as for myself, if it were published, and because I did not complete a finished version of the manuscript and I could not clearly ascertain what would and what may not be harmful to people in the department, I decided not to publish it at all. I think more than a few people felt let down by this, as if I owed them something to them for granting me the interview, and I think this may have tended to reflect negatively upon my status within the department. I already had my own ideas on how to improve things in the department, even before the study, and my results from the study only tended to reinforce than to disconfirm those ideas. I myself could not clearly nor concisely separate my own values and attitudes from those, which I was supposed to be reporting on in the department. During many of the interviews themselves, I became keenly aware of how my presence, my own relative positionality and status, and my own background experiences were critically influencing the direction and results of each interview. If the interviewee and interviewer were interested in achieving rapport, there tended to be an exclusive emphasis on things shared in common, and a de-emphasize upon exceptional differences. If there was a block to achieving mutual rapport, as happened most often with some of the faculty, then the emphasis came to be on the differences and upon the dominance of the interviewee’s own points of view, while things in common tended to be de-emphasized. Either way, the results were considerably more biased than an ideal, disinterested study demands. Though I think this kind of bias is inevitable and must always contaminate the neutrality of any kind of ethnographic participant observation, this does not complete negate the value or importance of such a study.</p> <p>In hindsight, it has struck me how much like anyone else anthropologists really are, and how much like any other kind of corporate community in anthropology department is really like. In this regard, the expectations of reciprocity for the interview was not too unlike the demands many Vietnamese refugees made of me in return for interviewing them. Bringing the results of such a study too close to ‘home’ must always have unintended and probably damaging consequences for someone within the department, as it must follow the dictum knowledge is power. There is no such thing, in a local context, of neutral knowledge. There is also no way of being able to be completely sure that the identity of one’s informants is completely protected, so that what they say may not be used against them by other people in power. Different people were attempting not only to influence what I wrote or how it was written by representing themselves, and the department, cast in a certain light, but were indirectly via my own study attempting to exert an influence within the departmental setting. There is no knowledge, however indirect, which cannot be used to ‘triangulate’ upon a person’s identity and to modify the local status of that individual.</p> <p>The most important thing though, was that everyone seemed to be presenting themselves and their own perceived situations in the most advantageous light possible, myself included, and were, conversely, subconsciously trying to cover over all that may have been threatening to their own sense of status identity. How each person represented her/himself depended largely upon their own positionality and context within the department, such that what some people may have been attempting to highlight others may have been attempting to implicitly deny.</p> <p>Finally, this sense of foreground/background contrast seemed to me to relate to what I believe to be a prototypically ‘American’ characteristic of a kind of compartmentalization between private and public domains of existence and experience, and a kind of socially reinforced ego-centricity of orientation in which experience becomes focused by, and oriented around, one’s own psycho-social and biographical identity.</p> <p> </p> <p>Another interesting aspect of the study was that almost everyone believed that the interviews and the question protocol asked during the interview was the main thing of the study, when actually the main organ of the ethnography was my own participant observation and the indirect open-endedness that the interviews with its protocols was set up to foster. The interviews by themselves meant little, but when compared to everything else that went on alongside of and outside of the interview, tended to reveal a great discrepancy between how almost everyone presented themselves to me and the kinds of actual interactions that occurred in many other contexts. This speaks of the silent, subtle, and the sublime power, which the ethnographer carries to the field. No aspect of an ethnographer’s experiences escapes notice and interpretation. There are few if any ‘neutral’ elements of such experience.</p> <p>Setting oneself in a position of participant observer in any setting has certain consequences. It tends to frame all experiences in a quasi-objective way which such that every new experiences becomes added to the cumulative fund of knowledge, and becomes weighed in relation to this larger fund. It superimposes degree of self-alienation in which others come to participate in and reinforce. In such a manner, one can no longer be a naïve or completely innocent participant in the ongoing production, but one’s own identity and positionality is thus contaminated. Furthermore, this is an irreversible process which leads not only to a permanent loss of innocence, greater understanding, but to the relatively permanent affective separation of one’s own sense of identity and the social context in which that identity becomes defined. Once achieved, such an attitude or point of view cannot be simply undone or removed from experience, though it can perhaps be redefined.</p> <p>Though only one person in the department actually read what I wrote, and though only a couple expressed enough interest to actually ask me about it in any detail, everyone seemed to have formed some kind of opinion about the whole thing, for better or worse, both before, during and after it happened. For some it was seen as a threat, to others it was a weapon, and to still others it was to be a tool for change. During the interviews, a few found my protocol not matching their own expectations, and expressed disappointment. Others found the interview fun and even enjoyable, largely because it was one of the few times they got to talk at length about what they themselves were about to someone else within the Department context. A few criticized my approach and told me how I should do it and what I should be asking.</p> <p>Summer soon came, and with the semester over, the incentive to continue actively with the project waned. Other involvements quickly diverted my attention and I left the whole thing basically incomplete and unfinished. I felt like I did with the Vietnamese. I grew tired of the interviews and I grew to dislike the whole situation I was involved in. I did not want to be construed any longer as the student doing an ethnography of the department—either as a rebel or as a savior. The whole project had gained control over me, my status, frame of mind, and identity, rather than my having control over it. I began believing that the whole thing was a mistake from the beginning, an unwise mistake, and I came to question my original motives for beginning it in the first place.</p> <p>Nevertheless, subsequent events, a few of which were quite unexpected, and others which seemed almost too predictable, tended afterward to confirm my understanding, and to reaffirm my basic attitude about the department and the people within it. I had set something in motion, which I no longer had the power to stop, either in myself or in the department. My own status and positionality within the department had become irrevocably jeopardized by the study.</p> <p>It is interesting that during the course of the study, though I had been already into it for a couple of months, an outside set of evaluators came in to give the department a critique. They were there all of one day, and they were given the grand tour by the powers that be. Though everyone had long known what I was up to, no one even suggested the possibility that these observers might want to talk to me about the department. There was almost a feeling that I should be kept apart from them. I have always wondered what these relative strangers could learn about the department in the course of a single day what I couldn’t learn in a few months. They must be pretty good. I’ve learned to accept my own anthropological triviality and mediocrity—besides I do not yet have that all-important PhD that would legitimate whatever I do. A similar thing had happened at CSU Fullerton. A rather politically oriented professor was appointed in charge of a program for the Southeast Asian refugees, not because of her relative lack of experience with these people, but because she had a Ph.D. Meanwhile I’ve remained long unemployed and essentially unemployable in spite of my anthropological experiences.</p> <p>I got involved in painting the house where we lived for our landlady, and doing some carpentry during the summer. It did not earn us very much, but the gratitude and friendship of our landlady. My wife became pregnant, which tended to complicate everything else a little bit. Towards the end of summer, just about two weeks before the fall semester began one of the students in our department committed suicide. I had met him in the hallway just a week before as he was having an interview with one of the professors—the same person who was not only implicated in his own problems in the department, which this professor was trying to solve to my problems. His suicide caught everyone including his live in girlfriend, by surprise, and everyone was quite upset about it.</p> <p>I placed flowers in the department in his name. The head of the department definitely did not want them there, as I felt he wanted to cover over the whole incident and get things back to business as quickly as possible before the new semester began. A group of students who were his friends approached me, and asked if I would help sign a petition of complaint that would go above and outside of the department, in protest of unfair practices, which they believed, aggravated the circumstances of his death. I agreed, but didn’t hear anything more about it. More than a few people felt that this student had been unfairly treated by certain people within the department, and that his death was not altogether attributable to his own psychological problems.</p> <p>Even before his suicide, I had reached the general conclusion about the department that, because it was so hierarchically top down and status oriented, it depended upon its effective ethos upon finding and persecuting abnormal difference within the department. This was a kind of group think phenomena in which many people seemed to be engaging in unconsciously. Different people had been the target of this kind of ‘persecutory’ and incriminating complex, with various consequences. It was a kind of scapegoating and ostracizing which maintained the relatively tight reign of authority, control and conformity which the more politically motivated people seemed to have over the whole department. This formed a kind of background context which tended to predefine and precondition the individual students own status identity, psycho social adjustments, and their peer and official evaluations which were kept on file and which were used as a chief instrument in determining a person’s eligibility for support.</p> <p>One person almost experienced a nervous breakdown over the evaluations, which she read about herself by a professor, an evaluation she felt to be unfounded and unfair. Also, other students were quite aware of this, and were deliberately engaged in ‘impression management’, not only in terms of their identity, but in manipulating professors' opinions about other students in the department. This involvement and influence of other students over the official and semi-official status of an individual graduate student within the department became especially marked over issues involving critical indeterminacy and greater subjectivity of evaluation. Some people seemed almost frightened by too much subjectiveness approached and demanded from professors a more objective and authoritative standard from above. It is a paradox, that some of the most self righteous, and most cool seeming students were the ones most implicated in this deliberate manipulation of the professor’s attitudes and opinions about other students. The demands were always made in terms of greater authorial objectivity.</p> <p>In regard to the professors, one facet of their authoritarianism I found particularly disgusting was their somewhat hypocritical and hypercritical paternalism toward their children. Those students who manipulated the professors played up to them as if they were parental figures and they were dependent ‘children’ who needed to be protected and favored over and above the other students who refused to play along with the unwritten rules of the game.</p> <p>This kind of paternalistic attitude towards graduate students became particularly apparent to me in the third and final semester at Binghamton. I was finally given a TA-ship, and though I carried a heavier load, and did most of the work on schedule. Where some of the TA’s were late even though they had only half as many students, these TA’s were chronically given preferential treatment by the professor because they ‘played along’ with him in such a supplicative and paternalistic manner.</p> <p>One professor in particular, who was the one implicated with the suicide, thought that she could solve my problem, which became expressed in terms of writing. (Similar to the suicide’s problem) I resented her paternalistic, parent child attitude from the beginning, and refused to play along with her. I disliked not being treated like an adult, with my own sense of the world. She backed down after I threatened to put a special note into my file complaining of her preferential treatment of some students over others in our class. Though I wrote some of the most productive papers ever for her class, she began giving me consistently lower marks for each subsequent paper. I began responding by adopting ever more outlandish styles in which to frame my essays.</p> <p>I was working on the assumption that authoritarian personalities have difficulty in dealing with normal frame disruption. If one deliberately disrupts the ‘normal’ taken for granted frames and style of convention in one’s writing, such people would not be able to deal in a tolerant way with such differences, even though such framing had little or nothing to do with the actual subject matter or content of the paper, except in terms of being ‘metalogically’ framed in ways that reflected the content. As I expected to have happen, this person could not deal at all with such distortion, and each term paper gave me a lower and lower grade, until she gave me a ‘D’ for the final paper which was written as a take home Master’s examination.</p> <p>The real power a professor has over the status of the student became clearly apparent to me by the end of the semester. A group of professors who did not like me decided to withdraw departmental support I had been promised for the following spring semester. I knew this would happen even a few months earlier. The first response by this particular professor to my first term paper sealed my fate. I remember realizing then, in a sudden moment, that I had no more future or place in the department. I remember, two months before it ever happened, walking out to a window at the end of the hallway and looking out at the cold gray skies, and feeling the same cold inside of me.</p> <p>I planned my exit from the department in a graceful fashion. I had already written to many other schools and had applied to ten. I people whom I asked for letters of recommendation from Binghamton I either did not fully trust, or else they failed somewhat miserably to come through at the last moment for me. The key professor I was counting on, the British social anthropologist who advised me to transfer the year before, suddenly took off to Africa without completing what I requested from him. None of the schools that time around accepted me, and I ended up leaving Binghamton without anywhere else to go.</p> <p>The news of the withdrawal of support and the readjustment of my status, from a Ph.D. Candidate to conditional on the basis of the letter grade of that one paper. I resented as well the fact that I had already had my MA degree that I felt I had earned the hard way. It still hit me like a ton of bricks. It happened right at Christmas time, and right before Rosie was due to have her baby. I was floored and severely depressed. I never stepped foot back in the department, and never said goodbye to anyone except one student who had been in Brazil when all of this happened, and yet who remained a close friend in spite of it. We left there about a month after Mahala was born, packing our truck, giving away most of our possessions, and driving back to California. No one there got to see what our baby looked like, and none of my ‘friends’ had seemed to have the nerve to bother to find out about us.</p> <p>I left Binghamton completely. I met another graduate student in philosophy there who came there at the same time as I and who was just leaving the school behind in the same way. He expressed to me many of the same feelings, which I had felt, about the place. We had both arrived there a year and a half before with high expectations of success, and we were both leaving with profound disappointment about the school.</p> <p>I had been made to feel like a failure when I had really done nothing wrong, except not to conform myself to the paternalistic expectations of a few professors. Their own, highly prejudiced judgment weighed much heavier than all the years of experience and successful involvement in anthropology I had had. I would not doubt it if these same professors intentionally tried to keep me from getting into other graduate programs through insider networks and unofficial phone calls. We all still know who we are, in spite of the impersonal side of it all.</p> <p>  <hr> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Gateless Gate</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">An instant realization sees endless time.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Endless time is as one moment.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">When one comprehends the endless moment</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">He realizes the person who is seeing it.</p> <p> </p> <p>  </p> </font> <p>I arrived back in California feeling as if we had never left, as if we had gone right back to where we had begun with, nothing different except the facts that we were two years older, had a small baby, and a sour attitude towards anthropologists and anthropology in general. I anxiously awaited the news from my other applications only to receive one disappointment after another. It seemed as if no program wanted a half-baked anthropological reject from SUNY Binghamton. I was left without any sense of direction or determination, and we didn’t know what to do. I felt like déjà vu all over again, like a vicious and endless cycle. I knew anthropology and felt fundamentally confident of myself and my training, and I resolved myself to apply again. I ended up applying to about 16 more schools over the summertime, for all those programs accepted applications in the off season. I cost me about a thousand dollars all in. I busied myself in the meantime with little different projects. I installed a Jacuzzi my sister had given to my mom into the deck I had built for her two years before. I worked on another deck for a professor friend from CSU Fullerton that was located in the mountains. I later received the news that the whole cabin had burned down. I was near frantic to hear positive news from somebody, but was feeling in fundamental despair without any hope of anything. I believed I would only receive more rejections. I ended up pouring a concrete driveway for my mom. Then I received news of acceptance from Southern Methodist University and from the University of Missouri, Columbia, at about the same time.</p> <p>I couldn’t make up my mind between the two, and left early to visit both departments. SMU had offered me support for the springtime and seemed as if it had more wealth than MU Columbia. It was perhaps one of the hardest decisions I ever made, and after visiting both places, I felt more uncertain and confused than before. I felt literally as if I was in two places at once without being wholly in any place. SMU soon came through with on campus housing which clenched the decision for me. We stayed about a month in a hotel room in Dallas until the campus housing became available. We moved in just before Christmas time and settled in just in time for the spring semester to begin.</p> <p>It took me all of about two weeks to realize I had made a mistake in choosing SMU. It was not really, from a purely academic standpoint, a bad department. I just did not click with the people in it very well. I felt even more ostracized beginning at SMU than I did finishing at Binghamton. I made open comments to a lecturer in one of the classes which neither the lecturer nor any of the students appreciated very much. The next day, in my office, I overheard this same professor talking out loud about it, saying how this new student was being nonconformist. I thought I had made an intellectually valid and interesting comment. Rumor spread throughout the department, the reverberations of which came back to me via other professors, and though none of the other students even made the effort to talk with me or to try to get to know me, it was as if they had already formed their own opinion and evaluation about me.</p> <p>The other TA I worked with added fuel to the fire. She was a middle-aged neurotic white woman who drove to school everyday in a Mercedes Benz and seemed to have little better to do than to annoy other students and screw the faculty. She thought that she should have control over my sections and my own work, even though the professor in charge of both of us made it explicitly clear from the outset that we could do our own thing under the aegis of her syllabus. She followed this professor around like a young child, and her paternalism was as strong as what I had experienced at Binghamton. The teacher though, saw through it for the most part and was a little disturbed by it. She just didn’t know what to do about it. This student was a pain in more than one butt. She was having an ongoing affair with another, rather neurotic looking professor, and felt as if she had some power in the department. She spread lies about me just at the time when the funding for the following semester was being decided, and tried to influence the department about me, even though she herself never bothered to ask about me or try to get to know me in any way. She had convinced our professor that I was being too ‘subjective’ in my evaluations of my students essays when in fact all I was really doing was using my own system of ‘points’ different from the other Ta’s. It seemed pretty petty and pointless, but its effect was well designed and deliberate—to influence the committee decision against my further funding.</p> <p>The same general kind of phenomenon I had observed going on between professor and students at Binghamton I observed at SMU. The same paternalism, manipulation, the same kind of incriminating ostracism, the status control of the grapevine and the focusing of all these issues over the authorial problem of objectivity and subjectivity. I happened not just once, but several times at SMU. I was prepared for it, having experienced it before and I knew better how to deal with it. I bowed out rather gracefully from SMU. I made A’s in all my course work there, and we packed our truck and left without saying goodbye to anyone.</p> <p>The case and cause at SMU was not exactly the same as at Binghamton. I had made the acquaintance of one graduate student who had been six years at SMU and he had informed me a little of the inside history of the department. The general orientation of the whole department, exceptions notwithstanding, was basically one of cultural materialism and cultural ecology. Any critical voice to the contrary was met with strong reaction, a mutual reaction by both order imposing professors and order seeking and conformist oriented students all of whom wanted to play at science. Materialism formed a certain orienting, and often, hidden, agenda which emphasized the etic over the emic, the material over the ideal, and the positive over the evaluative. This acquaintance had been screwed over by the same strong voices who thought that I should be silent and obedient in class, and he was looking to transfer to another more productive program.</p> <p>  <hr> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A Mountain Dream</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Pure Void: bamboos by thousands find a home.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The brook cascades-a mirror spilling chills.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A shower of moonlight drenched the air last night.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">I rode the yellow crane and joined the gods.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Nguyen Trai</p> <p> </p> <p>I am now completing my first semester at MU Columbia. We drove directly north to Columbia from Dallas. I opened a bank account there the first day, and we deposited our possessions in a storage rental, and drove back to California to await news of receiving on campus housing, which I was expecting a month later. Back at home again, I put in a new lawn, an automatic sprinkler system and landscaped the front yard for my mom.</p> <p>We drove back to Columbia in a hurry when we found, a day late, that we had to be there in person to be let into our apartment by the first, which meant we had just one week to get ready again. We made the move without any hitches and settled in during the hot summer months at the University Village.</p> <p>Since being here, I have dedicated myself almost exclusively to my writing and this has proven to be one of the most productive periods of my life. The basic cost of living here is about as cheap and affordable for poor people as can be had in the entire US.</p> <p>Though I refuse to adopt the same kind of attitude as I had at either Binghamton and SMU, and will not try to analyze the social relations or power structure within the department, I will offer my first impressions of the place. It is perhaps one of the poorest universities on the States—making its incentive structure for graduate students less than adequate. The people, either graduate students or faculty, are not overly friendly. Though I’ve been here almost a semester now, I’ve only spoken to one other graduate student at all, though I see a few almost everyday. Everyone here seems too busy or too important to take the time to chat. The professors here, like everywhere, are always very busy juggling their schedules. But here, people seemed to behave more professionally and less paternalistically, perhaps more in spite of themselves than because of themselves. I do not know what complex set of factors make the difference between one professor who passes judgment without a complete knowledge and another who holds such prejudgment, or at refrain from allowing their own presentiments from being the decisive factor in their treatment of students.</p> <p>The future is in deed and in word still an open, unfinished book. There is no telling what our future will bring us, whether we will reach yet another dead end, or whether my time, money and energy spent here at Columbia will prove rewarding and worth it. Though I am of a minority in Anthropology, I am not alone, and I know of more than a mutilated handful of others who share in my anthropological worldview and values.</p> <p>I have learned one important lesson from all of my many trials and tribulations throughout my life. Though I may be alone, I no longer feel lonely, and though I may be in the company of many others, I often feel very alone. I will not treat others in my time as others have so often treated me.</p> <p> </p> <p>  <hr> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Sleeping Buddha</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Dreaming of Nirvana</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">By the time you awaken</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">It will be too late</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Hugh</p> <p> </p> </font> <p>I now take my anthropology with a grain of salt. There are no complete, unfinished, impartial truths in the world—there is only half-truth that is discolored by deceit and obscured beneath the veil of illusion.</p> <p>The truth can both empower a person and can be used against a person—it is a double-edged sword that often as not cuts both ways.</p> <p>We would sometimes like to live within a world in which truth is simple and straight forward, clear cut and concise, but it proves to be rarely, if ever so.</p> <p>There is a certain prestige power associated with the command over and control of truth in the world. Because truth I is always half empty and therefore half false, there is always an unfortunate degree of uncertainty also associated with truth. Uncertainty becomes associated with falsehood and the unknown, as well as with the possibility of deceit. Such uncertainty also becomes associated with failure, especially in a society which value success, and rewards it well. The preoccupation with success is underscored by a secret fear of failure, which must be projected out upon antithetical examples in our social environment. We must find failure in our world as much as we must find success, and we must realize it in order that we can then persecute it. Such fear of failure leads to an obsession with uncertainty and a compulsion for certainty and the kind of order that such certainty brings with it. Those obsessed with failure must seek out and destroy uncertainty in their lives, and they must find examples which embody such uncertainty as much as they symbolize failure.</p> <p>Because truth is relative, one person’s certainty may be another’s uncertainty, one person’s success another’s failure.</p> <p>The power of truth involves the possession of information and the management of social impressions in order to reinforce status and social solidarity. Control over the truth amounts to control of a person’s solidarity. Control over the truth amounts to control of a person’s status in face to face and group interactions. Truth and its illusion determines the measure of acceptability of and legitimacy of certain forms of knowledge which in turns tend to validate such knowledge in self reinforcing cycles of belief and behavior. Information networks—grapevines—serve the function of reinforcing status and group boundaries—augmenting the status quo of the existing power hierarchy and systematically excluding marginal members who come to represent the repressed feeling of failure and doubt which is common to the social atmosphere. In maintaining the power of one’s truth and the system that supports it, one must deny and falsify or exclude evidence and viewpoints which are contradictory or conflicting and that cast the shadow of uncertainty over such power.</p> <p>Deceit is implicit to the denial of truth. Within the circle of deception that maintains the vital lie of absolute truth, deceit comes at various levels and in various ways. There are permissible kinds of everyday deceptions that are largely unconscious and mostly out of awareness, in the service of maintaining the local status of one’s own ego identity. Then there are tolerable deceptions which pass unnoticed or semi-officially acknowledged as part of the way things are. There are also promotional deceptions, those delusions that become the part and parcel of ideology and the mythoi of power. Then there are also those tactical and strategic deceptions that allow the effective user to manipulate, conceal, deny, and distort truth in effective ways, for the purposes of power. In the circle of deception, truth becomes the vicious, unfortunate lie. Truth becomes dangerous, and becomes sanctioned to the taboo regions. In the manner of Irving Goffman and John Berreman, we can separate social spaces into the front regions of open, overt discourse and back regions of tact denial and of covert dialogue in closed circles.</p> <p>With the social reinforcement of the denial of truth, there comes a need not to know. If knowledge creates responsibility, then its denial constitutes an avoidance of responsibility. There is a need to avoid, ignore and discriminate against those elements of our common environment which constitute a threat to our understanding—ultimately the threat to our unknown and the fear of uncertainty.</p> <p>Within small communities, the social psychological phenomena of ‘group think’ can take control over the ethos, nomos and pathos of collective group consciousness and conscience. The desire for the kind of solidarity which comes from blind conformity and self sacrifice to the good of the corporate interests of the collect, and the corresponding emphasis upon organizational efficiency and routine operational conformity can take control and become the over riding imperative in the determination of an individual’s status identity, freedom and responses. Within such an atmosphere, truth becomes taboo, and deceit becomes routinized, habitual and an indirectly sanctioned constraint upon an individual’s belief and behavior.</p> <p>To the extent that an anthropology department provides a forum for social mobility, like any other academic forum, anthropological knowledge and understanding becomes conditioned by and informed by a kind of class consciousness which is articulated in status control, ego identity, and truth power in daily, face to face discourse. This is as true for graduate students who are preoccupied with their own future careers in the field as much as it is for faculty members who are concerned for the reputation and their professional recognition within the wider status hierarchy of the field. To some extent, this class-consciousness informs the mythoi of anthropologos. In this regard it must be seriously questioned what is the symbolic status of the anthropological other as a counter-reference significant other, as well as to what is the somewhat liminal, and anti-structural status of the field in relation to the center of anthropology as this is practiced and reproduced within the university. It has been my claim that, to this extent, the field has constituted by and large an officially sanctioned dumping ground in which the normally repressed subjectivities of the anthropologist can be enacted and brought to realization, while the significant, counter reference other constitutes the unconscious, symbolic target of the anthropologist’s own repressed subjectivities and feelings of weakness, inferiority and insecurity.</p> <p>American culture and character reinforces this predisposition and ego centric orientation of self aggrandizement at the expense of others by its extreme emphasis upon the values of achievement and social success. Anthropologia, within the academic island of the department, becomes imbued with so much Amerikana with its implicit promotion of aggressiveness and personal acquisitiveness.</p> <p>There are several related features of a kind of American complex of what might be called Academic Authoritarianism. First, besides being largely class tied and class bound consciousness of status identity, which from the standpoint of false consciousness of people preaching one thing and doing the opposite, constitutes so much legitimated and legitimating hypocrisy, academic authoritarian in general is largely paternalistic. Besides a male dominated, ‘father knows best’ kind of attitude, it promotes a parent-child identification and relationship of social dependency/dominance between the professor and the student. This kind of relationship is mutually reinforcing and supplicative for the egos of both the professor and the student—reaffirming one another’s identity vis a’vis the significant reference/counter reference’s other. This relationship links knowledge and the control of truth with ego identity and feelings of certainty/uncertainty, success/failure and with social power/prestige and status role identity. It involves, differentially and quite variable, some measure of compartmentalization of the self between personal and subjective feelings of uncertainty and insecurity, and professional and objective attitudes of confidence and expertise. These tendencies become highlighted in a field such as American anthropology when one’s professional status is not as unequivocally legitimated by social values and interests as are, for instance, a medical doctor or a lawyer. This is so especially when the chances for failure are large, the consequences devastating for one’s career and livelihood, and the opportunities for success are increasingly fewer and further between.</p> <p>It is the central the understanding of anthropology as a socio cultural system with its own distinctive dialectics of discourse and power, its own professional ethos and sense of specialized community interests, values and views, and as embedded within a larger American and world society and as serving certain definite structural functional purposes within the larger context, as a ‘mode of information,, that the issues of subjectivity/objectivity and of the legitimization and empowerment of one’s anthropological status, should come to focus upon and be articulated by the power and authority of the written word. It is the literal legitimacy of the signature, the published, printed article, that the greatest power of truth becomes articulated. One’s success as a writer, in a convincing, anthropologically acceptable mode or style, is what makes or breaks one’s anthropological status, authenticity and authority in the world. Anthropological authority is authorial, and anthropological authoritarianism is most articulated as authorial authoritarianism. It is not by accident that most of the issues involving anthropological authority and academic authoritarianism with which I became involved in or have given autobiographical witness of, have involved the issues of the subjectiveness and credibility of the student’s ability and manner of writing, in which cases it is often not so much a matter of what is said rather than how it is said.</p> <p>I close this extended paper with the last claim that autobiographical authority remains the most reasonable, and perhaps the most honest, form of authorial claim to the truth which the anthropologist in the world has. Whatever the experiences, the ethnographic encounters in the field remain foremost and in the final analysis the participant observer’s own, primarily subjective, personal, biographical episodes of her/his own life history. Autobiography is not the only form of psychosocial inquiry available to anthropology. It is not mere narcissism, nor just introspection. It involves an extended kind of reflexiveness in which we do not just see ourselves as others see us, but through which we also begin to also see others as seen by ourselves, and even more important, to see others as we see ourselves. All experience is autobiographical experience, and such experience constitutes the only available pathway to a common ground of understanding between all humankind. Along this way we come sooner or later to our own heart of darkness which we share with so many others, and then we arrive at the realization of the possibility of our own, and others, eventual salvation.</p> <p>I proffer autobiography as a legitimate, authentic mode of anthropological discourse. It is not the imperialistic ‘I came, I saw, I conquered but it is enough: "I witnessed, It happened, We and the world became transformed." It offers us an acceptable, anthropological alternative to the metalogical horns of reflexive dilemma of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange, without our having to compromise our sense of anthropological authority in the world.</p> <p>Given American ego-centrism, the first person singular is perhaps the best we can do in the world. It reaffirms my faith to know that not only are anthropologists like any other people in the world, but that other people’s anthropologos are liable to be similar in basic ways to our own.</p> <p>Without acknowledging the inherent subjectivity of human suffering in the world, there is little point or purpose in achieving anthropological wisdom or seeking anthropological experience.</p> <p> </p> <p>  <hr> <p> </p> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The wild geese fly across the long sky above.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Their image is reflected upon the chilly water below.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The geese do not mean to cast their image on the water:</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Nor does the water mean to hold the image of the geese.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anonymous</p> <p> </p> </font> <p>As a point of deriving some objective value from this study, I have drawn the following conclusions based upon it:</p> <font SIZE="2"> <p>  </p> <ol> <ol> </font> <li>The denial of human intersubjectivity, the subjectiveness of both self and others, is at the base of both authoritarianism and the positivistic ‘objectivity’ of the social sciences.</li> <li>It is this inherent subjectivity and intersubjectiveness of human understanding that renders our ‘anthropologos’ irremediably ‘relative’ and susceptible to so much bias and distortion.</li> <li>The issues of objective/subjective in anthropologos forms a background dialectic in the production of knowledge in the field and in the social reproduction of the field itself.</li> <li>This dialectic of anthropologos becomes focused upon the issue of writing, literacy, the written and published word, the signature, the thesis, the term paper, and the kinds of conventional and informal but common constraints place upon such literary production,</li> <li>Much normal and conventional discursive and literary praxis centered upon anthropologos is oriented towards objectivity and implicitly denies the inherent subjectiveness of anthropological truth and understanding. Autobiography is proffered as one alternative approach to such anthropologos that has as its aim the historical/biographical excoriation of such subjectivity of understanding. It is a form that can be applied to and by both the self and others.</li> <li>Issues of power, of authenticity, anthropological credulity and authority, and of ego identity, come to be centered and depend crucially upon the issue of relative objectiveness/subjectivity of the written word, and become articulated primarily in terms of its dialectic of anthropologos.</li> <li>There are many corollaries to the preceding points. Issues of class consciousness, especially as this is articulated in day to day, face-to-face dialectics of personal power within the departmental setting (whose word if the final one?) underlie most social relationships. Related issues inform these relations as well, issues of a form of derivative ‘false consciousness’ legitimating a status quo of power relations in the world, of resulting hypocrisy between the said and the done, professed beliefs and actual behaviors, professional anthropologos as a social symbolically sanctioned structural functional ‘mode of information production/consumption’ that has as its implicit, primary, unmarked purpose the nihilation of the subjective identity of the Other of the world and the affirmation of the objectiveness of the Self. The denial of the subjectiveness of the Other in the world has been witnessed in terms of the denial of their sense of history, biography, time, experience, mythoi, and even their very human beingness.</li> <li>In terms of the ‘professionalization’ of students of anthropologos and the social reproduction of the field itself, its measure of effectiveness, though always partial and incomplete, comes to depend upon the Archimedian fulcrum of the dichotomization and compartmentalization between the subjective and the objective, which by common human association, becomes critically connected to the separation and compartmentalization between the personal background and the public, professional foreground. There is a great deal of individual variability in just how this kind of separation and compartmentalization is achieved, depending upon many intermediate biographical and historical variables. But in whatever way it becomes expressed, its consequences are generally the same. What is repressed as subjective and personal, as weak, partial and antithetical to the public, objective and professional, becomes projected implicitly upon the images of the counter reference significant Other of the field. The mythoi of the field constitutes a kind of theoretical, affective, social and methodological antistructure to the structure and authoritarian praxis of the academic department.</li> <li>Other common associations that become connected with subjectivity/objectivity are those of failure/success, uncertainty/certainty, falsehood/truth, weak/strong, corrupt/pure, non-rational/rational, nonscientific/scientific, etc.</li> <li>This set of interrelated points constitute what I would call a central paradigm of the mythoi, consciousness and character of authoritarian anthropologos, informing the central constraints of the dialectic of anthropologos.</li> </ol> </ol> <p>We must somehow learn to live with the prospect and possibility that in our dialectic of anthropologos we must always remain unrehabilitated, imperfect, and partial pawns of power in the world. Because human development, and the human world, is yet unfinished business, so also must our anthroplogos remain unfinished business. Though some of these points may seem intuitively obvious, the extent to which they inform the everyday praxis of anthropological production is somewhat less than obvious, and usually out of awareness.</p> <p>  <hr> <u> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="two"><font size="4">Part II</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></a><font size="5">REWITNESSING THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE WORLD</font></p> <hr> </u><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropological Construction of American Anthropology</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">An Addendum and Afterward</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>This work has special meaning for me now because in a literal sense I have come full circle to where I began more than 25 years ago. I sit now in front of my computer, rather than at my typewriter when I first composed this work about 10 years ago, but that seems to be about the only real difference, except for the fact that I am now ten years older. I am living in the same place where I started out back then, after all our adventures and sojourns around the world and across the country.</p> <p>I have come full circle to where I started out 25 years ago, and I cannot say exactly what I have gained from the experience. Very little materially was gained, so far at least, in the final accounting. We've had and we've lost, regained and given up. I am in fact poorer now than in the beginning, at least in a material sense. I am much less of a conformist than I was a quarter century ago, at least in an implicit way. We are surprisingly unattached to material things. Funny about this, because my core character remains the same and even more conservative than I used to be about certain things that always have a conservative connotation. I tend to judge people, sometimes quite harshly, on the basis of their behavior and their values, not in terms of their status or material possession, their looks or their means.</p> <p>But in a soulful and intellectual way, I am so much richer than I used to be. If I can say I've ever had my act in one bag, it has been just in the past year that this has grown in sophistication and complexity in a way that was never before known. I am counting on it eventually becoming the prelude to a better life for ourselves in many senses--if I can translate it finally into some material and social sense of well being.</p> <p>This second part of my story begins basically where I left off from the writing of the first part, that first year at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1992. The second part consists of about 6 different parts leading up to the current time of my writing here where I started out so long ago. Since then, we lived in Missouri a couple of years, traveled to do fieldwork in Penang, Malaysia for about a year and a half, and then returned to Missouri to finish our dissertation, a process that required about 7 or 8 months to complete. We then returned to my mom's house in Southern California where I looked for work with my degree behind me. I sent off over three hundred applications that year, and received not one nibble for an interview. In August of 1996 we got in our minivan and traveled back east, camping as we went. Our aim was an education program in Tennessee, which we found unsuitable for ourselves. We ended up with a broken down car in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where one thing led to the next until I ended up with a job conducting genealogical and historical research for a family there.</p> <p>To retell the second part of my story, I must bring the last part of our recent sojourn to central China and the first part of my memories of my father together. Sitting in China about a year and a half ago, (late 1998) I had a memory (or should I say "remembrance"?) that I had not remembered since before the death of my father. China was our penultimate episode, before coming back to where we are now, where it all began so long ago.</p> <p>China proved to be mostly a miserable experience for us. I had grand plans of recouping some of my lost research context that had left a huge hole in the core of my being and in my central identity as a worthy person in the world. I brought three computers there, with the purpose of carrying forward research. Little did we know after a long train journey to the interior, that almost everything we hoped for would be systematically dashed, eroded, and finally destroyed by powers that were beyond my control.</p> <p>The primary individual with whom I dealt, the key foreign affairs person who by the way was one of the few good English speakers of the entire city, proved to be not only unreliable and incredibly manipulative, but also downright damned deceitful. He, more than anyone else, who was the critical mediator of our adjustment to China, destroyed not only our research context, but probably permanently our ability to trust Chinese. This is all another long story, for another place and time.</p> <p>Our "home" in China I called the dungeon. It was a semi-subterranean basement at the backend of the guest hotel of the city. Its tiled floors were chronically damp and cold. Mildew formed overnight on all the walls and in all the dark nooks and crannies. In the course of a year there I killed over forty centipedes within the immediate vicinity of our quarters, many of them in our bathroom and bedroom. I also killed many rats and a few mice. We were frequently without lights, even in the middle of the day, working and reading in the dark interior by the light of candles that we pushed into the openings of the one-liter beer bottles. We rarely had any hot-water--only once or twice a week at first, and frequently we had no water at all. It would be shut off on us unpredictably at any time of the day or night.</p> <p>There was a good side to our being in China, because we befriended many of the students, and of these, a few proved to be very dear to us. My students would come visit with smelly feet, embarrassed to take off their shoes in our "Asian" household. Often they would not have showered for almost a week. And yet, we found many of them to be kind and caring, and they lightened our burden on a daily basis.</p> <p>It was in such a situation, sometime in late November or early December, with the cold of winter descended upon our abode, and with nothing but a small space heater and many blankets and layers of clothing to keep us warm. All of us more than a little hungry for lack of good food and whole meat, that I found myself stripped bare of all my illusions about life. I had found myself, and even worse, my small family, incarcerated for a year in a place I didn't really want to be, without the compensation of being able to productively carry the fieldwork I wanted forward.</p> <p>In such a condition we received a surprise box of goodies from my Aunt and Uncle and my cousin's family from Chow Chilla, California, where I was born. Strange that they would bother to send us such a box. It was full of snack foods, sausages, canned potato soup mix, dried mash potatoes, and many other small goodies that raised the curiosity of my students. And this box of food, close to Christmas time, made me think back very deeply to my childhood in a way that I had never thought of before.</p> <p>For some odd reason, I was able to remember the day before my father died, when he took me to my Grandmother's house and I helped him in the back one-acre lot behind the house to sand on the small rowboat he had built a few years before. I remember that he had previously shown me how to sand with the grain of the wood, and in circles, using a block of wood that fit into palm of my hand. He should me how to sand one at a time in rows small sections of the downside-up bottom of the boat as it rested on saw horses.</p> <p>Well, I was up on that boat with him standing on a sawhorse, and he told me that he was soon to go away again. He told me he had to go to a special place. He had, in his illness, gone so many times before, so that I in my 7-year-old naivete and blank innocence, asked him where he was going and for how long. I wondered if it would be for a couple of weeks like before. He told me he didn't know for how long, but it would be for a long time. Then I asked him if it would be for a whole month, with out a clear idea of how long a month was. In my mind I pictured something like a clinic across the street, or a hotel, done in typical 1950's So. Cal. Style architecture. A one-story affair with translucent glass brick walls, and palm trees in front. Then I asked him if I could come with him, but he told me no, that I must stay and look after my mom. I didn't understand what he was telling me. Soon afterward my mom came home from her teaching job to pick me up, and I remember waiting by the boat while my mom and father had an argument on the path to the back lot, out of my earshot.</p> <p>That was to be the last time I ever spoke with my father or saw him alive. He killed himself the following day. He had shot himself in the heart with the .22 caliber rifle that we used to shoot old tin cans with out in the desert near Palm Springs. I do not know why I had repressed this memory from my conscious experience for so long. I do not know why, sitting in that dark dirty room in China, looking at the box my Uncle, my father's brother, had sent to us in kindness, that I should suddenly then remember that curious experience. And it was not even clear if it was really real, or just imagined, though I believe it really did happen. It is almost as clear as the day it must have happened.</p> <p>Funny, to be stripped of all life's illusions, laid bare of all familiar and comfortable attachments, and in such a miserable condition to be able to remember things that had been forgotten for almost 35 years. But I believe my life changed fundamentally from that moment. I relinquished my basic illusions about Anthropology and research that I had long maintained, and I decided henceforth on a radical change of identity and a new declaration of rugged independence.</p> <p>It was a kind of early mid-life crisis, I believe, perhaps precipitated by our stressful life experiences iced by the cake of our present circumstances. It was male menopause at 41-years of age and I reevaluated all I had done before, and asked myself what it was all now worth, and then determined to myself to do it all over again, somehow.</p> <p>With this digression, it it worthwhile now to backtrack to where I left off with my life in Part I, during the first semester of my time at the University of Missouri, Columbia.</p> <p>  <hr> <p>The time spent at the University of Missouri, Columbia, between the summer of 1991 and the summer of 1994, were especially productive for me from the standpoint of my writing, my studies and my research. The first year we stayed at the University Village that was situated basically off the main-campus and at the head of the Katie Trail. The apartment complex was a series of double storied redbrick apartment buildings that dated back to the late 1940's in construction style, with black asphalt tiled floors, small refrigerators and windows with metal frames and hand-cranks. We were in these apartments for the first year, during which time we made many sets of friends within the complex. Most of these friends were young foreign families.</p> <p>There was a Taiwanese family in the building across from us, and an upper class Indonesian family with their live in Indonesian Amah whom we especially befriended.</p> <p>There was a mainland Chinese family in the block down from us, and a young white girl with a young black baby on the other side.</p> <p>There was a Hungarian and his Polish wife in the very last block of apartments that faced the forests of the trail.</p> <p>There was a young white Texan who worked at Kinko's and his Mexican-American wife who was attending the law school. Most of these families had small children, just born or just a few years old.</p> <p>There was a Korean family in the apartment next door to us who had lived there for seven years and whose children were already adolescent. The father worked in the English department and played golf, and though we liked the wife and daughter, we also found that the father and son were quite arrogant.</p> <p>There were also quite a few single Indians living in the apartment complex--how they got to live there without having families no one ever asked or answered. The Indians always seemed to be getting special advantages others didn't have.</p> <p>There was an African family from Rwanda who moved next door to us on the other side whom we also grew quite close to. And then there was the young white southern couple from Southeastern Texas with their small daughter. These were all our friends. We got to know each other fairly well during that year, and we would go to picnic and to the lake swimming sometimes, or take walks up the Katie trail in the evening.</p> <p>During the first few months of my time there, in the first semester, I dedicated myself to writing, and I wrote probably about five or six manuscripts during that period of time, including the first part of this manuscript. Rosie earned a little money from baby-sitting. In the first semester I sat for my Ph.D. candidacy exam, and in the second semester I gained a teaching assistantship in a introductory course in General Anthropology with Dr. Raymond Wood. I look back at this time as one of the better and happier periods of our life. It was marked by peace and poverty, but a washing away of the difference that poverty made by a curious kind of communitas in an International set of friends.</p> <p>There was a stark contrast between these families and the mostly white families at SMU in our previous apartment. At first there was a little tension between Rosie and myself, that did not resolve itself for about a month. I devoted myself to writing and some of my writing was the most creative I had done so far. Also, at the encouragement of one of my professors, purchased myself a little MacIntosh Classic II computer. It was the first computer I ever owned and it took me a couple of months how to figure out what to do with it. My introduction to computers was primarily with trying to write and print my first manuscripts, and to figure out how to build expert systems for a class. It was a period of transition in my writing between reliance on my typewriters and reliance on my computer and printer.</p> <p>I would spend most days at my typewriter or computer, and in the late afternoons I would take the bicycle that I had bought at a yard-sale for $15 with a child's seat on the back, and take Mahala down the Katie trail. The trail was actually an old railroad line that was pulled up. It ran fairly straight with long wide curves and was mostly embanked at a level higher than the surrounding terrain. It ran more or less from the center of town, along the edge of a fairly large stream, out to the point that it intersected the country road beyond the town limit.</p> <p>Each day we would ride further and further down a little bit. Eventually we made our way to the small lake about halfway down its length. Nearby was a river that cut a deep gorge. We would ride through the barren deciduous forest of fall and wintertime, passing by small farm fields and under the highway. Mahala would like to stop here and play at the water's edge, hunting for frogs and finding dead fish and things.</p> <p>The trail stretched a total of 3 or 4 miles, winding under the main road of town, and going out through farm fields, near a lake, and then down through woods until it came to a dead end at a T-section with a lonely country road. One day I made it all the way to the end of the trail. It was a warm day. I was by myself, as I think Mahala had grown tired of the long rides. It was a good stress releasor for me. I reached the end of the trail, and on the way back followed a butterfly that flitted its way all the length of the last leg of the trail until it opened out near the cornfields by the lake. If flew as fast as I road, though it could not fly in a straight line, and was amazed by its speed and persistence to travel almost a mile in such a manner, before veering off into a neighboring field.</p> <p>I returned from this bicycle trip, having found what was at the end of the trail, and parked the bike, and never took it back down the trail again. After that we would walk down the trail along the little stream that wound its way around near the trail. Our apartment backed this trail, blocked off from its deep forest growth only by a high chain link fence. There were many creatures in this forest. One night I saw two opossums and three raccoons at the same time in the same area immediately behind our apartment. Deer even ran along the edge of the trail up to the point it intersected the main highway, often stalking right by a train of bicyclists and joggers without being noticed.</p> <p>Overall, I would say in hindsight that this was one of the happier and most carefree periods of our married life. Most of the students didn't have a lot of money. A few of the foreign students were from obviously wealthy backgrounds, but generally they made a point of not playing this up.</p> <p>During the spring semester, when the weather started to warm up again, and the green came back to the trees and grass, I began playing baseball with a young teenage Mainland Chinese boy. His father was attending an engineering program and whose mother worked at a computer keyboard assembly plant outside of town. (I think she worked at the chemistry lab.) I don't remember how we started. I started tossing the ball to him, and we began playing more and more, until it reached a point that we were playing quite regularly in the evenings after I came back from my classes. Soon he had found some gloves and I bought a bat and some balls and then other kids and even some of the adult students began playing with us. By the end of our time there, we had organized a regular baseball game with the kids on the green area near our apartments, and even the manager who was a Puerto Rican and a good player joined in.</p> <p>It happened in the second spring semester, as I held a TAship and was busier at school, that a young Korean couple moved into the apartment directly above us. I don't even remember who was there before them. But this couple was not very friendly. The husband beat the wife several times, as we could hear through the ceiling. They were quite noisy and disturbed me frequently, to the point that I became very annoyed and it began to ruin the peace and pleasantness of the village. To top this off, I believe they sometimes made noise deliberately to annoy us, and would act very unfriendly to us whenever we met them outside.</p> <p>I therefore decided to put in a request to relocate to the University Terrace apartments that were located on the other side of the campus behind the Medical Center. They did not have the trail nearby, but they had Gardens behind that students could use, and they had more private arrangements that seemed better than those of the Village. So before the end of the semester we were relocating once again back to the other apartment complex. My African friend and my Taiwanese friend from across the street both helped me to move--a luxury I have seldom had either before or since.</p> <p>We used my old big blue Chevy suburban, and made several trips back and forth. On one the return trips, we went in to get more furniture, and I made the mistake of leaving Mahala in the back of the truck. She crawled to the front driver's seat and must have begun playing with the shift lever on the steering column. As we came back outside the apartment with a box in our arms, we noticed the truck slowly rolling forward down the slight slope of the parking place. I immediately let go of what we had and ran to catch up with it and saw little Malaha, steering the truck as it was rolling forward and not knowing really what was happening. I tried to get in front of the truck to slow it down a little bit, but to no avail, and it ran into the back of another car--an Indian man's car, on the other side. It did no real obvious damage, and no one else seemed to notice the incident, so we pulled the truck back, loaded the rest of the furniture, and finished our move.</p> <p>We relocated to the new apartments near the end of the second semester, just before the period of the final exams began. The complexes were made entirely of cinderblock, built in the early 60's, and they had a bigger, newer and better organized kitchen with a real refrigerator. They had also a private laundry facility for each four-apartment block that was easier than the central facility of the Village. I did not regret making that move, though Rosie at first did not want to do it and I basically had to do most of the work myself. But we soon made new sets of friends there, and kept most of our old friends as well. There was especially a young Portuguese couple whose husband was finishing the veterinarian program and whose wife was a doctor who had already finished the Medical school and was doing her internship at the Cancer hospital on the North side of the town. There was a Salvadoran family who had been there a number of years, and a family from Bangladesh with a young boy who always spit, and another family from Pakistan, and a Sri Lankan family whose small girl was Mahala's age who played with her. There was a family from Jordan with a little boy. There was a Taiwanese family directly above us whose baby was just one, and another Taiwanese family with a young girl. There were a couple of mainland Chinese families. There was a Thai family who had a small daughter, and a couple of Indonesian families with small girls too. There was also a Korean family with two little boys.</p> <p>All of these families became our friends. The playground was in a square area in the middle, surrounded by the apartment blocks, and it created a common meeting ground for children to play together safely and for the parents to get to know one another. Though there were few trees and no trail, the Terrace proved to be even better than the Village. There was a white family with two little girls whose mother was a Mormon and the husband was a Vietnam vet who worked at the Veterans' hospital across the parking lot and who was an Art education major.</p> <p>The relocation interfered with the studies a little bit, but I remember getting down with a couple of more books during that Spring Semester. Near the end of the semester, the backfields behind the apartments were ploughed up and spaces were offered to all the students to plant gardens. The spaces were about 10-12 feet wide by about 20 feet long. We drew numbers from a box, and I pulled a lot that landed me in the very middle of the entire field. I remember laying out my garden very carefully, stretching some yellow twine used in construction to mark the boundary and to help me level the garden a little bit as it was on the side of a gradual hill and sloped widthwise enough to make the water drain rapidly away.</p> <p>As I was working out under the sun, an old Mainland Chinese grandmother came over to my garden, and twanged the taut little yellow line, and started laughing at it as if it were a big joke. I was a little annoyed but persisted in my efforts. I planted my seeds and covered the areas over with dried grass clippings from the mown lawns. At the end of the semester, while the seeds were germinating, we decided to drive back on a vacation to Southern California to spend a couple of weeks with my mom. I paid an older Indonesian girl to water the garden for me, and we got in the Van and drove back to L.A. We had a car problem in Utah, near Green River, when I lost my battery and had to get a new one. It was then that I decided we needed a newer and more reliable "used" car and we shopped about L.A. and found a Toyota mini-van for about $6,000. My mom helped us from a loan she had previously taken out.</p> <p>I sold the Suburban to a Mexican, a friend or family member of the Mexican who worked for George, the Japanese gardener who was doing my Mom's house. I don't remember much else about this particular trip back to Grandma's. I drove my Mom up to see my brother Tom who had moved to Exeter in Central California. I remember he treated my Mom very poorly that time, and I was quite angry with my brother Tom and his wife, Angie. From that point I never since went back to visit them. I gathered my drip-irrigation stuff and transformed a couple of old buckets into water-containers for my garden, and I scrounged some good organic fertilizers from around the house.</p> <p>We had left in our old suburban, and returned in a "new" Toyota mini-van that was quite sporty looking with its decaled racing pin-stripes. We turned more than a few heads as we pulled into our parking space. My garden had been dried up, but otherwise the seeds were all just sprouting up through the dried grass clippings, which had proven effective in keeping the moisture down. So that summertime, with little else to do, I worked mainly on my garden, installing my drip system that also caught the attention of a few people, and brought more derisive laughter from the old Chinese woman who spoke no English and smiled with a toothless grin.</p> <p>I also worked on a couple of manuscripts. By mid-summer, my garden had grown up huge in the middle of the field. Most of the other gardens were dwarfed by comparison. I mulched it with some hay and manure and regular additions of grass clippings I would gather in the cool mornings. I had a trellis of beans, a row of Sunflowers, about six tomato plants, peppers, cucumbers, carrots, even some corn and potatoes. I planted the corn too late and it did not do so well. I also had some pumpkins that did quite well, and squash. It proved to be the most outstanding garden of the entire field. The apartment manager would even take visitors to see it. The old Chinese woman never came around anymore, though one late summer's afternoon a couple of young Chinese men almost tried picking a fight with me. By late summer time, we had more vegetables than we knew what to do with, and we ended up passing these out to the various families around us, who came to look forward to my returns from the garden. I got about 16 pumpkins from the Garden, some fairly large.</p> <p>We took a trip in my mini-van with the Taiwanese family from the village in late August to St. Louis to visit my Uncle's family and to take the kids to the St. Louis zoo. We spent the day there and it was quite nice at the zoo. During the summer I befriended a Korean friend who was finishing his doctorate in Journalism. His boy played with Mahala outside in the evenings, and I would see him out in the gardens, where he came over to ask me for some help on some minor matter. So we began to get to know each other. He was not like the other Koreans who were mostly in a closed network among them selves.</p> <p>He had told me he made a commitment to living and working in the U.S. He had worked an internship program in Washington, D.C., and was trying to figure out what to do for his dissertation. He taught part-time a course in statistics. I helped him during our discussions to formulate his ideas for the dissertation, and he came to me to inquire about how to do content analysis. I had only done a little content analysis before, but he decided on focusing on labor union strikes in the steel industry after World War I. I helped him a little bit with the evaluation of some of the articles he used in his survey, and in the end, the following semester, I helped him by editing his dissertation after class.</p> <p>It was between all my classes that I got side tracked by helping the wives to organize a Halloween party. I don't know where it started, or whose idea it was, but I remember that I ended up doing most of the work in the last week to prepare for it. We arranged with the Taiwanese manager whose wife had a few airs to use a vacant apartment. At first he gave us a hard time, but a deputation of women went to talk to Judy, the administrator of the apartments, and she overruled the manager. So at the last moment, we got an apartment and just a day before Halloween, the men and women were all in there fixing it up. We decided to convert one bedroom into a haunted house, and the other into a scary room with different activities for children. The main room was to be the central hall for the adult guests to eat and socialize. It was to be a costume arrangement. It took more work and time than I wanted from my studies, but it turned into a big success and almost everyone from the terrace came to see it and bring their children. Even some local news television cameras from town came to take some video of the party and interview some of the guests.</p> <p> That fall semester, besides the difficult A.I. class, I had to take a foreign language exam for Spanish that was the foreign language I knew best. I had hired a Cuban friend of mine to tutor me after class in the evenings, and she helped considerably to improve my oral skills of listening and pronunciation and my vocabulary. It was a crash course in a life-long language lesson plan. I put over a thousand new Spanish words on index cards and drilled myself daily until I knew most of them on the tip of my tongue.</p> <p>We resumed classes in late August. A few weeks before, I got a telephone call from one of the professors in the department. I had been offered another TA ship in a course on comparative primatology. I also decided, since it was to be our final year of graduate study, to go ahead and take out a $7,500 dollar student loan to help cover the expenses for the year. In fact, with the TA ship, we only used about half of the amount, and put the balance to help cover the costs of fieldwork in Penang. Even now, as I write this book, I am still paying back that loan. We have managed to knock it down to just under $2000.</p> <p>Pursuing some aspects of anthropological study in knowledge representation, I decided to take a course in Artificial Intelligence being offered in the Computer Science department. It was my first graduate course outside of the Anthropological milieu, and quite an eye-opener for me. It was from one standpoint one of the most difficult classes I ever had. It was also one of the least friendly and most competitive classes I ever sat in. Many of the students, as I surmised by what I saw in class and in the corridors, were probably engaged in regular cheating. Especially, I felt, the few Mainland Chinese students who were always making the highest grades in the class but never seemed to be doing any real work. They were gaining answers from other members of their small and exclusive coterie, and even from a couple Chinese professors in that department. It proved to be my first experience with an alternate cultural pattern that was to prove itself even more evident in China six years later.</p> <p> </p> <p>  <hr> <p>I went ABD (all but dissertation) in the Spring of 1994, after two years study. I managed to take the right classes, after being notified of some special technical course requirements at the last moment, and in the end, my main mentor managed to have most of my credit hours from SUNY-Binghamton transferred over to my completion of coursework for the degree. The examination consisted of a week of writing papers for questions posed by the various members of my committee, and finally an oral examination. I had spent a great amount of time that semester writing research proposals and grant and fellowship applications. Of the many I sent out, I received only two grants. One came from the University itself. It was a travel grant for the amount of $600. The other was from the Pacific Cultural Foundation for the amount of $2000. I was a little disappointed by the amounts received, as I knew it would not get us very far in the field. Thus we finished the semester and I had nothing else to do but to go to try to get to the field. I had already submitted a request with the Malaysian government for permission to do fieldwork in Malaysia. It was supposed to take six months to get a reply. We got rid of a great deal of our belongings that couldn't fit the small storage space that I had rented. I should have gotten a larger space. And then we ended up driving back to southern California one more time. I helped the Mormon family who was moving at the same time. He was lucky enough to land a lecturing job out at Cal State L.A. in his area, and they rented a huge Ryder moving van and loaded all their junk into it. Their small apartment was chock full of furniture, piano, new appliances that they had been acquiring. We reached California first, and when they got there, the husband called me and I went over and helped him to load all his belongings into a storage space. About a month later, he called me again, and I helped him to move his belongings to a house he had found down 1-15 near Rancho California.</p> <p>We had little else to do, and we decided to try to go to Malaysia early before we received our official authorization in order to try to get something started. It was a risky move, and a little expensive, costing us most of our extra loan money. But in hindsight it was probably crucial to the eventual success of the fieldwork there, as it gave us about a two month period to break through some social barriers and get us oriented in the right direction. We came back from Penang Malaysia sometime in September, and we ended up spending the next few months working on my computer projects and putting together some of my tasks for my field methods.</p> <p>I was quite intense on developing some AI type programs derived from my previous anthropological work, and I began making progress on this line of inquiry eventually. By about November, not hearing anything from the Malaysians for at least six or seven months, I decided to send another letter off, and then to make a few phone calls to the Malaysian embassy about it. It was fortunate that I did this, because it was apparent that the paperwork had gotten stuck on some desk in KL, pending approval in three separate departments. Eventually though, soon afterward, notification of permission to conduct fieldwork did arrive to me, but not the necessary paperwork that was supposed to be completed with it. Thus we were set to return to Penang, and we arrived back in mid-January just about a week before the Chinese New Year festivities were to kick off. It was a good time. It was warm but not so impossibly humid. We checked back into the Modern Hotel we had stayed at half a year before and received special rates just in time before the price-hiking season kicked in.</p> <p>The plane flight over was, as usual, uncomfortable. The only saving grace of the interminable flight was a young Malaysian Chinese hostess who talked to my wife, and took a strong interest in my young daughter, even taking her up to the cockpit of the giant plane to visit the pilot. We arrived in Penang having taken a hop from KL. We stayed in a small Malay run hotel the first night in KL. We woke up in the morning to find huge cockroaches crawling inside of a box of cookies we had carelessly left half open on the nightstand. We checked back into the Modern hotel, and the management was surprised and delighted to see us back again. But the management had changed. A new rotund and gregarious middle-aged woman had won part shares in the establishment through gambling, and though she was quite friendly, she drank a lot that was quite unseemly for a Hokkien woman to do in the first place. Also she had two new cronies who were regulars in the hotel. It turned out that they were members of the Chinese secret society and were quite nefarious in their activities. It turned out, as the staff confided to us afterward, that they had been drilling holes through the walls of the rooms, from the back store room and other rooms, to peep at women.</p> <p>Two American women had checked into the room next to ours. They were a mother and a young daughter duo who were from Orange county and decided to go trekking together. They were made to feel very uncomfortable in the hotel, and after the mother witnessed the rape of a woman in the field behind the hotel, which upset her greatly, they fled Penang in great culture shock without having given it a chance to have its charms sink in. I felt sorry for them. I told them to get away from the hotel. It was obvious the two gangsters were making little holes through the plaster of the storeroom walls. The Americans found plaster dust on their bags and felt quite violated. Regardless of these unfolding and unfortunate circumstances, which the old management really regretted, we had a good New Year's dinner with these people and I ended up giving some of the old uncles life-history interviews.</p> <p>It was about a month into our stay there that I went to the local immigration office to see about my visa. I was concerned because I had only been granted a tourist visa on my entrance to Malaysia, and no one told me anything about what to expect. At the immigration office I explained to the officer my situation and I showed him our papers and letters. He told me he could do nothing more for us but we would have to go back down to K.L. to straighten things out. That weekend we found ourselves on a flight back to KL. Within two days we contacted the Prime Ministers office. We were told there, finally, that we were supposed to have received official letters telling us of what we needed to do upon our arrival, and to have a research visa chopped with an identity card, but the letter had been mailed to the wrong address in California and therefore never reached us. Thus we ended up taking an long and expensive taxi ride to the other side of KL, after having some passport photos and an special identity card made up, to the main immigration headquarters where we had to pay another nominal fee to have our visas chopped once again in our passports, good for one year. We got back to Penang within three days of our whirlwind tour with a severe case of diarrhea picked up from a hawker in the city.</p> <p>I was intent on getting established in a research context, and new that the hotel was inappropriate for this purpose. The management wanted us to stay, even to the point that they wouldn't help me to place a phone call outside, and I ended up having to go find some real estate agents in the city by myself in order to locate a decent place to rent. We looked for several days, until we found a nice old second story of a Chinese style mansion in Tanjung Tokong not far from the beach. It had been owned by the deceased husband of the landlady, who was the godmum of the young yuppie Chinese couple who lived on the bottom floor and who already had three little girls. The main floor was being occupied by another older family of Chicken hawkers who spoke loudly and crudely in a different dialect, and were at their job making money every day. We resided on the floor above them, and eventually, a young British couple came to reside on the top floor above us in a small one-bedroom apartment. The apartments were in a grand style with large balconies, huge cut-glass mirrors, red clay tiles and built-in closets and cupboard.</p> <p>The place had been previously occupied by a Malay family. There was a large hall, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a laundry room and two balconies off our own floor. There was also a kitchen. I was still receiving his mail and especially his electrical bills, which he had dutifully disregarded notifying of his relocation. I even had to pay part of a month's bill that belonged to him, before I could get my own service established. But the apartment was filthy when we moved into it. The walls were completed covered by grim, grease, and the young Malay daughter's crayons. The kitchen looked as if it hadn't been cleaned for years. At the bottom of the stairway leading down to the main floor, there was a two-foot heap of trash that had just been thrown down the stairs. It took us a good week to clean the place up, and I offered to the managers to paint the place to make it habitable for us, if they bought the paint. They bought the cheapest paint possible, and it was so thin it required at least two coats for to make it cover over all the dirt spots. The aunt and uncle, the part owner of the Modern Hotel, offered to help us to clean the place, and they spent a couple of afternoons working very hard to help us. I paid them a small amount of money, but they at first refused any. It took us about a week to get it cleaned up. I was growing more and more anxious to get the research going, as we were already into our second month on the island, and beyond a few life-history interviews, had gotten little else going for the money we had spent.</p> <p>But we were getting organized quickly. We enrolled our daughter into a day-care in the mornings. She at first liked this because the primary teacher was a pretty young Indian woman who had taken vows to become a Hindi nun and was always dressed in yellow. She was very nice and my daughter took to her right away. We would take her in the morning to the day-care that was at a private residence right on the coast below our house, and then take the bus downtown. At first we began walking through the town conducting interviews with shop owners and doing surveys and census. We began mapping most of the central part of the city of Georgetown. We would return by bus early in the afternoon to the other side of the island in time to pick up our daughter and to settle in before the hottest part of the day.</p> <p>After a couple of weeks of this routine we realized we were not getting very far, and I knew I needed to establish a community context for the work I was doing. One day we were down one street near Weld Quay and we noticed some tourists in trishaws going into the area of the city known as the Jetty and that was notorious for harboring criminals, gangsters and lower-class elements of Hokkien society. On a lark we decided to follow the tourists into the area and, unlike any of the tourists, we sat at the coffee shop outside to take a break and talk to people. Soon an uncle had bought us a cup of coffee, and they took great interest in us as a mixed couple, and in the fact that my wife spoke Hokkien. In fact, my wife was born in place not very far from that street, and her extended family probably came from the area surrounding. We began asking and answering many questions, and then I had an idea that maybe these people would welcome us coming there to do further research work. They told us to come back the next day to talk to the leader of the community, a man whom they had called, somewhat uncomplementary, as "pig belly." Pig belly met us at the same coffee shop the next morning and appeared quite kind and reasonable. He was a fairly large, middle-aged man, and seemed quite mild and sensible. I bought him a cup of coffee, which he acknowledged with a nod of his head. He told us it was O.K. if we came to do our work. He told us of a woman who had worked there a couple of years before.</p> <p>And so it was that we landed or primary research group during that year on Penang in1995 We ended up going there everyday, spending most of the mornings there interviewing and talking to people. We did this for about the next eight or nine months. I started out to break the ice by taking people's blood pressure and asking some basic survey questions and interviewing individuals and giving some fun color tasks. We continued on some off days and in the early afternoons, before returning to fetch our daughter, to do fieldwork also in the larger part of the town. I came to focus on some particular aspects of the larger city pattern. We were soon invited into different people's homes and I began piecing together the facets of my study based on what I wanted to get done. One day, in one of the homes, the mother directly asked us if we could teach her kids English. I considered it, and the next day told her that I would do it if in turn those I taught would do some tasks for me. This was an acceptable arrangement and soon I was teaching three separate classes, once or twice each week, to young adults, some teenagers, and younger children on the Jetty. In exchange for these lessons, I was provided with three groups of regular people of different age sets to do my symbolic framing tasks, and through this means I rapidly developed, tested and retested my Symbolic Framing battery and a host of other innovative tasks. Up until that time, the problem with this level of the research was the lack of coordination and consistency in the study. People came and went and it was largely catch as catch could within the context of our always limited time there. Thus I found the opportunity to teach English on a regular basis in order to gain a captive "control" group who would do the tasks for me. I also felt like I was giving something back to the community for their having given me so much time and opportunity to work there in the first place.</p> <p>This work became the focus of my study for the next several months, though I carried on many other aspects concurrently and intermittently. During that time, mostly the Spring and Summer of 1995, we lost the narrow network of friends and associates we had previously had in Penang, and we transformed in a curious way. We became much more independent there, and we reached a point that our previous connections did not have any real relevance to what we were doing. I gained a considerable amount self-confidence and a sense of independence in the conduct of the fieldwork itself and became quite adept at administering tasks, observing and taking notes, and giving interviews. This was an invaluable lesson, and soon we were accumulating reams of notes and assorted task papers. I had set up a little black and white photo lab in our flat, and in the afternoons would process the film from the day's work. We accumulated this way a huge dividend of photographic materials from our work there.</p> <p>Our daughter was proving to have difficulty in her preschool, and we were not happy with her new primary care-giver, an Tamil Indian woman who seemed very distant, even possibly mean to the kids. We ended up cutting back her hours and days considerable, and letting her spend more time with us on the jetty. The families there all loved her very much, and she had much greater access to households than we ever managed. Soon she fit right in with the other kids of the Jetty. Because it was so hot, she ran around in her underpants only, like many of the other people there. There soon emerged a fundamental schism in our daughter's behavior between school, where her behavior was increasingly negative, to the point of refusing to eat or do the tasks they requested of her, and on the Jetty where she knew almost no bounds and at every turn people were feeding her and shoving candy at her. We ended up first removing her completely from the school by late summertime, and then even had to cut back taking her to the Jetty to get her straightened out. Thus it was that by October we had decided to begin phasing back our work on the Jetty, as it seemed that the people there were getting tired of answer all our interminable questions anyway. I began putting an end to the tasks I was doing, and wrapping things up. It seemed provident that we should look at cutting our costs in the entire affair, and even return early enough to try to complete the dissertation write-up by Spring. I was in a hurry, after almost a decade of graduate study, to bring this phase of our life to a close. We had burned out on the Jetty a little our selves, and it was growing increasingly difficult to justify to myself spending more of our limited resources in this way.</p> <p>It was during the last phase of our work in Penang that we had gained the acquaintance of the British couple who lived above us and their coterie of British friends. They had moved in several months after us and were for a couple of months quite aloof and I considered unfriendly. Finally, one evening, the young girl of the couple came down and asked us through the window if we knew a doctor for her boyfriend. He had been kicked in the ribs during a soccer match at the University. A couple of phone calls later and we were all soon in the back seat of my friend's car, going to the general hospital on the island. Fortunately, my friend was acquainted with the main physician on duty, and our British acquaintance was taken to be X-rayed within five minutes of our arrival. It turned out only to be a very severe and painful bruise, fortunately, and he had to pay only a small nominal fee for the x-ray and the painkillers he was given. We went back to our apartment and we ended up talking until the wee hours of the morning with our British friends.</p> <p>The frosty British ice was broken, and we were soon in the middle of a network of about 18 British students, many of them paired off heterosexually, who were all attending and Malaysian language program at the University. I came to like these young Britishers a great deal, and to admire their adventurous spirit abroad, and then took the opportunity to administer to as many of them as I could my symbolic framing study to gain a comparative sample that I had missed because of the politics of the study with the Malays and Indians on the island. A couple of them even accompanied me to the Jetty to observe what I was up to and soon were installed there with some of the more status conscious families teaching English to their children.</p> <p>So it came to pass that our routines consisted mostly of getting up early in the morning and seeing our daughter off to school. We then caught the earliest bus we could downtown, always waiting dutifully for the Sri Negara bus as we had befriended most of the bus staff and learned a great deal from our daily intercourse. We either went to the Jetty to try to finish up one end of the study or another, or else walked about on one errand or another downtown, to spend the mornings and early afternoons there, to return in the afternoon to fetch our daughter, then to settle in for the evening, frequently in the company of our new British friends.</p> <p>In late October, I had given notice to our manager of our intention to vacate the apartment, and we arranged a flight out of Penang back to the U.S., which could not be secured for about a month later. Fortunately, the timing was pretty good in fact. The last month was spent constructing some crates in the afternoons and evenings to hold my research materials, and arranging for their shipment back to the U.S. We shipped most of our materials out a couple of weeks before we left Penang, which was a week before Thanksgiving holiday back in the States. The last couple of weeks were spent in a strange kind of limbo for us. We were detached from most people there, and were growing a little homesick finally. I think to get the research done, we had put everything on hold for most of year, only to wake up at the end of it to discover that we were not at home there, and perhaps more than a little culture shocked.</p> <p>Whatever is written about culture shock, I would say that it hits different people in different ways and at different times. For us perhaps, it had settled at that time deeper down in a sense of fundamental existential rootlessness--a sense of not feeling attached or like we belonged to anything. I gradually brought each of my English classes to a close, one after the other, and looked forward to the termination of what had become somewhat dull and routine for me. Already I was looking forward somewhat disparagingly to the next challenge of meeting more academic deadlines in the game of chasing my doctorate. One day at the Jetty, I realized our time had come to an end, and the feeling seemed mutual, and I knew that when we left it, we would not be coming back to it. Many of the people sensed it as well, as if we did not really belong there after all. For the first time, near the end of the study, I had begun walking around the other Jetty neighborhoods more and looking around at the larger scope of the place. I wondered why we did the things the way we did them, and not in some other way. Then, finally, we looked at the occasional tourists who sauntered down to the Quay, and we sensed that we were no longer any different--just transient beings waiting for our train to come.</p> <p>The last week of our time in Malaysia in 1995, I booked a nice hotel room at the Lone Pine hotel down at Batu Ferringhi, the nice resort hotel along a short stretch of beach. It was the almost Northern most outpost of world civilization on the whole island short of a set of workers flats built just a litter further up the coast. We had stayed at this hotel a couple of times previously, the first time back in 1986. We liked it a great deal, as compared to the neighboring hotels, it was small, very quaint and relatively modest in price. It had the charm of having many nice Cassurina pines on the cost, with a nice lawn. It had been built in the 1950's and had wonderful meranti and datu furnishings. We took the room for about a week, and we invited as many of our Chinese friends and associates as we could. For about a week we had almost continuous visits from people, up until the last day we left.</p> <p>The return to the U.S. was uneventful. I hardly even remember it now. I remember being met at the Penang airport by one of my students. They saw us off, and we were soon on the plane. We waited at the K.L. airport only a few hours before boarding the plane for the U.S.</p> <p>  <hr> <p>We decided to cut short our time in Penang and booked a flight that got us back to the U.S. about a week before Thanksgiving holiday. I had previously shipped the four crates I had made full mostly of my research papers, and we went back to await their arrival. It was several weeks later and we were still waiting, when I by chance made a few phone calls to find out that the crates had already arrived and were sitting for a couple of weeks in some where house, ready to be claimed. No one notified me. I went down in my minivan, and it ended up costing me another $130 dollars to pay for the warehousing of the crates and the forklift that put them at the edge of the loading dock. I had to back my van in and load the crates myself. I was very dissappointed. It was apparent that a Taiwanese company had taken over and monopolized this end of shipping, and were realizing a tremendous middle-man mark up for their "services."</p> <p>Having gotten finally my notes, about three weeks overdue, I launched soon into the organization of my materials, and then into the analysis of the information, one section or set at a time. I had conceived of an overall framework for analysis, depending on type of task battery administered. I began working everyday, at least 15 hours per day, for the next four or five months in such a manner. I worked for about five weeks thus at my mom's house in Southern California, before heading back in the first two weeks of January to get settled in there before the semester began. It was my intention to have the dissertation finished by the end of the Spring semester. I was offered a TA ship with my main advisor in his Hindu civilization class. It was yet another writing intensive course and my job of course was to read and reread all the students' written essays. I continued with the analysis of the information, into the middle of February, at which time I had begun to work on a rough draft of the dissertation. My main advisor, kept encouraging me to submit the draft as soon as possible, as he worked on a first come first serve basis, and he had a commitment pending with some student in some other program. I got pretty pissed off at him when I finally did bring in a draft of my dissertation, only to have him refuse to look at it for several weeks so he could focus on this other student's, who was not even in our program. I could see that I would be getting no special favors from anybody, not even from my own primary mentor.</p> <p>The next couple of months were spent most writing and rewriting the dissertation, and doing the students' essays, and continuing with the analysis of my data. Things began falling into place pretty tightly by the fourth month, and by the fifth the finished form had taken shape. It went through four successive versions, and went from about 2000 pages in total length to a finished form of about 250 pages, a not unreasonable reduction, especially when 95% of the photographs were removed. I also had problems with my committee membership, as both the external committee members from other departments were no longer available. One was still in Malaysia on a visiting teacher program, and the other had mysteriously "left" his program because he had problems of not completing his own dissertation (no body told me about this issue beforehand.) I found a fourth and fifth committee member, both from within the program, and from without, in the department of psychology. The cognitive psychologist was just the right individual to appreciate the work I had been conducting in cross-cultural psychology, and I had the least problems with him in this regard than with anybody else. Though he was busy, he was not unforthcoming in helping me.</p> <p>I was so tied up in finishing the dissertation that I had blocked out all social relations besides counseling a few of the students I was TA ing. It was not until the end of the semester, while I was waiting for my advisors to review the dissertation, that I had time to form new friendships in the Terrace. The Taiwanese family whom we had known previously from the village was finishing his dissertation also, even before me, and he asked me to read the finished draft for English corrections. I did this for him, and when moving day came, helped them to load their things on the belated truck. I also formed a good friendship with the Argentine family that lived immediately across from his. The wife had been a lawyer in Argentina and babysat mostly for Latin families during the day, while her husband, Roberto, as finishing his Master's Thesis in Agro-meterology.</p> <p> </p> <p>  <hr> <p>We returned to Southern California to stay once again with my mom in early August of 1996. I immediately began sending off letters of application to various academic positions, especially to one in Singapore that I was really hoping on. During the first month, I continued to finish a couple of manuscripts relating to my symbolic framing methods and inter-correlational analysis while doing applications and waiting to get some reply from them. I think I worked so much on my little Mac powerbook that I soon caused it to crash and had to rebuild my operating system, discovering in the process that the black salesman I had bought the computer from back in late 1994 must have opened the box and taken the system software out, perhaps for the purpose of reselling it. Anyway, after crashing my program, I more or less let go of the work on the research I had been doing. I read a few books in anthropology, and submitted a few of my works for publication to some journals. I mostly worked on all the job applications I could find to academic positions, high and low, far and wide. I did over two hundred such applications to schools domestically, and if I remember right, about 15% to schools abroad in one country or another. By January I was mostly watching and just waiting for all the rejections to begin coming in, one after another, while continuing to send out as many more applications as I could. I figured that I could gain at least one position.</p> <p>By springtime, with my daughter in her first year of kindergarten, we were helping the teacher almost on a daily basis to put in a small garden for the kids. It was a very successful garden, installing my old drip system as well as mulching mostly with dried lawn clippings and straw hay that we had bought at a feed store in Yorba Linda. I continued to hold out hope, but I watched one rejection after another come back to me. I applied for grants and post-doctoral fellowships, all to no avail. I even applied to a couple of Teacher's training programs in Tennessee, of all places, that looked fairly prospective. It was evident to me though by April that no jobs were forthcoming for me, and, besides being more than a little down about it, I decided that it was better just to get on the road by July and see where we would end up. So that was our decision. About a week after my daughter's school had ended, we packed up our little van, had repair work done on it, bought new tires, and hit the road, not clear where we would end up. We had bought some camping equipment--new sleeping bags, utensils and a new self-supporting dome tent, with the idea of camping a little while along the way back east. I figured I would get back as far as Tennessee, to see if the program was real or not.</p> <p>  <hr> <p>Not having a clear direction, clutching at tenuous straws cast from far away, we got in our small minivan in late July of 1996 and just drove away, hoping to find something better for ourselves down the road. We got up to Wyoming where we decided to put in for a day or two camping down at Flaming Gorge reservoir. It was hot, and the campgrounds were not very pleasant for us, lacking even the amenities of water or proximate toilets. Rosie was miserable for the couple of days there, and made me know it. Finally we got in our car early and drove back up to Rock Springs. On a hill coming back, my car popped a belt. It proved to be the alternator belt. Fortunately we got into the the town of Rock Springs and to a mechanic at a Texaco station who was willing to repair it for us, but it would take at least a day and we checked into a hotel just behind the station.</p> <p>Little did we know that day that we would end up spending the next couple of years of our life there in Rock Springs. The car was not finished until early afternoon the next day, and we had already paid for a hotel room for another day. So we decided to spend another day in the city. We saw the advertisement for the Dinosaur exhibit at the community college, and we found directions and drove up the hill to visit the exhibit. While there, we met a woman who was the curator of the museum there. We got talking to her and I told her I was a doctor of Anthropology, and next thing I know she was showing us around her collections in the back room behind the exhibition hall of the museum. She gave my daughter some small fossils and a piece of trona.</p> <p>On the way out the next morning, we drove across the rest of Wyoming headed east, and by the time we had gotten into the western side of Nebraska, Rosie was crying and I had to stop. She didn't want to go on, though we drove across Nebraska, into Kansas, through Missouri, down to Southeastern Missouri where we cross the river at Cape Giradeau, and then made our way across the Southern tip of Illinois and then into Tennessee. We arrived at Johnson City in East Tennessee a couple of days later. I tried immediately accessing the program at the school, only to discover that most of my paper work had never left the desk of the admissions officer, and there was no knowledge of my intention to join the program. A day spent fruitlessly at the school, where I was desperately pleading with one program member, finally led us to a hasty departure later that evening. The hotel we were at seemed insecure, and was run by an Indian woman. The locks on the doors were in disrepair, as was the entire room, and we were not comfortable there as there was much transience and trash coming and going. Finally, late into the night, I told Rosie to pack our things and we took off back down the road in the direction we came from. I drove most of the night, until I pulled into a truck stop somewhere in central Tennessee to sleep a couple of hours. I got up the next morning and we drove all the way back through Kentucky, Illinois and into St. Louis. We ended up staying that night just west of Hannibal, Missouri. We decided to go back to Rock Springs and plant our flag there in that sandy ground. We rented a cheap hotel room there with a weekly rate and a kitchenette, and I commenced the job of searching for an apartment. In fact, we took the first apartment we looked at, after comparing it to a couple more. We liked the managress, and we were soon headed back down to Southern California on a Grey Hound bus in order to rent a U-Haul truck to bring our belongings back up. We had a week to get squared away, as Mahala had to begin first grade by then.</p> <p>We had Mahala in school and I began looking for work. For a couple of weeks I went to interviews but had no luck. Nobody wanted to hire me as I was "overqualified." I applied for a substitute teaching credential with the state and had to take a special examination to meet residency requirements. In the meantime, our landlady, knowing I was a doctor of anthropology, told us of her friend, a restaurant owner, who had a book that he wanted us to take a look at. We went down one morning to the restaurant and left the hostess our phone number, after eating a breakfast there. About a week later the owner called us and we made an appointment to talk with him for that evening. We had dinner at the restaurant with him and his wife, who did most of the management and cooking in the restaurant. It turned out to be a huge place, in excess of 7,000 square feet, with a large banquet hall, conference rooms, a full bar, etc. In fact, the place had a notorious reputation at one time of being the longest bar in the state of Wyoming, and a place of corruption where a federal drug agent had been assassinated by the local police just a few years prior. They had an old book with the binding broken and in tatters. It was a story of the Robidoux. It turned out that the wife was a descendent of this family, and they asked me to do the necessary research to uncover her lineage and to figure out how the restaurant could be renovated in keeping with this story.</p> <p>And so it was that I fell in with the owners of this restaurant. At first, for the first couple of months, they wanted me to plan a major renovation of the main area of the restaurant before the Holiday period. I came up with a Santa Fe style plan, in keeping with the name of the restaurant and the cultural tastes of the wife, who was part Indian. We planned new tiles, and the construction of lodge-pole columns dividing off the interior space. We redid many of the walls, knocking out some, rebuilding the stage, retiling all the floors, painting and having the main framework of the timbers installed. We made their late November Thanksgiving deadline by just a day or two. After this was completed, they set me to work doing some carpentry work about the place, and we set up a small woodworking shop in a garage space nearby my apartment. By that time, I had managed to get them in touch with a genealogist who had already reconstructed the majority of their family line--all they needed to do was to tie themselves and their family in at the bottom of the tree. It turned out that the wife was the direct patrilineal descendant of "Indian Joe" Robidoux, the son of the famous Joseph Robidoux of St. Joseph, Missouri. They then asked me to build an art exhibit on the theme of the Robidouxs and the fur trade, and to collect art for a gallery. Thus I built almost a hundred wooden frames, planned and executed an information exhibit incorporating about 25 information boards. I worked in that small space through the winter and early Spring, sometimes when temperatures outside reached 50 below zero and all there was was a small kerosene space heater. I did the matting and framing and the design of the entire exhibit. By the time this was completed in early summer, we had more than a hundred pieces hung on their walls. At that time, the husband was unsure of which direction to proceed, and set me on the task of designing further renovations that would be suitable. I made a couple of signs for the outside, and we put up a Teepee and I spent about a month painting this. I formulated several plans for them to consider, bringing in several outside experts to assist us. One plan consisted of a trading post/museum store distributed in nice cabinets located throughout the facility. I set to work building a few of these cabinets--making three in all to begin with. Another plan was to have school children tour the facility and to enact shows on the stage. We hired a doctor of education local to the area who had done her work on the Mormon trail and she began writing us a script to use for such a program with small children. She suggested that we build a Mormon handcart in keeping with the theme of the trail, and we found plans for this and found an historical reconstructionist who had worked on Robidoux projects in Colorado. He came up with a plan to renovate part of the interior to produce a Fort/trading post. I also came up with an idea for installing a multi-media presentation system on the central stage to incorporate normal dining within this relatively unused area of the restaurant.</p> <p>None of these ideas seemed attractive to the husband, who did not want to invest the $10,000 or more each of the plans would have entailed. By November, I told him that I had better just turn to on writing my book on the Robidoux, based on all the information I had gathered during the previous year. He was afraid of someone stealing the story or the book or the whole thing, and grew impatient. So I turned to during the winter and spring of 1997-8 finishing this book. I was in fact finished with it by April of 1998, but it needed extensive editing and rewriting to be manageable.</p> <p>By then relations between the husband and myself had become strained. I wanted to redefine our relationship in a way I thought would be mutually better for both of us. As it was, with the amount of pay I was receiving compared to the number of hours per week I had been working, it came to almost a minimum wage. In December I took only half pay from him, hoping that he would back off to a part-time position, so that I could then gain the leverage for starting my own business. What sealed my decision was the fact that in the second year of working for him, the IRS took an extra eight hundred dollars of our savings, just when we had accumulated enough to buy a CD with it or to invest in a little parcel of land, which we were intending then to do. They took us up on a weekend fling to Jackson Hole Wyoming, in early Spring, just as the roads had cleared enough for traffic to get safely through. He stayed drunk most of the time. They tried to convince me to stay with them on a quasi-permanent basis, though they could give me nothing in writing and no sense of security. Furthermore, they were imposing a definition of my professional identity that I found far to constraining, and in the larger scheme of things, somewhat unrealistic.</p> <p>The husband and I got into increasing arguments over copyright as he believed it to be a work for hire though no contracts were signed or anything and the work was in fact a by-product of the entire project to date. He wanted the rights to the entire book exclusively. I was afraid not only that he would totally alienate my identity or authorship from the text, but that he would actually take the book after I had completed it to a ghost writer to butcher it in any way he saw fit. He asked me to research out copyright law, and when I reported to him that I felt, by law, that copyright was retainable by myself, he accused me of lying and trying to cheat him.</p> <p>It turned out that he mainly only wanted to make a lot of money from the sale of the book. I was willing to yield copyright to him, but felt very strongly that my authorship should not be alienated thus as he tried to do. I therefore quit him by May, and finished the book on my own, paying for its reproduction mostly with what little money we had managed to save from the year before. Therefore I made about 25 copies of it myself, to distribute to archives and libraries. The husband found out and had me produce twenty more copies, and in total I made myself 51 copies of the book. We finished the book the very last day of our residence in Rock Springs, actually working the night before by the light of a drop-lamp hung from an outlet from outside because our electricity had been shut off. We gave the husband and wife about 25 copies, and kept most of the rest for distribution. We left Wyoming in the early afternoon, just having finished packing up our few belongings. We were headed back to California before going to China, where I had managed to land a contract to teach English.</p> <p>  <hr> <p>The trip back from Wyoming was very peaceful and pleasant. We were accompanied by storm clouds the entire way across the state and into Utah, which took the edge off the heat of the early summer and cast the greening landscapes in remarkable veiled vistas of shadow and clouds. Coming through Utah, we drove directly into a storm with lightening and wind swirling. It was this in hindsight that I've come to miss most about Wyoming.</p> <p>My motivation to go to China was based on two sets of factors that were only indirectly related to one another. In my deteriorating relationship with my employers, I needed a reasonable direction of escape. I did not look forward to becoming unemployed once again in Wyoming after going through what we had already done. The other issue was the unfinished agenda of my doctorate and conducting post-doctoral research in China related to some aspects of my doctoral research regarding computer-based simulation of cultural systems. Some Chinese were interested in this, and we had written a couple of grant proposals back in 1995-6, but nothing came out of it. Thus, it was unfinished business in the background of our lives. In fact I applied to the position in China while applying to other positions in the U.S. through the Chronicle of Higher Education. I had done it on a whim, without taking it very seriously. So I was surprised a few months later to receive an acceptance letter, and then an e-mail from a foreign affairs person in central China. At the moment, Rosie really did not look forward to going to China. Her own job was working out well for her and she was gaining status and pay, though it was hardly enough to sustain us. In fact, I was very unsure of China myself. The first set of prospective schools there in fact refused me, after offering it to me and then offering it to somebody else. But soon I received a phone call very early in the morning, to be told that I would be teaching at a small teacher's college in central China. I agreed to this, with the proviso that I would be allowed to conduct the research I had intended to. We had to rush through a set of medical examinations, which, in order to clear their requirements of official seals, in fact had to somewhat fraudulently use and complete the forms using only a notary public's signature. If I had known then the implications of this convoluted bureaucratic procedure, I would probably not have ventured to China at all.</p> <p>We stayed in California just a few weeks. I was waiting for the Chinese embassy to finally chop our passports, which they did by the very last day of the posted period. It was getting late in August, and the semester there was supposed to begin in just a week or two. I was impatient to get my family resettled before the semester began. As it was, I had already had enough bullshit from the Chinese, between the medical exams and the embassy and their foreign affairs people. The last day, I was very uncertain about it all, and almost just got back into the car to drive back the way we came.</p> <p>But the day soon came to pack up our things for China. We bought a new set of luggage, some nesting suitcases with little wheels, for only $29. I had three computers to carry with me, on the expectation that these would be used for doing some of the research and development work. The foreign affairs person with whom I was in contact was somewhat vague and sketchy about anything, and I should have taken this then as a sign that something may not be quite right. On the eve of our departure, I had spent over $500 in faxes to China, and had almost 10 pieces of luggage loaded with our belongings and things to do field research with. I had also shipped off two sea-bags loaded with textbooks and other materials for teaching and research I was expecting to get done.</p> <p>We went to China, not knowing what we were getting into, with no expectation of real pay or savings, giving up most of what little bit we had accumulated, overloaded with junk and quite ill-prepared for what we were actually getting into. We arrived in China early in the week in late August. We landed at first in Beijing. We were ushered off a plane to be greeted by a host of uniformed security offiers, all looking as if they were in the military. My feelings were very ambivalent, as I am sure my wife felt strangely too. The sense of oppression greeted us at the door as much as the humidity would greet us at the door of the plane in Malaysia. It was a sense of oppression that would not leave us finally until after our departure a year later the following July.</p> <p>We stayed in Shanghai for the first several days. The foreign affairs man who met us struck me from the very beginning as affable, but falsely friendly and it did not take me very long to begin not really liking this fellow very much. I will call him Mr. Z. He was tall and skinny and he brought his wife with him. She had never been to Shanghai before and she was relatively fat and short, unusual for a mainland Chinese women for which a history of periodic famine and cannibalism selected for thin women. They were an odd couple, and I bemused somewhat extraordinary. Their little boy was friendly enough, but he caged around like a monkey enough to become especially annoying to my wife. With each passing day the foreign affairs person rubbed me the wrong way worse and worse. The first night, we got in two taxi's and one got lost getting to the hotel, when it did finally arrive, an argument ensued between the waiting taxi driver and the foreign affairs person over extra payment for the half-hour spent waiting. It was already 2 or 3 in the morning and we were all too tired to stand the bullshit.</p> <p>A couple of days later I bought him and his wife a nice dinner at the hotel we were at, and was quite embarrassed by his arguing with the main hostess over the charge for the tea. I did not mind the cross-cultural aspect of it, but felt, even from a Chinese standpoint, that such vociferous argument in a nice place was a little bit embarrassing. Going back to the train station to go to the school a day later, I was really upset when we got in two taxis but his sped off and left my wife and daughter in the rear taxi stopped at a traffic signal. We became separated in the crowded streets of Shanghai near the train station for at least an hour, and when we finally did reconnect my daughter was broken down in tears and my wife was near tears. Then he had the gall to get into another argument with some poor porters, a family, to carry our bags but refusing to pay just a few Yuan they wanted.</p> <p>The train took more than twelve hours, and we arrived in Zheng Zhou station the next day. We had to manouver our heavy bags into a small waiting room to wait for our connection. He never told me anything, even if I asked him, but acted impatient with things. We waited a few hours there in a squalid and overcrowded room, with men spitting all over the floor and a couple of women in military uniforms shouting at them as if they were caged animals. We finally got on the train for Xinyang and we arrived in the evening exhausted, hot and thirsty from a long trip. I noticed our foreign affairs person was buying food for his wife and himself, but would not even offer to buy us some, so before leaving for Xinyang I insisted that we go buy some food and drink to quench our insatiable thirst and hunger. We were quite disappointed to find only hot sodas and funny bread that was greasy and relatively unappetizing. We passed through a small town and the foreign affairs person pointed out his father's home. We went on a half-hour more and arrived in Xinyang. We came off to be greeted by more crowds and waiting taxis.</p> <p>We arrived at the school to find only mounting disappointment. We were ushered down a dark and damp hallway at the basement of a hotel, to find our new "apartment" in the back basement, semi-subterranean. The bathroom was stopped completely from a plugged drain, and the floor was flooded with filthy water. The entire rooms were filthy. Furniture consisted of odd cast-offs by the hotel. It was not the worst of it though. That night the Foreign Affairs person had arranged a special dinner at the campus restaurant. He had told the chef to serve us fried chicken and French fries (alas, Chinese style) because we were Americans. We were hot, tired, dirty, and wanted to rest and clean up, and all he seemed to really care about was parading his new "prize" around the campus for people to see. In hindsight I guess we disappointed him as much as he proved disappointing to us. Not only were we not as he expected, but we were perhaps more than he was counting on. The meal we ate was horrible. We waited in a small room at a vinyl couch. The glass top coffee table was so filthy with grease and grime it looked as if no one had bother to wipe it off for months, even years. We were to eat at a large round table by the door. There along the wall ran a rat, one of the Foreign Affair's "squirrels." We were served tea by a young waitress in a Chinese evening gown. When we went to sip the tea we found what we took to be pubic hairs in the teacups. We politely set the cups back down without drinking.</p> <p>Soon (a half-hour later) the food was brought in on large plates. We sat down to a meal of chicken heads chopped up in sliced potatoes and a kind of river fish that was not very tasty. He had a couple of bottles of the local beer. Ji Gong Shan beer. It was probably the worst tasting beer I ever had, and I don't think in the year there I could ever finish an entire bottle of the stuff. It has a slightly sweet flavor, as if it had been fermented with some kind of fruit, and it always had an off character. But it was good for getting a large party going at little expense. It was sold in sets of ten bottles bound together at the stems with plastic raffia so that the bottles formed a bundle. This bundle of ten one liter bottles cost the equivalent of about U.S. $1.60 and it became quite apparent to me in the course of the year that alcoholism, even among students in broad daylight, was not an uncommon problem in central China. I drank a couple of glasses of the warm beer with my host, and he wanted to get more, but Rosie insisted on our precipitous return to our new apartment. I was in agreement with her.</p> <p>We lost our appetites when we saw the chopped up chicken heads starring at us, with exposed brains and gobblers and beaks and all. I offered for the foreign affairs person to take the plate home to his own family to eat, since he said that it was his son's favorite meal, and since they must have been hungry from the long train trip like we were, but he refused. I managed a bit of the fish but it did not have either texture or flavor but had a peculiar smell that was almost like mud or algae. I was almost a little insulted by everything, as if this was an elaborate but crude joke being played on us by our hosts, and it proved not far from the truth. I looked the foreign affairs person in the face and told him in no uncertain terms that even in Malaysia we would not feed such food to dogs. We must have really disturbed and disappointed our Foreign Affairs person because we proved not to be the gullible Americans he expected us to be. From that time on my distrust in him and in the other authorities only grew worse. Not only were they insincere, but they were incredibly poor but inveterate liars.</p> <p>We returned to the apartment with a confused state of shock mixed with both hunger and exhaustion. The place was a total mess, and we had not the will to unpack any of our bags. The only thing we wanted was to flee as soon as possible out the front gate and back to the train station to reverse the long and laborious journey we had just completed. We felt stuck in the middle of a world completely distant and cut-off from everything we had known. We were beyond a mere case of culture shock--this was cross-cultural disaster.</p> <p>By two a.m. that next morning, sleepless and still in a dazed state, I had reached a conclusion that these people were either totally inept and without moral fiber. I could not accept this judgment anthropologically, and I decided that maybe they lacked any sense of class and refinement at all, which I also found to be anthropologically incredible. I could not but help wonder if this was not the cumulative result of the work of communist liberation, the true state of 49 years of communist repression and totalitarianism. I realized in a state of horror what I had gotten us all into, and I felt miserable. Rosie was insistent that we leave as soon as possible, and I was in agreement with her, except that I didn't think we could get very far by ourselves before the authorities would detain us and escort us back to our abode. Were we therefore in a prison basically against our wills? In a sense it was true and that was part of the issue on a fundamental level. An existential sense of a fundamental loss of control plagued us the entire year, and crept up on us increasingly to undermine our psychic in ever more perfidious ways in the course of our sojourn.</p> <p>Such was our first and most lasting impression of our China sojourn. We felt very vulnerable stuck in the middle of a completely alien world. We were fundamentally at the mercy of a single individual, our dear Mr. Z., who was himself quite insincere about anything and proved in time to be quite nefarious in his dealings with everything. He showed himself eventually to be an out and out liar, and in the course of the year not only perversely stood in the way of any research I tried to get done, but was reading our personal mail, particularly the letters sent from my mom, and he was regularly spying on us from the room above. How much of this activity had been an authorized part of his job, and how much was merely a function of his socio-pathic predisposition will never be clearly delineated. He had cultivated an unusual skill in speaking English, and this was his ticket to a good position next to the President of the campus. He had above average intelligence, and his eyes would shift and flit in a peculiar nervous habit whenever he appeared to be thinking about something secret. But this did not offset his basic spinelessness of character. He was the main English translator for the entire city and surrounding area that probably encompassed a total of half a million people.</p> <p>We arrived about four days before the beginning of the semester. I spent the first two days and nights cleaning the apartment as best I could. My wife had gone through a period of psychological denial and refusal, insisting at every turn on our immediate departure. I scrubbed all the walls and all the floors, and tried to arrange the odd pieces of furniture in a way that would be suitable to us.</p> <p>The first six weeks were perhaps the most difficult. It took about a month to get used to things enough to even find food for us to eat. After about the first week, when Mr. Z had managed most of his paperwork, there was little else he had to do with us that was not somehow a "control" function. In a sense I knew we were pretty much on our own. Some more aggressive students did mediate for us that month. Our diet fell to pieces, and by the end of September we had hardly eaten more than noodles and crackers, and were starved for protein to the point of having early symptoms of protein-calorie malnutrition and even beri-beri. Our breakthrough came when the fall National holiday sent our normal "mediators" away on Beijing holidays, and a new group of more mild students came and told us where to get food behind the campus. My wife went with a couple of the female students, and from then on for about a month or two we began buying real food there, enough to keep us from feeling hungry. At the same time, by then, my family's "care" packages began arriving with enough dietary supplements to off set our chronic hunger.</p> <p>It did not take very long to realize that we were invaded by numerous rats, and the first three months of our time there was marked by regular attempts to kill them without mercy. They had gnawed holes through the door jams at the bottom and created a pathway that led probably through the entire hotel and out beyond. I lifted cement and sand from the many construction areas around the campus and I closed in as many of the holes as I could find. Fortunately I had my mom mail us some rat poison, so after the first month I baited them in the kitchen area, and in the room next to ours, as well as outside and in our own rooms. In such a manner, after a couple of weeks, I managed to keep most of the rats at bay within our own area. They seemed to be a bit territorial, and I knew that in time they would come invading from the area from behind the hotel and the forest that was just on the other side of the wall that held back the earth in our compound area.</p> <p>About two months into the affair, I found the package of rat poison in the adjoining bedroom that we normally kept closed and vacant to be totally chewed up and eaten. I referred in my classes to the rat family who lived next door, and I invited them to dinner. Ocassionally we would find a dead rat smelling underneath a piece of furniture or in the morning having tried to get out the door we sealed to find fresh air. During the first month there, I kept hearing noises in the bathroom area above the old tub. Everything in the Bathroom was jerry-rigged and there were numerous spaces for things to hide and crawl in. One night I heard a sound of splashing from the bathroom in the wee hours of the morning. I got up to discover a mature rat splashing in the toilet bowl, trying to get out but unable to get a grip on the porcelain. I don't know if he had fallen accidentally in from above, or tried swimming up from underneath. I grabbed my baseball bat I had brought with me and tried smashing him, which I eventually accomplished but not before having cracked a hole in the porcelain of the bowl.</p> <p>It was not only the rats, but numerous centipedes that liked the constant moisture in the drains. Some grew to eight inches in length and looked very tough and intelligent from a standpoint of natural selection. I counted about forty centipedes that I killed or captured within the premises of our dwelling in the course of the year.</p> <p>Such was our introduction to China. I was almost immediately engaged in teaching, and the first couple of months were spent really trying to get my feet on the ground in this regard. I was overloaded with classes, virtually teaching all four grades in English, and the senior grade in two classes. I can say I really learned my English in that semester, but it left little time over for anything else. I fell pretty sick just before Christmas time, and had to lay up in the darkness of the bedroom for a couple of days. The first semester was difficult, but the second semester, which resumed at the end of February after a month-long and much needed Spring break, went much more smoothly. I had really gotten my act together and I insisted on cutting back the number of class-hours, essentially eliminating two of the least productive and most antagonistic grades in order to concentrate on the two grades that seemed to need and appreciate my help the most.</p> <p>Things went better in the second semester than the first, and proceeded quite smoothly up until news the middle of the second semester when the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia touched off a near violent student action on the campus, most of which seemed directed at us.</p> <p>The wintertime was the most difficult for us because of the cold and damp of our dungeon. So much moisture came through the walls that where the light did not penetrate, there was a constant film of moisture and a strange algae growing on the walls, under all the furniture and all the other unseen nooks and crannies. It was cold and there was no heating. The walls were basically brick without any insulation. The ground surrounding us except for the front came up above head-level. We had one small electric space heater that would produce enough heat to warm about a three foot radius from its front, and if we were not at class bundled in four or five layers of clothes, we were huddled in front of this small heater wrapped in all our blankets and quilts. We stayed this way through the Christmas season and into February, when at the end the days began lengthening again and the shadows emerging stronger on the tiles through the bars of the windows.</p> <p>It was not entirely bitter that first semester. We found considerable consolation in the kindness of a few of our students who had large hearts. We took their friendship quite seriously. We had no connection with any faculty members of the campus. The most they seemed to want to do was get me out and get me so drunk I would make a fool of myself. I was warned about this beforehand, so I avoided such a situation as best I could. I did not mind, as I liked the younger students a great deal. We put on a nice Halloween party, and then a Christmas party, that was quite successful for many of my students.</p> <p>Things worked much better for us during the first half of the second semester. I had formulated a teaching regimen that minimized the labor input and maximized the gain from the students, and the student's seemed to be enjoying their classes more. I adopted a radical approach that deemphasized the examinations, for which I discovered a pattern of chronic cheating even involving key department and school leaders, and that was very daring and unconventional from the Chinese perspective.</p> <p>I was taking my students out regularly to do activities outdoors once it warmed up, encouraging them to use their English loudly and in public situations. We maintained the normal schedule, but got so much more accomplished at the same time. Within a couple of weeks of the semester, we had also organized a student library that started in one class and soon came to incorporate almost all of the students of the English program as it fulfilled a strong need of the students for extra books within an open framework. We met with some resistance from the authorities, and I found out through connections that Mr. Z, the Foreign Affairs person was trying to destroy the library in almost anyway he could.</p> <p>He would block letters the library sent to the President of the campus, throwing them in the trashcan, and he recommended to the President that the library be destroyed and the books confiscated. This was only the beginning of a sordid and lurid story that involved manipulation, illicit sexual misconduct, lying, spying and cheating. It was all too much to bear, even with a grain of salt or a glass of beer.</p> <p>But everything about the second semester, whether positive or increasingly negative, paled in significance to the bombing episode. We heard news about it first from one of my students in the morning. The Americans had bombed the Chinese embassy in Sarajevo. Soon Mr. Z showed up and told us that we had better sit tight and not go out much, and explained what he knew of the unfolding story. By evening a number of my students showed up to be with us. Groups had been forming all day long under our apartment below the wall, and slogans and hate posters had been pasted on the walls directly below our apartment along the main thoroughfare of the campus. My students didn't want to leave, and it grew very restless outside after dark. A couple of windows could be heard breaking above us. We slept very little that night and several students slept in our main hall and in the room next door. The next day, and the next couple of days, we couldn't go out. A student demonstration and march was held that led down the thoroughfare of our apartment in the afternoon. The students were organized by leaders from above. Their mobilization was remarkable, and it was clear that the communist party leaders, ever secretive, were behind it all. Police in riot gear showed up in some vans and cordoned off the hotel in the forest and in the parking lot on both sides of our apartment, and school officials were all over the place.</p> <p>It was at that point that my spirit broke. I sat in our kitchen area where I was trying to grade my mid-term examinations above the den of the shouting students. I decided it just wasn't worth being there any longer and wanted to return as soon as possible to our own country. Later that week I communicated to Mr. Z my desire to terminate the contract. I was not too surprised when in fact he seemed almost happy and relieved to let me go, and I found out afterward that he hoped to gain some cash out of the default on the contract for himself. But the students and the President of the college all encouraged me to continue, though I saw that the context for doing the active teaching I had been pursuing before the bombing was all washed away. It was hard to teach before forty students at at time, when you knew on some level most of them hated you or despised you for being an American. It made the remainder of the semester difficult.</p> <p>We were in fact confined to our apartment area for a couple of weeks and were told not to venture beyond the school gate. I could not go out on campus by myself without groups of students cat-calling and even aggressively confronting me. It was bad enough from the beginning--a sign of more than 90 percent closure of the people to the outside world. But it was even worse after the bombing, as a lot of poor and frustrated students didn't need many excuses to find vent for their anger and pent-up hostility. A week later I did go out, and the posters were still on the walls, and I stopped to read them on the way to class, and one had a picture of Clinton with a Hitler mustache painted on, and another exclaimed in red letters "blood for blood." Unlike the library posters we had put up in the same location earlier that semester, these were not torn down the first hour of their appearance, but remained untouched on the walls long enough for the rain to eventually wash them away.</p> <p>We returned in July, the day after the finals were finished. The finals went quickly and relatively smoothly. A little cheating was unavoidable in China, but they were as fair as I could manage them under the circumstances. By the end of the year in China, we had grown adapted to the local context. Food was no longer a big problem--in fact we grew fond of some of the local diet and rarely ate what was sent to us from overseas anymore. Mahala had developed a coterie of Chinese girls and was talking fairly fluently in her own Chinese style. She even looked quite like a young Chinese girl. In the end, the Foreign Affairs person tried to send us back unescorted, knowing we would have difficulty. But the secretary to the President, whom I had befriended and trusted, accompanied us with his girl friend. We stayed two or three days in Shanghai before departing in late July.</p> <p>We returned a year ago from the time of this writing. When I got back, we stayed about a week with my Grandma before we got on the road to go back east to look for a place to live. We drove back as far as St. Joseph, Missouri, and then backtracked and drove through most of Wyoming. We landed in Lander in Riverton County, Wyoming. It was a nice little town and we decided to give life a go there, but finding a place to rent proved difficult. We had most of our things in storage still in Rock Springs. After we managed to secure a place, we returned to Rock Springs, renting a large Ryder Rental Van. We loaded it all up and then drove back over South Pass to Lander, only to discover when we got there that the people who were supposed to meet us there to rent the place never showed up. We waited several hours and tried making phone calls, but to know avail. Loaded down with a huge truck, we didn't know what else to do but to get back on the road and drive back down to Rock Springs. We explained it to the rental guy who let us keep the truck loaded a few days longer until we could work something out. Rosie's friend from where she had previously worked found us a small but nice apartment downtown, and we decided to take this. We stayed there all of two or three weeks. I found out over the Internet that my previous employer at the restaurant there had filed copyright of the Robidoux book with his own name as the author, and this destroyed me. It undermined my desire to be there any longer, and, so giving up on most of what we owned, passing it to the Mormon "Bishops Closet" we left Wyoming one final time with only our books and old research papers. We returned to Southern California where we are still currently residing.</p> <p>While in China the previous year during December I had a bit of a mid-life mini-crisis, and I had decided that I wanted to go into my own business. In our life circumstances that seemed like the best thing we could do for ourselves. I had been planning this since then and now was anxious to try to put my plans in motion. I am still at it even now.</p> <p> </p> <p>  <hr> <p>Here we are now. It is late October. We have been back at my mom's house since last October. I have been continuously working on my business, mostly over the Internet. I reached a crisis period in late January of 2000, full of uncertainty about our future and realizing that Southern California was a deadend for us. At that time I put out about thirteen applications to community colleges throughout California, as well as one application to a graduate program at Humboldt in Northern California. I received rejections eventually from most of these schools. I did get admitted to the Humboldt program, and to me, Humboldt didn't sound like an unreasonable deal, as it was more or less aligned with my own professional and private interests, at least on paper. Of course, it was hard to be certain of anything under our circumstances. As summer approached, all I got were rejections from my job applications. I was most angered by the local community college, which had become most a Mexican affair. I got back a little green post card telling me I was not selected for an interview. I was so angry by it that I tore it up. Afterwards, I thought better of it and taped it back together again. Now I call it my 'green card' and keep it as a reminder of the contradictions of our current system. If I felt underqualified for these jobs, or if I felt like the people being hired to them were more qualified, then I would not mind the near blanket and absolute rejection. But to know that I spent so many years of my life gaining the qualifications, and that those being interviewed were probably far less qualified, but probably only selected for their ethnicity, I found disturbing. As my wife says to me now, these are jobs that we should be getting, and that others probably far less deserving are taking from us.</p> <p>My wife and I went up to Humboldt in mid-April to look around there during my daughter's Spring break. It was a pleasant trip. We left about 3:00 A.M. on Sunday morning and drove up through the central valley and veered over the coastal mountains near Lake county just north of Sacramento. It started to rain as we got into the mountains, and it rained the entire next day while we were up there, and the entire week, in fact. We drove through the mountains and then up Highway 101 through "redwood alley." It was beautiful inspite of the rain. We got into Humboldt at just about 4:00 P.M. Sunday afternoon. We ate in a Chinese Restaurant just on the Highway in downtown Eureka to get our bearings. The Chinese food proved to be some of the worst we had ever eaten--not remotely like anything my wife ever cooked. We then drove up to the small town of Arcata to be next to the campus. We checked into a small hotel off the main highway, and settled in for the evening while it rained.</p> <p>The next morning, we checked out of the room fairly early, ate some donuts in a small coffee shop downtown Arcata, run by a Thai woman, and then we made our way to the campus to walk around a bit. I found a small map of the campus and then we walked to the environmental sciences department where I was supposed to be a student. I found nobody around but one woman who seemed quite self-conscious of her own underdog status as a junior lecturer in the program. I left a note for my primary mentor in his mailbox and then we looked at the bookstore and the main center of the campus. I was astounded by the huge trees growing on the campus, and found it to be the most impressive thing about it. Especially near the playing track there was a huge Eucalyptus tree that was in girth as round as any of the redwoods nearby.</p> <p>Not knowing what else to do with ourselves, and missing our daughter after only one day, we decided to leave early and head back down to Southern California. In the parking lot we met a woman who wanted to take our parking space, as there were not enough for all the students, and we pulled our van out and got into a conversation with her. She was a middle-aged returning mother who was moving back onto apartments on campus. She told us it took her six weeks to get an apartment there the first year. She liked the campus a great deal and found the program really rewarding. As we were double-parked, and a campus police car had driving into the parking lot on the other side, we took her leave and decided to pull out. A pickup truck with huge tires, elevated about three feet off the ground, was near our car with a big bumper that extended out. As we pulled away, I heard a crunching noise and found that the bumper had squashed the side of our van near the door. Fortunately, the damage, though ugly in appearance, was mostly superficial and did not obstruct the opening of the side door. I was angry at myself for my carelessness.</p> <p>We drove back south down the highway in silence for a while, the rain coming and going intermittently. We stopped to take a break in a redwood grove about an hour down the highway. It was pretty, near the Eel River. Rosie and I were talking about the school. She was disappointed by it all, as I was also. It seemed too much like going backward in our life. She was crying in her unhappiness. We walked by the river as I tried in my own cold manner to console her about our sad state of affairs. I understood that she was very unhappy about a prospective move to Humboldt, and about my becoming a student again in such a program.</p> <p>We talked as we drove back south, and in an hour or so she seemed to be feeling much better. We drove down 101 through Napa Valley and then into San Francisco area, across the Golden Gate Bridge, and we got temporarily turned around downtown, which seemed busy and chaotic. We finally got back onto the 101 South, and ended up stuck in traffic through Silicon Valley. We couldn't believe how much San Francisco had grown and become impacted even in the last decade since we were there during my daughter's first year.</p> <p>We had intermittent rain and clouds and sun the entire trip back down, and we got into L.A. at about 1200 P.M. at night. Later that week we decided to take our daughter and my mom down to San Diego to Sea World. It was still a little rainy, though we managed a good morning at the amusement park until the rains came down harder in the mid-afternoon. The park was interesting, but a bit disappointing compared to the expectations we had of it based on the commercials advertised on television.</p> <p>On a whim, after we left the park, we decided to look for my father's gravesite at Rosecrans National Cemetery. It turned out that we were not very far from it, and my mom had thought enough to bring her papers that had the number of the grave. We got into the cemetery just about 15 minutes before it was closing. It was still raining intermittently. We drove around looking for the grave, but couldn't find the matching numbers or even the alphabetically arranged areas. On a whim we drove down to a second, third and fourth entrance to the cemetery, which stretched along the main road that ran through the Naval base there up to the Point Loma National Park at the end of the finger of land that jutted out into the sea.</p> <p>On a hunch I pulled into the last entrance that was a small circular drive in the middle, and without even looking at the numbers on the graves I knew the location from more than thirty years before. When we drove near the place that the funeral had been, I strangely recognized the hillside, the road, and even the trees, which had grown quite larger by then. We found his grave not far off the road. My mom immediately broke down crying.</p> <p>My wife commented on the wonderful Feng Shui of the place. It overlooked the bay that was mainly dominated by the Navy installations directly below us and on the other side. I recognized the San Diego airport and a part of the Marine Corps Boot Camp nearby. Both Mom and I had tears in our eyes from some deep source within that we had kept locked up probably for the entire thirty-five years. It started raining again and after a few minutes during which we took a few photos, we got in the car and drove up to Point Loma at the end. The facilities at Point Loma were all closed, but we found some restrooms and in the rain I walked my daughter to the lighthouse that overlooked the vast Pacific Ocean. It had all brought back haunting memories from an earlier and almost forgotten period of our lives. I do not know if ghosts dwelled at that cemetery ground and beyond at the lighthouse, but it would probably be a good place to hold a seance.</p> <p>We delayed going up to Humboldt until after my daughter finished her school and left on the fifth of July, the day after the holiday. No jobs were forthcoming from my 15 or so applications, mostly in the state of California. When I had returned from Humboldt the first time, I decided to renew my effort at finding some other job, and I found websites dedicated to ESL, at which I put in numerous applications and received almost immediate phone calls from Korea and China. But Rosie was not happy with these propositions either. It seemed as if I would have to go by myself to these places, under what were mostly very problematic circumstances. During the last two months in May and June, we got involved in binding and bookmaking in several jobs, one of which even paid us some extra money.</p> <p>We spent ten days up at Humboldt the second time, in the middle of the month of July. We traveled through the Central Valley, and stopped and visited my aunt at Chowchilla for a couple of hours. I got to meet a cousin I had not seen or talked to for at least a decade. We were invited to visit my other cousin on his small farm he was renting up north of Sacramento. We did not realize how far it was, and we had driven almost the entire length of the state of California, just south of Redding, before the end of the day. My car was acting up, and the warning lights came on as we were pulling off the main highway. The entire trip was hot, and I-5 was very busy. We witnessed a terrible accident on the highway in the middle of Sacramento. A car had a blowout doing at least 75 miles per hour, and lost control and went right up under the mid-section of a truck that was on its left. The entire top of the car was sheared off, leaving an explosion of glass fragments and twisted metal pieces in its wake. We were but one or two hundred feet behind and were lucky to escape a small pile up of cars immediately behind it. We continued down the road without stopping, as other people were getting out to assist, and it was almost certain most of the people in the car were instantly killed.</p> <p>My cousin had a nice little 5-acre ranch, complete with barn, guesthouse, a huge lawn the size of some city parks, and a nice spacious two-bedroom ranch-style house surrounded partly with a deck and a Jacuzzi. I couldn't believe he was paying less than what some people in the city paid for a simple apartment. My daughter enjoyed the company of her small second cousins and the horses that they rode. I talked with my cousin and his wife who was cooking a good Sunday dinner for us from the last of the hams they had gotten from the pigs they themselves had slaughtered. We left for Humboldt early the next morning, and drove over the mountains and entered the city of Arcata from the Northeast.</p> <p>We ended up staying in Arcata and Eureka area for about 10 days trying to find an apartment or a house to rent. It was extremely tight, tied up by real estate people and their management staff, and it turned out that we looked at barely a handful of places by the end of the week, and in fact inside of only three or four places. We put in several applications, but realized that we were not being called. Finally, in disgust, we went camping up in a forest at Agate State Park north of the city of Arcata about a half-hour. It was a beautiful campground, and we ended up staying there three days over the weekend. I took my daughter on numerous short hikes, and we would spend the day visiting the main beach or the rocky coasts on the other side of the park.</p> <p>We returned to Arcata for a couple of days to renew our search, but it was not long before we realized we were making absolutely no progress and spending more than a hundred dollars a day. So we decided to abandon the Humboldt idea.</p> <p>On the very last day, I found an ad in the classifieds for a house, and I called and gained an interview with the owner. It was an old Victorian style house in downtown Eureka. He wanted only a reasonable rent and deposit, which we were quite willing to cover, but we never heard back from him. In disgust, we left Arcata and Eureka, and returned back to my mom's house empty-handed, having spent about $1200 within little to show for it but some rocks and driftwood picked up on the beach. On the way back down we stopped at a small roadside state park with a redwood grove and ended up camping there for a day near the Eel River. It was the same place my wife and I had stopped at on the previous sojourn to Eureka. This time it was sunny out. The river was only half the size it was in April. Mahala went swimming and in the evening I took her out swimming again and we tried to catch the trout under the water using my daughter's goggles. We could see the fish almost within arm's reach, and we spent a good hour or two in shear delight in the shadows of the evening. Needless to say, on our return journey the next day the most my daughter and I caught were the flu, and we did not get back to So. Cal. too soon to feel the full brunt of the symptoms over the next few days.</p> <p>For about a month afterward I held out with the idea of going up by myself to Humboldt to even lease a small business space before school started. I was very frustrated with things not working out for us. I packed and unpacked my car at least three separate times. It was rocky for my wife and myself. My Mom went back east to a family reunion for a week, and we kept her house for her while she was gone. In the meantime I had gained a contract to teach English in Saudi Arabia. It paid very well, all tax free, but Rosie didn't want me to go there. It was not until late August that things finally came to a head. In the last couple of days, about a week before school was to start, I found a man willing to rent his shop space for 500 a month. He wanted a five-year lease up front but I talked him down to a three-year lease.</p> <p>I ended up turning down the Saudi Arabia contract which I held in my hand, much to the chagrin of the businessman in Palm Springs who was quite angry and disappointed with my rejection. I repacked my van and was set to go back up to Humboldt that weekend. I got up at 3:00 A.M. in the morning, made coffee, got dressed, and then just sat in the kitchen by myself. I felt funny about leaving and going. And decided to wait until the next day to think it over. I got up about the same time the next day and went through the routine one more time. In the end, I didn't feel right about it on a gut level and just went back to sleep. I decided simply to remain at my Mom's house for another year and to try to carry forward the business from there.</p> <p>In a week we had taken the back bedroom and converted it into a small office. I am sitting there now, writing this. It has been about six weeks, and we have slowly managed to get the business off the ground. I applied for car registration and have been walking through the steps in declaring myself a legitimate businessperson. Things have improved a bit for us in this time, even though we have no money and are in some debt. Not two weeks after I made my final decision just to remain where we were at, I received a phone call from an apartment manager up at Arcata asking me if I was still interested in an Apartment, but I told her she was about a month too late.</p> <p>So this is where I am at now in this unfinished story. I am sitting in front of my computer, writing this story as a conclusion to another chapter in our life, and perhaps as a prelude to what may lie ahead of us. Sometimes I would give anything to have a sense of what lies around the next bend on our road. I know that I am anything but conventional or even convention-bound.</p> <p>I do not any longer expect any positive reply from the job applications I have sent out. I subsequently sent out a few more to Alaska and to the federal government. I found real job discrimination here as the people would not even forward an application to me.</p> <p>I have learned that nothing in life is without its contradictions. I must struggle everyday and with too many sleepless nights with the complete lack of status or support within our system. I have become a total pariah in our society. I mean this in an absolute sense of almost complete social isolation and exclusion.</p> <p>In regard to my anthropology, I've come to terms with it in my own life. I continue to take my own professional identity as an Anthropologist quite seriously, even though nobody else but my wife does also, and even she has her critical doubts that are tied to our chronic underemployment</p> <p>I have come to the conclusion that Anthropology and anthropologists are mostly class-tied and professionally self-serving, preoccupied with their own ego-status identity in the world, much more than they probably were in a by-gone era of Margaret Mead and even Napoleon Chagnon. Unfortunately, the political atmosphere surrounding the articulation of Anthropology in academic departments across the country leaves a lot to be desired. My opinion of American anthropology has changed considerably over the years, and, simply put, I can no longer afford to look to them or count on them professionally for my sense of identity or self-worth in the world. I have learned to begin defining myself as an anthropologist professionally and independently of any academic context, and fundamentally, I feel better about this than to continue to wait to receive more "thin slips" in the mail.</p> <p>I do not take the professional ostracism and discrimination very seriously any more. I simply can't afford to. I consider through experience American society, and the vast majority of participants within it, to be too caught up in the class system to see them selves objectively within it. But in this most Americans are not so different from any other human beings on earth. The small world contexts I found articulated in every anthropology department I was ever associated with, were not so anthropologically different from the small world contexts of any other social situation I was involved in over the years, whether in the U.S., or Malaysia or China. On a basic anthropological level, people behave in such settings in a very predictable and characteristic manner.</p> <p>It all mostly seems grandly hypocritical to me now, but I have not abandoned my faith in myself nor in my anthropology in the world. Most illusions about being an anthropologist in the world are destroyed now. We live now in a strange, anti-climactic kind of limbo. Anthropology for me exists in the world primarily, intrinsic and extrinsic to it, and is no longer context-bound within narrow academic parameters determined by an even more narrow political culture. Even if I had managed to land that golden opportunity of a real teaching job in Academia, I doubt I could ever now reconcile myself anymore to such a narrow vision of Anthropology or of the world squeezed through its fractured lens. And yet, in the final analysis, I cannot lay the blame fully at the doorsteps of the Anthropologists. They are guilty perhaps of some hypocrisy and double standards, but they are mostly the products of the society that made them, nothing more and nothing less. And, in the end, I must include myself as an unfinished anthropologist as well.</p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"><font size="5">Post-Script</font></p> <p align="center"><font size="4">September, 2002</font></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="left">I made a decision to remain in Southern California in August of 2000 and for the first month and a half focused upon trying to organize my business scheme without any capital to invest with. By October, I came to focus in my room converted into an office upon writing a book entitled Natural Systems theory, and this book progressed rapidly through the next eight weeks, in which almost all of my time was devoted to the project. It represented for me a real breakthrough in my thinking about natural systems, and provided me with a context for learning rapidly in a number of areas of the sciences. I had finished the manuscript about a week before Christmas of that year. At the time, I had received a call to an interview for a part-time position at a community college in Compton, California, and went to the interview of the same day that I was printing out the first copies of my newest manuscript. The interview did not go well, and by the end of it I realized that they did not want me, and probably had not intended to hire me from the start. They never called me or got in touch with me after the interview. </p> <p align="left">In the next few weeks after Christmas, until February, I wrote another book entitled <u>Cosmology and Reality</u>, which was an extension of ideas in physical systems theory developed the months before relating to the dynamic state universe. I made ten copies of this book, but stopped halfway through binding them. I had found through the Internet information relating to grant applications for revolutionary concepts with the Nasa Institute of Advanced Concepts, and I set about writing four proposals to this agency within a month deadline. The proposals centered around the articulation of the metasystem, and led to a number of productive new ideas in theory and application of such a systems approach at different levels. After submission of these proposals I continued for about a month in developing the ideas that were initiated by this, while I waited for the rejections to the proposal to arrive, which they eventually did. I had turned to writing a further extension of the text.</p> <p align="left">At that stage, I had grown fairly discouraged, and it was in May that I turned my sights once again to searching for a job through the internet. For the next three months I applied to many different kinds of jobs, many relating to the government in different areas. I did not apply to too many schools, but targeted either government or private sector jobs. I did get a call for several interviews, as well as for another interview with a community college in Los Angeles which was similar to the program in Compton. In all the interviews I came to the conclusion that they probably did not intend to hire me, or if they had so intended, had probably changed their minds, in part and in hindsight I believe because I represented a threat to the interviewers.</p> <p align="left">By July, I was little further ahead in my job search, though it appeared to me that there were "nibbles" from the State of Alaska that intrigued me. In part discouragement that seems to come strongest at that time of year, I set my sights once again on the possibility of returning to a school and applied to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. At the same time, a school system in Ponapei, Micronesia, contacted me to hire me for a position. I finally passed on going to Ponapei as I was concerned about the educational situation for my daughter. I chose instead to return to school at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, in order at least to obtain a teaching credential. We were immediately given an apartment on campus through residence life, which proposition influenced my decision even though my wife was not happy with the prospect of relocating again.</p> <p align="left">Bidding our farewells were difficult this time around, unlike anytime previously. Mostly I lost my little dog, Socks, who had become my best friend and only companion over the previous two years. My daughter had to say good-bye to a whole network of her friends.</p> <p align="left">By the first of August we were on the road to Alaska, driving in our little mini-van up through the states of Northern California, Eastern Oregon and then Washington State, entering Canada and passing through British Columbia and then the Yukon Territory along the Al-Can highway. It was much longer than I realized it would be, and turned into a 7 day road-trip during which I drove for more than 12 hours per day. The Canadian northern frontier was huge. Besides the natural beauty of Canada, my only other impression was of long tracts of washed out dirt roads and being shortchanged for my US dollars at all the petroleum stations, to the point of dropping at least $35 US more than I should have by the time we crossed back across the boarder into Alaska. </p> <p align="left">We arrived at the Alaskan boarder in the late afternoon of the sixth day on the road, and we proceeded a couple of more hours to Tok junction, which was my first impression of Alaska besides an interesting discussion with a filling station owner at the border. My immediate impression of Alaska was the tremendous cost of everything, the food, the room, etc., compared to anything we had previously spent upon the trip. The next morning we got up early enough to make the remaining four hour trip to Fairbanks, arriving there in the early afternoon. We ended up stuck in a hotel the first couple of days as we got in on a Saturday, and had to wait through Sunday until Monday to see about our campus housing. </p> <p align="left">Coming into a new city that is to become one's future home is always a daunting and somewhat confusing task. One learns a little bit at a time as one constructs a map based upon one's experience. Fortunately, Fairbanks was built more or less like a giant square in which the main highways or boulevards were the perimeter, and everything else branched from these. Therefore, as long as one stayed along the main highways, one could not easily become lost. </p> <p align="left">My first impressions of Fairbanks was the high cost of everything, the lack of luxury of many accommodations, and the continuous daylight of the late summer. I was not disappointed when we got to check into our apartment immediately on Monday morning, as the apartments, though small and also very expensive, were in a nice forest setting at the edge of a larger trail system that led behind the campus. I had missed so much being able to walk amongst the trees, and I found the boreal forest at that time of year, with its many kinds of mushrooms and toad stools, its lichens, and deep, plush carpets of moss, quite inviting to explore and walk through.</p> <p align="left">I found a part time job within two weeks with the campus mail services, which made me feel good, and by the end of the month we commenced our courses. I had taken a field ecology course in the biology department, a mandatory chemistry course, and a Native Alaskan class in Anthropology that was preparatory to becoming a teacher in meeting state requirements. The ecology class I found the most interesting, as it involved field-labs that took us out with different activities around the Fairbanks area. I remember that Sept. 11th, 2001 was my first day with the class, and the World Trade Center had just been bombed that same morning. The students were all in a kind of daze, as was the T.A., and as we walked through the Boreal gardens and forest area of the school Arboretum, taking notes on all the plants and trees, we were all distracted and thinking about other things. I remember thinking to myself how good it was to be sharing this kind of experience with American students for a change rather than being caught in a foreign setting with people whom I could not relate to or understand in such times.</p> <p align="left">I became busy with schoolwork and my mail job, which involved me carrying the afternoon mail between the campus extensions and on-campus between the main administrative offices. This involved handling the monies transferred between these offices at the end of the day. I did not mind the job, as it gave us extra income and it was good to get some physical exercise which I sorely needed, but a few of the other student employees were a little less than professional and immature in their conduct and aggravated me somewhat. </p> <p align="left">In November I came down with a severe respiratory infection and a flu that made me bed ridden for at least a week. This was around Thanksgiving time, and I believe our stream-ecology course where I accidentally got wet on my shirt-sleeves up to my shoulder, precipitated this illness. It was at a time when I had started another book, entitled <u>Metasystems</u>, which was combining things I was currently learning, especially in the ecology course, with my previous work in Natural systems. I came out of the semester with straight A's and a finished manuscript that was somewhat haphazardly constructed. </p> <p align="left">Christmas in Fairbanks was a dark and somewhat depressing affair. We did not have much money to buy gifts for my daughter, and we had very few things in our apartment. I did buy a nice tree and stand to celebrate, against the protestations of my wife.</p> <p align="left">School resumed in mid-February, and I had by then just quite my Post Office position because it would have interfered with my coursework, the hours of which I increased. I took a microbiology and cellular biology course in Biology, the second half of the mandatory Chemistry requirement, and a course in Archaeological theory and method, which I found most interesting. I had arranged to take the Praxis exams to meet the state requirements for entering the credential program, and did this in early February.</p> <p align="left">I was very disappointed with my Biology courses, as one was instructed by a young student who did not yet have her Master's degree, and she proved the poorest teacher I ever had, unwilling to explain anything or to try to contextualize the thick technology knowledge that comes with a detailed understanding of cell biology. The microbiology course was also very disappointed as the teacher was fairly authoritarian and overly strict with everybody. I found myself working very hard for both courses, but my grades dropping in spite of what I was learning. Our cellular biology instructor failed nearly 75% of the class on the first exam, myself included, and on that day I dropped her class and also made a commitment to get myself admitted into the credential program by summer time. I had interviews with the people of the program, and they disappointed me greatly when they told me that I must devote all of my time and energy to their program, even in lieu of employment or other involvements. Coming home that evening, I immediately sent off an application to Azusa Pacific University and, later that week, to Cal State Fullerton, with the idea of abandoning Alaska as a fair proposition for us. </p> <p align="left">Our native American neighbors in our apartment block had exacerbated my disappointment. They returned from their summer camp sojourn at the beginning of the Fall semester, almost to the day, and the apartment went from pleasant to extremely noisy on that day. They made noise at all times of the day and night, and the unwed woman had three small kids which she hardly bathed or watched, and they banged on the walls and jumped from the furniture often until 2 or 3 in the morning. By Halloween I filed an official complaint with the Residence Life people, but they refused my request to relocate to a new apartment. I told them that the likely outcome was not good, but they flatly ignored my interests. By New Years, I once again filed a complaint with the black managress of the apartments, but she did little, and believed the family next door who made up lies. After that, she did not answer any of my phone calls complaining about the neighbors. After a drinking session in about April that went until 5:30 A.M, and that was the evening before a big examination, I once again wrote a letter and this time bypassed all the people and went straight to the top. Nothing constructive was accomplished, but after complaining one more time, the Residence Life manager called me and offered me a new apartment at the end of the year. By then it was too late as I had already set my sights on returning to Southern California to complete my credential with Azusa Pacific University. I reasoned that, in spite of the high tuition, the total cost would be almost cut in half.</p> <p align="left">Regardless of the noise and the unnecessary hassles in my coursework, I managed to finish a second manuscript relating to Archaeological systems theory, entitled <u>Digging the Past,</u> a week before the finals. I had also landed a job with the Community Service Officer program on campus, which I worked for about a week before we made our final decision to relocate to Southern California. I had booked passage on the Alaskan inland ferry that went from Haines, Alaska, to Bellingham, Washington in four days time. </p> <p align="left">We left Alaska about a week after finals and a few days before my daughter's school ended. There was no one there to see us off in our departure, and the day we left Fairbanks was about like the day we arrived. We could have been in Fairbanks for fifty years and still have been as anonymous as the day we arrived there. We made haste to Haines before the departure date of the ferry. We enjoyed the twelve hour trip, and found Haines expensive but beautiful compared to dirty Fairbanks. We were in Haines a day and a half before departing on the ferry back to the lower 48. The ferry trip was luxurious compared to what we had experienced in all our previous sojourns, and we enjoyed the four days on the boat in a manner we had not previously known. </p> <p align="left">We arrived back in Whittier about a week after our departure from Alaska, in late May. I had several weeks before starting my first summer semester with Azusa Pacific, and we stayed busy doing different things since then. I do not this time regret coming back to Southern California. The social atmosphere here has changed since 9/11. There are more signs of American patriotism and no Mexican flags being flown, and people seem more tolerant and friendlier than ever before. My daughter immediately reestablished her network of friends, and my wife is much happier here than she ever was in Alaska.</p> <p align="left">Since having returned, for the last three months, I have remained quite busy. We got ourselves a new dog, a female mix named Zoie, who is quite lovable though not very beautiful by dog-human standards. I have managed in the last few months to reconstruct the system that I had let go of the year before and couldn't get going in Alaska. The components of my multi-faceted system are coming together quite well for a change, though we are in greater debt now, than we have ever previously been.</p> <p align="left">In hindsight, our venture to Alaska was a mistake mostly, though the coursework was good for me and I have managed to be able to advance my theoretical work considerably.</p> <p align="left">My anthropology I carry forward in relation to my metasystems science and natural systems theory, though I no longer see any academic relationship to it. I have dropped almost all of my previous academic mentors as basically unreliable and unrealistic in their orientation. I quit trying to apply to academic positions with my degree, and am thoroughly disgusted with the double-standards and hypocrisy in professional Anthropology that is evinced at almost every level. It is no longer a dying field, but it is essentially a dead and moribund discipline, supplanted as it has been by more politically correct "ethnic studies" and its scholars replaced by more correct "others." </p> <p align="left">Though I am a professional persona non-grata, I still believe in the functionality and theoretical relevance of anthropological knowledge especially in its applicability to real problem sets in the larger, non-academic world. I have therefore created the organization for alternative anthropology with this framework in mind. Its emphasis is in promoting alternative human and technological development in the world in a manner that provides us a healthier and fairer model of globalization than the one that our country and the most of the rest of the world seems hell bent on pursuing. </p> <p align="left">I cannot afford to regret the loses of opportunity and null development that we might have achieved in a more open and more equal world. I learned in Alaska and subsequently that I was not even given a chance to achieve anything significant professionally in Anthropology--these screens of opportunity were systematically sold off to foreign and minority scholars in the interests of elites bent on globalization. Too many years have now passed to be concerned about the politics and prejudices that have so stifled and determined our fate but about which we have had no control whatsoever.</p> <p align="left">I continue in an unending condition of social ostracism and exclusion with hope and basic, unshakeable confidence in my beliefs and view of the world in spite of class contradictions in our society that are becoming now enormous. I returned to the Fullerton campus, of which I am an alumni, to consider their program, and found a school that is now over run with 33,000 students, which student body is growing exponentially with each passing year. The school was already over-crowded fifteen years before when I finished my Master's there. It is now beyond its reasonable carrying capacity and conditions of overcrowding are equal to those found in China.</p> <p align="left">Though the future remains increasingly uncertain for all people, I continue with a basic sense of faith and hope that we can yet create a better world for everyone. Though I fight everyday as a total social leper against insuperable odds, I realize that my best fight and my best days are yet in our future.</p> <p align="left">As I continue with this narrative work, an exploration in autobiographical anthropology, I realize that life, as long as we live it, remains an unfinished book. The next chapters are yet to be written, and as long as there is a new chapter to write, there is always the hope for a happy ending rather than yet another tragedy in the making.</p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center">Sept. 15th, 2002</p> <p align="center"> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> s="na";c="na";j="na";f=""+escape(document.referrer) </script> <script language="javascript1.2" type="text/javascript"> s=screen.width;v=navigator.appName if (v != "Netscape") {c=screen.colorDepth} else {c=screen.pixelDepth} j=navigator.javaEnabled() </script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> function pr(n) {document.write(n,"\n");} NS2Ch=0 if (navigator.appName == "Netscape" && navigator.appVersion.charAt(0) == "2") {NS2Ch=1} if (NS2Ch == 0) { r="&size="+s+"&colors="+c+"&referer="+f+"&java="+j+"" pr("<A HREF=\"http://www.TheCounter.com\" TARGET=\"_top\"><IMG"+ " BORDER=0 SRC=\"http://c2.thecounter.com/id=1576484"+r+"\"><\/A>")} </script> <NOSCRIPT> <a HREF="http://www.TheCounter.com" TARGET="_top"><img SRC="http://c2.thecounter.com/id=1576484" ALT="TC" BORDER="0" width="88" height="31"></a> </NOSCRIPT>  <p align="center"> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> s="na";c="na";j="na";f=""+escape(document.referrer) </script> <script language="javascript1.2" type="text/javascript"> s=screen.width;v=navigator.appName if (v != "Netscape") {c=screen.colorDepth} else {c=screen.pixelDepth} j=navigator.javaEnabled() </script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> function pr(n) {document.write(n,"\n");} NS2Ch=0 if (navigator.appName == "Netscape" && navigator.appVersion.charAt(0) == "2") {NS2Ch=1} if (NS2Ch == 0) { r="&size="+s+"&colors="+c+"&referer="+f+"&java="+j+"" pr("<A HREF=\"http://www.TheCounter.com\" TARGET=\"_top\"><IMG"+ " BORDER=0 SRC=\"http://c1.thecounter.com/id=466979"+r+"\"><\/A>")} </script> <NOSCRIPT> <a HREF="http://www.TheCounter.com" TARGET="_top"><img SRC="http://c1.thecounter.com/id=466979" ALT="TC" BORDER="0" width="88" height="31"></a> </NOSCRIPT>  <p align="center"><a href="http://www.prtracker.com/cgi-bin/link3.exe"><img height="31" isMap src="http://www.prtracker.com/cgi-bin/count3.exe?30001,lewismicropublishing@lewismicropublishing.com" width="88" border="0"></a><br> <a href="http://www.prtracker.com/FreeCounter3.html">Free Counter</a> <p> </p> <p align="center">  <p align="center"> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> s="na";c="na";j="na";f=""+escape(document.referrer) </script> <script language="javascript1.2" type="text/javascript"> s=screen.width;v=navigator.appName if (v != "Netscape") {c=screen.colorDepth} else {c=screen.pixelDepth} j=navigator.javaEnabled() </script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> function pr(n) {document.write(n,"\n");} NS2Ch=0 if (navigator.appName == "Netscape" && navigator.appVersion.charAt(0) == "2") {NS2Ch=1} if (NS2Ch == 0) { r="&size="+s+"&colors="+c+"&referer="+f+"&java="+j+"" pr("<A HREF=\"http://www.TheCounter.com\" TARGET=\"_top\"><IMG"+ " BORDER=0 SRC=\"http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383"+r+"\"><\/A>")} </script> <NOSCRIPT> <a HREF="http://www.TheCounter.com" TARGET="_top"><img SRC="http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383" ALT="TC" BORDER="0" width="88" height="31"></a> </NOSCRIPT>  </body>