AuthorWilliam Alba

among us

Who among us has not been isolated, judged entirely for our appearance, the color of our skin? And not just in the places where one might expect, it can happen anywhere. I grew up in a conservative small town in Ohio, where some peers called me an orc or a nigger, but I’ve also encountered deliberately nasty prejudice in Trader Joe’s in Pittsburgh, at a high-end stationery store in Manhattan, before orientation at my beloved alma mater in Ithaca, at a gift shop purporting to be inclusive in Chicago, and in the hallways of the chemistry department as a grad student at Berkeley — just recollecting a few incidents off the top of my head.

Meanwhile, I have been aware of the Surrounded web series produced by Jubilee, or at least it’s been on the edge of my awareness from reading about Pete Buttigieg convincing some undecided voters before last year’s general election, and of Jordan Peterson floundering to define himself as a Christian. The format of the series involves a couple of dozen people surrounding one person, who debates each of them about claims.

Yesterday the YouTube algorithms decided to feed me the most recent episode of Surrounded, entitled “1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives (ft. Mehdi Hasan)”. I took the bait. Although I was unfamiliar with Hasan, I was curious to see how well he would represent his progressive views. I was also prepared to witness some uncivil behavior towards him. 

However, I was unprepared to see the extraordinary degree to which these young far-right conservatives were willing to go, to reveal the emptiness of their arguments while remaining stunningly petulant and clueless that they had in fact lost those arguments. So far I have been able to bear to watch only the first half hour.

The introduction teases us with several exchanges. In one, a green-shirted angry man questions why Hasan, a naturalized citizen, should have any stake in the claim “Donald Trump is pro-crime and pro-criminal”. Another openly declares that he is a fascist, to the laughter and applause of many in the group. The third becomes stone-faced when Hasan says that he is an immigrant:

Get the hell out.

I should get out? Why?

I don’t want you here.

As for the actual sequence of events, in this episode Hasan claimed that “Donald Trump is pro-crime and pro-criminal” based upon the data that Trump pardoned January 6 protestors who violently assaulted police officers as well as those who committed financial fraud, that Trump associates with criminals, and that Trump is himself a criminal. The first interlocutor Jace had no real response and was swiftly voted out by the rest of his group. The second interlocutor Richie admitted that Donald Trump is pro-crime but that it simply doesn’t matter to him. The third, Gerard, attempted to argue that progressives are also pro-crime and that Hasan’s claim is in bad faith, but his argument didn’t land. The fourth interlocutor Samuel claimed that it’s possible that Trump pardoned criminals for other reasons, such as to unite the country, and that Trump’s intent is important to determine whether he is pro-crime and pro-criminal, but Hasan successfully countered by stating that knowingly releasing violent criminals renders someone pro-crime, regardless of intent. The last interlocutor of this segment, Lance, attempted to “whatabout” Joe Biden’s pardons, but Hasan noted that Trump is himself a convicted criminal and associated with criminals.

In summary, from what I have watched so far, Mehdi Hasan established his positions and held his own against attacks, not only on those positions but also his views on what it means to be a US citizen.

I do not know whether the outrage Surrounded elicits in viewers is actually helping us to see others’ points of view or whether it further polarizes us. I do not know whether a video that shows others applauding a self-proclaimed fascist is good for our country. It does seem to me that Hasan was waylaid, believing that he was going to argue with rational far-right conservatives rather than outright fascists. Nevertheless, here it is, among us.

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a tale of two campuses

Today I learned Macalester College is supporting their international students to stay in the United States this summer, in order to mitigate their fears that they would not be able to re-enter and continue their studies if they go home between terms. Both the college and the surrounding community have pooled resources to take care of these students.

As far as I can tell, Macalester is helping their international students not because they are compelled by law, not in order to raise money, not because it helps their college rankings, and not because it makes them look good. Indeed, the news of their generosity isn’t even on their website; I can’t find it anywhere, at least as of this moment. I learned about this good deed from an email newsletter of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the main trade journal of the industry.

Macalester is helping their international students this summer because it’s the right thing to do. Imagine that.

Meanwhile, yesterday Carnegie Mellon University hosted Trump, who is destroying the ability of students from around the world to study in the US, who is throttling funding from the sciences and the arts, and who is threatening to shutter the most prominent universities in order to silence all of them.

Having worked at Carnegie Mellon for seventeen years, I know how the university operates. I concur with this professor that CMU is image conscious “beyond comprehension and beyond the bounds of what universities used to be about, which was the interaction of civil discourse … If it’s just a private sort of a corporate brain-think with no opportunity for question and answer … maybe a university campus isn’t the right place for it.”

What a world of difference between these two institutions. They both have Scottish roots — tartans in their logos, bagpipes at their ceremonies, Scottish animals as their mascots. But in their hearts, how very different.

I am so happy to be free of Carnegie Mellon. I am so proud our eldest will study this fall at Macalester.

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todavía no somos Gilead

I had a dream last night that I told you to give the bones of my wrists and fingers to the dogs after I died. We were in a car, a dark car of the sort you might see driven by a Driver in The Handmaid’s Tale. i had decided it was time, so we were headed to some place where I was going to die.

But in reality, I’m not ready for that, not any of that, not at all. 

…

Yesterday at the No Kings Day rally at the City-County Building, I felt a sense of hope, surrounded by thousands of people, peaceful and polite, protesting against the current administration. Walking together towards Penn Station, there were lots of great chants: Education not deportation. No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here. Trump’s a jag-off.

I like the name “No Kings Day” because it’s memorable, inverting “Three Kings Day” and recalling the revolution against King George III, the very raison d’être of the United States. On the other hand, I recognize some great countries remain monarchies. It’s just that “No Tyrants Day” doesn’t have the same ring to it. Plus we’d miss signs like: A faux king loser and No faux king way.

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where life wants to be

When we drove to and from Reno this past week, we didn’t take the quickest route. Marissa had done this road trip twice before and preferred skirting the Sierras instead of going exclusively through Nevada. In fact, during our travels she remarked several times how you could tell we were in California because it was more beautiful. Well, there is a subtle beauty to the high flat desert, but it doesn’t compare to a greener alpine landscape, with vistas of snow-covered mountains.

On the way back approaching Beatty, there is one place in the desert unnaturally blanketed by acres of grass, irrigated in circles. There are no crops, the lawn didn’t seem for pasture, and the boundary between the lush sections and the dry dust is stark. Immediately I realized that someone had water rights and was using them, only so as not to lose them. The place is called Oasis Ranch and according to this article from last January the property is for sale at $9.37 million dollars, with an annual water allotment of 3.27 million gallons. As of today it is still listed at that price on Zillow. That water usage is about 25 times more than the average house in the Las Vegas Valley. And for what? To have an enormous lawn. It’s outrageous. With that money, just buy a house in a part of the country where the grass grows.

In Pittsburgh during the summer, I’m continually mowing the lawn, cutting down trees volunteering along the fences, pulling ivy from the walls of the garage and house. Life wants to be there.

It’s similar to when I was leaving Santa Fe twenty-two years ago. As I walked the edge of Central Park the first evening I was there temporarily for a few weeks, I laughed as the rain misted my face. Santa Fe is beautiful in its own way (The New York Times has a strange obsession with the place), and the first summer I visited it thirty-three years ago I was stuck in a pounding thunderstorm that turned to hail as my friends and I descended Atalaya. But usually it’s so dry there. When I was walking through water in New York it was like a dream, a dream come to life again. And then when we moved there cross-country and reached Pennsylvania, Marissa saw the rolling green hills and she, who had lived in flat Illinois her whole life before we moved to New Mexico, she said it was like paradise.

…

When we lived in Manhattan, I walked around the city a lot, which of course is what New Yorkers do. This transformed my mental map. I thought I knew the city fairly well: I was born in Belmont near Arthur Avenue, and also lived as a child in Bensonhurst and the South Bronx; I visited Midtown and the Village frequently even after we moved to rural Ohio; my college girlfriend grew up in Bay Ridge; and I had plenty more personal and professional opportunities to visit over the years.

But walking around the city made me see it differently. I previously would take the subway to get around, popping down in one place and then back up again, as though Scotty were beaming me via transporter. I knew the lines well enough to get myself from Coliseum Books to Book Scientific to the Strand. I knew the Compleat Strategist was next to the Empire State Building, but that FAO Schwartz was closer to MoMA and Radio City, and the Met and the Guggenheim were on the Upper East Side.

Yet in my head these were distinct destinations. When the electricity went out across the entire Northeast the month we moved there, I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and up Broadway until reaching our apartment off Columbus Circle, and even in the dark I began to stitch together what once was separate. As I became more of a pedestrian, I realized how Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Union Square, and other neighborhoods connect to each other. 

The same sort of thing happened on this trip. Fifteen years ago I took Green Tortoise on my first and only trip to Yosemite, and afterwards we saw the tufa at Mono Lake, stopped at a Chevron station where I emailed the family, swam in the fresh water of June Lake. Seven years ago I visited Reno for my first conference with the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology, although I saw only the section near the Truckee, up along Virginia to UNR. At various stages in my life I considered studying or applying to teach at Deep Springs College. These places were separate in my head, but on this trip they began to come together.

…

A necklace of episodes. A highway of memory.

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lines for lenses

For no good reason, I fell asleep on the couch last night. I woke, not to this sound of the garbage truck in the alley, but from the dappled light of the sun. At this time, in this season, it fell across my eyes.

The light entered my eyes, after traversing the frosted pane with its stained glass emblem, the storm window still down for the winter, the leaves of the neighbor’s tree, the skin of the atmosphere, the eight-minute space from the surface of the Sun, the millennial-long random walk from its birth at the core.

Eighteen years ago, our eldest was rocking in a wind-up swing. The swing, likely now in landfill if not some other living room, was named Flip A Way. Flip A Way 1 2 3, it was written on the top of the apparatus. Our child, she would stare enchanted at the window while rocking. Nor’easter, we called it, because it’s the window in the northeast corner of the house.

Last night he officially committed to college, placing the deposit right after or while we spoke. As I write this, the Sun and Earth are dancing as to change the light through Nor’easter, so the shadow of the branch of the tree in the neighbor’s yard falls in this direction.

Eighteen years ago, five years ago, that shadow would not have passed through the type of glasses that I now use for intermediate distance. I can use this pair again after bringing them to Costco the day before yesterday, after dropping off my parents and sister at the theater to watch the movie about the saint-to-be, the beatified boy who died some days before our eldest was born.

I bought the glasses last year at a Costco in Nevada. The left lens had fallen from the frame. Just give me twenty minutes while you shop, she said. She didn’t ask for proof. They only need a top and bottom line.

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and then

This morning I completed the Duolingo tree for Spanish. I had expected to receive some colorful animation, musical fanfare, or at least a badge to note the occasion. Instead a new section called “Daily Refresh” simply revealed itself. It’s fine, just as with pilgrimages and birthdays, it’s less about recognition, more about the journey. But a little celebration is also always welcome.

Anyhow, I had already planned to continue with Duolingo. I did not complete all of the sections to Legendary status on purpose, leaving about half of them to review and turn gold. There are “side quests” too — additional exercises and word matches. I’ve considered doing the reverse tree (Spanish to English), or returning to French, or taking on a related language such as Portuguese, or an entirely different one like Japanese or Mandarin.

Of course there are other ways to learn Spanish and other languages. I could focus more on Repaso Total; Clozemaster; and immersion through Dreaming Spanish, movies, music, travel, Pimsleur recordings, and online and in-person classes. To help people move in the other direction, I’d also like to complete my TESOL certification.

Yet I’m still likely to continue with Duolingo. I probably will ease up a bit, after Sunday. I currently hold first place in the Diamond League finals, so it would be great to finish there, making my own way to mark reaching the top of the Spanish tree.

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three score

On my birthday, my sister Joyce wrote

So you’re 16, right?? Hope it’s a good one!

I immediately replied

Jajaja, estoy orgulloso de haber cumplido sesenta años!

…

When I was younger, birthdays felt more significant. Even half-birthdays, even though we didn’t celebrate them — I used to tell adults my age in half-years. I remember telling my mother before a party at the bowling alley that 10 felt important because I was going into double digits, and that was also around the age where I stopped declaring half-years. But then at 15-1/2 I got my learner’s permit, and at 16 my driver’s license. At 18 I could vote but had to register for the draft, at 19 I was legal to drink, but then they changed the age and I had to wait again until 21.

Many of the rest sort of blur together, in part because they don’t mark legal transitions. I do remember celebrating 29 together with friends, although I don’t have a strong recollection of celebrating the 30th. 35 was Dante’s age midway through life (“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”), as well as my age when I first read Dante. I married that year. I was aware that I was old enough to be President.

40 was filled with changes, moving from Manhattan to Pittsburgh, saying goodbye to Mookie, buying our first house. However, like 35 before and 50 after, while the year was eventful, the actual birthday, not so much. The years became more important than their passage. The sweeping of the hands on a clock, not the marks where they pause.

…

Increasingly the birthdays, even the half-birthdays, have started to take legal import again. At 50 my health insurance would pay for the shingles vaccine and for a colonoscopy. At 59-1/2 I could withdraw penalty-free from my retirement accounts. At 62 I could begin Social Security as well as purchase a lifetime pass to the US National Parks. 65 is my full retirement age for Social Security and when I become eligible for Medicare. If I wait until 70 for Social Security I could receive maximum payments. At 72 I must start taking required minimum distributions from my retirement accounts.

60 is not a subject of the law, it is pure, important for its own sake. 60 is a beautiful round number, plenty of divisors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, .., just naming them is like counting the passage of time. And 60 is intimate with time: seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour, now years in a lifetime. It is an age when I do not take for granted that I can travel to other countries and walk pilgrimages, decide on a whim to go parasailing or scuba diving, sleep a good night’s sleep on a thin pad when I go camping. It is an age where I have learned so much, forgotten so much, can continue to build and learn too.

Sí estoy orgulloso de haber cumplido sesenta años.

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soñar con lo que aprendo

When I was fifteen, sixteen years old I would wake up remembering dreams about things I was learning at that age. There were dreams of organic chemistry mechanisms floating through space, of driving the streets of my hometown, of speaking French. I don’t recall now if I dreamt at the time about karate, but that would surely fit the pattern.

…

This morning I woke up with a phrase in my head: respeta naturaleza. I was with a group of hikers, including some younger ones who were stomping on some mushrooms on a log, no reason, just to smash them into the rotting wood.

I thought: that’s not quite right. I should have dreamt, I should have said in my dream, respeta la naturaleza. Or if Nature is personified, perhaps respeta a Naturaleza. If I’m addressing one person formally, like the safety instruction cards on an airplane, the imperative would instead have been respete. But hold on, this was a group of hikers, so respeten. Unless I’m in Spain, and then I had to look up whether it was respetad (which is correct) or respeted — my knowledge of vosotros conjugation is lousy, I need to work on that.

…

But at least I dreamt in Spanish! It was wonderful to dream once more about something I’m learning. I’ve been wondering for a long while if this could ever happen again, whether I would ever dream in Spanish. For some months now I’ve reached other milestones. Sometimes these are delightful: during the last year when I had conversations with people around Spain and Mexico, I’ve sometimes been unable to remember later that day which language I was speaking. Other times, not so much: there have been a few occasions when I’ve wanted to say something to an English speaker and had only the words in Spanish. To lose my abilities in French while learning Spanish, whether out of disuse or the Spanish “crowding out” the French in my head, that’s one thing. But to lose my ability in English!

I asked my parents a year or so ago whether they dreams in Tagalog, Visayan, or English. (It’s strange how often we know so little about the inner lives of the people close to us.) My father said he barely remembers any of his dreams, so he couldn’t say. My mother said her childhood dreams are in Tagalog and her adult dreams are in English, even though she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t know both languages. I asked the same question of a couple of other fluent multilingual speakers I met last summer, and they both said it depends on the situation, on the people they’re meeting in their dreams.

…

Over the past month I have been inviting dreams about a particular Spanish word: patria. This is a key word in Filipino hero José Rizal’s last poem, which he wrote in the hours before he was executed. Sometimes he capitalizes the word, at other times no. It makes its presence felt as the second word, embedded throughout the poem, and then its stark literal absence from the last stanza. But what does it mean to him in each of these instances, and what word or words would be most fitting to use in an English translation?

My friend and former student, Daniel Davis, who is an accomplished multilingual translator of technical works, suggested one resolution is to leave patria unchanged in my translation. I had already considered that for the word salud elsewhere in the poem, which I believe is acceptable because as an interjection it is already on the edge of being a loanword in English. But if I were to take this route with patria, it would be because I see it as a shifting, nebulous concept in Rizal’s own thinking, both historically and within the poem. I’m not sure if I want to leave both of these words, salud and patria, in their original forms when the causes for doing this would be such different reasons.

There is so much more I would want to write about this one word, what it seems to mean throughout the poem and how different English words don’t quite fit, but I want to finish our taxes today.

And so I find myself still hoping to dream of patria.

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Bustamante, Tlaquepaque

On the third of this month I took a day trip from Guadalajara out to Tlaquepaque. I only brought my phone with me on the trip, and I just found this poem that I wrote outside an art gallery.

With a bigger laptop screen before me and a bit more time, I made a couple of edits to the original. In the first line, I substituted the preposition por instead of en between pasar and el césped. In the penultimate line, I replaced the indicative vive with the subjunctive viva, to give more of a sense of hope than expectation.

I don’t write poems much anymore. For whatever reason I was moved to that afternoon, and what’s more in Spanish.

…

El obrero puede pasar por el césped
y la obrera puede tocar las caras
de las esculturas en la casa
de Sergio Bustamante
en el pueblo de Tlaquepaque.

Por mi parte poseo las obras de arte
con mis ojos. No hay precios
en ninguna parte por los preciosos
excepto las joyas. El libro se llama
Alquimista de los sueños.

Pues la obrera no las toca de verdad
solo sí las plumas de su trapo.
También las piernas de una mosca
que no mueve durante mi visita.
Espero que todavía viva en esta zona

de aire acondicionado.

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the casual racism

Yesterday while walking along the malecón (esplanade) here in Puerto Vallarta, I sought some shade under a group of tree planters. One of the things I relearned here in Jalisco, including last week in Guadalajara, is always to walk and sit wherever there is shade. (I first learned this from Mookie, walking with him around Berkeley and trying to get him to heel on my left side, but he wisely insisted on walking in the shade instead, where the hot sidewalk wouldn’t hurt his paws.)

There was already some older white guy in the shade, fiddling with something in his hands, maybe his phone or his wallet, I don’t know. When I arrived, he immediately stood up. Walking away, he glared at me, shaking his head.

To the typical tourist here, because of my brown skin and casual clothing, they believe I’m Mexican. And so when I don’t act deferential, they think I’m dangerous or trying to scam them.

This evening after sunset, while the sky continued to turn marvelously nuanced grades of hues, I decided to walk south along the boardwalk from Playa Los Muertos, because I hadn’t been in that section yet. I had already taken a bus up towards the Saturday tianguis, and also walked inland in search of more affordable food, and walked north along the malecón too. So I decided to head in a different direction this time. These restaurants didn’t have tables set along the playa — instead, there were beach chairs that had been rented and now abandoned by los ricos. I decided to sit in one and watch the changing colors of the sky, reflected in the ocean.

— Are you following me? asked a woman, perhaps my age, seated in a nearby beach chair.

— What? No. I have no idea who you are.

— It’s just that I saw you earlier.

I myself hadn’t noticed her at all. She was a complete non-entity to me. But then I realized she might think I’m dangerous. Fair enough. It was getting dark, and the only other people near us were a Spanish-speaking family. Like pretty much all the gringos here, I suspected she had made no attempt whatsoever in her life to learn the language at all. She was a solo female traveler and I was a stranger.

— Would you like me to move? I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.

— No, that’s okay. I’ll only be here for a minute.

It’s impossible to escape the racism of my fellow Americans, even when I’m traveling in another country. Last January while having tempura for breakfast (tempura for breakfast!) in a tiny shop in Asakusa, I was having an extended conversation with a group of men a little younger than me. Several minutes in, one of them said:

— Your English is quite good.

I had to pause for a long moment. Was this guy being serious? I mean, it’s true that I had come to the same conclusion about an Asian-Canadian when I first saw him in the hostel, but once he started speaking I immediately realized that he was like me, born outside Asia. We kind of laughed about it when he admitted the exact same thought about me. But this? We had already been talking for several minutes.

— I should hope so. I’ve been speaking the language for fifty-nine years.

No apology, no laughter, let’s just move on to the next bit of racism, this time from his friend, about why he won’t be traveling to the Philippines anytime soon.

— Why? I asked. Because everyone speaks English, because of the beautiful beaches, because the people are so friendly, because it’s so affordable… ?

— No, because my wife said she saw a TV program where they eat dogs.

Oh my god, it was like the Trump campaign all over again.

— I have never in my life known anyone to do that. Maybe in a big enough country, you can find someone who would do that, but I believe it’s extremely rare and the producers paid people willing to do this for the shock value.

He tried to be nice, in his own way, mentioning that he understood that people have diferent values in other cultures, that he himself didn’t think it was wrong, it was more because of his wife.

— I think it’s wrong! I interrupted. I didn’t want to get into a discussion about how I have been a pescetarian for nearly twenty years, having given up meat when Mookie died, but this bit of moral relativism definitely didn’t sit well with me.

He kept on going on until his friend reminded him that I had already said I think it’s wrong and don’t know anyone at all who eats dogs.

They seemed like nice guys, and they were also fellow boardgamers, but dear god. The amount of casual racism among my fellow Americans, I should be used to it by now, I hope to escape it every time I travel outside the country, but somehow it follows me.

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