I am an MIT GRT (RA)

Browsing nytimes.com on my laptop in the hospital as I waited to start my last week of homevisits here in Bangkok, I came across this article entitled, "In Study, Texting Lifts Crash Risk by Large Margin" as the top emailed story under the technology section. I thought to myself, "Wow, I had no idea that during studying texting can help people from crashing and burning. I'll have to keep this in mind when we get back to Cambridge and tell the kids. Texting and distractions are actually good for them!"

I proceeded to read the article and realized within the first paragraph that the "study" referred to a research study and that crashing a car was more likely to happen. I felt completely out of touch; I wasn't even close to deducing what the article was about from its (now very obvious) title.

You can take the girl out of the GRT position, but you can't take the GRT position out of the girl.

The Familiarity and Foreignness of Hong Kong

Having grown up food shopping with my mom in Manhattan's or Brooklyn's Chinatown once a week for 18 years, I felt very comfortable in Hong Kong this past weekend. I interpreted Hong Kong to be the equivalent of Chinatown expanding beyond Canal Street and taking over the island of Manhattan. The sounds, the smells, the sights- it was all so familiar. I had the same Sunday brunch as I do in New York (dim sum! but better in HK of course). I rushed through the same, pushy (and shorter (woohoo! I'm considered tall in Asia)) crowd to make it onto the subway. I bargained in the same manner with the same storekeepers to collect the same knick knacks as sold on Canal and its extensive side streets.

I was incredibly surprised by this comfort. Spending a summer in Bangkok without much prior exposure to Thai culture has left me feeling scared and excited everyday to live and learn in a new and novel place. But in Hong Kong, I had this visceral reaction- I felt as if I were home. Even the HK buildings were as tall as those in Manhattan.

But, Hong Kong is not New York. For one thing, scaffolding in Hong Kong is made of bamboo, cut on the construction site to fit whatever need there is. Then, there are mountains surrounding the skyline, making it more like LA (which is definitely not NY).

Perhaps though most poignantly for me, Hong Kong is not New York because in Hong Kong, Filipino women congregate by the 100s in the Central area on Sundays, their day off from being a domestic worker for the more affluent of the city. Why Central? Why by the 100s? (1) They don't have much money, (2) they want to see their other Filipina worker friends, and (3) they have no where else to go- so stated matter of factly a Filipina overseas worker living in HK whom Lawrence and I chatted up when we accidentally stumbled upon this Filipino culture in HK. We ran into the HSBC building lobby to avoid the typhoon rains and found literally 100s of Filipinas who were basically picnicking indoors with each other. They brought blankets and cardboard boxes to sit on, playing cards, books, baon (snacks brought from home to satisfy one's own craving throughout the day), and the usual chismis (gossip) to share. In fact, in discussing this topic with a Filipina college friend later that day who has been living in HK, we learned that these gatherings are in a way supported even by the city government; city maintenance workers come and tie up the cardboard boxes every Sunday at 7PM after the Filipinas have left, perhaps saving them for the following week's gathering.


The scene in the HSBC lobby flooded me with mixed feelings. The same manner in which being in Hong Kong elicited a comfort in me, hearing Tagalog all around me did too. From my feeling of comfort with the familiar, however, I soon fell into a state of anger, shame, sadness, guilt, and hopelessness all at once. Hong Kong journalist Chip Tsao recently called the Philippines "a nation of servants" in an article he had written entitled "A War at Home" in the March 27th issue of the popular HK Magazine. In this same article, he even threatened to terminate his employment of a Filipina domestic worker to avoid committing an act of treason "by sponsoring an enemy of the State by paying her to wash my toilet and clean my windows". Though I've always known and been keenly aware that Filipinos, educated and otherwise, travel abroad to work in all sorts of jobs, I don't think it ever really hit me viscerally, even passionately, until I walked into the HSBC lobby that morning.

With all its familiarity, Hong Kong is no New York. It is not home. It may look like it, smell like it, and feel like it, but it isn't It. (NY will always be my home, for all its greatness and all its flaws.) Like no other place I've ever visited, though, Hong Kong did have the gall to open my eyes to the sad state of the country of my ancestors. So for all the angst I feel against the city for its attitudes, I can really only look towards the Philippines as the reason for the (in my opinion, forced) diaspora of its people and the only hope for ever turning things around for Filipinos in Hong Kong and everywhere.

I Shouldn't Be Writing About This But I Can't Help It... Gyros!

I realize that I should be blogging about life here in Bangkok. With only three weeks to go here, I'm becoming sentimental about living here, and I'm starting to become nostalgic about it even though I'm still here. It's like I know what I'm about to lose, so I'm savoring every moment as best I can. (This sentimentality seems to be a common theme in my life; it happened at the end of high school, the end of college, the end of my life as a free/real/non-med-school-slave person. Even the end of Dawson's Creek or Felicity or Sex and the City- yikes revealed my guilty pleasures there.)

But as I was about to blog about life here and my travels with Lawrence during our stint here, I was concurrently reading nytimes.com and stumbled upon an article by David Segal about the history of one of my favorite foods/mystery meats, gyros! (And I pronounce it GI-ros (sorry for the terrible phoentic spelling of my pronunciation), as we do in NYC, not YEE-ros, as the rest of world does). And since I haven't had a gyro in so long (since visiting Greek Lady at Penn in Philly last April- so long ago!) and started to salivate as I read the article, I figured I'd pay it a bit of attention here.

The gyro meat cones, it turns out, used to be handmade from left over beef and lamb trimmings by the individual Greek restaurants that served them. They only started to be mass produced Henry-Ford-style in the 1970s, and the idea was birthed by a Mr. Garlic, a brilliant Jewish man whom I would have liked to personally thank for his gyro genius had he still been alive today. (He died in the 1990s.) Unfortunately, neither he nor his family really got to harvest the fruits of his labor and genius; he and his business partner had a falling out, leaving the Garlics out of the mass production of gyro cone meat. His widow's heart still breaks every time she sees a cone of meat in a restaurant. (To draw an analogy to a recent tennis world event, she must feel like Andy Roddick every time he sees Roger Federer across the net, especially after this last, grueling, heartbreaking Wimbledon final loss a couple of weeks ago. Poor Andy = Poor Mrs. Garlic)

Mmm... gyros. I better go eat some street pad thai to take my mind off my favorite mystery meat.

Me in Paradise (aka Maya Bay, Ko Phi Phi Leh, Thailand)

A one hour flight from Bangkok and a short boat ride gets me here for the weekend. This is me staring up at the larger than life limestone faces that drop in front of me into the aquamarine Andaman Sea. As I contemplate the wonders of nature and the ease with which I arrived in paradise, I realize- I love living in Bangkok.