1. Get bribed by corrupt officials and wrung for all I’m worth.

At the border crossing, two officials waved me into a small booth with mirrored windows (heartening) and asked me if I was carrying psychotropic drugs. To their disappointment, I only had Tums and fifty bucks. “Throw it all out on the table!” said small-hatted goon #2, making a sweeping gesture to indicate I should turn my pockets inside out. Big hat goon #1 intervened, however, and I happily kept all my money.

2. Be arrested on trumped-up charges by paranoid policemen.

Uzbekistan is a police state, which sounds intimidating, but actually has a hilarious manifestation: apparently, half of all employable men are policemen (a rather ingenious way of eliminating street crime). Policemen were ubiquitous, and so numerous at important historical sites that it seemed like clusters of them might break into choreographed song and dance numbers. Besides that, they were shockingly friendly and polite. The one time we were asked to show our documents, in the Metro, the officer smiled and bowed. It’s common practice even for locals to ask directions from cops.

Clearly they’ve been well schooled on the importance of not messing with tourists, because Johnny and I got out of one almost certain disaster totally unscathed. It’s a strange fact that in Uzbekistan the official value of som is about twice that of the black market, to the point where even tour agencies recommend exchanging money in a back alley. One evening, Johnny and I chanced on a drunk guy perched on a curb croaking “dollar!” and followed him to his tiny store. We had about 200 dollars to exchange, and because of the low value of som against dollars and the low denominations of som, we began to fill our backpack up with huge wads of cash. At one point, the drunk guy got his figures mixed up, and a cop walked in to the store behind us just as Johnny was patting his backpack and explaining, “I HAVE FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND IN HERE RIGHT NOW!”. How we managed to not get bribed beyond belief, I have no idea. I doubt it had anything to do with drunk-o shrugging innocently and whining to the cop “come on, mister, it’s a holiday!”.

3. Stumble on pockmarked streets and fall into large steaming manhole of filth a la Katharine Duckett.

Oftentimes, one image in my mind epitomizes an entire concept for me. For example, when I think of the trash piles I see daily in my village in Kazakhstan, I think about a family of turkeys I once saw picking at dirty diapers someone had deposited behind the bazaar.

Uzbek people in Kazakhstan had told me that Tashkent was free of litter, but I skeptically chalked it up to romantic notions of homeland. How happy I was to be proven wrong! Immediately over the border the change was apparent. Streets – even their gutters – were clean. Trashpickers, weeders, and whitewashers were everywhere. It wasn’t just the capital, either; all along the rural roads there were beautiful plantings and well-tended orchards, all free of litter. Once, in front of the Amir Temur mausoleum in Samarkand, I saw a man chatting to his friend while polishing his shoes with a bit of paper. After he’d finished, he walked several meters to the right and deposited the paper in a trash can. KZPCVs, keep your pants on.

Believe it or not, there were numerous documented sightings of lawnmowers. And at Ulughbek’s observatory, I saw a man lovingly cutting the grass with scissors.

4. Be shocked by rude, uncultured, greedy people and their barren country of despair.

There are many things that Kazakhstan should improve upon, but the system of gypsy cabs has always seemed perfect to me. For a small fee, random people will shuttle you most anywhere. The convenience and logic of it is hard to beat. But Uzbekistan managed to one-up its northern neighbor yet again in this respect. First, the cars themselves are better. At some point, the Korean car manufacturer Daewoo opened a factory in Uzbekistan and flooded the market with cute, cheap, European-style cars. Don’t doubt my love for CCCP clunkers: I still squeal when I see Volgas, and I’ve got it bad for an eggplant Lada. But it was very nice, for once, to hitch a ride in something that had been inspected in the last decade. Even better, drivers almost always stopped in multiple. There would invariably be a patient queue of white Daewoos waiting to take us to our destination.

People were very polite and friendly. And as for the natural and architectural beauty, the photos speak for themselves. I took about 600. I wish I could have beamed Sari Goodfriend over for a week – I felt hopeless to capture the imposing doorways and arches without distorting them.

There’s one thing you’ve got to read about, but only if you won’t judge me: I got a full-body massage by an Uzbek man while lying buck naked on a marble slab inside a hammom. At first when the guy told me to take off my robe I told him I’d rather wait for the friendly female masseuse that was sure to arrive. When he disabused me of that expectation, I figured I had two choices: abandon ship, sacrificing pride and money, or just take a deep breath and drop trou (or in this case, sheet).

You know how in real estate location is everything? In nudity, context is everything. Yes, I was alone in a dark steamy chamber with a strange (and let’s face it, he wasn’t bad looking) man. Yes, he was rubbing my naked, soapy body with his capable manly hands. But it was unmistakable that he viewed my body as a series of knots to be unwound, respectfully and diligently, and he paused only occasionally to ask if I was okay. The massage itself defies description. The man did things to my joints that I didn’t know could be done. At one point, he pushed his fist up the length of my spine and cracked several vertebrae like gunfire. I left feeling like a rag doll.

[Random tangent: after having us make those lists, the trainer showed us a priceless inspirational video called Law of Attraction. Basic premise: everything that happens to you was attracted to you, by you. After invoking Galileo and Newton, the hosts (whose stellar titles, such as 'Michael Lambasto, Visionary', and 'Wilson LaMonte, Entrepreneur', mean the thing was made by a bunch of unemployed guys in a basement) went on to explain that if, for example, you are afraid that your bike might be stolen (dramatization of man in fuzzy sepia city locking his bike to a pole and looking around nervously), the mind vibes that you let off (man's head emits radiating light akin to nuclear bomb impact) will attract bike-stealing thieves (man returns to pole, despairingly grasps at limp bike chain). Wilson LaMonte or whoever then clarifies that, although you might be thinking “Man, I didn't attract all that debt/recent robbery/car accident”, sorry buddy, you actually did. The take-home message of the video – only send out positive nuclear bomb mind vibes – was brilliantly illustrated yesterday when some lady parked her twin babies in a stroller on the sidewalk and then went to get ice cream down the street. Clearly, she was emitting zero baby-stealing mind vibes. A-plus for parenting!]

But, as of this week, I’m now in the oldest group of volunteers here. The 23rd group of Kaz volunteers has arrived! Soon I’ll be going to help train them, which probably will make me feel old. The first thing that volunteers do upon arrival in Almaty is choose between studying either Russian or Kazakh. Rumor has it that staff is increasing the ratio of Kazakh to Russian learners. At our training, staff had to force people into the Kazakh learning group, which was about a quarter the size of the Russian group. Our Kazakh group was mostly women and two total dorkosaurus guys (Jon, you know I love ya, please don’t punch a tree). People cited all sorts of reasons for wanting to learn Russian over Kazakh, such as its broader usefulness and world-language status, but I don’t buy it. How many RPCVs read Pushkin in bed at night? Probably the same number that reads Abai. I think our group was more attracted to Russian because it’s perceived as more powerful and sexier (same thing, really).

I’m not referring to the economic power of Russia, I mean the power that a language is endowed with the more it’s spoken or written. I think that consciously or subconsciously, people are aware of other peoples’ use of a particular language, and that this affects their own feeling toward it. For example, when I say “thank you very much” in Kazakh, I see a mental litany of Kazakh village people saying it after receiving a gift or seeing off a guest. When I say the same phrase in Russian, I see sexy cosmopolitan models saying it after being told they’re gorgeous. I see Stalin saying it after learning of Hitler’s retreat (haha, okay so maybe not that exact phrase, but you get the idea).

Maybe you’re thinking: doesn’t she just mean economic power makes a language powerful? But English serves as a great example of how that’s not true. English is, and will likely always be, the international language. This is not because England is powerful, but because English itself has become powerful. Everyone in Kazakhstan knows the phrase “I love you”, or at the very least, “HELLO!” My students who only get to bathe once a week still join Facebook. People still ask me if I know Schwarzenegger, “the Governator! Hahaha!” (how do people KNOW about that??). English is truly globalized; it has gone beyond its roots in any particular place.

And then within English, within everyone’s native tongue, there are phrases that are more powerful than others. When someone says “Will you marry me?” it’s powerful for the meaning, of course, but also because those are the exact words that your cousin Sammy said to his wife and Paul McCartney said to Linda, and your consciousness of that links the whole situation to a broader importance that has been established by countless people on bended knee. The same with “fuck you” – it doesn’t even really mean anything negative, in a way, but its actual meaning has nothing to do with the powerful negativity it has attained through extensive use.

Power in language has another interesting side to it: male vs female usage. Did you know that studies have shown women to use more proper and accurate language, as opposed to the more vernacular language of men? Apparently, this is because accurate language is a form of symbolic capital – a way to be perceived by others as valuable – and women count more on symbolic capital to define their social position than men, who are judged more by skills or activities.

But that’s not the only reason that women tend to be more accurate in language use. It’s been shown women in a position of economic or material disadvantage use more linguistic politenesses, and conversely that “coarse and nonstandard” language use in women is linked to increased economic empowerment. To which I say, hells to the yes, fo shizzle my feminizzle. Paycheck please!

Recently, to make up for lack of libraries, I’ve been reading JSTOR articles online (so dorkosaurus). I found some really interesting information about the status of women and language in post-Soviet countries. In Ukraine, a broad-reaching study found that subjects listening to the same woman speaking Ukrainian and, later, Russian, judged her to be more honest, intelligent, trustworthy, and a slew of other qualities (all except hard-working, hah!) when she was speaking Russian.

Those results certainly resonate with the linguistic climate here. The Russian language embodies all things chic and important. Again, you could say it’s because Russia is an economic power, but I think the relationship between languages in Kazakhstan has taken on its own direction, irrespective of the former USSR. I see my Uzbek/Tatar intern belittle Uzbek students by berating and condescending to them in Russian. How else can she make them respect her? She’s just a year older than they are. And here in the south, it’s a war of tongues between Kazakh and Uzbek (teehee, tongue war). Uzbeks are elated to hear me speaking their language, rather than that ugly guttural abomination that is Kazakh, and Kazakhs are disgusted to hear my Kazakh dirtied by an Uzbek word or accent.

In any case, I’m beyond excited to go to Uzbekistan in ONE WEEK!!! Since 2009 I’ve been living in one country and speaking primarily the language of another (you know, the one where people are nosy and have bone in their brain). I finally get to go to Uzbekistan, the fascinating land of Silk Road legend, beautiful textiles, and polow… and shock people with my Kazakh accent! Although apparently in Samarkand, Tajik is the language of the streets. Better dust off my two semesters of Persian. Oops, shouldn’t have spent them flirting with the teacher.

I took almost perverse pleasure in the fairness that I encountered. In a cheap salon one day, it took a total of six people to cut and dry my crazy-ass curly mane, and I don’t think it even occurred to them to charge me extra (I tipped the main stylist five bucks and he gawked in disbelief). Even weirder, people wait in line. The whole week I had the bizarre sensation that nobody was trying to rip me off. It was great, but I couldn’t help thinking… you’re all suckers! (Uhh… is that bad?)

The museums were unbelievable, and so humbling. It seems that Koreans were making delicate pottery while we were still grunting unintelligibly and drawing horses on the wall. Their National Museum is massive, allegedly built to withstand everything except a direct nuclear hit, and given North Korea’s recent adolescent taunting, that seems rational. Another spectacular stop was the War Museum, chock full of indictments of North Korean belligerence, thorough historical displays, hilarious/terrifying dioramas (see in FB photo album: North Koreans Beating South Koreans in an Unprovoked Attack in the DMZ… I swear that was the actual caption), virtual reality firing ranges and futuristic weapons displays.

Johnny and I had a great time eating our way through Seoul and seeing my old friend Marc, and then at midnight, the spell broke and our carriage turned into a pumpkin. But it wasn’t so bad coming back home. Seoul felt unreal; Kazakhstan was just a return to reality.

Everything’s great in the village now; it’s not so cold for January and work is getting more interesting by the day. I’m moving into a new apartment where the rent is lower and there will be a washing machine – talk about perfection! Sometimes, Kazakhstan definitely pulls through. And though I’m feeling supremely settled in and productive and generally happy, I’m ready to move on. This school year will come to a close, and with it will finish all of the projects I’ve been planning. After a couple months of summer, all loose ends will be tied up and I’ll be ready to leave.

And as it turns out, I will be leaving in August. Though a typical Peace Corps tour is 27 months (two years of work plus three months of training) our administration has rearranged the schedule of entering and exiting volunteers so that newbies will now come in March. When that happens, there will be far more volunteers than is sustainable for the country staff to manage. Because of that, they’re sending our group home three months early. Perfect!

I have lots of ideas of what I want to do next, but graduate school is not one of them. Though the security is tempting, I’m not ready to jump back into academia yet, even though this program seems so perfect for me. Living in America is certainly an option, though I’d love to spend some time working for an international aid organization in Uzbekistan or with an Uzbek diaspora group somewhere, given how much effort I’ve put into learning this language and culture.

One thing I’m almost certain to be doing is travelling. If you have a chance, read Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake. In it he describes a trip west from China’s major cities to Urumqi, populated by Uighurs and Kazakhs, and then his descent through Tibet and Nepal into India. I loved the way he described the constant but minute changes that signified one culture bleeding into another, and I want to witness it myself. Fortunately, Peace Corps sees fit to pad our pockets with a pretty respectable “readjustment allowance”, as well as offering us the option to cash in our plane ticket home (no small sum… finally, an upside to being so ridiculously far from home!). I can imagine myself “readjusting” pretty well, maybe on the Tibetan plateau with a cup of yak-butter tea.

I have to write about something that makes me so happy every time I think about it. One of my best students at college went to America with a so-called educational farming program. He left in September and was placed on a factory farm in the middle of nowhere, without any recourse for the inhumane conditions he was working in. After visiting my parents in Boston for Thanksgiving, he and they recognized that the situation had to change. All three of them worked together to overcome the many obstacles put up for them by the host program, and finally, amazingly, found him a new job on a small organic farm.

When the truth about his original situation came to light, I felt so ashamed of my countrymen for their mistreatment of a young foreigner (especially after all the kindness and generosity that’s been proffered to me here) and angry that I’d encouraged my student to put his studies on hold and become an indentured servant to some asshole. But I was also powerless to do much. My parents took it upon themselves to ameliorate his situation, despite having met this boy only once and receiving only discouragement from everyone that should have been concerned about him. In a few days he’ll meet his new hosts and, fingers crossed, start to have the experience he signed up for. I’m so proud of and grateful to my mom and dad!

Poetically (can I say that?), his family has been so kind to me, inviting me over and offering all sorts of exorbitant help to me. They are the funniest and nicest family I’ve met here, generous without being pushy, affectionate without being saccharine, so gracious. His six-year-old sister’s got perfect dimples.

To see Korea photos click here.

Our group was guided by the austere Kazakh version of Mr. Miyagi, who kept us on our guards by springing strange demands on us. “Girl! Take off your earring and put it on that rock!” (the rock of energy, shaped like a table, which renews anything placed upon it). “Young man, take off your jacket and turn off your cell phone. Do you have anything broken in your pockets? What’s your father’s name?”

When we were instructed to touch our palms to the rocks and bow our heads, the oldest lady in the group started making wheezy grunts, akin to the one that starts “ohhhhh but mom, I washed the dishes yesterday”. I’ve never seen Kazakh people so emotionally involved in anything, religious or otherwise, which is ironic because the holy site was so patently not Muslim; it was a cluster of interesting rock formations on a hillside (imagine a group of devout American Christians caressing and praying to the sides of the Grand Canyon).

But given how indifferent Kazakhs are to most everything, including Islam, it made sense. Yesterday, I felt like I was experiencing something genuinely Kazakh — some part of the original Kazakh religion, maybe. In the distance, a shepherd was riding a horse across the spine of a hill. There were no buildings for miles. If I were a nomad on the steppe, I would definitely worship sandwich rocks. Allah has no place in this landscape. Mosques and mausoleums look like they’re photoshopped in.

But Muslim or not, some kind of deity definitely intervened when we drank out of the holy spring. Flash back to training, when Dr. Victor told us that drinking unfiltered water leads to pooping and more pooping (nothing is cuter than “poop” in a Russian accent). Flash forward to two Americans bending down to fill their cups with spring water, in accordance with Miyagi’s unbending will, and drinking it down like champs. “That was for your eye!” Miyagi says, poking his eye.

“Now somethingsomethingsomething!” (Damn you, Kazakh dentistry. With a few more teeth in him I might have understood a little). He points to another part of the spring.

We bend down to fill up our cups, but are stopped by urgent flailing and gasped instructions from the peanut gallery. Another man dips into the second part of the spring and fills our cups from his cup. We drank again. “This is for your ear!” he pulls his ear.

At this point, we were like crazy pagans taking Catholic communion, who misunderstand the priest and grab a handful of communion wafers.

But apparently, despite all the hilarious awkwardness, our good intentions were evident to the Kazakh Miyagi. As a reward, perhaps, he instructed us to drink from the third section of the spring, the part that’s good for your stomach, the part that was… stagnant and brown.

I’m not sure whether to be happy or disappointed that the holy spirit never manifested itself in divine diarrhea.

Kazakhstani women have it great. On a scale of zero to 1, 1 being “Equality” and zero being “Yemen”, women here rank a 2.02 (Double Equality!) in the category “Professional and Technical Workers”. They rank a 1.5 (One-and-a-Half Equality!) in the category “Enrollment in Tertiary Education”, and make up the vast majority of educators.

Wohoo!! Things are so equal here that women study more, work more, and educate more than men! And according to a recent unofficial survey conducted by me, women have reached levels of Triple Equality in the categories “Washing Dishes” and “Sweeping the Rocks in the Street in front of One’s House”.

Good job, World Economic Report. I’d just point out, if I could, that in basing your judgments completely on statistics you have managed to confuse “Equality” with “Slavery”. Just a minor thing.

Maybe les francaises get paid less every month than les francais, but I can’t imagine any of them would trade their form of inequality for, say, arranged marriage at 17. Has the ivory tower gotten so high that economists can’t see through the fog of their statistics to the human level? They report a cheery 75% in the category “Existence of legislation punishing acts of violence against women”, but ask me, what happened when my 18-year-old pregnant student showed up to class one day with burns on her neck and fingernail-shaped chunks torn out of her arm? Fucking nothing. Laws have to be implemented to mean something, geniuses. Doesn’t Massachusetts have a law against oral sex still on the books? We’re not exactly getting accolades from Christine O’Donnell.

I’ve been holding Gender Discussion seminars (better title pending) in which I always hear that a good Kazakhstani woman is shy, obedient, hardworking, and respectful. Nothing shocking, just traditional. But the traditional roles of the superior man and the inferior woman are being broken down, slowly, by a quiet erosion of respect for men.

This report I keep roasting is idiotic to place Kazakhstan 41st in terms of gender parity, but its statistics do bely coming social change. When women start surpassing men in the realms of education, health, and productive employment (as well as doing all the work at home), they begin to supplant the man in his seat of superiority. Sometimes revolutions don’t need conscious actors.

Right now, most women here defer to their man in every decision. My host mom once asked her husband for permission to attend her own grandfather’s funeral (and if he said no?). But this isn’t sustainable. Most men here, well, they suck. Drunkenness in men is barely shameful, it’s so widespread. Walk around at lunch hour and you’ll see all sorts of unemployed cheloveks playing cards (the only card game here is appropriately named “idiot”) and spitting sunflower seeds like they’re too cool for school. Meanwhile, their “Doubly Equal” female counterparts are wearing themselves out teaching those same mens’ rowdy, self-entitled sons.

This country’s future lies with the girls. It’s the girls who study, who achieve, who do all the productive things that will drive Kazakhstan out of the second world (that is, former Soviet bloc) and into the first. The boys, resting on their inherited laurels, make fools of their gender by being lazy and waiting for success to alight upon them like it did under Big Brother. Inevitably, women will acknowledge the ridiculousness of deferring to someone worse-educated and less-successfully-employed.

It’s not a social movement in any explicit way, but rather a natural progression coming, ironically, from women’s propensity to “be good”. Get a job, says her husband. Do the laundry, can the vegetables, watch the kids, cook the dinner. Don’t get a driver’s license, because I like to take the car out of a Sunday afternoon, park it on a side street, and take a nap in it (no joke, I see this all the time).

By being meek and taking on all the major responsibilities, women are bowing to the will of their husbands, but at the same time undermining their authority. These men are making themselves obsolete. Though it might seem backward, meek assumption of duties will slowly build this gender’s self-respect and sense of worth. Someday, they shall inherit the earth.

After school ended in June, I organized a summer camp in a local Uzbek village. After a year of masquerading as a serious professor, it was heaven. We played sports, had a cookout, did an egg-drop which made teenage boys shed tears of joy. The whole thing was hilarious. After that, I travelled around to help out at other volunteer-organized camps of all types (sports, English, girls’ life skills etc). It meant spending time with American friends, being outside, drinking beer, swimming, eating good food, and happily forgetting that I was in a country that can make life very difficult.

After two months of that, punctuated by a glorious trip to Italy to meet my parents & some friends, I came back to site. That was early August, and from then until a few days ago, I’d been standing on shaky ground.

The day I got back, I knew immediately that I couldn’t stand another year with my host family. My love and appreciation for them couldn’t outweigh the constant stress of crying babies, soup three times a day, and seriously restricted independence. I had waffled all spring, but being away had given me the kick in the ass I needed. I packed up all my things and moved to an apartment, where I reveled in the glory of walking around naked all day and eating grapes for dinner.

But still, coming back to site after a fun and relaxing summer was, as one friend put it, like staring down the barrel of a gun. Through August my thoughts were constantly marred by dread of the difficulties I knew I would face the coming year. Unlike when I first arrived, I knew exactly what I was getting into, for better and for worse.

And it was worse than I expected. One of the big problems I was loath to face was the situation at college, where petty and possessive administrators wield the iron fist (minus the velvet glove) to keep teachers in the office from 9 to 5, no matter their lesson schedule. It’s resented by local teachers who are actually paid by the college, but it’s been especially hard for me, since last year I wanted to do projects in other community institutions and was constantly getting myself or my fellow teachers in trouble for it.

Then, apparently, the Education Minister cut our lesson hours, reducing my schedule to between 2 and 6 teaching hours a week. I started ignoring the administration and going to teach at different local schools until the college director found out and… the shit hit the fan. People started getting yelled at and threatened, in the all-too-familiar Soviet manner, and I was summoned to her office to explain myself.

Only in a place like this, where ingrained clannish greed too often rears its ugly head, would I have to explain why I’d prefer to fill my days with useful activities rather than obediently drinking tea in the teachers’ room. Last year I respected and was even a little intimidated by the director, but this year I see her clearly for the narrow-minded fist-clencher that she is.

I’m not here for her sake. I’m here only for my students, who are more like my little sisters, my students whom I love to teach. I didn’t want to leave them stranded, but my regional manager from Peace Corps told me I’d have to find a new institution to work at. I felt trapped in limbo with less-than-appealing options on either side: leave the community I’d built up for a year, or stay in a situation that was sure to be miserable. And this was the culmination of two months spent worrying about how I’d manage to start a whole new year, one that I’d imagined would be a lot better than it was shaping up to be.

The bright side to all this darkness was that in my nomadic spurts at different schools in the area, I’d found a few situations that I was eager to work in: a big school in the Uzbek Silk Road village of Sayram (with the best English teachers I’ve met here so far), a Kazakh school in Aksu center that has accelerated English tracks starting in first grade (and, consequently, rooms full of 3rd graders who practically pee their pants with the excitement of saying I AM SEVEN!!!!!!), and the Uzbek school in Karabulak where I had held camps over the summer. Karabulak’s are some of my favorite students in the whole region.

On Wednesday last week, two trainees were sent to observe my site at the same time that my Regional Manager came to sort out my situation. I thought the poor girls would spend their visit to college surrounded by hordes of sobbing teenage girls and administrators angry about my site change. But my RM and I decided on the best possible solution: 2 days of work a week at college, and the remaining 3 at schools of my choice. An hour and a half of wrangling with the director and my RM came out of her office saying “I’m alive!”

Now I have the best possible schedule: flexible, varied, both familiar and new. I still don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing every day, but I know that it will be the most useful and productive thing that I can find to do. One year has passed by like lightning, and the second year promises to pass faster still. Finally, I’m out of limbo and on my feet again. I’m optimistic and excited about the rest of my second year, but mostly just relieved to be feeling that way and no longer drinking the bitter cocktail of dread, futility and frustration that I had been for most of August and September.

In my apartment now I have internet access, so email’s by far the best way to stay in touch. I’ll be better about posting on this thing now that my life is real again. And I promise not to post such serious newsy stuff in the future.

Now, Taldykorgan, Balkhash, Zhezkazgan, Italy, Jangatas.

Wait, did someone say Italy? It’s  going to be the most well-deserved vacation of my life.

~

Image: Unaccompanied children under the age of three wandering in the street

You: These children have lost their mother and she must be found

Me: Hey, kids! Have some candy!

~

Image: Thick, hairy legs ending in high heels

You: Transvestite

Me: Average working woman

~

Image: Wedding

You: Happiness and celebration of love

Me: Crying my eyes out

~

I’ve been to two weddings in the last couple of weeks (’tis the season) and I hate to sound negative, but if I’m going to sound negative, I might as well go all out: I absolutely and totally revile every minute of them. It’s a good thing this is not my native culture, because everything is still blessedly interesting to me. I don’t think I’ll be able to manage any weddings next spring, now that I know what’s coming.

My good friend Naseeba got married first, a wedding greatly anticipated since the man who had been following her around in his Mercedes and unsuccessfully trying to woo her went over her head and won approval from her parents. She’d grown accustomed to the idea since then, and was utterly serene in her cream puff dress, but I was a wreckage of inner turmoil and my wedding toast was something along the lines of “I know you’ll make the best of this dire situation” (it was in English, understood by nobody, and I smiled charmingly throughout: give me an Oscar). She now wakes up at five every morning to scrub and cook and serve tea, and I’ll see her rarely, if ever again. That’s it: she’s gone. Weddings are to girls here what the cliff is to lemmings, what the vending machine drop is to a bag of chips, what the plank is to a pirate.

But nobody here shares my sense of tragedy. Nobody seems to care at all, really. The focus of a wedding is decidedly not on the bride and groom, but rather on the free food, the dancing, the entertainment. It wouldn’t be so tragic if other people were paying attention to the matter at hand, but their complete indifference only fans the flames of my agony.

Okay, agony’s a bit dramatic. But one of my closest friends here was just given away as a household slave to a family she has no emotional connection to, and all my tablemates talked about was when were we going to dance and please pour me some more Fanta. For the love of pita!

A week later I attended the wedding of my host cousin, and after the party a big group of women and I accompanied the bride to her husband’s house. She, unlike Naseeba, had actually dated the guy for three years and it was (more or less) her choice to be marrying him. But what tapped my tragedy reserves on this occasion was the manner of her delivery into a new life. Once she’d arrived at her in-laws’ house, she was seated in a corner of a large room, and in front of her was hung a large cloth to hide her from sight. Forty or so women sat near her, eating, drinking, and talking (not about her), and she fell asleep in her little fort. I’ve never been much of a fantasy-wedding-concocter, but I can tell you right now that hours after my wedding I won’t be falling asleep in a corner.

Uzbeks do a lot of things well. They host extremely well, they dance like royalty, their music is haunting, they speak a beautiful and creative language, they hold funerals and post-funeral parties that I envy for their raw release of emotion and unbridled outpouring of support.

They do not do love well.

And sometimes I want to scream: wake up! There is a large world out there in which many people choose their wives and husbands. In which people fall in love, break hearts, break dishes in fury, cry with happiness on their wedding day. Arranged marriages are fine, but in the same way that Hamburger Helper is fine. Arranged marriages are meant for societies that are struggling to survive, for which early marriage and lots of babies in succession are necessary reassurance that the generations will carry on. This society is rooted in that tradition, but things are not that way anymore. Yet somehow love hasn’t made it into the collective consciousness. It’s not talked about. It’s not longed for. It’s not agonized over. Which makes me wonder: what do females between the ages of 15 and 35 do all the time?

I miss love. I miss seeing people holding hands and going on dates and flirting. I feel its absence in advance for my little sisters, one of which said yesterday that she wants to be a bride, too, and I couldn’t swallow for a second because I was choked by the knowledge of what that will mean to her, and worse, what it won’t mean to her.

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I posted some photos and a video of the weddings. You can find the photos at the link below, and the video’s on my facebook page (sorry, I tried to embed it but it didn’t work!)

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=182329&id=647796540&l=d6ceff5efb

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=179272&id=647796540&l=9994fd842c

The hill was so pointy that running around on it we were like two little bugs on someone’s fingertip. If we distanced ourselves by 100 feet, neither of us could see the other because of the hilltop in the way. To the west of the hill, Aksukent’s tin roofs reflected the setting sun. To the east, snowcapped mountains glowed. A half-mile to the south, cows and sheep grazed on a ridge.

As always, when something interesting is going on, kids came to investigate. After a few minutes they were all playing with us. A kindergartner named Islam threw like a pro, even though the disc was practically the size of his whole body. By the time Damir called to tell me the barbeque was lit, they must have chased the errant disc down the entire hill fifteen or twenty times.

Raking light and elevation are an intoxicating combination. That night and that hill were a balm. The academic year is nearing an end, and for some reason I’m not lightened by the prospect of summer but rather deprived of the ascetic grit that got me through the winter. I see phantoms, or rather, I smell them: dinner wafts up from the kitchen and I can swear it’s pesto or roast chicken or grilled vegetables (it’s meat and potatoes). For one whole week I was obsessed with the idea of a tuna melt. It was like being in love; all I could think about was the utter perfection of tuna, olive oil, and sharp cheddar. Sometimes I eat spoonfuls of raspberry jam and they taste like grapefruit.

It’s only very rarely that I have the feeling of missing anyone or anything. Generally, what I mean by “I miss you” is “I love you”. Maybe it’s my disposition, or my age, or my life’s trajectory, but for whatever reason I am usually too caught up in the present or future to experience pure longing.

Perhaps that’s why the things that lack in my life simply appear to me, in the present, as flickering realities. I was sitting on a bench one morning in the center of town, and a woman’s swishing skirt and high heels swept Italy onto a patch of the sidewalk. For a moment, she was walking on cobblestones and wearing real leather shoes. There was the tinny honking of scooters and rumbling latin voices, and then it was gone.

The time before that wasn’t visual, it was a feeling: one day, for the last few hours at work I had a strange sensation that I couldn’t quite place, until it finally occurred to me that I was anticipating the concert I was going to that night (do I have to write it? There was no concert).

Of course I have woken up in my childhood bedroom several times, but the phantoms are always more intense when I’m moving, like when I was jogging down a forested hill one morning and was hit with the bizarre certainty that if I ran just a little faster I’d turn the corner and slip into one of my running trails from college.

I’m training for a marathon to be run in Istanbul in October (khuda hohlasi!). I try to keep track of my mileage, but having no accurate way to measure distance I’ve started measuring in terms of destination. An hour-long run takes me to the river and back. A run to Mankent is pretty long. To Shimkent is a marathon. Last Sunday, I got up early and ran to my friend’s house in Karabulak, a neighboring village. When I got to her house, I splashed myself with water, put on one of her house-dresses, and took a nap. When I woke up she fed me soup. The whole rest of the day all I could think was: two Karabulaks is a marathon! I hope, by October, it will be the opposite: the marathon will just seem like two Karabulaks.

In other news, fruit trees are fruiting, flies are buzzing, buses are smelly: the season of ubiquitous pregnancy and endless weddings has begun.