The First Time

“He was a bold man, who first ate an oyster.” - Jonathan Swift

Life is full of many firsts: your first steps and solid food; your first day of kindergarten and getting on a school bus. No one forgets that first kiss and other firsts that happen around those years (or later – much, in fact - for those of us a bit slow on the uptake). And who could ever forget your first job or car.

Being a seasoned woman over forty, I’ve had many firsts. Piles of those milestones have received a second, third or fourth round. But I can swear with absolute sincerity that one first from last night here in Bangkok will never get a second chance: eating a freshly opened oyster.

www.oysterguide.com

The horror of it all. The mystery of it all.  After I recovered from emptying my martini glass with a frantic gulp to wash down that slimy chewy slug, I could not help but notice the contrast between my moment of wide-eyed distress and the look of pure bliss from my dining companion as he happily slurped down yet another plump morsel. And that got me thinking –what is it that creates such love and loathing regarding this modest looking mollusk, who sits hidden in a craggly silver white case that grows one of the most coveted jewelry items in the world? What is it about that ritual of effort to risk life and limb to cut open the shell, carefully peel the blade around the pillowy briny center, reach for a squeeze of lemon and swallow the slippery thing that brings such a deep sigh of satisfaction and longing for yet another one?

A rapid fire internet scan yields some curious results. A first entry of “oysters” revealed a top visited erotica site entitled “Oysters and Chocolate: A Sensual Feast for Men and Women.” Being on a work computer I did not feel inclined to add that page to my electronic fingerprint, despite the obvious link between erotica and the workplace. Next up came a site of quotes dedicated solely to oysters and their apparently endless wonder. A short page, to be sure. Last but not least appeared a more vanilla oriented site of “oysters.com” which lays out everything that in my opinion, one never needs to know about an oyster. Just get rid of the lot, I say.

Not so fast, say those oyster lovers. Seems there are significant health benefits to eating those little gems. Oysters are apparently very good for people who need zinc and for men who need a boost of you-know-what to you-know-where. And yes yes, we’ve all heard that little chestnut about the sex appeal of oysters  and how they help to recall blissful moments of a past romp or to get ready for the next one. Personally I think I'd get more turned on watching the grass grow outside.

More amusing is the effect that oysters seem to have on people’s basic communication skills. When chatting with a friend about my near death experience last night, said friend launched into such a breathy rhapsody about her love of all things oysters that I thought she would smoke a cigarette while propped up in bed and charge $3.75 a minute for our phone call. Another friend, when sharing an obvious passion for the treats, typed out such a uncharacteristically garbled string of skype messages that I wondered what had gotten into him – particularly when he opined that the best time to eat oysters was “on a Saturday morning as the sun sets." What is wrong with you people, I ask!

Which is exactly what I heard back when explaining my snack from hell last night. The world may be my oyster, but I'm not biting it ever again.

That's more like it

The Year of the Monkey

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. – Anais Nin

I’m astounded by people who want to “know” the Universe, when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown –Woody Allen

Ms. Nin must have been in a contemplative mood when she authored that quote, since usually her writings were significantly more racy and blushing with her erotica and sensual suggestions of living lustfully in the world.  Mr. Allen on the other hand, I bet was right where he usually seems to be: commenting in that delightfully endearing and neurotic way on a basic tension of being human: how to feel connected to something bigger than our immediate world when the daily challenges of just being in that world seem daunting enough. 

That tightrope of balancing the rippling clarity of sensing something more with working out the mechanics of reaching that clarity is one that I also bet everyone of us recognizes –we feel the tickles of something fluttering inside that nudges us in a direction that feels intuitively clear but the stubborn minds’ eye wants to “know” what it is before making a move. Therein lies the trick –in order to know what’s ahead, steps need to be taken and it’s not possible to just leap to the end of the street. I mean, who would start a movie, and then just jump to the final scene in order to know what happens? No one, that’s who. Most of us can breezily say that in such a scenario, you have to just watch to scenes unfold and be available for what comes on the screen. You can’t force the screen anymore than you could start the movie knowing how it ends (ok ok, I get it about films like the Titanic –since the ending is already known, the challenge is how to make the story line interesting. What were we all doing before meeting Jack and Rose…) the point being, there’s something to be said for just showing up and seeing what happens.

But there’s lots more to said for just dealing with what many Buddhist teachings call  “monkey mind.” What is that, you may ask. Think about it. Monkey Mind is when the mind just leaps, swings, screeches and yelps day and night with chatter and distracting projections of “what if.” Note the distinction between the brain and the mind. The brain is just a collection of bio-chemical and physical traits that create a pile of grey matter inside a skull. It is a tangible, actual thing that you can look at, pick at and scan. The mind, on the other hand, is a construct of that stardust from the universe that creates thoughts, feelings, impressions, fears, desire, anger and all those other good things that humans and creatures experience over a lifetime. The brain doesn’t “do” anything beyond the chemical –but the mind, left to its own devices, is a force to be reckoned with.

I don’t lie awake at night at 3am because my brain wanders into darker corners of uncertainty and anxieties. I don’t pace the hallways like Medusa at 4am looking out at the stormy Kathmandu skies because my brain is fluttering like a jar full of butterflies. When I do those things –and it’s not often but has happened, particularly when jetlagged (thanks body chemistry) – it’s because I have chosen a certain record from the collection of my musical monkey mind. And I’m playing it at full volume. The mind can seem very far from being a soothing friend. It can be the farthest thing from a warm hug, a smile from a friend, or a kiss from a loved one. Instead, monkey mind can be a powerful cocktail of doubts, questions, uncertainty that causes me to turn around and look back as if I can hear the tail of monkey mind swishing up and getting ready to greet me.

Monkey mind can also be a very good friend to get you into that place of darkness. I read once that the darkness of the deep night is in some cultures considered a sacred and coveted space of enlightenment and revelations. It is there, in the deep night, that the most powerful and revealing insights come to us through the slivers of star or moonlight that trickle down from that universe above. It is there, in the sleepiness and solitude –and sometimes sadness—that moments spark into helping us understand that something is changing. That we are changing.

The months of this past year have held many such moments. Moments of looking out the window while deep rains poured down, hitting the glass so hard that I felt sure any moment the windows would crack and the rain would just wash away the doubts and questions and desire alive in my mind to reach out to something that felt unclear. Other moments were in the pre dawn light, where birds were waking up and the blanket of night lifted away to reveal the sounds of morning sweeping and little temple bells starting to ring. At those moments, the puffs of incense coming into my nose tickled me in more ways than one.

But monkey mind is not all deep contemplation. It’s also talking with dear friends who say something insightful like “I’m more than 40 years old, I don’t have to put up with this shit anymore” that results in a belly laugh of understanding so obvious and clear that it’s worth a week of meditation regarding a sense of peace and acceptance. It’s skyping with a delightful little 4 year old who says “I want you to read me a story here on the couch please.” And you realize that yes, I want to sit on that couch over there. These moments set into motion a series of little hops, sparks and desires that then become concrete steps, decisions, choices and conversations. And it’s figuring out that Ms Nin was onto something –that staying in that little bud really does become a bit of a pain, and that the pain of kicking it out and saying “what the hell, why not” does actually feel a whole hell of a lot better.

And who gets lost in Chinatown anyway. 

Wandering at Crystal Cove Beach, California -  a most beloved place for me

A most beloved little nephew

The much beloved Chang clan of Southern California, who is always "that family" in any Chinese restaurant

Remembering

 A new season has begun in Nepal. The dark and damp winter haze is lifting out of the Kathmandu Valley, replaced by puffs of white clouds that flirt with the bright blue sky and glossy white mountain peaks. Even against the filth of Kathmandu, this change still manages to bring a promise of adventure and possibility. As the Mt Everest climbing season approaches in April, the streets start to fill up with the most determined of climbers set on summiting a mountain that while not the most technically difficult  (that prize belongs to a peak in the Annapurna Range) is still considered the most intimidating and of course, the highest.  Soon the newspapers will give harrowing details of climbers gone missing, climbers gone to the top, and other climbers who have gone for good.  Avalanches, accidents and reflections on previous expeditions and the “art of the climb” will continue to present a curious narrative of what has been done before and what remains to be done. Words will revolve around remembering and hoping.

April is also an important moment in my own personal memory. The end of March starts that remembering. One of the loveliest things to me about memory is how such a storehouse can connect seemingly disparate moments together in ways that then later make perfect sense. I had such a time last night in Bangladesh. 

30^th March 1999: as a newly minted “aid worker”, I was 5 days into a new position before being quickly deployed as part of the Emergency Assessment Team to Tirana, Albania. Tasked with helping to establish a new office for responding to the rapidly exploding Kosovo refugee crisis, I’ll always remember this flight date as it is my mothers’ birthday. In March 30 of that year, I felt exciting promise that I would soon move from being 30 to 31 years of age. A sense of permission and evolution to move ahead into a time of more maturity and connection.

Traveling with a new colleague, a retired former Marine Colonel who was in charge of security and also overall management of this yet to be understood humanitarian crisis response, I left Atlanta with a wariness over knowing my parents were deeply concerned about this trip. My German mother, having spent her WWII childhood surrounded in Berlin by bombings, various military troops and in the end, even receiving several bonafide CARE packages, did not smile over seeing her daughter head towards such a conflict. My Chinese father, another survivor of war but of the Japanese invasions and civil conflict that meant chronic displacement and fleeing throughout the China eastern seaboard, was even more bothered by all this. They did point out the peculiar “western” idea of people from one country roaming to other countries to engage in this kind of work. But as always, they shared themselves with me without guilt, without control and without hesitation.

The details of that journey to Tirana shuffle like a deck of snap shot cards–Atlanta flights to Boston and then Italy, long train rides from Milan, portside hotel rooms where red neon store signs flashed outside; I recall a deep in the night ferry ride from Italy’s east coast over the Albania, surrounded by BBC journalists, aid workers and even some former CNN colleagues who were discussing critical elements such as if anyone had remembered hotel reservations and driver/local support. Arriving into the coastal ferry port, I saw a crush of humanity so dense and dominated with men in low dark caps, long leather jackets and non shaven faces that I felt for sure I would simply dissolve into the crowds. Driving through the black night towards Tirana, we came across many police checkpoints where stern but young looking officers flashed bright lights onto our tired passenger faces. The main thing I remember next was tumbling onto a very soft hotel room bed, fully clothed and waking up in the morning in the exact same diagonal display of fatigue.

After a few days of predictable emergency moments –endless coordination meetings, finding office space, meeting CARE colleagues and doing the rounds at respective embassies – a little deployment team was ready to move out into a field operation. A few days later a team of us drove up towards Kukes, on the Albania/Kosovo border in one of the bluest mornings I have ever experienced. With a solid Mercedes jeep, seat belts fastened in front and back and a young driver winding the 5 of us up and down the steep winding hills, that day also seemed full of possibility and promise. And it was.

15 minutes and 500 feet later far off  the mountain cliff road, I was pulled out of a crumpled car that had been driven too fast and too soon around a descending switchback and as a result soared into the sky to capitulate, careen and crash land with a loud bang in the valley below. My marine colonel colleague had been yelling “stay alive” over and over as the car flipped and spun and bounced its way down, down and down. A group of amazingly strong Albanian women, wrapped in colored scarves and thick clothes, pulled me out of the car as if I was a newborn. They carried me to a patch of grass and took charge of stroking my face and hair and patted my cheeks while murmuring softly in my ears. My eyes fill even as I write this now to remember that moment, and my mother always takes comfort to know her daughter was cared for like that by total strangers at the bottom of a Balkan mountain. Local transport brought us into the chaotic capital and after an overnight stay in an Albanian hospital, we were delivered to the NATO airport clinic.

The efficiency and speed of a NATO diagnostic medical theater is breathtaking: a patient arriving laced to a stretcher is unloaded out of the ambulance onto the airport tarmac and hustled into the medical tent. She is then unstrapped and body-lifted by 4 military officers onto a table who then together with a loud yell announce that “patient Claudia M. Chang available now for treatment post mountain car crash. 30 year old female conscious and conversant.” (newsflash: even after such an accident I’m still managing to have a chat). Seemingly seconds later, several take-no-prisoners medics and nurses descend upon the unsuspecting patient to simultaneously pull away any clothing blocking a let’s-just-say-very-thorough head to toe inspection. One doctor takes charge of speaking to the patient, introducing himself and asking her name along with questions about location, what happened and how many fingers is he holding up. The rest of the team is each assigned a particular limb and body section: more ID wristbands are strapped on, an IV drip is started and eye pupils are examined for dilation. Toes and knees are tapped to test for reflex damage while abdominal areas get prodded and poked to look for internal bleeding. Next, gentle but firm hands all together now turn the patient on her side to check the back of the head, neck, “posterior” area, legs and ankle mobility. Leaving Albania for Germany and the Ramstein Airbase, it is the only time in my life I have traveled internationally without going through immigration. 

After two weeks in an extremely efficient hospital and daily little paper cups of colorful and soothing pain meds, I then moved to one of Germany’s top rehabilitation clinics in Bonn for 6 weeks of physical therapy. As would be imagined, that experience warrants its own separate narrative. Returning home to my house in leafy Atlanta months later was a sweetness I could never capture on paper.

People often say “I’m so sorry that happened to you. “ I’m not. Most of the time actually, I wonder what I did to deserve such a gift. And being with people last night in Dhaka who generously listened to my words also reminded me of why I’m not. Without interrupting, they simply listened to what I had to say. I realized later how I appreciated that basic gesture and choice to hear aloud my story during the time of year when it’s particularly significant for me to tell it. Flying back into the blue Kathmandu sky also reminds me why I’m not sorry. That’s the thing about remembering - it helps to keep the sense of promise and possibility alive, even if you yourself really shouldn’t be after events of April 7^th 1999. 

April 6th, 1999.

April 7th, 1999