The apples are too tart for pie, or anything else for that matter, but I pluck one from the tree by the back bedroom window anyway. I walk towards the car, an already dust-caked Corolla, and take in one more look at the uncurled surface of Cayuga, the middle Finger Lake just past blood-red sunrise. I rub the fruit across my pant leg. It’s a summer apple, smaller than most, knobbed and uneven. I raise it to my mouth, take a bite. It’s a bitter mealy mouthful, as I knew it’d be but hoped it wouldn’t. I spit it out, cast away the remains, reach for the handle.

“Time to go,” I tell her.

Time to head west through the heart of the country, on highway, on dirt road, on main street. Twenty days through wood and mountain and prairie and plain. Always west. She tilts her head so I can see her eyes flash behind sunglasses.

“Giddy up,” she says.

A small border-patrol officer with a bowl cut pulls at the elastic edge of her doctor’s gloves as she asks us questions.

“Any guns, alcohol, or tobacco on board?”

Before New York’s Route 90, we pass Goulds Pumps and its brown and white metallic hodgepodge, a handful of cemeteries with crumbling family monuments, and the Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls. Besides the pump factory, which is now owned by ITT Technology, hydropower mills and tanneries puff out the remains of a hushed local economy. A series of locks and dams choke off the lake from the channel. Red, white, and blue signs dot the roadsides: “No Sovereign Nation, No Reservation.” The Whites and Native Americans are still at it, fighting over land claims and now casinos, too.

I-90 West, then north on 33 until Niagara Falls. It’s surprisingly easy to cross the border. We stop for pictures at the overlook, feel the mist dust our faces and then leave like everyone else. Roads are closed, so we stop at a burger stand with a hand-drawn sign advertising a ten-ounce patty for six dollars Canadian. There, a four-hundred-pound woman gives us directions so unpromising we bleat a rushed “thanks” and drive on, even more disoriented, to find a better place to get unlost. We find Highway 3 and head west. Always west, past tobacco field and grapevine and ash tree.

We stop for burgers at a diner packed with seniors slouched over bowls of clam chowder and glasses of iced tea: for the retired, it’s ten-percent-off every Tuesday. I order a burger with bacon only to receive a burger with a sliver of ham. Subtle differences. After inhaling a slice of lemon meringue and packing a slice of chocolate pie for the road, we meander a path back to the highway and in two hours cross the Ambassador Bridge out of Canada and into Detroit.

A small border-patrol officer with a bowl cut pulls at the elastic edge of her doctor’s gloves as she asks us questions. When she’s not tugging at her gloves, she’s scratching at the large bandage on the left side of her neck.

“How long were you in Canada?”

“Seven hours.”

“Purpose of visit?”

“Passing through from New York to Michigan.”

“Any guns, alcohol, or tobacco on board?”

“We’ve got beer.”

“Are you bringing anything back you bought while in Canada?”

“Just some pie.”

She searches the trunk: a mess of camping gear and suitcases, a driver, a putter, a baseball mitt, two cowboy hats, and the beer. She rummages around for a minute and lets us go on our way.

We roll into Ann Arbor in time for cocktail hour. We sip Bell’s on the backyard patio of her mother’s house. Hydrangeas droop in the August heat, and everything smells like grass. This night, I’ll have to sleep on a couch too short for me. We walk the dog holding hands. I’ll prop the door open for her when we get home.

“Day one,” she says as she passes.

Excelling at running is like excelling at breathing or sleeping. Long distance running is the only physical exploit humans excel at. Whereas each and every other creature can claim phenomenal athletic prowess – web spinning, tree vaulting, spyhopping – humans have the marathon.

Of course I’m terrible at running. It’s a unique and special kind of terrible, embarrassing to watch on par with a little girls’ pageant talent segment. My form, which has remained unchanged since the dreaded Presidential Physical Fitness Tests of my childhood, is truly ugly, my arms pulled up awkwardly by my chest; now and then I catch a glimpse of myself in an office-building window and am shocked by how closely I resemble a tiny tyrannosaur. Ever since I discovered this, I scan the faces of everyone I run past, searching for any hint of a smirk, though most are bred well enough to attempt hiding their amusement.

While some people affect clumsiness because they feel it makes them somehow endearing, I have an innate lack of coordination usually attributable only to severe inner ear malformations.

There are greater perils to face on my morning run than merely looking foolish: I also risk losing my teeth. While some people affect clumsiness because they feel it makes them somehow endearing, I have an innate lack of coordination usually attributable only to severe inner ear malformations. At twenty-five years of age, I cannot ride a bicycle without training wheels, and I still grip the handrails for dear life when descending stairs. For this reason, I’m stunned by the fact that I haven’t yet sustained a life-threatening injury from running. Nevertheless, whenever my trainer catches on a root or I underestimate the height of a curb, I let out an involuntary yelp, my head spinning with visions of spilling forward onto the street, dashing my teeth out on the asphalt.

The indignity of being watched by complete strangers, squealing and sweaty and wearing improbably bright shorts, is mitigated by the endlessly fascinating running subculture. There’s an air of survivalism that permeates the running community, a sense that, under certain circumstances, the rules of polite society do not apply—especially as they pertain to personal hygiene. Elite marathoners – and even very dedicated non-professionals – will soil themselves during a race to avoid losing time in a Porta-John.

There, underneath a slew of storm clouds, the paved stretch of runways and lots that connected Poland to the rest of the known world had looked neatly folded into the patchwork quilt of fields that constitutes Balice, a tiny village on the outskirts of Kraków. I was returning to my homeland, a fact my mother had reminded me of for the umpteenth time as she helped me pack the essentials for a two-week stay. This was the late summer of my eighteenth birthday, marking not only my transition into the collegiate world but also the tenth anniversary of my immigration to the United States. Not until I made my way through the doors of the terminal did her parting words finally hit me: This is who you are. Who you always will be.

Still, my molars ground insistently, as if the significance of the words were yet more than I could swallow.

This was, as I have said, during the terminal summer of my childhood; and so my childhood begs some explanation.

Although most girls at the tender age of ten concern themselves simply with homework, soccer practice, and dollhouses, my extracurricular activities had always consisted of diaper-changing, dish-washing, and baby formula. While my mother was at work, it was my duty to take care of my younger sister from the moment I returned from school. After countless instances of turning down invitations to play at a friend’s house, grab ice cream, or catch a movie, I began to echo my friends’ incomprehension of my childhood lifestyle. “How come you can’t go?,” my social engagements would always begin; “I have to watch my sister,” they would always progress; “But why?,” they would always end. Why indeed? I posed the question repeatedly.

Yet I did not remember the peeling yellow paint that – before the descent of the Iron Curtain – had been used to brighten up the dank stairwell.

The years stretched into adolescence, and the conflict became more and more pronounced as my world grew, and with it foregone opportunities for fun and exciting endeavors with friends. My resentment of my family grew as well, as I continued to miss the teenage rites of passage that were mine by right of existence. High school did permit more freedom, but each additional hour came at a bitter emotional cost and with the required justification that the activity be beneficial to gaining admission to college or procuring a job. The moment our mail carrier bequeathed me a large envelope from the University of Chicago I began a countdown: college was going to set me free.

I was finally in the home stretch. Orientation began in two weeks, and the final task left to accomplish was to spend some time with my uncle and his family in their hometown of Tychy, where I had spent a large part of my formative years.

Upon exiting his Fiat Seicento, my uncle Jacek and my grandmother – who had driven several hours to retrieve me from the airport – led the way down the small, winding road connecting the parking area to the ten-story high-rise weathered by time, the elements, and civil ambivalence. For the duration of our walk, and the entirety of the trip, they filled the conversation with questions alternating between those regarding my life in America and ones that stemmed from “Do you remember—?” I did.

I remembered countless, joy-filled visits to my uncle’s home, where I would spend hours running around inside and out with my twin cousins Ania and Agnieszka, only two years my senior. I remembered sitting in my uncle’s lap as he read to me from a book containing folk tales from the island of Sri Lanka, my favorite stories at the time because they had seemed incomparably exotic. I remembered hiding behind my aunt Terenia’s long, printed skirts from their excitable, fully grown Doberman, not believing in the benign and playful intentions of a creature over a foot taller than I was. Yet I did not remember the peeling yellow paint that – before the descent of the Iron Curtain – had been used to brighten up the dank stairwell leading to the door of their seventh-floor apartment. I did not remember how the sofa was wedged mere inches from the center table in the living room, forcing the residents to shuffle sideways in order to make their way to the kitchen, itself the size of our food pantry back in the States.

he California Blue Line Stop roosts high above the angled intersection of California and Milwaukee on Chicago’s west side, and the sound of the bustle below floats up to the elevated platform even on cold, rainy winter nights. Where bored commuters had went about their business in the daylight, a few like-minded musical zealots huddled together for warmth. We were on our way to a party none of us had any business attending, after an afternoon spent arguing the merits of each other’s Top Ten of The Aughts compilation albums, trying with evident success to find the bottom of every bottle in sight.

In our compromised state, we could only agree on a few things: So far that day we’d drank way too much; Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, with four inclusions on eight records, was, in our collective estimation, the best record of the 2000s; the stinging rain was not helping the night’s bitter chill; and the fight earlier in the evening threw everyone and everything off-course.

It started during The Black Lips’ “Cold Hands.” Tony, aggressive guitars goading him on, implored us to fisticuffs. “If you want to fight, now’s the time!” he’d shouted, and so we started shoving each other, bigger men pushing smaller ones and more generous souls staying clear. Jabs and kicks, at one point friendly but no longer, peppered the scene—a body held aloft in the tiny Palmer Square abode, and long-forgotten, bygone grievances between old friends. The explosion lasted three minutes, but the détente took significantly longer to procure.

Jabs and kicks, at one point friendly but no longer, peppered the scene—a body held aloft in the tiny Palmer Square abode, and long-forgotten, bygone grievances between old friends.

It seem logical, later, to keep our evening on life support, to migrate to Tony’s sister’s house and a party at which we’d only know each other. We could blend in. We could be charming, act sober enough. Sure we could. It wasn’t until we stood atop the elevated platform and peered over the railing at the intersection teeming with activity beneath us, activity that wouldn’t pause or reset itself because we were processing things at a more leisurely pace, that it occurred to us that heading to this party wasn’t such a great idea.

But then the train showed up, so off we went.

Matt had conceived the Top Ten party both as a celebration of the first decade of the 21st century and an excuse to get sloppy in the neighborhoods of Chicago. Eight men were invited, each tasked with creating his own compilation record featuring one song from his ten favorite albums of the 2000s. An important distinction: We were not seeking to name the ten best songs of the decade, but rather albums. Songs come and go, but an album, as a work of art, was somehow more legitimate than a single.

This just-past decade was an important one for our group. During those ten years, we grew beyond the ignorant and idealistic bliss of being sixteen or seventeen years old and into the thicker skins brought about by disappointments on our way to twenty-six and twenty-seven. We traveled from the end of high school through college and into burgeoning adulthood, maturing from cultural neophytes to supposedly seasoned music connoisseurs.

Ait Iktel feels much smaller than its eight-hundred inhabitants, mostly because the summer heat inclines one to stay indoors. A trek from Hassan’s house near the bottom of the village to the mosque at the top will only take about fifteen minutes, but the rocky elevation and hot, red dust that clings to your shoes, as if yearning to climb with you, make the journey seem much longer. When Hassan and I make our afternoon trip to have tea with Haj Mohamed, we pass a small, stripped field. It is nearing the end of the wheat season, and the harvest is being threshed by men with pitchforks. They heave the wheat into the village’s only thresher; it is a rumbling, smoke-belching shock of modernity juxtaposed against the ancient stone olive presses that now lie dormant until autumn. When the men finish in a few hours, the thresher will move to another field, continuously working. After the threshing is done, the wheat will be distributed among the village families, and what little remains of the harvest will be sold in the town about an hour away. We continue to climb, and through open doorways I catch glimpses of women in the houses lining the path. They are constantly sweeping away the same red dust that is hitching a ride with me.

We continue to climb, and through open doorways I catch glimpses of women in the houses lining the path. They are constantly sweeping away the same red dust that is hitching a ride with me.

Hassan and I sit on the floor, because it is more comfortable than the lumpy bed, the only piece of furniture in the room. Through the window, or more accurately the space in the wall in which Hassan’s father omitted bricks, I can see the night sky. It is a blanket of stars, broken only by the silhouette of the Atlas Mountains. Hassan brings my attention back to earth when he clears his throat and begins our discussion. He starts with a simple math puzzle, the solution to which requires nothing more than the concept of negative numbers. I answer correctly and he declares that I am scientifique—and that I should, therefore, easily comprehend the need to convert to Islam since the Qur’an says I am doomed to eternal damnation if I don’t. I counter that this conclusion only follows if one accepts the Qur’an as an authority. Hassan repeats his point. Full stop. I attempt a conversational detour and remark that it is amazing that the stars lighting up the mountains may not even exist. They could have died millions of years ago, and their light is only now presenting itself to us. “Pas du tout,” says Hassan: God would never let us see something that does not exist.

The neighbor’s eldest son came home from Marrakesh today. Hassan and I stop in to greet him, and we are promptly abducted for mint tea and beghrir with honey. With perfectly coiffed hair and a knock-off designer T-shirt stretched over bulging deltoids, Mustafa looks out of place in the dirt-floored living room in which he grew up. He loves Marrakesh, and is quite disappointed to discover that I am not from New York City. Hassan tells Mustafa about the installation of the new well, funded by the Japanese embassy, and how Ait Iktel no longer has to ration water out to each family. Mustafa, however, only wants to talk about girls. He asks whether or not I have a girlfriend back home, and when I answer oui, he shoots me a playfully suggestive look that is only meant to be decipherable by urban sophisticates, even those not from New York. I ask him about his job in the city, and he offers only that it is boring. He asks me how much my watch cost aux Etats-Unis, and I lie, scaling down by a factor of ten.

“She can’t vacuum, she can’t cook[,] but she can do almost anything else if you know what I mean,” the New Jersey-based artificial intelligence engineer said. “She’s a companion. She has a personality. She hears you. She listens to you. She speaks,” he said. “She feels your touch.”

[The image on screen is a dark and shallow room, no more than twenty feet deep. A poster advertising the 1982 movie Tron hangs crooked, edges curled, on the shadowed walls at the back, and a hanging lamp dangles unlit and coverless between us and it. There is a long table in the background, on top of which rests a thin sheet cast on top of an indistinguishable object; the outline of stairs can be seen in the opposite corner. A man sits at his desk, facing us. The computer before him casts a twilight blue light across his face. The few strands of hair on his head are cast haphazardly across his Smurf-like pate, resting over a forehead furrowed by a wide-eyed gaze. In his left hand he holds the bodiless head of Barbie doll; he strokes its hair with his right index finger, which is clothed in a doll's dainty laced-linen glove.]

Things have been progressing well. Very well. Mmm, yes. Very well.

We decided to do away with real girls’ hair. That freed up our time. Yes it did. No more spending longer than needed in the bathroom. We owe it to Ms. Jackson’s Maltese, Trudy. She died last week. Her hair is so luscious. Now we just need to clean out the dirt – all that nasty, stinky grave-dirt – and it will shine porcelain white—just like her teeth. This will help us maintain symmetry. Symmetry is the essence of beauty—yes. Symmetry.

In our last entry, we mentioned that unfortunate horsepower problem that led to our delicate, delicious—mmm, yes, del-i-ciousss—

[The man on screen pauses for a moment, closing his eyes. His jaw muscles tighten as he begins to lick his lips, the blue-pink muscle running along his mouth like an icing dispenser squeezing strawberry icing onto a double-layered wedding cake. The man on screen deposits saliva in equal portions across each lip and – his mouth now fully glazed – returns his gaze to the camera.]

—that horsepower problem that led our friend to thrust through the kitchen wall. It has been fixed. No more Volkswagen batteries; no. This means we must scrap our favorite model, BDSM Betty, but now we can begin developing our real beauties: Terrified Tammy and Comatose Cathy. They will be good and fun. Yes. Good and fun for us all. Mmmm.

There are other problems, though. She does not vacuum and she cannot cook. She can knit pretty things, and, even when she gets confused on off-beats, she waltzes good. She can do almost anything else, if you know what I mean; she makes daddy so [the man grunts] proud.

She does get confused sometimes—beautiful, delicious, precious—yes, very naughty girl gets confused. She does not understand all commands; she does not understand how to [The man holds up his hands and curls his index and middle fingers into air-quotes. The lacy doll glove on the right bobs up and down as he claws.] . . . “mash our potatoes”. Heh, heh, heh—mmm, yes. Mashed potatoes. Delicious.

But we love her. She listens to us. No one listens to us—no, no one. She talks to us, yes. No one talks to us. No one. No one ever. Now we have a companion. Mmm. She loves us. I was alone and miserable before her. No one would associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me, no. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being I needed to create. And now I have her.

[The man swings around on his seat to face the table at the back.]

You love us, don’t you? Tell us you do love us.

[There is a slight whirring sound. The sheet begins to rise from the table. The cloth slowly peels back, and the lights go out.]

Roxxxy?

The name “Casey Johnson” meant nothing to me as it clambered its way up the bloody ladder of the week’s headlines; that particularly spongy portion of my brain reserved for cataloging the deaths of pop cultural icons was soaked to saturation with CNN.com’s December tribute to Alaina Reed-Amini, who is best remembered for having left the cast of Sesame Street more than 20 years prior. Eventually, however, the words ‘dead heiress’ refused to be ignored any longer.

Articles about Johnson’s death read like the VIP list of hard-partying L.A. nightclubs (Please never let me be upstaged by Paris Hilton in my own obituary), and while the ever-quotable lines of Twitter accounts could depressingly suffice in the place of today’s journalism, news sources should feel free to omit the 140-character condolences of Lindsay Lohan’s ex-girlfriend, no matter how genuine her tweeted-up tears seem to be. Johnson grew up on the pre-Gossip Girl Upper East Side, slumber partying with the Hiltons and other mini-millionaires. In death, she is covered in the same sheen of quasi-fame as she was in life: She penned a book at fourteen about living with juvenile diabetes, an act upstaged in the public consciousness by a near-nude Vanity Fair photo shoot and a public declaration that her boyfriend had been swiped in by the claws of her much senior aunt.

In the last years of her life, she adopted a toddler from Kazakhstan (naming her after a similarly ill-fated celebrity, Marilyn Monroe), announced her bisexuality, had her hair lit on fire by an ex-girlfriend (so much for no-tears haircare), was charged with grand theft for stealing $20,000 in underwear (used) among other items, and got engaged to reality TV star Tila Tequila less than a month before being found dead in a reportedly rat-infested home on the verge of repossession. All this from the baby shampoo heiress?

Clearly, I’ve brushed up on my Casey Johnson trivia, and not merely for the car-wreck quality that mesmerized me, but because, in a twisted series of events, the two of our lives were separated by only two degrees, and in the middle was a stack of court papers.

I am the heiress of a failed ophthalmology practice in Portland, Oregon. In the early 90s, my father, in the midst of a manic high, proposed to Johnson & Johnson a new surgery center that was to be built outside city limits. The details – not unlike those surrounding Casey’s death – were hazy. The request was a mix of philanthropy, entrepreneurship, and an improperly-medicated bipolar disorder. Johnson & Johnson replied with a check for $1,000,000. A loan, as they thought it at the time.

To this day, my father’s financial dealings remain somewhat obscured, partially by those bits of his brain matter which were lost to electric shock therapy. At the height of his fuzzy-accounting escapades, we had an Olympic-sized pool in the backyard with a water slide and my mother tooled around town in a baby-blue Jaguar. With an extra million lying around, Rolls Royces started appearing and then, one day, even a boat. As a five year-old, this was all very exciting.

Among all the cars and the pool with the slide and the boat, though, there was an empty space: the place where the surgery center. Johnson & Johnson was starting to notice. So, in earnest, my father sat down and penned them an explanatory letter. Building surgery centers was hard work, time consuming work, expensive work. He would need more money to finish (or start) the project. Johnson & Johnson sent a check: another $1,000,000.

The downfall of his ill-gotten empire came soon after the second million, with money flying out the door on expenditures that no accountant could keep up with. At one point, we owned a Starbucks. Soon the state medical board came knocking with reports of insurance fraud, and creditors put our number on speed dial. It had been fun while it lasted, but in the end, I was asking my elementary school teacher how to spell ‘bankruptcy’ for the Mother’s Day card I was making. Chapter 7 was filed; the assets were seized; the money was gone.

The worst part of bankruptcy is the guilt—not that my father felt any. He lost his medical license twice, had a brief career selling burial plots, divorced my mother, and now collects social security and lies about his age to get the senior discount at the diner where he eats his meals. My mother, however, even after watching her mink coats get carted away by the repo-man, and even after giving up the keys of her Jaguar for a 1987 Buick station wagon with fake wood paneling, felt nothing but tremendous guilt for all the money that would never be repaid to all the people who had so trustingly signed it over to my father’s unbalanced brain chemistry. Johnson & Johnson and their two million dollar imaginary surgery center topped her guilt list.

For the last 15 years, wheeling the cart through the grocery store with my mother and a handful of coupons for “10 for 10” boxes of macaroni, there has been the awkward pause in front of the band-aids. Off-brand “adhesive bandages” make the same antibiotic promises as their name-brand peers for half the price, and my mother’s hand always reaches out in hesitation. Then, with resolve, she drops the Johnson & Johnson band-aids in the cart and wheels away. For 15 years, she has been repaying them $4.59 at a time in small pharmaceutical purchases.

The Johnson family has long existed in my mind as the squeaky clean American dynasty that cares about making babies’ bath time tear-free. Casey Johnson is the first real face I’ve had to the family, and I’ve seen much more than her face now that news agencies are airing her engagement video to Tila Tequila (politely referred to as “Ms. Tequila”) in which the two prance around in their underwear, intoxicated on a little more than love.

I always imagined the Johnsons having everything I didn’t. For a brief moment, at 5 years old, I had had a glimpse of their lifestyle as we spent their money with the reckless abandon fitting of the Johnson family’s actual peers. The moment created in me a confusing mixture of jealousy and guilt toward the Johnson family, a feeling called up for the rest of my life with every incessant smiling baby in a bath commercial on television. When Woody Johnson, Casey’s father, bought the New York Jets for $635,000,000 in 2000, it was clear that my father had in no way dented the family’s fortunes; my guilt eased somewhat, my mother may have even started purchasing off-brand band-aids.

Now, seeing Casey Johnson’s death splashed across every tabloid, the jealousy is beginning to subside.

Sifting through such vivid memories years later, I finally understood why my grandfather called us an “American miracle.”

In 1949, when the Communists took over China, my grandfather was a mere teenager; at the time, the political overhaul appeared to him a blessing. Schools formerly reserved for the wealthy opened their doors to the children of the poor, allowing him to pursue his love of classical music at Hubei Conservatory. Despite the Communists’ claims to have democratized China, however, citizens were forced to abide the censorious habits of the regime; as an artist, my grandfather did not take well to this fact.

After publicly voicing his dissatisfaction, the government removed Grandpa from his post as a cultural minister and made him a cook for a construction crew—a job he ended up holding for twenty-five years. The position separated him from his family for months – on some occasions, even years – at a time, leaving my grandmother to raise their two sons, my father and my uncle, on her own.  Were it not for the violin, he might have found the loneliness unbearable. It was through music that my grandparents were able to bring meaning to their suffering. Grandma dispensed with six months of her salary to buy my father and uncle child-sized violins; and, whenever Grandpa came home, he would give his children music lessons. When they had grown a bit older, Grandma would send them on train rides, hundreds of miles long, to play for their father.

Those lessons paid off. My father and mother, also a violinist, earned scholarships to study music at Michigan State University, and my grandparents and I followed them two years later. At the same time, China issued a letter of apology to Grandpa, asking him to resume his previous post.  Grandpa refused, saying, “I’d rather play on the sidewalks of freedom any day than in the grandest halls of oppression.”

While my parents were completing their studies, I stayed with my grandparents in Chicago’s Chinatown.  They planned to retire in China as soon as my parents settled into stable jobs—but things did not go according to plan. While driving back to school after visiting my father in Tennessee, where he had just received a position at the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, my mother died in a car accident, only three weeks before her graduation. Her death left my father destitute, and, having also just hurt his fingering hand, he was both physically and emotionally incapable of continuing to work alone in Nashville.  He moved to be closer to my grandparents, who stayed to take care of me in Chicago; but we all lacked money, language, friends, and now a large part of our family. To sustain us all, Grandma babysat, and Grandpa resumed his career as a performer—on the city’s streets and in its airports and subway stations.  The first time someone dropped a dollar into his case, he asked his son how much rice it would buy—as much as it would take a Chinese peasant days to earn.  “We are an American miracle,” he marveled; “America is a miracle.”

Grandpa handed his love of the violin down to me; and, when I reached the age of six, we became a duo.  Rain or shine, about 360 days every year for almost a decade, he would pick me up after school, and we would hit the town. In the summer, after an hour or two performing across from the Hancock Center, Grandpa would take me to Oak Street Beach for a refreshing swim, after which we would diligently return to our post. When asked once whether I would rather be playing with my friends, I replied, confused by the question, “No, doing this with Grandpa is like a game. Isn’t that why they call it ‘playing’ music?”

Of course, with the harmony came dissonance.  On one of the coldest Thanksgiving Days I can remember, Grandpa insisted we go out, despite my protests that no one would be around. He contended that we could not slack off just because some call the day a holiday, and so we went. My fingers were so cold I could not even extend my pinky finger to the second string, and I burst into tears out of frustration. On my Thanksgiving, I was grateful that no one was there to witness my embarrassment.

Unlike my classmates who remained sheltered in the Chinatown community, my early exposure to the outside world precipitated questions of identity. Despite attending a largely Chinese grammar school, all the students had English names. I felt insecure about my own strange and monosyllabic “Yi,” which some often pronounced “Ee.” An elderly woman had come to take a liking to me and came to see us perform everyday, and one day, when she inquired of my name, I blurted out “Mary!” Shame overcame me immediately, and all I could say to myself was “Thank God Grandpa doesn’t understand English.”

Those days were among the most beautiful, sublimely simple, and formative in all my life—and their far-reaching effects verify the most fantastical versions of the American dream (My playing with the C.S.O. is not the least among such Utopian realities). Every day we would open our cases, and every month, no matter how much we’d made, my grandparents would stow five-hundred dollars away for college. 

Nevertheless, as I could only understand later, rent and college were only the tangible reasons for our daily street presence. Grandpa vividly recalls when China and America were allies during WWII and the Chinese Civil War. America sent food supplies that kept many from starving, each carton labeled, “Gift of the People of the United States of America.” For Grandpa, playing music on the street was his way of offering thanks to this country for taking us in, providing for us, and giving us refuge—his way of doing justice to that memory.

That a grandfather and his granddaughter could play on any corner of their choosing, and moreover, that people, caught in the riptide of rush-hour, would pause to drop their bags, bare their hands to the brutal cold to deposit some change into the little girl’s sticker-covered case, allowing themselves to be spellbound and appreciate what the immigrant duo humbly offers—that remains a most magnificent phenomenon.

In fact, the present ubiquity of unsightly hybrid vehicles should stand as a sweeping indication of humanity’s imminent fall. Our collective sense of environmental responsibility has warped us so much that the contemporary object of automotive desire looks like, well, a coagulated piece of green nose cheese from some distant, intergalactic space monkey—where is Charlton Heston when you need him? And it also appears that, in our environmental zeal, we have all come down with a case of vicious amnesia: Honda’s 1985 CR-X was just as fuel efficient as the fanciest Toyota Prius on the market, and yet the former achieved its greenery through the brilliant engineering of light-weight material, not through overly-complex power trains that require the manufacture and eventual safe disposal of toxic batteries. Further, the CR-X’s traditional internal-combustion engine allowed the car to retain the beautiful feature of manual transmission, making it fun to drive while also providing the added benefit of left-calf-muscle exercise, a noted mode of preventing left-calf-muscle atrophy (a serious problem in a world that is turning to automatic transmission electric vehicles).

Legitimate complaints with “green” vehicles aside, I am far more concerned with the malicious existential effects of society’s environmental crusade. When I express my love of tree-unfriendly speed, the common argument devised to make me feel like some kind of environmental Jeffery Dahmer is that I am putting my own pleasure and happiness over the well-being of the entire planet. The accusation, therefore, is that I am an asshole. Perhaps, but allow us to consider the terms under which I am being indicted. I am crucified because I am putting my own desires over those of others, for refusing to act like the insignificant speck that the cosmos must incessantly remind me that I am. Yet how can I act otherwise? When you demand that I drive a Prius, you require that I resign myself to being nothing more than a microscopic ripple in the flow of time. When you deny me my love of internal-combustion engines, you ask me to give up my personhood and dissolve into the collective, with no use for my own existence except as some dew drop on the great, black pane of this social solar panel. A society that demands such a sacrifice in the name of the planet is not benevolent; it’s cruel, alienating, and selfish.

It’s likely that my grievances will fall upon ears deafened in the awkward silence of idling electric cars, but I will continue to shake my fist in the face of the inevitable and continue to drive fast cars, like a thirteen-year old choirboy given a last meal of Playboy magazines while he awaits castration to preserve a voice he never wanted. And when everything automotive that I love is scoured from this earth, and society has been molded into a homogenous mass of shoppers leaving the farmer’s market in electric cars, I will remain a melancholy Luddite. I will curse my misfortune of being born in these times, and I will refuse to sink to their level of celebrated, terrible boringness. And maybe then, only then, will I consider taking the bus.

’m walking down a backstreet, an alley flanking Thannon Saeng Chuto, the main road in town, hurrying to the guesthouse, my established domain, peace and quiet. The night market was a wash—the same old smells, the same old scene. So I’m heading back to freshen up before I set out this evening, for pleasure and perhaps a shot at happiness, which will doubtless be Beer Chang and a few ham-handed attempts at connection

The trouble is, I’m only half-here now; where I am is only where I’m going and what I’m passing. I dislike this, how I can’t even check in at my hotel before my mind’s eye turns to the next place: how I’ve taken to minting firm opinions and labels so early in the trip because I’m hell-bent on avoiding what could be repetitive, how I believe I’ve done this or that already because this or that looks mostly the same. Maybe there’s something counterfeit about the area, because I’m supposed to be overjoyed by doing what I’m doing; still, the condition likelier owes to the trip’s overwhelming constant: me. Glad but not subsumed, I feel mere tinges of what I’m told I should; I gather pale, phantom impressions as if through a telescope veiled by the partition of an atmosphere.

As I consider why I’m traversing the rural roads of Southeast Asia, I realize the reasons amount to something like a grail quest for contentment. I begin to understand that, for myself, happiness tends to be a vampish seduction, more one-night stand than lover, about as ephemeral as the experiences in which I presume it waits. I’m thinking I’m too smart to keep chasing mirages, too self-aware to believe what I’d really like to believe—yet here I remain, still looking, still sure of its tangible existence and my odds on finding it. I wonder whether the search is for something I’ve lost or it’s for something I just haven’t found yet, and then I decide there’s no difference.

Without really knowing or planning it, just flowing, I’ve turned and proceeded west, angling down Thannon Lak Muang and arching past the city center, the retail quarter, feral dogs, fresh durians, some zooming tuk-tuks high on petrol. Not really here, I’m dipping into the past and into the future, swimming laps from now to the start of this trip and to the end of it, trying to see my face at both points; maybe I got stuck somewhere along the way, became welded to some moment and false forever, and can, with concentration, re-triangulate my life.

At the rear of a grassy lot, open and inviting, the fifth wat I’ve seen today looms among palms and stupas. Deciding to have a look at the temple (Maybe I’m in there), I choose an entrance, cross the street, cut through the field. Then I spot her: the lady with the caged birds, jailer and liberator, ubiquitous as the wat itself. I don’t want her to see me and try to sell me her contradictions, but I know she has and know she will. We both play the same game on approach: I pretending not to see her, she pretending not to have been scorned. The last few steps are familiar, the motions and feelings an echo, the song tired and sad.

Disregarding the lady and her advances, I push away her birds and the superstitious power they offer so cheaply; I turn my back on this, the same vulgar, fiscal spirituality that I attempted to leave back home. This is just about as anathema as you could hope to get to the idea, any idea, of Buddhism. But the idea’s for sale, right on the wat’s front step. The perversity of the situation is enveloping, the sheer absurdity of it laughable; if only it weren’t so depressing.

I’m strolling through the yard, watching several young novices in their orange shrouds as they do their daily jobs for their daily reasons (or for their lifelong reasons; how can you tell?). It’s a curious life, this one; and I’m concerned about motive. Why are they here, these kids? What draws them, brings them, keeps them? Schooling? Desperation?

Happiness?

At heart, I know that most kids are here because of the education and the resources; then, when young adults, they serve their obligatory year or two. I also sense that wats form the central part of communities in this country. Because I can’t speak Thai, however, I’m certain of little more than the figures of my research and intuition. Yet, as I walk through the grounds, I’m seeing the same thing I’ve been seeing since I got here; and I’m growing a little more comfortable in my grapplings, in my appraisals—one of them at least. There is a constant in these temples, something I’m starting to take for granted.
It’s the smiles. Not just the smiles that surface in response to my own, but the smiles that paint the children’s faces as I see them unawares. Like those plastered, right now, all over a group of kids playing near the main stupa.

I’m nearly through the lot, about to rejoin the street, when a young boy leaves the group and ambles up, glowing in the standard saffron and the standard grin. I stop, and we chat a few minutes in broken English. He’s eleven, likes the Yankees, California, and Keanu Reeves. His job today is to feed the chickens and weed the garden. He likes his life. He doesn’t have much. This is his home.

I tell him I like Thailand and love Kanchanaburi.

And I do. It’s an inviting, peaceful town resplendent in green. The pace is slow, sleepy, the people friendly, their lives relaxed and unhurried. I love the quiet and the trees and how the aroma of the omnipresent flowers seems to frame every interaction. I love Kachanaburi’s informality and honesty, its simple and unquestioned contentment. Of course, I’m a tad reluctant to fly to Cambodia tomorrow, even if the night market doesn’t inspire; I’d prefer to spend the day lounging by the river, reading, thinking, compartmentalizing the Thailand I’ve come to know over the last month. I’m set to go; but, mentally, I still haven’t packed. I can’t find my things.