Movable Worlds: Recent Episodes
Emily Ding
Short audio notes to accompany a newsletter about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world—and our personal and collective place in it.
movableworlds.substack.com
I like to begin this series with a passage from a work of fiction I’ve read that evokes something of places and how we inhabit them. Press play for a very brief reading of this passage from Colm Toíbín’s Brooklyn:
As the train moved south, following the line of the Slaney, she imagined Jim Farrell’s mother coming upstairs with the morning post. Jim would find her note among bills and business letters. She imagined him opening it and wondering what he should do. And at some stage that morning, she thought, he would come to the house in Friary Street and her mother would answer the door and she would stand watching Jim Farrell with her shoulders back bravely and her jaw set hard and a look in her eyes that suggested both an inexpressible sorrow and whatever pride she could muster.
“She has gone back to Brooklyn,” her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmine Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years ahead, when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself.
Making sense of the world & our place in it
New Zealand wants to eliminate almost all imported predators, which are threatening its native biodiversity. Is this feasible? Story by Pete McKenzie and Jim Huylebroek.
Many of its most iconic native creatures are flightless. As a result, they are defenseless against predators like stoats—weasel-like creatures with jagged teeth and remarkable agility—which were introduced to New Zealand in the 19th century to control rabbits. Approximately 4,000 of the country’s native species are classified as “at risk” or “threatened”—the highest proportion of threatened native species in the world. […] Their goal may seem unrealistically ambitious, but it has become normal in New Zealand, where the government committed in 2016 to eliminating most nonnative predators by 2050.
The Vietnamese Secret Agent Who Spied for Three Different Countries—France, Britain, and Japan—by Richard Collett. This will be of particular interest to Malaysians. (Also, a long time ago, I wanted to write this story! Well, another one to cross off the list, haha.)
Relatively obscure in the modern Western world, Lai Tek’s espionage had geopolitical implications across Southeast Asia. Dubbed the “traitor of all traitors” by scholar Leon Comber, he brutally betrayed the most important figures in the Malayan Communist Party, rising through the ranks of the organization he’d been tasked with taking down by both the British and the Japanese. Delaying the MCP’s efforts to launch a revolution, Lai Tek ensured that a communist government never gained power in Malaya, contained communist influence in the region (Vietnam aside), and paved the way for the eventual smooth transfer of power from British colonial authorities to local leaders.
A Teacher in China Learns the Limits of Free Expression, by Peter Kessler:
Some of my most powerful memories from the classroom in Fuling involve incidents in which I made a statement that touched, even obliquely, on a sensitive aspect of Chinese history or politics. At such moments, the room would fall silent, and students would stare at their desks. It was a visceral response, and it became the same for me—looking out over the bowed heads, my heart raced and my face grew hot. Initially, I considered these to be the instances when I felt most like a foreigner. But I came to realize it was the opposite: my body was experiencing something that must be common to young Chinese. The Party had created a climate so intense that the political became physical.
Nomadland, My Mother, and the Frontier’s Broken Promise, by Mitchell Johnson:
If Nomadland has a pioneer subject, it’s missing an object—there’s no land to settle, no future to work toward. It has the emotional texture of a frontier story, divorced from that story’s original source of meaning: property. Instead, Fern has brief experiences communing with nature, brushes with the romantic sublime. For much of the movie, her character is emotionally withdrawn, but she comes alive in the natural world, gazing up at a redwood in childlike wonder or running along an oceanside cliff, overwhelmed with emotion. But these moments occur in periodic bursts, interrupting the drudgery of hard, physical work. Earlier pioneers might have made claim to the land, but the most Fern can do is visit it, briefly, before heading to her next gig.
Wild animals are adapting to city life in surprisingly savvy ways, by Christine Dell’amore and Corey Arnold:
The advent of the city bear in Asheville and elsewhere stems from a combination of trends, including changes in land use and the tempting buffets available when living near people. These factors have boosted North America’s black bear population to nearly 800,000. At the same time, sprawling cities and suburbs have swallowed up large swaths of bear habitat, leaving the animals little choice but to adapt to living with human neighbors.
It’s a phenomenon happening in urban areas across the United States and around the world, and it’s not unique to black bears. Many mammals that eat a wide variety of foods are moving in and changing their behaviors as they learn urban survival skills.
Movable Worlds is made possible by you, dear readers. To receive new letters in your inbox and to support my work, please consider a free or paid subscription. Thank you!
Something to think about
Ocean Vuong, in a review of Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre:
She’s a Taiwanese immigrant to Paris—and we often don’t think of the immigrant having, or the immigrant story having a sex life, a love life, a life of depression and deep existential angst. And Miaojin really positions immigrant narrative in an existential wonder. And I think this is one of the most powerful testaments of rewriting or repositioning what immigration is on a global scale. And it positions the immigrant in the trajectory of the artist, because I think immigration demands a great amount of innovation and creativity. Nobody really survives the process of immigrating to a new country—to America, no less, which is so rich and complex—without being creative. So I love this book because it kind of pushes creativity and innovation at the center, that immigrants are not just victims who are trying to get by, they are active agents in their own life.
How we make sense of the world & tell its stories
Nature Writing is Survival Writing: On Rethinking a Genre, by Michelle Nijhuis:
Nature writing still tends to treat its subject as “an infinite variety of animated scenes,” and while the genre’s membership and approaches have diversified somewhat in recent years, its prizewinners resemble its founders: mostly white, mostly male, and mostly from wealthy countries. The poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie calls them Lone Enraptured Males. Meanwhile, writers in every genre and discipline are wrestling with the relationship between humans and the rest of life, recognizing that while writing about other species is often about wonder and uplift, it is also, inevitably, about survival—the survival of all species, including our own.
Digital journalism didn’t have to be this way, in conversation with Marcus Gilroy-Ware, who researches the politics of the attention economy:
At a certain point we started to use a word that troubled me, which was content. This is content, or creating content. This is emphasizing the wrong part of what we’re doing. Journalism isn’t just content—it may be content for somebody, but that’s somebody who only cares about very specific aspects of its presence and its exchange value. Neoliberalism has reduced journalism to being content to the extent to which it now has to compete with all the other forms of content that are out there on the internet.
Jami Attenberg, When the Place is New to You:
Walk everywhere and also, walk at different times of day, too, to see how things move differently, how things are lit up differently. For example, I have distinct feelings about places in my neighborhood early in the morning versus at sunset; I notice different things. Even just that a car might not be parked in front of a building gives me a new perspective on—the way a street looks.
Before I go, a sound postcard of post-pandemic merriment in KL:
Thanks for continuing to subscribe and for reading. I’d appreciate it very much if you’d recommend or share it.
emilyding.me / instagram / twitter
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
I like to begin this series with a passage from a work of fiction I’ve read that evokes something of places and how we inhabit them. Press play for a brief reading of a passage from Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel:
In Wintu, a language of ancient California, there are no words for right and left: speakers differentiate between riverside and mountainside, from a time when it was taken as a given that you would live your life and bear children and die in the landscape where you and your parents and your great-great-grandparents had been born. A language that would disintegrate at sea, or while travelling beyond either the river or mountains; go beyond the boundaries and there would be no reference points, no words to describe the landscape you moved through—imagine the unfathomable cost of leaving home.
You’re reading a newsletter by Emily Ding about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world—and our personal and collective place in it.
If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free, or you can choose a paid membership to access paywalled letters and help fund guest writers.
Making sense of the world & our place in it
Taiwan’s Han Chinese seek a new identity among the island’s tribes, by Lily Kuo, Alicia Chen, and Lam Yik Fei:
“I have been completely naturalized. I’d say I am from this tribe,” Li said. “I am Indigenous in spirit, even if not by blood.”
Li is one of an increasing number of young Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in Taiwan, who in recent years have fully immersed themselves in one of the island’s Indigenous cultures—spending days exploring the ancestors’ routes through the mountains, hunting and taking part in festivals and ceremonies.
The growing identification with Taiwan’s Indigenous communities comes amid a revival of Indigenous culture and a renewed emphasis on Taiwan’s Austronesian roots—trends that undercut Beijing’s claims to the island, which it says is an inalienable part of China.
From Niger, How farmers in Earth’s least developed country grew 200 million trees, by Katarina Höije, Craig Welch, David Rose, and Sven Torfin—about how, sometimes, the solution is simply to desist from doing what we have always done:
Since 1981, Rinaudo, a young missionary from Australia, had been in Maradi trying in vain to plant trees. He knew they would cool the air by emitting moisture, provide shade, and potentially help crops. But planting trees was taxing, and the new ones mostly died before their roots could reach the water table, which was dozens of feet deep. Local farmers, facing crisis, had little interest in waiting around years for baby trees to blossom into something useful. “They were more concerned with growing food,” says Rinaudo.
One day, Rinaudo spotted a desert bush, a fresh new stem emerging from a cut stump. Something clicked. “I’d observed cut trees regrowing before,” he says. “But it just connected it for me—all these stumps can become trees again.”
The Magic of Alleyways, by Will di Novi and Zoe van Dijk:
Flocks of manic songbirds squabbled in the bushes. Hunchbacked trees dangled fragrant purple fruit, luring hungry pedestrians and voracious raccoons. And because of the alley’s seclusion within the heart of the city, it offered a space where people escaped to be their most intimate selves. Dad rock-loving yuppies jammed out in their Volvos. Homeless can collectors paused to whisper prayers. At night, I witnessed the surreptitious butt-taps of couples in love.
This was a microcosm, the city in miniature, and it defied my assumption, reinforced by the stabbing and countless Hollywood films, that alleys were hostile spaces. The setting I observed and started documenting—first in frantic iPhone notes, then a formal diary—was something more inviting, and so much more complex: a vibrant public commons, a backstage in what urbanists call the “theatre of city life.”
Three prodemocracy activists on the run from Beijing, three wild and bizarre journeys to—and through—America, by Timothy McLaughin and Adams Carvalho:
Hong kong was long a magnet for people seeking opportunity and running from persecution. Residents of mainland China fleeing the violence and political purges of the Cultural Revolution swam toward the city’s lights—Tommy’s grandmother among them. In the late 1970s, thousands packed into ships, many of which were cramped wooden fishing boats, to escape to Hong Kong from Vietnam as that country’s war ended. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, student activists from China snuck into Hong Kong.
Now the fleeing has reversed, as Beijing’s crusade to strip Hong Kong of its defining freedoms has created a wave of exiles.
Saving the Sounds of an Ancient City — I have, for the longest time, been talking about wanting to go to Cairo. I keep putting it off, perhaps hoping I’ll manage to learn a little Arabic before I go. I guess that will take a while yet. Anyway, here’s my immersive armchair introduction: a compilation of photographs set to sounds, built on the recordings of Youssef Sherif and Nehal Ezz.
Overwhelmed by the chaos of older neighborhoods, many residents who can afford it are moving to modern, quieter compounds on the outskirts of the current capital—seeking relief from congestion, traffic and, yes, noise.
This migration looks to dramatically remake the city’s soundscape in the years to come.
Something to think about
Jan Dutkiewicz asks: Should We Be Breeding Pigs Just for Their Hearts?
Ethically speaking, the use of animals for medical purposes is thorny. While eating animals prioritizes humans’ gustatory pleasure (your love for bacon) above animals’ interest in not experiencing pain or being killed, leading many ethicists to consider it unethical except in particular contexts, the medical question changes the stakes, weighing the life and suffering of both currently existing and future humans against the life and suffering of animals. If a medicine can save many humans, is it not worth killing some lab mice or beagles to get there? If pigs’ hearts can save people dying on organ waiting lists, is it not worth killing some pigs and baboons?
How we make sense of the world & tell its stories
From Malaysian artist Sharon Chin:
A couple of years ago I was invited to apply for a government-funded art residency to Antartica. An artist’s dream: explore the farthest ends of the world, and make art about it. I turned it down, because I’ve seen how art is used as the initial, “soft” strategy in staking claim on a territory. Antartica has vast reserves of oil and gas, and the world’s largest stores of fresh water. In the coming years, as the climate crisis deepens, we’ll see corporations and nation states fight for control over these resources, while art programmes focused on Antartica will increase. It’s painful but necessary to see how art accompanies capitalist exploitation like a loyal handmaiden.
One down, 39,136 to go: the explorers who walk every street in their city, by Amy Fleming:
No one is yet close to completing all 39,137 streets of Greater London, but in 2014, before CityStrides took off, Noelle Poulson from Utah in the US blazed a trail by walking every street within London’s congestion zone—about 400 miles, she says. Armed with a trusty A-Z, she was determined to become intimately acquainted with the city before her visa ran out. For her, she says, “it was a lot about chatting with people, and going into little shops that I hadn’t seen before, and taking photos and having picnics in the park and really engaging with the city.”
Documentaries and the Art of Manipulation, by Blair McClendon:
Although the two are intertwined, it doesn’t quite make sense to think of documentary, especially its Trump-era surge, as an outgrowth of journalism. Most of the earliest motion pictures—depicting workers, trains, dancers, galloping horses—qualify as nonfiction. Only after it was swallowed by Vaudeville and the nickelodeons did the distinction between different kinds of cinematic images even become meaningful. Debates about truth and deception have value, but they obscure the fact that documentaries have always been more akin to essays than articles. It would be hard to hold up an essay as proof of anything at all, except perhaps consciousness. They are dramas of a mind, or often several, learning, searching, and making things cohere. Trying to relate the problems the booming documentary field faces to the supposed ethical commandments of journalism, as Funt does, obscures a bigger issue: most viewers are not taught to comprehend and evaluate documentaries on the terms by which they are constructed.
Reader rolodex
As more of you subscribe here, I’ve been sharing what some of you have been tending to, professionally or personally. On this occasion, say hello to Nico Vera, a vegan Peruvian chef based in Portland, U.S., who writes the newsletter La Yapa.
I love, love, love Peruvian food, and its tangled diversity and embedded histories, having spent some months living in Lima and travelling around the country some years back. Reading Nico’s published work and his newsletter has been a way to reconnect with a cuisine and culture I am no longer living in proximity to—and through a different lens: to recognise what has always been there, and new possibilities that can be adapted and reimagined, yet again.
He also often reflects on the connections between family, food, and migration. Here’s a piece he wrote about how tacu tacu tells the history of Peru and how it binds generations of his family together:
Peru’s comida criolla is a fusion of Inca, Spanish, African, Chinese, and Japanese culinary cultures that has evolved over a period of 500 years; tacu tacu is one of those dishes with strong Afro-Peruvian roots. Colonists brought African slaves to Peru’s Pacific coast to labor on sugar plantations, cultivate rice, pick cotton, and mine guano. It was at coastal haciendas that slaves began to prepare some of Peru’s first criollo dishes, using ingredients like rice, onions, and limes that had been introduced via Spain’s colonial foodways. These Black women creatively combined leftovers or discarded foods, like frying rice in lard and mixing it with a stew of local canary beans over a wood fire. This was the humble beginning of tacu tacu, whose name comes from the Quechua word taku, which means “mixed.” Over the centuries, this simple dish became popular among Lima’s families—like my grandfather’s—that were part of the city’s working class of Andean, Asian, Italian, or Afro-descended heritage.
Where I leave you
Rediscovering Southeast Asian cinema:
And thanks again, for reading.
Patti Smith, in a recent interview, said this about Substack: “It makes me feel like, in the movies, where you see the reporter that goes to the phone booth and calls in her article. I feel a bit like that.”
It feels the same to me.
Before you go, have a read of last month’s guest letter by Abby Seiff, and our accompanying Q&A:
And something I was commissioned to write in March on the rights of girls in Malaysia, which was published earlier this month:
Until the next,
Read more about this newsletter. If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free, or you can choose a paid membership to access paywalled letters and help fund guest writers. Thank you!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
I like to begin this series with a passage from a work of fiction I’ve read that evokes something of places and how we inhabit them. Here’s one from a short story, “The Ukraine”, by Artem Chapeye—read by W.C.:
When the bus stopped on the highway north of Rivne and in climbed an old woman whose sheepskin coat smelled of hay and cows, the people turned up their noses, not appreciating that this old woman was, in fact, the Ukraine. The official folk kitsch—that stereotypical woman with ribbons flowing from her hair, holding bread and salt on a traditionally embroidered towel—is a fake, but that dilapidated mosaic at the entrance to the village, depicting a Ukrainian woman with ribbons in her hair—only she’s missing an eye—now, that’s the Ukraine. The Ukraine is also the romance of decline. The unfinished concrete building on the outskirts of Kamianets-Podilskyi. The bottomless, purple-green lake in a submerged quarry in Kryvyi Rih, which you’re looking at from a tall pile of bedrock, fearfully watching as a single minute swimmer slowly does the breaststroke, holding himself up above the lake’s impossible depth on the treacherous film of the water’s surface.
And a recent conversation here with Chapeye that takes in the latest developments in his home country, where he is also now serving in the Ukrainian Army: “This is quite surreal. In one reality, you’re a private (the lowest rank) in the Army. In another, you’re answering questions for The New Yorker. And these realities just don’t intersect”.
You’re reading a newsletter by Emily Ding about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world—and our personal and collective place in it.
If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free, or you can choose a paid membership to access paywalled letters and help fund guest writers.
Friends & familiar strangers,
You may have noticed that I’ve downsized Landmarkings since the last edition. Curation takes more time than one might think, and I’ve decided to keep this series leaner in order to keep it going.
In an attempt to be somewhat comprehensive, I used to include reads here on what I considered newsworthy happenings from around the world, but from now on, you can follow me on Twitter for occasional tweets for that. Here, I’m going to focus mainly on essays and journalism that I simply find a pleasure to read or that explain a particular phenomenon—guided by the desire, essentially, to learn about the lived experiences of different people in different places; you may also notice that I have a certain fondness for the absurd. In truth, I’m also attempting to narrow my thought landscape a little more this year to focus on deeper work, and I’m hoping this little shift will help.
Meanwhile, I’ve been glad to be back home in Malaysia amid all its teeming green. Even the scattered protrusions in the spaces between mammoth towers of concrete in Kuala Lumpur have a dense wildness to them that is invigorating to the spirit, even as I have to adjust again to a city made more for driving than walking. I should have more for you from here, in my always deeply felt but never completed mission to see my home with new eyes, but I’ll keep this note short for now, with just two photos from a recent trip to the island of Langkawi.
Enjoy reading ❤️
Making sense of the world & our place in it
Piecing Together the History of Stasi Spying, a photo essay by Annalisa Quinn and Mustafah Abdulaziz, as part of NYT’s Surfacing series:
First the researchers cut the sacks lengthwise, careful not to disturb the jumble of torn paper inside. Then they go through the bags loosely, pulling out food scraps, trash or anything else mixed in during the chaotic rush to destroy evidence.
They are working to reassemble, scrap by scrap, some 40 to 55 million pieces of paper that were torn up and stuffed into sacks by the East German secret police in the final days of the German Democratic Republic.
Can India clean up its holiest river? It will take a village, by Laura Parker and Sara Hylton:
Yet even in the face of it, and of sometimes lethal counts of fecal bacteria, belief in the mythic purity of the Ganges endures—and it complicates long-running efforts to clean up the river. […]
“The river is really two rivers,” Sen said. “There is this belief that the river can clean itself and has magical properties. If the river can clean itself, then why should we have to worry about it? I have seen this. I have heard many people say the river cannot be polluted; it can go on forever.”
War Strands Ukrainian and Russian Tourists Together in Egyptian Resorts, by Vivian Yee and Laura Boushnak:
Egypt never stopped catering to Russians and Ukrainians, who once made up a third of visitors to the country and were starting to flock to Sharm again late last year. At resorts across Sharm, guests can find menus, signs and activities in Russian, which is also spoken by many Ukrainians. In the guest rooms, the TVs carry mostly Russian and Ukrainian channels.
Until two weeks ago, united by language, culture and history, the two nationalities vacationed in harmony. Then the Ukrainian channels started showing Russian forces destroying Ukrainian cities and firing on fleeing civilians, and the Russian channels started claiming that there was no war at all.
The Language of Your Fathers, by John Merrick:
At 18, I vowed to never look back. The act of leaving home offered a freedom from my past. As a teenager, I would sneak out of Crewe, to the nearby cities of Manchester and Stoke. Cities offered a sense of possibility. Like Baudelaire’s man of the crowd I was anonymous, able to be whoever I wanted to be. Yet there is a form of community that working-class towns like Crewe offer, one that provides a form of basic social safety net, however meagre that may appear from afar. Family and neighbours look after your kids for the evening, allowing a momentary respite from childcare, or help if you fall sick or unemployed. But to have this means the presence of an invasive surveillance, even if it is meant as a loving form of care. Community can be both freedom and subordination, often at the same time. Growing up, it was this sense that came to dominate. An often-overbearing feeling that I couldn’t escape, that I was being watched, observed, mapped, that what I was doing and when was known by all, that the communities that formed around my family were holding me back. It was this that came to define my relation not just to the town but also to those around me.
Mark Rayan Darmaraj, a Malaysian wildlife conservationist I spoke to recently for a story about the near-extinction of the Malayan Tiger, referenced the disappearance and reintroduction of wolves in America’s Yellowstone National Park as an illustration of how the presence or absence of tigers could affect Malaysia’s biodiversity and ecosystem. I had already been following that story trail with some interest, and here’s Paige Williams and Balazs Gardi with a recent longread: Killing Wolves to Own the Libs?
The extirpation was recognized as a mistake even as it was happening. In 1924, a naturalist at Yellowstone National Park, Milton P. Skinner, observed, “We need these predatory and fur-bearing animals alive and living their normal lives.” Balanced ecosystems require predators. Wolves can regulate the presence of coyotes, sparing many of the small mammals also eaten by hawks and bald eagles, and wolf kills feed a range of scavengers. Wolf packs keep ungulates agile and alert, and they cull herds of weak or diseased members. Skinner considered it appropriate for wildlife managers to kill “animals individually responsible” for attacking livestock, but advised against “declaring war against a whole species.”
From before the pandemic—For lonely men in Spanish towns, the ‘caravan of women’ brings hope of love, by Meg Bernhard and Angel Navarrete:
They have paid 23 dollars to ride on la caravana de mujeres, a private bus that takes single women from Madrid to small, rural towns for an evening of food, drink and dance with local farmers. […]
Three men lean against dusty trucks near the red-brick hotel where, a few hours later, there will be dining and dancing. Their sun-wrinkled faces are impassive as they stare at the women spilling into a tiny plaza, where they straighten their skirts, light cigarettes and take selfies in the fading daylight. The bus arrived about 7:30 p.m.,earlier than expected, and most of the men are still at work in the surrounding farmland. They’ll come soon, the hotel owner assures the women. Everyone just has to wait.
Something to think about
Jack Shenker, in Meet the ‘inactivists’, tangling up the climate crisis in culture wars:
But there is now an even more powerful weapon in the inactivist armoury. It comes in the form of an appeal to social justice: one that casts environmentalists as an aloof, out-of-touch establishment, and the inactivists as insurgents, defending the values and livelihoods of ordinary people. “The biggest single threat to the net zero transition is a culture war-style backlash that heavily politicises this agenda and spooks governments into moving more slowly,” says Murray. “At present, it’s on the periphery. But as the past few years have taught us, ideas that were on the periphery can become very influential, very quickly.”
How we make sense of the world & tell its stories
To the Son of the Victim, by Sophie Haigney:
I’d moved to San Francisco just a few months before to become a “breaking-news reporter.” The romance of breaking news was that you were just thrown out there, learning on your feet, somehow transforming into a real reporter in the process. I had wanted this badly, all of it: the crime scenes and fires, the early-morning wake-ups and late-night phone calls. But it turned out I hated showing up on people’s doorsteps in the wake of disaster and death. One Friday, there had been reports of a hostage situation many miles north. While the details emerged online and over the radio, I did something unforgivable in the profession: I went to the bathroom, took deep breaths, and waited a few minutes until someone else was sent instead.
Kate Harris, author of Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road, in a conversation with fellow travel writer Rolf Potts:
Is there anything left to exploration beyond grandiose, obsolete jargon, especially on a planet that feels, at times, so mapped and tamed? After all, exploratory “firsts” these days really only count in terms of landing the “explorers” lucrative gigs on the inspirational speaking circuit! But one job of literature is to make language mean again, and exploration at its idealistic heart is about setting off into the unknown, not in search of profit or power but truth or beauty. This is a beautiful impulse and one worth keeping alive in the world in some form, and words are how we keep ideas alive. So I wanted to celebrate that kind of longing in exploration and I also wanted to live it out myself, not just during my and Mel’s bike ride on the Silk Road, but forever, throughout my life. Exploring is an attitude, really, a quality of attention to the world around you. It’s also more of an art than a science, and like all art, creative and digressive and rebellious to the status quo. Exploration demands a refusal of all the usual maps: of the world, of how you’re told to live your one and only life.
Reimagining Magic City, by Erika Meitner and Anna Maria Barry-Jester:
How could we present something that’s long-term and large-scale dramatic, but harder to see in smaller daily moments, and almost impossible to photograph: raised roads in Miami Beach leaving sidewalks and storefronts below grade, or giant pumps that move water from the streets back into the Bay that simply look like large metal boxes? What language should we use to describe the paradox of a city in a time of sea-level rise, lying just feet above sea level, that’s also built on porous limestone—where rampant development means that multimillion-dollar waterfront houses and condominiums are still going up all along the shoreline?
Reader rolodex
As more of you join in here, I thought it would be nice to share what some of you have been tending to, professionally or personally. This issue, say 👋 to Fuad Alhabshi and his band, Kyoto Protocol—based in Kuala Lumpur—whose music inflects a varied mix of influences. Their latest music video:
Where I leave you
As always, if you’ve been enjoying Movable Worlds, please share it and tell your friends to subscribe. Meanwhile, here are some very nice words from a reader (thank you, Abby!)—who is also a great journalist:
“This looks so wonderful! (In fact, breaking my vow not to sign up for new newsletters for this one!) Everything Emily writes is stellar.”
—Abby Seiff
Until the next,
Read more about this newsletter. If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free, or you can choose a paid membership to access paywalled letters and help fund guest writers. Thank you!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
Dear readers,
I met Travis, an American, briefly more than a decade ago in Central America, and we stayed Facebook acquaintances. Two years ago, he reached out online to tell me about a personal dream he was embarking on along the Via Francigena, a medieval pilgrimage walking route which runs from Canterbury to Rome and spans England, France, and Italy. Now he and his partner Juliane have made a new home in Capranica, a town in Italy’s Lazio region just north of Rome—in a house that they have opened up to walkers on a donations basis, as part of what they call their Road to Rome project.
Connecting again after so much time had passed, we exchanged admittedly scant memories about how our travels had coincided—we’d stayed in the same hostel, had a meal together at this great little Korean restaurant, shared the same Spanish tutor. And in edited parts of our conversation I’m sharing here, we talked about what his Central American travels meant to him and how they have oriented his life, how the death of his father and his experience on Spain’s Camino de Santiago eventually pointed him to Italy, and what his hopes are for the future in his new country. When we first reconnected back in September 2019, he was staying with his mother back in the U.S. while waiting to make his way back to Italy. Battling through Covid travel restrictions, he’s since reunited with Juliane, who is German, in Capranica last year.
“Because I became Juliane’s partner, I didn’t need a special visa to enter Italy, and I was able to get my Permesso di Soggiorno here, which will be valid for five years, after which I will renew it to be permanent. I've gotten signed up for the national health service and can now work and pay taxes in Italy. Basically, this is officially my new home—finally! I haven't had a real home in over three years, so these last few months have been wonderful to finally feel grounded.”
Best of luck with your next adventure, Travis! To everyone else, I hope reading this reminds you of a time when you traveled, too, without expectations, and felt like the world was looking out for you. Coincidentally, I was also just reading The Routes of Man by Ted Conover, and found this:
It's knowing that your door is always open
And your path is free to walk
—Glen Campbell, “Gentle on My Mind”
More guest stories coming soon,
You’re reading a newsletter by Emily Ding about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world—and our personal and collective place in it.
If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free, or you can choose a paid membership to access paywalled letters and help fund guest writers.
As mentioned, this conversation began in September 2019, around the time Travis was expecting a hurricane back home in Louisiana, updated with a couple more exchanges in the following months.
Emily Ding: Hey Travis, how are things? Did you guys get through the hurricane okay?
Travis Criddle: We did, thanks for asking. In the end, not much happened here in Louisiana. The first hurricane just skirted the coastline and didn’t really do any damage. The second hurricane went all the way on the west side of the state and I’m on the east side. We had a couple of stormy days, but that was just like a normal summer storm. There’s one tomorrow coming straight for us, so let’s see.
ED: Where exactly are you in Louisiana?
TC: So, Louisiana is shaped a little bit like a boot, and my house is in the toe of the boot. We live in Franklinton, about sixty miles north of New Orleans in a rural area, just outside the area that is Cajun- and French-influenced. I’m currently living with my mother, who recently underwent heart surgery. I’ve been staying here through the Covid crisis and helping her by doing much of the food shopping, together with my siblings. In this way, she wouldn’t have to risk exposure, since she’s very vulnerable to the virus with her health issues.
ED: And you were born in Franklinton? What do you think the experience of growing up in Franklinton gave you?
TC: I was born in West Virginia, but we moved down here in the early eighties when I was about six weeks old. My dad came to work in the oil industry—there was a big boom during Reagan’s era. The economy in West Virginia was really bad at the time. The only jobs were in the coal mines and those were super dangerous. My father didn’t work in the coal mines, but he occasionally drove trucks for them.
I had a pretty good childhood, all things considered. Franklinton was mostly peaceful, but being part of the Deep South, it had its fair share of racial problems. I didn’t recognize them easily at the time, because that was all I knew. It wasn’t until university, or even after, that I gained the perspective to look back at my earlier life and realize how isolated it was, culturally. Even with that in mind, I feel the town offered a good, safe place to grow, even if it wasn’t able to prepare me for the broader world, or competitive job and school environments.
ED: When did you leave Franklinton for the first time?
TC: The first time I left home to live in a new place I moved to Mississippi, just about eighty miles from my parent’s house, and attended university there for three years. It was close enough that I usually drove home for weekends. I did, however, spend my second year of university doing a study abroad program in Swansea, Wales, back in 1999-2000, and that was what set me so strongly on a new path.
ED: So, how old were you when you headed to Central America for the first time? Was it particularly momentous for you?
TC: I was twenty-six at the time.It was pretty life-changing for me. Since Wales, I hadn’t really traveled. Then, Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 andaltered my entire life. I had left my job just before, and after the hurricane landed I worked in debris clean-up on a temporary government contract, which paid quite a lot of money. I took that money and I went back to university for a couple of years. I was enrolled in computer science in Mississippi, but I also took anthropology classes and absolutely loved it. That was what made me decide I wanted to travel. One of my professors had done all her work in El Salvador, and a girl from Southern Mexico also gave a presentation at our university about the Zapatistas and the La Otra Campaña political movement. I was very politically minded at the time and I was pretty far left in my thinking, so it all just got me really interested in the region.
I made a plan to go down there with three friends, from Mexico City all the way to Panama. But all of them backed out and I wound up going alone. It was the first time I really traveled alone. I had traveled alone a couple of days when I did my study abroad in Europe—in the sense that I was traveling with friends, and then I traveled the last few days alone, but I didn’t leave to go on a new journey alone. The first time I did that was in Central America. I spent about five weeks on that trip before I ran out of money, and I didn’t make it anywhere near as far as Panama. I had thought I would spend about a week in each country, but in the end I wanted to spend more time everywhere I went. The next year, when my study abroad in Tibet was canceled—our professor was seen at a protest for Tibetan Freedom and we had our visas canceled—I went back with my girlfriend at the time.
ED: Did those trips to Central America make you think about how travel could play in your life in a more substantial way?
TC: Yeah. Not that I was close-minded before, but it made me rethink things and open my perspective a little bit more. On my study abroad in Wales, my only real travel was one of those whirlwind Euro trips kids do with the Eurail pass. That’s a very different experience from traveling in Guatemala and Mexico. It’s very sheltered. I mean, you see new cultures, but it’s sort of self-contained and is its own separate world. I don’t know if I want to use the word “safe”, but it felt very much within my comfort zone. Whereas going to Central America, there was a lot I didn’t know to expect and I was presented with a lot of situations that were new to me.
Traveling there, I also started to realize what life is like for people living in poorer nations. It challenged a lot of my preconceived notions about them, and I found that really liberating. The best place I went to on that trip was a town in Southern Mexico’s Oaxaca state, called Llano Grande. It’s part of a network of small villages up in a mountain range and the people who live there are mostly indigenous. A lot of the buildings didn’t have electricity, and a lot of them still got water from a hand-pumped well. I stayed there for three days, which made me reevaluate my entire mental relationship with the concept of success and happiness—which I was reasonably open-minded to before. But now, I was presented with the reality that you don’t need all the trappings of success in America. You don’t need the American Dream, essentially. That was a huge moment for me.
ED: Was there something in your life after that trip—a decision you made, a course you changed—that had its beginnings in what you experienced in Central America?
TC: So, I went back to university but ended up not finishing my degree, for reasons I won’t go into. I stayed in Hattiesburg, my university town, for about a year, working part-time jobs and making ends meet. Then I got a job in New Orleans washing barges on the Mississippi River. That was a radical change for me. It was very hard physical labor, but it paid well, gave me lots of time off, and got me in better shape. It’s weird. That’s the job I’ve had that society would view as the lowest, but it’s been my favorite. I liked being able to see my finished work at the end of the day and being part of something big. It gave me a sense of purpose and pride.
And it did have a romantic appeal to it. I was proud to be on the river and to see all the machinery in motion. You know, a single barge has like 1,500 tons of cargo and they would bring in twenty to thirty barges in a day. We mostly dealt with food products like grain, corn, and fertilizer, and to see that much material moving along was incredible. It’s a bit like when you see a massive landfill and realize for the first time just how much humans consume and throw away, except this was in a positive way rather than negative. It was a little unbelievable to see how much raw food and goods we move, create, process, etc. on a daily basis. At one time, they were sending supplies to Haiti, which had just had a big earthquake. I was just a worker, it’s not like I was doing charity work or anything noble. But it was really cool to see the scale of those operations at work. I think when I worked on the barges, the desire to travel was pretty far from my mind.
Anyway, I worked at that barge company for a couple of years, and then our shipyard got shut down after it was bought out by another company. Then I got a job working for a fire protection company designing sprinkler systems for buildings. It started pretty great, and I felt really connected to the job for a couple of years. Then I got moved back into the main office doing the lowest, simplest design work, and it was pretty soul-crushing and tedious—mostly paperwork and reading regulations. I was stressed, eating more, sleeping less, and not really exercising. I probably wouldn’t call it depression, but I became much less happy with the general state of my life.
That was in 2014, and then I took three months off to try to find a job in Europe. I didn’t have any great ideas of what I wanted to do, but I saw that labor laws in Europe were much better than what we have in the U.S. Life seemed less about work and more about family and community and quality of life outside work. I just wanted to explore the idea of this.
I started in Norway and I really enjoyed it, but there wasn’t really work available for me. I don’t have a degree and it’s hard to find work for which a company will justify the effort of getting a work visa for you. It also drained my money way too fast, and that’s how I ended up going to walk the Camino de Santiago, as a way to figure out a new plan while doing it very cheaply. I just wanted to have time to clear my mind a little bit and to come up with a new strategy, and walking is obviously free and the hostels on the Camino are very cheap.
So, it wasn’t really a noble idea at the start. I just went out there for a lack of knowing what else to do. I had only planned to walk a week or so until I came up with a new plan, but I loved it so much I stayed and walked the whole thing.
ED: How did the Camino change things for you?
TC: I absolutely loved the Camino. It changed my life a hundred percent, more than my Central America trips even—though it was an extension of the same ideas. It showed me a life without the daily grind, living and working for yourself, and how helping others can mean so much to them when it costs you so little. I wanted to live that way.
But after three months I had to get back to work, and I soon got bogged down in dreariness again. I took a few hiking trips in the U.S., to California and Colorado, but I realized that it wasn’t enough for me to just take two-week trips once a year.
In 2016, my grandmother and one of my uncles died. I had used all my vacation time going to my grandmother's funeral, and then visiting the uncle for a few days while he was sick, so I couldn't attend my uncle’s funeral without losing my job. That was a breaking point for me. I realized there’s a problem with the American system when you have to choose between such things. That’s a choice you shouldn’t have to make. I needed a new life.
So, in 2017, I put in my two weeks’ notice and used my last vacation from work to visit Italian friends I had met on the Camino de Santiago, and that’s when I decided to change everything and try something new.
ED: And why did you pick the Via Francigena in Italy?
TC: My Camino hiking family was mostly a group of three Italians, and they became brothers and sisters to me. I feel incredibly close to them. I came to Italy to visit them in the spring of 2017, and all the old joy of the Camino de Santiago came back to me. I fell in love with Italy as a country. I had been there for a couple of days in 2000 on that Eurail trip, but didn’t really see much. This time, I realized how wonderful it is, and I didn’t understand why there isn’t a similarly popular pilgrimage around Italy as the Camino.
So, I looked into it and found out about the Via Francigena. Earlier on, I had thought about supporting the Camino de Santiago in some way, but I had started to hear negative things from people who had gone there to hike—how it was overcrowded and drawing people who were going there with a party atmosphere in mind, distracting from the original spirit of the journey. It seemed to me that adding to the number of tourists on the Camino would only make the problem worse, whereas the Via Francigena is underdeveloped and there’s still a lot of room to grow before it becomes problematic. The Camino routinely sees 200,000 to 300,000 people per year finishing it. The Via Francigena gets more like 11,000 to 12,000.
ED: And your dream is to set up a few lodgings for hikers along Via Francigena?
TC: Exactly. When we looked at it closely, the trail—in Italy, at least—is fully signposted, fully walkable, but there are very few places to sleep, especially in the pilgrims-only style that is most popular on the Camino de Santiago, and especially in the final hundred kilometers of the trail. By “pilgrims-only”, I mean that they don't usually accept anyone who's not walking or cycling the route, and they have a spirit more like a backpacker's hostel, where you meet people and share space, share experiences, and feel like you're part of a community of walkers.
I didn’t raise enough money in our first round of fundraising to buy the building I wanted in the town that I wanted—Sutri—along the Via Francigena, but I found an apartment in a town called Capranica about five kilometers away that was much cheaper, albeit much smaller. It’s basically self-funded, and it was what I could afford. I’m borrowing money from friends back in the U.S. I’m essentially paying a mortgage to them rather than to a bank because the bank wouldn’t loan to me.
So, we decided to start with that, and we’re actually really happy with it now. It’s a two-bedroom apartment, which is basically also our home, and we have a spare bedroom with several beds for pilgrims, like a hostel. I think we can host about six to seven people now. Essentially, according to Italian regulations, we can host people as long as we are not running as a business, which supports our model as a non-profit registered in the U.S., because we’re not planning on charging people to stay. We’re running it on a donations basis, meaning payment is not mandated. We’re completely comfortable with someone staying for free if they feel like they need to for whatever reason. We don’t want them to feel like it’s about the money at all. It’s about the spirit and experience together. Because honestly, each time we have hosted, we have had wonderful evenings together with our pilgrims.
I had crowdfunded over 2,000 dollars that is essentially still sitting in the virtual account. The only thing we spent out of it was to maintain the website and deal with the paperwork for the project. We hope to crowdfund again in the future to raise more funds to buy another property for a second donations-based hostel. But if, in the end, we’re only able to open one or two hostels, but that works as a foundation to inspire more people and grow the larger trail, then we'll be pretty happy.
ED: Do you remember at which point you committed to this idea?
TC: I think I really did it before I even went to Italy, truthfully. I had already been looking for a way to leave the rat race in the U.S. behind for a couple of years. When I got back from my 2017 Italy trip—to visit my three friends whom I had met on the Camino de Santiago in Spain—I left my job at the sprinkler company and began making plans almost immediately. I started selling off things and pooling all my savings, even some retirement money that had been sitting untouched for almost ten years. I found a tenant to move into my house so that the mortgage wouldn’t weigh me down, and I started looking for a way to volunteer in Italy.
My first three months on my return to Italy were mostly spent volunteering at a hostel outside of Rome, so I could learn the industry a bit, learn the culture, make friends and allies in the area, and make sure it’s something I really wanted to do before I ask anybody to give money to my project. That was a very happy time for me, and it cemented everything. I met my Juliane while there as well. She’s German, but speaks Italian. She was volunteering via Workaway at an organic farm that partners with the hostel I was volunteering at, and we met at one of the shared events.
There were another two pilgrims who came to stay at our hostel as volunteers. They had just finished the route and were looking for a place to stay for a couple of weeks to recuperate from the trail before they travelled again. They were much older than the hostel would normally employ. I was thirty-six at the time and I was already old for the hostel; it’s mostly twenty-something kids. They were probably in their sixties.
I’m a bit spiritual and Christian, but I don’t like to say that I’m religious, because I don’t agree with most of the churches and their doctrine. But these people practice Christianity in the same way I do, and they said they had recorded a bunch of information about their journey. They didn’t know why; they didn’t have any plans to open a hostel of their own, but they had a packet of information about all the towns that they had gone through and which towns had cheap hostels, which hotels had places you could stay in for free, and which places were donations-based or Airbnbs. They basically gave me research to see which towns needed help first. I felt like the universe was putting us together to guide me to the right place to start.
ED: I think you told me before that you had been in touch more with your spirituality when your father died?
TC: Yes, my father died about the time I moved back to Louisiana to work on the barges, in 2010, when he was sixty-five. He had been sick for some ten years, with major damage to his lungs from exposure to chemicals throughout his career. He had told somebody not too long before that he felt his time would be up fairly soon, and that his ideal last day would be to ride his motorcycle with his friends and be out in the open air for a few hours and to play pool with his friends—and then to come home and go to sleep and be with his best friend, his wife, and then to die in his sleep. And that’s exactly what happened.
The day before he died, I was working on the barge and they were the most difficult days of the entire job, and I was exhausted. I was a little bit proud of what I was doing, actually, because it was so difficult physically for me, and my dad called me to tell me he was proud of me and just said a lot of nice things. He had the same experience with my brother that same day. My brother at the time had left his job—I think as an engineer for a turbine engine company—to pursue his passion for music as a sound engineer, which my dad had disapproved of for a long time. But that day, he told my brother he finally understood how much it meant to him and that he was great at it; he was proud of him. And later at his wake and his funeral, so many people came to talk to us and every person had a story to relate in the previous weeks about him—he had said something important to them somehow, or reconnected with an old friend, or buried the hatchet with someone.
He died peacefully, and happy. I hadn't seen him truly happy in a long time. To me, it felt like a miracle had taken place, that he had been given some extra time to wrap things up. It was the first time in my life that I felt certain there were spiritual beings looking out for us. It’s a bit vague, but at the time it was extremely powerful to me.
ED: Ultimately, what is it that you want to share with people along the Via Francigena?
TC: I walked the Camino de Santiago with basically no plan, and for me, that was the key magical, beautiful part of it. I was walking with just what was on my back and realized that was the happiest I had ever been. It’s a bit like the feeling you get when you relax in water and float—safe. I just sort of trusted that the world would be okay and I would be okay, and I walked with an open mind and heart, and no plans. And it was, I was.
The amount of kindness and amazing, wonderful coincidences I experienced on the Camino—it’s like the world is a beautiful place if we just let it be; it only becomes chaotic and stressful and bad when we fight it and try to force it to our expectations. That's what I felt there. And that feeling of letting go of everything and feeling that the world was actively taking care of me, that was overwhelming. It's hard to worry much after that.
That's the kind of experience I hope to share here with Road to Rome. To make it so that people can walk the Via Francigena without a plan, and arrive in a town tired, hungry, but spiritually or mentally clearer and happier. They don’t have to make a plan, or a schedule, or worry about how many kilometers to do before sunset and all that. Or if they have a foot pain, for it to be okay to stop earlier than expected. Or if they have a second wind after lunch, to feel happy to go one extra town, and not worry that there won't be a place to stay.
When I checked in last month for a quick update:
ED: So, how long have you and Juliane been staying in your new Capranica home now? How has it been settling in?
TC: We’ve been here for eighteen months now, and we feel very at home in our new town. We’ve started teaching English lessons here, both in a class format and also some private lessons. We’ve also joined a local association that does small works to improve the town and hosts history walks and other small events at times. Our most recent projects are restoring some old shepherd trails and clearing the brush and trees from them, so they will be usable as hiking trails again. They connect to some old Etruscan, Roman, and Medieval era tombs and shelters, so it’s a way to preserve access to Capranica’s cultural and historical heritage.
Views and experiences related in this conversation, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, are the speaker’s own. Guest appearances in this newsletter hope to reflect the variety of lives lived in this world.
Read more about this newsletter. If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free, or you can choose a paid membership to access paywalled letters and help fund guest writers. Thank you!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
I like to begin the Landmarkings series with a passage from a work of fiction I’ve read that evokes something of how we inhabit places. Here’s a passage from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Press play for an extended reading (but forgive the background noise, I recorded it from a cafe near an airport):
This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again. Even stopping for luncheon at a wayside inn, and going to a dark, unfamiliar room to wash my hands, the handle of the door unknown to me, the wallpaper peeling in strips, a funny little cracked mirror above the basin; for this moment, it is mine, it belongs to me. We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.
You’re reading a newsletter by Emily Ding about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world—and our personal and collective place in it.
If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free, or you can choose a paid membership to access paywalled letters and help fund guest writers.
Making sense of the world & our place in it
Earlier this month, thinking of family reunions as we segued into the Chinese New Year—a handful of moments in this Chang Rae Lee essay, Coming Home Again, broke me in little ways. In this passage, he writes about his mother:
She believed back then that I had found her more and more ignorant each time I came home. She said she never blamed me, for this was the way she knew it would be with my wonderful new education. Nothing I could say seemed to quell the notion. But I knew that the problem wasn’t simply the education; the first time I saw her again after starting school, barely six weeks later, when she and my father visited me on Parents Day, she had already grown nervous and distant. After the usual campus events, we had gone to the motel where they were staying in a nearby town and sat on the beds in our room. She seemed to sneak looks at me, as though I might discover a horrible new truth if our eyes should meet.
How Berlin’s club scene is weathering the pandemic, by Arikia Millikan and Ruben Salgado Escudero:
But most interestingly, many nightlife spaces also found ways to contribute to the battle against COVID itself by converting into coronavirus testing and vaccination sites, offering former employees the opportunity to reinvent themselves in a new line of work.
For Basti Schwarz, who became the staff manager at Arena Berlin after spending the previous 30 years of his life touring around the world with his brother in the DJ duo Tiefschwarz, working at the former concert venue turned vaccination center provided a rare opportunity to have a social life while staying put and remaining in the present. Basti estimated that 85 percent of the vaccination center employees at Arena came from the nightlife world, from artists to booking agents to bouncers, which presented an interesting working and social environment in daylight life.
Her Name Is Untac: UN Peacekeepers’ Forgotten Children in Cambodia, by Marta Kasytelan:
Even today, all she knows is that she resembles the Ghanian United Nations peacekeeper who left Cambodia shortly after her birth in the early 1990s. The exact year of the man’s repatriation and Zamel’s birthday, like many aspects of her biography, are unclear. Her family identification document, or family book, says she was born in 1990, but that is almost certainly incorrect. Mistakes on official documents, especially dates of birth, are common in Cambodia. Zamel’s given name on her ID card is “Untac”—the acronym for the UN mission that brought her father to Cambodia and lasted from 1992 to 1993.
How Malaysia Got in on the Secondhand Clothing Boom by Ezra Marcus, with reporting by Ushar Daniele. The story began with a question: “I’ve wondered for a long time why all the best clothes on Grailed and Etsy seem to be in Malaysia”:
Nowadays, a given clothing item—say, a Nike hoodie—may be made in a factory in Taiwan or Bangladesh, sold to the United States, donated to Goodwill, shipped in a bale to Malaysia, and then sold back to the U.S. on Etsy.
'Colonialism had never really ended': my life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes, by Simukai Chigudu:
I am often asked how I feel about being an associate professor at Oxford, specialising in African politics. Do I see any contradiction in working for the institution that I am agitating to change? Who is the target audience of my writing—privileged, often white students, or my fellow Africans? The answers to such questions are long. However, there’s a fallacy in thinking that Africa is where I am needed most. Yes, I remain committed to writing about the combustible politics of the country of my birth, and I hope the true promises of liberation will be fully realised one day. But Oxford, Britain, and the west must be decolonised, too. Essential to this is advancing a richer, more complex view of the imperial past and its bearing on the present. Zimbabwe is not Britain’s troubled former colony—it is its mirror.
No school, no hair cut: one girl’s journey through one of the world’s longest Covid lockdowns, by Naomi Larsson and photographer Irina Werning:
Animals That Infect Humans Are Scary. It’s Worse When We Infect Them Back, by Sonia Shah:
For spillback pathogens, cities full of people, colonies of free-living animals and herds of captive animals are an unbroken continuum of flesh and tissue to exploit, but for our surveillance systems, humans, wildlife and domesticated animals are separated into three distinct biotic spheres, monitored by different entities with peculiar jurisdictions and distinct technical approaches. Those creatures that defy our ontological categories—the supposedly tamed captives that go feral, for example, or the wild creatures intimately embedded in civilized spaces—can escape notice entirely.
I started this list with mothers, here’s ending it with fathers—one of my favourites from a while back. Schemes of My Father by Eric Puchner is about how his “East Coast dad tried to relocate—and reinvent—himself in the land of red-hot cars and eternal suntans”:
At the beach club, my father circled the parking lot a couple of times in the car he drove most often, a Porsche 928. I don't know why he wanted to impress the guests so badly, but I suspect it had something to do with the vision of Californian life arrayed so platonically before us: the mothers in bikinis, the thwock of Smashballs, the smell of sun lotion mid with the briny breeze from the ocean, whose gentle waves seemed to frost the sand like a cake. Boys in Jams and rope bracelets slurped Cokes or played volleyball or skimboarded across the wash with sunglasses on. These of course were the effortlessly tan Californian kids I so admired and feared, the ones who knew how to surf and skateboard and had managed to lose their virginities at preposterously young ages, generally to their older sisters’ friends. They said “gnarly” with a straight face and spoke in a diabetic drawl that made each word seem like a message washed up on the beach. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get tan, and though I burned my face and arms every summer to a freckled variant of brown, my legs were hopelessly immune to the sun's rays.
An audio postcard
Something to think about
To immigrants, papers are everything. They can also mean nothing. For how often my community gets called “undocumented,” perhaps no one in this country possesses more documents, or clings to them more fiercely to prove their existence, than we do. Practically every immigrant family in this country has a thick folder padded with their most valued documents—some put them in a safe box; others make virtual copies that they upload to encrypted cloud servers. Even vaccination charts or a spelling-bee certificate can prove something. I keep my papers in a yellow manila envelope.
—Jesús A. Rodríguez in The Heaviest, Lightest Thing
How we make sense of the world & tell its stories
As I slowly make my way through The Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and the late David Graeber (of B*t Jobs fame)—btw, an interesting exchange on the book between Kwame Anthony Appiah and the authors here and here—I’m thinking of how the increased popularity of Big History, epitomised by Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens*, has changed our way of thinking about the world and ourselves. As someone who is more naturally a generalist (perhaps it’s wired to the storytelling impulse?), I feel like this broader, more holistic view offers up refreshing perspectives, and its proponents say it may serve to overcome nationalistic impulses and unite a fragmented world. But it also has its shortcomings. What Big History misses by Ian Hasketh offers some insights, including the history of Big History itself:
What accounts for Big History’s attraction for popular audiences and educators? For Christian and other big historians, the answer is built right in to the premise of writing Big History in the first place. By producing an overarching story of life, Big History is meant to fill the void that was left by the processes of secularisation that have dismantled the holistic narratives that were provided by traditional religious systems. According to Christian, secularisation has left people feeling fragmented and searching for some sort of grander vision and meaning of life that they can no longer find in religion. In supporting this view, Christian often refers to the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who in 1893 argued that modern life has engendered a state of ‘anomie’, meaning that most individuals find themselves disoriented and uprooted from a deep sense of social belonging. Big History should, therefore, be understood as providing the kind of holistic meaning that used to come from religion. In this way, it is a ‘modern creation myth’ or an ‘origin story’, but one based on science rather than ancient scripture.
Robert Macfarlane, reviewing three books on wayfinding in Landscapes Inside Us:
Underlying all three of these books is a deep belief in the importance of collaboration and cooperation between humans and their environments, as well as between humans and other humans. Having read them, I’ve come to think that we might best imagine wayfinding not as a skill or art but as an ethic. The abilities that are cultivated in wayfinding—imagining things from different viewpoints, moving the mind backward and forward in time, seeing situations from other perspectives, weighing alternatives subtly against one another before making the best decisions, seeking information from others and giving it freely in return—might be the same abilities that contribute to a resilient, equitable community or polity. If this is wayfinding, then we need it now more than ever.
Re-reading some of Joan Didion since her passing. Here, a less oft-quoted passage from her 1975 commencement address that was making the rounds:
That was the question the ‘60s gave us—was there any objective reality? That was the question most of you grew up on. And you grew up, a lot of you, correctly suspicious; suspicious of ideologies and answers and easy symbols. And you’re probably not in too much danger of being blinded by those things.
I think what you might be blinded for, what you ought to watch out for, is the habit of saying no, the habit of not believing anybody or anything. You’ve got to watch out for moving into a world where you don’t think there’s any objective reality, where there’s only you and that tree you just planted. There’s an objective reality, there is an objective social reality. Take it on faith.
All I want to tell you today, really, is not to do that. Not to move into that world where you’re alone with yourself and your tree. I want to tell you to live in the messy world, throw yourself into the convulsion of the world.
Reader rolodex
As more readers subscribe to this newsletter, I’ve invited some of you to share what you’ve been tending to, professionally or personally. In this letter, say hello to Amanda:
I’m Amanda Magnani, a Brazilian (photo)journalist, passionate about the human side of stories. I am currently living in the Czech Republic, after having spent a year in Denmark and six months in Ireland—a lot of moving around since the pandemic started.
Over the last year, my work has mostly been focused on migration and climate justice—preferably with a strong gender perspective. As a storyteller, I believe knowledge can’t be separated from those who produce it: it’s always situated and anchored on experience. This, however, doesn’t have to be a limitation. Quite the opposite. Every story I tell is a reflex of my perspective as a woman, as a Latin American, as an immigrant.
As this new year starts, I hope to continue bringing forth stories that matter and that, hopefully, promote change.
Read Amanda’s work on how refugees are being forced to leave Denmark and how melting Andean glaciers are reshaping indigenous rituals.
Where I leave you
“Joy is not made to be a crumb.”
As always, I hope you find something here to carry with you.
If you’ve been enjoying Movable Worlds, please share it with your friends. Meanwhile, here are some very kind words from a new reader:
I want to thank you for your contribution to some really interesting articles. I’ve been enjoying your newsletter; the subject matter is capacious and your writing style is succinct and unique. When I'm reading your webpages, it's like going down another rabbit hole, but one filled with intrigue and relevance.
—Jan Setter
Until the next,
Read more about this newsletter. If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free, or you can choose a paid membership to access paywalled letters and help fund guest writers. Thank you!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
From a short story by Ayşegül Savaş called Future Selves, after the protagonist couple view an apartment they think capacious enough for their growing aspirations:
After the visit, we could find no café in the neighborhood at which to sit and talk about our impressions, so we took the train back. On the way, we both said that we’d liked the diversity of the area, and would be excited to live there, though it also seemed that we might not be able to become part of the community, that we’d be living shuttered within the confines of the splendid loft, travelling all the way to the city whenever we went out. Over drinks the following evening, Sami told us he’d take the train to visit us on weekends. He was such a good friend to us, always offering his support of our choices.
You’re reading a newsletter by Emily Ding about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our personal and collective place in it.
If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free by default, or you can choose a paid membership to access private letters and help fund guest writers.
Friends and readers,
My inbox is burgeoning with year-end round-ups and reflections, as yours probably is. I’m not so adept at such things—not reflecting per se (I feel like I’m constantly reflecting, as a writer), but reflecting on time, prompt on occasion. This year, it feels even more difficult.
I’ve tended to see my life as being divided into years-long chapters, and this one, which started in late 2019 doesn’t feel like it’s ended yet. The same considerations that underpinned the pandemic for me, on how best to live, love, and work, still preoccupy my mind. I have not yet caught on to that rumbling undertow that might catapult me into yet a different groove, though I have felt it, while worrying over ideas in recent weeks until they either animate or crumble. I’m waiting—willing—for something to take shape.
So here’s a good old Landmarkings round-up for now. May you find something interesting in it. At the turn of the new year, I hope you get to hold your family, your cats and dogs, and your dearest ones close. And I’m sending you all my best wishes for the times that lie ahead.
Making sense of a world at once quotidian, absurd, brutal, poignant, and extraordinary
A very long but comprehensive first-person look at what happened in Afghanistan—Inside the Fall of Kabul by Matthieu Aikins (who, btw, also wrote that great piece on Syria’s White Helmets, Whoever Saves A Life):
It was noon when I got home, and I found my housemate, Jim, with his camera in hand, already wearing a traditional robe. I donned mine; we both spoke Dari and could usually pass for locals. He wanted to take a walk and see what was happening in our neighborhood; it wasn’t clear to us, from the rumors and official denials on Twitter, whether the Taliban had actually entered Kabul.
The last shopkeepers were locking their gates as we walked down Chicken Street. Workers were rushing out of their offices and heading home. Now and again, we could hear scattered gunshots. There was a police headquarters and ministry nearby; some guards were still in uniform, but others stood wearing robes, ready to run. Some checkpoints were deserted.
A police commander lived on our street, and when we got back, we found his guards milling outside his house, most of them in plainclothes already. I had a sudden sense of the fragility of the social contract that bound us; our shared reality was melting into air. I was as worried about being robbed or shot by them as I was about the Taliban.
The Secretive Prisons that Keep Migrants Out of Europe by Ian Urbina, as part of The Outlaw Ocean project (which continues where his book left off):
In the past six years, the European Union, weary of the financial and political costs of receiving migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, has created a shadow immigration system that stops them before they reach Europe. It has equipped and trained the Libyan Coast Guard, a quasi-military organization linked to militias in the country, to patrol the Mediterranean, sabotaging humanitarian rescue operations and capturing migrants. The migrants are then detained indefinitely in a network of profit-making prisons run by the militias.
Yan Cong, Beimeng Fu, and Ye Charlotte Ming translate visual storytelling on China for English-speaking audiences in their newsletter Far and Near, and their latest window on that world is fascinating:
A school in Harbin, Heilongjiang province has been teaching business drinking etiquette—from how much to pour, to who to toast first and what to say when making the toasts. The most telling part of the video is the interview with the students: a businesswoman, a red wine salesman, and an accountant. Few of them enjoy drinking and socializing on such occasions and feel compelled to put on a disguise and suck up to their superiors or clients. But most agree that chugging that glass of beer or Baijiu is an important, possibly the only, way to cement a deal, and thus to advance one’s career and get ahead in life.
Selections here sometimes mirror the things I’ve been wondering about, which may not be new. Here, a piece by Archie Bland on the alternating perniciousness and vapidness of “banter” in British culture:
The trust game in banter was traditionally supposed to be: do you trust me when I say we’re friends in spite of the mean things I’m saying about you? But now there’s a second version of the game: do I trust you not to tell anyone the mean things I’m saying about other people? “I think originally it was a harmless thing,” said Cameron, whose analysis is rooted in an archive of male group conversation, mostly recorded by her students, that goes back to the 1980s. “But then it started to be used as an excuse when men were caught out engaging in forms of it that weren’t so harmless.”
I wonder if Calcuttan friends will find this next piece romanticized, but the idea of adda—I am unsure if, in my lone wanderings about the city in 2019, I had managed to experience the real thing—was something I was searching for (particularly after reading passages on it in Kushanava Choudhury’s The Epic City, a book I can’t recommend enough). Coffee or Chai? At 2 Kolkata Cafes, ‘Adda’ Is What’s Really on the Menu by Mujib Mashal:
“Adda is something that goes unnoticed—because it’s so part of our every day and it’s so integral to the identity of being a Bengali,” said Dr. Nabamita Das, a professor of sociology at Presidency University in Kolkata who wrote her doctoral thesis on adda. “And when you think about adda you think about adda integrally tied to the space of adda—you talk about the Coffee House adda, the Favorite Cabin adda.” Some of Bengal’s favorite icons would hold adda at the Coffee House, from the legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray to Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel in economic science. Many of the city’s intellectual giants have spoken fondly of how the coffee and conversation shaped their worldview, likening each table to its own literary salon.
Pigs to the slaughter by Leighton Woodhouse—“The [U.S.] meat industry’s response to COVID-19 was a confluence of cruelty to animals and workers alike—yet the owners are doing better than ever.”
To date, an estimated 86,000 workers have caught COVID-19 and at least 423 have lost their lives to it. Today, fewer workers are getting sick because of the vaccines, but one poultry worker told me that at her plant, managers had learned from the pandemic that they can keep up the same pace of production with fewer workers. They never bothered hiring new staff to replace the workers they’d lost to COVID; they’re just pushing the remaining workers even harder. That’s led to fatigue and injury, which is a hazard to workers and animals alike. Whenever workers are pushed to the brink, animal welfare suffers too, as tired workers means less focused workers, and that can mean animals not being fully killed before they get through the kill line, which means they’re eviscerated while still alive.
In China, Bragging About Your Wealth Can Get You Censored by Vivian Wang and Joy Dong:
The Chinese authorities have declared war on content deemed to be “flaunting wealth,” amid sweeping calls by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to combat inequality. As Mr. Xi positions himself for a third term, he has cast himself as a man of the people, leading a campaign against entrenched interests.
London No Longer Has One Chinatown. It Has Many by Angela Hui:
Migration isn’t limited to the Cantonese south any more; China’s growing middle and upper-classes are exploring the world and arriving in London en masse, bending entire global industries as they go and fueling demand for goods and services from home. Attracting a younger generation to neighbourhoods like Aldgate, Hackney, Holborn, Lambeth and Victoria, the past two decades have seen a huge influx of investment from mainland China, and the number of traditionally-run family-owned Cantonese restaurants are dwindling, making way for more specialist, regional Chinese and pan-Asian businesses in a bid to appeal to this newer demographic, as well as attracting a broader spectrum of customers.
The Aldi effect: how one discount supermarket transformed the way Britain shops by Xan Rice reveals fascinating things about Aldi’s secretive, media-shy German founders (one of them having been kidnapped before) and how the supermarket chains work:
As anyone who has tried navigating a ram-packed Aldi on a Saturday afternoon will know, you still don’t go there for the ambience or relaxed shopping experience. “Aldi panic” at the till endures in the electronic age thanks to a simple innovation that allows for instant scanning of goods. Packaged products in all supermarkets come with a barcode, which the checkout assistant will locate and scan. But look closely at a packet of Aldi toilet rolls and you will see not one but four barcodes: two long ones down the sides, and one on each large flat surface. A container of butter has three barcodes; a bag of carrots has two. For kidney beans, a pinstripe barcode is wrapped around half of the can. This means that whichever way the assistant holds the product the scanner will register it.
From time to time I like to go back and share my favorite pieces of narrative nonfiction. One of them is The Contestant by the Peruvian writer Daniel Alarcón (who is, btw, equally skilled at fiction)—“Ruth Thalía Sayas Sánchez, a teenager from the outskirts of Lima, Peru, became an overnight sensation on a hit television game show. Then, she disappeared.”
Then came question number 18: Have you ever accepted money for sex?
Vilma bent over, as if in physical pain.
Ruth Thalía answered yes, and the show’s announcer, a disembodied, almost robotically precise woman’s voice, called out:
“The answer is… true.”
There was a long silence.
“Just twice,” Ruth Thalía explained. “We needed money. We were in a bad situation. It hasn’t happened since, and it won’t happen again.”
For this truthful admission, Ruth Thalía had won 15,000 soles, or about $5,300—almost ten months’ wages for someone living in Lima. Beto asked if she wanted to go on, in search of 50,000 soles.
… and our place in it.
Stupid Xenophobic Parrots: On Transitions and Transformation by Michelle Kuo, writing with unapologetic candor about her return migration to Taiwan (in the newsletter she writes with her husband, A Broad and Ample Road):
English has long been the best thing I’ve had going for me, proof I have something to offer the world. It gave me confidence as a shy kid, helped me create something out of myself. It made me virtuous, a woman of action. A word after a word after a word, as Margaret Atwood wrote, is power. English made me a teacher, encouraging students to find their own voice; it made me a lawyer, crafting legal briefs to sculpt fury and kill doubt. It made me a wife, crying as I wrote my marriage vows.
Did it make me a daughter? That’s more complicated. My parents were always proud of my love of books and my achievements as a writer, even though it meant losing something in the way I communicated with them. I think if a Faustian devil had said I will grant your child mastery of English, on the condition that she will be dumb to your mother tongue and never understand a word you say, they still would have agreed.
Somehow, I had never read this piece. The 15 Year Layover by Michael Paterniti tells the extraordinary story of the man who inspired Spielberg’s The Terminal. Due to some truly mind-boggling confluence of circumstances, he lived, waiting, at Charles de Gaulle airport for eighteen years before he had to be hospitalized due to illness:
Alfred's odyssey had begun when he was a young man from a well-to-do family living in Iran and had ended here on an airport bench in Paris, by mistake. Twenty years ago, while living in Belgium, he'd simply wanted to go to England by boat. But having rid himself of his identification papers during the voyage, he'd fallen into a twilight limbo as a nationless, unidentifiable person no one wanted, bounced from Belgium to England to France, where, finally, he'd been left stranded at Charles de Gaulle Airport. He'd lived there ever since.
Watch the deliciously flamboyant music videos (I feel like it captures perfectly a kind of humour from our part of the world—simultaneously campy, nerdy, and ironic), filmed against familiar tropical backdrops, by Yung Raja—a Singaporean who raps in English and Tamil, in this profile by Nyshka Chandran with photographs by Lenne Chai (who, btw, also shot this brilliant fashion spread imagining what a queer Singaporean wedding would look like).
A view of home
No one article could capture the full scale and devastation of the floods in Malaysia—the worst since 2014, at least 48 dead—or the community relief efforts that have sprung up to make up for the sore lack of government initiative; you’d have to refresh social media feeds constantly for that. Najjua Zulkefli, one of my favorite Malaysian photographers, shot an incredibly evocative photo essay. Fazry Ismail and Firdaus Latif too, captured moments that make me wish I were home to help in a way that goes beyond donating money. Kudos to friends and acquaintances helping in the clean up. Oh, and did you see that burly croc that got washed out of the river onto a bridge?
Bornean communities locked into two-million-hectare carbon deal they don’t know aboutby John C. Cannon—more details here. In the same vein, a note on why indigenous communities are wary of carbon-offsetting schemes.
Terengganu state has passed a law to ban the sale of turtle eggs by June 2022 (it is commonly and openly sold here for consumption), by Bryan Yong for Macaranga—an environmental news outfit co-founded in 2019 by Yao-Hua Law and Siew Lyn Wong that could use your monetary support.
Another scandal on how Malaysian companies—a Dyson supplier this time—treat migrant workers. Also: U.S. Customs bans fifth Malaysian glove maker over alleged forced labour!
A Thousand Thousand Islands is a series of beautifully illustrated zines inspired by Southeast Asia history and folklore, for use with fantasy adventure tabletop RPGs, by Zedeck Siew and Munkao. A helpful preview, if, like me, you know hardly anything about RPGs:
Something I wrote for the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung foundation teasing out some of the issues that were discussed at Women's Tribunal Malaysia—the first of its kind in Malaysia.
Malaysian food via London: Escaping the Roti King Queue by Jonathan Nunn of the Vittles newsletter. (Which also contains a couple of passages I wholeheartedly agree with on the new not-really-a-queue queue system that has infected some of the city’s restaurants. Just take bookings already!)
Read more about this newsletter. If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free by default, or you can choose a paid membership to access private letters and help fund guest writers. Thank you!
Reimagining our world (for better or worse)
Octopuses, crabs, and lobsters will be recognized as ‘sentient beings’ in U.K. by Kelsey Vlamis. Coincidentally, the news came immediately after I watched My Octopus Teacher (on Netflix), which is really very profound, and as affecting as people say it is. I realize I knew nothing about octopuses. You will marvel at what it is capable of, the relationship we’re capable of having with non-human creatures, and what that might tell us about ourselves.
Our Self-Imposed Scarcity of Nice Places by Daniel Herriges
The Year Basic Income Programs Went Mainstream by Sarah Holder
In the works for years, a suicide machine will soon be tested in Switzerland by Julian Mark
Why rich countries could be sued for destroying the climate by Jocelyn Timperley
Inside Mexico’s Historic Lawsuit Targeting U.S. Gun Companies by Ryan Devereaux
What if we didn’t build a single new building in 2022? by Elissaveta M. Brandon
Saving lives and making money: Can humanitarian impact bonds marry the two? by Ben Parker
After two failed attempts, Canada bans conversion therapy by Rachel Treisman
Rohingya sue Facebook for £150bn over Myanmar genocide by Dan Milmo
To sink into
Watched a trio of films lately related to German history. Besides A Hidden Life, based on the true story of an Austrian farmer who was a conscientious objector to Hitler’s war (August Diehl plays the good guy for once), I also liked Barbara, about a doctor who, after filing an official request to leave East Germany, is incarcerated and transferred from a prestigious East Berlin hospital to a small rural hospital, where the Stasi continues to monitor her. I also found The Man in the High Castle, an Amazon Prime TV series adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel that imagines a world in which Hitler won the war, quite addictive. It’s by no means perfect, but there’s just something about the texture of its world that speaks to me creatively. I didn’t want it to end.
Something to think about
Like Ayşegül Savaş’s short story quoted at top, Deborah Levy’s memoir, Real Estate (which I recently read and recommend), is concerned about finding a house to hold a home, and all the illusions of womanhood that come with it.
Seeing a woman feeding pigeons on the sidewalk, she finds herself thinking:
When I saw she had painted on her eyebrows so that one was much higher than the other, I suddenly felt exhausted and didn’t think I could commit to the slog and sorrow of her back story. I saw her as a child with both eyebrows in the right place, but knew I would have to track the long female journey to the left eyebrow floating near her hairline. As a structure for a film, that was quite appealing. I was also thinking about my best male friend’s idea that his wife, Nadia, was happy but pretended to be unhappy. Why did he think she was pretending?
Before I sign off, a belated Christmas Carol:
Thanks, as ever, for welcoming my letters to your inbox. If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, found it illuminative in any way, I would appreciate it very much if you would tell your friends to subscribe.
Happy new year ❤️
Yours,
www.emilyding.me / instagram / twitter
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
I like to begin the Landmarkings series with a passage from a work of fiction that evokes something of how we navigate the world and our relationships with places. Here’s a passage from the long-anticipated third novel (interesting take here) of the Irish novelist Sally Rooney:
All my feelings and experiences were in one sense extremely intense, and in another sense completely trivial, because none of my decisions seemed to have any consequences, and nothing about my life—the job, the apartment, the desires, the love affairs—struck me as permanent. I felt anything was possible, that there were no doors shut behind me, and that out there somewhere, as yet unknown, there were people who would love and admire me and want to make me happy. Maybe that explains in some way the openness I felt towards the world—maybe without knowing it, I was anticipating my future, I was watching for signs.
—Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You?
This dispatch is split into two parts. The second is here.
You’re reading a newsletter by Emily Ding about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our personal and collective place in it.
If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free by default, or you can choose a paid membership to access private letters and help fund guest writers.
Friends,
Here’s another Landmarkings dispatch. Before you read further, though, I’d like to draw your attention to another letter I published online earlier this week, which I didn’t email out to avoid cluttering your inbox. It’s my last dispatch from Croatia, where W.C. and I sheltered for a time during the pandemic, and it’s free to read for a week. An excerpt:
The sea salt has curled our hair in places, misted our skin. We wear our straw hats slant across our faces and lie on our backs to dry off on towels spread across a concrete slab, paved between craggy rocks. We can hear the waves slapping against the shore, bright green Aleppo pines swaying overhead—and every so often, the breeze sends a rustling through the leaves, casting dancing shadows on our faces, shaking spiky brown filaments and pinecones loose on us. Earlier, I had seen ants scurrying in their midst, and try to keep a childhood memory from intruding: sudden stabbing pains deep inside my ear, my parents driving me to the nearest clinic as I whimper in the backseat, the doctor tipping in an oily solution to wash out a pinprick of a creature that didn’t look like it could possibly have caused so much trouble.
You’ll notice that I’ve also changed the overarching name of this newsletter to Movable Worlds (I gave “The Great Affair” over to the guest section). I wanted something that could more readily encompass the idea of a world in flux, a world capable of change, and—riffing on Hemingway’s moveable feast—the inner worlds of our own making that we carry with us wherever we go. I thought the name change would also better embrace some other ideas I have for the newsletter, without having to start a separate one—but more on that in another dispatch. Beyond that, you can still reach the newsletter at its old URL, which will simply redirect to movableworlds.substack.com
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this month’s curated letter. It’s long, since I missed last month’s, but take your time. And as always, feel free to let me know your thoughts.
Making sense of our place in the world
Tiki Girl by Amanda Lee Koe—fairly sure this is nonfiction, but even if it’s not, I love the spot-on vibes this scene conjures up!
More often than not, when Bud stepped off Bus 10, she would be in a cosy sweater. Aircon on those double-decker night buses was extra frigid, but on alighting, the streets were balmy again. I would hold her T-shirt down as she removed her sweater. Then we’d walk to my favourite neighbourhood kopitiam, where the Mainland Chinese drinks stall lady with a frizzy perm knew my order: I’d start with a cold teh c peng and end with a warm Milo. She was friendly to me, unlike the Singaporean Chinese beer auntie in an ass-hugging Tiger-Beer skort who only bussed the tables of bawdy uncles who started every sentence with ‘Kanina’, the Hokkien equivalent of ‘F**k you’. From what I could hear, they seemed to be using this merely as a placeholder for ‘Let me tell you…’ and the appropriate response once someone had finished relaying his anecdote was a hearty chorus of ‘Lan pa!’, the Hokkien for testicles, which appeared to connote ‘No way!’
My Accidental Visit to the Pandemic’s Party Capital by Rosa Lyster and Gueorgui Pinkhassov, which I love for how closely it hews, in feeling if not necessarily in its material facts (at the risk of sounding square, I am not much of a clubber), to my own experience of growing to love the places I’ve loved:
Becoming abruptly besotted with a new city can be like falling dramatically in love with a new person, and much of it rests on the sense of elated mystification that is unsustainable in the long term—if you walked around swooning at coincidences like this all the time, you would fall in a hole or become unemployed—but it is also one reason the species continues to thrive. The difference between a city and a person is that a city can’t love you back, but Kyiv frequently gives the impression that it is trying, in that it instantly repays whatever attention you might lavish upon it. It is a city of hidden courtyards and underpasses and bars that you come across by mistake, all of which enables a sense of personal ownership over discoveries everyone has already made. This still isn’t a reason. I can’t say why Kyiv knocked me out the way it did any more than I could objectively account for why and when I fell in love, other than to establish for the record that a feeling of instant affinity is still possible, where matters progress with a speed both astonishing and inevitable.
American Spit by Malaysian writer Vanessa Chan—very short, very punchy:
You roll your eyes at me in bed, sigh with the resignation of someone who feels the burden of civility resting on your thin shoulders.
“No, babe. It’s ‘con-TEM-pla-tive not ‘con-tem-PLAY-tive.’ You said it wrong again.”
You are Asian too, but American, and this makes all the difference. It means that you know how to use filler words like like in the right places, even if you don’t seem to like anything about me these days.
Making House: Notes on Domesticity by Rachel Cusk:
Not long before, I was driven to what appeared to be the brink of mental and physical collapse by embarking on the complete remodeling of our London flat, and while it was true that my children and I were now enjoying the benefits of living in a more pleasant environment, I still felt a certain sense of shame at how determinedly I brought these events about. I caused walls to be knocked down and floors to be ripped up and rooms to be gutted; I threw away decades’ worth of clutter and keepsakes and old furniture; with what at times seemed like magic and at others sheer violence, I caused the past to be obliterated and put something new, something of my choosing, in its place.
The Places We Lost, an illustrated comic by Kathy MacLeod (from Believer magazine—which, very sadly, will cease publishing in 2022):
Making sense of a world at once quotidian, absurd, brutal, poignant, and extraordinary
On migration
How Africa will become the center of the world’s urban future by Max Bearak, Dylan Moriarty, and Júlia Ledur
The Migrant Workers Who Follow Climate Disasters by Sarah Stillman
Brain Drain From Britain Delivers Financial Boon to Estonia by Stephen Castle
A once-remote patch of rainforest is now packed with migrants trying to reach the U.S. by John Otis
Why Belarus is using migrants as a political weapon by Ellen Iones
On culture, conflict, etc.
What happened to the women who stayed behind in Afghanistan, from a photo essay by Laura King and Marcus Yam. “Unlike many Afghan women, Sahar didn't lose her job when the Taliban returned to power. But something has changed: She has to pretend that a man is the one doing her work.”
Why Japan Can’t Bring Itself to Ban Sexual Depictions of Children in Manga by Hanako Montgomery. “Some also argue that children who grow up seeing this unregulated media could think it acceptable to be sexualized, even making them susceptible targets of sexual grooming by perpetrators of child sex crimes.”
The global streaming boom is creating a severe translator shortage by Andrew Deck. Quoting Paolo Sigismondi, a professor who researches the global entertainment industry, “Squid Game is another sign that there is a demand for locally produced media entertainment content above and beyond local audiences—for Korean content outside of Korea, for Mexican content outside of Mexico.”
The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s’ Most Decadent College by Lili Anolik. Quoting Donna Tartt, of The Secret History fame: “[E]verybody there was like the oddly gifted person who made bad grades and hung out in the parking lot.” Also appearances by Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem. The story is relevant again because of a new podcast by the same writer.
Global Hunt for Looted Treasures Leads to Offshore Trusts, by journalists at the Washington Post, as part of the Pandora Papers exposé—and what it turned up about the religious artifacts Cambodia wants returned to it. “This led to a broader examination of the global trade in art, a realm in which shell companies and trusts conceal smuggling, and some famed institutions and private collectors buy items of murky origin.”
Terror & tourism: Xinjiang eases its grip, but fear remains by Dake Kang. “Many of the practices that made the Uyghur culture a living thing—raucous gatherings, strict Islamic habits, heated debate—have been restricted or banned. In their place, the authorities have crafted a sterilized version, one ripe for commercialization.”
In Texas, where legislators have passed a bill to usher in a future without abortion rights, a maternity ranch is born, by Stephanie McCrummen. Uh, to quote the founder: “What if Texas ends up becoming a model for the future? What if Texas meets this shift in culture? And instead of having high abortion rates, what if we help single moms to become stronger moms, to become successful?”
Spätis: The convenience stores that rule Berlin by Krystin Arneson. “They supply locals and tourists with cigarettes, snacks and €1 after-work wegbiers ("beers you drink on the go"). But during the pandemic, and particularly during the warmer months, they became essential fuelling stations for outdoor gatherings, as shuttered bars and nightclubs turned social life inside out.”
After Rittenhouse: Will deadly clashes multiply as the right to self-defense expands? by Mark Fischer and Mark Berman. “Under Wisconsin law, people who perceive a threat to their life don’t have a duty to run away. Such laws are designed to give armed citizens the flexibility to shoot first and ask questions—or be challenged on their decision in a courtroom—later.”
The Thrilling Dare of Scorched Rice by Ligaya Mishan. “To turn a mistake into a virtue, to recast dregs as bounty, to make a gift, an honor, of something that would once have been cursed at and cast aside: Is it possible that this says less about resilience and more about the sheer perversity—and generosity—of human nature, which leads us so often to seek the good in the bad, to favor the damaged, to love the flaw?”
On climate change & the natural world
Got to delve into the history of the Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia for a story I contributed reporting to: How the hunt for this deadly virus shaped the search for coronavirus’s origins by Karin Brulliard and Ben Guarino. “By 1998, Malaysia had undergone an economic boom that led to a greater demand for meat, and more forests cut for agriculture. Some pig farms, previously a backyard industry, had tens of thousands of animals. Some farmers supplemented their income with fruit orchards, planting trees next to open-air pigsties—perfect flying fox buffets."
Please Don’t Feed the Whale Sharks? Fishing Town Says It Must, to Prosper, by Hannah Reyes Morales:
“Where have you been?” Mr. de Guzman asks 180, whom he hasn’t seen in weeks, as he drops handfuls of shrimp into the water and gently scrapes off some debris from the shark’s body. “You must have traveled to a far-off place.”
How Americans’ Appetite for Leather in Luxury SUVs Worsens Amazon Deforestation by Manuela Andreoni, Hiroko Tabuchi, Albert Sun, and Victor Moriyama. “Amazon deforestation has surged in recent years as ranchers race to supply the growing demand for beef, particularly in China. Leather industry representatives make the point that as long as there is demand for beef, they are simply using hides that would otherwise be sent to landfills.”
Countries’ climate pledges built on flawed data, Post investigation finds—particularly damning of my home country. “Malaysia’s latest catalog of its greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations reads like a report from a parallel universe. The 285-page document suggests that Malaysia’s trees are absorbing carbon four times faster than similar forests in neighboring Indonesia.”
The Money Farmers: How Oligarchs and Populists Milk the E.U. for Millions by Selam Gebrekidan, Matt Apuzzo, and Benjamin Novak. “They have created a modern twist on a feudal system, giving jobs and aid to the compliant, and punishing the mutinous. These land barons, as it turns out, are financed and emboldened by the European Union.”
A view of home
How The Pakatan Harapan legend crumbled in Malacca by Bridget Welsh: “The opposition stalwart and prime minister hopeful [Anwar Ibrahim] has consistently failed to secure a major election victory at the leadership helm. How many times does he need to be rejected before the opposition realizes that Anwar’s time has passed?”
Singapore court orders temporary reprieve for mentally disabled man on death row by Shibani Mahtani—“Exacerbating the pain for Dharmalingam’s Malaysia-based family are travel restrictions that have made it challenging and isolating for his family to see him in person and say goodbye.” But that is not the end.
Of Putrajaya, Amnesic Utopias, and The City of Omelas by Lily J.: “What are the terms that a city like Putrajaya must accept, in order to remain pristine? Primarily, it must remain an amnesic city, constantly forgetting the country around it, and the history that existed before it. It’s a city of erasures.”
Read more about this newsletter. If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free by default, or you can choose a paid membership to access private letters and help fund guest writers. Thank you!
Reimagining our world
The elephant who could be a person by Jill Lepore—“the most important animal rights case of the 21st century”.
EU aims to curb deforestation with beef and coffee import ban by Jennifer Rankin—“for the first time the EU will attempt to regulate products linked to all—and not just illegal—deforestation.”
The lettings agency that's exclusively for homeless people by Lauren Brown
New York City is building a wall of oysters to fend off floods by Julia Hotz
The German Greens are proposing a Europe-wide network of sleeper trains, by Frank Jacobs. (Found this in Lauren Razavi’s Counterflows newsletter about borderless living.)
Something to think about
Anne Helen Petersen, who writes the Culture Study newsletter, on community:
You can show up for others, which can mean so many different things. You can talk to people you don’t know, which can take many other different forms. You can give alms willingly and without expectations. But most of these things involve taking time away from the concentration on your own to-do list. Community is showing up to weed the library garden even though it’s on a Saturday and you like a certain routine for your Saturday. It is actually joining the volunteer fire department. It is committing to a two-hour-a-week volunteer spot even though it feels weird because you’ve learned to dedicate all hours to work, and then blocking it off the same way you would block off any other commitment. It is offering assistance before it is asked for, even if it means camouflaging it in the form of “I’m going to the store, can I pick anything up for you?” It is having conversations that go nowhere even when you have dinner to start. It is unlearning so much of what many of us have taught ourselves about making every moment of our lives as efficient and optimized as possible.
Before I go, a sound postcard—after a late breakfast one weekend, while it’s crisp cold and sunny outside—of W.C. and his younger brother bringing their childhood home to life. It comes to an abrupt stop, unfortunately! (I hadn’t been planning to share it.)
A reminder that this dispatch is split into two parts. The second is here.
Thanks, as always, for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, found it illuminative in any way, I would appreciate it very, very much if you would tell your friends to subscribe.
Yours,
www.emilyding.me / instagram / twitter
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
I like to begin the Landmarkings series with a passage from a work of fiction that evokes something of our relationships with places. Here’s a passage from a short story about the rapacious development of a town through one man’s eyes, with a nice touch of surrealism that elevates.
The changes were stunning, almost impossible to believe, but a lot could happen in three weeks, especially in a town like this. Levinson was all too familiar with the kind of person who deplored change, who swooned over old buildings and spoke vaguely but reverently of earlier times, and though he was startled and a little dizzied by the sight of the new downtown, which made him wonder whether he had fallen asleep on his front porch and was dreaming it all, he looked out at the street with sharp interest, for he was wide awake, drinking his iced cappuccino on a Saturday afternoon in town, and was not one of those people who, whenever the wrecking ball swung against the side of a building, felt that a country or a civilization was coming to an end.
—Steven Millhauser, “Coming Soon”
This dispatch is split into two parts. The second is here.
You’re reading a newsletter by Emily Ding about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our personal and collective place in it.
If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free by default, or you can choose a paid membership to access private letters and help fund guest writers.
Friends and readers, hello again.
I turned another year old some days ago in a city where I don’t quite have my own community yet, so I spent it quietly, and simply, but with good feeling.
I woke up to a lovely surprise from W.C., spent half the day finishing up a deadline that I’d had to extend, attended a cousin’s wedding via Zoom with family, cosied up in a cafe where we sat indoors for the first time, spoke with friends (and their adorable children) on the phone, and played Ticket to Ride while having a home-cooked dinner of gnocchi stewed with a creamy red pepper-and-wine sauce. My parents also had an orchid plant and a bouquet of roses delivered—something we’ve taken to doing for each other over this pandemic. Since the first time W.C. delivered flowers to my family’s house back in KL when we were still apart, we’ve all been doing the same for each other. The pandemic, as hard as it has been on so many, has been a reminder to be good to the people who matter in your life—to not just appreciate them in your heart and come through in difficult times, but to also show them you care on a more consistent basis. Admittedly, I have a lot of room for improvement in this.
Thinking about birthdays: I feel like I’ve tended to play down my own after my university years, during which there was always a merry-go-round of celebrations among my circle of friends. It’s not so much to do with dreading the physical aspects of growing old, but a sense that I’ve felt less comfortable making things about me—and perhaps there’s a sense of guilt too, in asking people to come out on a particular day when you haven’t seen some of them for a long time.
Then again, why see it that way? Shouldn’t any reason to gather be a welcome thing? Or, put another way: Why does it have to be about ourselves? The times I did call for a bigger celebration I think we all always enjoyed having a reason to see each other again. It’s just another occasion to celebrate friendships. All this makes me think of a newsletter by Sari Botton called Oldster Magazine—not about the experience of “old people”, so to speak, but the experience of growing older, no matter what your age. I particularly enjoyed Alice Driver’s Q&A about turning forty, in which she also shares her sentiments about birthdays. I’ve been following her bilingual journalism on migration, and admire the self-possession with which she carries herself and her work.
The other thing about growing older as a writer is, you’re always anxious about whether you’ve produced enough good work. When you’re in your twenties, it’s enough that you show your potential. When you’re in your thirties, you wonder if you’ve manifested it sufficiently, and how much more room you have to adapt and grow. It’s not so simple, and I do know better. Some of the world’s most famous writers got their start writing books in their forties or later—Toni Morrison, Helen DeWitt, Raymond Chandler, and more recently, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson. There’s time still to make concrete one’s dream writing projects, and as Mary Oliver said, “Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.”
I have to remind myself of this, because there is so much more I want to do—more journalism and essays in longer form, a book? Short fiction, even? As soon as you finish one thing, there’s always the next thing, and then the next thing. Recently, texting briefly about this with a fellow journalist, she said, “I try to have projects that feel more pressing than any personal anxiety because the work is in the end not for or about me.” That’s solid advice, I think.
In her poem Tomorrow Is a Place, Sanna Wani writes:
There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper. There, in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.
It’s beautiful. Read the whole thing ❤️
Making sense of our place in the world
The Man Who Sailed His House by Michael Paterniti, a miraculous tale of surviving the 2011 Japanese tsunami:
You decided to abdicate to nature—or stand up to it—because somewhere inside, you had a flash of invincibility; that is, you thought, If my life is worthy and my house is well made, it will be strong enough to stand up to the wave—and the moon and stars (none of which care for you, Hiromitsu, nor soothe or feed or augur). You realize now that once you arrived home, once shown the precious thing about to be taken away forever, once you saw the garden and barn, the koi pond and the pigeons, and Yuko arrived with the rice seed, you knew you wouldn't be able to leave—that you would be doomed by obligation and memory and sentimental attachment—which is how you’ve ended up here now, on the roof of your house, nine miles out to sea.
Dancing Through New York in a Summer of Joy and Grief by Carina del Valle Schorske:
I’ve never known what “despojo” means, precisely, though it’s a word I use with some frequency to express a physical craving for spiritual catharsis: “Necesitamos despojo, quiero despojarme.” Or, watching a friend gain momentum on the dance floor and begin to enter a self-forgetful trance: “Esoooo! Des-po-jo!” My Spanish-English dictionary has only the verb (to despoil, to shed leaves) and the plural noun (the spoils of war, mortal remains, rubble, waste). Google Translate: dispossession.
The politics of archaeology in Jerusalem by Rachel Poser:
Archaeologists reconstruct the past based on whatever material has happened to linger in the ground for thousands of years—a tiny percentage of what existed at the time. Turning that partial record into a narrative about people and events takes a deep knowledge of history and some degree of imagination. Because archaeology ties identity to territory, the questions asked of it are often animated by contemporary geopolitical concerns. Armed with potsherds and inscriptions, ethnic groups or states can tell stories about the past that enable them to make claims about who they are and where they belong in the present. But that logic relies on our ability to define group identity through time, which has become even more fraught as the character of the nation-state adapts to flows of migration.
Goodbye House by Malaysian writer Samantha Cheh—about the homes that hold the memories of her childhood and her grandfather, their caretaker, who kept them lush and green:
Right in the middle was a path of octagonal stepping stones that led from the sliding doors to a corner of the garden made wild by low bushes and tall palms. We imagined ourselves as pirates leaping across treacherous, shark-infested waters, questing for a treasure buried beneath the brush. The bushes hid us from predators and adults, and there we dreamed of finding a lost city amid the towering red palms.
Young, Dumb, and Broke: Why Outdoorsy Types Suck at Money by Gloria Liu:
This same desire to belong can also drive the opposite behavior—putting on the appearance of being broke even when you aren’t. We tend to surround ourselves with people who have the same money beliefs we do, says Klontz, and we get uncomfortable if we drift above or below them financially. This is why you see tech bros and dentists wearing patched-up puffies and eating instant oatmeal in trailhead parking lots (out of their tricked-out vans). “It’s the same exact human psychology as I need to drive a Mercedes,” says Klontz, “except it’s How poor can I live? It’s a competition for that.”
Photographs that breathe
A series by Anne Moffat titled Forget Me Not 勿忘我 (2015-2019)—“a body of work made in Sandakan, Malaysia, portraying my maternal grandmother’s descent into Alzheimer’s Disease.”
Making sense of a world at once quotidian, absurd, brutal, poignant, and extraordinary
The U.N.’s Own Humanitarian Crisis by May Jeong—on the organisation’s lacking response to sexualharassment and assault among its own ranks.
It’s not just video games. Xi Jinping’s crackdown on everything is remaking Chinese society, by Lily Kuo.
Dr. Sasa Visits a Bomb-Making Class by Aye Min Thant, about how an American is teaching activists and guerrilla fighters how to make weapons and bombs, and the involvement of the National Unity Government fighting the Tatmadaw. The context around how this was published is also worth attention.
Indonesia’s tech giants are battling to bring roadside stalls online by Meaghan Tobin, Adi Renaldi, and Jihan Basyah—but not all warungs are buying into it. “The companies may, in fact, be selling a solution to a problem that doesn’t fully exist.”
The young women behind BooksActually speak up by Charmaine Poh, about the blurred lines of relationships that lie behind the indie Singaporean bookshop’s success. Follow-up by Olivia Ho.
Al Jazeera’s 101 East has a video doc about The Rising Trend of Limb Lengthening Surgeries in India. For a long time before the pandemic, I had been thinking of doing a longform story on this. Well, someone got to it!
From Terrence McCoy: Deep in the Amazon forest in Brazil, a 22-year-old indigenous Tatuyo woman goes on Tiktok… and shows us scenes from her extraordinary ordinary life. Could social media help safeguard a culture threatened by development?
A fishery observer’s job sounds simple—to monitor fishing activity. So why do they keep disappearing at sea? Story by Alicia Chen, Casper Xu, and Haohsiang Ko from a new cross-border collaborative reporting initiative, Oceans Inc.
The Cult of Virginity Just Won’t Let Go by Helen Lewis—“This fall, Britain is poised to ban virginity tests—and will consider banning hymen-repair surgery too.”
Michael Marshall on tardigrades: “the microscopic animals can withstand extreme conditions that would kill humans, and may one day help in the development of Covid vaccines”. They also look like someone stuck a vacuum filter onto a paper bag 😆
A view of home
Absolutely love this dikir barat version of the Rukunegara (Malaysia’s five “national principles”, so to speak) by Projek Bina Bangsa:
How planting fig trees could make Sabah Asia’s top wildlife tourism destination and help restore its forests, by Marco Ferrarese.
Malaysia’s Drug Law Condemns Vulnerable Women to Death by Ngeow Chow Ying—a lawyer who has been campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty, and who has been immensely helpful in my own previous reporting on the subject.
Amy Chew on the government’s persecution of Nur Sajat, Malaysia’s wanted transgender woman and cosmetics millionaire, for dressing as a woman at an Islamic event. The authorities are looking to extradite her from Thailand to face charges of blasphemy at home.
How they made us feel, by activist lawyer Ambiga Sreenevasan, on Malaysia’s ongoing upheavals and how politicians are playing themselves into irrelevance. That leads us to the hope of the burgeoning youth movement in Malaysia, which I wrote about for Al Jazeera. Do have a read ❤️
Read more about this newsletter. If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free by default, or you can choose a paid membership to access private letters and help fund guest writers. Thank you!
Reimagining our world (for better or worse)
On Sunday, as Germans cast their ballots in the federal election, 56.4 percent of Berliners also voted in a referendum to expropriate the properties of landlords owning more than 3,000 units—which could involve some 240,000 apartments. This, in a city of rising rents where 84 percent of the population are tenants. More context here by Aggi Cantrill and Hayley Warren.
World’s first commercial cultured meat production facility operational in Singapore by Audrey Tan. In December 2020, the country was also the first to approve the sale and consumption of cultured meat. However, a piece from Joe Fassler to counter the hype: Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.
Two years ago, a Chinese scientist shocked the world when he reportedly used CRISPR to produced the world’s first gene-edited humans—twin baby girls—to make them resistant to H.I.V. What else can CRISPR do? It could be used “to save species from extinction—or to eliminate them”, reports Elizabeth Kolbert.
The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost by Lisa Wells. “He did look like a king, or like a woodland deity out of Celtic mythology—his gauze-wrapped neck the only evidence of his life as a mortal.”
Say Goodbye to Your Manager by Ed Zitron—“In order to survive, managers, in other words, will need to start proving that they actually do something.”
Moving images
This is about what happens when the Chinese become the boss at an American factory. Cue several cringeworthy moments of culture clashes, sometimes laced with a kind of naïveté I also found moving—though I feel like the film only just skimmed the surface of the human relationships forged across the divide.
Something to think about
So when you think about anything from a Twitter feed or a Facebook feed to a news website, the most recent floats to the top always. It’s always in reverse chronology. And I think that’s conditioning us to believe, rather falsely, that the most recent is the most important and that the older matters less or just exists less to a point where we really have come to believe that things that are not on Google or on the news never happened, never existed, or don’t matter. I would say probably 99 percent of the record of human thought is off the internet and from the history of humanity.
—Maria Popova
Before I go, a sound postcard from Berlin.
For a long time, we only ever went where we could walk. But since getting vaccinated, we’ve started taking public transport again. Here’s a clip from the U-Bahn, when a heavyset man trundled onboard and started holding forth. Masked, he never made eye contact with anybody, and was just absorbed in his own aura—like he was chanting. Then, just as abruptly as he got on, he got off, still deep in his mantras.
This dispatch is split into two parts. The second is here.
Thanks, as always, for reading. If you’re enjoying this newsletter, I would very much appreciate it if you would tell your friends to subscribe.
Yours,
www.emilyding.me / instagram / twitter
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
I like to begin the Landmarkings series with a passage from a work of fiction that evokes something of our relationships with places. Here’s the opening passage from one of my favourite novels:
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and we houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “ws, pimps, gambler and sons of b**s,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.
—John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
This dispatch is split in two parts. The second is here.
You’re reading a newsletter by Emily Ding about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our personal and collective place in it.
If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free by default, or you can choose a paid membership to access private letters and help fund guest writers.
Friends, hello again.
And to new readers, here’s the first of many more hellos, hopefully. Thank you for being here.
It’s been said: The thing about keeping up with the news so much is that you can grow disconcertingly inured to the daily rights abuses and tragedies that aren’t happening right in front of you. What’s happening in Afghanistan, though, has torn down this wall of dislocation for me a little.
I read about the mother whose baby was trampled to death in a crowded rush to get inside Kabul airport, and the father whose despair was so great he said, “If the U.S. gives me the entire universe after I lose a child, it is worthless.” I read about the young football player who clung to a plane as it took off, fell off in mid-air, and died. I read about the women who, having found some emerging sense of ownership over their bodies and identities, are now forced to erase themselves. Literally, as their photos on the facades of beauty salons and other businesses are removed and painted over, as they scramble to disappear any hints on social media about the schools they used to attend, the jobs they used to do, the guitars they used to strum, the football they used to play. “Only memories are safe now,” said Khalida Popal, a founder and former captain of Afghanistan’s women’s national team. At the same time, as real as those gains were and as wrenching as it is to watch them being taken away again, journalist Azmat Zahra makes the point that the narrative of empowering Afghan women was used to build support for a war in Afghanistan, even as they were also shortchanged.
Amid all that’s gut-wrenching, though, the thing that really made my heart lurch was an info doc being shared around to help those in Afghanistan get themselves out of the country. Last I checked, it was written in language that was soberingly uncertain. Reading it took me out of my present moment, here, in the relative peace and quiet of Berlin. There is all this advice on what to do, but there are no guarantees, especially as the window of opportunity contracts day by day. You are told to leave your pets behind, that you can carry nothing but your documents with you. You are told that you will have to get to Kabul for any chance of being evacuated, but that you will have to find your own way there. You are told that you will likely also have to find your own way to the airport, possibly at a time outside the Taliban’s designated curfew, possibly through Taliban checkpoints. There was something to the effect that the US government will not be able to ensure safe passage to the airport.
No surprise, then, that the stories I gravitated to most were of people trying to find a way out, including this piece by a Washington Post journalist who made that treacherous—but, luckily, successful—journey with her Afghan colleagues and their families. In similarly good news, Afghanistan’s first female Paralympian, an all-girl robotics team, and its only boarding school for girls have managed to leave. It’s a relief to hear all this, but it also makes me think about what will happen to all the women who haven’t been marked out as having any professional distinction or “potential”, even as the Taliban has announced it will treat women with a lighter hand from when it ruled Afghanistan over two decades ago.
Going beyond the news, here are three stories, from past and present, I found interesting to read:
Love Crimes by Jennifer Percy, for a close-up look at the difficult project of women’s freedom in Afghanistan—how they are caught between those who want to liberate them and those who want to silence them:
Koofi showed me an iPhone photo of a girl with no lips. The woman’s husband had chopped off her nose and lips because she wouldn’t give him her jewelry. He needed money for heroin. “We have raised the awareness that women are human beings, but we have not built the capacity of the man to tolerate such a woman.” Koofi had posted the photo on Facebook. “Get your nose chopped off in Afghanistan, and you become an icon for women’s rights in the West,” she told me.
Last Tango in Kabul by Matthieu Aikins about Afghanistan’s “Kabubble” of expats in times gone by:
“People had this idea that the rules that governed normal society were just out the window,” says Tom A. Peter, a freelance journalist who lived in Kabul during the Surge. “You’re at the center of this big world event, and in a weird way that social culture is all part of that—it makes everybody feel like they’re really important.”
What I Learned While Eavesdropping on the Taliban by Ian Fritz, who served in the U.S. Air Force.
On every mission, they knew I was overhead, monitoring their every word. They knew I could hear them bragging about how many Americans they’d managed to kill, or how many RPGs they’d procured, or when and where they were going to place an IED. But amid all that hearing, I hadn’t been listening. It finally dawned on me that the b****g wasn’t just for fun; it was how they distracted themselves from the same boredom I was feeling as they went through another battle, in the same place, against yet another invading force.
Meanwhile, I’m following Kiana Hayeri, who has been reporting some great stories from Afghanistan before she evacuated. Worth reading is an in-depth Nat Geo story she recently photographed with writer Jason Motlagh about the urban-rural divide in Afghanistan which gave wheels to the Taliban takeover.
I’m also following Marcus Yam, a Malaysian photojournalist with the Los Angeles Times, whose Insta Stories show scenes from the ground. He wrote recently about being beaten by Taliban fighters while on assignment and how the encounter took an absurdist turn, and about burqas serving as a kind of barometer of the Taliban’s outlook on the status of women.
Most importantly, there are Afghan women journalists with Rukhshana Media and TOLO News, as well as activists such as the impassioned Mahbouba Seraj of the Afghan Women Skills Development Center, who have chosen to remain in the country and continue their work. “If everybody leaves, what is going to happen to Afghanistan?” Mahbouba said in a Washington Post podcast (do listen to her segment). “Besides, I’m seventy-three years old. If they want to come and kill me, hey, let them come and kill me.” But understandably, as Betsy Joles reports from Pakistan, more and more journalists are questioning whether the risks of staying are worth taking. Hats off to all of them.
As we watch what’s unfolding there from our different perches around the world, let me gently bring you, and myself, back around to Berlin. I’ve been wanting to write about this city since my first visit two years ago, but I’m still finding my feet, and I’ve yet to find the words. For now, I’ll let myself savour just being here, where it’s possible to enjoy an easy moment—eyes closed, face tilted to the wind (okay, let’s not romanticise it: on days like yesterday, the wind lashes) or to the sun—and where it’s possible to walk down the street openly, hand in hand, with someone dear.
Making sense of our place in the world
Las Marthas by Jordan Kisner, about “a visit to a colonial debutante ball in Texas where girls wear hundred-pound dresses and pretend to be Martha Washington—and the question of what it means to find yourself in the in-between”:
When I hit adolescence and the rituals of femininity became social requirements rather than play, I chafed against them, and my mother and I began to argue more over my appearance. By and large, women inherit their habits and neuroses about femininity from their mothers, and mine were inherited from my own Texan mother and, by extension, hers. The rituals of female beauty are deep-rooted in Texas, as is pageant culture—the desire to commodify the beauty of young women, and the sense that it is the moral duty of the mother to teach her daughter the rules of tasteful and advantageous self-display.
One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps, by Tahir Hamut Izgil:
Some time after, a man in his 70s had come across a Quran in his house that he hadn’t been able to find following the confiscation order. He was afraid that if he turned it over now, the officials would ask why he hadn’t relinquished it earlier, accuse him of “incorrect thinking,” and take him away to be punished. So he wrapped the Quran in a plastic bag and threw it in the Tuman River. But the authorities had installed wire mesh under all bridges, and when the mesh was cleaned, the Quran was found and turned over to the police. When officers opened it, they found a copy of the old man’s ID card: In Xinjiang, the elderly have a habit of keeping important documents in frequently read books, so that they are easily found when needed. The police tracked down the old man and detained him on charges of engaging in illegal religious activities. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.
FMA and Me: Reckoning With Anime as Japanese and American, by Nina Coomes:
Complicating the magnetism of anime were the strange expectations that white anime lovers had of me. The hungry way they stared at me, the unnatural insertion of Japanese words into their speech, their claim to “love Japan”—which usually amounted to an essentializing of what they saw on-screen with little awareness that anime often presented fantasy, not reality. They didn’t know or care about the mundane everydayness I missed so much—the oddly plush digital feeling of pressing buttons on an ATM, the cigarette-urine-plastic smell of a crowded subway station. So many of the affectations adopted by white anime enthusiasts made me feel fake and plastic, which confused my yearning for the language and familiarity I so craved.
Making sense of a world at once quotidian, absurd, brutal, poignant, and extraordinary
The influence of the “wave” of Korean music and film on global culture was no accident — a comic by Sam Nakahira.
About 400,000 of the world’s 1.6 million seafarers are Filipino. Here’s their story: The Lonely and Dangerous Life of the Filipino Seafarer by Aurora Almendral. “They came home with thick, gold chains around their necks, built tall cement houses among their neighbors’ bamboo huts, provided for their parents and sent siblings, nieces and nephews to college. Marriage proposals poured in.”
Don’t Be a Prude, by Nicole Schmidt, on Berlin’s ease with public nudity, and where it comes from. I believed I spotted a butt-naked man in Volkspark, in plain daylight, during my first summer here; now I know I wasn’t imagining things.
Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan by Yi-Ling Liu — “Indeed, in the past five years, China has become a nation obsessed with its own science fiction. What was once a niche subculture with a small circle of hardcore fans has blossomed into a full-fledged 66 billion yuan ($10 billion) industry of films, books, video games, and theme parks.”
I’m enjoying this series on iconic home designs from around the world: Berlin’s Mietskaserne tenements, Hanoi’s “tube-houses”, New Orleans’ Shotgun Houses.
Many in Pakistan have considered the sari a foreign item of clothing. Generations of Pakistani women have insisted on wearing it anyway, by Saba Imtiaz — also a story about Partition.
How Your Cup of Coffee Is Clearing the Jungle, by Wyatt Williams from Indonesia.
A view of home
Great video by Ell Zulkarnain cut from scenes of Malaysian youth protesters taking to the streets on July 31 to call for the Muhyiddin government’s resignation—which happened—melded with a galvanising track by Indonesian singer Jason Ranti. (I wrote a piece about the white flag and black flag movements for Esquire Singapore’s print magazine—out soon.)
Dozens of Malaysian Indians Died in Police Custody. Not a Single Officer Has Been Charged, by Heather Chen, with illustrations by the rebel artist Fahmi Reza (Vice documentary on him here).
Malaysia’s Sexist Citizenship Law Is Keeping Families Apart—something I wrote for Foreign Policy, about how Malaysian mothers (unlike fathers) can’t automatically pass on their nationality to children born abroad, and how a court case challenging the constitution could change this. Follow Family Frontiers for updates.
Shih-Li Kow’s short fiction Under the Circumstance, which aptly pokes fun (just a little) at Malaysia today—on the one hand, a people agitating to be progressive; and on the other, struggling to breach our complacency.
This illustration by Erica Eng, which reminds me so much of home—note the monsoon drains delineated by yellow rails! (Her Fried Rice comic, a work of autobiographical fiction, won the Eisner Award in 2020.)
Read more about this newsletter. If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free by default, or you can choose a paid membership to access private letters and help fund guest writers. Thank you!
Reimagining our world
Cutting remote workers’ pay is unfair. The alternative could be worse — Interesting take by Isabelle Roughol of the Borderline newsletter on global living, and a good starting point for discussion.
Maricá, near Rio de Janeiro, is using its own digital currency to fund one of the world's largest basic income programs, by Meaghan Tobin and Marvio Dos Anjos.
There Is No Good Reason You Should Have to Be a Citizen to Vote, by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian.
Something to think about
In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes made of our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it—with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited—it takes on a life of its own.
—Susan Orlean, The Library Book
Before I go, a sound postcard from the archives—during a solo trip to Italy, at a Ennio Morricone concert at the Verona Arena, before he passed.
The second part of this dispatch is here.
Thanks, as always, for reading. If you’re enjoying this newsletter, I would really, really appreciate it if you would share it with your friends.
Yours,
www.emilyding.me / instagram / twitter
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
I like to begin the Landmarkings series with a passage from a work of fiction that evokes something of our relationships with places. Press play for an extended reading from a Murakami short story, in which a Japanese woman tells of her mother’s trip alone to Germany—during which the latter enters a lederhosen tailor’s shop and asks a German stranger to stand in for her husband for a fitting—and the rupture that ensues. (The exaggerated German accent hews to the translated text, so, naturally, I asked a German person I know to read it! 😆)
“That’s something even Mother herself didn’t understand at the time. It made her defensive and confused. All she knew was, looking at that man in the lederhosen, she felt an unbearable disgust rising in her. Directed toward Father. And she could not hold it back. Mother’s lederhosen man, apart from the color of his skin, was exactly like Father, the shape of the legs, the belly, the thinning hair. The way he was so happy trying on those new lederhosen, all prancy and cocky like a little boy. As Mother stood there looking at this man, so many things she’d been uncertain of about herself slowly shifted together into something very clear. That’s when she realized she hated Father.”
—Haruki Murakami, “Lederhosen” from The Elephant Vanishes
This dispatch is split into two parts. The second is here.
You’re reading a newsletter by Emily Ding about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our personal and collective place in it.
If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free by default, or you can choose a paid membership to access private letters and help fund guest writers.
Hello again, everyone.
I said I would try for more frequent dispatches of Landmarkings, in hopes that they might each be shorter, so here’s the fifth in the series. I enjoy putting Landmarkings together because it also helps me take note of what I’m paying attention to, and I hope you get as much out of it too.
In some of my letters throughout this pandemic, I expressed how writing about anything but the most urgent events impacting the most vulnerable communities can feel futile, even though I am not primarily a news reporter. (I mean, my writing is almost always based on reporting, but I prefer—am better at—making sense of the news cumulatively after some time has passed.) I’ve also been wanting to take this time to complete a piece of short fiction, and I’ve been finding it difficult to give myself the mental space for it. I imagine some of you must be feeling the same.
But recently, I read a piece by Tess Taylor about how communities in Belfast employ “art as civic repair”, to bridge the indelible divide left by the Troubles—a divide I saw for myself and wrote about a couple of years back. It really lifted my spirits, and made me realise again that art in all its forms, broadly interpreted, is essential, even more so in difficult times. Taylor also argues that cultural investments can serve “as pollinators, helping to rebuild the ecosystem”. It’s the same plea the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre made in its open letter, as new daily coronavirus infections in the country continued to climb, hitting a record high of 17,045 yesterday.
At one point, Taylor writes about how, three days after the 2016 elections in America which ushered in Trump’s presidency, she went on an assigned road trip through rural Virginia to write a travel article for an upscale magazine. She had been excited about the trip, but suddenly, all she felt was grief and rage. She arrived at a Friday night square dance along the Crooked Road, Virginia’s heritage music trail, feeling “suspicious of anyone who would square-dance at such a moment”. But she took a deep breath, and joined in.
In the end, she writes, “When I was done, I realized that I could be angry or I could dance, but I could not do both at the same time. I did not lose my resolve to fight for the things I care about, but I also noticed how the dance invited a small mountain community into a social contract: dancing together was a way of agreeing to care for one another.”
Making sense of our place in the world
Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu write in their newsletter A Broad and Ample Road about returning to “the Motherland”, Taiwan, to make a new life together after already building their lives in America. From Michelle:
There is a path, though, whereby returning is not a loss, whereby global hierarchies don’t hold the sway they did for my parents. It brings me great joy to see how far ahead of me today’s Gen-Z Asian Americans are in embracing it. I’ve been electrified by that openness and curiosity in my students, and it’s inspired me to think about a version of my sense of self where I don’t have to be articulate and native, where I can learn new cultures and manifest solidarity by making myself vulnerable. It’s put me in mind of the idea of pilgrimage: leaving a familiar place, but with a purpose. That’s what my parents did: like all immigrants, they were pilgrims. They came to the U.S. so that their children could have a better life. And children, in turn, are supposed to “make their sacrifices worthwhile,” to use the line everyone repeats. But what does that mean? What makes sacrifices worthwhile? Can’t we define success in a way that allows for parents to become rooted and secure enough for their children to become pilgrims again, to continue the journey, to not stagnate?
Suzanne Joinson in Hotel Melancholia:
I grew up in a clapped-out seaside town on the south coast of England, not so many miles away from Emin’s Margate. I did everything I could to escape the shingle, the bad weather, the faded, John Betjeman‑esque hotels where I had summer jobs waitressing for sleazy hotel bosses, serving ice cream to ancient old ladies. For many years, I equated this chalky, desolate coastline and the squawking of seagulls with death: the end of the world, the end of time.
I circled the globe as many times as possible, but just as Jean Rhys found herself continually back in the same bedsits – ‘predestined, she had returned to her starting-point in this little Bloomsbury bedroom that was so exactly like the little Bloomsbury bedrooms she had left nearly 10 years before…’ – I find myself living again in a similarly run-down seaside town, a spitting distance from London, a spitting distance from Gatwick airport, walking along a tide-line scattered with cuttlefish bones and dried fish eggs. I now live close to a seafront lined with shabby hotels with names such as the Belle View and the Sea Bright. When I peer into the windows, I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s disparaging list of hotel ‘decorations’: the ‘unattractive wallpaper’ and the ‘Turkey carpets’. In the end, to remain alive, I gave up the fancy travelling job. I gave up pretending that London, or any other city, was my home and moved back to the weather and the seagulls and the shabby hotels, to work on making an uneasy peace with standing still.
David Hoon Kim in When I Lived in French:
For me, despite what French represents for many people—either a symbol of elitism or an instrument of colonialism—it was, above all, a neutral language, neither the language of my upbringing (Korean) nor the language of my immigration (English). In other words, it was an idiom that belonged entirely to me, because I was the one who had chosen it. According to Akira Mizubayashi, a Japanese author who writes in French, a language is something that exists outside of national borders: you can come and go as you please, without answering to any higher power or authority.
(More about Kim in a companion newsletter from the NYRB.)
Making sense of a world at once quotidian, absurd, brutal, poignant, and extraordinary
The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles by Rachel Aviv. A mind-blowing story that goes into the historical background—perhaps an overreaction to Nazism?—that permitted this experiment.
In 1976, the magazine Das Blatt argued that forbidden sexual desire, such as that for children, was the “revolutionary event that turns our everyday life on its head, that lets feelings break out and that shatters the basis of our thinking.” A few years later, Germany’s newly established Green Party, which brought together antiwar protesters, environmental activists, and veterans of the student movement, tried to address the “oppression of children’s sexuality.” Members of the Party advocated abolishing the age of consent for sex between children and adults.
Six Months Inside One of America’s Most Dangerous Industries (i.e. a slaughterhouse), which is heavily dependent on migrant workers from Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, by Michael Holtz. Quoting an HR rep: “We pretty much feed the world. That’s why when the coronavirus started, we didn’t shut down. Because you guys want to eat, right?”
At 17, biologist Juliane Diller was the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Amazon. Fifty years later she still runs Panguana, a research station founded by her parents in Peru, by Franz Lidz. Diller had fallen some 10,000 feet, but survived miraculously with minor injuries because her row of seats had landed in dense foliage, which cushioned the impact. “The jungle caught me and saved me,” she said. “I vowed that if I stayed alive, I would devote my life to a meaningful cause that served nature and humanity.” / I had heard of her story some years back while I was in Peru. If you ever get lost in the jungle, just follow the water to a river, like her, I remember someone told me.
How Singapore Is Creating More Land for Itself by Samantha Subramaniam. Remembering Lee Kuan Yew’s words: “In a world where the big fish eat small fish and the small fish eat shrimps, Singapore must become a poisonous shrimp.”
‘You have to be violent to be heard’: Northern Ireland’s teens take to the streets, by Laura Noonan—with photos that capture the wonder and weirdness of being a teen in Belfast, by Megan Doherty.
A view of home
Redang folk turn to farming to survive pandemic by Hasnoor Hussein. / The Malaysian Insight has been publishing some great photo essays that give us a close-up look at the impact of the pandemic on human lives.
Hartal Doktor Kontrak, a nationwide movement, says that doctors will strike on 26 July if their demands are not met—even as COVID-19 rages through the country, by Minxi Chua. / Update on the strike from Between The Lines.
Decision to cancel talk by renowned dancer Ramli Ibrahim reignites debate about the impact of religious conservatism on cultural traditions, by Marco Ferrarese / I also wrote about this with regards to wayang Kulit in Kelantan a while back.
How we move and live now
The Jessica Simulation: The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more? By Jason Fagone, on Joshua Barbeau’s search for closure through AI.
He couldn’t reboot her anyway, even if he wanted to, thanks to the randomness setting in the site’s code that made each version of a bot unique. The current Jessica was sweet and loving and comforting, but next time, Joshua knew, she might suddenly get mad at him about something, and stay mad. Joshua wasn’t sure he could deal with a simulation of Jessica that said hurtful things.
From Turkey: Farm Bank let players make money, while supporting real farms. Then the CEO vanished with $80 million, by Paul Benjamin Osterlund. “In my opinion, people conned themselves,” said the app’s programmer.
The wealthy Nigerians buying citizenship overseasbyOllie Williams: “Golden visas are the lesser-reported side of the Nigerian migration story.” / This Swiss Lawyer Is Helping Governments Get Rich Off Selling Passports by Jason Clenfield
Nathan Heller from the US: The traditional home is under renovation. Can people find meaning in groups? “What can be a deliberate life-style decision in strong social democracies is a financial necessity in much of the world; the ‘intention’ in intentional community reflects some luxury of choice.” / Plus a view from Asia.
The pandemic didn’t kill Singapore’s UNESCO-listed food stalls. Delivery apps might, by Peter Guest. “Hawkers, he said, simply can’t compete on the apps, which typically charge 30% commission, wiping out any profit they could make.”
Mise-en-scène
Lynell George in Safe at home in Los Angeles:
It’s just out of reach, the source of this memory: An image from a film on a loop, flickering like the California Dream itself. A critical scene shift. An establishing shot locates us in a sleek, dim bedroom: Drapes, pulled apart, allow a streak of clear, sharp light; tropical plants with scalloped leaves stir in a suggested breeze; palm fronds throw spiked inky shadows on a white wall. The protagonist raises herself in bed, reaches for a peignoir. Sitting back, she accepts the breakfast tray from an unidentified attendant. It’s arranged with toast and coffee, a grapefruit half. Next to the dishes, a folded newspaper confirms what we already suspect—know—that we are in Los Angeles. We intuit this from the delicate change in light from powdery to aqueous, which tells us always that the East has been shed for the West. It’s the morning of a new chance, so different from the half-light of the last location.
Read more about this newsletter. If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free by default, or you can choose a paid membership to access private letters and help fund guest writers. Thank you!
Reimagining our world
Is Poverty Necessary?An idea that won’t go away, by Marilynne Robinson:
In order to understand all this, I read classical economics, using Marx’s Capital as an annotated bibliography, working back through time to the late eighteenth century. It was fascinating to see how endlessly a little clutch of certitudes could elaborate itself without ever evolving. The crucial assertion at the center of it all is called “the iron law of wages,” which says that the price of labor must and will tend always toward subsistence, quite literally toward the level consistent with the worker’s survival. Then there is “the labor theory of value,” which proposes that labor is the source of all economic value. One might expect this to imply that the value of labor should be reflected in wages. But this would defy that iron law. So the theory is interpreted to mean that labor is the great cost in the making of anything, which would diminish capital, the ultimate employer. If wages rose above subsistence, this would plunge the whole system into ruin. Thus workers must be kept poor for their own sake. Or, a less benign view: workers would subvert the social wealth, impoverishing the nation, if they by any means had more than they absolutely need. William Beveridge, called the Father of the Welfare State, wrote economics of just this kind, and so did Beatrice Webb. I have no reason to think it ever died out. Indeed, American practice moves continuously in this direction, toward the radical polarization this economics was meant to promote and rationalize.
On This German Farm, Cows Are in Charge. Or at Least Coequals, by Melissa Eddy. “No animal is there to serve a human need”.
A migrant hunger strike is shaking Belgium’s government, by Camille Gijs; and an update here on its suspension, by Jakob Hanke Vela. “Six strikers have sewn their mouths shut. Five tried to commit suicide. Some stopped drinking water.” All for the struggle to gain resident status.
Who’s Afraid of the Four Day Work Week? by Anne Helen Petersen, which includes some context on the Icelandic trials.
World’s leading economies commit to global minimum corporate tax rate, by Richard Partington.
Something to think about
In Malay, we use the term ‘lupa’ (literally: to forget or forgetting) to describe a state of ecstatic trance, a prevalent feature of ritual performance in the Malay world and Southeast Asia. While there is, of course, a sense of uncertainty and risk associated with ‘lupa’, it is also a doorway to a visceral freedom otherwise unattainable in mundane reality. In the transitory casting off of the social self, one discovers another, more essential, self. I see such liminal experience as instructive to the process of translation—perhaps in losing (ourselves and meaning) we can access hidden aspects of language, something there but yet unwritten.
—Pauline Fan
Before I go, a sound postcard from where I am. I’ve been collecting several of these from the road over the years, and I might as well start sharing them.
The second part of this dispatch is here. Thanks, as always, for reading.
www.emilyding.me / instagram / twitter
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
Studies in minor details: An exercise in watching people and noticing how this city—until recently a poster child for overtourism—is changing as it settles into summer.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
The world outside your door: a wide-ranging round-up of stories about people and places & how we (want to) live now.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
The world outside your door: a wide-ranging round-up of stories about people and places & how we (want to) live now.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
What I've learnt from more than a decade exploring the world on my own, and what it means to me.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
The world outside your door: a wide-ranging round-up of stories about people and places & how we (want to) live now.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe
The world outside your door: a wide-ranging round-up of stories about people and places & how we (want to) live now.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit movableworlds.substack.com/subscribe