Penis To Meet You

Last weekend I met a man whose passport made me laugh hysterically. Now, normally I try not to do that, but here’s the thing: his name was MAN SUCK. You’d think it was a joke, or at least an exaggeration, but trust me on this one: language in Korea is a quagmire, a hot pot of words from around the world served up by well-intentioned, but often hilariously misguided people- and to be fair, I’m one of them. You see, I live with two problems: first, the English that I’m required to correct in the classroom, or edit and rewrite, is insane- barely recognizable most of the time. And second, the Korean language is made out of Lego. It’s just simple building blocks. Great, you’d think, and to some extent you’d be right, but I have a word of caution: in English, if you omit the ending of a verb, you have, for example, work, instead of worked. If you omit the ending of a verb, or any word for that matter, in Korean, you have a totally different word. You see, in Korean, each piece of Lego is really, really, really important.

But first let me tell you about the joy of watching and hearing my native tongue cut out, stir fried with seaweed, and served in a piping hot stone bowl with rice. I spent a year teaching children, enjoying the daily slips in English, like kids telling me with absolute sincerity that when they grew up they wanted to be pencil sharpeners. “Ah, yes, a pencil sharpener, how interesting”, I would say, before inquiring just what exactly such a job would entail. But nothing that I encountered that year could prepare me for my work with Korea’s largest steel company, the fifth largest in the world, it turns out, although how they’ve managed to break into the international market remains a linguistic mystery.

What I do know, is that the following sentence is insane, totally, unbelievably insane:

We will constantly get your demanders’ trust by practicing the management philosophy to insure the substantiality than value the scale or appearance.

Right, I’ll just make that make sense. No problem. Sure. Um, here’s the thing: I quit. And you know what? I really did. Okay, so I lasted nine months, during which time I developed a strange sixth sense for understanding sentences and paragraphs, and in fact, twenty-page documents, full of “language” like that. No one knows how I did it. Not even me. Of course, somewhere, on the internet or in company brochures, there exists piles and piles of incorrect information about one of the biggest companies in the world, but really, whose fault is that?

So, having quit my job deciphering hieroglyphics, I’ve been endeavoring to learn some more Korean. After all, my new friend Man Suck tells me it’s just like Lego. But I’ve already told you the catch. And you know, you don’t even have to entirely omit a word ending to screw things up- you can just speak too slowly. Here’s an example: If I say the equivalent in Korean of “I don’t want anything else to eat,” people will understand. “But, if I say I don’t want any…” it would mean “listen, penis.” Amazing stuff. But let’s not leave it there. No. What about “I don’t want a break.” Harmless? Hardly. Miss a single syllable and you’ll be approaching your boss to tell them “no, vagina.” Yep, and it’s so easy to do.

Granted, everyone stares at me all the time, sometimes with a great deal of pointing and laughing, but just the idea that I could have a conversation like the following, is enough to make me quit studying right now, pack my bags, and go home, where I can point and laugh at the Korean tourists in Victoria’s inner harbour, with their massive cameras and expensive hiking hear.

Matt, can I get you anything else to eat?
Well, penis, thank you.
Er, um, do you want to relax a little, or should we get going?
No, vagina is fine. You?
Silence.
I said nipple bum tickle. Do you understand? Wait, where are you going?

Let’s face it: English is a pain the nipple bum tickle to learn, but at least it’s more difficult to brutally offend your host with than certain Asian languages, although Man Suck may have something more to say about all of this, especially since he’s now used his passport for international travel and can never change the English version of his name to the phonetically correct Man Sawk. Poor sucker, although, I guess that makes two of us.

Cell Phones & Dog Bones

This article is a how-to manual for eating, as so many of my friends would say, ‘weird shit’. (As in “whoa man, that’s some seriously weird shit.”) It’s also the story of how my new mobile phone, which I still view with the healthy disdain of a Vancouver Islander, played a part in turning me into a culinary monster.

Here is the actual transcript of my first ever interaction on a cell phone:

“Hello.” (This greeting, in my experience, is common, and generally inoffensive.)
“The dog’s ready.” (This greeting, in my apparently limited experience, is neither.)
“Um, right, hello?” (Might as well try again.)
“The dog.”
“The dog?”
“It’s ready. Sixth floor of the department.”

I stood staring at the phone for a minute until Shawna asked me who it was.

“Dunno,” I said, staring at the Korean display. The phone rang again. Actually it whistled. It does that. I don’t know how to change it because the instruction manual is written entirely in Korean. Go figure.

Here is the transcript of my second ever interaction on a cell phone:

“Hello?” (Ever the optimist.)
“Are you coming?”
“Who is this?”
“The dog’s ready.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“Good. Tell Shawna.”

Turns out it was Professor Moon. See, the confusing thing was that the voice had no Korean accent. He lived in California for years, and his English is perfect, which should have narrowed it down, and would have, if I’d ever spoken to him before. This, by the way, is a man who later slipped the story of his brother being shot to death in LA into a conversation about marriage. Oh, and his marriage was pre-arranged by his father. (If that’s not intriguing, then you should check your pulse and see a doctor.) Great guy, although, well, as you can see, sometimes a little ambiguous when it comes to explanations. The facts, yeah, the facts he delivers well and with gusto. But explanations? Forget about them.

As promised, the dog, cooked and served with a wide variety of fermented vegetables and dipping sauces, was waiting for us in a classroom on the sixth floor of the Tourism English Department of Chang-Shin College. And why shouldn’t it have been? I mean, study some verbs and do a grammar test, eat boiled dog meat… There’s clearly a logical connection.

To be honest, it wasn’t bad. It tasted like a fatty, beef pot roast. I was surprised by the fat. I imagine all dogs as really lean and kinda scrawny.

In case you’re wondering what people talk about while eating dog:

“It’s good for your stamina,” said Professor Moon.
“My stamina?” I said.
“Sex drive.”
“Right. Dog meat. Sex. Sure.”
“Last time I ate it I was really excited, and I drove right home to my wife. But it didn’t work,” said Professor Moon.
“Interesting,” I said, and I meant it.
“So I complained, and the restaurant owner told me that you have to eat the penis and the two balls.”
“Both balls?” I asked. Shawna kicked my shins under the table. Both shins.
“Yeah, so I ate the two balls.”

At this point Professor Moon finished eating, stood up, and left the room without a word. I presumed that he was driving home as fast as he could to see his wife, but Shawna sent a fiery glare across the table, which I interpreted as ‘just shut up and eat your dog meat’.

I’m sharing this story with you for a reason: you see, I’ve become quite a connoisseur of weird shit over the past three years. Here is a partial list: dog meat, the still-beating heart of a cobra, snake meat, sting ray, eel, sea urchin, sea slug, sea cucumber intestines, raw fish of all shapes and sizes, and octopus and squid in a wide variety of forms and stages of preparation. And of course I’ve also partaken in some fun Canadian fads like emu, ostrich, and caribou meats.

The hardest one to eat was actually the still-moving slices of sea cucumber parts and innards, which are really, really, really chewy, and excruciatingly difficult to swallow. The snake heart was a bit of a trial too, although I was fully aware that it would make me famous, or at least infamous, as opposed to the sea cucumber intestines, which just made me sick.

The secret of stomaching weird shit is simple: you’ve probably heard professional athletes talk about ‘the zone’, a state of being in which the mind and body harmonize to achieve amazing feats, like dunking a basketball from the free-throw line, or scoring the winning penalty shot in a World Cup soccer final. It’s the same deal with food. I don’t think about it exactly. I don’t talk about it at all, especially not during the meal. I don’t even really exist on a conscious earthly level. I just kinda float beside the table. I even have a mantra: it’s just weird shit. It’s just weird shit. It’s just weird shit. And then, before I know it, I’ve delighted my fans, or, in this case, Korean hosts who have spent a lot of money buying me the weirdest, most sacrilegious items in their country to eat while they watch on and sometimes cheer.

Granted, I’ve been extremely sick many times in Asia, but then, not everyone can say that they’ve ingested snake penis wine, or chewed on a sea cucumber intestine while it writhed and turned between their teeth. Oh, and as for the ethics of eating dog meat, please. Just imagine a Hindu touring a North American cattle ranch, and you’ll see my point.

Right, and one last thing: nothing, and I mean nothing, tastes like chicken.

Easter

I was ten years old and it wasn’t Easter. It was the end of May and the butterfly-blossom yellow-winged flowers were open on the Scotch broom along Deloume Road. The maples leaned over the stained asphalt in a canopy of green leaves that seemed to absorb the sun and cast cool shadows over the heat-stricken road. The leaves’ sap veins reminded me of the backs of my father’s hands. There were cedars too, the buzzing of insects and the smell of drying grass. Somewhere in the underbrush was the sound of a snake shedding its skin.

It was still too early for blackberries so my brother and I were using the juice-stained four-liter ice cream bucket for a hockey helmet. It had a shoelace for a handle and new holes were cut through the sides of the plastic for the string, because the original holes had torn through. The helmet was ridiculous over his blond hair and it rocked from side to side as I shot tennis balls at him over the smooth cement of our family’s carport.

But it was what happened in the kitchen when we took a water break inside that I remember most vividly. I used one of my mother’s dishcloths to wipe sweat off my forehead before dropping it onto the floor. And when I bent down to pick it up, I saw, in the corner of an open kitchen cupboard, beside a stack of pastel Tupperware and a white casserole dish, a small, chocolate Easter egg wrapped in blue tinfoil.

It was there because my parents hid Easter eggs for us every year, and even though they counted them carefully, my brother and I had the habit of eating them as we found them, so that no one was ever certain whether or not they had all been found. I sometimes like to think that some of them are still in that house, hidden forever in the unvisited cracks between cupboards.

When I held the tiny chocolate egg in my hand something happened in the pit of my stomach. I had no desire to consume the egg, although I think my brother did eat it, but finding that egg caused me to revisit Easter. It caused me to remember the excitement of searching for Easter eggs, but it also grieved me. Not just crucifixion or death, or even the profound irony of a carpenter being nailed into wood. What settled into my stomach was the knowledge that I had forgotten about Easter entirely, that it was an event that I only allowed myself to explore once a year.

Something in me changed that day. The smell of fresh-cut grass and the white-winged moths around the ancient Douglas fir tree in our yard took on meaning. They began to have something to do with Easter. The heat waves over the asphalt of Deloume Road and the wild strawberries tangled in the tall grass on each side of our driveway spoke to me of new life, but also of death. Ideas that had never gone together before joined in a way that I still can’t explain so that mourning and joy, death and life, winter and spring, turned into an early summer breeze. They turned into the broken hallelujah of bent sword-ferns, into the sounds of children playing road hockey, into the moving shadows of Alder leaves in the late afternoon, into every sight and sound around me, until my world became saturated with both grief and happiness.

And now I think this is how it is. We revisit death and suffering to better understand joy, and we understand both better because of the other. It is because of Christ’s death that all of creation is reconciled with the Creator. And even though I may not fully understand the significance of everything that Easter is, I know one thing for certain: when I look at the sap veins of a maple leaf, I see my Father’s hands.

Tintin & Reincarnation: Vietnam & Cambodia

Cilantro, cinnamon, vodka on breath, exhaust from countless scooters, and the smell of cooking meat on the streets of Hanoi disappear for a moment as a woman lights a bundle of incense sticks outside her shoe store.

I climb a flight of stairs and sit on the second story balcony of the Hummingbird Café, watch as a group of three children weave in and out of scooters, pause in front of a store selling brightly wrapped candy for the Lunar New Year’s celebration, and then continue out of sight, undaunted by the blaring horns or crowded streets.

It’s raining out of season and cold, so I lean over my Lipton Tea and let the steam warm my face before adding enough sweetened condensed milk to kill a diabetic. I dangle the tea bag like a fishing line, holding the tab between my thumb and middle finger, and using my index finger to jig it up and down. It spins slowly.

What stand out to me as I walk towards Hoan Kiem Lake are things that I didn’t expect, and could never have anticipated. Images of Tintin, red ribbons tied to telephone lines, and miniature orange trees on the sidewalk. And then there’s what I had hoped for: the stacks of baguettes, French architecture, bearded men with black berets selling books of poetry. I’m stopped by a woman who offers me a Vietnamese soccer jersey or a t-shirt with the face of Ho Chi Minh emblazoned on the front. It feels like a test so I smile, shake my head and keep walking.

I’m stopped again, but this time by a young man who asks me where I’m from. I smile again and sigh.

“Canada,” I say, although it takes all the effort I can muster not to ask him why it matters.

He tells me how highly he thinks of Canada, and I laugh, not because I’m proud (pride isn’t something they teach in Canadian schools), but because I could finish the conversation without him. Next time, I think, I will remember to say Iceland, or Greenland. I wait patiently for the sales pitch. What will it be? Post cards, photocopied travel books, authentic-fake, name-brand sunglasses?

But I’m wrong.

“Have you ever eaten snake?” He asks.

I shake my head. We talk for a minute then catch a taxi to a snake farm a few minutes outside the city.

The owner holds up a live cobra and smiles at me. My new friend translates.

“You want to touch it?” He asks.

“No,” I say firmly.

Thirty seconds later the snake’s tail is wrapped around my wrist.

“You want to try eating it?” Asks my friend/translator/devil on my shoulder.

“Absolutely not,” I say, glancing up at the exit.

The owner nods and cuts open the snake’s belly. He bleeds it into a glass jar then squeezes the heart into a shot glass.

“That’s for you,” says the snake farmer in Vietnamese.

“Forget it,” I say, but both men are already smiling.

We eat the whole thing. First, the still-beating heart with vodka.

“It’s Chinese medicine,” says my translator. “Look at how strong it is, still beating.”

I’m surprised when I don’t gag. Then comes the snake blood. Again I’m surprised. No flavor. Snake spring rolls. Barbecued snake. Fried snake vertebrae. Deep fried snake skin.

I could have stopped there.

“Wine made from snake penis is good for your stamina,” says the owner.

“No thanks,” I say, but we’re way passed that.

Afterwards I get a lesson in Vietnamese business. The bill is two hundred dollars. We settle on fifty and I leave wondering why in the hell I didn’t ask for the price first? I also realize that my ‘tour guide’ set me up. But in hindsight, it’s a small price to pay for a lesson that will no doubt keep me out of trouble in the future, not to mention an experience that will become the trump card for the ‘what’s-the-weirdest-thing-you’ve-ever-eaten’ conversation.

That evening I wander through the streets of the old quarter, watch shop owners place food and clothing on alters along the sidewalk for their ancestors. The air is full of ash from photocopied paper money. I’m told these rituals ensure that when their dead family members return, they will have food, clothing, and money, all of which they were forced to leave behind when they passed from this world into the next. I wonder why they return?

I take a night train from Hanoi to Hue, and then a bus further south to Hoi An, where I celebrate the Lunar New Year sitting on the bank of the Thu Bon River, watching thousands of prayer candles float past me in paper boats. I stare at them without blinking, searching for the right prayer, but none seems appropriate. One candle tips sideways and is extinguished.

Three weeks later in Cambodia, at the temple of Angkor Thom, I sit watching monks in orange robes light incense. It must be the mix of Hinduism and Buddhism apparent in the temples, but I can’t stop thinking about reincarnation.
An orange butterfly flutters past my head and then lands on my index finger: less than the weight of a teabag. I close my eyes and breath incense. When I open them again, the butterfly is gone and a monk is standing in front of me smiling. He brushes some dust off his orange robe and points to the disposable camera that I’m holding in my left hand.

“Want me to take your picture?” He asks.

I nod and pose for the photo.

Later, at home, I will smile and point to that same photograph as I tell a friend that it was taken by a monk who was the reincarnation of a butterfly.

“Really?” She asks. Then, “how do you know he wasn’t a bird, or a snake?”

I stop smiling and she notices, thumbs through the next few photographs awkwardly: a block of ice tied to the back of a bicycle; a woman melting palm sugar who refused to smile because she was missing teeth; a poster marking the 75th anniversary of communism, complete with the face of Ho Chi Minh, the hammer and sickle, and impossibly white peace doves. Then the islands of Halong Bay rising like chipped teeth from the green water; Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, where his embalmed body lies bathed in golden light, despite his request that he be cremated; the tombs along the Perfume River; and finally, an orange sunset over the madness of Saigon.

That night I unpack my bag. When I pull out a fleece jacket, a shower of ash falls on the floor around me. The jacket smells of incense, of smoke from the prayer money that the Vietnamese burned for their ancestors. I toss the jacket into the laundry bin in the corner of my bedroom and sit down on the end of my bed.

Two days later I still haven’t gotten around to doing laundry, and the smell of the jacket lingers in the air. I think of the prayer candles in the Thu Bon River, of the one I saw list and sink, before drifting downstream in darkness, pulled away from me by the unceasing, unseen current.

At last I have a prayer to go with the candles on the river, and I whisper it out loud.

Anything but a snake.

Death by Bus Ticket in Vietnam

Four weeks after downing the still-beating heart of a cobra with vodka, I’m happy to report that I haven’t experienced a single side effect. In fact, since returning from Vietnam, the only trouble I’m having is with my spine, the discs of which have been permanently realigned thanks to that nation’s ‘open tour’ bus ticket.
To better understand travel in Vietnam, I recommend dressing up as a Jehovah’s Witness (or Mormon, if you like hats) and walking around your neighborhood asking for directions. This will give you some idea of what it’s like to convince a local travel agent to sell you a train or plane ticket, or for that matter, anything other than an ‘open tour’ bus ticket within a month of the Lunar New Year.
The conversation went like this:
“Hello, I’d like to buy a train ticket please.”
Silence. Perhaps he doesn’t speak English, I think, despite the nametag on the travel agent’s shirt that says ‘I speak English’. I sit for a minute fidgeting as he stares at me, before trying again.
“What hotel are you staying at?” He finally asks.
“The Lotus,” I say, distracted by his perfect pronunciation.
“Too expensive,” he says. “Too far from town. You wanna stay at my friend’s hotel? Cheap?”
I pause for another minute. My hotel offers free shuttle service into town, is dirt cheap, clean, and has a swimming pool.
“Um, about the train ticket?” I offer up, glancing up at the large sign above his head that reads ‘TRAIN TICKETS NO PROBLEM’.
He shakes his head and picks up the phone. In Vietnamese he greets his mother, inquires about dinner, and hangs up.
“No trains till August 18th, 2013,” he says.
“What about flights?”
“Cost about fifty, five, seven, sixty dollars,” he says, looking up and to the right, presumably to access the creative part of his brain.
“Right, can you call and ask?”
He sighs, which is understandable, because what kind of asshole tourist would want to buy an airline ticket from Danang to Saigon from a Vietnam Airlines representative? I look up at the sign bearing the airline company’s logo.
“Hey bro,” he says in Vietnamese over the phone. “Are we still on for beers tonight? Great.” He hangs up the phone. “No tickets until next spring. You wanna stay at my friend’s hotel?”
Five travel agents later I have a list of tickets with times and dates ranging over twenty years, and a price list that starts at fifty and ends at something close to eight million American, which I suspect was a bid on some type of aircraft left over from the war.
When I return to my hotel a new receptionist, who speaks perfect English, greets me. She assures me that a train ticket will be no problem, and that I can pick it up the next morning. Optimistic, I know.
“Hi,” I say the next morning. “Any luck?”
“Sorry, no train tickets till next year. Would you like to book a room until then?”
“Um, what about an ‘open tour’ bus ticket?” I ask.
This she can arrange in seven seconds.
I have been putting ‘open tour’ in quotations because I believe that the title is somewhat misleading. They should be called ‘if-they-want-to-leave-your-hotel-make-sure-they-regret-it-for-the-rest-of-their-lives’ bus tickets, or ‘crap-yourself-with-fear-as-your-lunatic-driver-swerves-in-and-out-of-traffic-around-hairpin-turns-on-treacherous-mountain-raods’ bus tickets. I haven’t figured out how to accommodate the vomit running up and down the aisles or the loose latches on the exterior luggage compartment doors into a title yet, but I’m working on it.
For those of you who are thinking that I’m a culturally insensitive bigot, please understand that I’ve lived in Asia for almost two years, and have traveled without complaining by all forms of planes, trains, taxis, motorbikes, bicycles, rowboats, ferries, rickshaws, buses, subways, and elephants. And I’m not saying that Vietnam isn’t a wonderful destination, with smells of cilantro, incense, and lemongrass, French architecture and water buffalos standing under palm trees between rice paddies. But the ‘open tour’ bus ticket is something special. Something of note. Something that I didn’t expect among the Tintin comics, conical hats, and miniature orange trees tied to the backs of scooters. My lovely and scenic trips included bare smelly feet resting on my shoulders, unscheduled two-hour tours of towns as we were leaving them, no air-conditioning or ventilation of any kind, and additional charges for tickets at each stop, despite the alluring promise of the ‘open tour’.
My favorite moment on the bus involved the seat in front of me reclining into my knees and then breaking, so that it fell flat onto my lap. The Vietnamese passenger in the broken seat smiled up at me, his eyelids fluttering then closing, before asking me to tousle his hair and sing him a lullaby.[1]
Now that I’m at home and the experiences have sunk in and the smells have faded from memory, I’ve begun to think about it like this: the Vietnamese don’t treat foreigners as guests, they treat them like invaders. And really, with hordes of Western tourists touting gigantic cameras like guns, it’s easy to get the feeling that there’s still a war going on. I can’t very well blame people for wanting to win. This is why selling ‘open tour’ bus tickets to people like me can’t really be considered bad service. It’s a form of combat, of warfare, and of revenge, and trust me, it’s effective.
[1] Since Vietnamese has roughly 400 tones, even the first word of the simplest lullaby’s title is unpronounceable. Vietnamese music is even difficult to hum. But don’t think I let that stop me from stroking my new friend’s hair or from giving him a goodnight peck on the forehead.