I’m coming back to this neglected, vintage blog to post some stuff. I have been instructed to promote my upcoming book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, on social media. I am a bit loathe to wade into that septic morass, but it seems it must be done. Doing it here on WordPress as well as on the wider web makes me somehow feel a little better about the whole thing. Here I have some control and am not vying for algorithmic attention with QAnon.

I got this idea for a little instructional video series of “secrets to superhuman strength,” so here’s the first one. (I thought calling it #27 would motivate me to do more than one.) The book is about my lifelong pursuit of physical fitness, and how it has saved me by getting me out of my head and into my body. It’s about a lot of other things, too, but moving in an energetic fashion, especially outside, is key.

Divorce just blows. There’s no other way around it. It’s not fun and it’s certainly nothing like the booze filled Divorce Train to a ranch in Reno that was featured in the 1939 classic movie The Women. But if there is any upside to suddenly being on your own after twenty years of shared decisions…it’s that ALL THE THINGS are back on the table: jobs in remote areas, eating microwave popcorn for dinner three nights in a row, traveling without checking someone else’s calendar…and where to retire. 

I’ve always harbored a fantasy of spending my retirement (if that ends up being a possibility for me) in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas. It’s my favorite birding area in the United States. I’ve often said that the day I’m tired of seeing a green jay is the day that it’s time for me to hang up my binoculars. But the idea of a tiny home, with a water feature, native plantings and access to all the Tex Mex food I want and maybe volunteering at Estero Llano Grande just seems like a wonderful way to round out the last part of my life. 

When I tried warming up my ex-husband to the idea he wasn’t having it. I remember I took him down there for work and as we were driving around Harlingen he said, “Man, what a depressing area.”

“What are you talking about, this place is beautiful,” I protested.

“I see why you like the birds and the parks, but this place isn’t beautiful,” he said. 

We saw things with very different lenses. But now retiring in Texas is back on the table and I decided fly down to the Valley in February…it was my last trip on a plane for a looooooong time. But I’m glad that my last plane trip was to a favorite place and not someplace like Mexico, Missouri.

This trip, I made a point to stop at the National Butterfly Center, ground zero of the border wall fight. The federal government contractors started clearing the land before the wall project had been announced, much less before any eminent domain procedures had been followed. I started to drive to the property and a sheriff’s car was parked at the entry and told me we that we couldn’t get in. I thought it was odd but check in at the visitor center. “Of course you can get in. Unless they’re doing an active pursuit of people trying to cross, the area is open.”

There’s plenty to see and do around the grounds. It’s meant for butterflies but birds abound there and it’s a great spot for all the Valley specialties and sometimes there are bonuses like the Audubon’s oriole that was hanging out while I was there. The staff and volunteers also showed visitors an eastern screech-owl roosting in a picnic shelter. Here’s a video:

After walking the grounds for an Audubon’s oriole, I went back and the sheriff was gone. I headed down for more birding and a chance to stick our feet in the Rio Grande itself. 

So many struggles in such a beautiful and serene environment: the struggle for families in dire circumstances doing whatever they can to forge a better life for their kids, no matter how high the cost. The struggle for someone to prove they can do something no matter the cost, they just want a showy legacy that won’t even do what is promised. The struggle of private landowners to have what they own being taken away by a government. All of this as there are struggles with all the plants and wildlife struggling around human made chaos. It’s a heartbreaking beauty in some ways and I wonder how many more years I’ll have to witness this beauty before it’s blocked off by a useless, ugly wall. 

I still have no idea what my future will hold at this point. My life has taken such a strange turn even outside the divorce. But I do hope it includes the valley again. 

My neighbor died as I was finishing this essay. We were two weeks into the stay-at-home order during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. When the ambulance came, I stood on the front porch and watched the paramedics don hazmat suits before entering his home. His wife stood on the street as they loaded him into the ambulance, and I, unable to approach her, blurted out, “Will you be able to go with him?”

“They said I can go if I wear a mask,” she replied.

But they wouldn’t let her into the hospital. She spent the next 48 hours on the phone, trying to get information from the doctors about his condition. It wasn’t COVID-19, but only when they determined that his was an “end-of-life” situation was she allowed to go to his bedside. She sat with him and read poetry as they turned off the ventilator.

Today she sent me the link to the online memorial. Though she is next door, we are grieving at a distance.

It feels like a new reality, living in a socially-distanced world, but there are people who can show us how to do it. I come from a family of migrants, and migrants have long lived at a distance from their loved ones, through all their rituals of transition from birth to marriage to death. Adapting to new circumstances may be the most crucial lesson we can learn from the experiences of migrants, even if we never leave home.

My father left Pakistan in 1959 for the US and my grandmother told me that when he left, “he stopped speaking” to her and she was “left alone.” Yet, the sounds of his weekly phone calls to his family in Lahore and Karachi are some of my earliest memories. In the 1980s and 1990s, when these calls were expensive, they were brief and loud (his mother suffered the hearing loss of old age). My dad struggled to get all the news before the crackly line cut out and would beckon us to shout “Hello!” into the receiver, even though we couldn’t speak or understand Urdu and my grandmother spoke no English. This connection was a major improvement over the early days when they sent letters, fixed-price aerograms, and the occasional telegram (like when my grandfather congratulated my parents on their marriage). My father never lived in Pakistan again, but these technologies sustained our connection.

My grandmother’s loneliness after the migration of her two oldest sons to the US is a reminder of the toll transnational migration levies on families. Though he owned her home, sent monthly remittances, paid for weddings, funerals, and washing machines, my dad could never be there enough. Not until I lived with my grandmother in 1999 did I learn how the presence of her family sustained her. She expected to see her children and grandchildren, or at least speak to them, daily. Our American family had never been close enough for that.

In February 2006, my entire American family – including my father’s foreign-exchange host family, who had cared for him when he came to the US in high school – planned a trip to Pakistan. Shortly after we arrived, my grandmother had a stroke. Hers was my first Pakistani funeral. So many people were there. Grieving, like praying, is a public affair in Islam. Death activates the community and news travels quickly; ritual specialists, friends, and family come together to care for the grieving, and to shepherd the soul from the land of the living. The bereaved gather to hasten the progress of the soul by reciting scripture, praying, and doing good works, including caring for the bodies.¹ But Muslim burials happen within twenty-four hours, and migrants can rarely be there to serve their families when people die. How will distant families care for them?

Few migrants, I’m guessing, anticipated what it might mean to die far from home, but today, a lot of them need to. After the liberalization of US immigration laws in 1965, when South Asian migration to the US accelerated, people landed in places where they had little community. When a few South Asians were together, their communities were mixed, multinational. They stepped in to help each other – a South Indian Christian taught my father to cook at Texas Christian University – but they had to arrange everything. If someone died, whoever was available performed whatever ritual they knew. People from the community volunteered to wash bodies and lead prayers. Growing Muslim communities established mosques and, later, their own cemeteries. Today, as the post-1965 generation ages, American funeral homes have begun learning the rituals associated with Asian faiths, including Hinduism and Islam.

A good death, though, is not just a matter of knowledge. Because death rituals in Islam prescribe how the body must be arranged in the grave, and what will happen to it afterward, Muslims need a place when they die.² Still, the grave is more than a plot of ground or a repository; it is a site of pilgrimage. My Pakistani family observes the annual death anniversaries of our own family members, as well as those of the Prophet’s family. Each anniversary has different protocols and, if possible, people visit the graves to pray for the deceased. They leave flower petals on the graves of their loved ones and on the surrounding graves. One woman told me that she extends this care more broadly; when she passes a graveyard, she whispers, “Assalamu aleikum, ahl-e-qabr” (Peace be upon you, people of the grave). Community sustains the living and the dead.

When death is so tightly linked to place, leaving home means leaving loved ones, but also leaving one’s graveyard. When a migrant dies far from home, they anchor a new graveyard, and by holding the body, the host country becomes their country. My father, who left Pakistan in 1959, and settled in Texas, anchored our graveyard in 2013.

After his death, I feared that the connection my sisters and I had to our relatives in Pakistan would fray or even disappear, but I needn’t have worried. WhatsApp saved us. The messaging app gives transnational families like ours a way to stay in touch despite being separated by continents. My dad’s weekly phone calls and the alienation of distance have been replaced by daily check-ins. Through WhatsApp we can share news, good wishes, jokes, silly videos, and feel like we are all laughing together. Or mourning. There is one relative who only ever sends announcements about deaths. “Please recite surah-e-fatiha,” he reminds us.³ A chorus of “Done. Done. Done,” resounds from around the world.

Death itself is a migration, but I have learned about it through the experience of transnationality. We have always grieved at a distance. When we could not be there to recite “Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un” (Verily we belong to Allah, and to him do we return) or pray next to the body, kept cold by blocks of ice, news of a death had the substance of an announcement. It was not a process. Not until our next visit could we feel the cool marble of the headstone or inhale the fragrance of the rose petals. The first visits we scheduled when we landed in Pakistan were the condolence visits. Even months late, these visits brought closure.

Today, the technologies that have kept me in daily contact with my family allow virtual attendance at funerals, the global transmission of requests to recite prayers, and even provide the opportunity to gaze upon the headstone from across the globe. In Karachi, the private Wadi-a-Hussain cemetery proclaims itself the “first online graveyard.” Relatives can enter a grave number into a search field on the graveyard’s website and pull up “the grave pictures online so that people can offer Surah-a-Fateha to their love ones who are not a present part of their life anymore.” Similarly, the Shehr-e-Khamoshan (City of Silence) project of the Punjab government set out to offer “livestream footage” of funerals at its four “model cemeteries” in Pakistan’s largest and wealthiest province.⁴ These services are designed for overseas relatives, some settled in the Gulf, others as far away as Britain, Spain, or the United States, who can afford such arrangements.

Even in normal times, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter are awash with requests to pray for the deceased, to beg for the soul’s forgiveness, making Muslim grieving a public and transnational experience. Standing virtually next to the grave, even if you cannot cast rose petals on it, offers a more sustained intimacy with death’s finality, but also with the community that grieves with you. We may not look into each other’s eyes on FaceTime, but we can see one another’s tears.

As I write, displacement and social distancing affect far more than just transnational migrants. People from all walks of life are discovering that, under these circumstances of enforced distancing, it is nearly impossible to grieve in the intimacy of our families and congregations. Yet, for generations of migrants, these challenges are not new. Migrants have adapted to distance, found strategies for surviving displacement. Death may be the most intimate of processes, truly known only to the dying, but grieving is the work of community. If community can be globalized, can we, too, find comfort in grieving from a distance? Can we grieve authentically, even virtually? Whether by telephone or iPhone, we are learning to talk without proximity, connect without human contact, mourn without boundaries.

Notes

1. Hanan Hussein and Jan Oyebode, “Influences of Religion and Culture on Continuing Bonds in a Sample of British Muslims of Pakistani Origin,” Death Studies 33 (2009): 906. Return to text.
2. Leor Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 201. Return to text.
3. The Surah-e-Fatehah is the first chapter of the Quran. South Asian Muslims frequently recite it over graves. Return to text.
4. “Hold Your Hearses: Graveyards in Pakistan,” The Economist 424, Iss. 9055 (Aug. 26, 2017): 45. The project stalled in 2019 after a change of government administration. See “Shehr-e-Khamoshan Project Delayed,” The News (July 19, 2019). Return to text.

Breakfast or brunch couldn’t be simpler – just islands of fried eggs in a pan of cubed potatoes with perfectly crisped edges

After his citrus cookery demonstration, the Sicilian chef Corrado Assenza asked us, a room of about 20 people, if there were any questions. I put my hand up into the lemony air. A young man near me did not: he simply shot out his question like a bullet, and it was the same question as mine. Corrado noticed, but I turned my keen arm into a “it’s fine” wave, so he answered the man, ending with thanks for a good question, before turning back to me. Acknowledging that my question had been answered would have been the sensible thing to do, but petty rage isn’t sensible. Being sensible also felt like giving the upper hand to the usurper, so I grabbed a thought: “What is your comfort food?” translating it as it came out of my mouth (cos’e il tuo comfort cibo?).

Not only did the question feel wrong and twee, it was also a bad translation that didn’t make any sense. Even if I had got it right (qual è il tuo cibo di conforto?), it doesn’t have quite the same meaning. The situation was further confused when someone else asked if I meant comfort in terms of comodità, as in “convenient” or “easy”. Fortunately, Corrado understood what I was getting at; it depended on when I asked him, he said: “Different moments called for completely different sorts of comfort.” He also suggested that maybe the reason there is no need for the term comfort food in Italian is because the words are one and the same: food is comfort.

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Darius Kazemi's guide to running a small social network for your friends; emphasis on "small"

A new online database launched in February 2019 offers a glimpse of life under the wartime occupation of northeast China by Japan. The North China Railway Archive, which organizes the 39,775 photographs into a searchable catalogue, is a collaboration between several Japanese research institutes and the University of Kyoto, which came into possession of the photographs at the end of the Second World War.

So far in 2019, the University of Kyoto has organized several exhibits featuring just a small number of photos in the collection. Both the nature of the photos, which were intended to showcase or whitewash Japan's occupation of northeastern China, and the general tone of the photo exhibits, have reportedly provoked strong reactions outside of Japan, in China.

As a primary source, the image scans in the collection include the original matte blocking, as well as detailed documentation about the location of the image, when the image was taken, the name of the photographer and notes about what is being depicted.

The images were originally intended to be promotional stock photographs, and were taken by North China Transportation Company (華北交通) employees. The company operated in the region controlled by the so-called Provisional Government of the Republic of China (中華民国臨時政府, in Japanese), a puppet state in northeastern China that was supported by and collaborated with Japanese occupation forces during the Sino-Japanese war.

The company managed thousands of kilometers of bus and rail lines in northeastern China, connecting the Jingjinji region surrounding Beijing with Harbin and other cities in Manchuria, the location of another Japanese puppet state in northeastern China.

Besides showing off Japanese infrastructure investments in the region and demonstrating the supposed orderliness and peacefulness of the Japanese occupation, the images also promoted tourist destinations throughout the rail network (map) operated by the North China Transportation Company.

The sheer number of photographs in the collection means there are many scenes of city life in Beiping (now Beijing) and other parts of northeast China during the years of Japanese occupation in the 1930s and 1940s.

Since the photos were staged by photographers working to promote the North China Transportation company, there is no documentation of the extreme hardships suffered by Chinese people during the fighting and occupation of China during the Sino-Japanese War which lasted from 1937 to 1945. It's estimated up to 22 million Chinese civilians died during these years, while enduring brutality and atrocities at the hands of Japanese invaders, such as the Nanjing Massacre.

The online introduction to the North China Railway Archive makes no mention of Japan's role as occupier and colonizer, and instead focuses on the window on the past presented by the photo collection:

日中戦争のさなかに発足した華北交通が広報用に撮った写真には、戦闘状況はほとんど描かれておらず、地域の交通インフラの整備、資源開発、産業の育成をはじめとして、風土、民俗、文物など多様かつ多彩なイメージが盛り込まれています。グラビア雑誌や新聞、各種博覧会で公表された写真は軍などの検閲が必要でしたが、未使用の写真はそうした規制を経てはいません。そのため、この膨大なストックフォト全体を注意してみれば、80年近く前の中国の風景を読み取ることも可能なのです。その一部には、いまの中国で失われたランドスケープも含まれています。

The photographs taken by North China Transportation Company, launched in the midst of the Sino-Japanese War, were intended for public relations, and barely touch on battlefield conditions. Instead, the photos preserve the culture, folklore (of China at the time), as well as the development of regional transportation infrastructure, resource development and industrial development. While photos published in glossy magazines, newspapers and other places where censored by the military, unpublished photos (in the collection) did not undergone such censorship Therefore, if one pays close attention to this huge collection of stock photos, it is possible to glimpse the China nearly 80 years ago. Some photos portray landscapes now lost in China today.

Exhibits put on by the University of Kyoto, called “the China of 80 years ago” (８０年前の中国)  also present the photos as a resource to understand the past, and make no reference to Japan's wartime role.

Echoing an English-language article in the South China Morning Post, one commentator writing for RecordChina, a Japanese news site that focuses on China, noted:

「中国メディアの参考消息によると、両国のネットユーザーの注目点は大きく異なり、中国のSNS上では『歴史を心に刻み、国辱を忘れるな』との声が次々に上がったのに対し、日本のネットユーザーのコメントは鉄道沿いの風景などに集中していた。NHKも日中両国のネットユーザーの注目点の違いに触れ『多くの中国人にとって、中国に対する日本の侵略とその後の占領は記憶から消えない痛みのようだ』と伝えている」と紹介した。

The focus of internet users differed greatly (between Japan and China). On Chinese social media, there is comment after comment that says “Don't forget our history and don't forget (China's) national disgrace.” Comments by Japanese internet users focused on the scenery along the railway and so on.

The 39,775 images in the North China Railway Archive are organized by tag, by year, and according to the train station nearest to where the photograph was taken. The license allows the images to be freely shared and adapted, as long as credit and attribution is provided to the North China Railway Archive.

Written by Nevin Thompson · comments (0)
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