In Which We Destroy The Myth Of Living Abroad

Live Tigers

by DAYNA EVANS

We were trying to find a place called Fairy Hill, but no one knew where it was. I bought six hangers from a man on the street, who was standing next to several other men also selling hangers in groups of six. I paid roughly 75 cents for six hangers and was acutely aware that I was being ripped off. After I had stuffed the hangers into my bag, we carried onward in the direction we thought would take us to Fairy Hill. Several hundred yards later, we held a meeting in the street.

"Are we sure we’re going the right way?" I asked my friend, keeper of the guidebook.

"I think so. I can’t tell if we were supposed to turn back there or not."

"That didn't look like it'd take us anywhere."

"We could keep walking."

I have a friend at the grocery store now. His name is Abloo (though this is questionable as I still have trouble with his accent). We have met three days in a row because on each of those days, I was bored enough with my own company to walk to the grocery store and buy more food. I bought a broom from Abloo and it was broken so I went back to ask for a new one. Instead, we talked about Sri Lanka.

"The people there, they are very fat."

"Is that so?” I asked. "You didn't like it there."

"No, the people are too fat. But you, you are very slim."

"Thanks," I said. I thought about the nine pounds of chicken biryani I had eaten the night before. I grabbed an operable broom from the shelf and he swung it like a light saber.

A man wearing a dark gray t-shirt, dress pants and leather slip-on sandals, and carrying a black leather briefcase came up to us and asked if we needed help.

"We're trying to find Fairy Hill. Do you know it?" my friend asked the man.

"The hill? Which hill? Near? Is it near?"

I gestured for her to show the man our map. He began reading about Fairy Hill. "Fairy Hill is said to be named for the fairies and genies that were believed to occupy it when the Sufi saint Badar Shah first came to Chittagong. Legend says that he made a number of requests . . .”

We found his desire to impress us with his English charming at first. But he continued.

". . . to the fairies before they would allow him to build a place of worship. It's behind the main post office and New Market — climb the path leading off Jubilee Road just north of the pedestrian bridge near New Market. Ask directions for the High Court, the building on top of the hill. Fairy Hill was the common name during the Raj era and is rapidly being forgotten."

When the man had reached the end of the Lonely Planet description, we’d amassed a crowd, a common occurrence for us in Chittagong. To my right was an elderly, toothless man with a threadbare cloth covering the bottom half of his body. He had his hand held out to me and was mumbling. Behind and beyond our group of five girls were rickshaw drivers pausing mid-pedal as they watched.

One adolescent boy stood near, but not too near, regarding us with an obvious genuine interest that betrayed his attempt to seem aloof. Our guide didn’t say anything when he finished reading. Instead, he intently studied the book’s tiny and poorly labeled map.

"So . . . do you know where that is?" my friend asked, slightly impatient now.

"Ah, it is near D.C. Hill. I live there. Near D.C. Hill." The man then began to read the section on D.C. Hill. The five of us exchanged tired glances. "I take you, I know where it is. It is near where I live." We followed.

When friends complain about my lack of blog posts, I send them photos. Here. This is me with a funny-looking sign. And look, a photo of a poorly translated menu item. Finally, some friends and I sitting on a roof at sunset.

My apartment has a large window at its south end and it looks out over a trash pit with wild dogs and one goat. There is also a cliff where several cows graze perilously. I went to the roof of my apartment building to see how close they get to the edge. I determined that they get really close, reminding me of the time my brother’s dog walked into our pool. Cows aren't very smart. Neither are dogs.

The walk ended up being much longer than we had anticipated, and several times my friends and I looked at one another with discontent. Should we be following a strange man to a strange hill in a strange city? Not to mention, the teenage boy from earlier who’d pretended to not care had been trailing us since our map conference, staring intently at each of our faces for prolonged portions of the walk. We tried to speak to him to garner information about where we were.

“How old are you?”

Coy smile.

“Do you know where we are going?”

“Fairy Hill.”

“Is that man your dad?”

Coy smile.

We were told by the man leading us that the hill to our right was D.C. Hill and that Fairy Hill was coming up.

"No, no, that’s okay, we’ll just check this out instead." We had all telepathically decided to get out now. Despite his pleas to allow him to take us farther, we were avoiding potentially getting ourselves into trouble by disembarking then. The man walked off, while the teenager lingered. All six of us stood in front of D.C. Hill, our second choice for hill visits in the city of Chittagong.

There was an ice cream seller, several homeless men, and an armed guard. There were some scattered leaves and a pile of garbage. We tried to walk to the top of the hill, but the armed guard turned us away. My head hurt.

"Can we go home?"

"Yeah." So much for hills.

None of the clothes fit me in Bangladesh. My friend said it was because "you have a large chest." I didn’t like hearing that very much, so I walked away, leaving her near the saris while I went to buy a mug.

The myth of living abroad, particularly in a developing country, is that you must show the impact the country is having on you and impact you are having on the country. Last night I watched four episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and made a cucumber salad.

From the moment I arrived in Chittagong, there was the notion among my loved ones that what I am doing at any given moment is far more interesting than what they are doing. They perceive that I am living the life of an intrepid traveler, that I sleep in my hiking boots and drink water out of a Camelbak or anorak or whatever the hell gallant adventurers drink water out of (a gourd?). The truth is that I don’t own hiking boots and I drink water from a glass. I don't like granola. I feel that I have little to report.

When we travel, we’re predisposed to feel unusual and to like it. We want to find the newness in everything because we know that our warm beds and close friends are waiting at home for us with cold beers and their undivided attentions. It is living that I am getting used to. That is what causes me to feel so empty-handed in my correspondence — living is an entirely different monster. Even in the things that are different and strange, I look for similarity and comfort. It would exhaust me to feel genuinely shocked by every new cultural element. I want the neighborhood Shwapno to be my new 7-11. I want to convince myself that rice is bread, rickshaws are taxis.

We saw the Bay of Bengal. We had taken a short trip down to Patenga Beach, where they sell puka shell necklaces at beachside stands, just like at the Jersey shore.

G.E.C. Circle is a roundabout in the center of Chittagong, where crossing the street is more dangerous than triple bypass heart surgery performed by a randomly selected attendee at a Hannah Montana concert. There are no traffic lights and the crosswalks are a joke played on any tourist who takes them seriously. CNGs and buses will barrel confidently ahead despite seeing a crowd of ten or more people about to be decimated at their hands. At night, a bizarre metal fountain structure is lit with green lights and sprays thin lines of water into the air while the madness carries on around it; billboards and signs are illuminated in neon colors, as well. I’ve taken to calling this area Times Square, but even that isn’t an accurate representation of its life-threatening insanity.

We found an ice cream parlor on G.E.C. Circle recently, which seems like a relatively benign discovery unless you’re in a group of twelve women with a dangerous need for satiation and shelter. Everything about the parlor felt familiar, from the selections (cookies 'n' cream, pistachio) to the highly decadent sundae options. There was even soft serve. It was disgusting how quickly we found indescribable joy in what was in front of us. We had, in so many ways, walked through a warped door to our old worlds where frozen yogurt and chocolate syrup were as available as Netflix and H&M. When we were inside, eating ice cream silently around a little table, we forgot what madness existed outside of the doors. We were working on raising our life expectancy rates by staying within the parlor.

At the table next to us were three late-20s men in business suits. It was nearing six o’clock — they must have come straight from work. They were socializing loudly and playing around on their smartphones. They had ordered multi-layer sundaes with syrups, nuts, the whole bit. Before I could even stop myself from thinking it, my brain was translating this activity from a casual post-work treat to Bangladeshi happy hour. Attempting to live in a new culture on my old culture’s terms was proving to be occasionally inadequate.

Tonight we gather together at a friend's apartment. We will walk home a few hours later with our heads covered and our wits about us. Tomorrow we will be visiting Jobra, the village birthplace of the Grameen Bank. Our Bangladeshi friend is taking us fabric shopping this weekend so that we might get our own shalwar kameezs tailored. This is happy news for my large chest. In the future there are plans for visiting Dhaka (the capital), the Sundarbans (where live tigers crush skulls), and the tea plantations of Sylhet. We have trips on the horizon to Nepal, India and Thailand, most of which are as yet unplanned and complicated. I have asked if I will have to drink out of a gourd while hiking in Nepal. The answer is no.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Bangladesh. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her work on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air.

"Chloe in the Afternoon" - St. Vincent (mp3)

"Surgeon" - St. Vincent (mp3)

"Cruel" - St. Vincent (mp3)

The new album from St. Vincent is titled Strange Mercy. It will be released on September 13th and you can preorder it here.

In Which We Turn And Face The Strange

Heart of Chambers

by DAYNA EVANS

The Future
dir. Miranda July
91 min

Staring at Miranda July's pleading, childlike face for an hour and a half can be a daunting task. There's something about it — much like those Sarah McLachlan ASPCA advertisements — that elicits unnatural levels of sympathy within my cold, cynical heart. I want to give her hand-crocheted tea cozies, make her a key lime pie, or just tell her it's okay, everything's going to be okay. July is all sweetness, humility, and youthful confusion, but without an obnoxious giggle or noted affectation. Her earnestness seems to breed only further earnestness, which has caused many to repel her work.

The host of haters claim that lines like, “Hi, person” spoken between girlfriend and boyfriend are unrealistic and contrived. They take issue with dancing pink shoes in her first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, with her title choices and her outfits and that doe-eyed, bashful face. Despite how polarizing July can be, she feels authentic even if you're the kind of person who can't stand her.

The Future is a film about two mid-30s creative-types Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) who are waiting for their big moment, but are having trouble enabling it to happen. They want stability and familiarity (which leads them to adopting a cat), but they aren't certain for how long (the cat is dying). Matching MacBooks, gauzey curtains, and flea-market kitsch overrun their apartment.

The pair use the countdown to adopting their new cat as a time to shut off their internet, begin new projects (Sophie a series of dance videos, Jason a foray in environmental solicitation), and, to Jason's dismay, experiment with infidelity. While Sophie starts an affair with a wealthy suburban dad, Jason learns he can make time stand still and has conversations with old men and the moon (yes, the moon).

Paw-Paw the gray cat narrates the story, touching sagely on the range of warmth, possession, and loss we see the couple experience. Sophie moves in with her new boyfriend (David Warshofsky). She admires the 1,000 thread count sheets, walks around in a nightie, and abandons dancing. After her boyfriend’s daughter buries herself to the neck in their backyard with the plan to sleep, Sophie puts her in the bath. It is then that we see Sophie’s face betray what we’ve already concluded: there is suffocation in the comfort of luxury.

Not much later, she returns to Jason, who is cold but accepting. In their time apart, they have both unsuccessfully tried to pick up the cat — the cat has been euthanized because they were a day late in retrieving him, and everything about it is a poignantly written tragedy. The film closes as it began: two mid-30s creative-types in pajamas, quietly absorbed in their own thoughts. But they are absorbed together.

The Future isn't Away We Go, it isn't The Squid and the Whale. Unlike the many Grizzly Bear-soundtracked films that sound similar, this is not a compendium of white people problems and whining — it's a film of generous sentimentality and melancholy. It resonates so deeply that an ethereal yet honest mood exists, a mood that is only enhanced by the wonderful score of Jon Brion. The music creates caverns in which Sophie and Jason’s loneliness can nestle. At once warm and wide, Brion’s soundtrack is also disconsolate in its use of droney keyboards, which makes the score feel like a constant tribute to the film’s theme, “Master of None” by Beach House. The choice to use “Master of None” as a thread throughout the film could not have been more deliberate — it is exact in its replication of what we feel through The Future: hollow, somber, but not alone. The vast richness of The Future is in its ability to ask us what we look for at a certain age, and it does so without making generalizations and conclusions on our behalf. 

Movies like The Future merely present quandaries its intended audience already recognizes: variations of the “Where do we go/what do we do?” myth of young adulthood. Unfortunately, it is too easy to absorb-then-ignore these impasses as we watch them played out in independent films while the flood of thoughts about how we're going to be the next Basquiat, next DeLillo, or next July never ceases. It’s apparently what we do as part of a generation bound to narcissism. Sophie characterizes this self-involvement astutely when she says she'd like to start reading the news but because she's already so far behind, why should she bother?

The movie begins to feel like reality TV — a reflection of what people in their 20s and 30s go through — and it plays out like a fable without a moral. This creates disquiet in the theater. Can one take comfort or glean knowledge from a film that glimmers like a mirror? Due in full to July's astounding technique for writing human emotion in all its complicated forms, The Future shines in its use of what people can find insufferable about Miranda July's work: portraying sullen, adult truths through a lens of childlike surrealism.

Why would an adult woman call up a perfect stranger whose number is written on the back of a drawing and ask him where he lives? Why would her boyfriend have sandwiches with an old man who writes filthy limericks and then imagine the man was the voice of the moon? Who talks like that? Who dresses like that? Who makes a movie with a three-minute dance scene in which a woman writhes about completely enrobed in a T-shirt that moves on its own? Without context, all of this can appear juvenile and inchoate.

When these elements are strung together a deeper and much darker film emerges. And even if it didn’t, heaven forbid film or writing be intimate and uninhibited, for self-exposure as ripe as July's is considered shameful, perhaps even veers on appearing too feminine.

What detractors fail to identify is the overwhelming maturity in July's insistence on submitting to a tender, childlike sensibility in her work. In The Future, Sophie and Jason struggle with moving forward and becoming real people, but their recognition and gentle understanding of this problem is actually quite adult. Although a talking cat named Paw-Paw may be a hindrance for Werner Herzog disciples, perhaps it's time to find the gravity in lightness.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of her work on This Recording here. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about coming to America.

"Galaxy Plateau" - Twin Sister (mp3)

"All Around And Away We Go" - Twin Sister (mp3)

"The Other Side of Your Face" - Twin Sister (mp3)

In Which The License Plate Said Fresh And It Had Dice In The Mirror

Born and Raised

by DAYNA EVANS

My first real American Halloween, my brother and I dressed up as Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones from Men In Black. You can see the problem with this already.

I insisted that I would be Will, so my mom slicked back my hair and drew a thick, black mustache on my face in eyeliner. We wrapped toilet-paper rolls in tin foil to represent the memory-erasing “neuralizers” and wore baggy black suits of undetermined origin. These were probably the worst Halloween costumes in history, with the exception of the year that my friends and I were “homeless” and just wore sweatpants.

There was no way in hell that anyone would know what we were, but we took this holiday as newly-minted Americans very seriously and so we remained undeterred. The rules of Halloween, as shown in the movie Hocus Pocus, were that a cute face got you candy and the elaborateness of your costume was somewhat inconsequential, though dedication was always encouraged. We came home that night with pillowcases stuffed with foreign candy and the British Isles began to seem like a very faraway place indeed.

If you were under the impression that America is just a jazzed-up version of England with different sports and a shorter history, I’d like you to think about Halloween.

Every October 31st, little children and their mischievous older siblings wear disguises and run around their neighborhoods in pursuit of free candy, which grown adults dole out happily. Then these children take this candy home and devour it, leaving the undesirables (Sugar Daddys, Circus Peanuts) for their parents. What the fuck is this about?

I learned about trick-or-treating from Hocus Pocus, which made my British imagination believe that every suburban town in the United States looked like Salem, Massachusetts. We celebrated Halloween in England but there was never the same level of fanfare — usually it’d be a dull party with eight kids drinking too much sugary squash and going to bed with stomachaches. I don’t remember ever dressing up.

In 1996, when we were relocated to the not-so-New-England-looking suburbs of Philadelphia, my brother and I were encouraged to approach perfect strangers while cross-dressing in ill-fitting suits and ask them to give us stuff. And they would oblige. My love affair with America had begun.

1989 in Leicester

The gray-haired lady whose name I don’t remember held two silver coins, one in each hand.

“This is a nickel,” she said as she raised the chunky circle with Jefferson’s face shining back. "And this is a dime." Much more nimble, I thought. "A nickel is worth five cents and a dime is worth ten. And a quarter" — she reached down and presented the silver piece in her palm — "is worth twenty-five cents. Like a quarter of a dollar."

I shifted in my seat, feeling slightly patronized, though I knew that that afternoon I planned on inspecting a handful of change to test myself on the various names.

The next task was a little harder. The gray-haired lady had made a list of words that were spelled wrong, which she handed to me and said, "These are the correct spellings."

Was this a trick?

"You may be used to spelling certain words one way but we do it another way here."

I looked down at the list. It was long and had some words on it that I didn’t even know, but the ones that I did looked like weird cousins of themselves with letters deleted and transposed.

Color, pajamas, center, organize, traveled.

"Uh." I looked at the gray-haired lady, bewildered.

"Just try and memorize them, okay?"

Must memorise, I thought.

1991 in Leiceister

England and America are bound by certain commonalities. We speak the same language, we share the same flag colors, and we both are fond of sports-related riots. I have always seen America as the younger teenage brother of England and that's why I loved it so much when we first moved — juvenile excitement is everywhere.

The first time I ate ice cream out of a plastic baseball cap, I knew that America had an edge. Who decided that for supreme enjoyment of ice cream, a baseball cap should be turned upside down, miniaturized, and enrobed in plastic? An American. This was one of the greatest joys I’d ever known until I had my first encounter with pancakes.

I wasn't ignorant enough at age 8 to have not ever heard of pancakes, and I may have at one point even eaten them, but in no way was what I knew of pancakes remotely similar to what I would experience.

When we first moved to America, we lived with my uncle for a few months until my mom bought a house. My favorite uncle is a master pancake-maker; he manipulates batter into the fluffiest, sweetest, perfectly round and circumferentially exact pancakes. Pancakes are a thing here, which I learned rather swiftly and with no complaint. A stack of Bisquick pancakes topped with Aunt Jemima’s syrup is one of the hardest things to look at and say "No, thanks." Seven a.m. couldn't come soon enough when I was living there — seven a.m. was the pancake time. The great, wholesome pancake time.

When people don’t speak the language of their new home country, it’s not uncommon for them to pick up a lot of its nuances by watching television. It makes sense — not only do you get to hear the accent and see a less stiff version of the language than a book could show, you also get to see the new culture acted out. Though I already spoke English and needed no phonics assistance, I was a large proponent of this practice when I was younger.

I watched TV to find out what the hell an American was and how best to become one. When I would watch Sesame Street as a young girl living in an old British home with the original 250-year-old ceiling beams and a greenhouse, I believed my house was actually on Sesame Street. I have been told that most kids think this way, which is the magic of the show, but most kids don’t confuse their antique gold-gilded door chime in the perpetually chilly and dark foyer for a lively front stoop framed by window boxes of geraniums. I believed I was American before I had even left England.

My favorite TV shows when I moved to the States greatly influenced my understanding of American culture. They were all the 90s standards: Step By Step, Martin, Family Matters, Full House, Hanging With Mr. Cooper, and that weird show Dinosaurs, which I guess didn’t help me understand America but did freak me the fuck out. They all donated some key information — uncles are creepily affectionate, there is always drama at Thanksgiving — but there was no show that quite defined Americans to me more than The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

I wrote a 10-page paper in college about Will Smith. Looking back on this now, it was with certainty one of my best undergraduate achievements, marginally edging out my multimedia presentation on Shakespeare’s similarities with the Animaniacs. The paper reflected on how his presence in rap was essential for the progression of more legitimate hip-hop to go from underground to mainstream. Reflections like these remind me a cantaloupe with legs could get a liberal arts degree.

Given my insistence that I be allowed to dress up as Will Smith when I was 9, then 12 years later wrote a paper defending his legitimacy, it should be obvious that I have a slight fascination with him. A guy I dated my freshman year in college sent me a digital canvas portrait of Will Smith that has hung in every apartment I’ve lived in for the past five years. It is one of the best gifts I’ve ever received. Not to mention, he sent it to me anonymously months after we’d already broken up. For fifteen minutes, I speculated that maybe it was Will himself who had delivered it, knowing what a huge fan I was. Once I sleuthed around enough to figure out the real sender, I admit to a level of disappointment that probably is not natural.

I watched episode after episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. It was something about Will Smith’s simultaneous arrogance and empathy that made him seem so American to me. He wasn’t tight-lipped but he wasn’t necessarily impolite; he was funny and personable and warm. He was a guy who didn’t fit in with his surroundings but was making it work while occasionally failing, like when he used Carlton’s handspun silk pocket square as a tissue. It was his persona that I emulated and envied as I grew up surrounded by Yanks.

Looking back, channeling a 6’2” black man who played a loud-mouthed prankster with NBA aspirations on a television show about L.A. was one of my more misguided decisions. When he turned 38, I threw a Will Smith­–themed party in my college dorm with balloons and crepe paper; I wore a backwards neon hat and Nike dunks. That may have been the weirdest thing I have ever done.

I was drunk in a bar with two British friends when we got into an argument over which city was cooler: New York or London. Obviously, this is typical conversation for the metropolitan twenty-something douchebag, so I’m sure you can imagine what was said ("Uh, The Strokes, dude." "Have you seen Alexa Chung?") but at some point, there was a shift that made the disagreement much wider. Four or five pints in, in a state of belligerent twenty-something douchebag disarray, I found myself arguing that it wasn’t just New York that was better, it was America. Like, I was actually doing this.

My friends rolled their eyes and retorted with bland indifference. I became heated, saying things like "it’s just funner [sic] there." They even remained calm when I said that they were lucky Shakespeare was British because he was their "only defense." (I’m not even quite sure what that means.) There was no weight to anything I was saying because I obviously believed both places have their merits or I wouldn't have gone back to England several times since I’d moved. But the less they responded to my attacks, the more I wanted to prove that I was right. So finally I said what I’d wanted to say all night: "Brits are like Americans, but with less swag."

Dayna "I'm a patriot" Evans: 1, The Commonwealth: 0.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about summer reading.

"Santa Fucking Claus" - Johnny Foreigner (mp3)

"Tru Punks (Whiskas remix)" - Johnny Foreigner (mp3)

"JFNV" - Johnny Foreigner (mp3)

The new EP from Johnny Foreigner, Certain Songs Are Cursed, was released on April 18th and you can purchase it here.