How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia Read online

  How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit?

  True Stories of Expat Women in Asia

  Edited by Shannon Young

  Praise for How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia:

  How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit is an eclectic, soulful collection of stories by badass women who have adventured far out of their comfort zones. Full of candid observations about travel, language, food, self, and other, it’s a book for anyone who has ever felt peripheral, upside down, culturally shocked, or inspired. In other words, a book for all of us.

  —Rachel DeWoskin, author of Foreign Babes in Beijing, Repeat after Me, Big Girl Small, and Blind.

  A unique and inspiring collection of voices that calls up all the wonder, fascination, challenges, disorientation, and delights faced by women expats throughout Asia. I was moved by the breadth of experiences included in this anthology at the same time that I fell in love with one thread running throughout: how the expatriate journey takes us away from ourselves and then ultimately delivers us back, richer, wiser, and even more aware of how our own identities fit within our wide, wide world.

  —Tracy Slater, author of The Good Shufu: A Wife in Search of a Life between East and West (Putnam, 2015)

  How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit?

  True Stories of Expat Women in Asia

  Edited by Shannon Young

  Signal 8 Press

  Hong Kong

  How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit?

  True Stories of Expat Women in Asia

  Edited by Shannon Young

  Published by Signal 8 Press

  An imprint of Typhoon Media Ltd

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2014 Shannon Young

  eISBN: 978-988-12195-6-5

  Typhoon Media Ltd

  Hong Kong

  www.typhoon-media.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for brief citation or review, without written permission from Typhoon Media Ltd.

  Cover design: Justin Kowalczuk

  Editor photo: Joanna Suen

  Table of Contents

  Editor’s Foreword

  Forwarding Addresses – Shannon Dunlap (Cambodia)

  The Weight of Beauty – Dorcas Cheng-Tozun (China)

  Bangkok through the Eyes of an Indian Girl – Neha Mehta (Thailand)

  Bread and Knives – Jennifer S. Deayton (Hong Kong)

  The Truth about Crickets – Pamela Beere Briggs (Japan)

  Finding Yuanfen on a Chinese Bus – Kaitlin Solimine (China)

  Gods Rushing In – Jenna Lynn Cody (Taiwan)

  Our Little Piece of Vietnam – Sharon Brown (Vietnam)

  Love and Polka Dots – Suzanne Kamata (Japan)

  Happy Anniversary – Stephanie Han (Hong Kong)

  Jewish in China – Eva Cohen (China)

  Kampong House – Barbara Craven (Malaysia)

  Giving in to Mongolia – Michelle Borok (Mongolia)

  An Awkward Phone Call – Christine Tan (China)

  How to Marry a Moonie – Catherine Rose Torres (Korea)

  Huangshan Honeymoon – Jocelyn Eikenburg (China)

  The Rainiest Season – India Harris (Philippines)

  Cross – Saffron Marchant (Hong Kong)

  Moving to the Tropic of Cancer – Philippa Ramsden (Burma)

  Five Weeks On – Nicola Chilton (Japan)

  Token – Edna Zhou (China)

  Ninety Minutes in Tsim Sha Tsui – Susan Blumberg-Kason (Hong Kong)

  Here Comes the Sun – Leza Lowitz (Japan)

  Chinese Stonewalls – Ember Swift (China)

  Waiting for Inspiration – Coco Richter (Hong Kong)

  Charting Koenji – Kathryn Hummel (Japan)

  Acknowledgements

  For Donna Young

  And for all the women who inspire us in our lives abroad

  EDITOR’S FOREWORD

  There are rules to how one dresses to buy dragonfruit. The first time I read Shannon Dunlap’s essay "Forwarding Addresses,” this sentence resonated. It echoed an unspoken question that appeared again and again in the stories of the 86 expatriate women who submitted their work for consideration in this collection. It is a question I tackled when I moved to Asia four years ago, when I started my first expat job, when I married into a local family. It is, of course, not a question about shopping, nor is it about clothes.

  It is a question of balance.

  How can I be respectful of the rules of this new culture? When do I choose not to adhere to the norms of my adopted home? Should I assimilate? Should I be independent? Or accommodating? Where is the point of equilibrium for a modern woman navigating a new culture?

  From everyday occurrences like shopping and taking the bus, to dealing with loss and infertility far from home, the expat life is full of tension. Despite the enthralling stories resulting from this tension, too often expat women’s voices go unheard. We are labeled and dismissed, tagalong characters in someone else’s adventure. But if the scores of submissions I read for this work are any indication, there’s a lot more to the story.

  In Asia especially, expat men have long held the spotlight. They arrive, tall and privileged, and find a life that is charmed, exotic. Sometimes, they bring along wives who may not be able to find work, no matter how educated and accomplished they were back home. The women’s voices are confined to coffee mornings and emails to the folks back home. You will find those voices in this collection. But there are as many kinds of stories as there are expat women. Some feel freer, safer, and more valued in East Asia than in their home countries. They innovate and take control in a way they couldn’t in a more stagnant environment. They trail their ambitions here. They thrive. They make their voices heard.

  The twenty-six women in this collection will show you what it’s like to be an outsider. Some of them came to Asia alone, striking out to find a new life. Some took risks on a job, a lover, a whim. Some look, on the outside, as if they should blend in, women with Asian faces and other cultures who strongly identify as expatriates. They feel their otherness but are expected to be fluent in the language and the culture and the way one dresses to buy dragonfruit.

  These twenty-six women built spaces for themselves between the skyscrapers of China, the markets of Cambodia, the streets of Vietnam, and the art galleries of Japan. You will find them struggling to fit in and fighting to stand out. Just like any other women, they study, they work, they fall in love; they bear children and lose them; they wander; and they wonder where and what home is. You will find memories of childhood and confrontations with mortality, the furious uncertainty of youth and the emerging maturity of women who have found their place in the world—for now.

  As you read these stories, put yourself in their shoes, their dresses, their motorcycle boots. These women are making choices every day. They must ask: Who am I in this culture, this place? Follow along as they explore the balance they’ve found in themselves and in their homes abroad.

  Shannon Young

  Hong Kong

  February 2014

  FORWARDING ADDRESSES

  By Shannon Dunlap

  Wet Season: What I Look Like Here

  Dear Mignon,

  Even after twenty hours on a plane, flying away from you, there are few people I can imagine in more vivid detail. Perhaps it is because we have always looked so completely different. As a teenager, it was both a torment and a comfort to be
the inconspicuous one, to take shelter behind your glossy goldenness and know that watching eyes were directed elsewhere. Ever since, I have had a gift for vanishing, for flattening myself against the backdrop. In Cambodia, it is different.

  I have become suddenly, glaringly visible. I am aware of things I never thought about much in New York: my height, my weight, my clothes. There, I could have worn a Halloween costume and marched through the park playing an accordion and would have attracted only a passing interest. You know this as well as I do—it is a city in which you have to work to be noticed.

  But on my first full day in Phnom Penh, I stepped around the corner to the market and into a cultural pothole. There are rules to how one dresses to buy dragonfruit. How could I have known that Kate, in her spangled leggings and movie-star sunglasses, was within the boundaries of decorum, but I, in a plain tank top and shorts with my pale knees exposed, was not? I’m not sure why I didn’t ask her before I left the house instead of after, when I could see all over her face that no, it was not okay. "Everyone was looking at you,” Jason said, and I am such an oaf that I didn’t even notice.

  He is my partner here, more clearly my other half than ever, out of both love and necessity. But together we are otherness squared, the combination of us drawing infinitely more eyes. Two days ago, at a waterfall outside of Sihanoukville, a group of giggling little boys stuffed wads of pink toilet paper up their noses and made faces at us, posing spontaneously and eagerly when we pulled out a camera. But as they continued to trail us, watching with rapt attention as we walked, as we waded into the stream, as we clumsily put on our lace-up shoes, there was no ambivalence about who was the object, about who really belonged in front of the lens.

  Even when we are separated, Jason tells me more about what I look like than the mirror does. On the other side of a window at a roadside bus station in rural Thailand, he seemed the center of a complex diorama—the only non-native, all pale skin and hiking boots, staring dumbfounded at the steaming pots of unidentifiable food. Slumped in the bus seat, an undetected observer, I reflexively thought, God help us.

  Don’t misunderstand. I am not some poor little white girl; I chose to come here knowing that I would be a foreigner, an outsider. This is their country, not mine, and they have every right to notice the strangers among them. I certainly notice the smattering of other white people and find myself disliking them—for their loudness, for their rotundity, for their ugly socks and tourists’ T-shirts. Given this, I find it remarkable that no one here seems to shower me with the same disdain that I feel for the other foreigners; it is rare that a Khmer person looks at me with anything besides a mixture of kindness and curiosity.

  Even so, that curiosity is new to me. I find myself staring at the ground sometimes as I walk, a version of peek-a-boo in which I convince myself that if I’m not looking at anyone, no one is looking at me. But we learn as infants that we don’t disappear when we close our eyes. These anonymous watchers, what are they seeing? What are they thinking? And how have you managed to live your whole life under everyone else’s gaze?

  The last time you visited me in New York, the waitress at the pancake house asked us if we were sisters and insisted that we looked so much alike, which we found strange and laughable. Here, they would probably say the same thing, our similarities much more salient in these surroundings than our differences. But maybe there is more to it than that. What could the waitress see, as we sat there sipping our coffee? Maybe it is a little like spotting two people in love, the way it is visible in their faces, on their bodies. Maybe that waitress could tell how we grew up together, how infrequently we get to see each other now, how dear you are to me, and somehow all of that translated in her brain to one fact—that we looked just the same.

  And if that is true, I wonder what it means for the way I look at Cambodia and for the way it looks back. Maybe there will come a moment when this place and I will develop enough fondness for each other that we’ll take a long hard look and find nothing strange there at all.

  With much love,

  S

  Cool Season: Native Tongue

  Dear Mme. Dahlberg,

  I do not want you to feel wholly responsible for the fact that I am miserably monolingual. After all, it could not have been easy to be the sole high school French teacher in Lexington, Ohio, the only local expert in a language not your own, the lone Francophile amidst the fields of corn. But I do not think I am being merely modest when I say that I came out of four years of French class lacking the ability to speak any French. Half of the expats in Siem Reap are French, but I would rather feign mental retardation when I meet one of them than try to strike up a conversation in my pidgin français. And if I can’t speak even a fairly common Romance language with any fluency, how will I ever be able to tackle Khmer?

  Mind you, learning Khmer is hardly a prerequisite for living in Cambodia. Everyone here, from the tuk-tuk drivers to the wealthy businessmen, can speak English, and one’s fluency is usually a good indication of one’s affluence. ESL textbooks and workbooks are everywhere (though I’ve yet to find similar ones that teach Khmer). Children and young adults love to test out their English skills on us with stilted but spirited conversations. We have been told that American accents are especially respected, and when I see Obama and McCain orating from every television screen, I understand why. Unwittingly, and through pure luck and happenstance, I have been fluent in the language of influence and power for over twenty years. For a monolinguist, it is the most fortuitous possible position, and I can’t help but feel some guilt for stumbling into it.

  Maybe because of this guilt, it is important to me to be able to speak at least some semblance of the local language. I refuse to look like a tourist for the next year, unable to pronounce even the blandest pleasantries correctly. Let the record show that I tried, in advance, to prevent this from happening by purchasing "Talk Khmer Now!” for my computer, which features two decidedly Anglo-looking people whose lip movements do not match the words they are supposedly saying. But a single CD-ROM gave me little insight into a language so complex that it’s difficult to pronounce even the name of the language correctly (despite being spelled "Khmer,” it’s pronounced, inexplicably, more like "k’mai”), and while the software was marginally successful in teaching me a few single words, I am still incapable of stringing them into sentences ("Rice yes meat no please thanks big-big!”)

  Since the intricacies of Khmer grammar seem to be something only a real teacher can convey, Jason and I went in search of one at the local monastery, Wat Bo. A monk named Savuth was convinced to take us on as students, though he usually teaches English and seemed a little nervous about the prospect of teaching Khmer. Nonetheless, he told us we could come as often as we want, and when we mentioned the subject of formal payment, he looked embarrassed and said something supremely monkish, such as, "If you will learn to speak the Khmer language, this will make me happy.” Savuth’s request seems like an exceedingly modest one, but I worry that making him happy will be a little harder than scoring an A in French IV.

  Apparently, the sight of crazy white people wandering around the monastery is not an everyday occurrence, and two other monks showed up at our first lesson, counting on the potential entertainment value of the event. Savuth got right down to business, trying to teach us how to say I. This sounds simple enough, but the way you say I varies widely depending upon whether you’re talking to your grandmother or to a monk or to the King of Cambodia. A simple k’nyom will do if I’m talking to Jason, for instance, but for the king it’s knyom prea-ang meh cha, and God only knows what would happen if I had to speak to both of them at once. If I wanted to say something to Savuth, like "I think I might feel faint if I have to look at any more of the absurdly complicated Khmer alphabet,” I would have to say, "K’nyom prea-cah ro nah…” or something of the sort, just to express that initial pronoun, at which point I would have forgotten the rest of the sentence.

  After an exhausting assor
tment of Is, we moved on to telling someone your name. "Listen,” Savuth said. "Cheameuooioereh,” or some other combination of vowels I have never heard before. "K’nyom cheameuooioereh Savuth.”

  "Chamore?” I said hopefully.

  "Cheameuooioereh,” Savuth said, moving his mouth in a way that I cannot hope to replicate.

  "Shamoo?” I said, feeling smaller and smaller. This went back and forth for a while, until Savuth settled back to drink some Coca-Cola and compose himself. I slumped dejectedly while one of the monk audience members told me, "Clever student! Clever student!” in a way that I found extremely kind but unduly optimistic.

  The lesson ended with Savuth trying valiantly to teach us how to say, "See you Monday!” and then waving goodbye as we sputtered gibberish back at him.

  Mme. Dahlberg, where did we go wrong? Am I really such a dullard that acquisition of a foreign language is beyond my reach? Or did all that time in the middle of an enormous and powerful country muffle all the other voices of the world? Keep fighting the good fight, Mme. Dahlberg—we need people who can talk to each other, and Savuth and the rest of the international community deserve better than a one-trick pony like me.

  Best wishes,

  Shannon Dunlap

  Hot Season: Tea and Indifference

  Dear Kent,

  This morning, I was making tea, and I read the name on the tea canister—the Thai company Phuc Long—and I didn’t even smirk, didn’t even think about making a joke about it. And that’s one indication that perhaps I have been living here too long. Here’s another:

  Yesterday, I was walking down the street, and the guy with no arms who sells books out of a box hanging around his neck asked me for some money. I wasn’t carrying my moto helmet under my arm (as I usually do, marking me as an expat rather than a tourist), and he didn’t recognize me at first. And then he remembered me from around town, and gave a sort of shrug and a not unfriendly smile, as if to say, "Sorry! You’re a regular here. Of course you’re not going to give me anything.” And then we both sort of chuckled and walked past each other, and it wasn’t until I was about half a block away that I got a sickening chill at my own indifference.