What would it be like to view our home from fresh eyes? Can you imagine a world in the United States where humans interact with one another in order to form opinions as opposed to guzzling down force-fed media? I invite you to take another look at our country from the eyes of a traveller visiting a far off exotic land.
budak lelaki, orang Amerika itu makan banyak!
This phrase was repeated many times throughout the long hot sweaty holiday spent in the “kampung” jungles of Malaysia in the 1990’s. My college friend Amni invited me to join his family in a caravan style event inspired by the Malay-Islamic holiday of Hari Raya, which is the end of the fasting associated with Ramadan.
The tradition involves traveling between elders’ homes all day to pay respects. At each “kampung” there were ceremonies that I clunked through — not speaking the local Malay language but doing my best. I uncomfortably endured stares that followed with low tones in between the variety of relatives, clad in colorful print hijabs and white flowing robes.
Each home seemed to serve the same celebratory foods. There were cucumber salads and little cubes of steamed rice and chicken hearts and liver and the best cuts of meat. It seemed the most obvious way to show respect to my new family of Malay-Muslims was to eat the customary food at each stop, all day long. And in my eagerness to try to fit in and not offend the elders, I didn’t realize that everyone else stopped eating, many houses ago.
The phrase means, “Boy, that American eats a lot!”
I have a great appetite and a steel stomach perfectly suited for global travel, but even I was feeling a bit over-fed by the time I figured out they were all talking about me in Malay. Finally, Amni, and his sister Shareem, laughing, explained that their relatives had never seen anyone eat so much in one day.
The siblings also mentioned that Malays in general felt animosity toward the USA for extracting resources of tin, rubber and timber for many years while otherwise screwing over the developing nation. Most Malays had never met an American, so the disdain felt was largely conceptual — based mostly on information provided to them through the media.
The next year and the year after that Amni’s relatives asked about me, the American — perhaps because I hold the record of food consumed during day one of Hari Raya. I prefer to think it’s because respect and kindness transcends politics, language and religion.
The surprise of quarantine and then reflection of life over the past seven months has offered me a tremendous gift in the way of integrating personal reflections between my experiences abroad and the view from my front porch. Now, grounded more than ever in Pacific Northwest beauty, I feel a little more prepared to handle the barrage of media that smashes against the rocks of life each day in America.
Speaking of the media, a few weeks ago I came upon an essay about why we go to war — the focus of the article honed in on dehumanizing the “other.”
If you don’t view your foe as human — a sentient being — it’s easier to “destroy” them.
Since then, thoughts and feelings all shaken up, I’ve reflected on my travels and how, through some often awkward circumstances, my wanderlust opened me up to terrific opportunities to humanize people in countries far away — different religions, races and points of view.
A Parisian citizen helped me find the correct change in my hand while I flustered trying to pay at the cashier. A Korean family across from me in the waiting lounge for our canceled flight in Beijing offered a very hungry version of me their food — through gestures and smiles. And a man with a giant truck hosting republican bumper stickers helped me fix a flat tire on a very slanted side of the road in the middle of Washington State’s coastal mountain range — out of cell phone service.
Humans are not innately programmed to hate one another, or to have biases. Yet, it seems forcing humanity into fear of the “other” rewards some with power and profit. Traveling outside one’s comfort zone is the perfect antidote to that poison, opening up hearts and minds. It allows the person to reach humanity face to face, without a Facebook troll pulling the strings of marionettes, dangling in the air. If the desired message, “different is bad” really rings true, then why do so many people take pleasure in traversing the globe?
I’ve always felt different from everyone else around me — some of this came with growing up gay in a religious and rural world. Feeling different from others makes it easier for me to venture to explore the world, but the “different is bad”/ “othering” messages prevalent today sting like a nettle dragging across my ankle in the middle of the forest.
And this sting is brushing against all of us in the US right now. With words thrown around in our culture today like ‘socialist’, ‘nazi’, ‘facsist’, etc, there is little room for conversation. The labels of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have been used to divide us, when we likely believe more similarly than those pejoratives imply. It is profitable to powerful people for Americans to deem the “other” as negative, and continue to divide us.
I encourage us all to take another look at our country from the eyes of a traveller visiting a far off exotic land.
Avoid generalizations. Seek face-to-face experiences that shed light on what’s in the heart of people, rather than hearsay. Try different foods, engage by listening to all kinds of people, learn history from museums and reputable sources, experience local customs with the citizens who make up the population. Let’s be travelers in our own country — with open eyes, hearts, and minds.
And vote. Vote on local issues. Vote on local leaders. Vote for dog catcher. Vote for 5 cent charge on sugar sodas. Vote for governors and senators and president of the United States. No matter if in a blue or red or “safe” state.
From the American who eats a lot, happy October!
Matthew
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Seattle P-Patch
2020 is quite a year, but nature still finds ways to bring people together to live amongst inspiring colorful growth. In fact, Seattle has almost 90 community gardens, known as P-Patches, sprinkled throughout the city. A symbol of community coming together to help others (by raising food) and add more vibrant textures to our neighborhoods. Check out this photo gallery of my recent visit to a favorite P-Patch.
