a rambling update
There is little more absurd than "voting" happening in a region where all of the candidates who do not toe the party line have been disqualified from standing for office. The nerve of these pro-Beijing assholes to "urge everyone to vote", after greatly reducing the number of seats that are directly elected in the first place. It's just unbelievable that anyone can take their nonsense seriously. People who have gotten suckered completely into the CCP way of thinking truly are brainwashed, there is no other way to describe it. It's like 1984, where the word "democracy" is used to mean exactly the opposite of actual democracy, where the word "freedom" is used to mean exactly the opposite of actual freedom, and so on.
Every now and again i forget how utterly fucked the political situation in China was, but then it pops into the mainstream western media and i remember, yeah, nah, it really was fucking fucked. The political apparatus in China - and now also in Hong Kong - is living in a bubble of academic wank, where through ever more complicated argumentation they can somehow convince themselves that black is white and white is black. I don't think most of the populace takes it as seriously as the politicians and party members, but everyone knows better than to challenge it openly.
I don't know why what's happened in Hong Kong pisses me off so much. Although i have good memories of going there as a child, and i have some connection to the place due to it being the home of my grandfather for many years, it's also a place that represents a lot of things i dislike - capitalism run amok, massive wealth inequality, the gentrification and/or destruction of culturally distinct neighborhoods, multinational corporations crushing local business... But also it was one of the few symbols of freedom in the Sinosphere. A place where it seemed like there was a future for Chinese culture that wasn't suffocated by the CCP and PRC hegemony. Now there is only Taiwan, and for how long?
Sadly, visiting these places again is off-limits to me - and to most people - for the foreseeable future. Most of Asia has closed their borders to outsiders for over 2 years now. You can really tell in which countries xenophobic sentiments always ran deep by looking at which ones closed their borders when COVID emerged and still haven't reopened - not even to the vaccinated. Europe, Africa and the Americas seem to house people who are at least theoretically more open to travelers than Asia and Australia. It kinda reinforces my decision to become Canadian and not Australian, despite the fact i lived as a permanent resident in Australia for much longer than i ever lived in Canada. Australia is one of the more multicultural countries in the world, but it still has a bit of a fortress mentality, like many countries in that part of the world.
It's interesting to compare it now, as i spend a bit of time in Panama, which is "crossroad of the Americas" and a country whose economic stability has made it a migration destination for other people in the region.
I am staying with a Venezuelan family, one of the 5 plus million Venezuelans who escaped that country as inflation exploded to a degree orders of magnitude worse than anything people are experiencing in Europe or North America right now. Most Venezuelan refugees didn't escape to the US or Canada, so it doesn't really hit the news, but worldwide it's a crisis second only to the Syrian exodus. Reading the Latin American newspapers, one of the stories is the struggles Colombia has with over a million Venezuelans who migrated across the border. And, of course, the government in Venezuela is trying to spin this exactly the same way that the Chinese government spins Hong Kong brain drain and capital flight, by accusing all the neighboring countries of xenophobia and bigotry, and sponsoring a return to the motherland campaign. Authoritarian regimes are all the same in their refusal to ever accept responsibility for their mistakes, and their constant need to paint everyone else as the bullies. It's pathetic.
In Panama City, you will often hear a conversation start along the lines of "oh, you're from Colombia, me too!" I think migrants identify one another through their accents, or their use of particular terms and phrases that are more popular in one Latin American country or the other. Aside from being white and wearing a bum bag, there are also some aspects of my Spanish that mark me as an outsider, for instance always falling back on frijoles as the term for beans in the context of rice and beans. (Frijoles being the Mexican term for refried beans, which usually isn't the sort of beans that they serve here with rice.) I think the local term is gallo pinto, but it never pops into my mouth when i am put on the spot.
Yesterday i went to a Mexican restaurant and got a torta, and it felt nice to ask for a torta and just get what i recognize as a torta (as opposed to an omelette or a cake or something). In Panama an empanada is something like a Jamaican patty. A tortilla is a thick piece of corn bread, more like an arepa. Plátanos are plantains but bananas are guineos. And people use the word "fren" in place of amigo, in casual conversation, at least. But you also hear Spanish from Colombia, from Venezuela, from Mexico... I'm not good enough to hear the difference and instantly know, but i love to hear that there is a difference. It is similar to the feeling i had when i lived in Shenzhen and heard all the different Chinese accents from around the country (and occasionally even different Chinese languages altogether). It feels cosmopolitan, without feeling like it's an expat bubble.
But, of course, there is an expat bubble here too. People who have lived here for years and still don't speak a word of Spanish. People who only come for a couple of years and live right next to their company's HQ. And the bubble closer to the downtown area where you find the usual rich, well-traveled locals mingling with moneyed tourists. I went there yesterday to buy some pants. A shopping mall indistinguishable from any in Toronto, or Los Angeles, or Shanghai, or wherever. H&M. Old Navy. Nike. Adidas. Lacoste. Timberland. Benihana. Cinnabon. Dairy Queen. Olive Garden. Starbucks. Please stop me before i kill myself.
I hated it. I hated every moment of it. But i had to go there because i needed to buy pants. Despite the fact that it is allegedly dry season in Panama at the moment, every day there is at least several hours of extremely heavy tropical rain. Just like in China, the old parts of town were built with low-rise buildings that had awnings over the sidewalk so you could walk around outside and not get wet... But just like in China, the new buildings are all straight lines with no awnings that force you to either enter the building (if it's a shopping mall) or jump in a taxi to get to a shopping mall (if it's a residential tower), otherwise you will get soaked. Y'all know how much i hate shopping malls, and taxis, so repeatedly this week i have gotten soaked. I only own one pair of pants, and it is jeans. So. I need new pants. At least pants that will dry faster than jeans, because it really sucks to put on wet pants every single morning.
I suppose i could wear my shorts. But because i am going to school, and because i am in a homestay, i feel like it's not appropriate to wear shorts. The environment is too "classy", if that makes sense. Over here shorts are for the gym and the beach and more working class areas than the one i am staying in right now.
I am on the 16th floor, looking out past some other apartment blocks at the mountains. It's a nice view, but a depressing building. First 5 stories are parking lots, because everybody at this income level appears to own a car. Security guard at the entrance. Key thingy to buzz in. It feels like a prison, although i suppose less like a prison than those bungalows with walls, electric fences and razor wire around them. But the neighborhood is unfortunate too, with extremely busy roads that don't have pedestrian crossings because why would you ever walk anywhere unless you are poor? There is a supermarket across the road where half the food is imported from the US and costs more than it does in the US. This isn't even a "rich" part of town - this isn't where they built the mall with Chanel and Hugo Boss storefronts - but it's still middle class enough to feel oppressively suburban, in the North American sense.
Before i went to the big shopping mall yesterday, i went to a smaller shopping area that my homestay hosts recommended. It had lots of discount stores and little market stalls out the front where local people sold fruit and frybread (called "hojaldra" here) and cellphone accessories and other bits and bobs. It is much more the kind of place where i would prefer to spend my money, although unfortunately i couldn't find pants there either. Finding a 34" leg pant in Panama that isn't jeans or khakis seems to be a fool's errand. Tomorrow i will try the uniform stores, which annoyingly aren't open on the weekends. Maybe i can find some pants for construction workers or other outdoor workers in my size.
I did visit one wild store that i never even knew existed before yesterday. It's like a liquidation center for returns and surplus stock from Amazon and other online retailers. The other side of e-commerce. These stores have aisles of bins filled with plastic-sealed "stuff" where each bag is the same price. And the price changes depending on what day you are there - it's highest on Saturdays when the crowds are busiest, and perhaps when the best stuff arrives. By "stuff", i mean everything from electronics (cameras, toys, watches) to home decor (light fixtures, ornaments) to clothing. You can't always tell what's in the bag, you just have to have an eye for what it might be. Some people rip the bags open to see what it is, but there are a surprising number of unripped bags that folks purchase too. My host suggested installing the Amazon app to scan any exposed barcodes and find out what's inside to see if it's worth taking to the checkout. Either way you'll only pay a few dollars for "stuff" that in some cases could be worth up to a hundred dollars online. It was quite an experience shopping there, much more hectic and lottery-like than places like TJ Maxx or Ross in the US.
Admittedly, the experience did made me realize that i totally hate shopping and consumerism in general. I feel guilty that i ever worked for an e-commerce company. There is so much waste in the industry, even if stuff gets resold down the chain to poorer people in poorer countries. I wonder how much of this eventually still ends up in landfill anyway? Probably tons, literally.
Anyway, i didn't really have much of a point with this entry other than to react to the news out of Hong Kong. My life here in Panama right now is not very interesting. School in the morning. Trialing random affordable food for lunch, but none of it is especially memorable. In the evenings i am staying in my room and eating from the Ursack, as if i am camping, because i don't want to go into the kitchen or living room and bother my hosts. Maybe that's a strange way to do homestay, but i constantly feel like i am imposing and i am pretty uncomfortable with it, so i'll be happy when i can move out, despite the help it has been to have "normal" morning conversations in Spanish with my hosts.
I'll be here for Christmas too, which will be especially awkward.
But over New Year's i'll head back to a hotel, and then for January next year i need to decide whether to do a month more Spanish classes or just pick up and either head to Colombia (on a boat) or explore a bit more of Panama and Central America, with an optimistic view to heading back to Canada over land. We'll see. That's ages away yet. A lot of it depends on omicron and if countries in this part of the world decide to close up their borders too. I hope they don't because closed borders is the worst and most authoritarian bullshit that has come out of this pandemic. People complaining about masks and vaccination mandates should quit their whining over basic health measures. It's closed borders that's the real fascist policy.
Every now and again i forget how utterly fucked the political situation in China was, but then it pops into the mainstream western media and i remember, yeah, nah, it really was fucking fucked. The political apparatus in China - and now also in Hong Kong - is living in a bubble of academic wank, where through ever more complicated argumentation they can somehow convince themselves that black is white and white is black. I don't think most of the populace takes it as seriously as the politicians and party members, but everyone knows better than to challenge it openly.
I don't know why what's happened in Hong Kong pisses me off so much. Although i have good memories of going there as a child, and i have some connection to the place due to it being the home of my grandfather for many years, it's also a place that represents a lot of things i dislike - capitalism run amok, massive wealth inequality, the gentrification and/or destruction of culturally distinct neighborhoods, multinational corporations crushing local business... But also it was one of the few symbols of freedom in the Sinosphere. A place where it seemed like there was a future for Chinese culture that wasn't suffocated by the CCP and PRC hegemony. Now there is only Taiwan, and for how long?
Sadly, visiting these places again is off-limits to me - and to most people - for the foreseeable future. Most of Asia has closed their borders to outsiders for over 2 years now. You can really tell in which countries xenophobic sentiments always ran deep by looking at which ones closed their borders when COVID emerged and still haven't reopened - not even to the vaccinated. Europe, Africa and the Americas seem to house people who are at least theoretically more open to travelers than Asia and Australia. It kinda reinforces my decision to become Canadian and not Australian, despite the fact i lived as a permanent resident in Australia for much longer than i ever lived in Canada. Australia is one of the more multicultural countries in the world, but it still has a bit of a fortress mentality, like many countries in that part of the world.
It's interesting to compare it now, as i spend a bit of time in Panama, which is "crossroad of the Americas" and a country whose economic stability has made it a migration destination for other people in the region.
I am staying with a Venezuelan family, one of the 5 plus million Venezuelans who escaped that country as inflation exploded to a degree orders of magnitude worse than anything people are experiencing in Europe or North America right now. Most Venezuelan refugees didn't escape to the US or Canada, so it doesn't really hit the news, but worldwide it's a crisis second only to the Syrian exodus. Reading the Latin American newspapers, one of the stories is the struggles Colombia has with over a million Venezuelans who migrated across the border. And, of course, the government in Venezuela is trying to spin this exactly the same way that the Chinese government spins Hong Kong brain drain and capital flight, by accusing all the neighboring countries of xenophobia and bigotry, and sponsoring a return to the motherland campaign. Authoritarian regimes are all the same in their refusal to ever accept responsibility for their mistakes, and their constant need to paint everyone else as the bullies. It's pathetic.
In Panama City, you will often hear a conversation start along the lines of "oh, you're from Colombia, me too!" I think migrants identify one another through their accents, or their use of particular terms and phrases that are more popular in one Latin American country or the other. Aside from being white and wearing a bum bag, there are also some aspects of my Spanish that mark me as an outsider, for instance always falling back on frijoles as the term for beans in the context of rice and beans. (Frijoles being the Mexican term for refried beans, which usually isn't the sort of beans that they serve here with rice.) I think the local term is gallo pinto, but it never pops into my mouth when i am put on the spot.
Yesterday i went to a Mexican restaurant and got a torta, and it felt nice to ask for a torta and just get what i recognize as a torta (as opposed to an omelette or a cake or something). In Panama an empanada is something like a Jamaican patty. A tortilla is a thick piece of corn bread, more like an arepa. Plátanos are plantains but bananas are guineos. And people use the word "fren" in place of amigo, in casual conversation, at least. But you also hear Spanish from Colombia, from Venezuela, from Mexico... I'm not good enough to hear the difference and instantly know, but i love to hear that there is a difference. It is similar to the feeling i had when i lived in Shenzhen and heard all the different Chinese accents from around the country (and occasionally even different Chinese languages altogether). It feels cosmopolitan, without feeling like it's an expat bubble.
But, of course, there is an expat bubble here too. People who have lived here for years and still don't speak a word of Spanish. People who only come for a couple of years and live right next to their company's HQ. And the bubble closer to the downtown area where you find the usual rich, well-traveled locals mingling with moneyed tourists. I went there yesterday to buy some pants. A shopping mall indistinguishable from any in Toronto, or Los Angeles, or Shanghai, or wherever. H&M. Old Navy. Nike. Adidas. Lacoste. Timberland. Benihana. Cinnabon. Dairy Queen. Olive Garden. Starbucks. Please stop me before i kill myself.
I hated it. I hated every moment of it. But i had to go there because i needed to buy pants. Despite the fact that it is allegedly dry season in Panama at the moment, every day there is at least several hours of extremely heavy tropical rain. Just like in China, the old parts of town were built with low-rise buildings that had awnings over the sidewalk so you could walk around outside and not get wet... But just like in China, the new buildings are all straight lines with no awnings that force you to either enter the building (if it's a shopping mall) or jump in a taxi to get to a shopping mall (if it's a residential tower), otherwise you will get soaked. Y'all know how much i hate shopping malls, and taxis, so repeatedly this week i have gotten soaked. I only own one pair of pants, and it is jeans. So. I need new pants. At least pants that will dry faster than jeans, because it really sucks to put on wet pants every single morning.
I suppose i could wear my shorts. But because i am going to school, and because i am in a homestay, i feel like it's not appropriate to wear shorts. The environment is too "classy", if that makes sense. Over here shorts are for the gym and the beach and more working class areas than the one i am staying in right now.
I am on the 16th floor, looking out past some other apartment blocks at the mountains. It's a nice view, but a depressing building. First 5 stories are parking lots, because everybody at this income level appears to own a car. Security guard at the entrance. Key thingy to buzz in. It feels like a prison, although i suppose less like a prison than those bungalows with walls, electric fences and razor wire around them. But the neighborhood is unfortunate too, with extremely busy roads that don't have pedestrian crossings because why would you ever walk anywhere unless you are poor? There is a supermarket across the road where half the food is imported from the US and costs more than it does in the US. This isn't even a "rich" part of town - this isn't where they built the mall with Chanel and Hugo Boss storefronts - but it's still middle class enough to feel oppressively suburban, in the North American sense.
Before i went to the big shopping mall yesterday, i went to a smaller shopping area that my homestay hosts recommended. It had lots of discount stores and little market stalls out the front where local people sold fruit and frybread (called "hojaldra" here) and cellphone accessories and other bits and bobs. It is much more the kind of place where i would prefer to spend my money, although unfortunately i couldn't find pants there either. Finding a 34" leg pant in Panama that isn't jeans or khakis seems to be a fool's errand. Tomorrow i will try the uniform stores, which annoyingly aren't open on the weekends. Maybe i can find some pants for construction workers or other outdoor workers in my size.
I did visit one wild store that i never even knew existed before yesterday. It's like a liquidation center for returns and surplus stock from Amazon and other online retailers. The other side of e-commerce. These stores have aisles of bins filled with plastic-sealed "stuff" where each bag is the same price. And the price changes depending on what day you are there - it's highest on Saturdays when the crowds are busiest, and perhaps when the best stuff arrives. By "stuff", i mean everything from electronics (cameras, toys, watches) to home decor (light fixtures, ornaments) to clothing. You can't always tell what's in the bag, you just have to have an eye for what it might be. Some people rip the bags open to see what it is, but there are a surprising number of unripped bags that folks purchase too. My host suggested installing the Amazon app to scan any exposed barcodes and find out what's inside to see if it's worth taking to the checkout. Either way you'll only pay a few dollars for "stuff" that in some cases could be worth up to a hundred dollars online. It was quite an experience shopping there, much more hectic and lottery-like than places like TJ Maxx or Ross in the US.
Admittedly, the experience did made me realize that i totally hate shopping and consumerism in general. I feel guilty that i ever worked for an e-commerce company. There is so much waste in the industry, even if stuff gets resold down the chain to poorer people in poorer countries. I wonder how much of this eventually still ends up in landfill anyway? Probably tons, literally.
Anyway, i didn't really have much of a point with this entry other than to react to the news out of Hong Kong. My life here in Panama right now is not very interesting. School in the morning. Trialing random affordable food for lunch, but none of it is especially memorable. In the evenings i am staying in my room and eating from the Ursack, as if i am camping, because i don't want to go into the kitchen or living room and bother my hosts. Maybe that's a strange way to do homestay, but i constantly feel like i am imposing and i am pretty uncomfortable with it, so i'll be happy when i can move out, despite the help it has been to have "normal" morning conversations in Spanish with my hosts.
I'll be here for Christmas too, which will be especially awkward.
But over New Year's i'll head back to a hotel, and then for January next year i need to decide whether to do a month more Spanish classes or just pick up and either head to Colombia (on a boat) or explore a bit more of Panama and Central America, with an optimistic view to heading back to Canada over land. We'll see. That's ages away yet. A lot of it depends on omicron and if countries in this part of the world decide to close up their borders too. I hope they don't because closed borders is the worst and most authoritarian bullshit that has come out of this pandemic. People complaining about masks and vaccination mandates should quit their whining over basic health measures. It's closed borders that's the real fascist policy.