I just had my best sleep in a long time. My dreams were elaborate, meaning my harried mind finally had a chance to iron out, at least partially, a few kinks. In one dream, I was asked to review some miserable literary text, with a few footnotes in French. As I fudged and botched this unwelcomed task, a crowing rooster saved my ass. I woke up.

I’m paying $10 a night in Librazhd, a mountain town of 6,937 people. When I got on the mini-bus in Tirana, the driver thought I had done so by mistake. Looking alarmed, he asked where I was going? Foreigners don’t come here.

My room has an air conditioner that doesn’t work. There is hot water. My bathroom is the size of a shower stall, which is perfect, because it also functions, in its entirety, as a shower stall. A shower hose snakes from the puny, “Euro Standard” sink, and there’s a drain on the floor. At least there’s no courtesy comb with lots of hair from previous guests. I have a tiny balcony to dry my handwashed clothing, so technically, I can stay here forever. What else do I need?

Cicadas buzzing overlays a gurgling stream. White or yellow butterflies weave, stagger and dip among the shrubs, weeds and wild white flowers. Birds chirp, frogs croak and stray dogs bark. Looking down, I see grapevines and two cans of Coke, the only trash. In the distance, finger-sized humans walk back and forth, fending off death. Among tenements lurks the shape of an Orthodox church, with its three-bell tower. There’s a basketball court that’s always empty, but the daily high has been around 100 degrees, 10 more than usual, for two weeks already. On the horizon, mountains have arranged themselves rather dramatically, for my sole benefit, I’m sure. Knowing I was coming, they hurried, with girlish giddiness, into place.

Across the hallway, there’s an old guy maybe five steps away from the morgue. Through his thin door, I can hear him hacking. Unlike me, he must use the shared bathroom. With no common language, we can only wave at each other.

This morning, one of the crowing roosters sounded like an infant crying, which tore me up. Even in the most idyllic setting, there’s tremendous suffering, of course, one room over or maybe even in one’s bed, but what do I know, I just got here. Fully clothed in awful hand-me-downs, we suddenly tumble in, and in clownish rags, if that, we shall book, trailing curses.

Librazhd is distinguished by a rather macabre, black stone monument to two murdered poets, Vilson Blloshmi and Genc Leka. In the middle of a rectangular fountain lie two decapitated heads, one with its eyes wide open. Poetic fragments crawl up the side of a head.

What a concept, to be killed for one’s poetry, but this savagery can only occur in a society that’s still civilized, where the most meticulously calibrated language still matters, where there are still verbal shades, hues and textures, not just single words to trigger constantly enraged idiots, as in present-day America! There, poets are too irrelevant to be murdered. It’d be like raping a corpse.

(Even in Philadelphia, there’s only one statue of a poet. A modest bust of Whitman is on out-of-the-way Oregon Avenue, in front of the Dunkin’ Donuts. Granted, there’s the elegant Walt Whitman Bridge, but that was built in 1957.)

Arriving in Librazhd, I headed straight to the center to get my bearings, and also to find a hotel. Like in the rest of Albania, there were cafés everywhere. At the fanciest, there was a panoramic photo of Dresden, that tragic city, jewel of Germany, barbarically destroyed. Shunning all the chichi ones, I eased into a spartan, half obscured joint, away from the main promenade.

At an outside table sat a wiry, leathery man in a polyester polo shirt and beige track pants, on their last legs. Between gulps of raki, he rolled a cigarette with gnarly fingers. Unlike my lame, overly brainy ass, he clearly knew how to swing a hoe without chopping his toes off.

I ordered a large Korca from a boy waiter. Maybe 14, he was brazenly growing his first moustache. Transitioning into a man is no easy challenge, with many, if not most, failing repeatedly until death. Cemeteries worldwide should be filled with this generic epitaph, “I’M SORRY. I FAILED TO BECOME A MAN.”

Hanging laundry on a second-floor balcony, a woman accidentally dropped a chunk of wood onto the pavement. Glancing down, she saw no writhing or dead body, so leisurely returned to her chore. Walking by, an old man in a knitted fez noticed me and smiled. Smiling back, I mumbled and nodded.

After my first swig of Korca, I leaned back, stretched out my legs and felt almost too comfortable, for everything around me was perfectly normal. People talked and laughed. Although open, frank conversations are dear to life, they’re too often denied. If you’re too distracted or censored from engaging in such, you’re in hell.

Bringing me my second Korca, the kid waiter volunteered in crisp English, “Do you need help with anything?”

“Actually, I’m looking for a hotel. Is there one near here?”

It’s not a question he had ever encountered, apparently, for he had to consult the next table for a good minute before answering me.

His directions, though, were very fluent and precise, “You go to that corner and turn right. You will then see a bridge, a concrete bridge. There’s also a wooden bridge, but don’t cross that! About twenty meters after this concrete bridge, there’s a gas station. Ask the people there. They’ll show you where the hotel is.” Now, you try that in whatever Spanish, French or German you can still dredge up from your high school or college days.

English instructions in small town Albania must be fairly good, for I’ve encountered similarly impressive young people elsewhere.

In Peshkopi, population 13,251, I talked to a 19-year-old for nearly an hour, and he had no problems following me.

“Man, your English is very good!”

“I was one of the best in my school,” he smiled. “We had an essay contest in English. I won it two years in a row!”

“Wow! What did you win?”

“Just a piece of chocolate!” He laughed. “For writing this long essay in English, they gave me a fuckin’ piece of chocolate!”

“Ha, ha!”

“We had an American teacher. He was a volunteer. He’s gone now.”

“So what can you do with your English skills?”

“Nothing, really. I was a waiter at this café. Next month, I’m going to Italy to pick fruits. I will be there for three months, at least. It will be hard work, but at least I’ll make money. Here, I can do the same and make no money.”

Last year in South Korea, I went into a fried chicken place and asked for half a bird. Misreading my hand gestures, the lady gave me a full one, but chopped up. It’s standard in South Korea to gorge on an entire chicken, while downing mugs of beer. Their BBQ restaurants also stuff you with meat, usually pork.

Germans, too, can devour frightful quantity of pork at one meal. Served such a sinful portion in Munich, I immediately thought, There’s no way all that is going to fit inside my body.

In Cairo five months ago, I’d sometimes eat dinner with the staff at my budget hotel. Though it was always varied and delicious, there was almost no meat. With flat bread, we scooped potato chunks, mashed fava beans, lentil dip, eggplant in an oily tomato sauce, pickled carrots and turnip, feta cheese spread or falafel, etc. Not bad, since it only cost around $4 to feed three people. All over town, however, there were fast food joints that offered obscene-sized burgers. One named Cheesy Heart Attack had three huge beef patties topped with bacon, slices of cheese and deep-fried mozzarella sticks. A multi-tiered chicken sandwich was dubbed Bazooka. A five-piece chicken meal was called Bomb Attack!

Meat consumption is certainly an affluence index. In Albania, a typical deli sandwich, costing a buck or $1.25, has only a few thin slices of salami or prosciutto, and even the cheese is broken up. Used to heftier Philly hoagies, I’d buy one to go, then supplement it with store-bought meat.

In downscale Tirana eateries with no English menus, you can get spaghetti with butter for around $1.70, or a plate of pilaf with a meat-flavored broth for just $1.30. Either can be consumed whenever, including for breakfast, and your glass of water is free.

I’m giving you these examples to show that eating habits vary very widely, with each considered normal, for its time and place. In Saigon, even a piss-poor banh mi is supposed to have pate, ham, cucumber, carrot, cilantro and mayonnaise, but in a mountainous village near the Chinese border, I ran into a guy bicycling around to hawk six sweetened rolls for 22 cents, for that’s all the market would bear, near the end of a winding, unpaved road, among the clouds, with fairies, angels and maybe even God, just around the next bend. Like a dumbshit, I asked him, “What else do you have?”

We’re not just ignorant of what others eat, but what we had to swallow not even that long ago, and that’s why Orwell is, again, so magnificent. Big-hearted, he paid the closest attention to the most banal, yet most insistent, of our problems. That of feeding ourselves.

In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Orwell reproduces the food budget of a poor man, as printed in contemporary newspapers. His diet consists of just bread, margarine, dripping, cheese, onions, carrots, broken biscuits, dates, evaporated milk and oranges.

Orwell, “Please notice that this budget contains nothing for fuel. In fact, the writer explicitly stated that he could not afford to buy fuel and ate all his food raw. Whether the letter was genuine or a hoax does not matter at the moment. What I think will be admitted is that this list represents about as wise an expenditure as could be contrived; if you had to live on three and elevenpence halfpenny a week, you could hardly extract more food-value from it than that.”

Though in serious decline, the British Empire was still one of the most powerful, yet millions of Englishmen were literally disfigured by their poverty.

Orwell, “The most obvious sign of under-nourishment is the badness of everybody’s teeth. In Lancashire you would have to look for a long time before you saw a working-class person with good natural teeth. Indeed, you see very few people with natural teeth at all, apart from the children; and even the children’s teeth have a frail bluish appearance which means, I suppose, calcium deficiency. Several dentists have told me that in industrial districts a person over thirty with any of his or her own teeth is coming to be an abnormality.”

(In movies about England during this period, you don’t see any toothless smile, do you? That’s just Hollywood, obviously, so keep that in mind when you watch a film about any country. From its biggest claim to the smallest detail, Hollywood nearly always lies. You’d think everyone already knows that, but recently, an imbecilic reader used a Hollywood film to badger me about the Vietnam War. As Ron Unz sadly points out, Americans get most of their history from Hollywood. Talk about Jew-screwed! Shoah proves the Holocaust. Roots is a documentary about slavery. Three sistas took America to the moon, even if it never got there. It must be true because I saw it on a screen! No wonder the country is being flushed down a Third World shit hole.)

Orwell, “In one house where I stayed there were, apart from myself, five people, the oldest being forty-three and the youngest a boy of fifteen. Of these the boy was the only one who possessed a single tooth of his own, and his teeth were obviously not going to last long.”

After depicting working class life so grimly, Orwell paints an idyllic scene of a comparatively prosperous blue-collar home. On a winter evening after tea, “when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat.”

It’s where “you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good wages—an if which gets bigger and bigger—has a better chance of being happy than an ‘educated’ man. His home life seems to fall more naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working-class interior at its best.”

This assertion that a laborer is more likely to be content than an intellectual was likely derived from Orwell’s socialist orientation at the time. Still, no society can be deemed healthy if its working man’s lot isn’t at least tolerable. In the US, it’s already impossible, and will only get worse.

You grew up in El Cerrito, just north of Berkeley, then attended Reed College in Portland. Reed was like a madhouse in the 60’s. Then you went to Berkeley, before heading to Vietnam for four years, during the height of the war. Did you transform from a hippie to a gung-ho grunt?

I was too poor, too conservative and too goy to fit in well at Reed. At Berkeley I ignored the anti-war crowd and graduated in math in 1966.

I went to Vietnam to get out of the Army. IBM needed people to support the State Dept. and military. But… my National Guard signal company was a “designated reserve unit,” first to go if called by Pres. Johnson. They were not letting communications people out.

My sergeant was sympathetic to my problem, and excited that I had the chance to go to Vietnam. He said “The Army ain’t gonna step on its own dick. How’d you like to be a cook?”

In Danang I developed a rapport with the Marines I worked with. Glad not to be one, but respected them as people .

I’m assuming Vietnam was your first foreign country. It’s certainly not ideal to experience any place in during a war, with all its social turmoils and distortions. Still, you stayed there for four years, and even married a Vietnamese. What did you like and hate about Vietnam? Shoot straight!

IBM literally had to throw me out after four years. I loved the work, the warm weather, the freedom, the Vietnamese people and the money. I accumulated $100,000.

All bachelors, we formed the Benevolent Association for Recreation and Fornication—BARFUP. Our mission was to make the most of the outstanding French, Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants. We joined the elite French Club Sportif and Club Nautique.

The frustrations were tolerable: beggars, “I watch boys” who would vandalize your car if you didn’t pay protection, traffic cops who wanted bribes.

We developed what the French called la fièvre jaune, an appreciation of the beautiful young women. When one guy, who had divorced just to become eligible for Vietnam, brought his wife over we joked that he was “bringing a sandwich to a banquet.”

It is telling that despite the great availability of women, monogamy won out. Most settled down and quite a few are still married to their Vietnamese sweethearts. And why not? They love children, take pride in their bodies, and generally respect their husbands.

Vietnamese in French schools adopted French names, so my wife was Josée. Josée’s father, born in 1900 to the Bac Lieu province chief, studied law and lived in France. His firstborn of 12 came when he was 40. Mother, 20 years younger, was the daughter of the largest landowner. The incessant squabbles in their marriage presaged those in ours.

You ate your sandwich, and have apparently gotten over your yellow fever. You’re now married to a Ukrainian woman who’s 37 years younger! Can we assume she’d not have agreed to be your wife if you didn’t have an American passport? If so, is there anything wrong with that?

You can’t make that assumption. That would be the hard-up girls looking online to become “Russian brides.”

Looking for a place to practice English, Oksana dropped in on the Anglican church. My decade-older friend Mike chatted her up and squired her to Rotary and Toastmasters—where I also happened to be. Through conversations at their meetings she learned that I wanted to start a family. Mike escorted her to the Toastmasters Ball, where I danced with her.

She wanted to learn to type. My computer had a typing program. I put my arms around her and my hands on hers to position them properly. She still contends that the kiss on the neck came to her as a surprise, but I doubt it.

She played a weak hand well. Just as if she had read The Rules, she gave herself to me by slow degrees. She didn’t agree to marry until we had lived together for half a year. Encouraged by girls from her former dance troupe, she put my generosity to a one time test with diamonds and a fur coat. Satisfied, I heard nothing more. When burglars stole them they were not replaced.

While Oksana would like to see the United States, she has never had any desire to live there. Her family and friends are here.

We talk about our situation often in the context of encouraging mutual friends to get married. We were both somewhat unusual in that we were really committed to starting a family. The miracle is that we figured that out and were able to do something about it.

In between your Vietnamese and Ukrainian wives, you also had a Japanese one. How did you meet her?

I researched IBM overseas offices as my Vietnam tour ended. There was a sister office supporting the military in Germany. I booked an international telephone call—a rare thing in those days—to ask if they had openings.

I loved my time in Germany, learning the language and Spanish as well. I programmed what became an Army standard system—bit of a feather in my cap.

After Josée’s constant fighting led to our separation I discovered that my instincts had been right—the German girls were unromantic, hard-edged feminists. My one love was a Hungarian girl. Had I been wiser, I’d have married her.

When I returned from Germany in 1976, Washington was supposed to be a bachelor’s paradise—three women for every man. Yes, but each had read Sex and the Single Girl, The Feminine Mystique and Germaine Greer. They wanted careers and success—not families. The more attractive and intelligent, the more the corporate world would entice them. Those I met through church, the neighborhood and work were either uninteresting or uninterested.

I met this lovely half Japanese lady in my first week with Booz Allen just as short reconciliation with Josée failed. Within a month we were thrown together writing a government proposal. I had the expertise and the writing skill, Mary Ann knew Booz’ resources and how a proposal should be structured. I asked her out shortly after the victory party. She was surprised when “the bicycle guy” arrived at her door in a 450 SL.

She wasn’t sure that she wanted marriage or children, but gave it a try. However, she soon started her own company and career took precedence.

When you wed a foreigner, you’re also marrying her entire culture. How difficult was this? How did you get along with your foreign in-laws?

My Vietnamese, Japanese and Ukrainian mothers-in-law have all seemed happy that their daughters married somebody who could care for them. With minimal language overlap conversation was scant with the first two. Oksana’s mother and I talk easily about cooking, children and housekeeping. She can’t give me crap—I’m five years older and rather generous. Josée’s father enjoyed speaking of world affairs in French with somebody educated; subsequent fathers-in-law just weren’t interested. I’ve never gotten close to any of my wives’ siblings.

Josée’s friend My Linh and her French banker husband looked askance at the American husband. They didn’t trust America’s or American motives. In Germany Josée was the queen bee in the circle of Vietnamese rural wives, the one with savoir faire, the one who could negotiate in four languages, Vietnamese, French, English and German.

I didn’t form friendships with my wives’ friends until Ukraine. Oksana is extroverted. Her friends tolerate my Russian and/or are eager to speak English. Interest in the world is part of their culture.

What made you come to Ukraine initially?

At 80-years-old, you’ve done and seen quite a lot, but you didn’t exactly have an auspicious beginning. You couldn’t even graduate from high school. What happened?

I was expelled! I wasn’t much of a student anyway. I signed up for welding class and woodworking class, so I didn’t have to do any work, but in welding class, the instructor was a friggin drill sergeant from the Korean War! This son of a bitch was always ordering me around, “Do this,” “Do that.” If he didn’t like what I was doing, he’d say, “You, get on the floor, do twenty pushups!”

Right in class?

There weren’t desks or anything, but yeah. I had to get this asshole, so after school, I went back to the shop. There was no one in there, except me, so I welded a bunch of tools onto the welding table! My parents got a call. He knew immediately it was me.

So now what?

I joined the navy, on my 17^th birthday. I wanted to see the world. My parents had to sign for me. We were living in Bellevue, Washington. Back then, it only had about 10,000 people. So I flew to San Diego. I had never been on an airplane.

When you enlisted, you had to take a bunch of tests. They had to see what your aptitude was, whether you were a dishwasher, or swab the deck, or being an electrician or machinist. I took these tests and scored very high on them, so it made me eligible for a lot of technical programs. I went to submarine school for about three months, had psychological training there. You had to go through a 100-foot-tall escape tank, to simulate an escape from a submarine. None of that stuff bothered me. I graduated easily.

So where did you go?

My first submarine was a diesel submarine. It had completed patrols in the Pacific in World War II, successfully. It had sunk some Japanese ships, that kind of shit. It had about 70 enlisted men, and 10 officers.

On a submarine, everything was pretty loose. You can have long hair, you don’t need to shave, you don’t need to shine your shoes or any of that shit.

It was pretty cool. This was amazing stuff, I thought. Nobody was at war, 1957, so I had joined an adventure program.

They sent us to Pearl Harbor, but it was only to refuel and add supplies. Not much fresh vegetables. Lots of frozen stuff, frozen meats. The vegetables, they stacked them in the showers, so we wouldn’t be able to use the showers for a few weeks.

I got into a little trouble in Hawaii, because we were only there for a couple days. They only let us out for one night, to get drunk, chase women.

I climbed onto the roof of this nightclub place that had an open-air dance floor. I took these coconuts off this tree, and I was throwing them down onto the dance floor. Just crazy shit.

They didn’t really do anything to me. They just said, “OK, don’t do that shit any more.”

Were you drunk?

I might have been. I hardly drank anything, to speak of. When I was 16 or 15, I may have had a beer that whole time. I smoked, but I didn’t drink.

This was amazing, Linh, for an 18-year-old kid, to experience this, traveling across the Pacific. We ended up having to go through a hurricane on the surface. We were taking 45-degree pitch, and 65-degree rolls, and my job was helmsman, trying to steer this thing.

Cruising at night on the surface, my job was to look out at night, it was very peaceful.

In Hawaii, I bought ten cartons of cigarettes. I smoked Lucky Strike. They were a dollar a carton! I got paid $75 a month. Plus, we got another $30 hazardous duty pay, for being on a submarine. I really didn’t understand why. I didn’t see any hazard.

Seventy days later, we pulled into Yokosuka, Japan. Seventy days.

In Hawaii, we had seven or eight civilians come onboard, which was very unusual. Who are these guys? It ended up they were CIA. Our mission was to spy on a Russian naval base, right off the Russian naval base, submerged, and tap into their undersea cables, to monitor all their communication.

We were laying on the bottom, dead quiet, no engine running. No fans running, just dead quiet, hiding, and listening. There was a Russian destroyer that came out. You could hear their active sonar, looking for us. Apparently, they had an alarm that we were there, or some indication that we were right there.

We were just sitting on the bottom, in about 200 feet of water, not very deep. They started dropping depth charges. You know what those are? They’re big canisters they rolled off the destroyer, to try to kill submarines.

There’s your hazard pay!

Yeah, but we survived. So we were pinned down, and the air was getting low. The air was getting very screwed up. On the bunks, back in the crew’s quarters, we had carbon monoxide absorbent powder. The problem was we couldn’t turn on the air valves. There was no noise allowed. It was a little bit tense.

I remember going into the control room. That’s where they had the periscope and all that shit. I went up to the officer, and I said, “Hey lieutenant, you don’t mind if I smoke a cigarette?”

You couldn’t breathe and you wanted to smoke a cigarette?!

I figured I might as well have one more, if I was going to die soon. The officer said, “No, no , no, go ahead,” so I took out my Zippo and my Lucky, but the lighter wouldn’t light! He just laughed at me. There wasn’t enough oxygen to light the lighter.

So we weren’t caught by the Russians. We escaped, finally. They gave up after a while. Going deeper, we slowly crept out of there.

Eventually, we got back to Yokosuka, where the submarine was put onto a dry dock to be repaired. The hull of the submarine was damaged from the depth charges. It caved in from the compression of the explosions underwater.

It took six weeks to repair the submarine, so we had six weeks of rock and rolling! Can you imagine an 18-year-old kid, going into… Women everywhere, bars, 18-years old! Woo! Rock and roll!

Here’s a funny one. Halfway through, the chief of the boat, Jenkins, said we’re going to have a ship’s party. He said, “Everything in there is paid for! Everything.” Anyway, the ship’s party was in a brothel! It was at a fuckin’ brothel, with free pussy for everybody!

Jenkins was like a father to the other enlisted men. Besides organizing group activities for the crew, he also lent money to you if you were broke, and you paid him back on payday.

Did any man refuse to go to the party?

Oh no, no, no, we all went. What do you mean?

There might have been guys who were super religious, who didn’t think it was right.

No, no, no. They’re submarine sailors. What do you think?

It’s interesting, we had black guys on there too. Two or three black guys. At the time, black guys could join the navy, but they could only be stewards to the officers. You know, servants. Same with the Filipinos. They could join the navy, but they couldn’t be an electrician, torpedo man or anything. They had to work as stewards, as servants for the officers. It was pure racist crap.

It’s interesting, Linh, but where I grew up, during my entire existence, up to that point, I don’t think I had seen a black person, in person. Maybe on TV, you know. Like most things, I didn’t give it any thought.

One of the black guys became my best friend. We’d go get some women together, and stuff like that, and drinks.

He ended up with a girlfriend, after about two weeks there. I found a girl that I semi fell in love with, at 18. I stayed at her place most nights, that I could.

Then we went to Hong Kong. As a young, 18-year-old kid, and knowing very little, it was really amazing, the shit I went through, and discovered.

I just interviewed an American who’d traveled for five years straight, but you have been outside the US for 18 years altogether. Why, first off, and how have you been able to sustain yourself? Was there no place you wanted to settle? Will you ever return to the US to live?

I had always wanted to travel and see the world. I liked the idea of learning new languages, meeting different people and experiencing life in other countries. So, with a degree in literature I decided to go to Latin America and teach English. I worked in several small Latin American countries. The contrast between life in the USA and Latin America was striking. I was in Caracas soon after the banking crisis there. Students at the school where I taught had come to class crying after losing their life savings; the whole country became impoverished. I recall one morning a teacher showing up late for work because the police had literally kidnapped him off the street, taken him downtown, put a bag of cocaine on the table and said, “If you don’t pay us $200, this belongs to you.” That happened to a couple different people I knew in different countries. It almost happened to me, once. The trick is to be polite but firm, not to give in. “Officer, you say my papers are not in order? Let me show you again the visa stamp.” They don’t want a scene. I also worked in Ecuador, when, after just months in power, President Abdalá Bucharam embezzled millions of US dollars, held a party celebrating his young nephew’s own first million working as customs officer, then put out a CD of himself singing his favorite songs, which looked like an incredibly stupid distraction tactic. To the Ecuadorian people’s credit, Bucaram’s antics sparked a mass popular uprising. My boss told me not to go outside during the protests, because they might turn violent, but I couldn’t resist. There were marches and chants, tires burning in the streets, Bucaram hung in effigy. The Ecuadorian Congress voted him out of power on the basis of mental instability, and he fled to Panama with tens of millions of dollars. I saw how in Ecuador and many other Latin American countries, people didn’t trust each other, there was a higher tolerance for dishonesty, the public services were dysfunctional, there was endemic corruption, bad medical care, public littering, not much in the way of intellectual culture, but a good dollop of crime, and no shortage of people blaming America for their countries’ screw-ups. I didn’t want the United States to become like that.

When I went back to the USA in the mid-90’s, I tried talking to people about the problem of mass illegal immigration from Latin America. Back then, immigration was still a taboo topic. Pat Buchanan hadn’t been able to get the Republican nomination in ’96. Republicans let themselves be convinced he couldn’t get elected. I mean the guy actually wanted to build a wall to keep out illegal immigrants, for Christ’s sakes! I still tried to persuade people that our immigration policies, especially mass illegal immigration from Latin America, were going to cause real problems. I remember having a conversation with a young woman who had just graduated from Duke University. She was smart, well-adjusted, and good-looking. After explaining to me that the USA was a white supremacist country, I thought: another one off the deep end. But later, I remember watching a TV news segment on “whiteness”. It featured a traumatized teenage white girl emerging from some struggle session, whimpering through her tears and snot, “I’ll never take advantage of my whiteness again!” I remember the moment. I was stunned. The virus was spreading. I didn’t understand why so few people appreciated the risk posed by this rising tide of anti-white sentiment mixed with poorly controlled mass immigration of people of color.

I didn’t see the immigration-moderation movement having the power to effect much change. So, I left for Asia. China was my first stop. I taught English in Guangzhou. That was a great experience. The students sometimes told me about their lives in China, about their experiences growing up there, including what they themselves didn’t like about Chinese people and Chinese society. I learned a lot and grew to like many of them. Almost all of my enduring friendships from that time are with Chinese from the countryside. They are often earnest and sincere, very decent people. I spent some time in a western province, as well, where my Chinese teacher invited me to her home in the countryside for Spring Festival. I ate home-cooked Chinese food and got drunk on moonshine with the men. They assured me that if China and the United States ever went to war, they would protect me. But they wanted to know one thing: how could the people of the United State be so stupid as to have elected a black man president? Well … at least it wasn’t delusional anti-white hatred.

Over the years, I worked as a teacher, an editor, and a writer. It was this last work that finally made me leave China. It’s difficult to be a writer in an authoritarian country, and unlike many expats, I never really bought the idea that China was going to democratize. Five thousand years of authoritarian government doesn’t suddenly democratize because neoliberal economists with PhD’s advance a nifty self-serving theory. I was also fortunate to come into some money at that point, which allowed me the luxury of getting started as a writer. Writers often need outside funding of some sort to take the plunge. I eventually wound up in Taiwan, which is a great country. Even if Xi Jinping and John Cena don’t know it.

You encountered rural Chinese who didn’t understand how American whites could elect a black man. Was that racism? Did they simply expect people to vote for their own? Shouldn’t we be above that? You’ve spent a lot of time in East Asia, so how have you been treated? How do Orientals perceive whites, do you think? And blacks?

I don’t like the word “racism” because lefties use it to attack opinions about race they don’t like. That’s its main function. Anyone on the right who uses it is agreeing to a conceptual exchange on enemy territory, where the opinion-makers have already built their fortifications. Basically, I think what motivated the question was a lack of understanding of the history of race relations in America. A (half) black man became president in part as a result of that history. Cause and effect. But I avoided all that history by simply stating that Obama’s mother was white, which was a cheap answer. I suppose my teacher’s family must have had negative views of black people, or at least of their place in American society. Generally, I wasn’t too aware of that view in China. It wasn’t common in my students, who liked one of my black colleagues. On the other hand, he did have some hurdles to jump through. Some students complained before even taking his class, and the Chinese management initially opposed hiring him. (The school was owned by a Westerner, who overruled them.) I do recall another black teacher from an English-speaking African nation telling me how difficult it was for him to get a job in China. I think it may be that Chinese are generally pretty open to interactions with black people, but that some are afraid to initiate those interactions. Racial perceptions are odd. One colleague was an Asian woman who emigrated from Macau to the USA when she was a few months old. The students were convinced she had a thick Cantonese accent, which in reality was completely nonexistent.