Tony Zurlo understands a little about being a “farang” from his own experience as a “yang gui zi” (foreign devil) teaching in China (1990–91). He has published several books on nonwestern cultures and history, including books about China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam. His newest books of poetry are now available: Go Home Bones published by Pudding House Publications, about the effects of war on families and society; and Dali’s Clock, Schrodinger’s Cat, and a Pair of Dice published by Big Table Publishing Co., about the chaos of life in this new age of quantum and string theory.

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Farang
by Peter Blair (Thailand 1975–78)
Pittsburg: Autumn House Press, 2009.
$14.95
65 pages

Reviewed by Tony Zurlo (Nigeria 1964–66)

LIKE MOST PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEERS, Peter Blair had a passion for absorbing the culture of his host country. In Farang, a collection of thirty six poems, he offers a perceptive narrative in lyrical poetry about his experiences in Thailand.

“Farang” is a word used by the Thai people in both a neutral and derogatory manner to refer to white foreigners. In “Up-country Dream” he is “a farang as always / sitting in a deserted dirt-floor shop /” but he dreams of his grandmother “in a blue sarong [stirring] / fried rice in a wok” (ll. 1, 4). However, Blair is unable to shed his identity as a farang. The poem concludes: “Grandma, I take refuge in the Buddha, I yell. / My face in pillows, I hear the slow turning blades / of my ceiling fan: farang, farang, farang” (ll. 25-27).

More than half of the poems relate the narrator’s friendship with his students and fellow faculty members. He learns Thai from a student who is also his girl friend (”Between Daylight and Twilight”). Blair often writes with subtle humor about adjusting to the culture. In “I Fail the ‘Real Thai’ Test,” the narrator tries a Thai meal consisting of fruit, streak, onions, and peppers. When he takes a bite,

[the pepper] spills seeds and juice. Is good?
He wants me to smile, jump up,
fan my mouth with a frantic hand,
yell for water, a good sport.
But I sit still, and angrily
turn away in a cavernous silence (ll. 20- 25).

Predictably, Buddhism supplies much of the ambiance in the poems, from concepts such as Dharma, Karma, the eight-fold path, and non-attachment, to the practices of Thai Buddhist monks. One of his best poems is “By the Hundred-Foot Reclining Buddha.”

I am an inch-long farang.
The Buddha’s knowing
smile, the ant’s mandibles
articulate a delicate contrast:
Do I know everything,
or nothing? His huge toes
tower over me as my toes
tower over the ant. (ll. 9-16).

In another poem, a Thai professor who has returned from a retreat in a Buddhist monastery, attempts to explain the concept of Dharma: “Dharma is the empty / bowl.… The sky’s blue, like a bowl / overturned on market stalls and bleached / white buildings” (”Discussing the Dream of Culture with Professor Kwaan”).

Several poems present the sensuality of his relationship with his Thai girl friend, Siripan. Her  father is Chinese, a refugee who escaped from the “Red Chinese” as a teenager (”Siripan’s Father” l. 11). In “Dancing the Ramwong with Siripan,” he describes her as “graceful, like the dance itself, / a formal stylized courting, spinning / through all the positions that turn / a man and woman into blossoms” (ll. 11-14). From Siripan and his other Thai friends, he senses the ethereal quality of Thai culture. In “Goodbye Party” he describes the exquisite grace of another student’s dancing to “an ancient Thai song”:

[She] dances around me singing a prayer to Buddha
to keep my khwan from straying.
Her arms sweep candle-perfumed air;
her curved fingers unfold like fans
from her wrists. Circling me in the circle
of her classmates, she teaches me the grammar
of the spirit, the way candle smoke strays
up beyond her twirling hands into the sky
while her hips sway in a silk sarong
and her smile stays serene, unmoving. (ll. 22-30).

However, no matter how much he tries to blend in, the narrator never escapes his foreign identity. In the title poem, the narrator dodges stones thrown at him by Thais who shout out “farang” as an insult while he walks through a market after a night of visiting local bars (”Farang”).

In the poem “Two Farangs” he describes someone walking in the street:

He’s naked except for flip-flops
and frayed jeans cut-off
above mid-thigh and tight
around his bulging belly.
Look, at that farang strutting
down the sidewalk, I think,
sweaty, hairy chest and shock
of frizzed, blond hair bright
in sunlight. Ragged pants,
no shirt, that beard.
I’m about to cross the street
to warn him we Thais
find big white bodies unsettling
as ghosts, until I glimpse
my pale reflection in a store
window, my round farang eyes
staring back at me in wonder.

Although these poems can be enjoyed individually, they can best be appreciated as a lyrical narrative read in one sitting. The book provides insights into why RPCVs find themselves encountering Reverse Cultural Shock upon returning to the U.S.

To order this book from Amazon, click on the book cover or the bold book title — and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance.

In January 2008 I received an email from Jane Albritton (India 1967-69) asking if I would get the word out about her books project.  I was happy to do so. Anything to help RPCV writers get published. Anything to help RPCVs tell their stories. Anything to fulfill the Third Goal of the Peace Corps.

Jane’s plan was to publish four books of stories for the 50th anniversary. The four volumes-Africa and the Middle East; After the Cold War (focusing on Central Asia and Eastern Europe); Asia and the Pacific; Central America, South America and the Caribbean-would feature stories from past and present volunteers, staff and instructors.

Even while I was ’spreading the word’ I thought to myself: This is a crazy idea!

Four books by RPCV writers?
Where would she find the writers?
Who would publish four books by Peace Corps writers?

Well, once again Coyne is proven wrong!

Travelers’ Tales/Solas House, Inc. will be publishing the four books of Peace Corps at 50.

 The release date is March 2011, the anniversary of the signing of the executive order.

Congratulations, Jane, for pulling off this publishing Hat Trick, Plus One. And congratulations to all the writers who responded to her invitation and will be in print in these books.

Jane  Albritton has shown that RPCVs do know how to tell their stories to the world and in doing so are fulfilling the Third Goal of the agency while the Peace Corps in Washington, D.C. can’t even figure out a way to celebrate the success of our five decades of volunteering.

For more about Jane’s books, check out: www.peacecorpsat50.org)

Myth and mythology
Finally we come back to Gertrude Stein’s famous comment to Hemingway. “You are all a lost generation,” she told him. The truth is that Stein had heard her French garage owner speak of his young auto mechanics and their poor repair skills as “une génération perdue.”
     All Gertrude Stein wanted was competent mechanics to repair her car but Hemingway, seizing the expression, as any good writer would, identified a literary movement and a new way of looking at the world.
     Peace Corps writers do the same by bringing the world back home through their own writing. They have an understanding of parts of the world few Americans will ever know. And as PCVs they have a “way of looking at this world” that is new and fresh and insightful. Fulfilling the Third Goal of the Peace Corps means telling your tales at home.
     So, see how far you can go with a good line or two.
     Begin today.
     Write.

Marian Haley Beil and I are pleased to announce that Peace Corps Writers — one of the blog of Peace Corps Worldwide —  is launching a new line of books written by RPCVs. These books — fiction, non-fiction, travel, memoirs, poetry, etc. — will be published by CreateSpace, a well-known print-on-demand (POD) company that is , will carry the logo of the Peace Corps Writers imprint, and will be featured on our site and sold through Amazon.com.

For your book to become part of this new publishing venture, your manuscript must first be submitted  to our editors for acceptance. Once that is accomplished, a fee of $150.00 will be charged that will cover the cost of a unique “Peace Corps Writers” ISBN number, rights to use the Peace Corps Writers imprint logo in the production of the book, and inclusion in this new line of books that will be promoted by our website, Peace Corps Worldwide.

All editorial, book design, and production costs for your book will be paid directly by you to the POD publisher. Special editors at the company will be assigned to work with the authors of Peace Corps Writers books. All royalties from sales of your book will go directly to you. Peace Corps Writers will not share in your royalties. You will receive 40–80% of the retail sale of your book from the POD company, depending on the distribution channel through which sales are made.

Income generated from this line of books by Peace Corps Writers will in turn be used to support the awards given annually for the  best books written by RPCVs.

If you are interested in participating in this special publishing venture, please email me at: jpcoyne@optonline.net.

M. Susan Hundt-Bergan lives in Madison, WI, with her husband Hal. Susan is retired from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources where she was team leader for recycling. She is now a certified Lay Minister for the Diocese of Madison. She serves her parish, Blessed Sacrament, and the diocese in various ways, including coordinating the Catholic ministry at the Dane County Jail, a responsibility that takes her to the jail each Thursday night to worship and pray with incarcerated men and women.  She is blessed to be the mother of two and grandmother of three. Another joy and challenge is sharing ownership of a family farm with her ten brothers and sisters.

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Faith, Interrupted, A Spiritual Journey
by Eric Lax (Micronesia 1966–68)
Alfred A. Knopf
$26.00
288 pages
April 2010

Reviewed by M. Susan Hundt-Bergan (Ethiopia 1966-68)

IN THIS SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Eric Lax writes about his journey from a childhood immersed in the Episcopalian faith of his family, through an adulthood of spiritual drift, to his current uncomfortable agnosticism. On a parallel track, he also tells the story of his college friend, George Packard, who, after a distinguished combat career in Vietnam, became an Episcopalian priest.

The opening scene of the book drew me in. Eric, a boy of eight, is the acolyte for his father, an Episcopalian priest, at an early Sunday morning Holy Communion Service. The service is lovingly and precisely described. The earnest boy and his father the priest obviously adore each other. From that opening scene we enter into the life of this small family — father, mother, son — that revolves around their religious faith. I felt very much at home in the opening chapters of Mr. Lax’s book. I also grew up in a family with faith at the center, although Roman Catholic, and my oldest brother, not my father, is a priest.

From first grade through college (except grades 5 through Eric attended Episcopalian schools, and an active Christian faith was at the heart of his life. Once he entered Hobart College, the courses in philosophy and theology brought him to a new intellectual engagement with his faith, “faith seeking understanding” as St. Anselm wrote in the eleventh century. During his college years he was active in the campus Episcopalian congregation, served as an acolyte, and even considered the priesthood. It was at Hobart that he met George (Skip) Packard, a fellow Episcopalian, who became a life-long friend. Skip Packard’s life, most specifically his faith journey, provides a story within the story, a point of reference, and a contrast, to Lax’s course.

As Eric approached the end of his college years, the shadow of the Vietnam War and the Draft touched everything. Eric’s faith led him to two decisions: to join the Peace Corps, and to apply for conscientious objector (CO) status. Lax was sent to Micronesia, the tiny island of Tsis, where he was a teacher from 1966 to 1968. During that time he occasionally was able to worship at a Catholic church, staffed by a lively Jesuit, on a nearby island.

In the last months of Lax’s Peace Corps service and for several years afterward, his life was taken up with the CO petition. Eventually he was successful, and free to focus fully on his career as a writer, first in New York and then California. Something else was happening in those thirty-something years: his faith began to slip away.

Lax understands how he lost his faith. “It was a course of omission, not commission — of what I happened not to do rather than what I decided to do.  I no longer attended services every Sunday and found I didn’t really miss them, so I attended even less often . . ..  Fewer and fewer in my circle of friends were devout . . ..”  He also began to question the teachings of the book of Common Prayer that previously he had totally accepted. When his father died, Lax realized how much his father had been “the conduit” to his spiritual life. The Nicene Creed became too much to swallow, and he says, “More and more I liked the idea of leading a good life without having to frame it with dogma about original sin, ascension into heaven, and who is sitting at God’s right hand.”  With the death of his mother in the mid-1990s (Lax doesn’t provide many dates for the reader.), he no longer felt the need to pretend to be a believer. And, although Lax apparently felt relieved, he also felt the separation from his beloved father widen and deepen.

While telling of his own faith journey, Lax devotes a significant part of the book to his friend, Skip. In danger of being drafted, Skip enlisted in the army and became a distinguished combat leader, training others in ambush techniques. After his Vietnam years, he became an Episcopalian priest and was later raised to the bishopric.  Packard and Lax’s friendship had waxed and waned over the years, but the many conversations and the time spent together during the writing of this book brought them very close. The book reveals the strong contrast between their spiritual journeys: Packard persisted, through the vicissitudes of life, on the path of faith that Lax chose to leave.

And yet, the final message that Lax leaves with us is his uncertainty. He says that he envies his friends who have faith and the transcendence it brings to their lives. In his last paragraph, he speaks of how hard it is to find God, and that, regarding the faith he once had, “I miss it.”  There is also the curious title of his book, “Faith, Interrupted,” as though his belief in God is merely on pause. What are we to make of this?  Does he really yearn for a relationship with God again, to believe, to have faith?  Or is it simply a literary flourish?

We know from the lives of great Christian saints that it is common for them to experience a time, called “the dark night of the soul,” when God seems distant and unresponsive.  We know from letters and journals published posthumously that Mother Teresa of Calcutta suffered this spiritual loneliness for decades, but yet she continued a life of intense prayer and tireless care of the destitute and dying.  Each day she made the choice to believe in the God who was once so close and ardent but seemed to have turned His face from her. Faith requires an act of the will. We know from human relationships how feelings come and go and that we must choose to be faithful to our spouse, respectful and caring for an aging and demented parent, patient with a stubborn and disappointing son or daughter.

It is certainly not unusual for a person to challenge the faith in which he or she was raised. Looking back on my two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia (also from 1966 to 68), I am struck at how easily — after 22 years of Catholic formation and education — I was able to slip into a routine with very little formal worship.  (I can’t remember what my personal prayer life was like. Rereading my journals and letters home would probably shed some light.)  There was no Catholic church in my town, and I felt uncomfortable at the Ethiopian Orthodox churches, where everyone stared at me and I never quite knew what was expected of us foreign women.

After returning to the U.S., I always went to church when I was with my family in Wisconsin. However, there wasn’t much Sunday worship when I was back in Washington, D.C., where I worked immediately after Peace Corps. Yet I was almost always miserable and blue on Sundays.  Gradually I came to understand the problem, as St. Augustine (354–430 A.D.) expressed for the ages, “You made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”

My adult life has been a growing into that truth: my times of peace and joyfulness are those when I am open to God’s grace and walking mindfully with His Son, Jesus Christ, my Redeemer, Teacher, Friend.  I journey in the earthly company of my brothers and sisters in the family we call the Church.  Birth, coming of age, marriage, death, each of life’s threshold moments are made transcendent through the sacramental rituals of this institution Christ founded. The daily too becomes sacred because of God’s love for us and our redemption through the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Of course, having a human nature — a “fallen” nature — marked by the unending struggle between good and evil, each day I must learn and relearn what it is to be good. These days, as His light grows stronger for me, I like to think it is two steps forward and only one back!  (Would you agree, my dear husband??)  I can take credit only for an openness to God’s grace and mercy.

On a dewy, sun-kissed summer morning, when I cut salad greens in my garden and listen to the chickadees singing in the tree nearby, or play soccer with my young grandsons, I am grateful to God for the moment of grace and for the hope of the world to come.

Reading this book helped me to see my own faith journey with fresh eyes. I pray that Mr. Lax will indeed seek God with a sincere heart, and that his search will restore to him the gift of life-giving faith he once knew.

To order this book from Amazon, click on the book cover or the bold book title — and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance.

In the June issue of the publication BookPage there is a great review by Heather Seggel of  S.A. Bodeen (Tanzania 1989-90) [Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen] YA novel, The Gardener which we reviewed recently our website.www.http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/?s=Bodeen

Seggel writes, “Author S.A.Bodeen has laced this sci-fi-tinged page-turner with thoughtful commentary on world hunger, sustainability, biology and biomedical ethics, plus several high-speed chases and a believable budding romance, and the whole thing works like a charm….I stayed up late to find out how it all ended, and stayed up after that because The Gardener raised so many timely and pointed questions.”

Travel Now, Write Later
Anyone who has read The Sun Also Rises knows that this novel is also a wonderful travel book. Hemingway’s description of a bus trip to Spain is classic travel prose: “The road went along the summit of the Col and then dropped down, and the driver had to honk, and slow up, and turn out to avoid running into two donkeys that were sleeping in the road.” A trip like that in Spain in the 1920s is something most Volunteers can identify with today from their own overseas experiences.

Paul Theroux, it is generally agreed, reinvented the art of travel writing with The Great Railway Bazaar, published in 1975. He returned the genre to the place it held when Mary Kingsley and Evelyn Waugh were crossing Africa and globe-trotting the world. Many Peace Corps writers have followed, most notably Mike Tidwell, Thurston Clarke, Jeffrey Tayler, Karen Muller, Bill Barich, Karl Luntta, Stephan Foehr, Joe Cummings, Tom Brosnahan, and Peter Hessler, among many, many others.

Expatriates and exiles
Peace Corps writers are, at least for a while, expatriates and exiles from their culture, and from that experience they gain a new perspective, even a new vocabulary, as Richard Wiley recalls from living in Korea. “As I started to learn Korean I began to see that language skewed actual reality around, and as I got better at it I began to understand that it was possible to see everything differently. Reality is a product of language and culture, that’s what I learned.”
    

The experience is also intensely educational. The late novelist Maria Thomas said of her time in Ethiopia, “it was a great period of discovery. There was the discovery of an ancient world, an ancient culture, in which culture is so deep in people that it becomes a richness.”

For all these writers, their Peace Corps years were a time to learn the rules of another culture, as well as a time to learn about themselves in relation to the world, as well as in relation to the United States.

John Givens, a Volunteer in Korea and author of three novels published in the 1980s, says that the Peace Corps “suggested that experience was not limited to the mores and expectations of central California where I grew up. The ‘wideness’ of the world came home to me vividly in Korea, and I’ve been exploring the world ever since.” And novelist and short story writer Eileen Drew makes the point that writers with Peace Corps experience “bring the outsider’s perspective, which we’ve learned overseas, to bear on the U.S. We are not the only writers to have done this, but because of the nature of our material, it’s something we can’t not do.”

Bob Shacochis characterizes the modern generation of writers as followers. “We are torchbearers of a vital tradition, that of shedding light in the mythical heart of darkness. We are descendants of Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and scores of other men and women, expatriates and travel writers and wanderers, who have enriched our domestic literature with the spices of Cathay, who have tried to communicate the ‘exotic’ as a relative, rather than an absolute, quality of humanity.”

Cynthia Morrison Phoel’s (Bulgaria 1994-96) new book of stories, Cold Snap, has just been published with great reviews in Booklist and Foreward Magazine. Cindy is out of Boston and doing readings, interviews, and meeting up with Bulgarian RPCVs. First off is a trip to Chicago where on Friday she will be interviewed on Chicago Public Radio, and for the Chicago Tribune. Then there is a reading at a Bulgarian restaurant in Chi-town with RPCVs. The restaurant is called ”Bulgaria.” Cindy will read, take questions, and sign books, and, oh, drink beer! You can learn more at: CAPCAfundraising@gmail.com

Meanwhile read this great review of Cold Snap that appeared  in the Dallas Morning News over the weekend. It was written by Anne Morris, a Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News, and a member of the National / The Dallas Morning News Circle.

It’s not unusual for a returning Peace Corps volunteer to write a book. So many have that it’s almost a subgenre. Cynthia Morrison Phoel’s debut collection of six stories set in a Bulgarian village represents that kind of fiction at its best. Phoel conveys a unique sense of place, yet creates characters whose problems we recognize.

The stories in Cold Snap are warm, quirky and sometimes funny. Her fictional village of Old Mountain is 60 kilometers east of Bulgaria’s capital city, Sofia, and feels even more remote. A place of extreme temperatures, bleak prospects, friendships of convenience and the presence of Dallas on TV, Old Mountain is a community of hopeful hardship. Its traits are best represented by Cucumber, the ugly street dog “owned by no one and cared for by all.”

In the first story, “A Good Boy,” Dobrin is a sensitive teenager who worries about his parents’ marriage. His father has again accepted electronics in place of needed pay. This time it’s a TV satellite dish, largest in the village, “and at night the dish looks larger than the moon.” The males watch sports and porn, while the long-suffering mother, a teacher of literature, lies down with a migraine.

In “Galia,” an only child’s parents smooth the way for her with bribes, hire a classmate to do her homework and buy her a husband. Attempting to provide Galia with certainty in life, they unknowingly take it away. Even her disgusting husband will tell her, “When I’m with you, I feel like I’m with nobody.”

In “Satisfactory Proof,” Plamen achieves a master’s degree in number theory but fails to see the needs of those around him. He has learned how to take but not how to give in return, his supportive father finally realizes.

“Never Trust a Man Who ___” takes readers into the village classroom where their teacher, Ms. Kuneva, does her best to teach the “young ladies and gentlemen” to speak English. In this often funny story, she shares her rocky life experiences, and the student dialogues involve her being “spurned, jilted, shunned and forsaken.”

In “I Guess That Counts for Something,” an old woman mourning her husband’s death bonds with a lonely boy who is visiting her neighbor. They fall into a pattern of playing a game in which each tries to impress the other with something they possess: two frogs mating, for example, or a perfect report card.

The final, novella-length story gives the book its title. As the village suffers freezing temperatures, waiting for central heat to be switched on, characters from the earlier stories reappear. Their problems peak as the cold deepens.

Behind in his homework and with problems at home, the teenage Dobrin sees no point to it all. “Even if he mastered the English language . . . he was still going to end up in some mildewing apartment with pigeons whirring in the bathroom vents and the cold everywhere around him.”

Then the book tells you, “Maybe not.” The heat comes on, and with it, some sense of hope.

When the book ends, you will not want to leave these people. Fortunately, you can read the stories again and learn a little more about Phoel’s village each time you do.

Anne Morris at books@dallasnews.com

To order this book from Amazon, click on the book cover or the bold book title — and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance.

The Great “Peace Corps Novel”
Several former Volunteers have written novels that come directly from their own experiences. The first of these “Peace Corps novel” by a PCV is Lament for a Silver-Eyed Woman by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith. A third of that 1988 novel is set in Cameroon, where Smith served. In 1991 Richard Wiley published Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, a novel about a Peace Corps Volunteer in Korea - Wiley’s country of assignment. Leaving Losapas by Roland Merullo, also published in 1991, is about the life of a Volunteer in Micronesia where Merullo served. Marnie Mueller’s first novel, Green Fires: Assault on Eden, A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rain-Forest, published in 1994, is about a PCV who returns to Ecuador with her new husband.

Other Peace Corps-centered novels are Craig Carozzi’s The Road to El Dorado (1997), Susana Herrera’s Mango Elephants in the Sun: How Life in an African Village Let Me Be in My Skin(1999), Tom Hazuka’s In the City of the Disappeared(2000), William Amos’s The Seed of Joy (2000) and dozens of other novels written about the Peace Corps experience.

In his fiction, Paul Theroux has used the character of a “volunteer” in several books, including his third novel, Girls At Play (1969), set in upcountry East Africa, and has written more extensively about himself as a “Peace Corps character” in My Secret History (1984) and My Other Life (1996).

Maria Thomas used Peace Corps Volunteers as characters in several of her stories in the collection, Come to Africa and Save Your Marriage and Other Stories,published in 1987; Kathleen Coskran did the same in The High Price of Everything, also published in 1987.