A New Year traveller’s tale

Who can say how we got here?

Who can say why you and me are now caught in each other’s company?

And really, who can worry about questions like these? The Big Qs. The existential ones. The kind best pondered by priests or professors, by policy guys or those dreamy poets with their crooked, caffeine-stained teeth.

And none of them are sitting among us, not here and not now. Not in our raucous and rocking and leaky little sampan in the middle of this deep blue sea. In fact, out here, packed in our boat, all we know for sure is that there’s not enough of anything for anyone. Not for today, not for tomorrow.

In this djatung (talking story), we are a simple ark of papua Java’s wild ones. Gossipy monkeys, cheerful otters, imperial tigers. We are without a compass, but not without a clue because these things we know for sure: We treetop monkeys in our treeless sampan know there’s no safety at night. The ground-burrowers among us know there’s no earthy comfort when each sleeps. Our grumpy meat-eaters know — well, all of us know — red meat’s not on the menu.

A typical evening in the middle of our endless ocean goes something like this:

Madam Hari Mau yawns wide as our abysmal sea. Her lips roll back, way back off very pink gums and ivory fangs long as my forefinger. Her family’s never sated. Their eyes ember yellow, all night long.

"Ma-kan," she mouths like a Mandarin matriarch (din-ner). One word. Two syllables. Nothing more’s necessary for the rest of our sampan to leap into our roles. And leap we must, her expectation of an immediate meal, her rage when it’s not met, are as bad as the hunger itself.

Macaque roll off our sampan’s snoozing otters and rouse them with persistent and polite, if not sincere, pep talk. We get them slipping over our ship’s rolling hips, into the dark, cold, shark-infested sea. Hardest of all is getting otters, with their short spans of attention, to slap their catch onto our tigers’ plates, instead of letting it slide straight into their own tummies.

Can we continue?

Who can say how we all got here? Who can say why hungry hari mau, squirrelly macaque, and sleek river otters, are now caught in each others’ company. Together in this endlessly blue expanse.

The merits of tigers’ immense appetites, the caloric cost and squander it takes for us to top their tanks, on an increasingly skinny sampan, are probably best calculated by State U. profs and downtown policy types. The morality of wily macaque waking and making gullible otters get cold and wet and occasionally eaten, is likely also best left to deeper guys. To priests and poets.

The smaller, the more salient issues are still left to us, packed into our sodden little sampan.

And unless — say, off the coast of Cape Town or Yangon or Bordeaux, we sailors get lucky and spot the Lion of Africa Nelson Mandela, or Our Lady Aung San Suu Kyi, or the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, bobbing in the waves — we’re stuck resolving our most essential matters ourselves. And a fix is necessary real soon.

Dragon Year 2012

How we got ourselves here is not so meaningful. Whether it was crazy realty marketing or corrupt business banking or ugly faraway warring that shoved us all out to sea is no longer important. Why macaque chatter, why tigers dig stripes, why Pacific cod thin-sliced on sushi beats it deep fried between burger buns, matters less and less. What counts now is tigers eating less, what counts from now on is the rest of us furry folks saying so more and more. And of course, everyone cool about living with tuna breath.

This is not about a real or imagined one percent looking down from upper Manhattan. It’s about America. It’s about our anxious middle class and those eager to be. It’s about all our hungry expectations, being over. Our leaky sampan, our wobbly world, simply cannot sustain our appetites.

If we pulled any one of those old-school elders, soaked and chilled, out of that choppy sea and into our crowded company, each would simply say what President Obama dares not. What we already know — that there’s no bigger boat, no better time, no juicier steak, no wider screen Sanyo. Not in our future.

There’s only us. For Dragon Year 2012, getting along’s got to be bigger than getting more. There’s an enormous bank of social and spiritual capital between us treetop types, our sleek swimmers, and our jazzy stripers. Time to invest some. Time to trade on it.

For 2012, take a seat. Take a breath. Have an unhurried thought. Stop rocking our boat.

Hey, did you hear the joke about the skinny macaque, the gullible otter, and itchy tiger walking into a bar ...?

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The Asian Reporter’s Expanding American Lexicon

Sampan (pan-Asian): a shallow-draft watercraft made of long, gently curved, grooved planks.

Existential(ism): a post-Second World War European philosophy, focused on what remains of our slender lives when all social artifice is shaved away. Best expressed by Parisian freedom fighter Jean-Paul Sartre and French-Algerian writer Albert Camus.

Papua (Bahasa Indonesia): island.

Djatung (Bahasa): stories are traditionally spoken aloud. Not only because local sultans and foreign occupiers kept folks illiterate, but also because we are taken by the musicality of language. All of Polo’s columns are intended to be recited to those you love.

Hari Mau (Bahasa): great cat. Huge spirit. Describes tigers and panthers.