China, in 100 words or less

These are the things I saw in China: An Asian woman shoveling a Dairy Queen blizzard into her mouth in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Kites flying in Tiananmen Square. Bugs on a stick for sale. (To eat.) More people riding a city bus at a single time than go to most American minor league baseball games.

These are the things I did in China: Ate dinner (fried pork dumplings) with some college boys from the UK (who either kept Kosher, were vegetarians, or both). Walked on the Great Wall. Refused to buy postcards from a woman on the street, because I wanted to pay something akin to 40 cents, and she wanted a dollar. Got a manicure in a mall.

Going to Beijing last month made me once again realize how lucky I am to be living in Asia and to be about to take a two-hour flight into a place I never thought I'd visit in my life. It was also nice to be with my friend Mark, a physicist from Syracuse who was in China for a conference. It felt nice to talk to someone about friends and food and everything else with no need for a backstory. It was also great to be in a major city where a five-star hotel cost less than $100 a night and came complete with a water bed and the best masseuse I've ever run across.

I'd go on, but I wrote a travel piece for Stripes, and it finally ran about a week ago. Since I'm feeling lazy, and since my boss said I could write it like a blog entry, I'll just save us all the trouble. Let me know if the link doesn't work.

Unclassifiable, or why I walked two miles to buy a hamhock

It's taken me a long time in the past few days to feel better or even to feel anything close to normal. It's been hard, being halfway around the world. My friends here are sympathetic and have listened to me ramble on about New Orleans and the south, but it's hard to find common ground, to find people who know how to pronounce Biloxi and Landrieu and to care on a personal level about the people and culture that's been blown apart.

But on Wednesday, I finally started to breath normally, if only for a little while. For the first time since Katrina hit, I heard somebody else besides me talk about how mad, mournful and unexplainable the disaster and the response has been. I was in a military court to cover an assault case. The military court system differs somewhat from the criminal courts I covered in New York; in particular, the punishments seem much harsher. One thing, however, is the same: you end up sitting around for a good part of the day waiting for the witnesses, judges and lawyers to get ready to play their parts.

So during one of these lulls, I eavesdropped while a soldier talked about Katrina for 45 minutes while hardly taking a breath. I don't know him and didn't want to make myself known to him for fear his tirade might stop. He seemed to be in his 40s, a black guy who sounded like his parents grew up in the South but he didn't. He had worked in all parts of the Army: with the Army Corps, as a military police, as one of the soldiers that helps guard the president's football, the so-called system that always must be within reach in case he needs to launch missiles. He brought up a lot of things I hadn't thought of yet. Here he is, paraphrased:

*Why is it when something bad happens, it's always the companies like Microsoft that donate money, and never the oil companies. You never see BP or anyone give millions of dollars. They just raise gas prices.

*Those cops, you can't blame them. I heard starting salary for a New Orleans cop is $16,000. Nobody can blame them for leaving.

*You saw the photos. When it's white people, they're gathering food. When it's black people, it's looting. (Much has been written about these two photos. Both photographers, who wrote their own original captions, said they stand behind what they wrote as a description of what they experienced in the context of taking the photo. That explanation, to me, is even more interesting than the captions themselves.)

*You don't know how those people felt. I had lunch today. Those people were sitting on roofs for four days without food and water. If my baby was sitting next to me on the roof for four days without food and I kept seeing helicopters go by, I might shoot at them too.

*Those people didn't have cars. They couldn't leave. They didn't have nothing.

*They've known for decades that New Orleans would just wash away. They can't say now they didn't know.

*Why should we give money. Bush 41 and Clinton will be going around collecting money. We been paying money for years. Why should we have to pay more?

He went on and on, to no one in particular. It was wonderful. The captain sitting next to me, my press escort, said his Korean friends keep asking him how this could happen in America. He said he has no idea what to say in return.

Armed with some empathy, I began dragging out music that I thought would help. I created a new playlist and started dumping in New Orleans and Mississippi artists in the hopes that Irma Thomas' humming and Professor Longhair's piano would take me away from reading every story the Times Picayune writes and feeling awful all over again. The journey proved heartening as I saw for the first time that what makes these songs and their authors so valuable is that they wail about how precarious life can be. They all could have been written in the last two weeks: "Wish someone would care," by Irma Thomas; "Blue Monday" by Fats Domino; "Been 'buked and scorned," by Lightin' Hopkins; "I love the life I live, I live the life I love," by Muddy Waters; and "The Sky is Crying" and "Louisiana 1927" sung by nearly everybody. I've known all these songs for years, but it was like listening for the first time.

As always with iTunes (I can't figure out if I love to hate it or hate to love it), every time I sort my songs I try to update the info for each album. For instance, iTunes believes Alison Krauss is country, when everyone with two ears and no commercial radio knows she's bluegrass. It also believes Professor Longhair is rock, another error I went to fix. But when I looked at the categories, nothing fit. Not R&B, not soul, not reggae, not dance, blues, funk or jazz. I kept looking for New Orleans, cause that's the only proper description. It didn't exist on the list, so I picked the next best thing: unclassifiable. I'm not even sure if it's a word, but if not, it should be.

Now I'm making French bread and soaking Camellia red beans, even though I have no appetite. I had everything I needed except some pork, so I walked to the grocery store on base in search of hamhock. There they were, between the frozen ox tails and frozen duck breast. (How, by the way, can a store sell pork ears and chorizo but not buttermilk? Don't they know their audience?) Six hours later, I was eating red beans over Japanese rice. Comfort comes slowly, it seems.

Second Line

I know I’m overdue on a few blog postings from the second part of the summer. I’ve resettled in Seoul, traveled to Beijing and seen the Great Wall, celebrated with two of my friends here who were married, and gone to a Korean baseball game. But it’s too hard to think about anything fun or normal right now. I can’t tear myself away from the news, photos and stories that are pouring out of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

The images and reports are unfathomable. People wading with dead babies through the water because they don’t know what to do with them. People living on interstate underpasses for days at a time, without food, water or medical care, while empty buses roll past them. People shooting at rescue helicopters. Rapes and fights inside relief centers. Floating casinos cast upon dry land. A piano in a tree, scrawled messages on rooftops, Saks Fifth Avenue on fire. Patients dying in darkened hospitals while waiting for help. Nursing home residents dying before anyone knew they were there. All while government leaders called for patience and calm. It’s become clear that when dying and desperate people are told to be patient, two things happen: death and desperation.

New Orleans is a microcosm of our very best and our very worst, where poverty begets rich cuisine, where tourism feeds a government besot with crime and danger. The aftermath of Katrina has been no exception. As more and more pictures poured out this week, it became so obvious that the story is not just about natural destruction. It's also about how we think, or don’t think, about class, age, and race. More than a quarter of the people in New Orleans live below the poverty line, a fact that shouldn't be a secret to anyone who's walked down Bourbon Street with drunk or sober eyes. The area’s evacuation plan worked amazingly well for those who used it. Of course, to use it people had to have access to a car, an impossibility for so many of the poor and sick. Reporters and government leaders have said repeatedly that the images around the Superdome and the Convention Center looked more like Mogadishu than America. It seems so perfectly awful and accurate -- and so very Southern -- that help and assurance came to some in Louisiana from Wal-mart and Harry Connick Jr. before it came from the federal government.

The rescue, the recovery, and, hopefully, the rebuilding of New Orleans will involve much more than brick and mortar, as this piece about race from Sunday's New York Times points out. In addition to rebuilding a city in modern times, with rising insurance rates, dwindling supplies, ruptured sewers and piles of debris and bodies to manage, there will be deep resentment for decades to come about how everyone reacted in Katrina's wake. The images and stories of Uptown looting by black people while white tourists got early rides out of town won't be forgotten. In many ways, the flood washed ashore those segments of society that normally drift just above the breaking point. Most of the people who suffered through the days and nights at the Superdome and the Convention Center were the Americans often hidden from view: poor, disabled, criminal. As a quarter of the nation's fuel supply shut down and as lines at gas stations grew, many people began to think for the first time in decades about how to stretch a tank of gas further, about which car in their garage gets better gas mileage. More than showing how we react in a crisis, Katrina has showed how America reacts on a daily basis to race, poverty, the environment, elderly people and gang members. Leaving them behind has awful consequences.

The dichotomy of everyone’s response is just as bizarre, from the President down to local residents. Many actions in the first few days have been unforgivable. People turned on each other, shooting at police officers, pilfering and burning the city. Local officials had to beg for attention and assistance, cursing and crying on television while they pleaded for mercy from federal leaders. The world began offering assistance, even as American leaders turned it down. More than 3,000 National Guard members from Louisiana were set to finish their year-long deployment in Iraq in September. Now they are stuck waiting overseas to find out what happened to their homes and families while watching other guard members from other states give help and comfort to their own people.

Reporters on the scene have been as frustrated as local leaders and residents. The Times-Picayune on Sunday wrote an open letter to the president, taking him to task for the slow response. The day before, Maureen Dowd gave a scathing review of the country's leadership in the crisis. NPR, which has been indespensible to me halfway around the world, showed how one CNN anchor tried to verbally shake Mary Landrieu by the shoulders to get her to stop issuing thank yous and keep demanding assistance. Worse, the same story points out it took first an interview with NPR, then a subsequent report by public radio, to convince Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Thurday that, in fact, thousands of people in New Orleans had not had food or water supplies for three days. Landrieu, for her own part, grew so exasperated at the end of the week that she said she'd rather punch the President than listen to his promises of aid and his talk about the fun he's had in Houston, where so many of the homeless were taken.

There's a diaspora pouring out from an American city that, in better times, millions couldn't wait to visit each year. Many residents say they don't plan on going back, that the memories of rising waters and putrid conditions isn't worth going home for. I'm hoping that's fear and exhaustion talking, and that after some normalcy and comfort, most people will want to go back. Perhaps just as worse, it's hard to know at this point whether that will ever be possible.

I suppose I should have more thoughts about my own home state, Mississippi. As awful as things are there -- the Mississippi Coast is virtually gone --people's reactions so far have been more comforting and less horrific. Rescue and recovery crews are having a relatively easier time going door-to-door because the waters have subsided. Looting and violence seems to be at a minimum. Neighbors have set up impromptu watch groups and militias, working together to keep watch and make sure no one takes them by surprise.

The reaction in Mississippi is encouraging, but it doesn't shake away the desperation in New Orleans. It feels like every day is getting worse, not better. By Saturday, I started searching hard for any good news in the hopes that the tales of police officers leaving their jobs and even committing suicide were exaggerated or, at the very least, rare. Those stories turned out to be true, as was the one about a bus full of New Orleanians on its way to Texas that overturned, killing one person and leaving others in critical condition.

But the good is there, if you look for it. The premie babies got out of New Orleans before the storm hit. Staff at the Museum of New Orleans and the Audubon Zoo stayed throughout the week and are refusing to leave to protect the art and animals; both collections survived relatively intact. Fats Domino (“Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?”) was plucked from the rooftops and is now living with about 20 other displaced people in Baton Rouge at the college apartment of LSU’s sophomore quarterback. A couple was married Saturday afternoon in the Mississippi Coliseum in Jackson in front of 1,000 strangers who cheered them on. A homeless woman -- she was homeless before the storm -- became the wedding planner and gathered up donations of a wedding dress, honeymoon accommodations and promises of connections for new jobs and a new life for the newlyweds.

Peyton and Eli took 31,000 pounds of goods to Baton Rouge, and countless other musicians and sports figures are using their celebrity to provide help. In one of my favorite stories from the past few days, Joe Horn was the first celebrity to have the good sense to show up to the Astrodome Saturday afternoon. The Saints’ pro-bowl receiver used his weekend vacation to give hugs, autographs and encouragement to people who desperately need comforting.

Less famous people have provided comfort in their own ways. Workers at Charity sang for themselves and their patients to get through the days and nights. Anita Roach pulled herself and others around her from insanity by belting out gospel standards at the Convention Center, in one case preventing a riot. Less improbably, a six-year-old and a group of nurses, helped reunite six toddlers and babies with their families, and their names, as the rescues continued.

For three days, The Times-Picayune had to rely on its website, www.nola.com, to publish. The staff had stayed in New Orleans for the storm. But as rising waters threatened their building on Tuesday, they got in the back of circulation trucks and headed north. They began publishing paper editions at the end of the week and are now distributing free papers in relief centers in an effort to help families send messages to each other and to reunite. The publisher has also promised to continue to pay each staffer, whether he or she works or not in the coming weeks. It's a promise that's being replicated with other large companies, many of which are trying to set up temporary homes and jobs around the country for their Louisiana workers who have no where to go.

There's no mere liking when it comes to the city of New Orleans. Some who visit are uncomfortable with its pothole-ridden streets, its celebration of boobs and booze, its insistance that eccentricity and extravagence are both necessary means to an end. But in my small world, anyone who's visited or lived in New Orleans falls deeply in love with the city and its music, food, history, drunkeness, and celebration. It's hard to dispute that our country's cultural and financial center rests solidly in New York City, and that effects from the Sept. 11 attacks rippled fast and furiously across our nation. But America's imagination lives in New Orleans, an idea that will slowly creep through the country even as everyone begins to wonder whether it's really possible to move all that water. If you don't think so, just consider: Where else, in a crisis, would the man who sold more records than any other black musician in the 1950s end up sleeping on the couch at the home of a college quarterback, who by many accounts, might prove to be the more popular?

Over the past few days, I trust, people are remembering New Orleans, and those who never visited wished they had. They can imagine the glittering parties on balconies and the tap dancers in the street and the vats of homemade jambalaya that strangers shared with each other before Mardi Gras parades rolled by. They'll remember the accents and the music and the literature the sunken city nurtured and reared. They'll remember how it's not only customary, it's an honor, for grown men to dress up in feathered tapestries once a year and shimmy through the streets, rain or shine. They'll remember all the good things they thought they forgot, about how a love affair developed over time rich with the head-banging frustrations and toe-curling emotions -- all the good and the bad -- that come with all worthwhile romances. They'll remember the gumbo they ate but can't seem to replicate in their own kitchens; the only city in the world where any single bar with open doors serves a mouth-watering Bloody Mary; where it's appreciated, welcome and down-right expected for men to call women "darlin'" or "sugar" without any worry of offense. At least that's what I can imagine, if I really try.

An NPR anchor this weekend spoke about another staffer, one from New Orleans, who is trying to get through the tragedy by imagining a second line. In New Orleans, funeral processions of mourners are followed by a second line of revelers who celebrate the deceased's past life and journey into the next one. Many of the people who keep this tradition are the city's poor and black community, the ones who have historically provided New Orleans with so much of its imagination. Few right now feel like having a second line. It's too hard to imagine how the city can be rebuilt, how its people can recover. It's harder, though, to imagine our country without New Orleans, and I think that's why so many people are transfixed with mourning the losses. I know that's why I am.