Don’t Try This at Home

Near the wok and on the dining table in Thailand you can nearly always find a bottle of fish sauce. It’s salty, smelly, and indispensable. High-quality “naam pla,” as it’s called in Thai, comes from fresh fish that are allowed to ferment for more than a year. The resulting reddish-brown brew is high in protein and lots of other good stuff.

Most Thai food wouldn’t really be Thai without fish sauce, and so by extension most Thai people wouldn’t really be Thai without it. The stuff is so essential to life here that apparently sometimes it gets used for purposes it wasn’t designed for.

A colleague at work and I found ourselves caught up recently in that most ancient of male pastimes, the trading of injury stories. I described the time when I gashed open a toe while walking around the refugee camp in flip-flops; no clean water was handy so the Cambodians suggested that I pee on it. My friend countered with a childhood tale of a bad burn; his auntie reached for the bottle of fish sauce and gave him a good squirt.

A Thai doc confirmed for me that this home remedy, while still used by some well-meaning parents, is counter-productive. Fish sauce may indeed contain all the essential amino acids required by the body for growth and regeneration, but only if consumed—not applied topically.

Skype and Jip

We find it hard to remember life before Skype. Jip loves the video chats especially. Even though she can’t see the people on the other end, their comments about what she and her surroundings look like add a dimension to the conversation that delights her.

Now that we’re set up with wi-fi at home, we can skype from wherever Jip happens to be in the apartment. Not long ago we chatted in bed with some Seattle friends. My Chicago family took a guided tour of our place as I carried around the laptop and its built-in camera to various rooms. Sitting at our kitchen table, we were able to revive an annual tradition of ours by joining a holiday party that was going on halfway around the world.

Skype’s conference calling ability also works wonderfully with Jip’s random association ability. If we’re talking to someone who reminds Jip of someone else, we can spontaneously add the someone else to the call for a wild three-way conversation.

At the risk of showing my age, I recall what it was like to make international calls back when Jip and I used to work in the refugee camps. The little town where we lived had one only phone capable of dialing abroad, at a cost of several dollars per minute. The phone’s owner, never imagining that anyone could need to talk longer than seven minutes, had attached a timer to the phone so that it automatically cut off after that long.

I can definitely understand why Skype is now the largest international voice carrier. For much less than we spend on in-Thailand calls, we use the service roughly every other day, whether it’s to instant message, quickly check in with a relative, or conference among people who live in four different time zones. Send me an e-mail if you’d like to meet up on Skype!

China in Perspective

Now and then you come across factoids about China’s population that give you pause—percentage of the planet, number of cities with more than a million people, ratio of infant boys to infant girls. The trouble is that by themselves these stats can be unwieldy and hard to get a handle on.

Recently I saw a blurb that put China’s numbers in the context of other countries. To me the comparison below is easy to digest, and therefore more stunning than the raw numbers. Courtesy of James Fallows’ blog:

If Americans want to imagine what it would take to be "strong" in the way China currently is, all we have to do is imagine moving the entire population of the Western Hemisphere into our existing borders. Every single Mexican. (Rather than enforcing the southern border, we'd require everyone to cross it, headed north.) Every Haitian, Cuban, and Jamaican. Everyone from Central America. All 190 million from Brazil. And so on. Even the Canadians.

China, by the way, is just about the same size as the United States, though a larger share of its land area is desert, mountain, or otherwise nonarable.

If we did that, we'd be up to about a billion people -- and then if we also took every single person from Nigeria, and for good measure everyone in hyper-crowded Japan too, we'd finally be up to China's 1.3 billion size. At that point, like China, we'd have tremendous scale in everything. Rich people. Big businesses. A huge work force. Countless numbers of multi-million population cities. And we would also have a tremendous amount of poverty, plus pressure on resources of every kind, from water to food to living space. Just as China does now.

Scale gives China some strengths. But it also creates tremendous challenges, as Americans would recognize if we thought about this prospect for even a minute.

Here in Thailand (which is geographically about three-quarters the size of Texas but has a population about three times as large), these numbers feel familiar. Measured either in number of square kilometers or number of people, twenty Thailands equal one China. In other words, population density here and there is about the same.

Arable land is perhaps the biggest difference—Thailand’s percentage is twice China’s. As a result the Thais have for a long time been the world’s leading exporter of rice. The Chinese produce about ten times more of it than Thailand does, but for a long time have struggled to feed themselves. Tremendous challenges indeed.

What's Up?

Something is definitely up. We don’t usually get music floating in the windows from some hard-to-pin-down direction in the middle distance. But today there it is, the same sort of gentle tune that plays on quasi-public holidays like International Workers’ Day.

I make my way to the mall, thinking I’ll be in ’n out after a short errand and maybe a quick bite. But traffic is worse than usual for a Saturday morning, and when I get there the place is packed… with little people waving balloons. Not a free seat anywhere at the food court.

At the top of the escalator somebody has planted a big bounce house; a few tiny, smiling heads trampoline up above the roofline every few seconds. Dozens more heads just like them are moving that direction, all slurping or quaffing or gobbling. I take shelter on the margins of the fanfare, where a new mom is also parked, watching the middle distance, nursing a newborn.

Finally the penny drops. The second Saturday in January. Loads of free gifts, games, and food for kids. National Children’s Day! I love this.