But where could you go?

I am already on the alert while approaching the multi-story building – in the absence of a sidewalk, I’m forced to walk either on the rim of the bicycle path or in the soggy grassland at its edge, where my foot is quickly engulfed by mud. The bicycles hurtling along the straight stretch of road before the curve around the building are being pedalled at significant speed, the cyclists absorbed in phone conversations, composing text messages or pressing ahead to meet deadlines – the options for the pedestrian aren’t good.

As I reach my destination, a broad sidewalk looms, but weaving around abutments near the front entrance reinforces the vigilant mode – one of the outdoor columns under the overhead protrusion of the first floor is built in at a sharp slant. The column's trajectory appears haphazard and does not enhance a sense of stability.


To my relief, the mood is altered inside, where a front desk belies activity: computer lights blink, rotating stools are askew, as if just vacated, and the digital sign board and clock are blinking. The message is that security measures are in force, but nobody is around to scrutinize my arrival.

In the utter silence I proceed to the upper stories: along a ramp, a staircase, a transitional passage which leads through a dining zone (closed today, the packaged ingredients safe behind a roller shutter) and past the elevator, which I board. The meeting room I must find has a number in the thousands, but one digit provides the clue to the actual floor, where I emerge and see another glimmering digital display, directed, it seems, at me, condemning me to this empty stretch with information indicating that I have arrived.

Along the open-plan dual-passage hallway, through the ceiling-high windows bordering office spaces equipped with high-tech gear, I see no one, I hear no one, and a dream-like mist descends as I inspect the lifeless corridor. I decide to walk back to double-check the location details and en route I encounter the evacuation chair, neatly fastened to a central wall. The white figures on the green plastic are my only company this day – my eyes dart from the word ‘escape’ back to the digital sign board on the opposite wall and then to the elevator door, where a menacing grind warns of its opening.

Your Daughter is with Us Pt.6

This is the story of a few Parisians, some of Chinese origin, others of French and mixed parentage. Some of the Chinese are or were undocumented, others have forged their way into French society. Some are blood relatives, others are bound by official documentation or unspoken agreement, pressure from and loyalties to distant dons.

I first met them through French friends of mine, a couple in Paris, long-time residents of the building where the drama unfolds. Occasionally I visit these friends; unfailingly they are gracious hosts. I started to write about them when I met one of their (now former) neighbours, a little girl I call Hua.

Previous posts about Xiao Hua’s life in Paris can be found here:

Pt 1 - May 31, 2007
Pt 2 - June 25, 2007
Pt 3 - September 14, 2007
Pt.4 – July 21, 2008
Pt.5 - May 14, 2009


As mentioned in Pt. 4, Hua and her family have moved house. My friends now have use of the space (once home to Hua, her parents - or at least the people now legally recognized as her parents - and then also to a baby brother), the room under the stairs originally used as a sweatshop, and they harbour resentment towards the French couple who they see as having sided with the landlord who evicted them. They don’t know that the wife negotiated to make sure the Chinese family received a pay-off in exchange for leaving.

Their story so far is better than many others. Not long after Hua’s detention, French police entered a first-floor apartment in the same neighborhood in search of a thief and/or stolen goods. A middle-aged Chinese woman on the premises jumped out of the window to avoid the police. She died in custody the next day.

Hua is now a young teenager. My friend runs into her only very occasionally on the street. The girl’s father turns up from time to time, looking gaunt, in a wheelchair. He has been ill for the past couple of years and a hospital resident, receiving treatment for tuberculosis – making him unable to work, but he has attained legal status in the country, at least temporarily. The status extends to his children, but not his wife. Last summer he went to China for two months with the children. He could never pay for the travel on his own, so one assumes he was performing a service for the network which brought him and the children out of China. Even as a sick man he was seen in Paris selling trinkets from a blanket on the pavement, perhaps encouraged to do so by influential figures in his daily life.

Meanwhile, the noise from the Chinese family upstairs (with windows opening onto the courtyard outside my friends’ apartment), introduced in Pt.5, dropped a few decibels when the (illegal) back-room gambling space where the father hosted games on Saturday night was moved to the street-side, the front. The back room is now the terrain of the 3 little sons. The oldest is about 9, and they are nearly identical, happy to communicate with my friend downstairs, squealing with delight when she responds to their proddings with ‘ni hao.’

The father is a professional gambler and a wife-beater. There have been fewer violent incidents since the night when my friend called the police. But the father does not like her. The boys, on the other hand, know that she intervened, and continue, when not pulled back inside by the mother, to greet my friend.

As mentioned previously, they all inhabit an old apartment complex with several stairwells rising inside two five-story buildings set back from the street, home to many dozens. A stone lane runs from the street door past older and lower row-homes straight back to the last stairwell. The key code to the street door had been passed around, and the dark area just inside had become a favourite haunt of local (Chinese) prostitutes and their Johns for their brief encounters. Before that, a brothel had flourished in one of the upstairs apartments, and the young women would chat and laugh with abandon as they came and went.

Eventually the landlord renovated the door area and supplied a new code. The prostitutes have stayed away. The entire building complex has had a facelift in recent months: outdoor walls and stairwells have been sanded, resurfaced, varnished and painted. Toxic fumes and dust plague the residents, but it’s good for the property.

Fake Grass, Real Stickers

The newspaper from Texas arrived in Amsterdam with a visitor, who, like others before her, had kindly contacted me before leaving her home to ask if there was anything I wanted from the USA.

“A local newspaper, please.”

I like reading the most local of stories, of knowing that I’m supporting a local economy somewhere by encouraging the purchase of what I consider to be an important presence in each community. For the traveller, newspapers are not expensive. They are readily available and pose no packing problems.

The Texan delivered.

As the headline above reveals, the story that caught my eye concerned a resident of Dallas caught up in a legal battle over his front yard. His home stands in an urban zone of historical importance, and inhabitants have obligations: buildings and property must be maintained. The photograph of the man published with the article is slightly blurred, taken from a position higher than the subject. Motion, height: I imagined the photographer cruising past the man in a tall pick-up truck, vibrating in suspension over monstrous tires, the engine toned down to a percolating rumble as the subject was approached.

The pick-up passengers might have spoken with the man, although the article quotes a daughter, not the man himself, to explain his point of view. His English, it seems, was not very fluent. The picture might have been taken by a photographer drifting past in a helicopter, zooming in as the chopper sought balance in mid-air. As portrayed, the man does not seem to object to being photographed, but he does look sad. He had gone to great lengths to provide his home with a decent yard, but now, if I remember correctly, Dallas officials had ruled that the fake grass (widely used in the region, easily available) had to be removed, because it didn’t match the house on the lot.

I was also struck by the free color insert in this edition of the newspaper: stickers for readers’ appointment books. ‘Swimming pool services’ and ‘hunting season’ had two stickers each, while ‘family reunion’ had only one.

672 candidates

A new national government will be elected in the Netherlands on 9 June; election anxieties always mount for me when I receive my free copy of the candidates list (see above), which this year carries the names of 672 candidates.

I have addressed the subject in earlier posts: please see, for example "EU Election Anxieties" on 31 May 2009, when the 289 candidates put to the test my abilities to get informed and make a real choice.

We who will cast ballots are meant to vote for a party, not an individual, but we who will wield the red pencils in the voting booths can vote for any 1 of the 672 people running for parliament. A candidate lower down on the list can squeak past fellow party members higher up on the list if enough preferential votes come in. Ambitions to do just that take some candidate MP's out on the campaign trail, but the leaders of the respective parties have the highest profile, of course.

As in other European countries, the right-wing in Holland is coming along very nicely, thank you. We the people who would prefer to see center-left at least one step ahead hope that the good weather continues so that enough of the electorate will find a visit to a polling station (all local sites printed on the back of the candidates lists produced and distributed for each individual voting district) a pleasant proposition.

Some good things about disasters

I saved the receipt from the Glasgow green-grocer to remind me of Marta’s accent. She was a new resident of Scotland from Poland, working for Asians, and I imagined hearing all of that when she spoke. Throughout that neighborhood, commerce was being livened up by more new Britons (see LBN post Those Persians 25 March 2009). Eastern Europe used to be far away, but EU-member Poland in particular has been exuding a country-next-door come-hither aura.

This is not unfamiliar to me: Polish surnames (some Jewish, some not) were common at my grade school near New York City. Later on, Joe, the handy-man at my college dormitory, was Polish, and

He took care of his girls.

Under the circumstances this was a near-heroic stance: some of the local farmers in the New York countryside blamed crop failure on the young female students (offered as a postscript to recent remarks by an Iranian cleric who blamed natural disasters on scantily-clad, promiscuous women, statements which conjured up the images of Joe and Marta), girls who wore strange clothes and often spoke in loud tones, emphasizing their urban origins and accompanying disregard for country life. Joe was a Catholic family man, the son of pre-WWII immigrants. He turned up regularly with kielbas, as he called it.

Only the real Polish sausage for my girls.

Another encounter dates from the more recent past: one day I called my bank in Amsterdam to ask them to verify whether or not their internet banking system was experiencing an interruption of normal services. The customer service representative was very friendly and sounded sincerely apologetic about the breakdown. She spoke Dutch with an East European accent, and, yes, she confirmed, she was working out of a call center in Poland, one of Western Europe’s destinations for near-shoring (out-sourcing and paying lower wages) operations. This woman was delightful, in possession of a sweet voice and a willingness to depart from the call center script. She had been drafted from the population of new Dutch residents of Polish origin (and that story is not all peachy: see LBN post I Promise You 31 December 2008) to go home and earn a living there speaking Dutch. I hope she didn’t lose her job as a result of our conversation.

At Lurline's Behest

From the International Letters Home Archive emerges correspondence between Lurline Birchum and her mother. The fonts in this typeset version appear to have been selected with the aim of replicating the appearance of the original handwritten version. It is unclear whether the earlier handwritten version was notated by Lurline herself or put on paper by another literate townsperson at Lurline's behest. The glossary with pronounciation guide indicates that reception of the letter would have been dependent on accurate phonetic delivery of the contents. In all their brevity, the documents offer poignant insights into small-town life.

Let's be Civilized: Not allowed to show you (Pt.3)

Previously on Life Before News:

Not allowed to show you (Pt.1) – May 25, 2007

So far this much is known: Not allowed to show you (Pt.2) – June 5, 2007

From the rough graffiti displayed on January 30 to – by reassuring coincidence - an elegant anarchist cocoon: “Coming soon…” is the full text on the English-language webpage of the Library I entered on the day when the Dalai Lama and Barack Obama appeared together on front pages of newspapers everywhere. If you like that 19th-century polished wood sensation, this Library is a beautiful place, with a reading room seating 24, books locked behind well-cleaned glass, a conference room for public events and the Director’s office still sheltering a pianola (nostalgic and silent in our times; as innovative as the Library and its new collection back in the day), the only visual reminder of the space’s original purpose as a music room, where pianos and sheet music were at the disposal of any visitor who cared to drop in and play a few bars.

On a brief working trip to Barcelona, I had gone in search of a quiet place to read and write. In this city of monumental architecture, an ornate neighborhood retreat on a smaller scale would surely be just around the corner. It was: a library set in the former home of a 19th-century mustachioed left-wing anti-Catholic intellectual and anarchist, a playwright and Freemason, who instructed the trustees of his will to build what would become Barcelona’s first public library (although to this day run by a private foundation), open to all regardless of gender, age or social class and free of censorship on social, political or religious grounds. Any such symbols were banned (everywhere, including the Boardroom), as clearly spelled out in the Library’s very own rule book, a significant stipulation considering that the Library was opened in 1895, on the eve of the Montjuïc Trials, the torture of anarchists by the Spanish military and ensuing decades of bloodshed and violence - a history beyond the scope of this post, but one which is indeed still subject to review and revision as hidden documentation comes to light.

The Library staff agreed that I was free to write anything I want about what appears to be a pearl of an institution, but they issued clear instructions to the effect that - although I had followed proper procedures and obtained permission to take photographs inside through swift composition of a brief handwritten letter explaining my motivation, where I also made it clear that no commercial gain would result from using the photographs I envisioned taking of the abundance of text in view (not only on bookcovers, but inside the glass display cases [carrying paraphernalia from the world of Freemasonry which had survived previous eras of censorship under the dictator who missed the opportunity of destroying this subversive material when he ordered the Library closed rather than ransacked] and within the tiled floor under our feet and the tiled frescos overhead, the latter featuring the names of great scholars and writers in an inspired flow including a sequence which I particularly enjoyed: the moustachioed Edgar Allen Poe*, the tormented early 19th-century Boston-born writer, so popular in Europe, who laid the foundations of the modern thriller, the moustachioed and bearded Confucius*, the Chinese philosopher whose name now adorns the official Institutes of Chinese Culture which are mushrooming in hundreds of towns and universities around the world from Tehran to Texas, from Norway to New Zealand, funded by the Chinese government, a perfectly normal official cultural strategy made all the more interesting if one considers that flaunting Confucius was until relatively recently not done, and, next to him, another author whose work is recited thousands of years after its creation: the moustachioed and bearded [frankly they could all have lost the facial hair and that would have been fine by me] Valmiki*, India’s sage, poet of poets and author of the Sanskrit-language Ramayana epic almost 2500 years ago) – their instructions made it clear that I should not in any way, especially via internet, share pictures I might take, hence this quixotic ode to an urban retreat for all, a hub for scholars still reading through the collections behind glass, an ode which I conclude without identifying the research institution by name, out of what may in part be excessive deference to their desire to control the information and image flow and in part my own wish to enhance imagined scenarios where the dream-like hush of the dark wood, tile and marble interior of the Library is central, where the books have not yet been forwarded into the digital zone.

*The names of these illustrious men adorn the library interior, not their portraits.