Culture

The Chinese police officer told me not to pull my pants down. My right thigh was purple and the steak- sized bruise swelled and tightened my pant leg. I wanted them to see the aftermath after a man attacked me with a tree branch about as thick as the thickest part of a baseball bat. My right elbow was already severely swollen and barely movable. I wanted to pull my pants down so the eight police officers staring and laughing at me could see the evidence. ...

I lived in Budapest for a summer in the late-nineties. When I think back on my summer of interning at the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe, the palachinka and porkolt aren’t what first comes to mind but rather a punch, bruised eye, broken glasses and me attempting to sprint while wearing sandals. I left a dinner party at a colleague’s house one Saturday evening then caught a bus around eleven thirty in a central part of the city. ...

Trekking the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal back in 2007, I often encountered children from the nearby villages yelling “pens, pens” when we crossed paths. I thought, well that’s better than “sweets, sweets” which was a common refrain while backpacking through Latin America and Southeast Asia. I would read in guidebooks that the en vogue recommendation of that time was to give children useful tools such as pens for schoolwork rather than the dental bulldozer of candy. ...