Even in Arcadia Am I @miriam@octodon.social

18/ And by leaving to support your family, you have some control over the narrative: rather than leaving a shitty husband or boyfriend who felt entitled to all the promises patriarchal parochialism offers and being burdened with the reputation of a failed relationship (or pressured to try again), instead you're making good, giving--financially--rather than taking--via a degraded reputation.

17/ And to be clear, these were educated women--with college degrees [but not university degrees, in this case at least]. They'd left home to support their families, their children, usually with the added complication of a difficult relationship in their past. Divorce isn't possible in the Philippines, which means leaving an abusive or merely unpleasant relationship may mean leaving the country entirely.

16/ It was so hard when we first came, they said; at her first job, one told me, "I cried in every corner of the house." These were young women, in their mid- or late twenties by now; they'd left home five years ago, or so, but they'd been friends from high school or in college.

15/ I was the newcomer to the group, they all knew each other, and their night winding down--so I started asking them questions about their lives and their work. Oh, we have great jobs, our employers aren't bad like some of the stories you hear, one told me. (And you do hear--of the woman who fell from her boss' balcony under suspicious circumstances, etc.) Her friend said Noooo, she's a writer, we have to tell her the complicated version of our stories!

14/ They were a group of four domestic workers from the Philippines who were letting loose on their one night off per week (so now that I think of it, it must've been a Sunday night since domestic workers typically live with the families who've hired them, sleeping anywhere--under a table, sometimes, though sometimes they have their own rooms--and they usually have curfews).

13/ One night I was wandering through the Chungking Mansions. It was probably a Saturday night, and I didn't have any plans but to have a few conversations if they surfaced. I walked past one of the African bars far in the back, and a tableful of young women hollered after me and one put her arms around my waist and told me to join her. So naturally I did, and it turned out they were wonderful.

Wait last night I'd started to tell a story about the way storytelling itself deepens and folds back as the stories being told demand more context, demand the layers that had been omitted in the first brief retelling. Then I got distracted on a tangent about agarwood traders (which in turn I didn't finish because it was 2AM in Singapore, bedtime). Back to the first story.

#introductions I'm Miriam, a poet with a documentary practice, lives most of the year in Berkeley but currently in Singapore. Slothful these days, but sometimes cycle tourer (planning a Silk Route trip in a few years, & coastal Vietnam in Dec), longtime/long ago hitchhiker & freight hopper from rural Texas currently with one foot in academia & another longing for the porches of a southern junebug night.

@pollyguo are you a Mefite?

[In the meanwhile, it's almost 2AM on my side of the world--I'll try to continue this story tomorrow.]

12/ That wasn't strictly true, actually; at the point *he* was buying it, it seemed legal.

11/ I asked his friend what he did in HK, and he said he traded in sandalwood and agarwood. I must've been a little drunk because instead of asking a less direct question, I told him the only thing I knew about agarwood, which was that it was endangered because of heavy poaching of wild agarwood from the jungles. Did he encounter any of that? Of course, he said to me immediately; it's all illegal.

11/ All of which, very roundaboutly, brings me to the story I'd been thinking of telling, of an agarwood dealer I met one night a few days before I left last summer. I was drinking a beer with a friend, an older Indian man who I'd gotten to know a little bit over the past few days. We were sitting in an out of the way office listening to "sentimental music" (Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" came on his little radio) when his friend dropped by.

10/ Though in general, I've tended to find that perceived risk is so relative. Young Indian guys washing dishes in a restaurant illegally on a tourist visa very rarely admit what they're up to, whereas a friendly drug dealer once explained to me exactly how his supply chain worked. We were friends, yes, and he was from a Western, white country, and used the privilege that conferred on him in HK quite adroitly.

9/ ...mostly because he seemed like the kind of guy you didn't want to end up alone with for all the reasons women often prefer not to end up alone with certain men. He was a sketchy young dude, and much more open about his hustles than many of the other young men there who I got closer to over time.

8/ One day in an elevator I met a cocky young Kazakh guy who was hustling exchange rates; I think this is arbitrage, on micro-scale. He'd take a few hundred dollars to one exchange counter, change them for something, then for something else at an exchange counter twenty feet away. He went on like this, claimed he was making $20USD/hr while he waited for his ship to come in. I wanted to interview him, but knew it'd be dangerous,

7/ So for a few years now I've been interested in hearing stories of people who come through the Chungking Mansions before it's gone. It's especially interesting to me because it's a place where the hustle thrives, where people aren't necessarily breaking the law so much as making a living on the edges of the economy.