Lessons for the Asian neophyte

There are probably four things any virgin visitor to Asia in general – and China in particular – ought to know.

The first concerns food. Abandon happy and homespun preconceptions of steamed vegetables, stir fry, slivers of filleted garlic beef sizzling on a hot plate or sweet and sour-flavoured animal which once grazed on a farm. The reality is instead an array of domesticated pets, vermin, noodle soup with the viscosity of kerosene and a multitude of other unidentifiables served on the gunk-encrusted hotplates by the side of the road. Accompany this guidance with the critical footnote that parts of the animal with which a Western vet wouldn’t even be familiar are served with genuine pride. In addition to ear, brain, penis and cartilage, you find vague and worrying references to muscle, wall, contents, joint or tendon.

This is a lesson also learnt in India. Vindaloo, Korma and the brightly coloured and textured sauces you find when out for a curry back in the West don’t exist in India. Substitute, among other things, tiny fish sufficiently salty to make your body hair fall out and peculiar egg-shaped and hollow crunchy vessels filled with a hot, watery fluid which smells suspiciously like blood and tastes like chalk. Or vice versa, depending on the time of day. Regardless, the lesson is not to avoid sampling all this food. Eating weird shit is integral to the experience and means you will regurgitate not merely the food – a given – but fantastic tales of the Orient upon your emaciated return. The lesson is to be prepared. And find someone who knows how to translate, “Look, I’m not saying I wont eat it. But I want to know what you mean by ‘glands’”. This is more important than “Which way to the train station?” or “Why are there tweezers next to the chopsticks?”

Second, habits. You’re supposed to refrain from adverse judgment when travelling to new and exotic places and to accept that different peoples find different practices acceptable. Just as we would expect conservative Muslim visitors to the West to hold back from soapboxing about women’s attire or anyone’s consumption of alcohol (not that they do), similarly the visitor to China should keep his mouth shut when confronted with some of the less ingratiating local habits.

But as far as I’m concerned, that prohibition extends only as far as not directly accosting strangers in the street. Bitching to people back home is fine. Table manners are the first thing. The constant open-mouthed mastication I can live with. Ditto the nosepicking and regular dinner-table hand down the pants. It’s the spitting of pieces of unwanted gristle – which constitutes pretty much the entirety of a cheap Chinese meal – in a perfect parabola within inches of the visitor’s face that really gets my blood up. But the spitting during meals is nothing – nothing – compared to the veritable celebration of expectoration that goes on absolutely everywhere else. The Chinese spit in the street. They spit in a car. They spit on the floor of a bus or in a hotel foyer. They spit on the wall of the train station. And worst of all, they’ll spit on the wall of your sleeping compartment on the train. (This, by the way, is even done by the sartorial elite in soft sleeper class, heading from one city to another for a business trip. The mind boggles at what it must be like further back in the train. Like standing in a saliva rainstorm without an umbrella I suppose).

The spitting itself isn’t even the worst part. It’s the preliminary cacophonic wind-up. Whereas the Indians (world-class spitters, themselves, it must be credited) measure social status using a complicated and ancient caste system based on ethnicity, profession and skin colour, the Chinese – to their own credit – have simplified the system wholesale. Social status in the Middle Kingdom is directly proportionate to the volume, duration and raspiness of the phlem-finding process. It begins in the lungs, whereupon the truly aristocratic spitter can, in an impressive display of only four or five hacks, raise five ounces of honeyish snot to his larynx, hold it there, while using his tongue and teeth to produce a lump of blackish fluid the size of a tennis ball before hurling it through a curled tongue at the nearest wall, piece of furniture or mortified backpacker. From there, he will watch it glissade languidly down the wall (or furniture or mortified backpacker) admiring its leisurely track downward (the highest socio-economic stratum can manufacture such viscosity that it’ll descend so slowly as to be undetectable in movement – like a medieval pane of glass which is thicker at the bottom than the top). The peasant spitter is profoundly incapable of such virtuosity – no doubt why he remains a peasant. He probably had a job interview in the 1980s, enthusiastically spat in the face of the interviewer but it splashed down onto the prospective employer’s coat instead of clinging impressively to his nose. What a loser.

Third, toilets. Americans, in their inimitable way, sneer at European toilets just as they laugh at our dental work (see below). I don’t think it’s even about hygiene, they’re just confused by a water closet incapable of handling a fecal deposit weighing five or six kilograms. If their consternation is in fact about hygiene, they should drag their planet-sized posteriors to Asia. Hell may very well be Baghdad after a bombing or being stuck in an elevator with Italians. But more likely, it’s having to use a Chinese public latrine.

I’ll spare you specifics. You can probably imagine what I’m talking about – qualitatively, if not quantitatively. Let me just say: Never again will I wrinkle my nose at the facilities at a football match in Britain or a beach toilet in Australia. Never, ever, again.

Fourth and finally, dentistry – or rather, its conspicuous absence. For all you muppets like me who’ve had thousands of pounds spent on orthdontics, periodontics or just plain dental hygiene over the years, it transpires you can manage perfectly well with one sole tooth at the front, and gums everywhere else. Not only is flossing a boondoggle cash-cow conjured up by a cynical tooth lobby, but brushing your teeth is too. Just let them fall out, and wander around frightening tourists with a monodent grin. They’ll want to take your picture and offer you money for the privilege. But stick to soft food.

So, four little things of which to be forewarned next time you venture beyond the Costa Brava or Cape Cod. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that the west coast of the United States tends to do pretty well on all these things. Good food, clean toilets, selfconsciously free of bad public habits, and superlative teeth. As you cross timezones eastwards in the northern hemisphere, you’ll find that all these things steadily deteriorate. The US eastern seabord, then Britain, continental Europe, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, India, and finally China, which is a country of pet-eating, loogy-lunging, single-toothed floor-crappers.


I’m just saying. Forewarned is forearmed.

A whiter shade of grey

Stepping out of the customs hall in Shenzhen, having navigated the antiseptic metro system of magnificent Hong Kong and the nonsensical signs at the border (“China non-visitors this way”; “Foreign non-tourists take second queue”) you’re greeted by an urban vista which would make you vomit, but for the fact your first breath of the thick, fetid air got there first. The city is grey – but then, so are many around the world, and you can’t expect the self-indulgent prettiness of Florence or the colonial elegance of Phnom Penh everywhere you go. And calling Shenzhen polluted does an injustice to the word. Breathing is like fellating an SUV exhaust pipe while the driver hits the gas. But again: Athens is polluted, so are LA, Bangkok and Mumbai. Shenzhen is different, though. It’s worse. It may be the most miserable place I’ve ever visited outside of Utah. Or Agra.

Shenzhen today exists within the Shenzhen Economic Zone (SEZ), created in the 1980s to be a sort of Hong Kong within the People’s Republic of China. At the time, the city was little more than a collection of fishing villages with a combined population of about thirty thousand. It now has 8 million inhabitants. It has increased 300-fold in my lifetime. I’d be beyond surprised if in the history of humanity, any part of the planet has industrialised at that pace before.

China, as nobody with a newspaper needs telling, is for better or worse going to be the dominant global player of the coming century. Choose any measure you like of growth, of change, of the accumulation of wealth, and you’ll find this enormous country of over 1.3 billion people breaking astonishing ground. Perhaps with the exception of Shanghai, nowhere exemplifies Chinese growth better than Shenzhen. It calls itself “China’s richest city”. I don’t know how they come about that claim – productivity, perhaps; maybe GDP – but it’s a stomach-sinkingly awful place. Look beyond the pus-yellow smog that you feel clamming onto your skin, and the horrific stench (not the rotting refuse and bundled humanity smell of India, but the putrid reek of coal and exhaust and concrete dust and metallurgy), and you see what Dickens and Engels must’ve come across in Victorian London and Manchester. Factories as far as the eye can see (further, actually, considering you can barely squint beyond your outstretched arm), belching coal smoke into a dank sky which would make anyone who’s every been fortunate enough to leave the city open their wrists upon their return.

But of course, the millions of workers who slave away in this, the richest city of what will one day be the richest country, never get to leave, except for a few days every year when they return to their home villages for Chinese New Year, and hand over their meagre earnings to a family which can barely afford enough rice to eat. Just a couple of weeks ago, China’s worst weather in five decades brought the south-east of the country to a standstill over the new year holiday. 800,000 people were stranded for days in nearby Guangzhou train station itself, patiently waiting to take their annual few days’ respite from the inhumane backache of factory existence. In only the most recent of God’s nasty little jokes, many were prevented from seeing their families (their children included) for yet another year. It’s so obvious it goes without saying, but it puts one’s own pathetic little disappointments in perspective.

This area (Shenzhen, Guangzhou and their environs) is the part of China that produces much of the crap we buy on a daily basis. As a little experiment, I’ve just emptied my daypack which is sitting next to me in a smoky café in Yangshuo, and examined both its contents and done an inventory of what I’m wearing. Aside from my laptop, PDA, mobile and camera (all of which naturally are made in China), so too are about four fifths of all the other useless shit I have with me. If time and inclination moves you so, do the same. China is dressing you from shoe to brassiere to sunglasses and more. Statistics aside, these guys are producing everything.

And other than when Nike or the Gap gets caught in a PR glare by some do-gooding NGO and is then forced to renounce its use of sweatshops in south-east Asia, and the media momentarily trains its lens on such practices before the audience’s attention reverts to Wife Swap 3, it’s too easy to forget the real face of industrialisation. It’s not just ‘globalisation’, either – that’s an oversimplified cop-out by those whose main concern is losing jobs in their own manufacturing bases. It’s industry per se: the production of stuff in order for its consumption in order for growth in order for its further production. I’m by no means an agrarian utopianist; I’m very proud of and inspired by much that man has achieved. And exponential population increase naturally requires production to keep people alive. It’s just that stepping into the murk of ashen-faced Shenzhen and into a consumptive, Bladerunnerish gloaming, you can’t help but wonder what report card some of our ancestors might give us were they to see all this. Sometimes, it’s just not clear if we’re progressing at all.

I met one of Shenzhen’s anonymous millions on the sleeper train to Guilin. The sleeper train to get out of Shenzhen comes pretty close to redeeming the city itself. I adore trains – I’ve written ad nauseum on the subject before. I’m not what the English call an anorak – I don’t know one end of a train from the other – I just love the clickety-clack rhythm, I love the conductor taking your ticket and showing you the way to your compartment. I love the sliding doors and the bedside lamps (I’m talking here about real trains with little cabins and hot towels and fold-down beds, not the utilitarian cattle vessels where you sit aeroplane-style in rows and have to ask the corpulent bottom-feeder next to you whose stomach is hanging over onto yours if he’d move so you can get to the toilet. That isn’t really train travel. Unless the scenery is spectacular. And leaving Shenzhen, it surely ain’t).

So assuming you’re willing and able to spend what amounts to a month’s salary for a Chinese factory worker on a soft sleeper ticket, you get a journey of refinement and elegance which the TGV in France can never provide. It’s someone’s job to plump the pillows; another’s to vacuum the carpets on the corridor. It’s one guy’s job to patrol the train telling everyone to keep their valuables safe. As I was sharing my delightful little compartment with two girls who remarkably enough spoke less English than I do Mandarin, this cheery-faced and smartly-attired fellow came to give me his little rehearsed warning. I gave him a look of studied blankness before we both resorted to gestures, with my gestures signifying only that I didn’t understand his. Twenty minutes of this, and he was convinced I was not merely stupid but deaf too, so thankfully he moved on to give his performance to the lot next door.

But after tiring of nervous and uncomprehending smiles from my Chinese bunkmates, I ambled down to hard chair class and found the charming young woman who had helped me nagivate the otherwise unnavigable train station. A nurse in one of Shenzhen’s godawfully grey factories, she was heading home, as she does every weekend, to Guilin. Her name is Helen (her “English” name – her Chinese name sounded like the aluminium death-rattle of a TB patient) and she has an eight year-old daughter who lives in Guilin with her (Helen’s) mother. Helen’s husband left them some years back. I thought it impolite to ask the circumstances, but her sad eyes suggested another the existence of another woman. So the daughter lives with the grandmother, and Helen sees her for one day a week, once you take away the fourteen hour commute each way. The daughter is a gifted violinist, or so she said proudly, whipping out a well-thumbed and tattered album of pictures. Thrusting it into my hands and looking up into my eyes for a glimmer of warmth, I smiled as broadly as I could and said how beautiful her daughter was. She beamed back, exposing dental work that would make a blind man grimace, and invited me to come and meet the daughter and stay with them when we arrived in Guilin.

My heart ached with the recognition of one of those rare moments which are profoundly, palpably real. Here was a woman (she was 28, only a year older than me, but looked middle aged already) whose existence could at very best be called dire. What kind of life is this? Sixty hours a week in a Hadean beehive masquerading as a factory, a shared hovel in a city which Lucifer coughed up, separated from her daughter. A 28-hour return commute on a wooden-slat train bench every week to spend a sole day with her child, and having met a young traveller who was wealthy enough to afford a soft sleeper ticket, she invites him home with the presumable hope he would fall for the daughter and stay. I really can’t say for sure that she was hoping for marriage and a way out of this miserable life. She may just have been so proud of her musical daughter that she wanted to show her off. But although desperation in someone’s otherwise dead eyes is hard to describe, I know it when I see it. I’ve seen it a lot on this voyage. The tuk-tuk driver in Varanasi, the vegetable trader in Siem Reap, the rag-seller in Belgrade, the gypsy mother in Budapest, the beggar in Ho Chi Minh. It’s far too easy to mistake need for want; helplessness for calculation; desperation for envy. Desperation in such places comes in various guises and facing it with sympathy is the only real (however inadequate) susbstitute for empathy. Her desperation was different from theirs, but I saw it in her eyes. A barely educated and prematurely middle-aged single mother, in a country which values only men, with no money, no prospects and no real life worth the word. It was truly sad.

I apologised, explaining that my itinerary forced me to head straight to Yangshuo, and wished her all my heartfelt best. Sitting in the restaurant car a little later (my favourite place on a night train), drinking myself silly on undrinkable Chinese lager, I tried to regain my usual giddy enthusiasm for sleeper travel and for long, nocturnal journeys in particular. Peering out of the window, trying to grasp a glimpse of southern China by night and its tapestry of blackened factories chugging by, all I could see because of the bright lights above me was my own reflection in the glass.

A postscript to the bit about Australia

The "Pacific Solution" was the policy begun by John Howard in 2001 for dealing with the seemingly endless stream of asylum-seekers heading to Australia by sea from various Asian and Middle Eastern countries. The policy - instead of letting the boat people into Australia and examining their asylum claims - involved the Australian government paying the governments of Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea to house them in detention centres. Australia is state party to the Refugee Convention and the UNHCR. This policy (which also overlapped with the deporable "Tampa" situation which Howard used to win the 2001 election), was roundly criticised around the world and besmirched Australia's good standing as a global citizen.

I mention this now, because as of today, the last asylum-seekers have left Nauru, bringing an end - as promised in the election campaign by Kevin Rudd - to a racist and mean-spirited chapter in Australia's recent history. People who endeavour to come here on unseaworthy boats having used up their life savings to do so are either genuine refugees or they're not. Transporting them to deserted detention centres to keep the issue off the front pages and lying to the Australian public about the circumstances behind their arrival is one of the many reasons the country is better off for seeing the end of the little dessicated coconut and his ferretty little face.

A note

There is some problem on this page with text getting corrupted. I don't know why. To solve it, just click on the heading of the blog entry and it will bring the entry up in an uncorrupted, separate page. Thanks.

Back home in A Sunburnt Country

Perth, the town where i grew up, is unique. All places are – and a pedant will argue uniqueness is a binary state, something either is unique or it isn’t – but Perth is especially so. And the word continues to spread. The number of British people emigrating to Australia has already increased from 8,749 in 2001-2 to 23,290 in 2005-6 – and wandering through the major cities of Australia, you’d conclude the lion’s share have come to settle – as my parents, my brother and I did twenty-two years ago – on the sun-drenched and sleepy banks of the Swan River.

So why is Perth ‘especially’ unique?

A few facts to begin: Ben Elton once wrote that Perth has more dollar-millionaires per capita than any other city on earth. This would appear a tall claim to anyone who’s visited Hong Kong, Monte Carlo, southern California or Dubai. He wrote that in the 1980s so even if it were true then, it may not be now. Nevertheless, what is clear is that Perth is confidently affluent in a way that is dumbfounding, breathtaking to the hundreds of thousand of visitors it receives every year. If the weather, the green spaces, the crime rate, the provision of public services, the cleanliness of the air and the average standard of housing are what constitute ‘standard of living, it’s probably unrivalled by any world city. It’s also the most isolated city in the world. Adelaide is the closest neighbour (about 3000km away), Melbourne and Sydney are about half as far again, Singapore and Jakarta are about the same distance. Western Australia – of which Perth is the capital – has a population of just over a couple million, for an area the size of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Greece combined. It is 2.7m km2 of uninhabited and largely uninhabitable wilderness. So take my word, when you’re in Perth, you really feel a long way from everywhere.

Perth’s an ‘American’ city, built for the car and an exemplar of how urban sprawl can go unchecked when circumstances permit and geography mandates. Part of the reason is the history. The city was founded in 1829 on the banks of the Swan, but the early settlers were disappointed by the soil’s – that’s an Australian euphemism for gigahectares of sand – poor agricultural prospects. The more fertile areas were upstream and so small settlements such as Guilford were built. Although a ‘free’ settlement – unlike the settlements those built with convict labour on the east coast – many convicts arrived in the west and tourists can see their sartorially improved descendants to this day, stealing cars, plotting vegetable heists and sniffing glue over a tall macchiato on one of the cappuccino strip’s quaint cafes. Do wave and take pictures, I implore you. They love it.

Perth was generously designated a ‘city’ by Queen Victoria in 1856 – but a city which doesn’t have a second university shouldn't really be called a city at all. And that second university happened in 1975 – the same year that Australia had its major constitutional crisis (when the Queen through the Governor-General sacked the Prime Minister and dissolved parliament) and Australians vowed never again to tolerate a foreign Head of State*. The second university was called Murdoch Uni – rather appropriate since Rupert is Australia’s most influential person and he himself would be pleased to find that tens of thousands of mealy-mouthed undergraduates drop his name every day. A momentary digression on the subject of Mr Murdoch: Australia has the highest concentration of media ownership in the industrialised world. In the last major review (done in 1999), of the twelve capital city and daily papers, seven were owned by Murdoch and three by Fairfax. Few people complain, though, because the Australian media is so execrable there’s no guarantee letting anyone else in to produce more of it would have any beneficial effect whatsoever.

*They broke their necks getting around to a speedy referendum on the Republic issue only 24 years later, and the electorate – with the sort of well thought-out reason you expect from Australians en masse – decided that they quite liked the Queen after all, so voted no. Another referendum is expected some time in the 25th Century.


So although Perth was a city since back in 1856 (two years before the first independent school was founded – of which I am a proud alumnus, go you Haleians), it took until the 1950s to begin any meaningful expansion. Wave after wave of British immigrants came over on £10 tickets – the ‘£10 poms’ as they are affectionately known – and found themselves on a coastal settlement bound to the east by a mountain range (hills, really, but an obstacle nonetheless) and the endless Indian Ocean to the west. With barely thirty or so kilometres separating these two longitudinal barriers, expansion north and south was inevitable. And expand the intrepid settlers did. To call Perth enormous does an injustice to enormity. I’ve been to LA, I’ve been to Mumbai and I live in London. Trust me, for what it is, Perth is enormous.

The 1950s was the decade when the car became an affordable, mass-produced commodity. So a city like Melbourne on the other side of the country – which began its real growth decades earlier than Perth, setting up three universities** has a European-style system of trams and a public transport system broadly adequate for its people. Perth on the other hand has about the worst public transport of any place outside of Somalia, Mozambique and the United States. In that sense, Melbourne is to San Francisco or New York as Perth is to LA or Phoenix or Vegas. When space is aplenty and the car is affordable, governments built roads. And Perth is a road city like you’ve never seen.

**Murdoch Tech, Murdoch U and The Centre for the Study of Murdoch have done quite well, but the Murdoch Institute for Largescale Finance suffered due to its unfortunate acronym. No, I’m joking, but on that subject, Perth’s third university is the Curtin University of Technology. It was originally and ill-advisedly called the Curtin University of New Technology. But not for long.

Perth has more cars per capita than any other city in the world (roughly 750 per 1000 population, which translates to one per person when you exclude the elderly, children and those too incapable to pass their test. Thankfully, I suppose, it also has more car park spaces per capita than any other city in the world. Nobody seems to know how many that fleshes out to. Suffice to say at certain times of day you behold endless expanses of empty grey tarmac shimmering under the summer sun. At other times, you’ll get dizzy from driving around and around the block, cursing your road-fellows for their parking incompetence. “If that guy had parked ten centimetres further back, and the guy in front had done the same, and the guy in front and the guy in front and the guy in front of him had done the same too – I could’ve squeezed in there. Bastards.” This is a popular complaint. Circling the block in the city centre at night is like playing pass the parcel with Hyundais. It sucks.

In most other places, if you don’t have a car, or choose to leave it at home, you have – in addition to buses, trains and perhaps trams too – a variety of taxis buzzing around, which at least affords the option of beating the sweaty crush and not having to stand around with everyone else. For the sociopathically enclined, this has an irresistible appeal.

Perth has a population of just over two million people. Greater London has a population of nine or ten million. London has 30,000 official black cabs, and thousands of private hire mini-cabs too – which get you there just as fast, can be ordered at any time, and are a fair bit cheaper. Often the driver smells like a Parisian, but it’s a small price to pay for not actually having to be in Paris.

Perth, by contrast, has six hundred taxi licences. That’s right, six hundred, for a city the size of Birmingham, Nottingham and Manchester combined. Because everybody drives, nobody takes taxis during the day. So you seldom see them, and when you do they’re parked on taxiranks with bored drivers. But that’s fine, because as I said, nobody has any need for them. The six hundred drivers have a pretty rotten life with nothing to do. Which explains the government’s refusal to issue any more licences.

The evening is a very, very different matter. On weekend nights in particular, the whole city wants to go out on the town to drink until they fall over. This is Australia, after all, a country whose people coined the expression “technicolour yawn” and who largely herald from working-class England. And the English are famous for binge drinking in the way the French are known for sitting around and spouting pseudo-intellectual tripe; it’s not so much an engrained habit as the scaffolding which keeps society in one piece.

A local here will tell you the average time nowadays to get a taxi after midnight on the weekend is somewhere around two hours. My brother once waited for three hours before giving up and walking home, which took three more hours. When half a million people go out eating, drinking and dancing, and then all want to go home at roughly the same time, six hundred cars is a trifle inadequate. This was a problem when I lived here. It’s become even worse in the years since.

But watching the Aussies trying to get home from the nightclub district is revealing in itself. I saw a queue at the taxirank one hundred long. They all waited patiently in the way only Anglo-Saxons can. I took the girl I was with (a very attractive young blonde), walked fifty yards up the road before the rank, and sent her into the oncoming traffic. We had a cab within ten seconds. Nobody else thought of this. Which just goes to show that you can take the Aussies out of England, but you can't take being English out of the Aussies.

That night I'd been out with a bunch of friends. We went first to a Caribbean bar at 9pm. The queue outside was fifty feet long. I pushed to the front and schmalzed the bouncer, which had about as much success as it would anywhere else in the world. The men at the front of the queue sported the self-conscious metrosexuality all Australia men have nowadays, including designer stubble. One of them said he’d been queuing so long he was clean shaven when he got in line. Actually, he didn’t say that – he was a moron – but that was a gist. The queue was static.

So we walked to another bar. Which was closed. On a Saturday night. We passed half a dozen clubs – all of which had queues more than a hundred people long – and found one which was moving at passable speed.

Twenty minutes later, my friends and I reached the entrance. A wet-faced eleven-year old girl with acne scarring that suggested she’d been hunting with Dick Cheney was clutching a clipboard with an expression of nauseating self-importance. She looked down at my shoes (perfectly clean and neat navy suede sneakers), shook her head gravely and announced – with the nails-down-the-blackboard excrutiatingness of the ocker Australian lilt: “Yoi carnt come in hiere wurring thoise, mite!”

I argued, I reasoned. I even tried flirting. I pointed out that the guy in front was let into the club wearing a singlet which left tufts of black hair hanging from his armpits like a couple of squished bushrats. I explained that the group of gentlemen in front were likely too mentally challenged to be able to exit the building in case of fire, whereas I am an expert at trying to leave places, having grown up right here in Perth. And finally, I touched her shoulder, smiled and gave her a look of saccharine droopiness that made my friends want to vomit. She looked hesitantly around for a bouncer. I left.

But a place is nothing without its people and, unlike the various other cities, towns and villages I’ve been lucky enough to visit on this trip so far, I can speak of Perth as a local. I spent sixteen years of my life here. And although many of my attitudes to this remarkable corner of the world would be wholly unrepresentative of the thoughts of others, it’s nevertheless a place I know well and one which has indelibly marked my sense of self. One’s self is but a function of the people and places which have passed through it.

Paradise – by many people’s understanding of the term – Perth really is. Describe to an Indian or a Bulgarian or a Cambodian or a Serb a place of such bountiful wealth and opportunity, of such safety and sunshine, of such abundant space and flora, and they will think you waxing panglossian about a hereafter. When you tell them it’s the place where you first played cricket in the street, drank your first beer, had your first kiss, learned to swim and drive and write in rhyme, they regard you with an otherworldly fascination. Even Americans – brought up as they so often are to believe in the unarguable exceptionalism of their own culture – see in Perth in particular and Australia as a whole – that which America wishes it were.

If you tell the Indian or the Serb, however, that – despite being grateful for what this pristine utopia afforded you – you couldn’t wait to leave, he or she regards you not with fascination or even bemusement, but a real incredulity. Either your description of the place has been woefully misleading, or you are indefensibly ungrateful for what you’ve been given. After having experienced this incredulity many times, I cannot help but conclude that the truth must in fact be both. I have both failed to depict fully Perth’s shortcomings and I have never fully appreciated its virtues and its people.

But who are the people? Who are the inhabitants of this most isolated of metropolises? Despite Perth’s (and Australia’s) chest-puffing claims to multiculturalism, it’s actually anything but. Scandinavia it is not, but – don’t be fooled – if you come here expecting a polyglot melting-pot of white, black, brown and yellow faces, you’ll be disappointed. To this day it’s an overwhelmingly white country – and a great majority of these white inhabitants are protestant Anglo-Saxons too. Melbourne and Sydney have small but significant Mediterranean minorities (predominantly Greek, Macedonian, Croatian and Italian), and Sydney has a growing Lebanese community – many of whom came over in 1980s during the civil war.

White as it is, though, Australia is a country which is changing, and it’s a really interesting time to be back. After 11 years of a right-wing coalition federal government the November elections brought about a landslide victory for the centre-left Australian Labor Party. In truth the ALP is neither a “Labor” party (Australians don’t shed many tears for the unions) nor centre-left (the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, calls himself a fiscal conservative) but it holds a commanding majority in Canberra, as well as every single one of the State and Territory governments. The vanquished Liberal party of John Howard is now so weakened that its highest-ranking public servant in the entire country is the mayor of Brisbane. And next week, as the US did for slavery and its treatment of native Americans, and the British for Ireland, Australia atones for its own original sin. The federal government, meeting one of its campaign promises, will apologise to the Aborigines for the Stolen Generation, which is supposed to put to bed the sorriest chapter in Australia’s young history.

Australia’s relationship with its original inhabitants is a tortured tale of disrespect, neglect, blame, racism, middle-class guilt and politically-correct relativism. To visit this self-described ‘lucky country’ and lay eyes on its original inhabitants has broken the hearts of thousands with a social conscience who’ve come to these shores. Surely, what’s left of the Aborigines is the most wretched social group of any developed country in the world. Prevailing wisdom across the political spectrum is gloomy beyond belief. Virtually everyone thinks the Aborigines will be effectively extinct within two generations. And to make matters worse, virtually everyone thinks the problem is intractable.

Aborigines have 26 times the dementia of Australians as a whole. They have 3 or 4 times the rate of respiratory disease and diabetes. They have a full 70-fold the rate of communicable diseases, two to three times the infant mortality and five times the drug-induced mental-disorders. Life expectancy is 59.6 years compared to 72.9 for Native Canadians, 72.1 for Maoris and 70.6 for Native Americans. According to a 2004 Canadian study of 100 countries, Australia’s Aborigines have the second worst standard of life of any group on earth (after some Chinese indigenous communities). Despite this, Australia ranks fourth globally on the study’s human development index. The UNDP’s 2007/8 Development Index (the best recognised of its type) puts Australia third, after Iceland and Norway.

None of these statistics can ever reveal the full picture, though. For that, you have to sit in the centre of any of Australia’s cities for a couple of hours, and watch the world go by. The Aborigines lurk in the shadows like H.G Wells’ Moorlocks. When you see them, they’re dressed like vagrants, limping, invariably carrying a bottle in a paper bag. These are the more active ones. Take a stroll to a nearby park, and you’ll likely see a group of Aborigines, of both sexes and all ages, passed out on the grass. But even this doesn’t tell the full story.

The full horror lies outside the cities. Although a small minority of Aborigines do live in urban areas (with almost universal unemployment and welfare dependance), a large percentage live on what may charitably be called ‘reservations’ in the Australian outback. They live neither the traditional nomadic lifestyle they once had, nor do they integrate into modern Australia in any way. Ask any knowledgeable Aussie and he or she will tell you that I’m not overblowing my point: Aborigines live a life where they just wait to die. These outback communities have no employment save the one man who sells alcohol. The children regularly die of diseases which have been eradicated in all but sub-Saharan Africa. I met a lecturer in the History department at the University of Western Australia. He made an interesting point:

“This is a soft left department at a soft left university. But whenever there’s some sort of governmental intervention into these settlements, those academics who’ve never visited one predictably decry the policy’s paternalism and illiberalism. And those who have been out there, complain that it doesn’t go far enough. These Aboriginal communities are places of indescribable degeneracy. And nobody knows what more can be done”.

A comprehensive examination of the history and causes of Aborigines’ wretchedness is beyond the scope of this piece here. But it’s worth telling an undisputable truth. Alcohol and pornography have decimated black Australia. In the middle of last year, the Howard government – in response to a long-awaited report which detailed horrific levels of child sex abuse in these communities – banned alcohol and pornography to certain areas of the Northern Territory, which amounted to a ban for Aborigines alone. The only real outcry from the Australian Left was not to the policy per se, but to the cynical, populist reactionism of the government in so drastically implementing it. In short, practically nobody who lives here, irrespective of their political leanings, is unaware of the appalling, unspeakable sex abuse which is widespread in Aboriginal culture. In my two decades here, barely a week would pass without yet another story of the gang-rape of children. Only two months ago, nine men who pleaded guilty to gang-raping a 10-year-old girl at the Aurukun Aboriginal community on Cape York escaped a prison term, with the sentencing judge inexplicably saying the child victim "probably agreed" to have sex with them.

The argument that alcohol and pornography are to blame is one which tends to stun and bemuse neophytes. After all, both are freely available in society at large, and child rape – while it does exist – is not endemic. But whether you loathe Aboriginal men for their evil, or make the case that the taboo on child sex is as culturally specific as the prohibition on corporal punishment, the fact is a significant majority of children as young as two or three are systematically and continually raped in these communities and 2007 in Australia was the year the civil libertarians ran out of objections. The complaint that imposing our standards on these communities is paternalistic and is the root cause of Aboriginal wretchedness carries no more steam. Just this week, Robert Bropho, a prominent Perth Aboriginal leader of the Swan River Nyungah community, is on trial for child sex charges. He is – and I don’t say this lightly – completely representative of Aboriginal leadership in Australia. In twenty years, I can’t count the number of Aboriginal “leaders” who’ve been found to be – at best – corrupt, and – at worse – child rapists.

In my final year of law school here in Perth, I took Advanced Criminology. The majority of this very small class conducted investigations and wrote theses into Aboriginal rates of juvenile incarceration, or deaths in custody, arguing vociferously that White Australia is to blame, that Aborigines are unfairly targeted, that the media manipulates the electorate into believing Aborigines are more predisposed to crime than everyone else. As a proud social liberal, I was stunned and a little guilty to find myself shouting these people down, class after class. Despite the good-intentioned but morally deficient policy of taking Aboriginal children from their homes in the 1950s, despite the fact that this was their country long before it was ours, and despite early Aborigines being massacred by the British, the relativistic nonsense my classmates were spewing made me bilious with opprobrium. As they spent a semester researching and making excuses, always separating the disease from the symptoms, I wrote my thesis on virtual child pornography and argued its continued legality. It made me a hate figure, but I think their hatred of me served to confuse their own defense of contemporary Aboriginal culture. This was in 2003. Maybe they’ve come round to mainstream opinion since. Not for nothing, I topped the class. In response they voted me most likely to be a serial killer. I hated them all.

So next week there’ll be a milestone in modern Australia. Although a handful of progressive premiers and senators apologised to the Aborigines a decade ago, the Howard government – despite public support – steadfastly refused to do so. The explanation was that an apology implies culpability and a flood of litigation would drown the judiciary and bankrupt the country.

This was farcical and mean-spirited. But the time has come, and the new PM is giving both a written and verbal apology for the suffering caused. It probably won’t make much practical difference to the dire conditions in which Aborigines live. An apology won’t get them off welfare dependence any more than it'll convince Aboriginal men that child sex is evil. But if there's any disease which underpins the wretchedness of Aborigines, the disease with contributes to the other diseases I’ve already mentioned, it’s a disease of the soul. A culture with no remaining self-respect cannot summon the strength to save itself. The dearth of dignity which leads Aborigines to spend their days stumbling through city centres, eye-bleedingly drunk and cursing drivel at an imaginary foe, must surely stem from knowing that the white man never thought much of them in the first place. So if a genuine, heartfelt apology, based not on direct guilt but on compassion and sincerity, helps just a few Aboriginal men to stand up tall and announce, “I am a proud man and I will be a leader of my people before it’s too late!” then perhaps everything is not as dire as I've made out.

Time will tell of course, but on this historic week, I can't overstate how sad the Aboriginal problem is. Australia is a country with so much to be proud of. With a tiny population, it has a booming and resilient economy, sends fine actors, writers and musicians everywhere around the world, conducts some of the world’s pre-eminent science, has produced thinkers as diverse as Germaine Greer, Peter Singer, Edna Everage and my own greatest hero, Clive James. It’s the country of Don Bradman and Banjo Patterson and Joan Sutherland and Rod Laver, and the tenets which underpin Australian culture are as admirable as any in the world. Although visitors and expats may laugh at the notion of “fair dinkum”, it’s a laudable belief and should be on the flag. Admittedly difficult to define, it broadly refers to a spirit of fair play and hard work. It means respect for integrity and candour. And it’s the reason Australians smile and call total strangers “mate” – and really mean it when they do. It’s a marvellous country with a marvellous people. Which makes it all the more sad that the open wound of Aboriginal reconciliation continues to fester on an otherwise tough and tanned skin.

Each time I come back to Australia, I find it less and less like home, but with more and more to admire. And being here in Perth, in this most isolated metropolis of all, on a land which – as the anthem goes – abounds with nature’s gifts, with beauty rich and rare, I am moved to raise a cold beer to the Great Southern Land, which is going through a rite of passage, consigning to the past its adolescent sins, and beginning an exciting and unwritten chapter in its history.

Pride and Prejudice in Ho Chi Minh

For my tenth birthday I was given a book of short stories by Jeffrey Archer, someone I’ve always thought – despite being a fabulous scoundrel – one of the most gifted natural storytellers of all. I remember a lot of this great book, but my favourite story was the one about an insurance claims assessor, who lives a life of metronomic regularity. Every day is exactly the same as the one before and the one after, including his arrival at the train station every day to catch the 5:52pm home from work, but not after buying ten Benson & Hedges and a copy of the Standard, which he would place on the little ledge next to his seat on the way home, happily reading and smoking for the 38 minute journey.

One particular day, however, his routine is disrupted by some event at work, and a chain reaction of events leads him – instead of placing his newspaper and cigarettes as usual on top of his briefcase – to put them inside. Finding himself sitting in a different train from his normal one and surrounded by unfamiliar commuters, a leather-clad, pierced young skinhead reaches over to him with a glare of defiance, and steals a cigarette from the pack sitting atop the man’s briefcase on the ledge. Fearful and speechless at the breach of protocol, our protagonist grabs the newspaper. But the young punk glares again, reaches forward to do the same, a tussle ensues and the paper is torn in two. The insurance man smokes a cigarette from his pack but to his astonishment the skinhead grabs another, the insurance man takes another and for half and hour they glare at each other, both smoking the B&Hs as quickly as possible and clinging to the scraps of newspaper they’re left holding. Eventually, the insurance man reaches his stop and opens his briefcase, only to find inside a pristine copy of the Standard and an unopened pack of Benson & Hedges.


I hope the joke of that story survived its summary, because among the various bewildering experiences of Vietnam, one stands out. I needed to hail – as is perfectly the norm – a young man on a motorbike to take me across town. He was about twenty, short, very slight and bespectacled and wearing a shirt of typically catastrophic blue. We agreed a price, and before getting on the back, I turned away to put my iPod in my bag and check it was all securely fastened. This was a lesson I learnt in Cambodia when half my belongings narrowly missed being crushed under a brakeless lorry.

Turning back to the young driver on the bike, I saw an overweight German man – who could easily get a full-time job as a professional caricature – climbing onto the back of my young driver’s bike, and strapping on a helmet. Politely, I tapped his corpulent shoulder and I told him I was here first. No I wasn’t, he replied in accented English. This was now a problem. Not because there aren’t enough motorbike drivers around (there are plenty), but because firstly, you should always stand your ground, and secondly, if you give a German an inch he’ll take it as an invitation to invade a neighbouring country. And Cambodia has really been through enough already with the French.

So in what I imagined was a display of phlegmatic resoluteness, I pushed up to him, put my finger in his fat little face and told him to get the fuck off my motorcycle.

The man – and I should add that although fat enough to topple a ferry, he was more security guard than daytime television guest, and could’ve killed me with a single bear-hug – peered at me with the bewildered indifference with which a rhino might regard a wristwatch. His response was that which Germans often give when approached in the wild. He spoke in German – and I’m pretty sure in the cretinous, self-satisfied idiolect they use in Bavaria.

He disembarked from the bike – to the evident relief of the driver who was mentally calculating how much a set of new shock absorbers would cost – and a crowd of curious Vietnamese surrounded us. They’re all curious, and all of the time. But when there’s actually something more interesting than a dying dog to watch, they really, really gather fast.

Now he’s shouting and me and I’m yelling back, because I’ve absolutely had it to bits. You get screwed in India, you get screwed in Thailand. You get screwed in Nepal – but you forgive it because everything’s so pretty. Getting screwed by the locals is an inevitable part of travel, but I’ll take getting sodomised and beaten in a Vietnamese prison before I get screwed by a fat, lugubrious German.

As the yelling about who had the motorcycle first gets more and more heated, a uniformed policeman as thin as a chopstick and about as tall comes and breaks it up. A scuffle ensues, a fracas, a melee even. And then I see him. Sitting on a virtually identical Honda motorcycle parked directly in front of the bike with the bellowing Jerry is my driver. He’s watching me in the way a woodland critter must regard a bird of prey, having seen me approach the bike directly behind his to attack a total stranger for no imaginable reason. He presumably thinks me a certifiable lunatic, and upon catching my eye as I stare, dumbstruck and mortified with embarrassment, he frantically turns the key and speeds off. The German – still shaking with indignation – climbs back onto his bike and leaves. And the throngs of spectators who were pleased just to see a white guy lose his marbles, mill away and back to their lives. There are no more guys on bikes anywhere to be found.

I end up walking.

Vietnam is such a weird and perplexing place. Back home, it’s easy to forget that it was a country long before it was a war. Yet the war is how we see this country. We measure its progress against how much was lost during twenty years of conflict. We see, to this day, a communist government running a capitalist country – a government which exists because of the failure of the mostly American foreign forces to triumph in a war against a dedicated and hidden enemy which could stomach greater casualties and knew what they were fighting for. If only that were a lesson which’d been heeded in the last few years. Long before Vietnam meant bodybags and napalm and cold war proxies thrashing it out, it was a country of proud and dignified people. Proud to have worn the scars of battle against various enemies at different times, a centuries-old abnegation of foreign domination which gives the visitor a sense of the people’s national self-assuredness; something you don’t feel in other Asian countries. The Lonely Planet (as always) puts it well:

“The Chinese have been the traditional threat and the proximity of this northern giant has cast a long shadow over Vietnam and its people. They respect but fear China, and in the context of 2000 years of history, the French and the Americans are but a niggling annoyance that were duly dispatched”.

But it’s a country of stunning paradox, too. The Vietnamese have embraced capitalism and then run with it – creating a monster of mercantile, consumerist strength which belies its communist underpinnings. The significant Vietnamese migrant communities in the US, Canada and Australia – communities which left during and after the war in the 1970s to start a new life – have one striking thing in common. They have an extraordinary work ethic, a predisposition and facility for business and commerce which has been the envy of many other migrant communities. The Vietnamese diaspora was a sad part of modern Vietnamese history but has given a great deal to the receiving countries.

Like much of Asia, cursed (or blessed, depending on your perspective) with comparatively low life expectancy and an explosive birth rate, it’s a young and jaw-droppingly dynamic place. For every elderly Vietnamese wearing the distinctive, conical rice paddy hat and traditional garb, you see twenty young men and women porting what they believe to be the latest western fashions, carrying mobiles and MP3 players and swapping thousands of counterfeit DVDs. Ho Chi Minh City – which the locals persist in calling Saigon – thrums with commerce. Everywhere you look is the sensory overload of sights, sound and smells which characterises the Asian megacities in general. But Saigon has something else, something hard to identity and even harder to describe. The closest I can get it is to invoke a well-trodden and rather tired cliché. It’s a city which feels alive. It pulsates and undulates with the round-the-clock tramplings of five million inhabitants, three million motorcycles (the most in the world) and a culture of street commerce and an otherwordly chaos that tantalises and frustrates. Only thirty-three years since images of American troops and diplomats being saved from the advancing Vietnamese troops, hoisted from the roof of the embassy, brought humiliation into the living rooms of America, Saigon has been reborn. It represents everything, absolutely everything which means this century will be the Asian century.

The people are warm and engaging, but commerce underpins everything. A fruit vendor tells you about her children in the staccato, pronoun-free delivery which characterises Vietnamese English. Any reciprocated interest elicits a machine-gun burst of further minutiae about her family and an invitation to meet them. Then a rather aggressive request to buy a metric ton of papaya. Then indignation at your polite protest that a cubic metre of tropical fruit might be an unwanted burden to a backpacker.

A conversation struck up with an old man on a park bench continues for ten minutes or so. You admire his facility with English and his knowledge of the city, his stories of being a private in the South Vietnamese army, until he tells you he’s a freelance tour guide – and promptly pulls out a tattered and garish business card. A few years ago, an American politician, in a dumbass pique of Francophobe populism, announced that, “The French don’t even have a word for entrepreneur!” I don’t know whether the Vietnamese got theirs from the French while this was Indochina, or whether it’s culturally innate. I’m just saying: the Vietnamese are admired for the same reason that the Jews have been historically distrusted. They have commerce in their blood.

I told the man on the bench I don’t need a tour guide. Which wasn’t really true, I just don’t like to be observed having things pointed out to me while I almost get run over by five hundred motorbikes. I told him – as I have done countless times on this voyage – that I’d be delighted to retain his services for a couple of hours, if he’d tell me real things about the people and the place.

The man happily slurped the revolting coffee I’d bought him (important digression: don’t drink coffee in Vietnam. They serve it with the viscosity of honey, the smell of sewage, the taste of tarmacadam and the texture of soil). Vietnam, he told me – and South Vietnam in particular – has changed beyond recognition the past thirty years. The gap in understanding between the elderly Vietnamese and the westernised youth creates a disconnect which in other places might manifest as mutual hostility (I’m paraphrasing). Yet the young and the old, despite how different their lives and exposure to the West are, share a deep and passionate love for their country, a tolerance of their single-party government and a fierce determination that Vietnam should prosper.

My elderly vet said he’s as happy as anyone could expect to be. He remembers well the misery of the 60s and 70s. Lending weight to the lesson which many have learnt from the Iraq debacle, he spoke with clarity of the humiliation brought upon a people when foreign troops with space-age toys come parachuting in and wantonly go house-to-house. This, of course, is a guy who fought with the Americans, as part of the poorly-trained, indisciplined and ragtag South Vietnamese army. But anyone, he said, who sees their country invaded – even if the invaders are fighting on the same side as you – suffers the marked indignity of occupation. He couldn’t wait for the Americans to leave in ’75, even though it meant the communists had triumphed. And, he impassively observed, they’re still in power a generation later.

I met a schoolgirl in a black and white pressed uniform. She’d stopped off for a drink, halfway through her two-hour commute home from school by scooter. Five days a week, she sits on her girly-pink Honda for four hours in pea-soup pollution and end-of-history traffic, most of that time at a standstill. The two other days of the week she does the same thing to get to work, most of the money from which supports her family.

I said hi. She giggled like, well, exactly like you’d imagine a Vietnamese schoolgirl to giggle. We got chatting and I learnt – aside from her commuting schedule – that she has five siblings, was born in a village outside Saigon, and – like so many in this city and every other Asian metropolis – her family moved here for a better life. Her mother is a tailor who works seven days a week. She (my giggling friend, that is) has an iPod (fake), a DVD player (fake), some Bose headphones (fake) and a shiny new 3G phone (real). Turns out mobile phones are the only consumer gadget which the Vietnamese are yet to bother counterfeiting.

But they counterfeit – as do the Cambodians, and the Thais – with breathtaking ease, speed and imagination. In Thailand, I needed new headphones. Armed with the long-gotten wisdom that headphones are one of the few things you should never skimp on, I circled the islands for days in search of a single, solitary pair of Sony, Sennheiser, Samsung headphones – any would do. I probably found five thousand pairs scattered across forty electronics shops. And not a single pair, not one, was genuine! I know this because firstly, the text on the packaging would invariably have some ridiculous syntax. And secondly, when I would demand of the shop proprietor that I wanted the real thing and was willing to pay ten times more for it (the fakes were a couple of dollars), he or she would always give the same apologetic shrug, insist that it’s not possible to buy real headphones anywhere in Thailand, but “is ok, copies also good! Same, same! But different!” As if it’s like going into a chemist and buying generic ibuprofen rather than Nurofen. Rather than what it actually is, which is an illegal breach of Sony or Toshiba’s intellectual property – not to mention a besmirching of their reputation for quality every time anyone buys this otherwise cosmetically identical product and blames the company for its shoddiness. Which, I imagine, happens about a gazillion times a day.

My search for headphones is a rather dull tale (I ended up being forced to buy some “Sony” in-ear buds, and they naturally stopped working within six hours), but worth telling to illustrate a broader point. In a part of the world that is so bustling, so imaginative, so entrepreneurial and which boasts so much human capital, it’s completely impossible to buy a standard, genuine consumer product that you could find within five minutes in any European or North American city. Counterfeiting is well known to be rife in Asia – the Chinese are in a constant and circular battle with the Americans over a failure to crack down on DVD piracy – but you really have to go into a DVD or electronics shop to appreciate the scale of the problem. Hundreds of thousands of fake DVDs line the walls, sending not a single penny back to the producers, the actors or the film companies. But at least the product they’re selling doesn’t diminish the reputation of the studio. Electronics are a different matter. I can’t tell you the number of gadgets you can buy which are perfectly recognisable as having been made by the premium Japanese brands, only to shake them and hear them rattle like a box of smarties. Not everyone, I think, immediately recognises crap when they see it.

Some of it is very funny. Here are some photos of DVD covers at a typical Vietnamese shop; two of my favourites are “Overwhelming USA Action Movie”, which, it transpires, is a collection of Willis, Van Damme and Seagal blockbusters; and my personal favourite, “Robert De Niro: Gangster. Black helped eldest brother to come, the fire exploded a condition imminent!” Which, after ten minutes of brow-furrowed inspection, I still could not for the life of me decipher.

So some of it is amusing, but some really is not. And having been brought up to respect quality when I see it, I find my skin crawling by the churned-out crapness of so much in this part of the world. If some kid with a DVD burner wants to sell identical copies of movies at a discount, that is – although rightfully illegal – a real service which is being provided, and which is being provided to poor people who otherwise could not see the films at all. For people with very little to look forward to at the end of a 15-hour day in a factory, if watching a pirated American film gives some bit of pleasure, then who am I or anyone else to begrudge that? Especially so when the prevalence of Anglophone movies helps improve English and increase social mobility in an increasingly Anglophone world.

But as much as I can accept that, I’m repulsed by the mass-produced mediocrity of so much of the total shit which is for sale in south-east Asia. While the Japanese innovate and design and invest in products which make many of our lives both easier and more fun – while constantly having to stave off recession and lay off the poor salaryman who’s toiled almost to death for his company – the south Asians copy the product and sell it for practically nothing, reciprocating nada to the company which designed and built it.

Japan is rich and Vietnam is (at least for now) poor. So there’s maybe some fairness in what amounts to a downward redistribution of wealth. But taking from the lucky and giving to the unlucky (something I’ve always been for) is not the same as stealing, or taking something which is good and turning it into something which is bad. And as myopic and ethnocentric as I know this comment is, I really wish the south Asians would have a little more pride. Pride in not just stealing the innovations of others and making them worse. Pride in not celebrating the bottom-line production of rubbish. And have some pride in trying to create an economy which, while booming, innovates and generates revenue which can be plugged back into helping the poor climb out of their poverty.

And, I feel, it’s the very same lack of pride which brings me back to the giggling schoolgirl – who by now was turning pink and displaying the unmistakable signs of having a crush (I’ve come to recognise it well, it’s hard work being a man of the world, you know). Between trembling giggle-fits, she asked me whether I have a girlfriend, what I think of Vietnamese girls, would I ever marry one, etcetera. And - also mindful of whether I was being watched by a jealous, crowbar wielding ex-boyfriend – I projected what I imagined to be a boyish insouciance in changing the subject. But then came the heartbreaker – and it transported me suddenly a couple of months back to India and Shahrukh Kahn (the Bollywood star) advertising “Fair & Handsome”, the skin-lightening cream which all young Indians are so desperate to use, in order to look more beautiful. More European.

“I’m so ugly”, she murmured, with the unmistakable but exquisite glimpse of honesty you occasionally stumble across. Suddenly the constant thrum of the traffic left my mind, and I even forgot the imaginary ex-boyfriend and the fact my dairy drink tasted like blended Chihuahua. All I was left with was a moment of perfect candour with a total stranger in a totally strange place. “We are all so ugly compared to you”, she remarked, with genuine sadness. I clarified that she meant white people, and not me in particular, and she went on. “White girls are so beautiful, they have those round blue eyes, and they all have blonde hair and long legs…(I wish, I restrained myself from interrupting) … I want to have my eyes done and my nose too, but it’s very expensive, and it would never look real. I will always be ugly like all the Vietnamese”.

I gave her a few useless platitudes like how she was very beautiful and should be happy with who she is, and took my leave to contemplate this seismically sad divulgence. What upset me was not hearing the fears and insecurities of adolescence – I remember them all too well myself. It’s the fact that I know, I just now know for sure, that hers is the mainstream view across this continent. There is a macro-cultural inferiority complex going on which is everywhere you look. You see it in the mannequins in the shop windows across Asia – ALL of which are Caucasian. You see it in the billboards for lingerie, razors or suits. You see it in the obsessive face-whitening in India, the eye surgery in the Far East, and the fact that probably eight in ten Singaporean, Malaysian, Korean or Thai boys I’ve ever met dye their hair blonde or red. You see it in the desperately imitative fashions, the reactive gestures, the Asian ghetto patois that inculcates all of their tongues. You see it in the way as a white guy you’re treated with reverence while a black tourist receives disdain. And you sure as hell see it when a young girl of preternatural loveliness loathes the way her race looks.

Of course, young girls in the West hate their appearance too, but it’s different. Jealousy of one’s peers at a time of insecurity and hormones is the most normal thing in the world. An old and proud culture being subsumed by another, not by outside imposition but voluntarily welcomed, sought out, encouraged, is really sad indeed. Where is the pride in permitting to economy to be run by flogging fake junk? Where is the pride in the governments of this gigantic continent not asking advertisers to curb the cultural envy, not telling their people that they should be proud and happy to be who they are? It is sad, and so is an economy which employs its people to, if they’re not making the junk which we so needlessly consume back home, creates the social conditions for embarrassingly phoney copies of exotic things from other places. And I’m not even talking about the damn headphones.

Starting over in America

It’s primary season in the US electoral calendar. It’s that time when fleece-wrapped and beanie-clad Americans gather in hysterical throngs in civic centres and town halls in the frozen wastes of New England and Iowa, waving placards with sloppy slogans in fonts subtly different from those of their opponents. Under an avalanche of focus-group rhetoric, a hopelessly undemocratic (to the rest of the world, anyway) process begins.

It starts earlier each time, and this one began almost a year ago when the candidates of both parties set up their mandatory “exploratory committees”. Then the media gossiped and speculated until the senators, governors and varied Washington bigshots announced their campaigns. Then begins a process of shameless pandering to Iowans on of parochial matters of ethanol subsidies and to the fiercely freethinking Granite Staters of New Hampshire (state motto: “Live Free or Die”), in order that the first-in-the-nation caucuses and primaries provide momentum to sweep through the states to come.

It’s easy to be cynical. To the rest of the world, the primary system demonstrates little other than the sad fact that a small sliver of the electorate wields massive, disproportionate influence – just like the electoral college system, which pretty much sends twenty-something states to the Democrats, twenty-something states to the Republicans, leaving a small handful of swing states to decide the next President. It renders laughable any democratic principle of ‘one person, one vote’.

This time – even by usual standards – the world is watching with fascination and some nerves. It’d be hard to argue that there’s ever been a more pivotal election, geopolitically speaking. The course of the war on terror, global approaches to climate change, US relations with the Muslim world and with China – the next President of the United States will be crucial in determining what transpires in the years to come. And we all have a stake in it. Can’t the Electoral College should be expanded; if Texas can have 34 votes and small flyover states where nobody wants to lives get a handful each, is it that unreasonable for Europe to get twenty, China to get a couple of dozen, and the Arab world to get a few – depending whether they stop burning American flag on al-Jazeera? I’ve made this argument to a variety of Americans over the years (and I even mischievously posted on a right-wing American blog a while back), and the responses have run the gamut from condescending bemusement to outright hostility. It’s an idea that’s going to take some time to get the traction it deserves.

But I don’t mean to sneer at the American system – for all its shortcomings, the rest of the world owes it a great deal. And this time, there’s something truly different going on. In part, because for the first time since horse and carriage, there’s no incumbent President or Vice-President running (can you imagine the global opprobrium if Cheney threw his hat into the ring?) In part, it’s due to the palpable disillusionment the US electorate has, not with the GOP per se, but with the neocon, evangelical cabal which has hijacked its agenda, and in so doing alienated and enraged everyone else. Michael Moore probably played a role in why things are different this time too. His 2007 documentary, “Sicko”, brought real attention to the criminal unfairness of the for-profit health system in the US, which not merely has 47 million Americans uninsured, but leaves even those who do have insurance to get helplessly screwed by the HMOs who are beholden to “Big Pharma” and its Washington lobby.

And in part, it’s because on the Democratic side, there’s a man who comes along once in a generation. Obviously, nobody knows if Barack Hussein Obama will be the nominee. And if he is, nobody knows if he’ll win in the general election. What an improbable tale if he does – and I do hope he will. Nevertheless, what I’m sure of, from watching him since 2004 and his magnificent speech to the Democratic National Convention (http://youtube.com/watch?v=MNCLomrqIN8) is that he reminds people of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King for a reason.

What’s that reason? It’s not a conniving media strategy to position himself as their natural successor. Nor do I think he’s received politically correct favouritism by a mainstream media afraid to criticise the first black man with a chance of winning. I’m sure of what it is, and anyone who has seen him speak, seen him on the talk shows, read his books, and heard him captivate his audience must know it too. Even Republicans must know it. They must fear the exquisitely all-American story of the son of a Kenyan father, brought up by his Kansan mother in Indonesia and Hawaii who, upon leaving law school, doesn’t go to a lucrative corporate law firm to pull in a six-figure salary. Instead, he works the streets on the south side of Chicago with community empowerment programs. He works as a civil rights lawyer, and becomes first a senator in the Illinois state legislature and is then elected in a landside to the US Senate. Amidst massive encouragement and support and almost religious faith – especially from young voters utterly disgusted with the cronyism, falsehood and partisanship of the political system in Washington – he launches his presidential bid. The rest will be history – in every sense. The Republicans must surely fear the reason behind Obamamania: he reminds people of those giants from the sixties.

If the overused term ‘inspirational’ can be applied to anything, surely it can to Obama. He speaks in rhetoric without sounding stage-managed. He rouses a crowd with metre and cadence and does it neither notes nor a prompter. He engages without being obsequious or disingenuous. He’s qualified, naturally funny and just plain likeable in a way that Hillary Clinton – for all her very real qualities – will never be. But above all, there’s something transcendent – even ethereal – about his message, about the platform for his campaign. His speech back in 2004 referred to “the audacity of hope” – also the title of his second book. It advocated a future of nonpartisanship, of the restoration of American moral leadership in the world, of using progressive domestic policies to lead by example. From everyone in the States I speak to, from all that I read and watch, it’s abundantly clear: something over there is changing in a very real way. Seven years of President Numbnuts and his coterie of Machiavellian, base-pandering divisivists have alienated a great swathe of the electorate. For some under thirty – baby boomers’ children – their parents’ generation has bequeathed them a world and a country they no longer admire. It was their parents who began the era of rampant consumerism which will be inscribed on the twentieth century’s tombstone. It was they who failed to understand environmental problems and who now are the captains of industry who continue to obstruct real progress against climate change. And in this election year, it’s they who the younger generation see in congress and lined up behind the podiums in the election debates. Old white men, all in a row, railing against Hispanic immigrants, baiting the Iranians, parsing words on climate change, speaking in well-honed soundbytes, and hedging positions to remain friendly to the military-industrial complex and the lobbies which control contemporary DC.

On the Republican side, Congressman Ron Paul from Texas is the only one with the courage to speak unpopular truths. Despite being frighteningly conservative on many issues (his proposals for the abolition of the Inland Revenue Service and the CIA alone render him utterly unelectable – and a good thing too), he stated in a recent debate that in order to understand the hostility aimed at the US by the Muslim world, “[Americans] must examine [their] foreign policy”. He believes it’s US support for Arab dictatorships, the Iraq war, an apparently unwavering favouritism towards Israel, and the presence of US troops on Muslim holy lands which are the underlying causes of anti-Americanism in the Middle East. Not only did his opponents openly sneer, but one of them demanded he retract such an unpatriotic position. “They hate us because of our freedom”, was the predictable populist retort.

Two things deserve mention here. The first is that Ron Paul has been a phenomenon in 2007. Despite never polling out of single digits in any of the early primary states, he raised $20 million in the final quarter of 2007 – practically the leader among the GOP candidates – and not only did it practically all come over the internet, but it practically all came from 18-25 year olds. In other words, a fiscally conservative, elderly and rather wooden congressman from Texas, whose views on a variety of issues are totally at odds with the mainstream and who must be considered unelectable by even his most fervently dewy-eyed supporter, has tapped into a great lake of discontent among the youth, and raised more money than the establishment candidates. He was against the Iraq war from the start, he bemoans US hegemony, he spoke out against US dependence on foreign oil long before his competitors. He has – at every opportunity – said exactly what he thinks. So much so that Bill Maher – the famously left-wing, anti-GOP, libertarian comic and late-night commentator – after interviewing Congressman Paul for the first time early in 2007, was visibly stunned by the honesty of Paul’s arguments (http://youtube.com/watch?v=xo6KiusCBoU) and came pretty close to endorsing him.

Many Paul supporters – who stomp noisily around YouTube and the blogosphere with vituperative advocacy for their man – will likely coalesce behind Obama when Paul drops out of the race – as he inevitably will. In other words, the most right-wing and reactionary candidate from either party, a white, old southerner, shares more with a centre-left, young, black, progressive northerner than with anyone else from either party. And young voters – who are participating in historically unprecedented numbers – overwhelmingly support them both. What does this tell you about the exasperation the American youth is feeling towards the status quo?

The second thing deserving mention is that Paul is very right as well as very Right. What he argued in the debate on the role of US foreign policy in fermenting terrorism – and with which his army of devoted, web-savvy supporters must presumably concur, is conventional wisdom everywhere else in the world. Read the opinion pages of any British, French, Dutch, Indian, South-east Asian, Australian broadsheet – anywhere on the spectrum – and you find some attribution of blame at US foreign policy blunders and Washington’s calculated support for the undemocratic regimes in the Arab world. Until recently heresy in the US – outside of blogs and the New York Times Op-Ed page, the young are starting to realise this, while the old still do not. A seachange, in other words, is afoot.

Ron Paul won’t win of course – and it’s a good thing too. He’s a lunatic on most issues. Another Bush term would do less damage than a President Paul. He won’t win. But neither will the paleorepublicans who laugh him down on the debate stage. The policies of polarising the electorate on social wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage, and dismissing criticism of the administration as unpatriotic – has manifestly failed. It’s left the next generation of voters – sorry for the cliché – hungry for change. A full seventy percent of Americans believe their country is on the wrong track. Merrill Lynch this week announced that the US economy may be in recession. The most accurate civilian body count of the Iraq War so far puts the figure at 151,000. And the current Commander-in-Chief has made, after seven years, his first – first – trip to the Occupied Territories, and while there, in his usual, embarrassingly platitudinous double-speak, informed the Arab world there should be peace in Palestine. As if he’s just discovered it.

Thing must change across the pond, and the unprecedented turnout in the primaries and caucuses so far demonstrates how fierce that demand for change is. And the improbable candidacy of Senator Obama – with its refusal to “go negative”, with his soaring, preacher-like oratory, his warmth and his determination, his words infused with both moral anger with how things have gone so wrong and real optimism at how they can be put right – may be remembered by future historians as the first real sign of America’s renaissance. Once more a ‘City on a Hill’, as John Winthrop described America.

I’m as frustrated with the Bush Administration as anyone around the world. Each time I visit the States, I’m increasingly struck by the sense of fear drummed up by the news media, the perfidious advertising, the divisive rhetoric spewed forth by the elected officials – many of whom have a vested interest in the maintenance of this sense of national foreboding. A close friend lives and works in DC. “This country needs a big hug”, he’s probably said to me a dozen times, as we sit on his porch near Georgetown drinking a beer. It’s a little cheesy, a little corny perhaps – but I’ve never heard it put more accurately. America needs to feel good about itself again. The world needs America to feel good about itself again. From the Declaration of Independence to the Marshall Plan to the Apollo program, America has been a beacon to light the world. It’s just been so long since that were the case, and become a claim so cynically abused by the Bush administration, we’ve all overlooked that it can and should be true once more.

The more my friend has said it – that America just really needs a hug – the more I realise he’s not trying to convince me. Rather, he’s mumbling in quiet desperation for something to come along and allow the country to start this wretched century again. The installation by the judiciary of the puppet President and his cabal of reactionaries in a disputed election, 9/11, the disastrous and unaffordable tax cuts for the über-wealthy, the war in Iraq, the criminal mismanagement of Katrina: it all got the twenty-first century in America off to a beginning that the majority of its citizens feel has been a nightmare. The last time my friend said that sentence to me was over a year ago, when to most Americans Obama was just some word that sounded a lot like Osama. Things are very different now, and the Barack Obama juggernaut, with its message of hope and positivism and engagement – win or lose – will change America for the better. But especially so if he wins, and the world is waiting patiently.

Ho Chi Minhcemeat

Probing Evil

Perhaps the hardest part about writing while on the road is realising that, about some things, there’s nothing original to say. Not only have countless before you tried to pen elegant prose on the very same subject, and not only will others follow after, but they’ll observe and write the very same things, the same impressions. Some experiences are so powerful, some glimpses back into history so clear that the feelings they elicit can seldom be parsed by words.

It’s not true of everything, naturally. One person will see in architecture one thing; and she’ll draw impressions from the people she meets that may be in stark contrast to what another concludes. If that weren’t true, what would be the point in travel at all? Wouldn’t we all just read someone else’s book while getting brown on a coconut-strewn beach?

Occasionally, though, you’re stuck. You see something you came a long way to see, and your impressions are so predictably orthodox you wonder if there’s anything to do but just to snap away some photographs and tick it off your list of things to do before you die. Any effort to describe the experience to those who didn’t share it is pointless. Because it’s the experience itself, the sight and smell and sound and taste, which transcends what mere words can express. Background, context and descriptive prose cannot, I’m saying, describe S-21 in Phnom Penh.

S-21 is also known as Tuol Sleng. It’s where the Democratic Kampuchea regime – known to everyone outside as the Khmer Rouge – set up a prison to detain individuals accused of, well, pretty much anything. They could’ve used a hospital or a military barracks or a food market for this purpose. And in a parallel world, visiting such a place would still be a bitterly upsetting and frightening experience. But the Khmer Rouge – in an acted of calculated malice – used a high school previously called Ponhea Yat to torture and execute anyone who could pose any threat to the regime, and its pursuit of ultra-communist, agrarian collectivisation.

There’s something almost wantonly cruel about using a high school. I suppose they had other reasons besides its almost poetic nastiness: the convenient location, the many small classrooms on different floors well suited for separating people from their families. But visiting this place, you’re struck, floored, dumbfounded, heartbroken by the juxtaposition of innocence and evil, of warmth and coldness, of the rampant destruction of what is good and its replacement with all that is bad.

S-21 is located in south Phnom Penh, and covers an area 600 by 400 metres. During the late-70s regime, it was enclosed by two folds of corrugated iron sheets, all covered with electrocuted barbed wire. The houses around the four school buildings were used as administration, interrogation and torture offices. All the classrooms were converted to prison cells. All the windows had bars. The ground floor classrooms were divided into individual cells of 80 by 200cm – roughly the size of a small single bed or a large beach towel. The most miserable part of visiting, though, is when you walk in the front gate. You’re walking into any high school in the world. It’s a place where kids ought to have been running around the playground, screaming and giggling, learning, flirting, reading and playing music. Superimposing pitch-black brutality onto a place of youth and optimism seems like a bad dream from which you can’t wake.

At first, interrogations were conducted in the houses surrounding the prison. But the interrogators seemed unable to help themselves from raping all the women and children they were interrogating, so in 1978, the chief of S-21, a former teacher himself, converted building B into an interrogation office for women and girls. Because the gang raping of 7-year old girls was an inefficient use of time and resources. This way, the interrogators would have more time for electrocuting them, burning them, drowning them and lashing them with electrical wire.

The number of workers – employees – totalled 1,721. These included 1,377 “general” workers, which in themselves included sub-units of male and female children aged ten to fifteen. These children were selected and trained by the Khmer Rouge to act as guards. Without going into unnecessary detail here, these children were exceptionally, wantonly cruel and violent to the prisoners.

Approximately 10,500 people were held at this high school. 2000 of these were young children, all tortured and killed, according to the various archives available now. I want to reproduce in full the regulations, (translated with world-class almost comic incompetence from the original Khmer) which were posted in each cell:

1. You must answer accordingly to my questions. Do not turn them away.
2. Do not try to hide the facts by making pretexts of this and that. You are strictly prohibited to protest me.
3. Do not be a fool for you are a [I love this] chap who dares to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Do not tell me either about your immoralities or the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing. Sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Do not make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
9. If you do not follow all of the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

I won’t bother going into the idiotic repetition and intellectual emptiness of these rules: they speak for themselves. But reading them, as I did while sitting in the corner of a dark classroom on the top floor, I pondered – as often before – the nature of evil. And how the various evils of history compare, how they sit together. If Time or Letterman did a Top Ten Evils in History, what would be on the list and why?

Evil is a concept that always used to sit uneasily with me. It’s not that I’m not horrified when I see it on a screen, read about it on a page, or stand on blood-stained earth where it has taken place. I feel the horror as much as anyone who approaches the concept with ease and confidence. It’s that, overwhelmingly, those who commit what we call evil acts don’t believe themselves or their acts to be evil. History’s dictators have always had a lofty objective which they were convinced was virtuous every bit as much as everyone else is convinced it was not. Mugabe, Amin, Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Kahn, Mussolini, Bush (let’s not go there right now), Kim Jong-Il, Mao, and of course that bloated toad Pol Pot: what they share is both the fanatical belief of the zealot and a self-assured faith in the maxim that the Ends justify the Means. Serial killers only seldom consider their actions evil; usually they are proud to be cleaning the earth of some disease – prostitutes, homosexuals, immoral women. The percentage of serial killers who are devoutly religious might surprised any neophyte. Often, they’re doing God’s work.

The fanatics kidnapping Iraqi men and their families and drilling their eyes out while raping their daughters in front of them believe it too. Whether it’s the reestablishment of a global caliphate or the eradication of a different sectarian group or the approval of a deity or ultimate executive power through which their noble ends can be achieved, they all, they all believe that the Ends justify the Means and that consequently the means are – far from being evil – in fact virtuous.

It’s the fact that they believe this so unblinkingly which always made me uneasy. To import John Rawls – in my opinion the greatest thinker of the past half-century – how much of our revulsion is conditioned by our upbringing, by context, by culturally-specific values and circumstances? Had I been born an impoverished and devout Sunni man in Tikrit and had sectarian nonsense and hatred pummelled into me every day while seeing those I loved suffer, would I be the one with the power drill and the knife, raping the Shia women? When the ‘Veil of Ignorance’ is allowed to fall over our eyes, can we say with certainty what our actions would be when everything we know and have experienced is taken away? What is left of a man when all that is gone?

This is cultural relativism, and I’m pretty sure every humanities class at every university in the developed world teaches it to some degree or another. In other words, you don’t need to condone repulsive actions, and you are permitted to feel revulsion, but you have to temper your disgust and moral outrage. You must filter it through the prism of context, and hold back on untrammelled judgment.

This left-leaning orthodoxy has always outraged the Right, and because the Right has always outraged me, I’ve found some sympathy with the orthodoxy. Or rather, I did until 2004. August 2004, to be specific – and perhaps you’ll remember something that captured the world’s attention at the time: Beslan.

There’s something about the 24-hour news media. It conveys horror in a way no textbook ever can. For a couple of days that month the world was glued to its screens, waiting, hoping, for resolution of the hostage crisis. Because it was children this time, not theatre-goers in Moscow, or bankers and fund managers in the Towers, or even commuters on the Madrid rail system. These parasites, vermin masquerading as humans, went with automatic weapons into a school full of children. And everything got worse and worse.

When it ended, after the trigger-happy Russian troops stormed in and the ensuing firefight was over, there were hundreds of bloodied and naked children carried limp by inconsolable, broken men. Fatigued commandos stained indelibly with misery. Four-foot corpses festering in the Caucasian summer sun. More than three hundred children were dead, all of whom must have been frightened stiff like we will never know, and suddenly, immediately, totally, I understood the face of evil. It really shouldn’t have taken me so long, but it did.

What I’m saying is, I’d always struggled through the murky waters of tolerant relativism, grabbing in vain at the very existence of evil but it was a flapping fish that kept slipping away. But now I’m unshackled, and can look at a place like S-21, and allow the hatred to course freely through my veins. It’s cleansing, somehow.

Anyway, I was sitting there in the corner of the classroom, heartbroken at the awfulness of it all – something which can never be expressed in words even though everyone’s impression who visits there will be exactly the same – and I thought about the comparative nature of evil. Mugabe’s pernicious avarice and heartless disregard for his people will be remembered, but he’s not in the top tier. Hitler is usually invoked as the archetype of modern evil, for reasons that are probably self-evident to everyone. Stalin was ruthless – and killed perhaps more people than anyone in history – but he wasn’t genocidal per se. Mao maybe caused the death of even more than Stalin, and I think it’s unarguable that he caused the most misery, if such things are quantifiable. But even Red China recognised that in a collectivised agrarian society, you still need something approximating a pyramidal social structure. You still need the teachers and doctors and engineers and – some – intellectuals. As objectionable as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were, they made some, very limited sense on paper. You can understand at least what Mao was trying to do. I hope that statement is not too much of a stretch.

But Brother One and his Khmer Rouge: I think there’s a perfectly good case to be made that Cambodia 1975-79 represents humanity’s worst ever time and place. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing at all which is intellectually defensible about what this zealot group of murderers, torturers and rapists sought to accomplish. My heart aches for this crippled and tortured country. Perhaps two million people out of a population of seven million were killed because of the regime. Which is not only, in percentage terms, a loss of life probably unprecedented; but the people they killed – not that any lives are worth more than others – but the people they killed were the very people the country would have to rely upon to get back onto its feet. The thinkers, the professionals: those who would be needed to counsel the millions of traumatised orphan children, to rebuild an economy, to teach the skills and to take down history for posterity. A whole generation of the best and brightest was lost, and everyone lost someone they loved. So, I think: c’mon down, a big round of applause please for the Khmer Rouge: in my opinion the worst group of people ever to walk this bloodstained planet; the most evil, execrable and indefensible thugs and rapists of them all. And friends, bearing in mind the competition, I think we can all agree – that is really saying something.

But back in that same week of August 2004, my own watershed in shedding the shackles of relativism, two other things happened. The first was that Hicham El Guerrouj collapsed after his Olympic 1500m gold medal win at Athens, having finally secured the sporting immortality that had eluded him for years. He fell to the ground beyond the finishing line, spent, and tears of relief streamed down his pumping cheeks. He sat on the track, propped up by one arm like a dropped doll, as eighty thousand roaring spectators savoured a balmy night in the birthplace of western civilisation. Two of the other runners came up to him, they dropped to their knees next to a good and gracious man who deserved the gold so much. They smiled and embraced him through the dizzy cloud of fatigue, and – ignoring their own disappointment - cupped his exhausted face in their hands, an image for the pantheon of what’s great about sport; of life’s wondrous capacity to dazzle in a joyous snapshot for all time. I don’t know how everyone else watching felt. I can only speak for me. But time stopped still for that moment and I was flooded with love and admiration for my species.

The second other thing which happened during that eventful week was the launch of the Cassini-Huygens probe to Saturn and Titan. Sending probes to the other bodies of the solar system is commonplace enough now that people rarely get too excited. But this one was really special. Because while the Cassini probe would spend years to come photographing Saturn, the Huygens probe would descend to the surface of Titan – the mysterious Saturnian moon which is continually blanketed with an organic atmospheric carbon sludge that no telescope can look beneath. Scientist have been fascinated by the mysteries of Titan for decades, because it resembles most closely what earth would’ve been like during the primordial soup. It’s a glimpse back to our very beginnings.

And so I watched, jaw-agape, the launch of this remarkable vessel. Giddy with enthusiasm, I was so impressed at the acceleration of progress which allows, within fifty years, evolution from a cylindrical Soviet beeping satellite in low earth orbit, to a vessel which can plunge into a strange land billions and billions of miles away and send back what it sees. Months later, it did so, and surpassed the expectations of all the waiting scientists. I remember hearing the whooshing audio track as it plunged through the frozen sky of Titan. I remember seeing the first photographs of the surface, lakes and coastlines and boulders and a horizon. After an hour, the probe died of cold – as it was expected to do – but that hour of life down there was worth the millions of man hours and the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in it. Even aside from the scientific value, millions of children around the world watched it on the Internet, as excited as I was, and some of them will have picked up a science book that very evening, planning to become explorers themselves when they grow up. And this is the only way we move forward.

If there’s one thing about people and about the world which strikes me more strongly and more often than anything else, it’s the cavernous gap, the desperate disconnect between our good and our evil. And although I now accept that unqualified evil exists, and it was given a human face in the administrators, guards and conceivers of S-21, and I loathe them more than I can loathe anything, I find myself flabbergasted at how one species – for most of the time so remarkably alike – can be at once so good and so bad. What can you say about a species that kills its children in the same week as exploring other worlds for their future? What can you say about a species that tortures and burns people alive for nothing more than having an education, in the very same country that once built the magnificent temples of Angkor? What can you possibly, possibly say?

Which brings me back to the start: there are some things which have to be experienced to be experienced. You need to sit in the courtyard of S-21 and hear the crying ghosts of murdered children so young they should’ve been playing together in the streets. You need to visit the Angkor temples to appreciate their majesty and the ingenuity behind their conception. You need to watch Hicham El Guerrouj get embraced by his competitors after winning gold. And you need to listen to the wind rushing past the plummeting Huygens probe as it descends to Titan (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEM85Q71Y3E_0.html). Because it’s every bit humanity’s soundtrack as the crying ghosts of Cambodian schoolchildren.