American Standard: A Brand of Sink and Toilet
We’ve argued for hours about the International Date Line – whether a person can lose a day of their life, have a 48 hour birthday, or watch the same sunrise in the same couple of hours and be experiencing two completely different days. We even talked about changing the mission of BikeMovement Asia to focus on awareness raising about the ‘social construction of calendar time.’ But that is not what this post is about. It’s about our concepts of Time, not necessarily calendar time either, but the Time that we, subconsciously, interact with every day.
I experienced the change of Time as I crossed the border into Vietnam. The Cambodian children have third and fourth eyes. Their ‘Hellos’ come out of nowhere – in the literal sense like when you’re driving or biking in the West and you suddenly realize and say out loud, ‘we are in the middle of nowhere.’ The Cambodian children’s ‘Hellos’ come from that place, from that time. We bicycle for fifteen kilometers, see no one and hear endless, exuberant salutations. But when we see them, it is another thing. Time again, but this time rushed. This time you don’t think about how all they do is climb trees or sit under their houses and wait all day for ‘barangs’ (Cambodia’s word for ‘gringo’) to cycle by, defying Time. When they run to meet you with limbs flailing in a Southeast Asian imitation of the ‘American’ wave ‘hello,’ you think that they might be in a hurry. And it’s certainly the first time that you’ve thought this. In either framework of time, though, still the center is America. There are still hundreds of people in Cambodia that will sprint hundreds of meters to get a closer look at white skin.
Across the border, things are the same. They are the same, but they are different. Here, in Southeast Asia, they have a popular saying that goes, “Same, same…but different.” No one seems to know for sure, but one suggestion is that it refers to the 90+ percent similarities between human beings while recognizing the differences that make us interesting. I think we tend to focus on the differences, and I like that this saying demands attention to the similarities. But talking about differences helps us to understand one another. Cambodians and Vietnamese are different. They live in Time differently. The Vietnamese have their own saying. It says they work hard to produce rice – they cultivate, take care of and harvest the grain. Cambodians will watch the rice and it goes on to say something similarly judgmental of the Laotian. The saying is obviously somewhat ignorantly nationalistic and I don’t necessarily want to reiterate it, but it helps me to talk about Time. It illustrates, quite succinctly that the Vietnamese are industrious people and think of themselves as such. Their country is in many ways more ‘developed,’ in the Western sense, and – resultantly? – Time is different here.
You still see people napping at midday and 2:30 still means somewhere around 2:30, but people have more stuff to do, more things to help them forget to remember to interact so completely with people. Some of it is nice. Street vendors don’t pester you as long. Services are almost categorically more efficient. It’s more comfortable for me, coming from the West where Time is even more respected/scarce/whatever. But some of it is less nice. And I ask myself if I’ll miss the human capacity to sit and talk for hours about nothing but one another’s lives, completely succumbing to simple curiosities. I wonder what hailing a taxi or rushing to catch a bus will feel like after stepping out onto the streets and having three to twelve moto, cyclo and tuk-tuk drivers almost begging to give me a ride. And all this isn’t necessarily missing in Vietnam. But it feels, to me, like it’s headed there.
Time, though, is only one avenue by which to access these realities. There is food and dress and traffic and religion and a million other politico-cultural realities that could help us talk about the sameness and difference. Time, though, is what I thought of when I was staring at the toilet this morning. This is not meant, by the way, to be some negative commentary on the globalization of Western frameworks. I don’t think where the West has gone, or where Vietnam is going is necessarily bad – it all feels very much like ‘life’ to me. (I heard from a Christian here that nothing comes into Vietnam without being changed, and my experience confirms that they will always retain their own flavor, in case that’s what we’re worried about.) This is an attempt, rather, at an unbiased commentary (oxymoron?), and maybe one on the globalization of Western frameworks. It is true – I guess it is worth saying – that I thought of writing something about Time and the West as I peed this morning, into a toilet labeled “American Standard.” I had never thought about it before. In the States that brand was just another brand to me. In Southeast Asia, though – and they are invariably in the nicest homes and nicer businesses – those words, “American Standard,” struck me hard.
Tim Showalter
7 May 2007
May 18th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
I resonate with the time thing, having lived in Botswana for 9 years. Relationships are more important than time. I waited for my help (a Motswana young adult) to arrive at a trade fair booth. When she came, 2 hours “late”, she said, well, an aunt and uncle stopped at her rondaavel just as she was leaving. Of course, she had to entertain them till they were ready to leave. Otherwise “they would have told my mum that I was disrespectful and I would have been in big trouble.” Keep the news coming, thanks, Addie’s grandma Chris
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:13 pm
mr. showalter,
can you explain to a nonchristian nonmenonite person like me exactly how bikemovement is a “movement” and not just a couple of idealistic rich kids forcing meaning into every situation (easy to do in a foreign culture), and how such a “movement” benefits your church at all? from what i can see this whole adventure of yours is simply a vehicle for your own vanity, a public relations stunt for your identity, an excuse to act like you are actually making a difference in the world when really you are doing nothing more and nothing less than taking a vacation. enough pretense: just call it “bike adventure with idealistic philosophizing.”
June 1st, 2007 at 11:22 am
Thank you for your honest critiques and good questions. There is a great deal of truth in what you say. At the same time, I’d like to think there is a little more to it than “bike adventure with idealistic philosophizing.” We are idealistic rich kids, and we are philosophizing, but I think we are trying to unearth and share meaning, as opposed to forcing it. And our goals perhaps do hum with a hint of idealism – but I don’t think this is an inherently negative mindset. I hope that a healthy dose of idealism can fuel our visions for community building, for the church in its fullest sense, for creating spaces for challenging conversation that moves us to a wholesome idealism. At the same time, we realize there our gaps in our idealism, and so we welcome criticism, we welcome our broader communities and peers to challenge us and hold us accountable.
To respond to your first comment, BikeMovementAsia is a “movement” in a number of ways. Because of our affiliation with and growth out of BikeMovement USA we are a movement in that we continue with this name, but also with many similar goals (although dropped into a new setting). We also have committed to a movement of funds, as we attempt to continue the fundraising goals of Mennonite World Conference’s AMIGOS. As our vision statement articulates, “…while BMUSA strove to engage open conversations regarding young adult visions and perspectives for the church as they visited Mennonite churches across the USA, BMA seeks to realize the potential for global Anabaptist community-building through open and engaged immersion in the lives of our sisters and brothers in Southeast Asia.” In this way, we hope that we are part of this broader movement called the global church, seeking to move into new and growing relationships, new and growing understandings, and this movement of conversation exploring who we are and why we find ourselves a part of this global Anabaptist community. And perhaps we are also a movement as we fit into a constantly evolving Anabaptist movement/history, who’s stream is always shifting with the times, with an evolving composition and context. (For more very relevant thoughts in this vein, check out the thread on “Stories and a Global Anabaptism.”)
And how does this benefit our church? Again, we can only hope that as people enter this conversation, this flowing movement (whether by cycling, by opening their homes and stories to us here in Southeast Asia, by offering funds to AMIGOS, by contributing thoughts and reflections on our website…), our experiences are shared in concentric ripples, distributing our learnings, fueling conversations with our questions, breathing new energy and food for thought into the church.
We also recognize the privileged place we are in and acknowledge that this sort of trip is possible for only a very few -hence our attempts to share our experience broadly, while also committing to wealth distribution. And we do not deny that we are also on vacation (I don’t think we ever tried to say otherwise), but do believe that there are more dynamics to this adventure than pure leisure.
This said, your challenges are important ones, and raise questions we need to keep in mind as we shape our vision for this trip, for other BikeMovements, for any sort of movement. Have I responded sufficiently to your questions? And how would others respond? How could we be doing this thing better? What is the value in what we are doing – for our sending communities, for the communities we are visiting, for the global Anabaptist community as a whole?