Circuits of Conversion: From 14,000 to 1
Naeem Inayatullah
Ithaca College
naeem@ithaca.edu
1.
Money, like economics, produces considerable anxiety for most of us. To address it I need to speak about price and value—two concepts I have been struggling to understand most of my life. Further, I cannot seem to speak about any of these terms without working my way through another notoriously difficult concept, namely gravity. Allow me to start with gravity.
Mersing, as I remember it from my visit in late 1979, was a small and picturesque fishing village northeast of Singapore and Johor Baharu, Malaysia. Nan Bonfils and I were there at the invitation of Jim Baker, son to generations of missionaries working in Malaysia and Indonesia. Jim thrived on all things Malay and lived so that each of his actions would respect and cultivate aspects of local culture. He was a kind of an anti-missionary trying to undo the damage done by his relatives. Nan and Jim were teachers at the International School of Kuala Lumpur. I fell in with them as a regular substitute teacher while searching for employment after having earned a Masters in economics. Our destination was a forty-five-minute boat ride east of Mersing towards one of the smaller islands where Jim’s family owned a house.
When our chartered fishing boat arrived on Babi Hijong we could still not see the four houses on the island. But as the sand absorbed our feet and as we unloaded food supplies, Nan and I beamed mirrored grins. We had somehow dropped into a dream – a tropical island in the South China Sea, complete with swaying trees, a lush green interior, a double coral reef—all provided by a gracious and trustworthy guide. We three were the only inhabitants on the island—left there without the distractions of electricity, plumbing, radios or phones.
In the morning, I thought I heard the echoes of a megaphone. Could I hear noise from the mainland so many miles out, I asked. Jim pointed to the next island. It was within swimming distance. He explained that his family house had originally been located on the bigger island but they had been forced to relocate after the arrival of more than nine thousand ‘Vietnamese boat people’ – ethnic Chinese fleeing Vietnam who the Malaysian government refused to allow on the mainland. The government feared that these additional Chinese might trigger violence within the already volatile cultural political economy of the peninsula. The megaphone I heard was part of a UN relief effort.
As I listened I pondered the juxtaposition: they, 9,000 boat people on that island quarantined, waiting urgently and anxiously to hear of their re-location to somewhere on the planet; we three on this island, lying on the beach, cleansing ourselves of everyday toxins. Heaven and hell always appear together.
Gravity. I am still coming to that. Ideas, like the wind in my hair, flowed through my mind as I sat on the beach each day. I felt grounded as I observed each sunrise and sunset, witnessed the moon rise and set. Surrounded by the sea and its tides, I effortlessly ignored our neighboring island. As the sun set to the west over Mersing, I saw the moon’s light change from the distant flatness it offers during the day to that golden three dimensionality it reflects at twilight. Then it occurred to me: the moon is, in fact, reflecting the light of the sun. I could trace the vectors of light with my fingers: the sun sending light in all directions, that light bouncing off the surface of the moon, and coming down to my eyes on the beach. For the first time I saw the moon as a three-dimensional object, as something floating in space. There was more. An object that large – just hanging there – had to affect the tides as it moved in its orbit. I saw that; felt and sensed it. I was euphoric because I had intuited the effects of gravity.
Recently, twenty-six years later, I resumed that reflection on the big island of Hawai’i. I had seen the oozing lava, the newly created black sand beaches where two-foot waves battered me. And there again were the sun, the moon, the tides and gravity. I still don’t know the exact details of this system of interrelations, but I think I know something more than I did a quarter century ago. That more is this: concrete expressions vivify abstractions; the seemingly random material of actual experience emerges as already moving within a systematic dynamic whole. Transcendence and imminence work through each other -- they differ in name and function, but both work seamlessly as one.
Meaning what exactly? And why mention it? Because, if the concepts that we use to explain the world are productive of understanding, then those concepts cannot be altogether separate from the existent processes they help to elucidate. The concepts and the processes are two aspects of one reality.
I don’t know how to express the significance of this claim. I wish I could say it simply and forcefully. Maybe I can give you a better sense of it if I shift from tides, waves and gravity to money, value and price.
2.
My recent trip to Pakistan was not without some small element of success – with a book coming out, tenure around the bend at a liberal arts college, and some long-term financial hope of supporting my immediate family of four. This trip differed from my home visits as a child, teenager, and young adult. Then it was my parents’ money that paid for everything – the trips themselves, my clothes, and the large number of gifts I always purchased. One thing that had not changed was the need to translate dollars into rupees. This always requires a similar set of operations, namely, conversions and calculations. Conversion from dollars to rupees, from the 1 to 5 in the 1960s to the current 1 to 60; and calculations that translate dollars into gifts for my friends—kurtas, brass lamps, pillow cases, artisanal ware—things I hoped would allow my friends to believe that elsewhere, further than the dark side of the moon, life was also being lived. My college roommate Ted once teased, ‘How do we know you have a family in Pakistan? Or, that you have ever been there? For all we know you could be a CIA plant!’ Pakistanis, on the other hand, had few doubts about America’s existence. Just questions about how much of it I had brought back to them: ‘Can you do the twist? What kinds of cars have you ridden? Did you bring the latest Beatles album?’
Returning to Pakistan with a US job triggers two questions—inescapable and mandatory: ‘What work do you do?’ And, ‘how much money do you make?’ Except some family and a masseur from China, no one seems impressed that I am a paid ‘scholar’. In any case, the query about occupation is merely the opening to the real line of inquiry. My first decision – I have not yet settled on a formula – is whether or not I will offer some vague and diffuse answer about my salary. Declining this question provides insult and merely delays the matter. Giving offense is no small consideration since the primary mode of social relation is familial – acquaintanceship assumes friendship, friendship implies family; family is embedded in obligation, responsibility, and (seeming) open access. Hence, shortly after names have been exchanged, one can expect questions about land, size of home, salary, and connections to the wealthy and powerful. Vagueness in response is permissible; annoyance is not.
Feeling that I can no longer participate in the veiling of material life, I sometimes give a number – especially when I am deep in the heart of the Punjab’s agrarian terrain where my romantic link with the land has me at ease and unguarded. Except for one instance that I will relate shortly, the conversations have a set pattern. I give the number, say US$30,000 (back in the days when Assistant Professors in the social sciences started at less than 30 thousand). Converted by a factor of 30, 50, or 60 depending on the year, the sum in Rupees is a fortune. At that moment many things happen simultaneously. First, my co-conversationalist begins to imagine what he (always a he – I have never had this conversation with a woman) could do with such a sum and what I must be doing with it. I have learned to wait as this fantasy takes flight. My silence and stoic posture brings him back to the moment. I wait for the next two comments: ‘Mahshalla (thanks be to God) you are a wealthy man.’ I suspect that it is important to share in this vicarious pride—I want him to feel this success because it is also his; he and I look the same, have emerged from the same land. And then it comes.
Whether this is a moment of illusion or transparency, I leave to you: ‘How fortunate you are to live in America.’ This conversion of value I cannot accept without generating a counter circulation.
I begin my response with the hidden balance of the other side of the ledger: translated into Rupees the dollar cost of living—rent and food—is equally unfathomable. In my accounting I make it nearly impossible to make ends meet on 30K. I start to lay down the trump cards—how most everyone in the US lives on credit. And then, finally, quality of life: food tastes better here, I say; there is more vibrancy, more life here, I say; there is more vitality here, I say. The loneliness of an atomized and alienated life is as pervasive there, I try to explain, as color, smell, texture and family are overpowering here.
Quiet for a moment, I know I have not prevailed. The rebuttal: he cites cases of people gone abroad who bring back savings and live in luxury. My turn: but these are the rare cases that have saved money day to day by living as paupers abroad. By sheer luck and determination these few have overcome what most of the others have not, namely loneliness and its symptoms—gambling, booze, drugs, prostitution, television, religion, consumerism, and cultural paralysis. What they earn by alienating their labor only feeds that alienation. But he also has a trump card. He surveys my face and declares, ‘but you seem just fine.’ He does not say this with words but with his bodily dismissal of my failed attempt to puncture his hopes.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this frequent exchange is that it takes place, as economists say, behind both our backs. I do not know why I am trying to deflate his hopes and I suspect that he does not know why he looks towards gold mountains to realize his. There is something of waves, tides, and the moon in all this that I am trying to grasp.
I remember the day when I became aware of my role in this sub-conscious pantomime. It was after a half-day drive from megalopolis of Lahore, beyond my mother’s bustling village, in the flat green plains of Punjab. I arrived in a village of no more than ten to twelve homes. In the ensuing clear winter morning I had the usual conversation with one of the villagers about salary—but there was a twist. My trump card was followed by a detailed logistical and monetary explanation of how to enter the USA ‘illegally’, how many years it would take to save money by driving a taxi, and where he was going to buy his house when he returned. He was modeling his plan after someone who had accomplished just this; someone who now lived in a fine brick house in a nearby town. This was a strategy, not a daydream. He wasn’t engaged in banter; he was looking to me as a potential contact on the inside.
In my wavering about whether to offer him my address and phone number, it occurred to me that I was playing the role I detest the most, that of the immigrant who, as last one in, is the first to shut the door. I knew that in the actual world, capital circulates with the currents while labor swims against them. Why, I asked myself, had I been working against his labor, his motion? In the future, I imagine being more supportive. Still I suspect I will hesitate to become an inside contact furthering his mobility since my fear of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is something my body cannot shake.
3.
As a nine-year-old in 1965 Bloomington Indiana, I delivered papers for a newly started daily. Sundays I made my rounds twice, first early in the morning for the fat weekly edition, and then later on for collection. Collection required a six-by-four-inch book with two rings containing pages of perforated tabs. On top of each page was the name and address of each customer and on the bottom were the tabs marked with weekly dates. I knocked on doors, and waited for the Indiana University graduate students to come to the door. Then I announced ‘collect’, and waited for the money. I carefully tore out the tabs giving one for each week paid. All the money went to the man who hired me. He would pay me the $15.00 or so dollars we—he, my parents, and I—had agreed. The problem was that in the first three weeks I received no wages. Not that I minded the absence since my direct relationship to money revolved around finding empty soda bottles to return to the IGA grocer on 10th street where I converted them to Tootsie-Rolls, Clark candy bars and the occasional bottle of grape Fanta. When eventually I was paid, I routinely gave it all to my mother. Fifteen dollars a week was a significant sum, given that our whole family lived on my father’s graduate student stipend. My paper route probably supplied most of my mother’s discretionary income.
I had the sense, though, that the man from the Tribune was exploiting me. Perhaps my collection money was all the discretionary income he had, I don’t know. I said nothing to my parents accepting that his betrayal somehow seeped into me as my shame. In the fourth week my silent endurance was rewarded with pay and then by my mother’s grateful smiles. In addition, I started to win prizes—or at least this is what the man from the Tribune said. He brought me a baseball glove, a rain jacket, and even a twenty-pound turkey. I am convinced that I didn’t win the competitions as the Tribune man claimed; he was paying interest on my inability to sound off on his original cheating. What saved the day was that I enjoyed the work and had no conception of the meaning of fifteen dollars a week. I was still looking for empty bottles near the railroad tracks.
My friend Paul, another college roommate, told me about his paper delivery business as an adolescent. In the suburbs of Detroit, he sub-let two routes to kids in his neighborhood. He collected not by knocking on doors but by mailing bills with stamped return envelopes. In fact, he never left his house. He claimed to be saving for hiking and scuba equipment, but I think his deeper motivation was the magic of making money appear. Appear and multiply.
4.
The most sophisticated beggars in Pakistan are those who come to your house. If the gate is open, they will sit down so that driving a car out of the driveway is possible only with attentive navigation. After the obligatory opening round—the asking and receiving of water, and perhaps some food—the burka-clad woman will announce that she is not leaving until someone in the house gives her enough money to feed her three little children. One of them might be in her lap. The pressure falls on my mother who as the everyday accountant for the household has to make the decision. Her empathy for the poor has not diminished with age or with the rise in our family status. I recall the day she, our cook, and the woman who cleaned our toilets all sat and wept when the latter finally confronted my mother with the reality that our practice of throwing out three-day-old rice was a crime against her needs.
But with a professional beggar the context is more strategic. This beggar knows that playing to heartstrings, while an absolutely necessary part of the drama, is insufficient. Hence the strategic deployment of her body in the driveway. The test of nerve and patience will last hours because no one in the house will dare to physically remove her—not even the police. From my mother’s point of view, the monetary sum necessary to get rid of the beggar, a negotiation that will take at least a half hour, amounts to little. The real cost is information—paying her will mark our house as vulnerable and place it on the itinerary of the high-end high-risk beggars. If by chance guests are due to arrive, she will risk future annoyance for immediate results. Otherwise, this battle can take the better part of a day. At best the beggar will leave after three or four hours but not without forcing hearts to weaken and harden against the structural and strategic imperatives of sustaining a life of differential wealth. I have watched such battles, unable to imagine a way through this impasse.
5.
I am waiting in the transit lounge for a midnight flight from Islamabad to JFK. Having run the gauntlet of forms, passports, luggage, droves of people, and my peaking anxiety that all this should go smoothly, I finally sit and exhale. With the flight still more than an hour away, I think about what I should do with the last 2,000 Rupees left in my wallet. The currency exchanger will not convert them to dollars in New York—this I know. Either I spend it in this lounge or they will become tokens along with all the other bills in the top drawer of my desk. To my excitement I discover that there is a small shop that sells CDs and DVDs. I wake up the young attendant, who is bemused that I am a collector of classical Pakistani music. I ask his advice about every recording in the shop. Forty-five minutes latter, with help from his tastes and knowledge, I select some CDs and pay him. He has been waiting for this moment. Handing back my change, he asks me what I will do with the remaining 400 Rupees.
He has guessed that they will end up out of circulation. I have no idea of his income, or how much of his wages are made up by offering to relieve travelers of their petty cash. I should just give him the bills, I think. Another part of me hesitates. Am I damaging the local economy by treating what is a significant amount here as if it were spare change? On the other hand, perhaps I am using this ethno-economistic rationale about the disruption of local economies in order to justify my deeper commitments to an economy of just desserts. Beyond asking me for money, did he do anything to deserve the Rupees? How did he get a job in a transit lounge anyway? Who did he have to bribe? Was the expectation of petty cash calculated as a part of his salary? Then, in the see-sawing, I think: oh come on, you spent your whole career fighting this attitude theoretically and practically—just let go of the bills and don’t worry about dessert since you have no real idea of how this money came to be in your hands in the first place.
All this transpires in my moment of indecision as he and I sustain eye contact— the only real moment of our encounter. I walk away without a word. On the plane, looking down at the Hindu Kush mountains below, I conclude that I am a fraud.
6.
Money measures value and price like an enormous vertical ruler on a dock measures gravity and the motion of water.
Price and value engage in a necessary tension. Price concretely expresses and actualizes the abstraction value. Properly deciphered, price indicates a particular commodity’s role and place in the dynamic flux of a system of commodities—a system whose drive and teleological mission is to generate profit. It is not as simple as a high price generating more profit and a low price generating little since we know that an airplane carrying 800 passengers might be a future bust and that cotton socks sold in great volume by K-Mart may generate adequate revenue. The complexity of value cannot be grasped from a cursory reading of price. Rather, value is the abstraction that points towards the fuller articulation of the laws and processes of global capitalism. Value is the anticipation of a commodity’s relation to all other commodities, to the structured and changing needs of global beings, to the commodity’s eventual ability to serve the purpose for which it was made—profit-creation. Value is that anticipation, that process, and its realization.
Value is to price as gravity is to the movement of natural objects. To measure the movement of objects we use various types of rulers. Tidal movement is measured in inches and feet, centimeters and meters of displaced ocean water. Displaced water indicates, expresses, actualizes, concretizes, and operationalizes the abstraction—gravity. We have three separable elements: the abstraction, gravity; its expression, motion; and that which measure them both, rulers. Likewise with capitalism: we have the abstraction, value; its expression, price; and their measure, money.
Money measures price and value.
If we humans use our self-consciousness and creative energy in order to learn nature’s laws and then manipulate them for our own needs, it may also be the case, that from another angle, nature develops the human species so that nature can actualize itself as a self-conscious entity. As for nature so for capitalism: If from one angle we humans generate a social system propelled by profit for the purposes of creating wealth, from another angle, wealth, for the purposes of expanding its self-generation, uses, perhaps even consumes, humans. From this admittedly objectified angle, wealth’s productive consumption of humans—which does not necessarily mean their death but merely their post-consumption recycling for the next round of consumption and profit (think of the recycling of soda bottles)—suggests that, as productive inputs in a system of wealth generation, different humans have different values and prices.
To venture into the realm of the value and price of human beings is to enter a foundational debate in political economy. Are humans only slightly different from anything else made for use and therefore commidifiable? Or, is it a category mistake to think of humans as quasi-commodities—a mistake made and hidden in order to thrust humans into a commodity system and make them into a kind of object-beings? Or, on the third hand, can we temporarily tolerate this human-object tension in the ontologizing of our species for the promise of greater future good, namely wealth? Today, such questions—part of the core of what political economy once was—are largely suppressed. I mention this suppression here not as a critique but as an unadorned claim about the difficulty/impossibility of facing the real.
And yet, we may argue that the need to avoid the real depends on its pervasive mundane presence. Consider the following bits reported in various newspapers.
Janelle Brown reporting for Salon.com in a January 2, 2002 article titled, ‘The Impossible Calculus of Loss’ asks:
‘Is the life of an investment banker who died in the World Trade Center worth US$1.65 million in taxpayer money? What about US$3 million? Is the life of a firefighter worth more than that of a janitor he tried to save? How about the life of a woman who died in the Oklahoma City bombing?’
Ascertaining the relative worth of these roles, instead of being a hypothetical exercise in a typical philosophy course, is saturated with immediacy because someone will have to make a decision about how to distribute the windfall designated for the victims of 9/11. What Janelle Brown does not notice is that against her will and against the current of dominant ideology, this news is forcing her to assess the price and value of types of human lives. Here are the numbers as she reports them: the federal payout alone—that is, not including the sums accumulated by charities and private donations which would double the federal payout—amounts to an average of $1.65 million for ‘each injured or dead victim’. The exact formula for determining how much each victim is worth is particularized, therefore complex. The determining formula creates what David Barstow and Diana B. Henriques, in their December 2, 2001 New York Times article titled, ‘Gifts for Rescuers Divide Terror Victims’ Families’, call ‘an aristocracy of grief’. Whether this ‘aristocracy of grief’ is better articulated as a ‘hierarchy of value’ is to quibble somewhat. It is also to miss the larger point, namely, that their article expresses precise assessments of value, price, and money. It reports, that is, on the calculation of the relative worth of lives ended or damaged on 9/11/2001 in NYC.
The average value of firefighters, policemen, janitors, stockbrokers, CIA agents, and heads of CEOs lead to their average price—somewhere upwards of $1.65 million. A part of us objects to this number, feeling that humans cannot be commodified. We want to declare that not that sum, not a thousand times that sum, can state the value of those we love. And yet despite such remonstration, the number 1.65 million does tell us something, doesn’t it?
At the end of her article Janelle Brown quotes the philosopher Peter Singer,
‘What concerns me the most is the discrepancy in the way people respond to appeals to give to Americans [versus] the way they respond to give to people in need elsewhere in the world…[t]his is a particularly glaring case of it, because of all the publicity. It may seem hard to say this, but the number of people worldwide who die from avoidable causes on Sept. 11 were vastly greater than the number of people who died from the attacks…Americans can be generous, but their response is narrow.’
Brown’s use of Singer’s claim, while seemingly plain as daylight, hides a bit of significant reality behind its Kantian moralism. This bit of reality, for those of us who have sensed it but never quite believed in our ability to locate it, provides a peculiar but real satisfaction. Consider, please, the following story form the on-line edition of a Pakistani paper, The News, issued on July 8, 2002:
Dehrawad, Afghanistan: The victims of a US air-raid that killed 48 guests and wounded 118 at a wedding party in Afghanistan were paid a total of US$18,500 in compensation [by the US], an official here said…District commissioner Abdur Rahim said he paid out to relatives eight million Afghanis (US$200) on behalf of each individual killed and three million (US$75) for each wounded person.
At 40,000 Afghanis2 to a dollar, this amounts to 66 billion Afghanis per victim of the WTC attack. Or, if we prefer the conversion into what is known as ‘hard currency’: $1,650,000 dollars for each victim of WTC versus $112 for each victim of the wedding bombing.
Perhaps ratios rather than raw numbers are more illuminating: dividing 1.65 million by 112 we arrive at 14,732. The last is the number by which we have to multiply the value/price of an Afghan victim in Afghanistan to arrive at the value/price of a victim of the WTC. Rounding down instead of up—although we should round up since the $1.65 million is only the federal allotment to the victims of WTC—we can arrive at the following proposition: the worth of a WTC victim is 14,000 times greater than that of an Afghan. Fourteen-thousand.
First a few details before we get down to what this means, if it means anything:
1. The ratio of 14,000 to 1 is more likely to be doubled, given that charitable and private contributions were also in the billions of dollars.
2. Strictly speaking not every victim of the WTC was a US citizen; therefore, we cannot claim that the worth of US citizen is 14 to 28 thousand times greater than that of an Afghan, not without more precision and many more calculations.
3. Still, these numbers, if not exact, give us an impressionistic sense of how these monetary calculations indicate relative value and price.
Then again perhaps these numbers and ratios mean nothing. I embrace this conclusion since I am moved by Karl Polanyi’s claim that we cannot commodify humans without violating them. Nevertheless, let’s play this out on the terms of the dominant political economy and see what happens. First, 14 thousand seems arbitrary and nonsensical since the issue seems qualitative, not quantitative. If we listen to our heart of hearts we sense that the exact numbers don’t really matter. Indeed, it is precisely the deep qualitative discrepancy in relative human value that allows a cataclysmic uproar for those killed on 9/11. This event, if seen say from the point of view of a typical Guatemalan, a Vietnamese, an Iraqi, or the average inhabitant of this planet, remains a relatively minor tragedy.3 Meanwhile, the same discrepancy in value anesthetizes our outrage and short circuits our empathy, binding us to the cold mathematics that make the wedding bombings as well as near genocides visited upon others elsewhere a mundane feature of doing ‘business as usual’ in the modern world.
Second, and more important, the displacement of water caused by the tides, caused by the moon, caused by the system of planetary motion, is there for all to observe and measure. So also for the displacement of human value—all of us bear witness to it. Indeed, we can measure it. Measuring this displacement is an act that need not spring from a moral motive; rather, in doing so I am performing the scientific part of my education. It’s a training that asks me not to be awed by the sheer power of natural or social systems; at the very least I am hoping to dampen their sensational effects on my focus. The effects of the tides, the effects of the relative social worth of New Yorkers and Afghans are here, there, and everywhere—ever present in their monotonous banality. I am just trying to measure them.
Perhaps I am being a poor scientist—please feel free to offer your assessment. Perhaps your critique will point to my errors and sharpen my analysis. Nevertheless, until then, and with your permission, I want to share what I can deduce so far. Here are four abstractions:
1. A global social system based on the growth of wealth through private profit-seeking and based on the division of the world into a set of nations treated as states, is likely to evaluate the people of these nations on the basis of their relative usefulness in generating profit.
2. Such evaluations do not remain within their nation-state containers. Instead, they are likely to seep into assessments not only of peoples’ profit-generating potential, that is, how they might be deployed or consumed in this or that social regime, but also as an assessment of their very being.
3. Those who want to increase (or in some rare cases, decrease) their self-worth will attempt to move across national boundaries—boundaries that, among other things, indicate and mark relative value.
4. Such assessments of relative worth are expressed in existent reality.
If so, these expressions can be gleaned and measured. They can be observed in the stories I have been telling about money. And perhaps in other stories you might share.
Without knowing it, we monetize ourselves—making ourselves into a measure of value, seeking to circulate ourselves into a different displacement of worth, and blocking those who seek to flow upstream (and sometimes downstream). Supporting the status quo in this way seems normal because challenging this normality requires having intuited and opposed the rules and flows of the current social system.
Encounters with money, of the type I have related, appear to be stutters, hesitations, glitches in our ethical self-consciousness when we have not yet worked out whether our particular acts work to valorize or work to counter ratios such as 14 thousand to 1.
7.
My friend Nan left Colorado for Africa one winter. Buried under ten feet of snow in Fairplay’s library and powerless against the 10,000-foot-high Colorado winds, winter finally pushed Nan to the warmth of her deeper desire. She answered an ad for a grade-school teacher. Following a transatlantic agreement over the phone, and having spent her own money for the flight, she arrived in Kinshasa. She had never left the country and knew little more about Zaire other than it would be hot, lush, and more attuned to what she hoped to become. Ten years later, in Kuala Lumpur, where we met, she was a veteran of the international school circuit, a circuit through which teachers tour the world by changing schools every two or three years.
After a few notches in her tour, Nan had settled on the International School of Kuala Lumpur where she was a ‘foreign hire’. The designation does not come with merely being a foreigner since there were plenty of those on ‘local’ contracts. It meant that she would be paid in US dollars, would receive a housing allowance, and would be supplied with a roundtrip ticket to the US every two years. Local hires in contrast were paid in Malaysian Ringgits with no additional benefits. In 1980, her hard currency pay was $20K. She was able to place all of her income in savings because she used her housing allowance to pay rent, food, and her other bills. Relative to American/European standards she rented a small track bungalow with two bedrooms, living room, kitchen and a front yard the size of half a badminton court. Middle-class Malaysians who lived four and six in the same sized units surrounded her. She loved her neighborhood and rode her bicycle for transport.
By spending her non-working hours in the local economy while being remunerated at the level of an ex-patriot, Nan was quickly able to build up her savings. Indeed, diversifying her portfolio so that it included, for example, stocks and gems, became one of her minor worries. On the whole, however, the accumulation of wealth was a distant concern; Nan loved teaching, loved Malaysia’s flora, fauna, food, and loved most of all being enfolded within its people—Malays, Chinese, Indians. They massaged the stiffness and soothed the aches caused by her slightly aristocratic New England upbringing and by the chill of Rocky Mountain winters.
Of course, Nan’s strategy of going native came with a diminution of status—nothing could be done about this displacement. This change failed to curtail Nan since her value polarities were inverted—she needed Malaysia much more than the US. In any case, the dollar community did not reject her outright since she had their children for the better part of each week. In addition, Nan’s grounded gregariousness, subtle humor, and vital and sincere social grace give her equal access to ex-pats and locals. But best of all for Nan was that there was a small group of ISKL teachers who, like her, were converting to locality. Of these, Terry was a Peace Corps volunteer who had become a grade-school teacher.
Terry was harder for me to engage or understand. We shared a quiet understanding that we were moving in opposite directions. For reasons that I did not have the opportunity to explore, he had a need to eradicate all traces of his American past. His going native went as far, perhaps, as one could go: a conversion to Islam, circulating exclusively in his off-hours with Malays, dressing in local fashion at every occasion, a natural change in his accent to the tonalities, rhythms, and textures of Malaysian English, and dreaming not in English but in Malay. Indeed, it was my understanding that he had forfeited his US passport in order to become a Malaysian citizen.
While Terry’s name did not usually come up in my conversations with Nan, his example often did. My conversations with Nan were far-ranging but always energized by the tensions created by the framework of cultural encounter. Her conversion to Islam played a part in my mother’s and our family’s open embrace of her. But mostly she was able to relax us with her willingness to enter our house and fully accept the pathologies of our family life as ordinary, without need for comment or adjustment. While sipping lime juice with soda and eating sate at some street side stall, my conversations with Nan often turned to the theme of conversion. I would ask her what she gained in Islam that she could not find in Catholicism. Having been the target of both Christian and Muslim evangelizing, I could not imagine formally committing to either institution. Her answer stays with me as a puzzle: ‘It’s a straighter shot to God’, she said. I am still pondering this linear image. Her question to me has also stayed. It had to do with Terry’s wager. She asked, ‘Do you think I should give up my passport and apply for Malaysian citizenship?’
8.
I never considered becoming Malaysian even though, much like Nan, I am enamored by Malaysia. I will confess, however, that I have harbored a conversionary impulse aimed at bringing out the Afghan in me. I continue to feel a great pull towards Afghanistan. This confession, having come to the surface through this writing, makes me wonder: If some desire circulates in one direction to make up the 14,000-to-1 deficit, and other desires circulate in the opposite direction, does this mean that there is also 14,000-to-1 ratio that works the other way? What do they have there that is 14 thousand times greater than what I can get here? How do I make up that deficit?
Bibliographic Note
The ‘circuits of conversion’ imagery comes directly from chapter 1, of Marx’s Capital. My understanding of the relationship between value, price and money is influenced by reading of Adam Smith’s and of Karl Marx’s analysis of the labor theory of value. That reading has been largely determined by David P. Levine’s Hegelian reading of Smith and Marx in following of books: Economic Studies: Contributions to the Critique of Political Economy, (Routledge Kegan and Paul, 1977) and Economic Theory: The Elementary Relations of Economic Life, Volume I, (Routledge Kegan and Paul, 1978).
My other main source is what we usually call ‘auto-biographical’. In academic circles autobiography is unfortunately and unselfconsciously thought to be self-indulgent. To counter this bias, I want to move away from this term and towards the idea that we can read lives and consider them as sources. Autobiography can be seen as a ‘primary self-source’ where biographies and interviews would be ‘secondary self-sources’. The retrospective and continuous reading of a person’s life—even one’s own—while different from reading a text is perhaps neither more nor less reliable a source. Reading a life, like reading a text, can range from being mechanical, simplistic and facile to being theorized, contextualized and insightful.
1. I am grateful to David Blaney, Nan Bonfils, Bererly DiCocco, Debbie Lisle, Lisa Loomis, Laura McNeal, Stefan Senders, and Allison Truitt. Each provided detailed comments and/or pointed to problems that remain difficult for me to solve in this space. The essay is dedicated to the memory of Terry.
2. It is a fortuitous accident for my purposes that Afghans are called Afghanis in the Western press, that is, the national identity is conflated with the national measure of value; like calling citizens of the US ‘dollars’—something local sources would never confuse.
What remains to me a hyperbolic response offered to the 9/11 massacre by most—but certainly not all—citizens of the USA, can I think be explained by two factors: an immediate, deeply enabling, but mostly novel openness to the possibility that, ‘there but for the grace of circumstance go I’, and the presence of video cameras. Imagine these two elements being equally available for say, the fire-bombing of Dresden, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the napalming of Vietnam. Or with faster camera speeds: the slave ships during the middle voyage, the late nineteenth century planned famines of British India, or, to stay within the political landscape of the USA, General Sherman’s march through the South. Deploying our imagination in this way may allow us to grasp the material smallness of the 9/11 massacre and the gargantuan proportions of current US self-aggrandizement. Here, finally, the number 14 thousand