falling asleep to the sound of rain

there is something uniquely soothing about falling asleep to the sound of steady, deep, tropical rain. it's calming, reassuring, insistent. (and we can weave our unspoken wishes of what the rain insists into our dreams.) it was streaming dreamy rain for the last two nights in chiang mai. i was there for a conference of sorts – the mekong legal advocacy institute – a week-long gathering of environmental lawyers and activists from the mekong region to exchange ideas, share stories and consider strategies for environmental justice along the mekong and in our countries. participants came from thailand, cambodia, laos, vietnam, china, burma, and the Philippines, with a few aussies, americans and brits thrown in. the foreigners were mostly expats who had already waded into the river of expat life working on these issues and their presence was simply part of being swept along with that particular current. i suppose that is true for me as well.

but the carefully ordered chaos of life in beijing bears little resemblance to the teeming merry trot of life in southeast asia, or at least in chiang mai. i realized as i arrived, happily bouncing along the roads of sunny chiang mai chatting to my driver and watching the motorbikes whiz about in the warm mud, that i had not been to the region for many years. i had forgotten the warmth, the complexity, the grace. so it was nice to spend a few days succumbing to the embrace of this region’s beauty while immersed deep in its tragedy.

although our little collection of committed individuals was hopeful, i would describe the environmental degradation in the region (and indeed the world) as nothing less than a tragedy. i’m still green in the environmental game. i arrived on this chequerboard by way of human rights. concerning myself with how humans mistreat each other, i was less focused on how we are trashing the planet. and i wasn’t particularly focused on the connection, except in scattered, illuminated moments (a class here, some volunteer work there, an article or three along the way).

the participants in our program included a filipino judge / lawyer who has become a warrior for the environment. tony oposa thinks of god as his client and reminded us that even when were are fighting for environmental justice, advocating for the rights of poor communities to healthy and safe drinking water, we must not forget nature, remembering we must also speak for the fishes. tony has a contagious energy and raw, unruly passion for his work and for living each moment. but living it simply. he is a man who can speak of how none of us really need much, and admonish us all to live simple lives, and in the next breath insist that we all sing karaoke with him that night, and convince me to dance the chacha with him. his message of simplicity, and similar sentiments from others, were important connecting points for all of us. all of the nations represented are caught up in fantastic and constricting forces of consumerism and nationalism. so it was inspiring to collectively acknowledge those binds and loosen them, if only for a few days.

my first night did indeed involve dancing the chacha with the world’s most charming filipino environmental crusader as the rest of the group looked on. we also learned a cambodian line dance whose name one-two-three-kicked itself right out of my head. we were taught by a charming and precocious young cambodian lawyer named piseth who looks about 16, is ready to risk his life for land rights in his country. we were an interesting collection of dancers – a lawyer and member of parliament the burmese government-in-exile was deliberate in each step, a brooding journalist from laos with tattooed hands and striking glasses sat back and watched with his arms crossed, a gorgeous vietnamese environmentalist currently working on a phd in paris who danced with abandon, just as she peppered each speaker with spicy questions during our meetings, an australian attorney working to promote public interest law in phnom penh good-naturedly tripped all over himself. that first night there was no rain, but no matter. its song would have been drowned by the karaoke machine.

my last night was spent drinking the local leo beer with a crew of these new comrades. i attended the conference to give a presentation on china’s environmental courts, mainly because a colleague didn’t want to travel. i couldn’t help but think, as i laughed over our leos, how fortunate i am to being doing this work. i only wish i could do more. that we all could do more. there is a follow up meeting in january to continue to build regional momentum. it would make more sense for my colleague – who is a chinese attorney and actually from the region – to attend, but i selfishly would love to reconnect with this group. we will see.

there is a lot of time for rainfall between now and then. for now, i am off to hong kong to spend some time with little trouble and live in the moment.

lychees and liberty

it's lychee season. which means i am attempting to write and eat lychees at the same time and dripping sweet lychee love all over the keyboard. (i secretly resent people who are disciplined enough not to eat at the computer.) this week in china has been bittersweet. yesterday was the one year anniversary of the sichuan earthquake, china's largest national disaster in decades. more than the earth opened then, as private citizens, the government, the army, corporations, and civil society all rushed to do what they could. there was such an outpouring of emotion. and for a moment it seemed as though all of these sometimes disparate entities were united in an authentic, albeit tragic, way. the spirit of volunteerism that gripped the nation in the days after 5.12 (as it's called in chinese) is something that NGO leaders and government officials still mention (in addition to mentioning, of course, the spirit of volunteerism surrounding the olympics). wen jiabao himself flew to the scene. everyone was equally shaken by the sheer sadness of it all.

but the equality didn't last for long. according to government estimates, more than 5,300 children died in the earthquake as schools collapsed. as suspicion arose about the high student death toll being the result of substandard school construction, the government began to try to suppress the opening created by the earthquake. this is all over the press, so i hardly need to reheat what you read for breakfast. it is disheartening that so many of the parents, lawyers, activists, journalists, and artists that have tried to ascertain the truth about the conditions in the collapsed schools have been harassed or detained.

yet i wonder whether the government will eventually no longer be able to rely on these tactics, whether one day detention won't do. among the many reasons i feel privileged to do the work that i do, the sheer resilience of china's civil society never ceases to amaze me. for a country that is so committed to suppressing it, civil society here continues to flourish. (and yes, there are openings and space for public participation, we operate in that space and work to expand those openings. but overall, this can be a challenging place to speak truth to power. or advocate. or organize. or even to hold a meeting about law firm pro bono.) this resilience amazes me all the more because of the uncertainty of it all. there's something so precarious about everything right now. perhaps especially now. this is a year full of sensitive anniversaries in china - the tibetan uprising, tiananmen, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the people's republic. as a result, there is a certain tightness. it's as if each of the limited open spaces for civil society engagement could suddenly collapse like those primary schools in sichuan at any moment. i was talking with a colleague the other day about some of the incredibly brave individuals who continually take on the government. and how baffling it is that some people can just seem to get away with real criticism. we questioned whether there was some safety in being high profile, whether that allowed certain people to get away with more. i wondered whether some people just cannot not push. whether such people wouldn't describe what they do as brave or foolish, or even think of it in terms of an adjective, but whether pushing is just who they are. she pointed out that anyone, regardless of who or how or why, can get away with it until one day they can't. of course no one knows when that day will come. if it will. some people suggest that political reform in china will naturally follow economic openness. i am not so sure. what i am sure of is that the will of a people, once stirred, is hard to contain.

similarly and less seriously, lychee juice, once transferred from fingers to keyboard, quickly becomes sticky. at least it smells good.