Extremely rare 'ghostly' white stag spotted in Scotland

An extremely rare ‘ghostly’ white stag has been caught on camera in Scotland.

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Cities are turning to beet juice and beer to address the dangers of road salt

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Experts who fear road salt is starting to take a toll on the nation's waterways are turning to beet juice, molasses, and even beer or cheese waste to make them safer.

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10,000-year-old crayon discovery points to 'colorful' Mesolithic life

This is one crayon you're not likely to find in a Crayola box anytime soon.

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Here’s What It Was Like to Watch the State of the Union With the Resistance

President Trump’s Keeping Guantanamo on the Political Radar

Stormy Daniels Did Everything But Confirm an Affair With Donald Trump. Here’s What She Told Jimmy Kimmel

‘Tonight We Got Teleprompter Trump.’ Democrats Seethe After State of the Union

President Trump’s Big Speech Was Harsher Than It Sounded

Missed the State of the Union? Here’s a Recap

The DJ Convicted of Groping Taylor Swift Now Works at a Mississippi Radio Station

‘Out of Many, One.’ The Democrats Had 5 Very Different Rebuttals for Donald Trump’s State of the Union

Read Bernie Sanders’ Rebuttal to President Trump’s State of the Union Address

‘We Are Alive and Barely Conscious.’ Stephen Colbert Tackled Trump’s 2018 State of the Union Address Live

Here’s What It Was Like to Watch the State of the Union With the Resistance

President Trump’s Keeping Guantanamo on the Political Radar

Stormy Daniels Did Everything But Confirm an Affair With Donald Trump. Here’s What She Told Jimmy Kimmel

‘Tonight We Got Teleprompter Trump.’ Democrats Seethe After State of the Union

President Trump’s Big Speech Was Harsher Than It Sounded

Missed the State of the Union? Here’s a Recap

The DJ Convicted of Groping Taylor Swift Now Works at a Mississippi Radio Station

‘Out of Many, One.’ The Democrats Had 5 Very Different Rebuttals for Donald Trump’s State of the Union

Read Bernie Sanders’ Rebuttal to President Trump’s State of the Union Address

‘We Are Alive and Barely Conscious.’ Stephen Colbert Tackled Trump’s 2018 State of the Union Address Live

State of the Union: Trump hails 'new American moment' - BBC News

BBC News

State of the Union: Trump hails 'new American moment' BBC News Analysis by Anthony Zurcher, BBC News. You can tell a lot about a State of the Union address by where a president chooses to begin. On Tuesday night, Donald Trump delivered a polished speech that started by touting his economic record. Lower ... Viewers approve of Trump's first State of the Union address - CBS News pollCBS News Trump State of the Union avoids controversies but divides chamber on immigration reformABC News Live blog: Trump's State of the Union address 2018NBCNews.com Washington Post -New York Times -The Guardian all 4,012 news articles »

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Taliban threaten 70% of Afghanistan, BBC finds - BBC News

BBC News

Taliban threaten 70% of Afghanistan, BBC finds BBC News Will this be the last time I see them? We all think like this in Kabul now. My BBC colleagues are waiting in the car. We swap news about the latest attack. One of them, a mother of two young children, starts sobbing. "Sometimes I just wish I could blow ... The Taliban is gaining strength and territory in AfghanistanNBCNews.com all 565 news articles »

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US stocks fall for second consecutive day - BBC News

BBC News

US stocks fall for second consecutive day BBC News US markets have suffered a second day of steep losses, as investors dumped health care companies and Apple. The blue chip Dow Jones Industrial Average sank nearly 1.4%, marking its biggest one-day decline in months. The fall followed the news that ... and more »

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Used clothes: Why is worldwide demand declining? - BBC News

BBC News

Used clothes: Why is worldwide demand declining? BBC News Pity today's clothes. Like unloved toys, they're being worn less often than ever. The rise of fast fashion retailers has meant that consumers can buy trendy clothes almost the second they're designed - and just as quickly move on to the next fad. Most ... and more »

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Bitcoin - the Revenue comes calling - BBC News

BBC News

Bitcoin - the Revenue comes calling BBC News It is that time of year many a self-employed person dreads, the deadline to submit your tax return and pay anything you owe. But this year there is a question a select few should be asking themselves - have I profited from my investment in crypto ... and more »

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'Emotional support peacock' barred from United Airlines plane - BBC ... - BBC News

BBC News

'Emotional support peacock' barred from United Airlines plane - BBC ... BBC News United Airlines refuses to let a woman in New Jersey board a plane with a peacock, citing its size. Woman denied emotional support peacock on United flight | Fox NewsFox News United Airlines Denies Boarding to Emotional Service Animal...a Peacock - Live and Let's FlyLive and Let's Fly - BoardingArea all 98 news articles »

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Trump signs order to keep Guantanamo Bay prison open - BBC News

BBC News

Trump signs order to keep Guantanamo Bay prison open BBC News US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to keep Guantanamo Bay military prison open. Mr Trump announced the move in his State of the Union address. The decision reverses that of former President Barack Obama, who had said he wanted to ... and more »

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NBC News slammed for talking Russia probe as Trump kicked off State of the Union - Fox News

Fox News

NBC News slammed for talking Russia probe as Trump kicked off State of the Union Fox News NBC News' Tom Brokaw and Savannah Guthrie spoke about the Russian probe on air just moments before President Trump's first State of the Union address. NBC News' coverage of President Trump's first State of the Union address got off to a rocky start ... and more »

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What to watch for in Trump's first State of the Union

The big question looming over President Trump's first State of the Union speech is whether he will mention the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. But what he says will also give clues to his agenda for 2018 and his strategy for the midterm elections. Here's what to look for.

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GOP Congressman Calls For Undocumented SOTU Guests To Be Arrested On The Spot

WASHINGTON ― About 30 young undocumented immigrants are attending the State of the Union on Tuesday as guests of lawmakers ― and one of their colleagues wants to use the opportunity to have those guests arrested.

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North Korea Pulls Out of a Cultural Event With South Korea Ahead of the Winter Olympics

North Korea pulled out of a joint cultural event with South Korea planned for at the North's Diamond Mountain on Feb. 4

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Instagram fitness model removed from American Airlines flight after 'humiliating' row

An Instagram fitness model was “humiliated” after being removed from an American Airlines flight following a row with staff. Jen Selter, who has 11 million followers on Instagram, posted footage of her arguing with a pilot and a flight attendant on the delayed flight from Miami to New York on 27 January. “I did nothing wrong but got kicked off the plane,” she wrote, adding she had the “worst experience” following a delay which left the aircraft stuck on the runway for two hours. The 24-year-old claims she and her sister were told to leave the aircraft following a disagreement with a male attendant when she got up to put her coat away and stretch her legs. She argues that two other passengers had been allowed to go to the bathroom when she stood up, adding she was being sarcastic after responding “yeah” when asked by the attendant,  “Do you want to get kicked off the plane?” Current situation @AmericanAir .. insane. pic.twitter.com/kIOh3VysnU— Jen Selter (@JenSelter) January 28, 2018 Ms Selter says the attendant told her to sit down and they began arguing resulting in the pilot calling the police who then arrived on board. “The crew is asking for you guys to be removed off the plane,” the pilot tells them in one clip. Just like that, 5 cops coming at me. Worst experience American Air ✌�� pic.twitter.com/1LY1NrAQ3k— Jen Selter (@JenSelter) January 28, 2018 In another video, a police officer tells the sisters: “American Airlines calls the shots. They don’t want you to fly on their plane today.” Ms Selter told the New York Post: “It was humiliating. They made me feel like a terrible person, and I did nothing wrong.” A spokesperson for American Airlines said in a statement: “Ms. Selter was asked to leave the aircraft after a disagreement occurred Saturday night at Miami International Airport (MIA). “American offered her hotel accommodations and transportation, which she declined. She flew on American Sunday morning back to New York (LGA) – arriving around 8:30 a.m. ET yesterday morning.” Ms Selter has vowed “to never fly American Airlines again”. 

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India's 'Unwanted' Girls Number In The Millions, New Report Finds

Indian families’ traditional preference for sons over daughters has led to the existence of millions of “unwanted” girls in the country, a new government report estimates.

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Everything you need to know about tomorrow's super blue blood moon

A rare celestial phenomenon will take place January 31, when a super moon, blue moon and total lunar eclipse take place at the same time.

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The Latest: Arizona man confirms selling ammo to shooter

LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Latest on court orders by Nevada judges to release documents that had been sealed in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history (all times local):

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Taiwan holds live-fire drills as tensions with China mount

Taiwanese troops Tuesday staged live-fire exercises simulating a response to an invasion, as China steppeds up pressure on the island's President Tsai Ing-wen and a row over airline routes escalated. The ministry did not specify that the annual drill simulated an invasion by China but said it was intended to "show determination to safeguard peace in the Taiwan Strait and national security". Tsai last month warned against what she called Beijing's "military expansion" -- the increase in Chinese air and naval drills around the island since she came to power in May 2016.

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GOP Rep. Gaetz joins the 'Infowar' against the FBI

“We’re called conspiracy theorists because we see this cabal right in front of us,” said Gaetz. “We aggregate these data points and show what was really going on.”

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7 Glass Mosaics Around the World That Take Design to New Heights (Literally)

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Joy Behar Challenges Kirsten Gillibrand: Why'd You Push Out Al Franken?

Joy Behar kicked off an interview with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) on Monday by confronting the lawmaker for calling on Sen. Al Franken to resign after being publicly accused of sexual misconduct.

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State Officials Fire Employee Who Sent False Missile Alert In Hawaii

The emergency worker responsible for sending a false missile alert to people in Hawaii earlier this month actually believed there was an incoming ballistic missile, The Washington Post reports.

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Shaky start to Syria peace talks in Russia as opposition delegates refuse to leave Sochi airport

A Russian-organised peace conference aimed at ending the war in Syria had a shambolic start on Tuesday, after dozens of opposition delegates refused to leave the airport in Sochi and others backed out at the last minute. Moscow, a staunch Assad ally, is hosting what it has called a Syrian Congress of National Dialogue in the Black Sea resort that it hopes will launch negotiations on drafting a new constitution for Syria after almost seven years of war. But the conference, which is running in parallel to the United Nations-negotiated talks, looked in jeopardy after more than 70 rebel delegates refused to leave the airport until all logos and emblems representing the government were removed. A rebel source told the Telegraph Russia had promised to change or remove the symbol of the congress, which read “Peace to the People of Syria” but only featured the regime flag, only to be greeted by them at the arrivals gate. Sochi conference logo (w/only regime flag) causing problems. Apparently a group of opposition members refused to board one of the buses with it at the airport. They sat at the terminal until other transport was arranged. pic.twitter.com/hjSVlH0uR1— Neil Hauer (@NeilPHauer) January 30, 2018 The Syrian Negotiation Commission (SNC), the country's main opposition group, meanwhile said following two days of UN-led talks in Vienna last week that it would not attend the Sochi congress. Turkey, which backs the opposition and is co-sponsoring the talks with Iran, which supports Bashar al-Assad’s government, said it would represent the rebels. Lt. Col. Ahmad al-Saud of Idlib's Free Syrian Army claimed the opposition delegation was mistreated by Russian authorities at the airport, where he was detained for several hours Credit: Twitter/CombatChris1 Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, was heckled during his opening statement, with several delegates accusing Moscow of killing civilians in Syria with its air strikes. “In Russia, it's polite to say ‘please’ first,” Mr Lavrov responded, saying they would have a chance to speak later. The conference was initially billed as a two-day event but was cut down to one. Observers noted that much of Tuesday’s programme was taken up with a long lunch and dinner, leaving little time for discussion. Attendees shout slogans prior to a plenary session at the Congress of Syrian National Dialogue in Sochi  Credit: AFP Britain, the US and France did not send any official delegates because of what they say is the government's refusal to properly engage. Western powers support the UN process, which is now in its ninth round but has so far failed to make any major headway. The conference was also also boycotted by Kurdish delegates over Turkey’s offensive on the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia in Afrin, a northern Syrian enclave on the border with Turkey. A few Kurdish officials attended in a personal capacity and reportedly met in private with Russian counterparts on the sidelines of the conference. The main aim of the Sochi talks is to establish a committee to create a post-war constitution for Syria with UN backing, according to a draft statement. However, any deal agreed without he Kurds, which control some 25 per cent of territory in Syria, will unlikely succeed.  The poor start is a blow to Russia, which has been positioning itself a Middle East peace broker and trying to consolidate influence in the region as the US increasingly takes a step back from the Syrian crisis under President Donald Trump. "The whole point of the congress was to have a serious negotiation with the Kurds, or at least the Higher Negotiating Committee (the most relevant opposition body)," Neil Hauer, s security analyst focused on Russia-Syria relations, told the Telegraph from Sochi.  "Neither of them are here, and as such there's not much that can be discussed. Nor will anything announced here have much legitimacy. It will be very difficult for the Russians to spin this as a win." The opposition has accused Russia of not being an honest broker after failing to uphold a deal made in previous round of talks in Kazakhstan. Both sides agreed to so-called de-escalation zones across Syria, which government forces have since violated. Hours before the the congress got underway, nearly a dozen civilians were killed in a pro-government air strike on the largest market in rebel-held Idlib province. The government is now focused on the northwestern province of Idlib, which is dominated by al-Qaeda-linked militants and home to more than 2.6 million people, nearly half of whom have fled from other areas. It appears to have stepped up its bombing campaign in Idlib in recent days. The Observatory reported 90 airstrikes in Idlib on Monday alone.

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Amazon, eBay Remove 'Chinese Boy' Costumes Featuring Racist 'Slant-Eye' Images

Amazon UK and eBay UK have received immense backlash after social media users recently noticed “Chinese Boy Fancy Dress Costumes” for sale through the e-commerce sites.

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Suspect Accused of Killing 4 in Car Wash Shooting Was Jealous, Victim's Family Says

The family said he was obsessed with one of the victims

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Trial starts for woman charged with killing her twin

WAILUKU, Hawaii (AP) — A murder trial began Monday for a woman accused of deliberately driving off a cliff in Hawaii and killing her identical twin sister.

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China denies report it hacked African Union headquarters

By Aaron Maasho ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - China and the African Union dismissed on Monday a report in French newspaper Le Monde that Beijing had bugged the regional bloc's headquarters in the Ethiopian capital. An article published Friday in Le Monde, quoting anonymous AU sources, reported that data from computers in the Chinese-built building had been transferred nightly to Chinese servers for five years. After the massive hack was discovered a year ago, the building's IT system including servers was changed, according to Le Monde.

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US, Qatar reach agreement on subsidy spat with airlines

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States and Qatar have reached a deal to resolve a years-old quarrel over alleged airline subsidies, seven individuals familiar with the deal said Monday, as Qatar's government works to defuse tensions with the Trump administration.

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Russian fighter jet flies within 5ft of US Navy surveillance aircraft

A Russian fighter jet came within 5ft of a US surveillance plane as it flew over the Black Sea, in what the US called an “unsafe interaction”. The flight path of the Russian jet forced the US Navy aircraft, which was flying in international airspace, to end its mission prematurely, a US official said. “This is but the latest example of Russian military activities disregarding international norms and agreements,” the US State Department said in a separate statement.

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Tom Brady Has This Wish For Radio Host Who Insulted His 5-Year-Old Daughter

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady said Monday night that he doesn’t want radio station WEEI to sack the host who called his 5-year-old daughter Vivian “an annoying little pissant.”

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US threatens new sanctions as Russia laughs off Putin list

The United States warned Tuesday that it may soon impose new sanctions on Russian figures, after Vladimir Putin laughed off the release of a US target list of his closest and richest allies. The world was braced for a US sanctions onslaught on Monday when a new law came into effect 180 days after President Donald Trump, still hopeful for warmer ties, begrudgingly signed it.

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Orders Investigation Into Karolyi Ranch Allegations

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has ordered additional law enforcement to investigate allegations of sexual assault at Walker County’s Karolyi Ranch, the former training facility for USA Gymnastics athletes.

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Gold! Treasure lost at sea in 1857 shipwreck goes on display

SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — More than $50 million worth of gold bars, coins and dust that's been described as the greatest lost treasure in U.S. history is about to make its public debut in California after sitting at the bottom of the ocean for more than 150 years.

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North Korea cancels joint performance with South Korea, blames South media: Seoul

By Christine Kim SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea has canceled a joint cultural performance with South Korea scheduled for Feb. 4 blaming South Korean media for encouraging "insulting" public sentiment regarding the North, South Korea's unification ministry said on Monday. The North said it had no choice but to call off the performance, which was to be held in the North Korean territory of Mount Kumgang, as South Korean media continued to insult what Pyongyang called "sincere" measures regarding the Winter Olympics Seoul will host next month, the ministry said.

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The Latest: NY trial opens for reputed Philadelphia mob boss

NEW YORK (AP) — The latest from the New York fraud trial of a reputed Philadelphia mob boss (all times local):

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ICE Deports Palestinian Man Living In The U.S. For Almost 40 Years Despite Outcry

Weeks of confusion and inconsistencies from immigration officials ended on Monday after authorities deported a Palestinian man who had been living in the U.S. for nearly 40 years.

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Fox News Breaking News Alert

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Trump says he’s ‘100 percent’ behind releasing FISA surveillance memo

01/31/18 12:34 AM

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Trump: 'I am keeping another promise' by signing order to keep Guantanamo Bay prison open

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Trump invites Dems to help protect all US citizens 'because Americans are dreamers too'

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Trump says honoring veterans is ‘why we proudly stand for the national anthem’

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Clinton, moments before SOTU, explains why she didn't fire campaign adviser

01/30/18 9:31 PM

North South East West

WHEN OUR FATHER DIED, we didn’t know what to do with his body. Conversations with your estranged dad never include: “What kind of coffin would you like? Steel? Pine? Walnut?” “How about cremation?” “Where would you like to be spread?”

He was 66. He and his best friend had gone hiking. On the drive home, for reasons unknown, my father lost control of his car and went off the side of a mountain. Cause of death: “multiple blunt force injuries.” Makes me think of ninjas (or Vikings) just cinematically whaling on him, pummeling his body. But what actually happened was less glamorous, more frightening and mundane. He and his friend got knocked around and smashed up in a Chrysler Town & Country minivan. No man wants to go out like that — certainly not my father, who loved Charles Bronson and felt a stronger devotion to a carton of cigarettes than to his own children.

The local Korean newspaper ran a photo of a mangled vehicle (the same car I had learned to drive in) and a body on a stretcher in a black bag. The nearly one-page article included a picture of my father and a separate one of his friend. We had no idea how they’d obtained the photos, but there he was. He had made it into the papers.

Suddenly, he was no longer my father, whom I despised; he was the subject of a tragedy, a story that either left the reader grateful to be alive, or plunged into a despair about the uncertainty of life. He was no longer the man whom I, at 23, hadn’t spoken to in months. He was no longer the father who had abandoned my mother, my sister, and me when I was six. He was no longer that tall, thin figure with the downturned mouth, the dentures and the metal-filled teeth, the sad brown eyes, the angry lines around his brow, the sagging jowls.

He was just an older man, a father, who went to church, loved hiking, and died in an accident. Just another sad tale that you read in the paper, and thank god that it wasn’t you or anyone you know. But, in this case, it was us. It was our sad story. It was our father for whom I had over and over again, through the years, imagined many endings, partially as a form of wishful thinking — after all, that’s the way it is, isn’t it? That’s how you deal with those feelings that make you angry and ashamed. You picture the subject of those feelings being bludgeoned by Vikings and crude weaponry — one of those sticks with the spiked ball swinging off the end of it, or the axe handle with those chain thingees.

Because that makes more sense than real life.

¤

My father was one of those men of a certain generation who seemed perpetually broken — an old Maytag dishwasher in a sea of stainless steel; like Willy Loman, except he was Korean-American and this was the ’80s, which may have heightened his alienation and despair — all that hairspray and neon everywhere and all he wanted to do was go home, loosen his tie, smoke a pack of Marlboro Lights, and silently sweat.

He had an accent that encompassed the evolutionary, seven-layer dip of inner-city Los Angeles — part Chinese, part Brooklyn Jewish, part African-American. Yet he was none of those things. When he yelled at us, he sounded like something out of a Scorsese film, but he couldn’t say the letter “L.”

And he would greet black men in a parking lot with “What’s up, brutha,” which often resulted in a confounded look on “brutha’s” face. As a child, I would just silently recoil from my father, as we walked past his brother. How embarrassing! But I remember feeling a bit of pride, too, mixed in with the shame. Here was my dad, attempting to bridge cultural gaps in the most awkward, possibly offensive way (maybe not as bad as braiding his silky hair into cornrows), yet something about his naïveté seemed refreshing. Like, in a perfect world, they would be brothers, except that in this actual world, black brother was usually stereotyped pointing a gun at your face, and yellow brother cowered behind the counter doing math problems.

He owned, I think, three golf clubs.

He never wore T-shirts, only collared button-downs.

Hence, he had many undershirts.

¤

I hadn’t spoken to him since spring, probably to tell him that I had been accepted to grad school in Seattle. And my mother hadn’t seen him in years. But being his only family in the States, we had to pick up his belongings from the Los Angeles coroner’s office — a fanny pack filled with snacks and maps, a wallet with about $40, and an LG cell phone that still worked.

At first, we didn’t know what to do with these objects. But being a practical, immigrant, single-parent family, we went to a Chinese restaurant in Koreatown for lunch and spent the cash.

We were hungry. The hours since discovering my dad’s death had gone by at a frantic pace, saturated with decisions and indecisions, alternating between extremes of feeling and absolute numbness. It had begun when my mother and I, sitting in our living room, heard shouting, yelling outside the gate of our front yard. We looked into the darkness and saw the wife of one of my father’s friends, not the friend who had died, but another, a friend who had planned to go hiking with my father that day, but changed his mind.

With her elderly mother in tow, she’d arrived to tell us, screaming, that our father had died. I’m not sure why she didn’t call — perhaps she just didn’t remember our number, but she knew where we lived: in the same house as before my father had left us.

They came inside. The agony in our living room was at a fever pitch. Korean women sure know how to crank up the misery, wailing, as if their insides were being pecked at and pulled. Here were these strangers of the present, once friends of the past. We hadn’t seen them in over 15 years. Here they were in our living room, of which we were ashamed — the old, stained furniture; the cracked ceilings and walls; the dirty paint. Here they were, amid the evidence of our ruin after my father left us. Here they were crying and sitting on our floor.

As we sat there together, I remember the shock that took hold of me as I thought of my father going off the side of the mountain. Over and over I tried to imagine what that must’ve been like, what he must’ve seen, felt, or thought.

It was perhaps one of the very few instances in my life when I allowed myself to see the world through his eyes. Mostly, I had hated him for as long as I could remember, for how he treated and spoke to my mother, to us. Yet, as a human being, as his daughter, how could I not feel something for his story, the seemingly endless litany of hardships and failures in his life? From the hours he’d worked standing behind counters in some of the most dangerous parts of town to the final mediocrity of selling cleaning supplies at a small, increasingly irrelevant store in the Valley. His experiences with racism. His foreignness (that accent). His inability to create a family. To love a family. To even feel a part of the family he was born into, with his father in South Korea and his mother and siblings somewhere in North Korea, separated from him forever when he was only a child, and escaping the war.

And finally his death — the pain, the suffering, the violence, the loss of control.

Everything — the living room, the world — zoomed out for me at that moment: it was as if I were staring at a distance at my mother, my father’s friend’s wife, her old mother with her crown of gray hair, all of them crying, sitting on the floor in a very Korean way, heads hanging, napkins for wiping their eyes and noses crinkled in their hands. I realized that, from an artist’s or writer’s perspective, this was a touching, even beautiful scene. I wanted to be the one to write it — and at that moment, I thought what a monster I was, thinking of writing, thinking of beauty as these people suffered before me. Ugly and self-serving, I know, but it’s the truth. All I could think about was art.

¤

My father immigrated to Los Angeles in the 1960s on a student visa for a PhD program. He already had his bachelor’s and master’s in economics. He came from a well-educated family: my grandfather, his father, was a lawyer, and later a judge.

Growing up, I never understood why my father moved to the United States. He seemed to have more opportunities in Korea than here, with his lack of language skills and the fact that his degrees from Korean schools meant nothing in this country. Eventually he dropped out of his PhD program, and then spent some time working in factories, before owning small businesses, from a gas station to an army surplus store to a women’s clothing shop. Like most immigrants, he had a tough life with the primary challenge of supporting this family, and the secondary challenge of having some sort of identity — both within this country and within the self.

As he struggled with the physical realities of our lives, the limitations of what we could have, how much money he could make, how far he could go, as an immigrant, as a person of color, without family or the credibility of an American degree, I believe that secondary challenge, conceiving who he could become in the absence of fulfilling his dream, destroyed him.

He drank a lot. He reeked of tobacco, of whiskey. When drunk, he would sometimes lie nearly comatose on the couch, or slurring and playful. He was almost better that way, because, when sober, he was more likely to fly off the handle, to scream and yell and shame.

In addition to his sadness, his rage, his disappointment with life in the United States, my father also expressed a strong and strange level of disdain for Korea. He thought it antiquated, boring. He didn’t like the formality. He did like American food and movies. The clothes and glamour. The guns. His strongest ideas about this country, and what it should be, came from the movies —the ones starring actors like John Wayne and Charles Bronson — films that were not only a breeding ground for unrealistic expectations, but also for misogynistic and racist beliefs.

My father’s American dream, perhaps similar to that of other immigrants, was basically to become a white man. Not that he literally wanted to look into the mirror and see a white face staring back at him — or maybe he did. Of course all his heroes were white: all the images of power and glamour — all the things he wanted and didn’t have — belonged to white people. White people, as far as he was concerned, were always the protagonists, the stars of meaningful, triumphant lives. Even I, an American child born in Los Angeles in the ’80s, didn’t want to see my own small eyes, my own face. I wanted to see, I don’t know, Christie Brinkley?

So my father’s disdain for his homeland, and his desire to escape and reinvent himself are easy to understand, especially if you have an idea of what it was like for many Koreans from the north, who had been split from their families while fleeing for the south, prior to and during the war that would eventually divide thousands of years of culture and blood and language and love in two.

Along with his father, he had fled the north, leaving behind his mother, who was ill, and his siblings, with the plan of returning for them one day. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans had done the same, traveling through miserable conditions. (Today, seeing images of Syrian and Eritrean refugees flooding the shores of nearby countries, with sometimes nothing more than a backpack, if anything at all, just relieved to have what is left of their family near them dismantles me, not just on a personal, familial level, but on a level that reaches inside the organs, the bones. It is clear that although home, nationality, and culture inform our identity, nothing sustains, nothing keeps us alive more than the desire to keep our loved ones safe, to keep them from pain.)

My mother who had fled the north at age four, would tell me and my sister of the dead people she had seen along the roads, the families who had clung to the tops of packed trains, desperate to get out, only to fall to their deaths in the tunnels. She was “lucky” in the sense that most of her immediate family made it out, but my father, who was maybe 12 or 13 at the time, would never see his mother and his sisters and brother again. It was just him and his father now.

How could any of them have imagined that a border would divide them for the rest of their lives? How could anyone have predicted the horror that is now Korea, the horror of being hacked in two? How could we have seen the state that country is in now: how ludicrous, how insane, how utterly devastating?

North Korea may be a punch line to some — with its comically narcissistic dictator, inept missiles, loud fax machines, and generally high level of cultural tackiness — but to us, people whose families live beyond the barbed wire, that division, between us and them, is a source of deep pain and shame. How did we make it out without them? How could we have left them behind? What happened to them? Do they wonder about us? Or have they died off? And are we already forgotten?

There is no way to comprehend this trauma, except to zoom out from or turn off the screen.

And it’s easy, it must be, to despise the people that reattach us somehow. Maybe that’s what my sister, my mother, and I unknowingly did to my father. We were reminders of the loss that he had worked so hard to bury and run from, and forget forever in a tangle of work, alcohol, and rage. We were reminders of what he could not control, of the arbitrariness of his survival. How could he reconcile day-to-day life with the deaths of those he had left behind, or with the fact that perhaps, somewhere north of the 38th parallel, his family might still be alive?

When my father eventually left my mother and sister and me, perhaps he was reenacting that other escape. He was creating his own borders, his own DMZ.

¤

We decided to do a joint funeral with the family of the friend who had also died in the accident. I don’t remember who suggested this. Odd as it was to collaborate with them — we hadn’t known each other well when the men were alive — a combined ceremony would ease the burden of decision-making and honor a friendship that had lasted decades. It seemed like a good idea from both a symbolic and practical point of view.

Unlike the other family, we opted for cremation. We decided we would throw the ashes into the ocean. We remembered our father taking us to the beach when we were very young, before he left us. It made sense to send him back to that vast body of water, that metaphor for the unknown, plus we couldn’t afford a plot for his grave. We’d never had much money — my father never paid child support — and yet now we were responsible for his remains. My mother couldn’t stop complaining about how, in spite of his cruelty and absence, he’d left us with the burden of his final care. We had to buy him a coffin for the funeral showing and, when we went to the parlor to look at the caskets, which were absurdly displayed in miniature, like little hamster coffins, we had to choose the cheapest one.

It was plain and made out of the dullest wood.

I went to my father’s apartment to pick up clothes for him to wear. It’s an odd thing going into a dead person’s home, especially when you have not seen that person in a very long time. The whole place seems so quiet, and it’s as if you must respect that by keeping your voice low.

But who is there to hear you?

¤

My father left us in 1987, a week before my sister’s 10th birthday.

I remember coming home from school to our three-bedroom house in mid-city Los Angeles and finding that most of our furniture was gone, as if we had been robbed, ransacked for all the heavy things — all that solid wood — of our lives.

But, it was my father, not a stranger, who had somehow felt entitled — who had taken the furniture and run. It’s hard to say what the logic was there. Perhaps, as the primary breadwinner, he felt he’d earned that dining room set, that coffee table, the queen-sized bed that he’d stopped sharing with my mother a long time ago.

Anyway — there was a note taped above the living room thermostat, maybe 15 or so feet away from the front door. I remember my mother reading the note, as she cried and crumpled to the floor. A deep knowing overcame me as I realized our life had changed forever. I don’t have any distinct memory of what my sister was doing at this moment. Maybe she realized, too — or maybe she was wondering if my father would ever return.

¤

Before the funeral, we approached the viewing room and saw the two open caskets and my father and his friend inside, looking like dolls, their faces painted to cover the bruises, the gashes. It was the first time I’d seen a dead body — and there he was, my father, wooden and waxy — his hands folded in front of him, one on top of the other in white gloves. He wore the red tie that I had chosen for him and a crisp black suit.

Someone complained because we had requested closed caskets. The funeral people swiftly apologized and shut the lids.

The other family had spared no expense on the coffin, gleaming and white like a Cadillac, or the large color photo of their father surrounded by flowers. We ourselves only had a humble eight-by-10-inch in a simple black frame with a black ribbon tied around it. I felt incredibly sad for my dad and for us; for the lack of money in our wallets and love in our hearts. He and we were poor in every way possible, it seemed.

During the service I cried more than anyone else in my family. I held the tissue box in my hands, wiped my eyes, blew my nose the entire time, bent over, sobbing. I couldn’t stop and I didn’t know why. My mother and sister cried, too, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t contain myself. Was it the sight of that casket so simple and plain? Was it the grief of the family across the aisle? Was it the surprising number of people who had shown up for us? People whom I had never met, members of his church in the Valley who had made the trek to be there? Was it my father’s sadness that made me cry? Or was it all my own?

¤

I don’t know what my father did after he left us, where and how far he went.

Less than a year later, he came back to visit. By that time he was living in the Valley, about 30 minutes away, and he owned a janitorial supply store. He agreed with my mother to see us on Sundays. He’d pick us up and we’d spend the day eating fast food, which was a real treat, since during the week we mostly ate only Korean. He’d take us to picnic at parks or on the beach. Occasionally, he took us to Disneyland or Magic Mountain.

During the rest of the week, we lived with my mother, who worked the graveyard shift at restaurants, until she eventually owned her own clothing store in a working-class neighborhood southeast of Los Angeles. Every day was hard for her, which, at the time, seemed so incongruous with how my father lived. He never had to cook or clean for us or take us to school. He just got to do the “fun things” with us, and I resented him for that. I couldn’t enjoy myself on our day trips, because I’d find myself thinking about my mother, and how she hadn’t had time off in years, and how she ate the same food every day, and never slept because she worked so hard and then rose early in the mornings to get us ready for the day. Did my father want her to suffer? Was it because he felt so alone in his life, that he left her alone in hers?

¤

A few days after the cremation, my sister and I paid for a boat to take us out to spread his ashes. It was a beautiful sunny day. And this was something we did together, holding the least expensive urn we could find and then tilting the ash and pieces of bone into the water. The wind picked up, blowing him into our faces, and we laughed.

Because my sister had to go back to work in the Bay Area, it was up to me, with the help of my boyfriend at the time, to pack up my father’s belongings before the end of the month.

He’d led a fairly meticulous life in his one-bedroom apartment — there were file folders labeled and filled with brochures from places we had gone during “happier times” (Disneyland, Magic Mountain, SeaWorld). Framed photographs of my sister and me. I even found a few VHS cassettes of porn inside the living room’s coffee table cabinet, which I swiftly, without looking at the titles, chucked into the trash.

We didn’t know what to do with the larger objects — in particular, the furniture our father had dragged out of our mother’s house when he’d run away. In the end, we ran into a man down the hall, who was moving into another unit. He was probably in his 40s. He had tattoos along his arms and neck. We asked him if he wanted any of the furniture and he took it all — the dining room set, the bed, the coffee table. Jackpot. The man looked elated.

¤

In the past, I had imagined my father living for a very long time. I would visit him every once in a while in the hospital. I would look at him, dying, and confront him finally for leaving us, for hurting us, for abandoning my mother. I would break him, turn him into dust with my rage.

I had also imagined the alternative in which I would just sit by his bedside quietly, and he would look at me, and I would have great pity, even love for him, not as my father, but as a man, who had come to this country to reinvent himself, but failed. I had pictured watching him for hours, for days, sad for him, but also finally relieved that I would never have to visit or call him again.

In the end, I never had to make the choice about how I would honor my father or not in his last days. Perhaps his death — though tragic at the time — protected him from his own frailty, from the indignities that would have come with age. He’d managed it: he’d finally run away for good.

But from where and to what? Does hurt have a location? Does it float in the air, surrounding us? Does it circulate in the veins, in the blood? How many generations does it take for trauma to leave the body? And are those entrapments, that which we must endure together, what make us family?

Looking through my father’s shelves, I’d discovered a brochure for a cemetery. I realized then that he had actually considered buying a plot. And I thought of my sister and I dumping him into the ocean, his ashes flying back into our eyes and mouths: What could we do about it now? Where could we visit him?

The boat’s captain had given us a certificate indicating the exact location where we’d scattered his remains: but where else would we find him — his grief, his pain? Not north, not south, not east, not west, but in the center, inescapably, within.

¤

Nancy Jooyoun Kim was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Selected Shorts on NPR/PRI, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, and elsewhere. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she’s writing a novel and personal essays.

The post North South East West appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2rQMhmx

Keeping the Darwinian Faith

DARWINISM IS A RELIGION and has always been one. So says distinguished philosopher Michael Ruse, whose 2016 book Darwinism as Religion proposes that evolutionary theory is no mere explanation for our planet’s biology but a worldview that exceeds the warrant of science. For the past 150 years, Ruse claims, “evolutionary thinking generally […] and Darwinian thinking in particular […] has taken on the form and role of a religion.” In other work, Ruse has argued that religious and anti-religious controversialists have much in common: a cultivation of orthodoxies, a tendency to dogmatism, and a telling zeal for persecuting heretics. In this book, he makes the case that atheists such as himself ought to grant the religious orientation behind Darwinian culture.

Ruse does not mean to cast aspersions on the science of biology. Rather, he seeks to show how Darwinian theory has served as a rival to the Christian worldview since the mid-Victorian period. We admire his treatment of the religious flavor of much literary and scientific culture, but we have reservations about the tightness of his theoretical categories. For Ruse, what makes Darwinism a religion is the way it emerges in dialogue and competition with Christianity. To us, it seems a stretch to call Darwinism a religion. Sometimes Ruse suggests as much himself:

[I]n the way that evolution tries to speak of the nature of humans and their place in the scheme of things, we have a religion, or if you want to speak a little more cautiously a “secular religious perspective.”

Claiming that Darwinism amounts to a “secular religious perspective” is not quite the same thing as saying it is a religion, as the book’s title trumpets. Yet rather than being guilty of hyperbole, Ruse seems genuinely indecisive.

In his more robust moods, Ruse treats Darwinism as a younger brother — or, as he wryly puts it, “bastard offspring” — to Christianity. Still, the lion’s share of his book has nothing to do with the philosophical categorizing of Darwinism as a religion. Instead, it addresses the idea of evolution in literature, chiefly by Victorian authors. Darwinism as Religion offers something like a terrific upper-level literary survey course, rolling pell-mell through writers both famous (Tennyson, Dickens, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot) and obscure (Charles Kingsley, Mary Augusta Ward, Constance Naden). Ruse’s textual readings show how evolutionary thought informed every significant mind — perhaps every engaged mind — during the age of Darwin and after. He does not add much to our collective knowledge of the subject, however; literary scholars have canvassed this topic since Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983). But Ruse understands Darwin more thoroughly than most literary scholars, and his range is truly impressive. The pleasure of his book is in seeing so very many authors brought together in this way.

Darwinism as Religion is broadly chronological but not linear; favorites like Eliot and Thomas Hardy frequently recur. More recent authors appear somewhat arbitrarily chosen, especially in poetry, but Ruse does treat important figures like Marilynne Robinson and Ian McEwan, who serve as representatives of Christian and Darwinian orthodoxies, respectively. Ruse’s overall point is that evolutionary theory springs from the Christian legacy and subsequently inspires its own social and cultural values, sometimes in opposition to that legacy.

Ruse gets into deeper waters when he depicts the Darwinian convictions of someone like Hardy as effectively religious in nature, while minimizing the same convictions in a Christian such as Tennyson. Both embrace Darwinism, but for believers like Tennyson, this commitment is no more religious than an endorsement of the periodic table or the germ theory of disease. (For that matter, pre-modern Christians like St. Augustine were perfectly satisfied to integrate the Scriptures with a dynamic scientific model of species.) Ruse points out that there have been Darwinists like the Huxleys who have tried to set up something like a Church of Darwin, but he relies on an overly broad and attenuated conception of religion. American philosopher William Alston once listed some nine characteristics typical of religion, including belief in supernatural beings, moral codes sanctioned by gods, prayer, rituals, sacred objects, and so forth; one or another feature is not enough. More recently, British philosopher Tim Crane has argued that religion is best understood as an apprehension of the transcendent paired with communally shared narratives and rituals that make sense of the world. Like Ruse, Crane sympathizes with religion as a reasonable response to an ultimately mysterious universe; unlike Ruse, he does not see his own materialism as a form of it.

Since religious practice today tends to be less institutional and denominational than it was even a few generations ago, it has become common to apply the label “religion” to everything from professional spectator sports and celebrity culture to partisan politics, philosophical trends, dietary fads, and Pokémon Go. All of these things resemble religion in important ways (tribalism, orthodoxies, et cetera), but they clearly serve different cultural functions. Ruse wants rather to get at what Beer called “Darwinian myths”: thus, he distinguishes between “Darwinism” as a worldview and Darwinian science per se, since the scientific theory of natural selection is not a myth but rather an explanation of the means by which the marvelous life forms around us have evolved. That scientific position was also available to Victorian clergymen like John Henry Newman and Aubrey Moore, who wrote that “Darwinism appeared, and, under the guise of a foe, did the work of a friend.” They rejected the Darwinian myth but accepted the science.

The specific myth Ruse has in mind, or perhaps the most salient of a family of myths, is a version of metaphysical naturalism — that is, scientism. This is the idea that only science can tell us reliable or useful things about the world. If we accept that the marvelous life forms around us did not spring into being spontaneously, Darwin’s theory “show[s] how there could be design without a Designer” (as Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor succinctly put it). Darwinian thought thus put an end to a commonly held 18th-century presumption for God. But deflating a good argument for something is not the same as providing a good argument against it. So natural selection can supply an explanatory need of atheism (as in Richard Dawkins’s remark that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist) without actually promoting any worldview. Ruse maintains that one might reasonably accept Darwinian theory as an explanation for the means by which it pleased God to bring about our present world. Probably most Christians do if they give the matter much thought.

Ruse’s emphasis on categories risks obscuring the real contribution of his book, which lies in tracing the interplay among scientific, literary, and religious cultures. Take the claim that Darwin ushers Western culture from the 18th-century hymnody of Isaac Watts into the purely material world invoked by Thomas Hardy’s 1899 “The Darkling Thrush.” This is a conventional position, but it is not borne out by most of the authors Ruse cites, nor perhaps is it felt by most people still reading this literature. Hardy’s contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins did not worry in the least about philosophical proofs for God being nullified by the theory of natural selection when he wrote in a famous sonnet that “[t]he world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Poetry like Hopkins’s strives for rapture, not proof. Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush” also traverses this ground, albeit at second hand:

So little cause for carolings
    Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
    Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
    His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
    ‎And I was unaware.

Here we see the atheist speaker’s hope against hope that the titular thrush’s ecstatic song suggests some blessed reality beyond the material one. Tellingly, Hardy writes in hymn measure: his lines can be sung to the tune of “Joy to the World,” or “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” The bird is caroling, but so is Hardy, almost despite himself. His hymn thus presents less an existential alternative to Watts’s hymnody than a hopeful appeal to it. In this, Hardy resembles (or wants to resemble) Hopkins, who grants the science of Darwinism without experiencing any diminution of his Christian belief.

The contribution of Ruse’s book lies in the breadth and accessibility of its account of the intersection of Darwinism and imaginative literature. Literature from the age of Darwin turns to religious paradigms so often because the 19th century was deeply religious and because of Romantic associations between poetry, beauty, and religion. Even in our more secular day, the poet Rae Armantrout maintains that “[p]oetry is like prayer for agnostics.” Alice Walker’s “I Said to Poetry” compares her writing of verse to joining the church. The classicist Emily Wilson says something similar: “there is a sort of religious practice that goes along with translation. I’m trying to serve something.” Simone Weil once put the case still more strongly, albeit from a believer’s perspective: “Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in [hu]man[s] and the only extreme attention is religious.” One need not go so far as Weil to appreciate how creative art can nurture our inner lives. Darwin himself wrote at the end of his autobiography: “[I]f I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”

Art can rouse us to behold the meaning of religion and Darwinism alike. Ultimately, this is the gospel that Ruse finds himself preaching and the real achievement of his book, as he himself seems to recognize in an ardent testimonial:

I have never, ever, had such an exciting project and if I can infect you with some of my enthusiasm that will be justification enough and more. If you do not sense that this has been a labor of great love, paying respect and thanks to writings that have filled my life with joy and inspiration since I was a small child, then I have failed both the topic and you, the reader.

We share and echo Ruse’s literary enthusiasms, his respect, his love. We would suggest, however, that much of the truly religious spirit he traces derives less from Darwinism than from art. It is true that Darwin’s revolution extended the range of a numinous element in literature, but that element has a much richer history than Ruse details. As this book amply shows, literature can elevate the mind to find or create meaning in our human situation, however dire it may appear to be.

¤

Charles LaPorte is associate professor of English at the University of Washington.

Joseph LaPorte is professor of philosophy at Hope College in Holland Michigan.

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The Bottom Rung of Migrant Hierarchy: Afghans in Istanbul

ZEYTINBURNU DISTRICT in Istanbul is undergoing construction. The drills and chipping of hammer on marble set a rhythmic soundtrack. Farsi shop fronts intermingle with Turkish. Zeytinburnu was traditionally home to the leather workshops that serviced the luxury boutiques lining the streets down toward the Bosporus, along the tracks of the disused train line to Greece. Today the demand for cheap textiles has overtaken the leather industry. If you sit silently, you can hear the faint tapping of machines under the concrete ground.

The Afghans who populate the district eat rice classed as “bird food” to evade the import tax usually reserved for humans. They import yellow sugar crystals from Iran, tea from India, cricket bats from Pakistan. Without legal status, employment rights, basic health care, or education, they exist in caged circumstances. Service provision is strictly utilitarian — call centers, money transfer shops, restaurants. The public spaces are for men, while the women stay largely behind closed doors. Services are advertised through secret channels.

Yet such utilitarianism is exactly what many Afghans claim to want. “We didn’t come to Istanbul to have a social life,” one casual laborer says. “We came to work.” Life is stripped of any expense that wastes precious money that can be sent home — the expense of transport, electricity, internet, socializing. “When we are not working, we sleep. There is nothing else to do.”

Zeytinburnu has been home to a substantial Afghan population since 1983, when the Turkish government invited in a few hundred people during the conflict with the Soviet Union, mainly the Turkmen and Uzbek Afghans Turkey considers ethnic brothers. They first settled in the mountains of Van, in the far east of the country on the border with Iran, before migrating west toward Istanbul. Over the next three decades they have fled continuous cycles of violence committed under the Taliban, Da’esh, and various other militant groups, as well as economic destitution, famine, and social injustice.

Their welcome in Turkey is very restricted. The Turkish government does not recognize them — or any national who is not a member of the Council of Europe — as legal refugees. They must therefore apply to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to seek internationally recognized refugee status, which obliges them to be resettled in a third country. But today the UNHCR is only providing limited resettlement options, hindered in part by the American government’s restricted quota for Afghans, thus leaving a sizable population with no durable solution. Those who are granted asylum in Turkey while they wait for resettlement must live in a satellite city, with few jobs or support networks. Many Afghans choose not to apply in the first place, forgoing legal status in order to live in cities with more employment opportunities.

The hierarchy among migrants in the country shifted with the arrival of the Syrians, who are prioritized legally, politically, economically, and socially. Afghans are on the bottom rung of that hierarchy. The racism is not as obvious as in Iran, where “Afghani” is a common insult and police violence against Afghans is routine, but it is more insidious. Without legal status, refugees have no access to health care or education. Private hospitals charge more because they know they can exploit legal vulnerabilities; employers pay less, or not at all, for the same reason.

Afghans are also being caught up in the increasingly common counter-terror raids. Police randomly pluck individuals off the street, holding them in deportation centers before sending them back to Afghanistan. In some cases, people have a choice to stay if they pay a heavy fine. In early November 2017, Zeytinburnu streets were emptied after police arrested and deported 290 unregistered Afghans. In February, 280 were arrested and 180 deported. In November, an estimated 100 Afghans were voluntarily returning home every day, a marked increase from the previous month. Some return because life in Turkey is not what they had expected. Others plan to marry in their homeland, then return to Turkey for more work. Others have no other options.

The middle classes gravitate to the jagged white skyscrapers that dominate the outer districts of the city. In Beylikdüzü, there are 25 Afghan real-estate shops (the government legalized the selling of homes to Afghans in 2013). But Zeytinburnu district remains the heart of the community. It is a place caught between mobility and stagnation. Life happens at a fast pace. Those on the streets may have been in Kabul or Tehran yesterday, tomorrow they will be in Greece or Bulgaria. Most have been smuggled from Afghanistan via Iran, spending days on foot: young single men cut off from their families or couples with small children and new lives on the way. Afghan women recently arrived from Iran wear their headscarves slighter further back, revealing some hair. Soon they’ll become accustomed to the more conservative Turkish style. Old men cycle wares between shops. Smugglers own the streets; networks of exchange crop up on street corners or in coffee shops. “We are in the business of selling hope,” says one young smuggler with a charming smile.

¤

Afghans have been incorporated into capitalism’s increasing accumulation. Their national identity has been commoditized, just as the market is exploiting their cheap labor. More Afghan restaurants have opened since Syrian establishments became popular and exposed opportunities for easy entrepreneurship. You can eat Afghan ice cream in front of painted or neon hills of the Afghan east, eat Afghan rice next to faded wall-sized images of the fortress in Herat, trade money in sight of small ceramic models of the Blue Mosque at Mazar-i-Sharif. You can pray in an Afghan-designed mosque. More men are beginning to walk around in traditional dress. The men can get their hair cut in Afghan-style Kuaförs, spending their days slumped in the leather seats, talking of missing family and home.

If you’re a migrant or refugee or other stateless outsider, time moves in strange patterns in an amorphous choreography. The strictures of capitalism and competition give way to the boundless emptiness of non-belonging. Standard working shifts are 12 hours a day, six days a week. On Sundays, people walk around in a daze, unsure how to spend their precious freedom. Groups of young men parade the streets in leather jackets, or sit squashed in cars circling the same junction. People collect like flies along the walkways or cluster on corners to exchange information and then disperse into the crowds of babies and balloon sellers. The frenzied mobility is punctuated by periods of stagnation. Hundreds of Afghans slept for months in the park alongside the Bosporus in 2015, blocked by the recently closed border with Europe.

One boy, Tariq, lives above a Kuaför shop, working as a smartphone technical assistant. Nineteen years old, he fled to Tajikistan with his parents after his two siblings were killed in Afghanistan, and was then deported from there. He joined an Afghan family traveling through Turkey to Europe but was abandoned by them in Istanbul. He is entirely alone. He found his job by chance. Some days he earns five Turkish lira per day (about $1.37), some days 50, some days nothing. On the 50TL days, he is obliged to give half to his boss for rent. He is effectively a slave. Last week, due to a nervous condition, he damaged the screen of an iPhone he was fixing; now he is in debt to his boss for the replacement.

We talk with Tariq about Afghan hairstyle trends, the burnt orange comb-over that seems popular among young men. “If they see something on the street they like, they tend to follow it,” he says. “Maybe this is the weakness with Afghans — they think that if they copy someone’s style, they can occupy their life, their emotions.”

The same pattern could apply to the ubiquitous stories of their journeys here (through Iran, maybe via Pakistan, and then on to Turkey in trucks or cars or on foot), their living conditions, the anxiety and depression many suffer from, the burdens most feel to send money back home. According to one worker, out of the 900TL — $230 — he earns per month, he sends 600TL back home, takes 200TL for rent and 100TL for living costs.

“I myself don’t like to interfere with what god gave us,” he tells us. He speaks with a dead weight in his voice. He doesn’t smile. He is serious and measured, with lowered eyes.

He shows us infected scabs on his hands and leg — his home is infested with bugs (he only knows the Russian word for them, “clappy,” from his time in Tajikistan). A few months ago, most of the Afghan population in Zeytinburnu were afflicted by similar infestations — they spread from one dank, overcrowded dormitory to another. He tries to pay for the çay we’ve drunk, despite the cost probably equalling a few “good” days of work.

The economic burden of subsistence often falls on young women, who can find low-paid work easier than their fathers. Mariam and Laila, aged 14 and 16, are laboring 12 hours a day, six days a week, in cramped textile factories because their fathers cannot work owing to health reasons. Miriam wears a bright bandana, her face full of laughter and the beauty of hope. But she has started having migraines as a result of the work. Her mother is 41 and has the face of a weary 60-year-old. “She only dreams of going to school,” she says of her daughter.

Labor rights don’t exist because the workers don’t exist legally. Aarash, 20 years old, was injured in a workplace accident a few weeks ago. Working in a plastics factory in Bayrampaşa, he caught a piece of molten plastic in his left eye, which risked his vision. His boss sacked him, and he returned to Afghanistan for surgery. There was no choice in the matter — he could not receive treatment in Turkey as an undocumented migrant. Another young worker broke his chin when the spring on a metal-cutting machine snapped. The 6000TL demanded by a Turkish hospital was too much, so he “chose” to return home for surgery instead.

¤

In Küçüksu, up the Asian coast of the Bosporus, six men stand around a car, negotiating. There’s another four on the bridge over the narrow stream that gives the area its name (“small water”). They line up, rucksacks on backs, ready for a day of labor in an unknown place.

Küçüksu is a new development, a middle-class district. A mosque sits on the corner of a busy roundabout, squashed between two green spaces, a few kebab joints strung along either side. There are cars, vans, buses rammed with commuters. The men line up every morning to be picked up for a day of casual labor, in bitter competition with Kurdish day laborers. There’s not much to do here except pray, seek work, and fight over work. According to the workers, Kurdish men have been job-hunting around here for roughly eight years, the tensions with Afghans high for the last two of those.

One man is carrying a plastic Marks & Spencers bag containing his work clothes, ready for a day of cleaning or gardening, construction, repairs, or carrying. Most of the men are young, a mix of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Pashtuns, and Turkmen. The six men find a van to get into on the other side of the road, but only two of them can fit. The remaining four must wait their turn. Another man is left alone on his concrete traffic island. His turn will come, if not today then tomorrow or the next day.

Competition between the Kurdish and Afghan workers erupts into physical violence at least once a week. Afghans are ready to work for 60–80TL ($15–$20), while the Kurdish workers ask for 100–120TL ($25–$30). Their expenses are greater: most have families to support and are not living in cramped dormitories. “The Turkish government is not assisting them,” an older Kurdish man calmly explains to us. “And they [the Afghans] are right — they have to work, they have to survive — but they shouldn’t lower the price. Of course, some of them are integrating with us, but if there are around fifty Afghans waiting here, thirty to forty of them are working with our price and the others are taking whatever price they can get.”

Other attitudes are less respectful — it is shameful, dishonorable, for them to leave their women in a country mired in conflict, another Kurdish worker says. An old Turkish man complains about the Afghans: they’re thieves, he says. “They steal fruits from my garden. And they’re terrorists.” But he spends his time hanging around with the subjects of his antagonism. Maybe he enjoys their company. Maybe he enjoys a sense of superiority.

Every day is a day of trust and luck, and trust in luck. They are Mahmoud Darwish’s Dice Players, reeds punctured by wind to become a flute. The exchange between Afghan migrant laborers and Turkish informal employers is bounded by fundamental human emotions of instinct and good faith, but it is trapped within the wider global system of supply and demand that brought many of the Afghans here in the first place. It is a lonely space of gathering; clusters form and fragment, groups of convenience, but each man is alone.

For most Afghans in Istanbul, life is a game of hide and seek and forced decisions. It is a cycle of precariousness and instability, of looking over one’s shoulder, of accruing debts that cannot be repaid. Caught between closed borders and increasing deportations in Europe, sustained injustices in Afghanistan and securitization and ostracism in Istanbul, the texture of life is full of holes. But it goes on.

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Anıl Olcan and Hassan Reza Mirzaie contributed reporting to this piece. Some of the names have been changed to protect the identities of individuals.

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Helen Mackreath is the Middle East Correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books, based in Istanbul.

Fattah Lemar Rabiei has been working with Afghan and other refugees for different NGOs in Istanbul since 2009.

The post The Bottom Rung of Migrant Hierarchy: Afghans in Istanbul appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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