Take Off Your Shoes

by Ben Feder

  In our attempt to steep our children in their own culture while simultaneously engaging them in more global affairs, Victoria and I recognized the risk that they might find our restrictions claustrophobic or irrelevant. I understood Sam’s conflict because I too yearned for an expansive world view based on being curious about and participating in the larger world while simultaneously maintaining ties to my culture, people, and faith. I told Sam that when he went to college, he would be free to make whatever life decisions he wanted. Nonetheless, I said, our family had chosen to live our lives in a certain way, and we intended to stay committed to it.

  We headed home, and about half a kilometer from home, I pulled over and dismounted the bike. Sam had calmed down. Although he was only fifteen, I offered to let him drive the motorbike alone for the first time. I gave him a hug and started to walk home. Soon he accelerated past me. I hoped that in his life, he would do the same.

  When I returned home, he was sequestered in his room. But when it was time to gather for Friday-night dinner, he sauntered out in his sarong, ready to join the family.

  twenty-two |

  Classes at Green School ended in June. We hired a local shipping company to crate up the paintings we’d collected, about half a dozen pieces by local artists. Visiting museums, galleries, and artist studios had become Victoria’s and my activity on most afternoons. We learned as much as we could. I was never too shy to ask artists questions about technique, theory, and intention. We were introduced to artists first by Richard, the friend who told us about Green School back in New York, and later by his friend Sika, another accomplished artist who had taught many others at the local School of Fine Arts. Some of these artists commanded rich prices by Balinese standards from collectors in Jakarta and elsewhere but still vastly less expensive than New York. Often, we visited artists in their family compounds and met their families and friends. Sometimes we were invited to remove our shoes and join them for a snack. There always seemed to be a chicken clucking its way around these places, and I smiled to myself at the thought that I never did get a chance to use my chalef.

  One local artist lived ten minutes down the road from our villa. I noticed him working every time I drove by because his studio was open and faced the street. His style was familiar; it had a flat, primitive, modern sensibility. I asked Nyoman to join me for a visit so that he could help translate. I asked the artist if I could commission him to create a large painting from a photograph. When he agreed, we settled on a price.

  Two weeks later, for Mother’s Day, I presented Victoria with a gift. It was the artist’s interpretation of a casual family photograph of the six of us the day in January when we bought and wore our first sarongs. I’d been self-conscious about that photograph because it was so at odds with the corporate image I had of myself, and I knew it would get distributed back home. Now not only was I comfortable with the image; I also celebrated it.

  Over the next few days, we made sure to see our friends over dinners, parties, and picnics to say good-bye. By the time our last bag was packed, Rita said, “I wish we could stay another year. I’m really going to miss my friends here. I don’t want to go back to New York.”

  But on Sunday morning, Nyoman came to pick us up to take us to the airport. He was dressed sharply, a rolled blue morning glory tucked behind his right ear. He hurried us along to make sure we wouldn’t miss our flight. We rode to the airport mostly in silence. We passed familiar scenes, the rows of artisan shops that sold Bali-made bric-a-brac and Buddha statues and the surf stores of Kuta. Nava cried out, “Good-bye!” to each landmark. By the time we pulled into the airport drop-off zone, the car was thick with the sadness of our leaving. We were especially upset to leave Nyoman, but it was he who shed the tear. Bali had changed us, but I could see that in our own small way, through Nyoman, we had changed Bali too. And that had meaning for me.

  As we waited for our flight, Rita asked me to record a song she wrote about Bali. The lyrics were in great contrast to the sad songs she wrote in Africa:

  As I’m walking in Bali, I never feel alone,

  I hear the dogs barkin’ and the ducks quackin’.

  In this beautiful sunlight,

  On this wonderful day,

  And this beautiful sunshine

  Is comin’ my way.

  As I’m walking through the rice,

  I see the farmers wave

  With a knife in their hand,

  They’re all over the land.

  In this beautiful sunlight,

  On this wonderful day,

  And this beautiful sunshine

  Is comin’ my way.

  There are temples, cremations, and offerings too,

  Living in Bali for me is dream come true.

  twenty-three |

  We planned to travel for six weeks through Southeast Asia as we slowly made our way home. Sam still hadn’t regained all his weight from his bout with paratyphoid. He looked wan. Victoria tried one last time to change his mind about returning to camp for the summer. I braced myself for another dramatic episode.

  Sam took a breath and looked at her. “Mommy, we talked about this before we left New York. I need some hang time with my friends before school starts.” He clearly was ready to break from the intense time with his parents. They both looked at me.

  The first leg of our journey home would be through Vietnam. The place held such an important place in American history and our collective psyche that I thought it was important for him to experience it. “How about coming with us to Vietnam and then heading off to camp?” I said.

  He shrugged. “That’s cool.” And with that compromise, Victoria and I accepted that Sam would be moving on.

  On Sam’s final day with us, as we walked back to the hotel from our visit to the Hanoi Hilton, I asked Sam how he felt about leaving the family. He said he had mixed feelings. He was excited to see his friends back home and eager to get back to American food. But he was sad to leave his friends in Bali. It upset him to know that he was unlikely ever to see them again, at least for a long while.

  “Leaving Bali sucks,” he said. “It’s the mood in the family we built up over the last few months. Now we’re going back to our regular New York thing.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. How would we keep our sense of adventure going? How could we maintain our closeness once we reintegrated into the structures and responsibilities of work, school, and extended family? I didn’t have good answers to those questions. “Can you carry the mood inside you?” We both knew it was a trite line.

  “That’ll be hard,” he said. “The stress of school, all the work. I’ll try.”

  When we arrived at the hotel, Victoria finished packing Sam’s bags and closed them. We helped him bring them down to a waiting taxi. Sam said his farewells and hugged his siblings awkwardly. Victoria didn’t tear up. Instead she focused, as she often did, on the list of things to be done, this time to ensure Sam arrived safely to her sister, Abigail, who would meet him at JFK. Then Sam and I climbed into the taxi bound for the airport.

  As we talked in the car, I was struck by how mature his manner was, how much more adult his face had become, and how much he seemed to have grown. Nobody in our family saw more change from our sabbatical than Sam. Freed from the pressures of a New York private school, he shined. His sense of humor was like a jack-in-the-box, flying out suddenly from within to get a laugh. He engaged. He played. He created.

  In Bali, Sam and I rediscovered each other. It was all so very earnest back home. Whether it was my work or his school, the stakes always seemed high. We ratcheted down the ante in our travels. We had breakfast and dinner together practically every day. I didn’t have meetings, business travel, or conference calls. He didn’t have too much homework.

  By the last day of school, Sam had become so integrated, so woven into the fabric of the expat community in Bali that he surprised me—and, I think, himself—at how difficult it was for him to rip himself away. When I looked at a picture of him on m
y phone from when we left New York, I was astonished by the change in a few short months.

  I walked Sam to the check-in counter. He was still so thin that he had trouble keeping his pants at his waist. His hair, normally close-cropped, had grown into a bush of wild curls. He wore flip-flops and carried an electric guitar case collaged with tourist stickers from places we’d been. By the looks of it, he had fully transitioned from Upper East Side prep-school kid to Bali hippie.

  The airline representative at the counter smiled and took his passport. The trip to JFK by way of Seoul would take about twenty hours. She looked up from her computer at Sam. “You’re fifteen years old?” She came around to our side of the counter and hung a large, bright-yellow ID around his neck that shouted in cute bubble letters, “Unaccompanied Minor,” a reminder from the universe that Sam was not quite yet a man. Still, he was no longer a boy.

  Sam and I walked together to the security checkpoint. He was a jumble of excitement, nerves, and adrenaline. Traveling alone over great distance was a coming-of-age moment for him and for me. Having matured so much in Bali, independent travel capped the sabbatical. I felt a swell of both sadness and pride as I gave him one last hug. And he was off. My boy was on his own.

  Saying good-bye to Sam reminded me of the many times in college and later when my own father, also named Sam, saw me off at the airport. My father never appeared to me to struggle with his values and ideas of virtue. He found all of it in the divine. Just as I had done with my son, my father used our car rides to the airport to talk privately with me. Sometimes he broached a sensitive topic. Mostly, I figured, my mother had put him up to it. Either way, I’d always felt safe with my father because he was incredibly loyal and always had my back. The last of those conversations took place on the way to an airport only a few weeks before he died suddenly at the age of sixty-one. It was the last time I saw him.

  From Vietnam, the rest of us traveled to the Buddhist temples and monasteries of Luang Probang in Laos, set high in the mountains at the confluence of the Khan and Mekong Rivers. There, each morning, hundreds of monks and their novices in saffron robes from the various monasteries walked through the streets collecting alms. The temple roofs gleamed amid overgrown hardwood trees; markets sold gorgeous silks of bright hues and intricate patterns.

  On our first morning, I woke before dawn, when the first notes of birdsong rose from the hotel garden, to participate in the daily alms procession conducted by the monastery monks. I left the family asleep in their warm beds and walked toward the main street. I stopped by a small shop to buy some sticky rice so I could offer it as alms to the monks, then waited for them by a curb. They filed past, their heads shaven and their maroon-and-gold robes flowing against the backdrop of a dense morning mist. I sat on a damp sidewalk, took some rice with my fingers, and placed the food in their begging bowls. When I had no more rice to offer, I pulled out my sketchbook from my knapsack and drew a young woman kneeling beside the procession, her head bowed, her hands extended above her head, raising a bowl of rice in a devotional offering to the billows of fire-yellow-and-red cloth that whisked past her. I wanted my drawings to be personal keepsakes of our travels.

  The next day, I woke early again, this time to meditate, with bedroom pillows for a cushion. The rain lashed down in sheets, and I used the sounds around me to open my awareness and ground me in time and place. I listened to trees rustling in the wind and to water pinging on the hotel roof and felt the damp air press against my open palms as I sat in open awareness for about thirty minutes.

  When Victoria and the kids woke up, we ate breakfast and biked down a waterlogged, muddy road to the Mekong River, where we had planned to kayak for the day. As we approached the riverbank, we saw whole trees being swept away by the surging water. The waterway had morphed into fast-moving rapids of brown muck. It reminded me of our time in Sumatra, and I felt a hint of fear light up. Our guide thought it was safe to proceed, but a fellow traveler from Colorado, who I figured knew something about rivers, said, “He’s out of his mind. I’d never send a kid out in that.” The last thing I was going to do was place my trust in someone who couldn’t see beyond his day’s wages. I had learned my lesson from the Bukit Lawang rainforest, and I lectured my kids about safety first. As disappointed as they were, we came up with an alternative plan for the day. In the afternoon, as the kids enjoyed some downtime by the hotel pool, I unpacked my yoga mat, plugged in my earbuds, and moved to the poses as Nikki Wong called them out.

  From Laos, we gritted our teeth and boarded a small Lao Airlines plane for a short flight to Siem Reap, Cambodia. What we experienced in that country was a surprise to all of us, heartbreaking because of its genocidal past and inspiring because we witnessed a young country desperately trying to grow and thrive.

  When we arrived at our hotel, I convinced one of the workers at the hotel to sit for me so that I could draw her portrait. Chilly was a young woman in her twenties. She blushed and giggled when I stared at her face, trying to capture her expression.

  Expressionist painters from Paul Gauguin to Gustav Klimt to Lucian Freud repeatedly tried to convey something of their sitters’ inner lives. A figurative or portrait artist who is paying attention almost always conveys something of the model’s personality and world, and I tried to do the same. But when I looked into her eyes to glean something of her inner self, I came up empty. Eyes don’t give away hints of an inner glow; facial movements around the eyes betray a person’s mood, and the viewer’s brain is acutely aware of the meaning of infinitesimal expressions and tiny movements of micromuscles. It could read volumes into the slightest upturn of an eyebrow. While there was vastness in Chilly’s facial expressions, there was nothing for me to learn from staring into her pupils. Yet like breath in meditation, eyes can serve as a focal point to let the surrounding meaning seep into consciousness.

  I drew other subjects too. On the Mekong, I caught a glimpse of a man at the tiller of a boat that seemed gigantic for his comparatively slight frame. He was stationary and appeared to be stuck in invisible mud. There was something about how he and his giant boat just sat there in the stifling heat and placid water. I took out my sketchpad and a few pencils. I noticed, for the first time, subtle changes in the tones of gray and brown in that dead calm and the contrast in dimension between the small man and the acres of boat that he helmed. Not only was I beginning to see truly the way an artist sees, I also had a greater perception for the nuance of things.

  In Bagan, Myanmar, Victoria and I met Khin Mar Lam, one of eight children of the owner of a vegetarian restaurant. The family worked hard to send some of the kids to university. But Khin Mar Lam stayed back to help. As I drew her portrait, she and her parents deftly avoided a Canadian lawyer at the next table who tried to engage them in a political discussion. He should have known that such conversations were bad for one’s health in a country that, at the time, was ruled by military dictatorship.

  The more I drew, the more meaning I derived from it and the more grateful I was to have learned that I was not by nature stuck with only whatever skills and intelligence were gifted to me at birth. All it took was being open to possibility, intention, and repeated practice. My drawing opened up a new dimension of travel for me. Spending an hour or so truly observing an image and perceiving the lines, edges, shadows, and perspectives was an unimaginable luxury. I then chose to turn those perceptions into drawings because I would add something of myself to the image, an expression that was personal and unique.

  It was hard to say what our children absorbed from day to day in our travels in Southeast Asia, but they saw and heard it all and asked difficult questions. They saw some of the ugliness that war brings to civilians, and they saw extreme need. They could not help but be affected by it. When I asked Oliver what made the strongest impression on him, he said, “The poverty.”

  Our children had the opportunity to see their own country from the outside looking in. When they saw amputees and orphans in Cambodia, we talked about the million
s of unexploded landmines, mortar shells, and bombs that were dangerous relics of the massive US incursions into that country. That was difficult, especially for Oliver, who was so used to seeing the United States as the winning team.

  At a market in Myanmar, I asked Rita how she felt about the experience. She found it hard to say no to people who were hawking their wares, people she described as “less fortunate” than she. “They don’t have as much food as me. I feel sad for them. Then I think about all I have. They’re not starving, but . . . it’s hard for me to look at.” The scene of children selling in the market especially upset her. “Our guide said we shouldn’t buy from them because those kids should be going to school.”

  In Vietnam, Victoria and I had an opportunity to teach our children about point of view in general and that any so-called unbiased information, like the sort one would expect from a museum, had an inherent perspective. Sometimes the point of view was overt, other times more subtle, but it was almost always present. Since the narrative of the war, as seen from the other side, was so different, it was an easy point to make. The experience reminded me of the first time I picked up a pencil to draw. To change perspective was to change perception.

  When the five of us boarded a plane back to New York, the better part of two months had passed since we left Bali. We would still have a little time back in the States before I needed to return to work in September.