An Intro to Two of Seven Emirates

My brother posted this article on my Facebook wall, and it's definitely been some food for thought.

You can see Al Ain off in the middle of nowhere, right up on the Oman border.

We moved back from the UAE more than ten years ago now, and the Dubai described in the article is in many ways unfamiliar. Back in those days, there was no palm-shaped island. There was no Harvey Nichols. There was no Burj Al-Arab. The largest mall in Dubai was the newly opened (and not quite complete!) City Centre, with its Ikea and massive, amusement park-like food court.

Dubai was where everyone went to shop in those days. There was no mall in Al Ain, and it was difficult to come across the simple things that everyone in every small crap town in North America takes for granted in those pre-internet days... like the newest English CDs and books. Dubai had an English radio station that played Rick Dees' weekly top 40 show, and that was basically the only exposure you got to the occasional rock song. The more privileged among us had MTV Europe instead of MTV India, but that still involved less rock and more techno.

You could go to the beach there, and the water in those days wasn't filled with sewage, like the article claims. My youngest brother loved to stand near the water and let the tide wash over his feet, though, and after a day at the beach, his feet were always black with oil. The atlas that my father had brought back for me from a business trip to Canada showed me that the Gulf Sea was choked with oil pollution, so I assumed that it was the whole sea that was dirty.

I've been told that they've recently built a virtual wall of buildings along the beach in Dubai, effectively blocked off the rest of the city from the ocean breeze. In my mind, that makes Dubai much more like Abu Dhabi, which is an island of overgrown skyscrapers in a desert country. In Abu Dhabi, there was no breeze, and the light would reflect off the skyscrapers into the street, baking the asphalt. There were no trees because it was the desert, but it was painfully humid because it was an island. The heat clung to you like a living object, and the air was literally thick with the humidity - you could feel it. Stepping outside of a vehicle or building was like walking into a physical wall of heat. Your clothes and hair would stick to you, and the heat seemed unbearably inescapable.

Al Ain was better. It was out in the desert, away from the ocean, but it was also an oasis, so it was full of parks. The summer temperatures were actually higher than in the larger coastal cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but since the air was dry, it didn't stick to your body in the same fashion. I don't know if we really appreciated how lucky we were in that regard. We were tweens, busy being bitter that we were disconnected from the rest of the world because we had to go to Dubai to buy a fashion magazine. Because I was a nerd, I was also bitter that I couldn't go to Space Camp, and that I couldn't look things up whenever I wanted to, because there was no public library. It's kind of mundane, really. I didn't hate it there because it was fake, or because I felt like it was a con game. I hated it because it was intellectually limiting.

I did see some of the darker side of things, though. As a child, there wasn't really much that could be done about it, and I didn't personally know anyone who told me the kinds of stories of victimization that Hari writes about in his article. He also seems to leave out a whole class of people, drawing lines between the local Arabs, the migrant workers from the subcontinent, the Phillipines, and apparently Ethiopia now, and rich, white expats from Western countries.

There's no mention of the families from the subcontinent who have lived there for decades with no rights in terms of citizenship. There's no mention of Western expats of colour like my family, or like my classmate's family, a black American girl. There's only a passing mention of the residents from other Middle Eastern countries who have settled there... and nothing of the many Baha'i residents that fled Iran to settle there. There's just so many different facets to discuss.

I've tried to determine how many of the differences can be explained simply by my living in the emirate of Abu Dhabi as opposed to Dubai, but it's still the same country. So I thought I'd write it myself, and add some of my own analyses. I'm not the greatest writer, but in this case, I have plenty of source material.

Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China

I read Out of Mao's Shadow a couple of months ago, and I've been meaning to blog about it since.

Philip Pan was on The Daily Show promoting this book sometime last spring, and it sounded pretty interesting at the time. I'm pretty bad at actually reading the books I put on my book list, though. Fast forward to November, and I noticed it prominently on display in the library, so I picked it up. Then it sat in my room for a few weeks as I read a biography on Hillary Clinton. Eventually I got around to it, and am I ever glad that I did! I tore through it in about two days.

The book is organized into three parts, or eleven chapters. Each one discusses a separate story, focusing on a specific person and their experiences in dealing with the Chinese system. For instance, there's a chapter about a doctor who broke the story of SARS as the Chinese govt tried to keep the epidemic under wraps as it escaped China. There's another chapter about the editor of a newspaper that struggled to maintain its voice and duty to report honestly in a climate of censorship. One of the most fascinating was the chapter about Lin Zhao, a young revolutionary woman in the fifties who turned against Communism with the same fervour that she felt when she first ran away from home to support it. She was imprisoned and wrote hundreds of pages assailing the Party with her own blood before her execution.


I'm not very well-versed in Chinese history, but Pan's book provides a fascinating primer. He places all the stories in their historical context, giving a basic background to events like the Cultural Revolution, and the extreme violence that took place in cities like Chongqing, as well as the role the Communist Party played in trying to suppress the populace's memory of these events and the people who struggled to reveal the truth and seek justice. Part of Pan's analysis is that in many of the cases, the dissidents were able to get the Party to make small changes, such as finally being open about SARS, enabling the medical field to fight and contain it. However, this did not result in more openness and a path to democracy in China, but rather the opposite. By showing a small amount of flexibility, the Communist Party was, in fact, able to strengthen its hold on power. They were basically able to take credit for taking action rather than being vilified for hedging and taking not action for so long.

I highly recommend it.

Blog for Choice Day

Today is the 36th anniversary of Roe v Wade, the landmark decision legalizing the right of American women to choose. In honour of today, I'm participating in Blog for Choice Day 2009, even though I'm not American.

This year's topic is our pro-choice hopes for Obama and the new Congress, and it's why I felt that it was important to blog today, despite not being American, and my belief that the many, many restrictions on choice in the United States, some of which are supported by ostensibly pro-choice people, infringe on the rights of women to exist as free human beings. (I'm a believer in the reasoning behind the Canadian Supreme Court's decision that any restrictions on abortion in essence force women to be pregnant against their will violates their very personhood.)

But I didn't really want to talk about my hard-line position on abortion today. I wanted to talk about the Global Gag Rule, also known as the Mexico City Policy. The policy bars any organization that receives US funds from having anything whatsoever to do with abortion, whether it is providing them, advocating for them, or counselling women on their very existence, whether or not abortion is legal in the country where the organization is located.

This is ideology trumping the actual health and well-being of the citizens of these countries, and using American aid as a tool to enforce this ideology on women who have very few other options. It puts health-care providers in the position where they are either prevented from giving women ALL the information they want, regardless of the risk to women's health and safety, or foregoing necessary funding and supplies. Essentially, they're playing with people's lives, because they can. Because they've decided they have that right.

Incidentally, abortion is now legal in Mexico City, although not in the rest of Mexico.

The Global Gag Rule was originally implemented by Reagan, thereby neatly fitting into my theory that Reagan was a scourge on humanity. It was reversed by Clinton at the beginning of his first term, until Bush reinstated it at the beginning of his presidency. Obviously, this means that it remained standing throughout Bush Senior's term, meaning that all three Republican presidents of the last thirty years deserve equal blame for this abominable policy.

So my hopes for Obama and the new Congress? Bye bye Global Gag Rule. And I don't know if it's possible, but it would be great if Congress could pass some legislation prohibiting future evil presidents from bringing it back once Obama's term has ended. The health and well-being of women and their families worldwide shouldn't depend on the whims of a president bowing to anti-choice interests.

Unattainable Beauty Standards

This article is more than five years old, but it discusses a phenomenon that I've seen my entire life: colourism. As a child, I didn't realize that it wasn't just limited to the South Asian community, but spanned many different communities of colour. It wasn't a shock when I did notice, because I was so used to the idea already. It seemed normal. Shitty, but normal.

I wasn't a "fair" child. I wasn't really DARK, but I definitely wasn't fair. I remember my mother instructing me not to go out in the sun too much, because I would get too dark. For the most part, though, I just went on living my life. I wasn't ever too concerned with beauty ideals, for reasons that are a subject for a different post. However, when I started university, I considered myself towards the darker end of the spectrum. I would never have defined myself as fair, like my mother.

Growing up, I was mostly exposed to other North Indians, and didn't meet very many South Indians, but there were a lot of South Indians at my university. The girls started commenting on how fair I was, in reverent and envious tones. It was jarring, and confusing. At first, I thought they were insane, because I so clearly wasn't fair; I was more along the lines of average. But I was, in fact, a lot lighter than the people who were saying it. It didn't make a difference to me, but it did seem to make a difference to all of them.

Why the difference? I think the article makes it clear.

She goes on to cite dusky Indian female film actors Kajol Devgan and Rani Mukherjee as examples of her conviction, "If you are dark, then dark is the best."

This is Kajol, taken from here.



And this is Rani, taken from here:



Both of these women are about as dark as I am. The article presents them as dark, in much the same way that I was always considered dark as a child, but still attractive. However, this puts them at the "dark" end of the spectrum, effectively erasing women who are much darker. Since skin colour is very much related to perceived beauty in Indian society, the implication is that anyone darker can't be beautiful. The flack that those girls must have gotten for being dark must have been so much worse than my mother telling me not to play outside and hearing an adult comment on how much darker I was than my mother a few times.

It's like the brown version of the paper bag test. Basically, I grew up around people who were lighter than the bag and got labelled as dark because I was the exact shade of the bag. But the whole principle of the bag is fucked. It's a ridiculous and stupid parameter for beauty.

Obviously, I want it gone. But I really can't blame people for buying into it when it's framed as something that is economically beneficial. So how to get rid of it? Beyond emphasizing whenever it comes up that it's a pile of shit.