Working on Earth: Class and Environmental Justice

Working on Earth

CLASS AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

EDITED BY

Christina Robertson

AND

Jennifer Westerman

UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA PRESS

RENO & LAS VEGAS

University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

Copyright © 2015 by University of Nevada Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Design by Kathleen Szawiola

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Working on earth : class and environmental justice / edited by Christina Robertson and Jennifer Westerman.

     pages        cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-87417-963-7 (paperback) — ISBN 978-0-87417-964-4 (e-book)

1. Environmental justice.  2. Human ecology.  3. Working class.  4. Working class—Social conditions.  5. Working class—Canada—Case studies.  6. Working class—United States—Case studies.

I. Robertson, Christina, 1960–     II. Westerman, Jennifer.

GE220.W67   2015

363.700973—dc23                 2014032929

FOR JOHN, CR

FOR JIM, JW

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction: Toward a Working-Class Ecology

CHRISTINA ROBERTSON AND JENNIFER WESTERMAN

PART I

Working for a Living: Class, Justice, and Environment

1 - Raining in Vietnam: The Personal Politics of Climate Justice

CHARLES WAUGH

2 - Working in Nature, Playing in Wilderness: Race, Class, and Environmental History in the Apostle Islands

JAMES W. FELDMAN

3 - The Rich Go Higher: The Geography of Rural Development, Fire Management, and Environmental Justice in Utah’s Wildland Urban Interface

JASON ROBERTS

4 - Beyond Boom and Bust: Recovering the Place of Kootenay Working-Class Stories

CHRISTINA ROBERTSON

PART II

The Ways We Work: Toxic Consequences

5 - Requiem for Landscape

EDIE STEINER

6 - Clean Air, Clean Water, and Jobs Forever: Filming Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

TERRE RYAN

7 - Bright Lights, Big City Ills: Artificial Light and the Night Shift

PAUL BOGARD

8 - From Orchards to Cubicles: Work and Space in the Silicon Valley

DEBRA J. SALAZAR

PART III

The Workers and the Land: Toward a Just and Sustainable Future

9 - It’s a Different World: Using Oral Histories to Explore Working-Class Perceptions of Environmental Change

PETER FRIEDERICI

10 - Working Wilderness: Ranching, Proprietary Rights to Nature, Environmental Justice, and Climate Change

JONI ADAMSON

11 - Survival Is Triumph Enough: Class, Environmental Consciousness, and the Southern Memoir

SCOTT HICKS

12 - Reinhabiting the Poor Farm in Memory and Landscape

JENNIFER WESTERMAN

Contributors

Index

PREFACE

Working on Earth owes its origins to personal convictions, friendship, and fate. Long before we became coeditors of this volume, a belief in activist scholarship drew each of us to enroll in the Literature and Environment Graduate Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. Interdisciplinary, bridging boundaries between the humanities and the environmental sciences, and unapologetically inclusive, the program attracted students from around the world. In addition to influencing a generation of scholars, teachers, activists, and authors, the extracurricular aspects of the program inspired partnerships, marriages, children, and many strong friendships. Our friendship is one of them. When we met fifteen years ago, our convictions took root in a shared passion for literature, environmental justice, and long walks in Reno’s foothills, with Jen’s husky, Mila, leading the way. All those footsteps precede this book.

Quite by chance, each of us chose to explore the intersection of labor, nature, social class, and environmental justice. While we approached these issues from distinct angles—as a literary and cultural critic and as a creative nonfiction writer—the workplace stories we encountered led us to consider the impacts of work on people and landscapes. We observed that environmental literary and cultural criticism focused on race, gender, and ethnicity, but was less engaged with class. At the same time, we were coming to understand that social class often determines levels of disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards for poor workers and working-class people of all races, genders, and ethnicities.

We saw, too, that conversations about job security, wages, and benefits tended to ignore the long-term impacts of extractive and polluting industries on worker health and safety, on the natural landscape, and on surrounding communities. When we found scholars already at work defining an emerging field called working-class studies, we recognized common ground with our growing interest in environmental justice studies. We wondered what restorative cultural work might emerge if we explored the confluence of working-class studies and environmental justice.

Many environmental literary and cultural critics insist that scholars, writers, and teachers have a responsibility to engage the worldwide ecological crises of our age in cultural texts and in everyday life. This project takes that stance. Like the graduate program that brought us together, this essay collection is interdisciplinary and inclusive, and aims to link the environmental sciences with the humanities. Scholars working in literary studies, history, anthropology, cultural studies, creative nonfiction, political science, journalism, environmental justice, and sustainability studies have contributed essays to Working on Earth. We sought to practice narrative scholarship, to include essays from both academic and creative writers, and to support exploration of the personal and the political. Drawing on myth, history, research, and personal experience, the writers gathered here attest to the power of storytelling to transform the ways we work and live on Earth. These essays urge us to reinhabit an environment where working-class people are visible and where the land sustains the connections we build, the systems we create, and the planet we inhabit.

How have we labored in the past, and how must we, in the future, work on Earth? How do our land management practices promote or hinder social equity and ecological diversity? How are environmental justice and social justice intertwined? Working on Earth has its origins in these questions, these conversations. We believe this book takes a new step toward exploring these ideas.

Whereas we assembled these essays primarily for students and scholars in the environmental humanities, we hope that this book will be read beyond those classrooms. Even as these essays are authored by people who, it must be said, work as academics, many of the voices featured in this volume belong to working-class people whose experiences often go unrecorded, and so unaccounted for. We also hope that this book will inspire further work at the intersection of working-class studies and environmental justice. One such volume of stories might illustrate the interdependence of union workers and the environment. Our aim here is to make the case that class—a marker of identity, culture, privilege, access, and agency—is inextricably linked to environmental justice. Environmentally and socially just economic practices will remain the exception until including the voices and stories and experiences of working-class people becomes the rule.

We would like to thank all of our contributors for their intellectual curiosity, creative insights, and dedication to seeing this project through to publication. Their words and their work continue to inspire us.

We would also like to extend our gratitude to our faculty mentors in the Literature and Environment Program at the University of Nevada, Reno, including Michael P. Branch, Michael P. Cohen, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Scott Slovic.

We also thank our colleagues at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, and in the Sustainable Development Department at Appalachian State University.

Our writing and planning for the book have been enriched thanks to the work of anonymous reviewers for the University of Nevada Press, and we are grateful for their time and thoughtful suggestions. We thank our editor Joanne O’Hare for her guidance. We also thank the staff at the press, including Kathleen Szawiola and Alison Hope, for their stewardship of this book.

We are also indebted to a group of environmental literary scholars, environmental sociologists, environmental historians, and scholars of environmental justice and the working class whose work has greatly influenced our own, including Joni Adamson, Julian Agyeman, Elizabeth Ammons, Robert J. Bruell, Robert Bullard, Renny Christopher, William Cronon, Daniel Faber, Sherry Lee Linkon, Carolyn Merchant, Chad Montrie, Kathleen Dean Moore, David Pellow, John Russo, Julie Sze, Tom Wayman, Richard White, and Janet Zandy, and the many scholars and activists working across the globe to make visible the relationship between work and nature.

We are especially thankful for the support and encouragement we have received from our families, and we offer our most profound thanks to them for providing both grounding and levity.

Finally, this volume has been a true editorial collaboration between us, and we are deeply appreciative of the ways that this project has challenged and expanded our understanding of class, justice, and environment.

Introduction

Toward a Working-Class Ecology

CHRISTINA ROBERTSON AND JENNIFER WESTERMAN

When Norma Fiorentino’s private water well exploded, Dimock, Pennsylvania, became the flashpoint for hydraulic fracturing, widely known as fracking, the controversial process used to extract natural gas from shale formations. Residents in this Susquehanna County township argued that methane from Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation’s hydraulic fracturing operations contaminated their drinking water, while Cabot contended that naturally occurring methane tainted the wells. Royalties from lease payments, industry jobs, and impact fees created economic incentives for natural gas development in Dimock, but residents like Fiorentino felt betrayed by the industry’s promises. The community splintered, as so often happens when development issues are framed in terms of jobs versus the environment. As natural gas developers tap shale gas deposits in the United States and Canada, the jobs versus environment controversy sparked by hydraulic fracturing divides community after community. From Washington and Radford Counties in Pennsylvania, and Killdeer and Dunn Counties in North Dakota, to Beaver and Clearwater Counties in Alberta and along the Peace River in British Columbia, working-class people face both economic insecurity and the unequal risk of exposure to environmental hazards that are largely unregulated and poorly understood.

Working on Earth explores the ideological, cultural, and actual space where class identity, the material conditions of work, and environmental justice issues intersect. As a group, working-class people are marginalized by their lack of access to political power, by their economic status, and by the common perception that they lack ecological knowledge. Even well-paid union jobs don’t often entitle blue-collar workers to participate in decisions about the consequences—bodily or environmental—of their work. As Janet Zandy observes in Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work, The white-collar middle class may endure long hours and job insecurity, but they do not lose fingers, destroy their mouth cavities, and poison their bodies because of their paid labor. And the rich, of course, never have to make such trade-offs.¹ Working-class people on the front lines face such hazardous conditions on a daily basis.

Social class is intertwined with and defined by what kind of work we perform, and manual wage labor is a key identity marker in our society. Getting one’s hands dirty, doing the heavy lifting, and working on and living off the land is the realm of the working class. This physical work carries inherent risks. Workers in closest contact with the land, including miners, loggers, farmers, ranchers, agricultural workers, fishermen, construction workers, ironworkers, roofers, sanitation workers, power linesmen, and shift workers face the greatest environmental dangers.² Indoor laborers, such as chemical or manufacturing plant workers, housekeepers, and night-shift workers, also face environmental hazards. Whether outdoors or on the factory floor, exposure to toxic chemicals, airborne pollutants, and artificial light are just a few of the many threats to workers’ health. And such exposure is rarely contained within factory gates. Toxins can follow workers home, polluting their communities, along with the air, water, and land.

Sustainable economic and community development, long-term job security, and living wages often elude working-class people. Consider that communities dominated by coal mining, such as those in Mingo County, West Virginia, are some of the poorest in the state and in the United States.³ Environmental and public health consequences, including water and air contamination and respiratory illnesses and cancers, are also higher in nearly every county in West Virginia where mining is the dominant industry.⁴ Workers come to accept the environmental and public health consequences as the terms of doing business, of making a living. As Robert D. Bullard argues, environmental justice is not about poor people being forced to trade their health and the health of their communities for jobs. Poor people and poor communities are given a false choice between having, on the one hand, no jobs and no development and, on the other hand, risky low-paying jobs and pollution. In reality, unemployment and poverty are also hazardous to one’s health. This jobs-versus-unemployment scenario is a form of economic blackmail.⁵ Indeed, the business-as-usual policies that drive industrial capitalism, in West Virginia and elsewhere, fail to account for indicators of human well-being and ecological health, such as aspirational needs and biological diversity. Working-class people face a dual injustice: the economic insecurity that accompanies boom and bust and disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards.

As the contributors to Working on Earth suggest, these injustices are rooted in the ways we have used and valued nature over time. They are reinforced by a social hierarchy where the most affluent groups amass wealth and dominate decision making while assuming less risk of exposure to environmental hazards. Working-class people sustain advanced economies, yet they receive less compensation for their labor and possess little control over policy making. The aim of this collection is to explore the costs of pitting jobs against the environment and to expose how this false choice exploits working-class people and the more-than-human world. Why, for example, do we so often accept worker exploitation and environmental pollution as necessary consequences for economic growth?

The essays in Working on Earth advance the need for what we term a working-class ecology. Working-class ecology calls attention to the ways in which class structures, access to power in the workplace, the material conditions of work, and the more-than-human environment interact.⁶ A working-class ecology challenges industrial policies and practices that divide economic security from environmental health, forcing workers, communities, all sentient beings, and the land to pay dearly for the cost of making a living. As Devon Peña suggests, The environmentalism of everyday life does not divide the environment into disembodied parts like ‘nature,’ ‘work,’ and ‘home.’⁷ The writers in this volume illustrate how dividing nature, work, and home produces environmental and social crises.

The Intersection of Working-Class Studies and Environmental Justice

The writers in Working on Earth illustrate a fluid understanding of what it means to talk about class. For John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, working-class studies is not only about the labor movement, or about workers of any particular kind, or workers in any particular place—even in the workplace. Instead, we ask questions about how class works for people at work, at home, and in the community. Working class describes not just a socioeconomic category, but also a rhetorical category. Class serves as an identity marker that reflects and reinforces social and political hierarchies in relation to other identity markers, such as gender and race. Zandy observes, Our understanding of class identity is incomplete without the interplay of these other identities, but these other subjectivities cannot be properly studied without a class dimension. The writers in this volume collectively assert that we must consider environment—places that shape and are shaped by the lives of working-class people—as an equally significant identity marker alongside gender, race, and class. Richard White has written that our work—all our work—inevitably embeds us in nature.⁸ When we separate economy from environment, making a living from realizing social justice, we fail to see how our class identities are mutually constituted not only by our labor, but also by the natural world. When we make working-class ecology visible, we come to see how the work that we do determines uneven exposures to social and environmental risks.

The environmental justice movement confronts the unequal distribution of environmental hazards in marginalized communities and challenges the structural inequalities that perpetuate such harms. Access to a healthy and clean environment, contend David Pellow and Robert J. Bruelle is increasingly distributed by power, class, and race.⁹ Scholars and activists in the environmental justice movement examine connections between social, political, and environmental inequalities, contesting practices and policies that exploit people of color, indigenous communities, women, the poor, and the working class. The environmental justice movement exposes one of the primary contradictions of economic globalization: as poor workers and working-class people become more dependent on modern industrial capitalism, they are increasingly susceptible to exploitation by that system. A second contradiction follows: Under capitalism ‘the greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth,’ the greater are capital’s ecological demands, and the level of environmental degradation.¹⁰ In other words, global industrial capitalism engenders worker exploitation and environmental degradation. As the environmental justice movement makes clear, many environmental issues intersect with working-class struggles—where we work, what kind of work we perform, and what materials we work with—yet the environmental justice movement has historically focused on discussions of environmental racism and engaged less vigorously with analyses of social class. The contributors to Working on Earth aim to demonstrate the necessity of analyzing class in relation to environmental justice.

The Cultural Work of Stories

Working on Earth is grounded in the belief that stories have the potential to illuminate—and to change—our values and practices. Stories perform cultural work. This cultural work is distinct from other forms of discourse that undervalue personal experiences and individual and community truths. A successful story can make us feel, on a visceral level, what’s at stake. As Zandy writes, No book can reattach the human hand severed on the job, but it can trace the process of dis/memberment and remembering, and see the hand’s potential for graceful movement, its delicate rough beauty, and its hidden wisdom. Stories framed by working-class ecologies link body and memory, landscape and labor. In other words, stories challenge us to recognize and examine the ways that work and environment intersect. Lawrence Buell argues that environmental change requires a climate of transformed environmental values, perception, and will. To that end, he continues, the power of story, image, and artistic performance and the resources of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural theory are crucial.¹¹ This transformation will only come about if people doing all kinds of cultural work argue, collectively, for a wholly reimagined relationship with the environment.

How, then, can stories challenge us to reimagine a world in which we view work and environment in relational terms? Working-class and environmental justice scholars hold in common the belief that stories of marginalized, poor, and working-class people are vital sources of knowledge, insight, and evidence. For example, Russo and Linkon emphasize the centrality of the lived experience of working-class people to current efforts in working-class studies, noting the importance of collecting and studying representations that capture the voices of working-class people, such as oral histories, songs, poems, and personal narratives. Robert D. Bullard and Damu Smith cite the fundamental leadership of women of color in the environmental justice movement, emphasizing, It is important that these women’s stories be told in their own words, in keeping with the environmental justice principle that demands that people be allowed to speak for themselves.¹² Scholars and activists in both fields also ask questions about whose voices go unaccounted for in social and environmental decision making. Such questions confront dominant narratives of human progress, narratives in which economic growth takes precedence over the well-being of both workers and the environment. As Charles Waugh, whose essay Raining in Vietnam: The Personal Politics of Climate Justice opens this book, remarks, In short, stories about climate change and climate justice sparked in us a global consciousness that highlighted the positions of power and privilege that otherwise remain hidden in most of our everyday decisions.

Our Working Lives, Our Living Earth: Essays in This Collection

Based in cultural theory, criticism, narrative, and research, the essays in this volume illustrate the impacts of the ways we work on Earth. Drawing on historical, societal, cultural, ethical, literary, and personal perspectives, these essays chronicle environmental histories that reveal social inequities in land management. These essays bear witness to lost landscapes and to family members who died making a living. They recover working-class stories and assert their importance in reimagining sustainable jobs and communities. They present solutions to the global climate crisis that do not divide worker from wilderness, labor from landscape. They offer examples of once-degraded landscapes, now reinhabited with sustainability and human welfare in mind. These essays call for new narratives, reframed around the collective survival of human beings and the more-than-human world.

Working on Earth begins with a historical reckoning of the jobs versus environment dichotomy, moves on to an accounting of unintended consequences for workers and the land, and concludes with a range of perspectives that reimagine relationships between work and nature. The contributors to Part I, Working for a Living: Class, Justice, and Environment, suggest that any analysis of class must be contextualized by how we value and manage land. Historically, those jobs linked with the land—farming, fishing, mining, ranching, and forest work, for instance—have been filled by people who identify as and are perceived as either working class or the working poor. Yet, in most cases, a close association with the land has not afforded these groups political or social power. Instead, as corporate-owned or public land increases in value—whether for economic or aesthetic reasons—those whose livelihood depends on continued access to this land or its resources are often excluded from decisions about its management. The writers in Part II, The Ways We Work: Toxic Consequences, call attention to everyday industrial practices that comprise occupational and environmental hazards that disproportionately impact laborers designated—culturally and on the job—as the working class. Indeed, the narrative arc of Working on Earth suggests that understanding and valuing working-class struggles must be an integral part of achieving environmental justice and sustainable development. The writers in Part III, The Workers and the Land: Toward a Just and Sustainable Future, examine shifts in the ways we value labor and nature. They document how human and environmental forces are challenging perceptions about how to achieve climate justice, cultivate class consciousness, and reinhabit exploited landscapes.

Across ages and around the globe, human beings have organized themselves around myth, parable, legend, and story. The stories we hear and tell about culture, history, work, and ways of living on the land frame our belief systems, our relationships, and our actions. One worldwide story now finally being told distills what ecologists have recently named the Anthropocene era, the geological blink of an eye that accounts for the sum effects of human activity on Earth. We know that the destiny of humans and the fate of the natural world are inextricably bound. We can continue to perpetuate the existing model of global economic capitalism, which will relegate the laboring classes to the basest of working conditions and consign the planet to ecological catastrophe. Or, we can change. Our collective survival depends on our capacity to make ethical decisions that consider all sentient beings and the land. To this end, the larger cultural narratives we live by will sustain us or destroy us. The future of our planet has its roots in the stories we tell: we need new narratives that reinforce the necessity of cooperation, of reciprocity, of respect for all beings, and of living within ecological limits.

NOTES

1. Janet Zandy, Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), The white collar, 29.

2. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Economic News Release, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries Summary, 2012, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nro.htm.

3. Sean O’Leary and Ted Boettner, West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy, Booms and Busts: The Impact of West Virginia’s Energy Economy (July 2011), http://www.wvpolicy.org/downloads/BoomsBusts072111.pdf.

4. For more information, see Michael Hendryx, Poverty and Mortality Disparities in Central Appalachia: Mountaintop Mining and Environmental Justice, Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice 4 no. 3 (2011): 44–53; Keith J. Zullig and Michael Hendryx, Health-Related Quality of Life Among Central Appalachian Residents in Mountaintop Mining Counties, American Journal of Public Health 101 no. 5 (2011): 848–53; and Keith J. Zullig and Michael Hendryx, A Comparative Analysis of Health-Related Quality of Life for Residents of U.S. Counties with and without Coal Mining Public Health Reports 125 no. 4 (2010): 548–555; Michael Hendryx, E. Fedorko, and A. Anesetti-Rotherme, A Geographical Information System-Based Analysis of Cancer Mortality and Population Exposure to Coal Mining Activities in West Virginia, Geospatial Health 4 no. 2 (2010): 243–256.

5. Robert D. Bullard, Environmental Justice in the Twenty-first Century, in The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution, ed. Robert D. Bullard (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2005), is not about, 42.

6. Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 1–4.

7. Devon G. Peña, Tierra y Vida: Chicano Environmental Justice, in Bullard, The Quest for Environmental Justice, the environmentalism, 190.

8. John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, What’s New about New Working-Class Studies? in New Working-Class Studies, ed. John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon (Ithaca, NY: IRL Press, 2005), is not only about, 10; 11–12; Janet Zandy, ed., What We Hold in Common: An Introduction to Working-Class Studies (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2001), Our understanding of, xiii; Richard White, ‘Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature, in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), our work, 185.

9. David Naguib Pellow and Robert J. Bruelle, eds., Power, Justice, and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), Access to, 2.

10. John Bellamy Foster, The Absolute General Law of Environmental Degradation Under Capitalism, Capitalism Nature Socialism 3 no. 3 (1992): Under capitalism, 79. See also John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011); Kenneth A. Gould, David N. Pellow, and Allan Schnaiberg, The Treadmill of Production: Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008); and Zweig, The Working Class Majority.

11. Zandy, Hands, No book can, 5; Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Black-well Publishing, 2005), requires a climate, vi.

12. Russo and Linkon, What’s New about New Working-Class Studies?, lived experience, collecting and studying, 11; Robert D. Bullard and Damu Smith, Women Warriors of Color on the Front Line, in Bullard, The Quest for Environmental Justice, It is important, 65.

PART I

Working for a Living

Class, Justice, and Environment

1

Raining in Vietnam

The Personal Politics of Climate Justice

CHARLES WAUGH

In the mythical past of Vietnam, the spirits of things roamed as freely on the Earth as did humans. So it was when on one particularly fine day the spirit of the mountain, Son Tinh, decided to stroll along the beach to enjoy the fresh sea air in his lungs and the warm sand beneath his feet. Eventually he came upon several fishermen eagerly discussing the great price a large, unusual fish caught in their net would fetch at the market. Longer than a man, with powerful thrashing muscles, the fish seemed determined to rise up from the beach and return to the sparkling water. Its glistening scales flickered from brilliant green one moment to vibrant blue the next, and when Son Tinh looked into its eyes, he saw something there he could not ignore. He said to the fishermen, Don’t try to sell this fish at the market; it won’t end well for you. The fishermen scoffed at this advice and told Son Tinh where and how he might find his own end. Seeing they could not be swayed, Son Tinh changed course. He doubled their price and bought the fish himself, with the condition that they put the fish back into their boat and take Son Tinh with them out to deep water. On the rolling waves, half a mile from shore, Son Tinh slit open the net and rolled the glittering fish back into the sea. With a mighty splash, the fish leapt from the water, and hovering in air transformed into the shape of a man shimmering with liquid light. I am Thủy Tinh, said the spirit of the sea with a slight bow. Thank you for saving my life. As a token of gratitude, he presented Son Tinh with a large and ancient tome, telling him it held the power to grant him anything he desired. Then Thủy Tinh disappeared beneath the waves.

Not long after that, Emperor Hùng Vương and his court toured the country, traveling from the capital to the coast and into the mountains to announce a contest to find a husband for Princess Mỵ Nương, whose beauty outmatched all other Earthly beauties. To prove his worthiness, the suitor would have to present the court with ten white elephants, ten giant tunas, ten tigers, ten sailfish, ten trees that were one hundred meters tall, and ten green pearls. Surely it would take someone rich and powerful to amass so many treasures from both the land and the sea. Smitten by the beauty of the princess riding in her palanquin along one of his jungle paths, Son Tinh decided at once to use the magic book to complete the challenge. But Thủy Tinh had also been captivated by the beautiful Mỵ Nương as she had sailed along the coast. Using the many fingers of his rivers, he painstakingly gathered each of the contest items. When he arrived at Hùng Vương’s court, he was surprised to discover he’d already been bested, and by his former savior no less. Unaccustomed to losing, he refused to admit defeat, especially considering Son Tinh had only been able to win by using the tome that had once been his. In his fury, he sent all the winds and waves he could muster crashing into Son Tinh, who raised his stony shoulders and shrugged the water back to the sea. When the storms subsided, Son Tinh remained unbroken, and it took another year before Thủy Tinh regained the strength to attack again. But attack again he did, and the next year, and the next year, and the year after that, and every year thereafter. And even though the mountains have always survived, the yearly monsoons have always returned, and the people caught in between have always suffered the most.¹

On the corner of Le Loi Street and Cua Dai Road in Hoi An, Vietnam, torrential rain pours from the sky like wet cement, splattering on the pavement all around. My family and I are on the southeast side of the intersection where it’s usually easier to hail a taxi but whose businesses have all closed up for the night—a bia hὀi (beer garden) shut down by the rain, and a bank and an agro exchange with regular hours—so the only light comes trickling down from storefront fluorescents half a block away. My six-year-old son bounces between a filthy concrete telephone pole and one of the brick columns of the bia hὀi’s fence. Black grime drips from his hands and red from the clay of the poorly fired bricks streaks down the back of his T-shirt. When I urge him to stop, he steps off the curb into the gutter stream of god knows what swept along by the downpour, submerging his sandaled feet to the ankles. My sixty-seven-year-old father, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis five years before, hobbles in circles on the broken pavement nearby, unable by natural disposition to stand still, and yet unable to make his right leg move properly. When he does stop for a moment, he takes all his weight on his good leg, his torso skewed like a house with a washed-out foundation. He’s thoroughly soaked. My wife, my mother, my son, and I have umbrellas, and we’ve tried to shield him as much as possible, but with rain like this there’s not much we can do. My father didn’t want to have to carry anything besides his walking stick and felt too hot to wear a raincoat.

It’s the night of the full moon festival, so thousands of tourists and townspeople alike have packed into this tiny old town on the central Vietnamese coast, and now, with the rain, they have taken every taxi, too. At some point the taxi companies simply give up answering their phones. We are stranded, stuck in a rainstorm like the moronic tourists we’ve become, and my blood boils as my dripping-wet yet ever-optimistic father says for the twelfth time, Getting there is half the adventure!

I want to strangle him. I am no tourist. I am not on an adventure. I’ve lived in Vietnam this time for three and a half months, and all together more than two years spread out over four stays, the longest a year in 2004 and 2005. I speak the language. I know this town. I have friends here. At this moment in my life, I live here. Normally, we’d have hopped on our motorbike an hour ago, before the storm even