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Temptation Island

Emily Yoffe — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:00:00 GMT

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Got a burning question for Prudie? She'll be online at Washingtonpost.com to chat with readers each Monday at 1 p.m. Submit your questions and comments here before or during the live discussion.

Dear Prudence,
My wife is planning to attend a professional conference in a few months in a warm location while I stay at home with our two young boys. In years past I have gone with her, but this year one son is in school. As much as I'll be frazzled by five days alone with them, I'm happy that my wife is able to build her reputation. But she will be attending the conference with a guy I don't care for, because he acts like he's my wife's best friend. They worked together for several years, and he was essentially her "work husband"—lunches together, drinks after work with their co-workers, texts and calls at home, inside jokes, birthday presents. I've tried to explain my belief that a man should not be "buddies" with another man's wife, but my wife doesn't see it and says they’re just pals. At the conference my wife will essentially be "dating" this guy for five days. I do trust my wife completely. But this guy is single and would, I'm sure, like to get involved if the opportunity were available. I’m annoyed that I will be home with the boys while she is on vacation with another man. I can't ask her not to go, and I can't join her. What can I do?

—Convention Dissension

Dear Convention,
What you shouldn’t do, once you tuck in the kids, is watch the movie Cedar Rapids. In that convention story, the insurance agent played by Anne Heche looks forward to the annual blowout so she can get away from her dutiful marriage, swim naked in the hotel pool, and get laid. Poor you, five days alone with your own sons, while your wife goes someplace warm (the nerve!), sees old colleagues, makes professional connections, and has some fun (bad Mommy!). One paragraph of your self-pity and bluster makes me want to pull up a lounge chair, order a pitcher of mojitos, and drown out the lectures on proper relations with the opposite sex. You’re right that some people have office spouses. This can be tricky because while it doesn’t offer conjugal privileges, it also doesn’t include such romance killers as wiping the kids’ noses and hauling the groceries. But you say you trust your wife completely, and during the years she worked with her office husband, they did not have an affair. I agree that if her relationship with her former colleague had been intruding on your time together, you would have been justified in asking for fewer happy hours and a moratorium on home phone calls—but they’re not even co-workers anymore. Stop harping on this conference, which is months away. When it rolls around, wish her a great trip and say you and the boys will enjoy doing guy stuff. That way, instead of thinking about what a relief it is to get away from her jealous prig, she will feel that no office husband measures up to the real thing.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence: Repulsive Co-Worker

Dear Prudence,
I was raised in a family where we were teased to the point of ridicule. Consequently, I acted that way to my children before I figured out what I was doing. By the time my son was about 11 years old, I started offering positive comments and not berating him. There were times, though, that I did fall back and make awful remarks. Since he has become an adult, I have apologized for the way I mismanaged my anger and the hurtful things I said. His response was to shrug it off. I recognize that he created boundaries because I hurt him. My son is married and just recently had his first child. He lives a long car ride away, and his father and I don’t see him often—when we do he makes no attempt to greet or hug us. He rarely calls but comes for Christmas every other year. After I had surgery recently, he did not call to inquire how it went. I have become discouraged because he rarely takes a genuine interest in me. If he won't talk with me about this, how do I handle the discomfort when we do visit?

—Sadder but Wiser

Dear Sadder,
I appreciate this letter, because while I often hear from the grown children of abusive parents, I rarely hear from the parents themselves. It is not usually in the abusers’ bag of tricks to recognize the damage they’ve done and its life-long consequences. You sound about halfway to understanding the situation. Read over your letter—while it starts off strong, it ends up being all about you. The lack of hugs you receive, your surgery, your feeling shut out. Instead of nursing your wounds, cast your mind back to your son’s childhood, and remember just a few of the many instances of your rages and cruel remarks. That might help you understand that despite your attempts to reform, and even apologize, you were a miserable mother. Some children grow up and forgive such parents, some children just tolerate them, and some cut them off. Be grateful you still have a thread of a relationship, and be aware that telling your son how much he hurts you could snap it. Now that he’s a father, it’s a good time for you to write him a letter telling him you admire what he’s made of his life and regret not giving him the start he deserved. Acknowledge that you know your relationship will always be strained. But say that you love him, his wife, and their baby and you hope they will let you be a loving grandmother. Then accept however much you get.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,
I've been working at a large company for nearly two years, and I hired a new assistant on a six-month trial period. Unbeknownst to my boss, I plan to quit my job and move to another state this summer. (If the company found out, I would be fired on the spot.) Before I leave, I have to evaluate my new employee's work and decide whether he will be hired permanently. Though he tries, he is socially awkward, incapable of working independently, and lacks several skills necessary to do the job well. He has told me many times that he is struggling financially and helps support his younger siblings, so he needs this job. If he doesn’t improve enough by the end of his trial, should I recommend him, since it won't be my problem anymore? Is it better to help someone who’s struggling financially or look out for the company, even though I feel no loyalty?

—Morally Confused

Dear Confused,
Almost everyone needs the job. Most people are in the workplace because the paycheck is necessary to support themselves and often others. Better candidates for the job also could have told you how necessary this position was for them and their dependents. Your first mistake was your poor hiring choice. You say he’s trying, and your obligation is to give him as much assistance as possible in the time remaining. If after that he still just doesn’t get it, do not compound your error by making him a permanent employee as you sail out the door saying, “Good luck, suckers!” You may feel no loyalty to the company, but presumably you also need a paycheck. So it’s not a good idea for you to saddle your former company with an incompetent you vouched for. If this guy is as bad as you say, the company will ultimately get rid of him. Then think of your potential employers possibly getting an earful from your former colleagues about your judgment. Be direct and honest with the assistant. Then if you have to let him know you’re letting him go, it will be painful, but no surprise.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,
I have a wonderful cleaning woman. She does a great job and I pay her well. There's just one thing. Right before she leaves my house, she makes a big stinky poop that renders the powder room gaggingly unusable for a few hours, despite my opening windows, turning on the fan, and setting out candles. The powder room is on the first floor of the house, and I work from my home office right across from it, so this is an issue. I'm not the type of person who doesn't let guests or repair people use her bathroom, and I certainly wouldn't think anything of it if it happened only once in a while. The paranoid part of me thinks she's doing it as a passive-aggressive Occupy the Bathroom statement because I'm in the office sitting on my butt while she's doing hard physical labor. Is there any way I can ask her to hold it or at least light a match without coming across as a total jerk?

—Holding My Nose and Scratching My Head

Dear Holding,
No, there’s no way to tell your cleaning woman that after a day of scrubbing your toilets she’s to seal her bowels and halt the peristalsis until she gets home. If you look up “foul smelling stools,” you will see that it’s possible your housekeeper suffers from any number of medical conditions. I think that her behavior is not some rear guard action, but an act of desperation. She’s in agony all day trying to hold it in because you’re home. Finally, her work is done and she can dump and run. You’d come off like a turd if you actually took her to task for this. In the end, you have to ameliorate her parting gift, so check out this Amazon page of top-rated air fresheners and find one that means you don’t have to endure her ordure.

—Prudie

Discuss this column with Emily Yoffe on her Facebook page.

More Dear Prudence Columns

“A View to a Thrill: Neighbor boys peep at my scantily clad daughters. Should I have them cover up?” Posted June 30, 2011.
“Loving Thy Neighbor: I have sex with the couple next door. Should I tell my kids about it?” Posted June 23, 2011.

“Fatherly Advice: Dear Prudence advises a dad whose wife fears he'll abandon the family in favor of his long-lost daughter—and other Father's Day advice seekers.” Posted June 16, 2011.
“Businessman on the Road to Ruin: My wife doesn't know I visit strip bars and porn theaters while away on business. But that's not cheating, right?” Posted June 9, 2011.

More Dear Prudence Chat Transcripts

“All Dogs Go to Heaven: Dear Prudence advises a dying husband on whether to confess his infidelity—during a live chat at Washingtonpost.com.” Posted June 27, 2011.
“Sloppy Stay-at-Home Mom: Prudie advises a man whose wife is great at everything except keeping the house neat—in a live chat at Washingtonpost.com.” Posted June 13, 2011.
“The 40-Year-Old Mean Girl: Prudie advises a former bully whose kids are being mistreated by her victim's children—in a live chat at Washingtonpost.com.” Posted June 6, 2011.
“The Accused: A young neighbor's unfounded claims put my family in danger. Should we allow the girl back into our lives?” Posted June 2, 2011.

The Real Caveman Diet

Brian Palmer — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:12:43 GMT

Russian scientists claim to have grown a plant from the fruit of an arctic flower that froze 32,000 years ago in the Arctic. That’s about the same time the last Neanderthals roamed the Earth. This particular plant doesn't produce an edible fruit analogous to an apple or nectarine, but rather a dry capsule that holds its seeds. Did hominids eat fruits and veggies during the Neanderthal era?

They definitely ate fruit. Last year, paleoanthropologists found bits of date stuck in the teeth of a 40,000-year-old Neanderthal. There's evidence that several of the fruits we enjoy eating today have been around for millennia in much the same form. For example, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of 780,000-year-old figs at a site in Northern Israel, as well as olives, plums, and pears from the paleolithic era. Researchers have also dug up grapes that appear to be 7 million years old in northeastern Tennessee (although, oddly, the grapes are morphologically more similar to today’s Asian varieties than the modern grapes considered native to North America). Apple trees blanketed Kazakhstan 30,000 years ago, oranges were common in China, and wild berries grew in Europe. None of these fruits were identical to the modern varieties, but they would have been perfectly edible.

Vegetables are a different story. Many of the ones we eat today have undergone profound changes at the hands of human farmers. Consider the brassicas: Between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago, humans took a leafy green plant and, by selecting for different characteristics, began to transform it into several different products. Modern kale, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi are all members of the same species, derived from a single prehistoric plant variety. Wild carrots may predate human agriculture, but they’re unpalatable and look nothing like the cultivated variety. The earliest domesticated carrots were probably purple, and the orange carrot emerged in the 17^th century. While legumes predate the dawn of man, modern green beans are a human invention.

It’s not altogether clear why fruits have changed less than vegetables, but it might have something to do with their evolutionary purpose. Plants developed sugary fruits millions of years ago so that sweet-toothed mammals would gobble them up and disseminate the seeds. By the time hominids descended from the African tree canopy, delicious fruits were widely available with no need for artificial selection. Since vegetables gain nothing from being eaten, they didn't experience the same pressure to evolve delectable roots, stems, and leaves.

Just because there are some paleolithic fruits in production today doesn’t mean you can easily mimic the paleolithic diet. Modern apples, dates, figs, and pears aren’t necessarily nutritionally equivalent to their late Stone Age ancestors. Selection by humans has made them larger and sweeter, and may have caused other chemical changes. Ancient man also ate plants that you can’t find at a grocery store, like ferns and cattails. His relative dietary proportions of meats, nuts, fruits, and vegetables are in dispute, and probably varied significantly with location. Some paleoanthropologists also believe hunter-gatherers ate a far wider variety of foods than modern man, each in a smaller quantity, to minimize the risk of poisoning.

Got a question about today’s news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks George Armelagos and Craig Hadley of Emory University, Bryce Carlson and Jules Janick of Purdue University, Naama Goren of Hebrew University, Susanna Hoffman of Hoffman Consulting, Mordechai Kislev of Bar-Ilan University, Yusheng (Christopher) Liu of East Tennessee State University, Katherine M. Moore of the University of Pennsylvania, Daniel Potter of UC Davis, and C. Margaret Scarry of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Private Dancer

Emily Yoffe — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:11:00 GMT

Emily Yoffe, aka Dear Prudence, is on Washingtonpost.com weekly to chat live with readers. An edited transcript of this week’s chat is below. (Sign up here to get Dear Prudence delivered to your inbox each week. Read Prudie’s Slate columns here. Send questions to Prudence at prudence@slate.com.)

Emily Yoffe: Good afternoon. Look forward to your questions!

Q. Stripper for a Daughter: I had been struggling to make a living at my job for a few years now and decided to apply as a bartender at a local strip club. After a few days of working there, the manager said he was low on girls for the night and asked if I would like to dance for the night. I was a little hesitant at first but decided it was just one night. I ended up loving it and made around $800 in a few hours! We talked, and I became a dancer overnight. This was about a year ago. The other night while doing a set, one of my parents’ friends comes up to the stage and asks for a VIP dance. The entire time he was telling me how he wants a cut of my earnings to stay quiet and not tell my parents what I am doing! I either have to come clean to my parents (who are VERY religious and would disown me), quit my job and get further in debt, or start paying this guy half of my nightly earnings.

A: Is this guy married? If he makes his threat again you could offer this deal: You won't tell his wife that he's a customer of a strip club and you two will call it a draw. Tell the manager of the club who this guy is, that he is blackmailing you, and you would like him banned. In the movies, places of employment like yours have big guys with shaved heads who bodily escort such customers to the door. If this old creep does tell your parents, so be it. Hold your head (and your pasties) high and tell your parents the last thing you wanted to do was to have to ask them to bail you out financially. Say you understand they hate your moonlighting job, but you hope they can respect that you're an adult and your choices are your own. I hear that pole dancing classes are the latest fad in fitness, and if your mother doesn't flip out, maybe you can offer to give her and her friends some lessons.

Dear Prudence: Repulsive Co-Worker

Q. Asking About Children: Since when did it become rude to enquire if someone had children? While at a party I was talking to my friend about our kids. There was another person standing next to us (someone I met that evening), and not wanting to make her feel left out of the conversation, I turned to her and asked, "Do you have any children?” She immediately looked irritated and answered gruffly, "No. I never plan on having any, either" and walked away. Afterward I heard that she thought I was rude and invasive for asking a "personal question." Prudie, I don't care if someone I'd just met has twenty kids or none. I was simply trying to include her in the conversation. Having children is hardly a secretive or intimate piece of information, and I don't understand why it's inappropriate to ask in a casual way. Was I committing some faux pas with this question?

A: No, but the childfree can live in a state of perpetual interrogation about their reproductive choices and that gets wearying. However, it's ridiculous to assume an innocent, appropriate question is the opening of an inquisition. The other woman should have said something like, "I don't, but I have a niece your daughter's age, so I've heard a lot about this." If she wanted to take pre-emptive offense, she was the one being rude.

Q. My Husband Sleeps With His Mom: When my dad-in-law passed away unexpectedly, my mom-in-law didn't take it well at all. After we found out she was on medication for depression we suggested she stay with us for awhile. We live in a two bedroom house and I've been sleeping in our baby's room (he has major sleeping issues) and Mom was originally going to occupy the sofa bed. One night she went and slept next to my husband after complaining of a back ache, and she has been there ever since. I once walked into Mom and my husband chatting in bed like a married couple. He stroked her hair back affectionately, and I felt completely weirded out. When I was pregnant I couldn't sleep well because of cramps, and whenever I asked my husband for a massage he didn't even bother getting up. He's never even helped me with nighttime feeding, either. Yet whenever he senses mom is having sleeping problems, he'll wake up and make sure she's feeling OK. I feel a crazy sense of jealousy, and I feel incredibly angry. I don't know if I'm being petty, but it's been four months. Should I say something here?

A: If your husband and his mother have you convinced you're being petty because they are now sleeping together and stroking each other, it may be time to grab your baby and run. You need to take an immediate stand that even though you have an infant, your marriage is in jeopardy if his mother doesn't move back into her own place—today. If she goes, you two need some therapy to re-establish the rules of your relationship. If she won't, I'm afraid you need to talk to a lawyer. In addition, it's one thing to decide you want an infant to sleep in your room with you because it's more convenient—but you should be sleeping in the marital bed. If you want the baby in his own room, get a baby monitor. Reclaim your pillow tonight and tell Mom to start packing.

Q. Boyfriend's Toxic Friend: My boyfriend of one year recently became friends with Fred, who he met through co-workers. Fred has hung out with my boyfriend and me several times, bringing along his girlfriend. This would be fine except he treats this poor woman terribly—insulting her in public, telling people that she wouldn't go anywhere without him, and demeaning her to everyone within earshot. His comments about women in general are indicative of someone who is very controlling. Several friends have seen Fred in action and all agree with me that his behavior is not just annoying, but also disturbing. 1) How should I approach Fred's girlfriend. She is very sweet and doesn't stand up for herself. I've tried to befriend her, but she's very shy. 2) I am actually having doubts about my relationship with my boyfriend for actually being friends with Fred. I grew up in a household where my father was verbally abusive toward my mother and I am very sensitive to these interactions. My boyfriend is aware of my history but gets angry when I refuse to hang out with Fred, even though I've explained to him why I have trouble doing so. Am I being unreasonable?

A: You don't need a family history of verbal abuse to find it repugnant. There's something off with your boyfriend that he thinks his pal's behavior is just fine. Tell him that you find Fred's treatment of his girlfriend appalling and you won't hang out with him anymore. If that means you won't be hanging out with your boyfriend, it's better to learn his character after a year than after tying the knot.

Q. Videotaping Childbirth: I am due to give birth to my first child in six weeks. My husband is already an excellent parent to his child from a previous marriage. He told me that he wanted to hire a videographer to take a video of our baby's birth. I am a private person, and I can't imagine anything worse than a stranger putting a camera in between my legs. My husband said if I feel embarrassed he could take the video. He says that childbirth is a beautiful thing and he wants a record of it. While I agree it's a special event I don't want to have a video record of such an intimate situation. Who should win this argument?

A: I wonder about these birth videos. I hope the people who took them don't haul them out every birthday and make the poor kid annually relive the journey down the chute. It's one thing to have a video camera of the cleaned up bundle of joy being placed in his or her mother's arms, but it is your choice whether to have the camera aimed up your private parts. Since every moment of our lives is now recorded, I'm increasingly of the school of thought that it's better to just experience most things and use the recording equipment sparingly. There shouldn't be an argument once you say you don't want paparazzi between your legs.

Q. Re: Stripper Daughter: LW1's predicament sounds like it could be extortion, depending on the state. She should remind her parents' "friend" what he's doing is illegal and if he doesn't leave her alone, she's going to the cops. In addition to banishment from the club and/or a "conference" with the bouncers, Mutually Assured Destruction should be enough to rein him in.

A: Good point. She should tell this dirty old man the cops will be alerted to his demands if he ever bothers her again.

Q. Ex-Teacher Engaged To Baby Sister: Imagine my surprise when my little sister's fiance turned out to be a man who taught us both high school math. He's 23 years older than she is, and he only recently obtained a divorce from his ex-wife. My husband and I correctly ascertained that my ex-teacher and my little sister were dating prior to his divorce. I try not to be a stick in the mud, but I'm having trouble adjusting to my soon-to-be-brother-in-law. He still treats me like a student, not like an equal, and a perhaps petty part of me wonders exactly when he began seeing my little sister. How can I work to accept this? He does seem to make my little sister happy.

A: I hope your future brother-in-law is not asking you to solve quadratic equations or saying, "If you got on a bus in Boston going 67 miles an hour and your friend got on a bus ..." He's divorced, they're engaged, and your sister is happy. So be happy for them. My guess is that in the long run your sister is going to need your support because unless he leaves the profession there may be other lovely young things who catch his eye.

Q. Gay Parents: My son is in second grade and a classmate of his has "two daddies." My son wants to go over to his friend's house to play, but we are nervous about this. I know my opinion is probably unpopular, but it is still my opinion: I do not know if this is a good environment for my son at his age. We do not talk about topics like homosexuality in our home. We do not want to field questions yet about these kinds of topics; we want him to be able to just be a kid instead of dealing with complex sexual issues. His friend plays at our house and he is a very nice boy, but eventually his "daddies" will want to know if my son can go to their house. How do we tactfully tell this couple that we would prefer if their son plays at our house? My sister thinks that I will just have to "get over it" and send my son over there. But isn't it my right to monitor environments and control influences for my children? I fear that children in modern society are exposed to far too much far too soon—what happened to letting kids just be kids?

A: So you think this little boy's home should be shunned in the name of letting kids be kids. You don't have to do a lot of explaining to second-graders. When my daughter was even younger than that we had a gay couple and a lesbian couple in our neighborhood who each had kids. We casually explained to my daughter—after she asked, which wasn't immediately—that usually kids have a mommy and daddy but sometimes kids have two mommies or two daddies. It was no big deal to her. I assume treating everyone with respect is a value you want to inculcate in your son. Letting him play at his friend's house will be a good way to put that in action.

Q. Grandchild's Baby Name: My son and daughter-in-law are expecting a girl in the next 10 weeks. They announced their baby name, and I find it rather distasteful. My daughter-in-law has been an avid Gone With the Wind fan and is using Scarlet as the middle name. The first name is a traditional girls’ name. I told my son, privately, that I think it is wrong to use a name like Scarlet as a middle name because her character in the book was not something a little girl should know about or aspire to be. My son told me that a middle name is hardly even used, usually just an initial is fine, and their daughter will be known by her traditional first name. Should I talk to my daughter-in-law about this?

A: Maybe you can hand your daughter-in-law a copy of The Scarlet Letter when she goes into labor. Apparently you also think Scarlett Johansson should hide her head in shame because of her "distasteful" name. Grandma, if you want to have a decent relationship with your daughter-in-law and your grandchild you will zip your trap and never, ever say anything except that this beautiful new baby has a lovely name that suits her.

Q. Guilt: Many years ago my daughter had a best friend, Maria, and the two girls were practically joined at the hip. One afternoon I found an envelope containing nearly $1,000 missing, and I had very good reasons to believe Maria took it. When I quietly confronted her, she became hysterical and said things that made no sense and contradicted each other. That evening I received an angry call from her mother who called me nasty names for accusing her daughter of being a thief, and I called her nasty names for raising one. Needless to say, the girls stopped being friends. My daughter also felt betrayed that her best friend would steal from her mom. Recently I discovered the envelope with cash stuck between the pages of an old book. I have no idea how it got there, but it's clear that Maria couldn't have been the person responsible. It has been almost 8 years since the incident, but I feel a tremendous amount of guilt. Should I contact Maria and offer her and her mother an apology? Or is the apology way overdue now?

A: Apologize to your daughter, Maria, and her mother. The people falsely accused in this awful incident should know the truth. It will be painful and embarrassing for you to do this, but even if Maria and her mother react badly, ultimately you should be proud of yourself for bearing up and doing the right thing. This is a good cautionary tale for people ready to accuse others of household theft.

Q. Boudoir Photos: I recently took some boudoir photos (classy but also sexy) of myself for my fiance as part of his groom’s gift. I went to a reputable photographer. I wanted to enjoy this part of my live when I have a great body so some day I can look back and remember what my mid-‘20s were like. We will have plenty of stuffy photos from our traditional ceremony. Yesterday my fiance started talking about how much he hates boudoir photos because a friend of his just got some as a groom’s gift. Mine are already done! Should I hang onto them myself and keep them or toss them out? Or still give them to him? I thought this would be a great gift, but apparently I was wrong.

A: This is something that two people should be able to laugh about for many years to come. Instead of giving them as a groom's gift, I think you should make the big reveal now and say something like, "I agree that Lacey's boudoir photos are probably junk. But if you wanted to see some that are both erotic and tasteful, take a look at these."

Q. Slow and Steady: I live with stage IV cancer and have done so for almost five years, knock on wood. Friends and colleagues know of my situation and they can see I live a great life—full-time job, great friends, great dog, etc. No one asks if I’ve "beaten it" because I've educated them that some metastatic cancers can be managed as a chronic, rather than terminal illness. And they're thrilled for me. I'm heavily monitored and do a monthly treatment. At my last treatment, my oncologist told me that my cancer may be slowly gaining strength again and I will have to go on a more rigorous cycle of treatment. In addition to being fearful, I am anxious for anyone to know about this, other than my sister and a close friend. What do I say to my friends who ask me how things are going? I may be more fatigued and not as cheery as I normally am. Your advice would be greatly appreciated.

A: I hope your new treatment is effective and quick. You can tell people the truth, "I'm hanging in, but my doctors have me on a new drug that unfortunately is rather fatiguing." You mention your great friends, so please know that if you need rides, food delivered, your dog walked, they want to help. You don't have to go into detail about your cancer, but you can let them know that the new drugs are knocking you out and that their assistance is appreciated. Your sister could set up a website (Lotsa Helping Hands is one) for people to sign up to do tasks for you and she can mention on it that since you need to preserve your energy, now is not a good time for socializing.

Q. Losing My Self Respect: I got married and moved to the USA. I love my husband. I used to be independent, and used to always believe in equality. I believed that husbands and wives have equal rights. But my husband becomes abusive occasionally. I told his family and my family about it, and they keep telling me that I should find ways to avoid situations which cause him to get that way. The problem is I have to be careful giving my opinion now, because anything could lead to an argument and then could get physical. I don’t want to leave him, because most of the time he is a good person. But I'm torn between my principles, self-respect and dignity, and letting myself down to avoid him getting mad at me. What is the right way to tackle this?

A: It's the rare abuser who's noxious all the time—then there's no incentive for the victim to stay. Your family's advice is terrible. No one should tiptoe through life to avoid getting hit or harangued. If you want to try to save the marriage, tell your husband you need counseling because this is not the marriage you signed up for. If he refuses, your situation is complicated by the fact that you are not a citizen. So find a lawyer who can talk you through the steps you need to take to get free. And if your husband hits you again, call the police.

Q. Accused of Theft: I was falsely accused of stealing (shop-lifting at a local store) when I was 10. My mom stood by me, but 20 years later it still stings because I was innocent. I would love an apology from that person because it’s nice to be vindicated. Send a note of apology. It costs you nothing and will likely make her feel better.

A: It's an awful thing to be falsely accused—I agree the mother needs to step up and clear this child.

Q. Family Issues: My father died unexpectedly in April, and it's been a tough year for my mother, sister and me. My mom seems to have handled things about as well as could be expected, and after I recently mentioned that I was considering joining a dating site she told me that she had considered making a profile as well. I was surprised, but not upset—I had been secretly worrying that maybe she would choose to be alone the rest of her life. I told her I would be OK with it because I wanted her to have companionship. My sister, however, called me and flipped out. Sis thinks that Mom is trying to "replace" Dad. She says she can't believe Mom would consider this, since it hasn't even been a year. When I cautiously said I wasn't that upset about it, my sister got mad and hung up the phone. Should I be more upset/concerned that my mom is thinking about trying to date again? Should I also be worried that it's too soon? My sister has always been a drama queen, but she made me feel guilty for not being as riled up as she was. Or am I being too cavalier about the whole thing?

A: Your mother doesn't need her daughters' permission to seek companionship. You might tell your sister her reaction has you concerned that she hasn't completely dealt with your father's death and maybe she should see a grief counselor. Reassure her that your mother is not seeking to, and never could, replace your father. But it is a good sign that she feels ready to date. Tell your mother you're pleased she is coming out of her mourning and that it's unfortunate your sister is reacting so badly to these positive steps.

Q. Made Friend Cry: I have a work friend who, over the last several years, has spilled over into personal friend. She is a VERY high maintenance person; plus I always have to watch my tone and what I say/or how I say something, as she will jump down your throat at the drop of a pin. Today, I came in with a haircut that was much shorter than it has been in a year. Last time I cut my hair this way she constantly referred to me at fuzz head and told me I looked like her dog. First thing this morning when she walked into my office, I got the fuzz head/dog remark. In the past I had just let it roll off my shoulders, but it being Monday and me being tired, I told her—did not snap—that it hurt my feelings when she called me that and please to not do it anymore. She started crying and said she did not mean it that way and has now stopped talking to me. Question: count my blessings or apologize?

A: Blessings! Now that you know a cross word will send her into a silent snit, be ready to say, "Bad dog!" every day at the coffee machine.

Q. Semi-Famous Blogger Crosses a Line?: My daughter is in second grade and is good friends with a girl whose mother writes a blog that has extensive readership. I read her blog and she is very careful to never mention any of her daughter's friends by name or post their photo. However, she posts her daughter's photo and writes blog posts about her frequently. In the past few weeks, my daughter and some of their other friends have started wanting their parents to write about them, too. I think these girls are at the age where female competition rears its ugly head and they are jealous that their friend is broadcasted on the Internet for lots of people to see when they are not. Is this something I should bring up with this girl’s mother? If I were her, I would want to know that my actions were causing some friction between young girls.

A: Does the blogging mom have a video link to her daughter's birth? I'm going to guess that in just a few years the other girls will be very glad their mother is not telling the world about how their puberty is going. Let the blogging mother do as she wishes, but it would be fun if you and your daughter created a scrapbook together of your child's adventures.

Q. Daughter's Adoptive Baby: I have been reading you for ages. My daughter is a very successful businesswoman, a senior vice president at a company you would recognize. She is also 37 and single, sacrificing a personal life for a professional one. Lately she has been exploring the option of adopting a foreign baby and being a single mother. I tried to explain to her that celebrities make this look far more glamorous than it actually is. I told her that she chose a career over a family quite some time ago and trying to have both now is going to be extremely difficult. She got upset and told me that what she is doing is perfectly normal. My husband and I are divorced, and I know how hard being a single mom can be. How can I explain this to her differently?

A: You can stop projecting your life on hers and support her if she decides to take this step. If you live nearby, I hope you would be part of a support system—that you would want to be—for her grandchild. Of course being a single mother is hard, but a competent professional like your daughter will have the financial means and the organizational skills to make this work as well as it can. It is rather cruel of you to say to your child that her dedication to her career means she must forgo motherhood.

Q. Housekeeper: This is a problem I am sure a lot of people would love to have. My boyfriend and I are in our late 20s and we both have good salaries. We talked about moving in together and we are fairly compatible. But here is the thing: He has a housekeeper. (That sound you hear is all my girlfriends rolling their eyes.) I do not think we need a housekeeper. Two people keeping a two bedroom apartment clean should be manageable. He thinks that if he hates to clean and can afford to pay somebody else he should. While I can't see anything outright wrong with that, part of me feels like he is indulgent and immature. I don't like to do a lot of things, but I do them anyway. He told me that if we let the housekeeper go then I will be totally responsible for all the cleaning. I think that is also unreasonable. Why can't he just pick up after himself? What if we can't afford a housekeeper in the future? Will he have any idea how to be self-reliant? Is it so wrong that I think we should be responsible for keeping such a small space clean?

A: Please dump this guy so he can find someone who will appreciate that a man who wants to pay someone a fair wage to keep his apartment clean is a keeper.

Q. Neighbor With Chickens: My neighbor has chickens that she keeps in a coop in her fenced backyard. As her immediate neighbor, sometimes when the wind blows a scent into our yard that is noticeable, but not terrible. My dogs are very interested in the smell of the chickens and spend a great deal of time scratching at our shared fence. This irritates my husband because he thinks that the whole purpose of a fence is to let the dogs out without constant supervision and now there are unsightly scratch marks. My husband checked the zoning in our neighborhood and the subdivision policy and both of them forbid owning chickens. My husband wants to report her and to get the chickens removed. I am not sure if this is necessary. I am sure owning chickens in a residential neighborhood is a fad that will go away soon and it does not bother us enough to justify reporting a neighbor and potentially sticking her with a fine. We decided to go to Prudie (and her readers!) with help on this issue. Is it worth it to potentially upset a neighbor and stick her with a fine for a mild inconvenience on our part?

A: A neighbor with an illegal chicken coup should be smart enough to give those living nearby an occasional clutch of fresh eggs as an incentive to keep quiet. Even in the absence of chickens my dog barks loudly at every bird, squirrel, and leaf. I agree with you that making an enemy of your neighbor because your dogs are interested in their chicken coop seems scrambled.

Q. Domestic Abuse and Visas—Important: Here's an article from the Post that explains a bit about the options for women who are victims of domestic abuse. To summarize: this is one area of immigration law that we've gotten right, finally!

A: Thanks for the link.

Emily Yoffe: Thanks, everyone. Have a great week, talk to you next Monday.

Discuss this column with Emily Yoffe on her Facebook page.

All Aboard (Not)

Emily Bazelon — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:24:19 GMT

Last February, exactly one year ago, my children spent three and a half hours by themselves on an Amtrak train ride from New Haven, Conn., to Philadelphia. It was a perfectly functional day that all of us remember fondly—the kind that makes you bless public amenities like train service. I was happy because I got to drop the kids off at the train station instead of spending an entire day making the trek to their grandparents’ with them and back. Eli and Simon, who at the time were 11 and 8, were pleased that they successfully fended for themselves (and ate all the pizza they wanted along the way). And my parents were of course glad to pick up the children from the nice attendant whose job it was to deliver them, and delighted to spend the long weekend with them.

At the end of said weekend, the children made their way back, feeling like trusty Amtrak veterans. And also like people who could be trusted to sit calmly and read a book or play cards. Not grown-ups, but not little kids, either. When I picked them up from a second nice attendant, who conscientiously checked my ID before handing them off, I was filled with praise for rail travel and its allowance for a rare moment of childhood independence. Hooray for Amtrak! Hooray for giving children small but meaningful chances to show they can navigate some carefully cordoned parts of the world on their own!

Actually, I take it all back. Because that’s what Amtrak has done, and I curse them for it. Children may no longer take the train alone, I discovered Monday, in a sad bit of news that has wrecked our plans for this February break and made me rue anew our hand-holding, paranoid culture. Amtrak has suddenly decided that Eli and Simon are no longer old enough to be trusted to ride the train by themselves. Never mind that they are a year older and wiser than they were last February, and never mind the nice attendants and the careful hand-offs to designated adults who present identification. Apparently, none of it is enough to keep our dear not-so-little ones safe anymore. Or maybe Amtrak just didn’t feel like dealing. In any case, for no apparent good reason they have changed the rules, which is infuriating and, as is so often the case with switch-ups like this, even worse than it would have been if we’d never had last year’s taste of freedom at all.

I will try to stop ranting long enough to explain, or rather to let Amtrak explain. Previously, children between the ages of 8 and 13 could travel as unaccompanied minors in precisely the way I’ve described: One adult handed them off to an attendant at one end, with paperwork designating exactly who was to pick them up at the other end. As of last November, however, a child must be between the ages of 13 and 15 to ride the train under these terms. Eli will have his bar mitzvah—he will be an adult according to Jewish law—before he’s allowed to ride on his own again. And even then, Simon won’t be able to come along, because if you’re under 13, your older brother isn’t a good enough companion. Someone over the age of 18 has to be your chaperone.

In an MSNBC story announcing the change, Amtrak had this to say:

“This is not in response to any incidents,” Jeff Snowden, Amtrak senior director of service delivery, said in a statement, but “out of an abundance of concern for the comfort and safety of all our travelers.”

Also, per MSNBC:

Under the old rules, children traveling as unaccompanied minors were issued wristbands that had to be worn for the duration of their trip. The new rules lift that requirement, in part because those wristbands too easily identified a traveler’s age. “Also, if a specific train station ran out of wristbands we’d have to deny travel to that child because of no fault of their own,” said Amtrak spokesperson Marc Magliari. He called the new set of rules “more customer friendly.”

Emphasis mine, because come on. More customer-friendly? How is it “customer-friendly” to eliminate a plan that makes customers’ lives easier—especially when it has been operating without a hitch? No child has gotten lost or stolen or even locked in the bathroom, Amtrak reports. And hey, if the problem really is missing wristbands, how about pinning a note on a kid’s coat? It is a tried and true strategy that worked for all those children evacuated from London during World War II. Also Paddington Bear.

I’m quite certain that Amtrak’s shifting attitude toward children has little to do with missing wristbands, but instead is about a company (is it a company even though it’s funded in part by our tax dollars?) streamlining procedures and minimizing inconvenience—for their benefit, not ours. When I reached Magliari, he said that in the last several years the trains have become busier. “There is more for the conductors to do, more fares to collect, and they need to be able to safely take care of everyone on the train, both under the age of 18 and over.” Oh that sanctimonious trump card of a word, safely. And it’s not just about the kids’ safety either—apparently the presence of children has become an endangerment to all the other passengers, too.

Fearing that my kids may never leave home alone again, I checked on whether they can still fly as unaccompanied minors. And yes, happily, this still seems to be a possibility, for the right price, for children ages 5 and up, though often only if they are flying nonstop. I am glad to hear that the airlines have not become as childphobic as Amtrak, but the train is a lot more convenient and less expensive, at least if you live on the Eastern Seaboard. My children will not be flying from New Haven to Boston to visit my husband’s parents this week. And anyway, I wonder if it’s only a matter of time before the flights end, too. After all, surely there is some liability issue someone somewhere could raise, some possibility that something, somewhere in transit, could go wrong.

Because increasingly, it seems to me, that’s what our society’s attitude toward kids boils down to: Stay away, they might break. This is particularly unfortunate because the far more present danger, child psychologists like Wendy Mogel argue, is that children will never learn to make their own way, to solve their own problems, to rely on themselves and their own good sense. But all of that goes by the wayside once risk-averse adults start imagining what might happen if kids are allowed to venture anywhere at all on their own. If, for just a few hours, they’re outside the control of their parents or teachers.

They are such a drag, stupid officious policy changes like this one. They make children’s worlds that much more cramped and constricted, and they make parents’ lives that much harder. (If you see my husband stuck in traffic on I-84, give him a wave; he’ll need some cheer on his hours-long round-trips.) It’s all supposed to be for the good of the kids, but it’s not really for them at all.

And so I have a plea to make, on behalf of Eli and Simon: Dear Amtrak, please let us back on the train! We’ll learn to love your railroad as we look out the window and watch New England roll by. You’ll help us grow up, just a little bit. And we’ll be good, like all those other kids who have gotten where they were going without incident. We promise.

More Single Moms. So What.

Katie Roiphe — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:15:19 GMT

The New York Times may as well have headlined its most emailed piece this weekend: Single Mothers Take Over the World. The point of the piece, with its peculiar moral undertone, was that the majority of babies born to women under 30 in this country are now born to single mothers, and in Lorain, Ohio, that number has climbed as high as 63 percent.

Conservatives will no doubt be elaborately hysterical over the breakdown of morals among the women of Lorain, but they will be missing the major point, which is that however one feels about it, the facts of American family life no longer match its prevailing fantasies. For those who have associated single motherhood with the poor and uneducated, and increasingly, with the urban very-educated (see the New York Times piece, the same day, on Casey Greenfield) they now have to confront the changing demographics of the vast American middle. No matter how one sees this development, and as a single mother myself I have my own views, one has to recognize that marriage is very rapidly becoming only one way to raise children. (And other countries are obviously way ahead of the United States in incorporating a rational recognition of the vicissitudes of love, and the varieties of family life, into cultural attitudes toward unmarried parents.)

One of the ways condescension makes its way into a neutral seeming New York Times story is the note the reporter chooses to end the piece on. Both of the two pieces on the single mothers of Lorain, Ohio, this weekend end with implicit judgments, with anecdotes that telegraph the unhealthiness of this new state of affairs, or whisper to the reader: “How do these women think they can get away with it?”

One ends with a freighted quote from a single mother saying she would like to do more with her daughter. (Actually it claims she would agree with a professor from Bowling Green State University’s vague conclusion that children born to married parents “experience better education, social, cognitive and behavioral outcomes”) Apparently she would agree with this professor because she would like to do more with her 6-year-old, but she often falls asleep after working full time and taking nursing classes. As if that feeling of wishing you could spend more or better time with your child is unknown to the married working mother, who of course never feels that she is too tired or distracted to do something she wanted to do with her 6-year-old, and anyway has a roast chicken in the oven, and a homemade pie cooling on the windowsill.

The Times reporters’ analysis of the economics and sociology of Lorain is punctuated by a pat “meanwhile, children happen” that is perhaps not quite as respectful as it could be of the fact that these independent-minded, apparently hard-working women are making decisions and forging families, after thinking clearly about their situation. One of the mothers quoted in the pieces says that to her and her friends “marriage is just a piece of paper.” Meaning of course that it does not ensure eternal love, or even eternal security, acknowledging, perhaps, that the father in the home is not necessarily more happily or fruitfully involved than the father outside of the home. Others describe the economic realities of not needing a man to support children, feeling the men around are too childish, or criminal, or jobless to help much, and not feeling a stigma about having a child outside of marriage. (By the time one finishes these strangely inflected articles, they seem to be arguing that these women should feel a stigma about having children out of wedlock.)

Of course, one of the reasons children born outside of marriage suffer is the culturally ubiquitous idea that there is something wrong or abnormal about their situation. Once it becomes clear that there is, at least, nothing abnormal about their situation, i.e. when this 53 percent of babies born to women under 30 come of age in the majority, the psychological landscape, at least, will be vastly transformed.

Even people who are certain that the children of single mothers are always and forever doomed to a compromised existence, are going to have to await more information about a world in which these kids are not considered illegitimate or unconventional or outsiders, where the sheer number of them redefines and refreshes our ideas of family.

In fact, the tacit judgment of the New York Times-style liberal is in many ways more pernicious than the overt moralizing of conservatives on the downfall of family and marriage. It is easy to dismiss the Santorum faction for its cartoonishly old-fashioned view of extramarital sex, and this group is at least forthright about its view, whereas the subtle psychologizing put-down of the New York Times-style liberal, the slight hint of self-congratulation that they are not a single mother in Lorain, Ohio, bringing their son to the bar where they work, is more poisonous for its pretense of fairness and open-mindedness.

This is a new world, and there are no studies or professors from Bowling Green State University, or subtly condescending New York Times reporting, that can tell us what it will be like for these children to live in it.

Lunch With Shaw-Lan Wang

David Pilling — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 11:30:00 GMT

Madame Wang enters the room at some velocity. The first thing I notice are her super-large eyebrows, arched like croquet hoops above her heavily made-up eyelids. Then I take in her fashionable haircut, short with a jagged fringe. Her hair is dyed dark auburn, edged with little tufts of smoky grey. Next I register her Mandarin-collared qipao in leopard-skin print, slit to the thigh. I know it is a qipao because she later tells me emphatically in her raspy, helium-filled voice: “I always wear my Chinese dress. I am not Japanese. This is a Chinese qipao. It is not a kimono.” Over it is a black, cowl-neck vest. The outfit is finished off – if that’s the word – with a chunky lord-mayor’s-style neck chain.

Normally when journalists write about what women are wearing, they get letters complaining that they would never discuss men in the same way. That may be true. But the 70-year-old Madame Wang is the owner of Lanvin, the oldest surviving French fashion house, which she bought in 2001 and helped revive. To talk about what she is wearing seems appropriate, even essential. For the record, I am dressed in a grey suit, slightly rumpled after two cramped flights, one overnight, and a floral-patterned shirt by Marks and Spencer.

We are in Taipei, where Shaw-Lan Wang was brought up after moving to Taiwan from mainland China at the age of seven. Specifically, we are in a 34th-floor dining room in the luxurious surroundings of the Taipei World Trade Center Club. I had arrived early and been ushered into the private room by a posse of women in grey skirt-suits. In the room, small but perfectly appointed, is a round table with a white tablecloth already set for two.

After she catches her breath, Madame Wang, as she refers to herself, reaches into her mouth to remove a piece of gum. She secretes the little green ball in her handbag, Lanvin presumably. Wang rarely gives interviews. She seems unsure as to how this one came about. “How did you get in touch? Through my PR in Paris?” she asks. I am not entirely sure either, since the encounter was also arranged for me. Yet somehow here we are, thrown together in this little windowless room of a Taipei skyscraper.

Madame Wang was born in 1941, the Year of the Snake. Although her family was from the coastal province of Zhejiang, she started out life in Chongqing, the wartime capital after the fall of Nanjing to the Japanese. Her father, a colonel in the army of Chiang Kai-shek, the Guomindang leader, came to Taiwan in 1947. Two years later Chiang himself led a full-scale retreat to the island after being routed by Mao Zedong’s Communist forces.

In 1951, her father founded the United Daily News, a staunch supporter of the Guomindang authoritarian government. Wang, who studied journalism in Taipei, worked as a reporter on the paper. She married an air force pilot and went to live in Switzerland with her husband, where she spent 12 to 15 years. She doesn’t remember exactly. One day, she received a phone call from her father asking her to return to Taiwan and run the paper. “I could not refuse.”

“What do you like to eat? You like kitchen or beef?” she asks. I take the former to mean chicken. Madame Wang’s English, spoken choppily and with the hint of a French accent, is less than perfect, though it is leagues ahead of my terrible Chinese. She speaks with little concession to English grammar, omitting pronouns, tenses and even verbs and nouns. Gaps are filled with the most splendid mimes. Over the course of lunch, she acts out blind, shortsighted, dizzy, happy, drunk, dead, injured, crazy, terrified and a few other things besides. Much is achieved through facial expression. On several occasions, in place of saying “good”, she jabs her upturned thumb in my direction. Once, in somewhat less generous mood, she brings her hands together and twists as if strangling a chicken.

She orders several dishes. The waitress returns with succulent cold cuts of chicken, pork and duck. As Madame Wang takes a bite of the accompanying kimchee, I ask how her newspaper is surviving competition with the internet. “It’s not enjoyable to get information from the internet,” she says. “A good book can touch your heart. But I have never had anything touch my heart on the internet.” But has the internet touched her sales? How is the paper faring in the face of online competition? “The quality of the press is going down all around the world,” she persists. “People have lost respect for the press.”

Two plates of grilled beef arrive. “Chinese style,” she announces. I abandon my internet inquiries – she isn’t sure whether her newspaper charges for its online version – and move to her more recent passion, Lanvin. How did she come to buy the struggling fashion house and how, in particular, did she come to hire Alber Elbaz, the designer whose appointment has transformed its fortunes? The purchase of Lanvin is easy. “I have a friend in Hong Kong and he has dressed in Lanvin for more than 30 years. I thought, ‘He would be very proud if I was the owner.’”

As for Elbaz, the Moroccan-born designer had been pushed out of Yves Saint Laurent after it was bought by Gucci. Embarking on a spiritual world odyssey, Elbaz contemplated giving up design altogether to become a doctor. Instead, he called Wang out of the blue, imploring her to bring him to Lanvin. “Please wake up the Sleeping Beauty,” he said. “I was in Cannes with a friend on a big boat,” Wang recalls. “Alber called, ‘Can I meet you?’ I say, ‘Of course. I will come to Paris.’” She had never heard of Elbaz, but has been quoted as saying she “smelt something meaty and fragrant” about him. To me she says: “He showed me his press book. The first fashion show, he called ‘Homage to Yves Saint Laurent’. Good, I thought. He knows respect. I was introduced to a lot of people. But with them I didn’t have that feeling.”

Whether or not it was the meaty smell, Wang’s instinct has served Lanvin splendidly. Under Elbaz, its reputation and sales have flourished. He makes clothes with a classic cut, to be worn year after year, not just for one season. “Alber’s dresses make women feel beautiful and easy. The first show he did was for winter. The fabric is quite thick. But all the dresses could swing. It’s because of the cut. Normally, thick fabric is very stiff. But he makes you dance with your dress.”

A steamed fish appears, evidently too early. Wang sends it away. Elbaz’s dresses are not overly revealing, she says, miming flesh spilling out of a low-cut dress. “They don’t show everything.” I had read that Elbaz didn’t like his clothes to be thought of as sexy, certainly not in the full-on way associated with Gucci’s Tom Ford, the man who deposed him at Yves Saint Laurent. “I don’t think so,” she says. “Sexy is good. It’s a compliment. But you have to have class. Not ... ” She leaves the sentence unfinished but treats me to another mime of a bosom bulging out of a dress.

The fish reappears. This time it has been cut in two, the part with the head for her, the tail for me. “Everybody loves Alber’s dresses,” she is saying. “Before I [used to] say Alber’s dress is for anyone from 18 to 81.” But she recently met an 85-year-old Chinese artist wearing a Lanvin dress. “So pretty.” Wang’s granddaughter, who is just 11 and evidently being groomed for greatness, also wears Lanvin. “The dresses are very elegant and simple, so the range of our customer is very big.”

I ask if she enjoys the fashion shows, the parties and the glamour. “Alber and my director go the parties. Not me,” she says, spitting out some fish bones into her hand. “I don’t like those kind of people or those kind of parties. I am not a jet-set person.” She has lots of famous friends but she meets them in private, she says, reeling off names of actors, actresses and kung fu stars. She’s off on a tangent, telling a story about when Jackie Chan annoyed the Taiwanese by suggesting that Chinese people needed to be controlled and that democracy in Taiwan was chaotic. “Jackie, he’s very honest and straight. I called him and said, ‘You are great. You have a very big market. If people here are stupid, don’t come.’”

We talk about the recent thaw in relations between Taiwan and mainland China. Although she is an anti-communist and counts among her friends several Tiananmen Square dissidents, she says the government in Beijing has changed. “Now, I agree with what they are doing. They are disciplined. Before you have the law, don’t give too much freedom,” she says, wagging her finger. “You have to teach people to respect the law, even if the law is bad.”

The waitress brings in some lusciously green and crisp snow peas with scallops. There’s barely room on the table. She continues on the China-Taiwan theme, saying it has been more than 60 years since the two separated. But unification is not so easy, she says, referring to the strong sense of Taiwanese independence. “We Chinese all have patience. Next generation, let’s see what that brings. I think in China one day, if they have freedom of the press and liberty of election, we can negotiate to become one big China.

“We have no reason to hate each other. The Japanese killed many, many Chinese and Asian people. Why don’t the people hate the Japanese?” she asks, referring to the relatively warm relations between the Taiwanese and their former Japanese colonists. “War kills, but not the way the Japanese kill. They use ... ” here she mimes the stabbing action of a bayonet. “They kill women and babies with their cruel methods. People say forgive, but I say, ‘I cannot.’”

To this day, she says, she refuses to meet Japanese people, notwithstanding the fact that she is currently negotiating to buy back the Japanese licence to Lanvin, previously sold to trading house Itochu. “It doesn’t matter what title they have. If people say, ‘Madame Wang, this is such and such,’ I never give my hand. I never say hello to Japanese.” She turns her head disdainfully. “Bye bye. I don’t care what they think.”

The waitress offers to wrap up the left-overs. “For my driver,” says Wang. Two egg tarts and two portions of taro pudding are served. The egg tart, with divinely crumbly pastry, is the best I’ve tasted. I had read somewhere that she compares the dual role of newspaper magnate and fashion-house baroness to having a husband and a lover. Which is which? “Who told you I said that?” she flashes back. “Since my husband died I don’t have any lover. So how can I compare my husband to a lover?”

The important thing is to throw yourself into both. “If you run a business, you have to love this business with all your heart. Before, when I ran a newspaper, I sleep for maybe two, three hours a day. I am so excited.” Now she has cut back and handed over day-to-day management to her nephew. With Lanvin, too, her strategy has been to step back and give Elbaz the freedom to create.

The waitress brings pear and papaya. I nervously broach the subject of who should pay for this feast. Wang’s assistant had warned previously that, under no circumstances, would Madame Wang allow the FT to pay. I try anyway. “I am meant to invite you,” I say timidly. “The FT really does insist on paying.” The riposte is swift and brutal. “Here in China, no. Never, never, never,” she shrieks. “This is my domain. Even if you are Chinese, you cannot pay.”

I figure it is useless. Besides, she is already wrapping up, telling me that on no account am I to refer to her as a Taiwanese businesswoman. “I don’t consider myself Tai-wan-ese,” she says, drawing out the word. “I am Chinese. And I don’t consider myself a businesswoman either,” she adds without explanation. Then she softens. “It’s true, I am a woman. That I cannot say anything about.”

This article originally appeared in Financial Times. Click here to read more coverage from the Weekend FT.

When Did I Ever Refuse an Accommodation?

Claire Wrathall — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 12:05:00 GMT

“Opening a hotel,” says Francis Ford Coppola, “is a lot like shooting a movie.”

We are sitting in the ground-floor bar of Palazzo Margherita, which opened last Thursday in Bernalda, the small hill town in Basilicata, Italy, from which Coppola’s grandfather, Agostino, emigrated to New York in 1904.

“A film needs a big idea. After that it’s a matter of incredible attention to detail,” he explains. “Here the concept is a 19th-century palazzo with a patina of age. But then there are a million details to get right if it’s to work as a 21st-century hotel. In a movie, the details are the things an audience will notice. In a hotel it’s everything the guests experience.”

Palazzo Margherita has been in production for six years, longer than it took to make Apocalypse Now, and Coppola has been closely involved at every stage. “I like to make decisions,” he says, and goes on to describe choosing everything from china and cutlery to what will be in the mini-bars. “I am not just a person who licenses his name.” But then he’s been thinking about Bernalda since childhood, having grown up with stories of this “mythical” place. “‘Bernalda bella’, my grandfather called it. We believed it must be like Brigadoon or something.”

A week before opening, however, he’s preoccupied with practicalities. Over lunch he had given the kitchen staff “notes” on how a “New York mafia dish” of chicken, mushrooms and rustic Italian sausage might be improved. It needed rosemary, maybe some oregano and the addition of little artichokes. The salsiccia secca should be sliced more thinly. And it should be served sizzling on a cast-iron platter, not in a terracotta dish. Later, our conversation is interrupted by the delivery of a sample shower door: the etching of the hotel’s monogram needs refining, he thinks, so back it goes.

For Coppola likes to get things right. It’s an abiding regret, he mentions as an aside, that the paterfamilias in the first two parts of The Godfather is addressed as Don Corleone, when correctly he should have been Don Vito (“don”, like “sir”, precedes a first name). Fortunately Dean Tavoularis, the Oscar-winning production designer who first worked with Coppola in 1972, is on hand to advise on issues such as the positioning of shaving mirrors in the bathrooms. “Dean”, says Coppola deliberately, “has a very good eye.”

Palazzo Margherita is Coppola’s fifth and most obviously luxurious hotel. The first, Blancaneaux Lodge, a jungle retreat in Belize, opened in 1993, after 11 years as a family holiday home. It was followed by Turtle Inn, again in Belize, on the coast, and La Lancha in neighbouring Guatemala. I have stayed at all of them and still consider them among the loveliest places I know: simple (no phones, no TVs, no air conditioning), rustic, sensitive to their wilderness settings and decorated in impeccable taste. In 2009 he also opened a six-room townhouse, Jardin Escondido, in Buenos Aires.

In contrast, this one feels appropriately like a palace. Its splendid new interiors are the work of Jacques Grange, whose last hotel was the recently revamped Mark in New York, and subtly recall the great baroque palaces of the Castelli Romani near Rome, with exquisite new wall paintings, original frescoes, chandeliers, specially designed tiles and marmorino, a kind of stucco made from powdered marble, buffed to look like the real thing.

It’s a far cry from the humble village home Coppola stayed in when he first came here in 1962, soon after graduating from the film school at UCLA. He’d just won the Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award and “from being totally a pauper”, he suddenly had $2,600 as well as a job as a soundman on a movie Roger Corman was shooting in Europe. “So of course I bought a brand-new Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider to be picked up at the factory in Milano. When we finished the movie, I took a ferry to Brindisi and drove my nifty sports car to Bernalda.”

There he found his grandfather’s first cousin and many other relatives – today he reckons perhaps a quarter of the town’s 12,000 population are relations at some remove or other (another cousin, Donato Coppola, is renovating the palazzo next door) – and so began half a century’s association with the place.

“After I made The Godfather,” he continues, “I became very famous in Italy and Bernalda made me an honorary citizen. There was a whole festa to honour me.” But he never, he insists, felt he wanted a home there, certainly not a dilapidated palazzo. In 2005, however, Bianca Margherita, the octogenarian granddaughter of the olive-oil magnate who’d built the property, asked if he’d like to buy it. “She figured I was a sucker.”

His instinct was to decline, but then the actor Michele Russo, also a native of the town, whom Coppola had given a part in The Godfather III, alerted him to Law 488, a government initiative to encourage development in the south by offering substantial subsidy to projects such as hotels. “We worked up the plans to apply for it, were ruled eligible and went for it. But of course the project turned into something much bigger and complicated than I imagined. They wouldn’t let me put a swimming pool in the garden, because it’s listed, so I had to buy another piece of land for that ... ” Walls had to be reconfigured, vaulted ceilings reinforced, doorways relocated. Every original floor tile was raised, numbered, renovated and then replaced over underfloor heating. But the promised subsidy remained elusive. He is audibly bitter that he’s never seen a cent of it: “I still feel the Italian government owes me because I played by the rules.”

Whatever the torments of its creation, the resulting hotel is a triumph: a beautiful one-off that feels more like a home than a hotel. There’s not even a sign on its ornate façade: just a house number (64), a buzzer and a modest doorway cut into a tall wooden gate. Step through it and you find yourself in an elegant courtyard, which in turn leads through a balustraded arcade into a luxuriant exotic garden, cross-hatched by brick paths and shaded by palm, pine, olive, fig and citrus trees.

The hotel has just nine rooms, six in the palazzo and three in former stables on the southern edge of the garden. There isn’t a restaurant in the conventional sense. Rather there’s a huge table that seats 12 in the brick-vaulted kitchen, where two local women, Filomena and Enza, produce delicious, unfussy meals of a kind you might be offered in someone’s home: antipasti, hearty soups, pasta, meat or fish preceded in the Italian style by a plate of local vegetables and, finally, homemade pastries filled with custard or whipped ricotta.

If the communal table seems too close to the pizza oven, those who’d rather dine privately can do so anywhere in the courtyard, the garden, the grand salone (which doubles as a screening room), their bedroom, their terrace (assuming they’re in rooms 9 or 4, those favoured, respectively, by Coppola and his film-director daughter Sofia, hence high-season rates in four figures). There are also two bars: an intimate upstairs one for guests and another public space with its own street entrance, a pizza menu and walls hung with monochrome photographs of actors and filmmakers who have worked at the Cinecittà studios in Rome.

Self-effacingly, there’s no portrait of Coppola among them. Nor do any of the 30-plus films he’s directed feature in the extensive library of classic Italian or Italy-set movies loaded on to the television in each room. You will, though, find wines from his Californian vineyards on the winelist, along with wines grown locally in Basilicata and Puglia and from Château Thuerry in Provence, which belongs to Sofia’s father-in-law.

There isn’t a spa or gym (though there are bikes), but the sweeping sands of the Ionian coast lie less than 10 miles away and the hotel has rights to open its own beach club on an as-yet undeveloped stretch, to which it will run a shuttle. In the meantime, they recommend the beach at Riva dei Ginepri.

There’s another lido near Metaponto, a 20-minute drive away, site of the ancient Greek colony, founded about 600BC, where Pythagoras hit on his theorem and now home to a museum of antiquities.

Bernalda itself is less obviously an attraction, for in the century or so since Agostino Coppola judged it “bella” it has rather lost its looks. But it’s not without appeal. There is a squat 15th-century Aragonese castle and a couple of handsome churches. Coppola calls it “the real Italy, authentic Italy – Italy as it was”, praising its restaurants, its festas, its languorous way of life. “Far from the traffic of men,” was how Carlo Levi described this wild, remote area in Christ Stopped at Eboli, his memoir of a year spent in exile in a village 25 miles from Bernalda in 1935. Outwardly it may seem a closed society, “another world which no one can enter without a magic key”, as Levi observed. But such is the celebrity, the popularity, of Don Francis that guests at his palazzo may feel they too have been handed the keys to the town.

This article originally appeared in Financial Times. Click here to read more coverage from the Weekend FT.

You Don’t Need a Kitchen To Be a Chef

Brian Palmer — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:56:00 GMT

My daily homework in third grade was to write down a word and its definition from the dictionary. One day, the kid next to me forgot to do the assignment. As the teacher passed through the aisles, sharing our polysyllabic selections aloud, my seatmate borrowed my dictionary and scribbled something down.

“Cook: to prepare with heat,” the teacher read from his journal.

I can’t recall any other vocabulary words we learned that school year, but I remember this incident in detail—the paperback dictionary, the name and face of the classmate who moved away that summer, and the disapproving glare the teacher gave him. I remember wondering why dictionary makers would include a word like cook. Everyone knows what it means. Why waste the paper?

That four-word definition has stayed with me for 25 years, though, because there’s value in recognizing the essence of what can become a complicated act. Cooking equals food plus heat. Nothing about food miles or amino acids. No mention of high-carbon knives or a panini press.

Most importantly, nothing about a kitchen. Kitchens are, admittedly, handy places to cook, in the same way that beds are great places for sleeping. But, just as you can sleep wherever you happen to be tired, you can cook anywhere so long as you have the essentials (food, heat). At any given time and place, I’m ready to whip up a stir-fry, a rice pilaf, or a couple of tacos. I call it guerrilla cooking.

It all started at work. Office kitchens—if it’s fair to call them that—are right up there with morgues and faux Irish pubs as the most depressing places to be at noon on a weekday. They’re usually windowless, filthy, and reeking of stale, microwaved cheese. They also have a feeling of class segregation, since the administrative staff tends to use them more often, while their executive overlords lunch out on the company dime. And who can blame the bosses? Nothing worth eating has ever come out of an office kitchen. It’s either frozen dinners or last night’s leftovers, entombed in a plastic container and revivified in the microwave. If you’re lucky, you might get a day-old homemade cookie that some office drone’s family refused to eat.

At my office, it wasn’t convenient to pop out and buy something, so I had to improvise. At first all I used was a cheap frying pan and an ordinary hot plate plugged into the outlet beneath my desk. (Don't worry, it takes a lot to trip an office circuit breaker.) I also experimented with an electric fondue pot, which served as heat source and cookware in one. Cooking in my office was probably against company policy—if the idea had ever occurred to the automatons in human resources—but no one ever noticed. I'd shut the door and let my office fill with the aroma of sautéed garlic and chopped cilantro.

Entry costs for guerrilla cooking are low. A serviceable hot plate runs less than 20 bucks, and you can get a top-class fondue pot for less than 50. Nonstick cookware is best, because soaking and scrubbing a pan in the communal sink inevitably leads to uncomfortable conversations about what you’re doing in that office of yours. (When co-workers found out I was cooking in my office, they usually gave a patronizing nod, raised their eyebrows, and said, “Interesting!”)

As for the food itself, you’ll need a box of kitchen essentials in small containers. Olive oil, salt and pepper, and bouillon cubes are extremely useful, but build your personal stash with additional herbs and spices to suit your needs. Keep it in your desk drawer and refill from home as needed, or adapt a toil etry case to the purpose and carry it to and from work everyday.

The key to guerrilla cooking is preparation. I recommend doing all of your knife work at home. A couscous pilaf is a great dish for beginners, because it requires no heat control. At home, dice onions, carrots, celery, and cauliflower in some combination to make two cups of vegetables, and put them in a zip-top bag. Store one cup of couscous and a tablespoon of paprika in a separate bag. In a third bag, put three-quarters of a cup of toasted and chopped almonds, walnuts, or cashews. The on-site preparation is easy. Sauté the vegetables. Add the couscous and paprika and cook for a minute or so, stirring. Add one-and-a-half cups of water, plus salt and one of your handy bouillon cubes, and bring to a boil. Cover, remove the pan from the heat, and let it sit for five minutes. Mix in the nuts. Voila. A fresh lunch in the privacy of your own office.

You can take it from here. Stir-fries, soups, frittatas, and quesadillas are obvious choices, but be creative. This is all about breaking rules. You don’t need an oven to make bread, cookies, or pizzas, if you get good at controlling the delivery of heat from stove to food. Scour the Internet for intriguing recipes, and adapt them to your minimalist set-up. Or look to camping cookbooks, and then adorn them with luxuries like white wine or fresh cheeses that you couldn’t take on a backpacking trip.

Once your culinary skills are off the leash, you can take your portable kitchen anywhere. Get a commercial camping stove and start cooking your lunch in the park across the street, or on the rooftop deck. If cost is an issue you can go totally rogue and jury-rig an alcohol burner from scratch. There are plenty of templates out there, but the most basic version consists of a tuna fish can filled with perlite rocks and denatured alcohol, then covered with an aluminum screen. (All those items are available for purchase at any hardware store.) Keep in mind that these burners produce an open flame, so you'll need to be prepared for mishaps. If you’re cooking indoors, open a window for ventilation or get a carbon monoxide monitor.

All this may sound like a hassle, but it's not. My entire alcohol stove set up fits inside a lightweight pot and weighs less than 6 ounces. And don’t worry about judgmental co-workers. They just don’t understand what cooking is all about. Food plus heat; it's that simple.

War Dogs

Aleksandar Hemon — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:45:00 GMT

The following essay is excerpted from the latest issue of Granta, the quarterly magazine of new writing. It is available online only in Slate. To read the complete version, click here to subscribe to Granta in print. For a limited time, Slate readers get a 25 percent discount.

My family’s first and only dog arrived in the spring of 1991. That April, my sister drove with her new boyfriend to Novi Sad, a town in northern Serbia hundreds of miles from Sarajevo, where there was an Irish-setter breeder she’d somehow tracked down. In her early 20s, my sister was still living with our parents, but she’d long asserted her unimpeachable right to do whatever she felt like. Thus, without even consulting Mama and Tata, with the money she’d saved from her modelling gigs, she bought a gorgeous, blazingly auburn Irish-setter puppy. When she brought him home, Tata was shocked—city dogs were self-evidently useless, a resplendent Irish setter even more so—and unconvincingly demanded that she return him immediately. Mama offered some predictable rhetorical resistance to yet another creature (after a couple of cats she’d had to mourn) she would worry about excessively, but it was clear she fell in love with the dog on the spot. Within a day or two he chewed up someone’s shoe and was instantly forgiven. We named him Mek.

***

In a small city like Sarajevo, where people are tightly interconnected and no one can live in isolation, all experiences end up shared. Just as Mek joined our family, my best friend Veba, who lived across the street from us, acquired a dog himself, a German shepherd named Don. Čika-Vlado, Veba’s father, a low-ranking officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army, was working at a military warehouse near Sarajevo where a guard dog gave birth to a litter of puppies. Veba drove over to his father’s workplace and picked the slowest, clumsiest puppy, as he knew that, if they were to be destroyed, that one would be the first one to go. Veba had been my sister’s first boyfriend and the only one I’d ever really liked. We were often inseparable, particularly after we’d started making music and playing in a band together. After my sister managed to get over their break-up, they renewed their friendship.

Soon after the puppies arrived, they’d take them out for a walk at the same time. I was no longer living with my parents, but often came home for food and family time, particularly after Mek’s arrival—I loved to take him out, my childhood dream of owning a pet fulfilled by my indomitable sister. Veba and I would walk with Mek and Don by the river, or sit on a bench and watch them roll in the grass, smoking and talking about music and books, girls and movies, while our dogs gnawed playfully at each other’s throats. I don’t know how dogs really become friends, but Mek and Don were as close friends as Veba and I were.

Much of the summer of 1991 I spent in Kiev, Ukraine, managing to be present for the demise of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s declaration of independence. That same summer, the war in Croatia progressed rapidly from incidents to massacres, from skirmishes to the Yugoslav People’s Army’s completely destroying the town called Vukovar. When I returned from Ukraine at the end of August, there was not fighting yet in Sarajevo—the siege would commence the following spring—but the war had already settled in people’s minds: fear, confusion and drugs reigned. I had no money, so a friend of mine offered me hack work on a porn magazine (he thought that people would want distraction from the oncoming disaster), but I declined, because I didn’t want bad sex writing (as though there were any other kind) to be the last thing I’d done if I were to be killed in the war. I packed a carful of books and moved up to our cabin on a mountain called Jahorina to read as many thick classical novels as possible (and write a slim volume of muddled stories) before the war consigned everything and all to death and oblivion. If I was going down, I was going down reading (and writing).

I stayed in the mountains from September to December. I read the fat classics (War and Peace, The Magic Mountain) and Kafka’s letters; I wrote stuff full of madness, death, and wordplay; I listened to music while staring at the embers in our fireplace; I chopped wood. At night, I could hear the tree branches over our cabin scratching the roof in the wind; the wooden frame creaked and, occasionally, the bell of a lost cow echoed through the dense night. Years later, I would struggle to perform exercises that were supposed to help me with managing my frequent outbursts of anger. On the advice of my therapist, I’d try to control my breathing while envisioning in detail a place I associated with peace and safety. I’d invariably invoke our cabin in the mountains: the smooth surface of the wooden table my father built without using a single nail; a cluster of old ski passes hanging under the mute cuckoo clock; the ancient fridge whose brand name—Obod Cetinje—were the first words I read by myself. The peace and safety belonged to the time I’d spent in the cabin, when reading in solitude cleared my mind and my hurt was healed by the crisp mountain air and ubiquitous pine smell.

Mek would also feature prominently in my anger-management visualizations. My parents and sister occasionally gave him leave to keep me company in the mountains. Before sleep, his steady breathing would calm me, distracting me from the cacophony of night sounds. In the early morning, his long warm tongue would wake me up, pasting my face with his happy saliva. He’d put his head in my lap as I read and I’d scratch him behind his ears. I’d go out hiking with him by my side, the thoughts generated by what I’d been reading racing in my head, just as Mek raced up and down the mountain slopes. When Veba came to visit me, we hiked together, while Mek and Don chased each other, stopping only to try to excavate phantom subterranean rodents.

We fantasized that, when the war came to Sarajevo, we could always retreat with our dogs to Jahorina and stay up here until it was all over.

***

The last time we went up to the mountains was to mark the arrival of 1992—we didn’t know then that the week we spent together would amount to a farewell party to our common Sarajevo life. Apart from my sister and me and our friends—10 humans in total—there were also three dogs: Mek, Don, and our friend Guša’s Laki, an energetic dog of indeterminate breed (Guša called him a cocktail spaniel). In the restricted space of a smallish mountain cabin, the humans would trip over the dogs, while they’d often get into their canine arguments and would have to be pulled apart. One night, playing cards into the wee hours, Guša and I got into a chest-thumping argument, which made the dogs crazy—there was enough barking and screaming to blow the roof off, but I recall that moment with warmth, for all the intense intimacy of our shared previous life was in it.

A couple of weeks later, I departed for the United States, never to return to our mountain cabin.

***

My sister and Veba remember the last time they took Mek and Don for a walk before the war started. It was April 1992, and there was shooting up in the hills around Sarajevo; a Yugoslav People’s Army plane menacingly broke the sound barrier above the city; the dogs barked like crazy. They said: “See you later!” to each other as they parted, but would not see each other for five years.

Soon thereafter, my sister followed her latest boyfriend to Belgrade. My parents stayed behind for a couple of weeks, during which time sporadic gunfire and shelling increased daily. I’d call from Chicago and ask how things were and my mother would say: “They’re already shooting less than yesterday.” More and more, they spent time with their neighbors in the improvised basement shelter. On May 2, 1992, with Mek in tow, Mama and Tata took a train out of Sarajevo before the relentless siege commenced—indeed, half an hour after the train left, the station was subject to a rocket attack; no other train would leave the city for 10 years or so.

My parents were heading to the village in northwestern Bosnia where my father was born, a few miles from the town of Prnjavor, which came under Serb control. My dead grandparents’ house still stood on a hill called Vučijak (translatable as Wolfhill). My father had been keeping beehives on my grandparents’ homestead and insisted on leaving Sarajevo largely because it was time to attend to the bees and prepare them for the summer. In willful denial of the distinct possibility that they might not return for a long time, they brought no warm clothes or passports, just a small bag of summer clothes. All they had was left in Sarajevo.

They spent the first few months of the war on Vučijak, their chief means of sustenance my father’s bee-keeping and my mother’s vegetable garden. Convoys of drunken Serbian soldiers passed by the house on their way to an ethnic cleansing operation or returning from the front line where they fought the Bosnian forces, singing songs of slaughter or angrily shooting in the air. When the air was clear, my parents, cowering in the house, secretly listened to the news from the besieged Sarajevo. Mek would sometimes happily chase after the military trucks and my parents desperately ran after him, calling out, terrified that the drunken soldiers might shoot him for malicious fun.

Sometime that summer, Mek fell ill. He could not get up on his feet; he refused food and water, there was blood in his urine. My parents laid him on the floor in the bathroom, which was the coolest space in the house—where there was no air conditioning and meals were cooked on a wood stove. My mother would stroke Mek, talking to him, while he looked straight into her eyes—she always claimed he understood everything she told him. They called the vet, but the vet station had only one car at its disposal, which was continuously on the road with the vet on call attending to all the sick animals in the area. It took a couple of days before a vet finally came by. He instantly recognized that Mek was riddled with deer ticks, all of them bloated with his blood, poisoning him. The prognosis was not good, he said, but at the vet station he could give him a shot that might help. My father borrowed my uncle’s tractor and cart in which pigs were normally transported to market or slaughter. He put the limp Mek in the cart and drove down the hill, all the way to Prnjavor, to get the shot that could save his life. On his way, he was passed by the Serb Army trucks, the soldiers looking down on the panting Mek.

The magic injection worked and Mek lived, recovering after a few days. But then it was my mother’s turn to get terribly sick. Her gall bladder was infected, as it was full of stones—back in Sarajevo, she’d been advised to undergo surgery to remove them, but she’d kept postponing her decision and then the war broke out. Now, her brother, my uncle Milisav, drove down from Subotica, a town at the Serbian–Hungarian border, and took her back with him for urgent surgical treatment. My father had to wait for his friend Dragan to come and get Mek and him. While my father was preparing his beehives for his long absence, Mek would lie nearby, stretched in the grass, keeping him company.

A few days after Mama’s departure, Tata’s friend Dragan arrived. On the way to get my father, he was stopped at the checkpoint at the top of Vučijak. The men at the checkpoint were drunk and impatient. They asked Dragan where he was heading, and when he told them my father was waiting for him, they menacingly informed him that they’d been watching my father closely for a while, that they knew all about him (my father’s family was ethnically Ukrainian—earlier that year the Ukrainian church in Prnjavor had been blown up by the Serbs), and that they were well aware of his son (of me, that is) who had written against the Serbs and was now in America. They were just about ready to take care of my father once and for all, they told Dragan. The men belonged to a paramilitary unit that called itself Vukovi (the Wolves) and were led by one Veljko, whom a few years earlier my father had thrown out of a meeting he’d organized to discuss bringing in running water from a nearby mountain well. Veljko went on to Austria to pursue a rewarding criminal career, only to return right before the war to put his paramilitary unit together. “You let Hemon know we’re coming,” the Wolves told Dragan as they let him through.

When Dragan reported the incident, which he took very seriously, my father thought it would be better to try to get out as soon as possible rather than waiting for the Wolves to come at night and slit his throat. When they drove up the road to the checkpoint, the guard shift had just changed and the new men were not drunk or churlish enough to care, so my father and Dragan were waved through. The Wolves at the checkpoint failed to sniff out or see Mek, because Tata kept him down on the floor. Later on, in their mindless rage, or possibly trying to steal the honey, the Wolves destroyed my father’s hives. In a letter he’d send me in Chicago he’d tell me that of all the losses the war inflicted upon him, losing his bees was the most painful.

On their way toward the Serbian border, Tata and Dragan passed many checkpoints. My father was concerned that if those manning the checkpoints saw a beautiful Irish setter, they’d immediately understand that he was coming from a city, as there were few auburn Irish setters in the Bosnian countryside largely populated by mangy mutts and wolves. Furthermore, the armed men could easily get pissed at someone trying to save a fancy dog in the middle of a war, when people were killed left and right. At each checkpoint, Mek would try to get up and my father would press him down with his hand, whispering calming words into his ear. Mek would lie back down. He never produced a sound, never insisted on standing up, and, miraculously, no one at the checkpoints noticed him.

***

My father and Mek eventually joined my mother in Subotica. When she sufficiently recovered from her gall-bladder surgery, my parents moved to Novi Sad, not far away from Subotica, where Mama’s other brother owned a little one-bedroom apartment. They spent a year or so there, trying all along to get the papers to emigrate to Canada. During that time, Tata was often gone for weeks, working in Hungary with Dragan’s construction company. Mama longed for Sarajevo, was devastated with what was happening in Bosnia, insulted by the relentless Serbian propaganda that was pouring out of TV and radio. She spent days crying, and Mek would put his head in her lap and look up at her with his moist setter look, and my mother talked to him as to her only friend. Every day, she had a hard time confronting the fact that they had lost everything they’d worked for their whole life; the only remnant of their comfortable previous life was the gorgeous Irish setter.

The one-bedroom in Novi Sad was often full of refugees from Bosnia—friends of friends or family of the family—whom my parents put up until the unfortunate people could make it to Germany or France or some other place where they were not wanted and never would be. They slept scattered all over the floor, my mother stepping over the bodies on her way to the bathroom, Mek always at her heels. He never bothered the refugees, never barked at those miserable people. He let the children pet him.

Young male that he was, Mek would often brawl with other dogs. Once, when my mother took him out, he got into a confrontation with a mean Rottweiler. She tried to separate them, unwisely, as they were about to go at each other’s throats, and the Rottweiler tore my mother’s hand apart. My sister Tina was there at the time, and she took Mama to the emergency room where they had absolutely nothing needed to treat the injury; they did give her the address of a doctor who could sell them the bandages and a tetanus shot. They spent all of the money they had to pay the doctor and then take a cab back home. In fact, they didn’t have enough to pay the cab and the driver said he’d come the next day to get the rest of the money. My sister bluntly told him that there was no reason for him to come back, for they’d have no money tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or any time soon. (The cabbie didn’t insist: The daily inflation in Serbia at that time was about 300 percent and the money would have been worthless by the next day anyway.) For years afterward, Mama could not move her hand properly or grip anything with it. Mek would go crazy if he but smelled a Rottweiler on the same block.

In the fall of 1993, my parents and sister finally got all the papers and the plane tickets for Canada. Family and friends came over to bid them farewell. Everyone was sure they’d never see them again, and my parents and sister knew that emigrating to Canada would irreversibly sever all connections with their previous life. There were a lot of tears, as at a funeral. Mek figured out that something was up; he never let my mother or father out of his sight, as if worried they might leave him; he became especially cuddly, putting his head into their laps whenever he could, leaning against their shins when lying down. Touched though my father may have been with Mek’s love, he didn’t want to take him along to Canada—he couldn’t know what was waiting for them there; where they’d live, whether they’d be able to take care of themselves, let alone a dog. Tata called me in Chicago to demand from me that I reason with Mama and Tina and convince them that Mek must be left behind. “Mek is family,” I told him. “Do not cross the ocean without him.” But I knew that Tata had a point and my heart sunk to my stomach at the thought of their leaving him. My mother could not bring herself to discuss the possibility of moving to Canada without him; she just wept at the very thought of abandoning him with people who were strangers to him.

***

In December, my parents, sister and Mek drove to Budapest. At the airport, my sister negotiated a cheap ticket and a place in the cargo hold for Mek. After they arrived in Canada, I rushed over from Chicago to see them for the first time in two very rough years. As soon as I walked in the door of their barely furnished 15^th-floor apartment in Hamilton, Ontario, Mek ran toward me, wagging his tail. I was astonished that he remembered me after nearly two years. I’d felt that large parts of my Sarajevo self had vanished, but when Mek put his head in my lap, some of me came back.

Mek had a happy life in Hamilton. My mother always said that he was a “lucky boy.” He died in 2007, at the age of 17. My parents would never consider having a dog again. My mother confides in a parakeet these days and cries whenever Mek is but mentioned.

The American Way of Eating

Tracie McMillan — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:30:00 GMT

This is the third of three articles adapted from Tracie McMillan’s new book, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table.

You can also read Part 1: I Got Hired To Do the Hardest Job at Applebee's, and Part 2: Who eats at Applebee’s—and why?

YO, FRY GUYS, I need a five-ounce, NOW. Hector and Luis, the two fry cooks giggling back by the freezer, jump visibly at my command.

I smile sweetly, reposition my voice an octave higher, a significant number of decibels lower. Please?

What you need, sweetheart? asks Hector.

A five-ounce, please.

Aiight, Ma, I got you, says Luis, and the other cooks titter on the line.

That was mad sexy, says Geoff, the Haitian cook manning the flattop, where burgers and quesadillas are made.

I felt that, says Rick, the server waiting on the five-ounce—slang for fries.

Well, you told me to bark, I say, pulling the five-ounce out of the window. Rick used to do expo before he served, so he tries to give me pointers when he sees me struggling. Pointers like, They’re not listening. You need to bark at them.

I can be loud when I have to be, I say, and I hand him his fries.

It’s Valentine’s Day, a Sunday, and last night we were packed; I walked in the door at noon and didn’t leave until midnight, going home just long enough to collapse into sleep and turn right back around. In at noon again, and I’m working the line with Terry, another kitchen manager, who drives me mad by pulling appetizer trios—infuriating platters containing a made-to-order constellation of appetizers that change with every customer, some nightmare I suspect was dreamed up by an executive who’s never worked the line during rush—and pushing them down to me at the far end of the line without the sauces. This means I have to double back and grab them out from under Terry, wasting time and energy. As the rush builds, Terry lets the printer tickets spiral down, down, down into the expo line, invariably dipping into the honey mustard. I grit my teeth every time he calls for a trio.

Tonight, what I really learn—and not for the last time—is just how little I know when it comes to my job.

It starts around 8 or 9. My eyes are burning—it’s all the gas in the kitchen, explains Freddie, offering to give me some eyedrops—and I’m blinking and rubbing my eyes furiously as the screen starts to fill up. By now, I know my place. I’m not good enough to direct the line, but I’m getting better at helping it move.

Here we go, says Freddie. He and Terry start pulling tickets and barking out dishes: Ribeyes, chopped steaks, Shrimp Islands with rice, kiddie hot dogs, Bourbon and New York strip steaks, garlic herb salmon, chicken penne pasta, shrimp pesto bowl, quesadilla burgers, hot wings on the bone and boneless honey barbeque wings. I duck in front of the managers, bending full over the pass so they can reach over me, and dress plates according to the laws I’ve managed to memorize: Ribs get coleslaw, anything that swims gets a lemon, anything with quesadilla in the name gets salsa, chicken fingers get honey mustard, fried shrimp gets cocktail sauce, fish filets get tartar, baked potatoes usually—but not always, I have to check the ticket—take butter and sour cream, and salmon gets smeared with garlic butter.

Let’s be clear: I’m no pro. For one thing, I don’t have the hands for it, a function of not yet having enough calluses. My hands are so tender that I yelp in pain regularly during service, once so badly that Geoff comes around from behind the line and, without warning, grasps my hand and massages ice onto my thumb. But the real reason I can’t pull plates is because I can’t identify dishes on sight and have to ask the cooks to tell me whether this steak is a rib eye or a nine-ounce.

At 9:30 I am shoved aside. The rush has slowed for the cooks but it has migrated to the pass, a stampede of meals run amok. There are bowls of pasta teetering curvily on top of each other; platters of ribs sitting in pyramids; towers of chicken baskets and trio plates hitting the top of the window. This food has to go out now. I’m ousted to the head of the pass, relegated to wiping down plates and checking orders against tickets before they go out. Now the real fun begins. Everyone’s working their own tickets, calling for plates from every window, a furious flurry of arms and cheap porcelain flying up and down the line. I’ve heard line work described as being as graceful as dance, but this is harder, faster, hotter, meaner. What comes to mind is neither battle nor ballet, but a simultaneous expression of both— capoeira. I work until 12:30 .

In a particularly sadistic (if lucrative) affront to restaurant workers everywhere, the calendar has placed President’s Day on the day after Valentine’s Day, which fell the day after Saturday. Three straight days of whirling plates, high-strung servers and endless fry grease. So while school children and office workers luxuriate in their day off, I head back to the kitchen on Monday.

By the time I finish my stint at Applebee’s, I’ll have learned how to spot the other members of my tribe on the subway: heavy-lidded eyes, blank stares, black pants bespecked with grease, hard-soled black shoes. I see them frequently on my commute, a scrappy crew of warriors heading to battle so that the rest of the city can eat. As a new inhabitant of the Applebee’s kitchen, I can verify that my fellow workers live up to restaurant kitchens’ reputation for being a haphazard melting pot. Luis, a runner, just came to the states from rural Oaxaca few months ago; the dishwasher Amadou used to run several businesses in his native Senegal; Tony was a musical theater devotee in high school in Puerto Rico; Hector ran an event production company with his wife before falling on hard times; Eric is paying tuition at a local college.

I’m the only white in the kitchen, one of a handful of non-immigrants, and the only woman putting in regular hours with the line.Although about 38 percent of restaurant jobs are in the back of the house, whites are relatively unlikely to work there, with 17 percent of white restaurant workers in those positions; I notice that of the five white people on our staff of several dozen, two are managers. Women seem to do okay here; there aren’t any consistent female managers in our store but a few come in from corporate now and then. The balance of management is black and Latino, though, which is noteworthy given how rare it can be elsewhere in the restaurant industry. In 2007, famed New York chef Daniel Boulud settled with Mexican workers who filed a federal discrimination case against him; a buser from Mexico claimed to have trained four different French bus boys and watched each get promoted ahead of him.

But even if I move up the ladder, from expo to line, it doesn’t guarantee much improvement when it comes to wages. When Freddie hired me, he told me I’d make $8 an hour for training and $9 an hour after that, putting me on the lower end of kitchen workers, whose median wages range from $8.69 for prep and $10.09 for cooks. Geoff, who cooks the burgers on mid, and Calixto, who does steaks and sides on broil, tell me they earn around $12 an hour, which sounds like a lot until I calculate what it means in annual salary: $24,000.

The wages I hear about at Applebee’s are fairly consistent, starting around $8 and going up into the low teens, and are always well within the law, but this belies its status as a corporation more than it exposes any norms within restaurants. While Applebee’s is the biggest “casual dining” operator in the country, the 1,868 American restaurants bearing its name in 2009 represented less than one percent of America’s full-service eateries, the majority of which are independently owned or members of small restaurant corporations running a few boutique eateries. As in agriculture, enforcing labor laws among a vast, decentralized army of employers is difficult, making it easier for employers to skimp on pay.

At Applebee’s, I never encounter the systematic wage theft I saw in the fields, but adherence to wage and hour laws seems to be as contingent on my currying personal favor with management as anything else. I was so intent on getting to work on Valentine’s Day, for instance, that I forgot to clock in and out, despite spending 12 hours at work; a manager assures me he’ll take care of it, but the hours don’t appear on my check until I cajole Freddie—a different manager—into doing so a couple weeks later. A training I’m called in for never shows up on my checks, either. The management doesn’t hand out paystubs unless we ask, and so it takes a couple paychecks before I know that I’m being paid $8 an hour instead of the $9 Freddy had lured me here with; he promises to take care of the problem, but never does. In the wonky terms of social science, this is a “partial nonpayment,” or, optimistically, “a backlog.” Either way, there’s another word that researchers who examined New York City’s restaurant industry in 2007 would likely use to describe it that I find even more disheartening: common.

From The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table by Tracie McMillan. Copyright © 2012 by Tracie McMillan. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster.