more borges

A major event in the history of the West was the discovery of the East.  It would be more precise to speak of a continuing consciousness of the East... something vast, immobile, magnificent, incomprehensible...

We will examine later the words Orient and Occident, East and West, which we cannot define, but which are true.  They remind me of what St. Augustine said about time: "What is time?  If you don't ask me, I know; but if you ask me, I don't know."  What are the East and the West?  If you ask me, I don't know.  We must settle for approximations.

- Jorge Luis Borges, "Seven Nights"

What does "the East" mean to "the West" - and more specifically, what does "the Far East" mean?  I feel like I have spent far more time thinking about orientalism and the interactions between "the west" and "the middle east/near orient" than I have ever spent thinking about the Far East... and I'm part Filipino!

So even before I can start to contextualize my trip - a white American woman traveling to the Philippines - within a larger context, and even before I can start to challenge my own assumptions about "the Far East," I need to know what those assumptions are.  And only then can I start to pick them apart, invert them, or approach them from an "Eastern" rather than a "Western" perspective.

Side note:  these constant quotation marks grow rather tiresome, but I can't help it - I want to use the labels and challenge them at the same time.  I am traveling to the "third world," but I can't quite bring myself to say that I am traveling to the third world.  Does that make any sense at all?

Anyway, the "Far East..." what do I even think of?  Certainly not the Philippines, before I started seriously thinking about going there.  Japan - pagodas, haiku, geishas, food.  China - economics, communism, language, food.  The Koreas - war, Kim Jong Il, flashy cell phones.

Vietnam, war.  Tibet, the Dalai Lama.   Thailand, food.

That's about all I've got, really.  It's downright shameful.  And note that the Philippines don't appear at all - they have the 12th largest population in the world and a long history of US involvement, and they wouldn't even have appeared on my shortlist of associations-with-the-far-east except, perhaps, as a personal note - "and my own ancestors, from this mysterious archipelago I can maybe locate on a map."

My point, I suppose, is that one of the biggest challenges I am working on, as I prepare for this trip, is to understand my own ignorance - maybe even to embrace it.  Not as a positive good, perhaps, and not as an unconquerable evil - I've been doing lots of reading! - but as a fact.  There's just so much I don't know.

Borges was writing (or lecturing, rather) on One Thousand and One Nights - when he says "The Orient," he means "Arabia."  I quote him anyway, because as I reflect on what "the Far East" might mean to me, I too am limited only to the roughest of approximations - and I find

something vast - including China pushes the scale of the East to something quite unimaginable
something immobile - literally, of course, as a fact of geology - but also somehow I have failed to keep up with the changing course of time, and with the exception of images of cell phones, the pictures I paint of "the East" are stuck several hundred or thousand years in the past.
something magnificent - art and religion and beaches, oh my!

and yes,

something incomprehensible...